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June 28, 2005
Chinese Torture
Here is an example of real torture going on in China. In this case a 13 year old Tibetan nun was the victim:
Ngawang Sangdrol was just 13 when she was first imprisoned by China in Tibet. She was so small her prison guards found it easy to pick her up by the legs and drop her, head first, on to the stone floor of her cell.They beat her with iron rods, placed electric shock batons in her mouth and left her standing in the baking heat until she collapsed of exhaustion. They called her the "ballerina", because when the pain became too much for her, she would stand on the tips of her toes like a dancer. "The more we cried out in pain," she said, "the more they laughed."
And here is a new book about how Mao was more evil than previously thought and how much of the story of the rise of communism in China (the long march etc.) was made up.
This is a nuclear weapon of a book: It devastates the reputation of Mao and most of his henchmen, and raises questions about the legitimacy of the ruling Communist Party. Among the authors' claims:* The famous "Long March," under which the barefoot Communist armies beat a retreat from Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang (KMT or Nationalist) armies surrounding them, was inglorious. Chiang let the Red armies go. He needed them as a buffer against warlords in Guizhou and Sichuan and was constrained because Stalin held his son Chiang Ching-kuo as a hostage in Moscow.
* Mao and his leading comrades never actually marched, since they were carried in litters and generally treated "like landlords."
* The renowned battle of the crossing of the Dadu River was a myth. Supposedly the Reds, under KMT machine-gun fire, bravely crossed a bridge that had been set on fire with its planks removed so that they had to pull themselves across using the incandescent chains. A 93-year-old eyewitness said the Red soldiers borrowed doors and coffin lids to replace planks that had been broken, but there was no attack and no deaths at the bridge.
It seems like both Japan and China have a problem with being honest about their histories. Victor David Hanson also has a good column about real torture and what passes for torture among groups like Amnesty International and people like Dick "our soldiers are Nazis" Durbin:
There is also an asymmetry in these slurs. Few mention there really are monsters and mass killers living among us -- the North Koreans who have starved 1 million of their own, Saddam's reign of terror that may have killed as many, and, of course, the Islamicist murderers who behead, blow up and torture. "Mein Kampf" still sells well in some Arab capitals, not in Washington or New York.
So cowards such as officials of the Red Cross and Amnesty International, and, yes, American politicians, prefer to showboat the purported misdemeanors of people who are civilized and will listen to them, rather than to condemn the horrendous felonies of those who are barbaric and will pay them no heed.
Posted by Pete at June 28, 2005 05:39 PM
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