POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES
Oh, please, Mr Rachman, "too soft" on China?
That's pure Richard Nixon circa his first run for office in California, a contest he won by suggesting a fine congresswoman was soft-on.
He along with intellectual and ethical giants like J Edgar Hoover built entire careers on this kind of nastiness.
Let China be China. It is the most remarkable phenomenon of our lifetimes, a miracle perhaps short only of the Internet. China will become a democratic state, with democratic values, just as all Western nations became democratic states. The huge growth of the middle class assures that.
You really have no choice anyway, it is too big and important, although many Americans with a tendency to want to control others still think they can say some words and change a fifth of the planet. Delusional.
And I remind you that the Google business is rather trivial stuff compared with matters like invading a nation and killing a million people.
The United States is almost laughable in the words it uses to defend companies like Google, just as when it makes its ridiculous annual pronouncements about the human rights and democratic behaviors in the world’s other countries, as though it were somehow entitled to pass judgment, which, given its record over the last half century abroad, it most certainly is not.
Google needs to be Google too - leave China if you don't like it. Don't go whining back to mommy at the State Department about the bad boys in the school yard.
In a hundred places in this world, the United States stands for abuse and its own privileges, not rights or decency or democracy. Guantanamo continues. Diego Garcia continues. Bagram in Afganistan continues. Every week Hellfire missiles kill innocent people in Pakistan, and in Afghanistan for that matter. Now, in Yemen too. Oh the list is too long to place here.
