atrocities and a thing called the industrial revolution

I was talking with my father this morning about the olympics and we agreed on the opinion that China is doing pretty ok in the overall scheme of things. Let me throw out a disclaimer here; I do not condone the atrocities that have been committed by China, nor do I promote the over-polluting of our environment. Now that we have that out of the way I will begin.

I was thinking about this "blog" all day at work. When I say I work, you have to understand that I was mixing paints today. Once the paints were mixed, I would then pour this hardening compound in and mix it so that it would harden to the point where I could dispose of it. Anyways, I had this plan to research it and get a lot of facts and really try to make this more academic than just my opinion, but then I watched a movie and tv all night. So, here goes my opinion with some factual backing.

The reason that I have a tough time blaming China for all the reasons that protesters blame them is this... I will start by outlining a history of the United States (roughly, beginning with pre-america).

1. Colombus came and conquered the Native Americans

2. Skip to 1776. Slavery was already extremely prevalent in America, but it would continue in America until 1865. During this time White Americans counted black people as 2/5 of a person. I will repeat this for emphasis, BLACK PEOPLE WERE COUNTED AS 2/5 of a person. After we finally ended slavery, we instituted what was called Jim Crow in America which would continue to the Civil Rights period. Jim Crow was a slight step up from slavery. Now that we have established this we can move on by stepping back.

3. While black people were enslaved, Native Americans were driven from their lands illegally and slowly had their rights stripped away through unfair and undermining treaties.

4. Skip for ward a little while and understand that while we were persecuting Native Americans and Black people we were also keeping women in a subordinate position, not allowing them to vote until 1919 (20 maybe can't exactly remember).

5. Ok lets move ahead again to WWII. Now we turn our hateful eyes towards the Japanese. Because we are in a war against the Japanese obviously we should force Japanese Americans into internment camps. It took 40 years for the landmark case of Fred Korematsu to get overturned, and finally admit that the US Government had done wrong to Japanese Americans.

6. Ok, I will try not to get longwinded and the details in my head are not perfect but I will continue to list some more things.

7. Involvment in Vietnam, so that the United States could put the person that they wanted in power and "to stop the domino effect".

8. Helping Israel to gain their own state so that we would have a foothold to middle east oil.

9. Helping Iran begin their nuclear power program (while they are allies), only to say that they are part of the axis of evil, and condemning their want for nuclear power. Why would they want nuclear power you ask. So they can protect themselves from us, cause we pick on weak countries (i.e. Iraq). Most of this comes from Noam Chomsky's book "Rogue States". I cannot take credit for some of these nuggets.

10. Ok, we also gave Osama arms to defeat the Russians which he would then use against us via terrorism.

11. Iran Contra

12. Invasion of Panama (and many other central american countries to implant puppet democracies).

14. East Timor/Indonesia- Again just fuckin' shit up the best we can.

13. Support of Sadaam Hussein until he pissed us off, so we invaded "Gulf War".

14. And finally this is going back again, but in the late 1800's we had this thing called the industrial revolution. It allowed us to become what we are today by massively polluting the environment.

But all of this happened in the past, we are much better than that now, and we must hold the rest of the world to our standards.

NOW lets take a look at China, and I by no means am an expert, but the major things we "American Media" have focused on are 1. the insane amount of pollution 2. Chinese support of the atrocities of Darfur in the Sudan as well as their treatment of Tibet. Again, I have not read much about China and unfortunately am not more attuned to their happenings but I think what I am getting at is that they can't even come close to the things that America has done throughout history.

Chinese is in a developmental stage and is it possible that they are in the midst of an industrial revolution and that they are making the same mistakes that we made, except that they are not near as awful and they are under the microscope because the time period that we are in.

Again this is not condoning atrocities, but think about the United States of Hypocrisy and the way we lay judgement on people constantly.