Gelman and Good Dictatorships

Juan Gelman is a poet, is widely regarded as being a human rights campaigner and when he was younger he was an active participant in revolutionary Peronism. Regular readers of this increasingly neglected blog will know that I don’t have a high opinion of Gelman.

However, even I was surprised by the depths he stoops to in a piece published in Pagina/12 today. It’s an acceptance speech for some bauble awarded to him under the auspices of the Chinese government. Here are some choice quotes:

On the 13th of April last the Chinese government published a national action plan for human rights which guarantees the basic civil rights of the entire population including women, children, the disabled and ethnic minorities…

In the introduction to the action plan the government recognizes that “China has a long way to go with its efforts to improve human rights.” As it proceeds along this path the death penalty will undoubtedly be abolished, the independence of the judiciary will be strengthened, censorship of publishers and the media will be softened, political prisoners who have not committed acts against the security of the state will be released, those responsible for disappearances, especially those of children, will be caught and punished and other relaveant measures will also be adopted…

The USA and western powers support terrorist groups and separitists who are trying to break China up into weak feudal domains and satrapies, the better to dominate them. Tibet and Taiwan form part of China since time immemorial.

Can Gelman possibly believe that the Chinese government is going to abolish the death penalty? And note that he only hopes for a softening of censorship and thinks its fine to hold political prisoners if they have committed acts  against state security. Guess who will be deciding whether they have or not? Yup, the judiciary whose non-existent autonomy he’d like to see augmented.

As anybody who has read a tiny bit of history knows, some of the most infernal regimes have had constitutions bursting with good intentions and have claimed to be passionate defenders of human rights. The Soviet Union was one such and Cuba today is another. Rather than judge the government of China on its decades of repression, torture and mass murder, the sainted Gelman decides to judge it on yet another blast of hot air  from the regime.

So, if you’re Taiwanese and you’d like to continue to enjoy the benefits of living in a liberal democracy, well, screw you. The great panjandrum of the human rights movement in Argentina thinks you should forget about all that nonsense and rejoin the motherland, where you’ll do well to keep your opinions to yourself if you don’t want to end up in a “reeducation” camp.

And if you are a Tibetan or an Uighur who doesn’t regard yourself as part of the Chinese nation,  who doesn’t want your culture and people to be turned into theme park amusements for tourists  and would like to assert your national rights, you are in even worse luck. As  far as Gelman is concerned you can quite literally fuck off and die. All you are is tool of imperialism.

Gelman is a hypocrite and fraud who never saw an anti-American dictatorship – no matter how monstrous – he didn’t like. This article also gives us a fair insight into what Argentina would look like today if he and his comrades and triumphed in the struggles of their  youth.

Apartheid En Los Olímpicos

Acá

Žižek, China, Tibet

Slavoj Žižek has a letter (scroll down to the end) in the current issue of the LRB about Tibet and China. It’s the bit about Tibet that I want to focus on. He questions what he sees as a romanticized Western narrative of the Tibetan struggle for independence and says,

There are complications in this story of ‘good guys versus bad guys’.

In what struggle for national emancipation are there not?

It is not the case that Tibet was an independent country until 1949, when it was suddenly occupied by China. The history of relations between Tibet and China is a long and complex one, in which China has often played the role of a protective overlord: the anti-Communist Kuomintang also insisted on Chinese sovereignty over Tibet.

China played a similar sort of role in Korean history for many centuries and continues to play it today with regard to the DPRK. Would that be a valid justification for a Chinese takeover of the Korean peninsula ?

Before 1949, Tibet was no Shangri-la, but an extremely harsh feudal society, poor (life expectancy was barely over 30), corrupt and fractured by civil wars (the most recent one, between two monastic factions, took place in 1948, when the Red Army was already knocking at the door). Fearing social unrest and disintegration, the ruling elite prohibited industrial development, so that metal, for example, had to be imported from India.

So pre-1949 Tibet was a pretty shitty place. That’s a shocker. He doesn’t say what relevance this fact has to Tibet’s claim for independence now.

Since the early 1950s, there has been a history of CIA involvement in stirring up anti-Chinese troubles in Tibet, so Chinese fears of external attempts to destabilise Tibet are not irrational

Ah, the CIA. Great move to get in a mention of the boys from Langley, Slavoj. If CIA activity at some point in a country’s history is going to delegitimise its independence then we’ll to have to recognize a lot of countries as illegitimate .

As the TV images demonstrate, what is going on now in Tibet is no longer a peaceful ‘spiritual’ protest by monks (like the one in Burma last year), but involves the killing of innocent Chinese immigrants and the burning of their stores.

Since when did a national liberation movement have to be peaceful to be legitimate?

It is a fact that China has made large investments in Tibet’s economic development, as well as its infrastructure, education and health services. To put it bluntly: in spite of China’s undeniable oppression of the country, the average Tibetan has never had such a high standard of living. There is worse poverty in China’s western rural provinces: child slave labour in brick factories, abominable conditions in prisons, and so on.

Very interesting. The Tibetans have never had it so good. So ungrateful of them to rebel against the Chinese when they should be thanking them for the economic and social progress their rule has brought. I just wonder what the reaction would be if an intellectual of Žižek’s prestige made a similar argument about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

What Žižek doesn’t seem to understand is that all national liberation struggles involve a fair dose of myth, the imagining into existence of an “ourselves” as different and separate from “them”. And how very odd that he thinks that economic and social progress and the exercise of violence undermines the validity of the Tibetans desire to rule themselves.

Racismo Light

¿Calne y leche? No tenel

Así titula el diario de Lanata una nota acerca del desabastecimiento de autoservicios chinos. ¡Qué sutil sentido de humor! Una verdadera muestra del respeto que el diario tiene hacia sus lectores.