China has issued a detailed report that examines the human rights record of the United States for the year 2009. Plain-spoken. Unvarnished. disturbing.
China examines human rights record of the United States
China has issued a detailed report that examines the human rights record of the United States for the year 2009. Plain-spoken. Unvarnished. disturbing.
It seems that link is broken!
Thanks, Mentat. I've relocated the link and reposted it. It now works.
It's an interesting piece. Some of the points aren't about human rights abuses of the US government per se; rather just prevailing social conditions. But others are strikingly condemning, the section on foreign activities the most so as expected.
I had a vaguely related thought recently. The 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow were boycotted by the US, Canada (where I am) and other countries, in opposition to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Now we find ourselves the invaders, yet nobody ventured to boycott the Vancouver Olympics because of this. Instead, we show on TV our soldiers proudly cheering on their home countries, while taking a break from their "noble work" in Afghanistan.
Mentat: Thanks for writing back. Can one cheer a soldier without implicitly cheering the work he or she does? I believe so, but the analysis can get tricky, because the phrase "support the troops" carries a lot of assumptions. http://dangerousintersection.org/2007/05/28/what-…
An interesting bit of propaganda.
In the cold war days, if you listened to Voice of America and Radio Moscow, you could see that both sides told the truth, but only that part of the truth supporting their political agenda. Interspersed among the facts are editorial conclusions intended to lead the reader to an agreements.
For example, they claim "Chaotic management of prisons in the United State also led to wide spread of diseases among the inmates".
This conclusion cannot be drawn from the stats they then quote, simply because the conclusion requires the assumption that the prisoners contracted the diseases in prison. The example they give for the rates of HIV in the population is much better explained by the fact that many of the HIV cases are among gang members whose risky behavior outside the prison included iv drug abuse and sexual promiscuity.
The article also fails to show any comparison to China's prison or crime statistics.