Latest Bush Diplomatic Coup: Pissing Off The Chinese

China slams Bush's "Cold War thinking" in anti-communism speech

Jun 14, 2007, 4:55 GMT


Beijing - China on Thursday accused US President George W Bush of reviving 'Cold War thinking' by inaugurating a monument to 100 million people whose deaths were blamed on communist regimes.

'Some political forces in the United States still use Cold War thinking and aim to provoke conflicts between different ideologies and social systems,' foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said in a statement after Bush's speech in Washington.

'We express our strong dissatisfaction and resolute opposition to the statements and actions of the US side,' Qin said.

Criticize communism? I thought that Reagan claimed that he had seen “the death of Communism.” That’s one of my favorite Reagan BS lines—“I have seen the birth of Communism, and I have seen the death of Communism.” Like so much of what he said (“it was not an arms-for-hostages deal”) it was an f’in lie—but it got *big* applause when he said it to the Republicans. That’s the kind of mind Reagan had, a mind that can ignore the existence of a billion Chinese communists. (The Vietnamese, North Korean, and Cuban communist states that survived Reagan hardly count at all, by comparison.) But it sounded good to conservatives, so Reagan pretended it was fact, and he said it--and that’s the secret of being popular with conservatives: pretend.

Actually, I would applaud Bush for honoring the memory of the hundred million slaughtered by the Communists—if I thought he understood the ramifications of making such a statement in our present circumstances. We’re gonna need the Chinese in what he calls the “war against terror,” we’re going to need them if Bush and the neo-cons are successful in expanding the war into Iran, if the Turks invade Kurdish Iraq, if the Taliban returns to power in Afghanistan, etc. So it really does no good, in the present situation, to announce to the world that the Chinese form of government is still innately evil. Stalin’s Soviet Union was certainly evil, but we really needed them to beat Hitler--remember?

No, he doesn’t. Bush never got the “history” thing, the “strategic alliance” thing, or the “diplomacy” thing. And forget the “vision” thing; no one in his family ever got that. Bush might be capable of understanding—after the fact—that designating the Chinese as “the enemy” isn’t such a smart move. Especially if your country is later going to be depending on Chinese aid or mediation in the general collapse of the Middle East and Central Asia that he is now bringing about.

Let’s see—who is there left in the world, for him to alienate? The Swiss? I guess there’s still time for him to call them a bunch of “venal, cowardly, cheese-making bankers.” Papua New Guinea? He could smear them as “a savage bunch of headhunters…” How about Canada? They still like us; why not build a wall and call them “a bunch of socialist snowback hockey-pucks?”