Totalitarian enough

Its comforting to know that we’re not the only country with some eminent domain issues. You see, China has them also.

A couple of poor old Chinese ladies have been sentenced by the Beijing police to “re-education through labor” for having the temerity to apply for a legal protest in a designated area there in the city. They are doing so because they are none too pleased about what they feel is the government reneging on a deal that would’ve put them up in tonier digs as their former homes had been razed to facilitate Olympic-themed development near Tiananmen Square.

Unfortunately, they are living in a ramshackle apartment on the outskirts of the city and their demands for compensation have gone unanswered.

Well, not unanswered entirely, of course. Both Ms. Wu, 79 and Ms. Wang, 77 have been allowed to return to their “home” but have been warned they could be sent to a detention center at any moment. Keep that overnight bag packed and by the door, ladies.

Officials say that they received 77 protest applications but that nearly all of them were dropped after the complaints were “properly addressed by relevant authorities or departments through consultations.”

If by “properly addressed” one means threats, intimidation, arrests, strong-arming and jail time, then, yes, all 77 applicants have been “properly addressed.”

And as an example of not quite grasping the realities of one’s surroundings, the authors of linked article from the New York Times ponder,
“It is unclear why the police have detained people who sought permission to protest.”

Perhaps Li Fangpin, a lawyer who has been arrested and beaten for fighting for representation of rights advocates can help out the authors: “For Chinese petitioners, if their protest applications were approved, it would lead to a chain reaction of others seeking to voice their problems as well,”

We always find it charming when people in the thick of the struggle find it necessary to break things down to the most elementary of levels for their more obtuse Western observers.

To be as charitable to the Chicomms, our hosts this past fortnight, as we can be, no government wants their dirty laundry aired… its just that constitutionally-based democracies appear to have a higher threshold of pain when it comes to this sort of thing.

P.S. B-Daddy noted in a comment in an earlier post that the term “Arbeit macht frei” is a German phrase meaning “work brings freedom” and which graced the entrances of Nazi Germany’s most infamous concentration camps and whose philosophical underpinnings parallel that of the “re-education through labor” of the Chinese.

We mention this because there are great similarities in the philosophies and ideological execution of all the great totalitarian strains of faith be it fascism, Stalinism or Maoism.

P.P.S. The title of this post is in reference to Nicolas Kristof’s equivocating over the term “totalitarian” which we took to task, here.

H/T: B-Daddy and Hedgecock