National Review: Outrages of the Week

Mr. Derbyshire

From New York, Iceland, and the U.K.

Sometimes the outrages come so thick and fast a poor commentator can't keep up. People sometimes ask me: "How on earth do you find a topic to be scathing about twice a week?" Are they kidding? Other columnists may speak for themselves; my problem is never that I can't find a windmill to tilt at, my problem is selecting one from the half dozen that every day's news presents me with. Once in a while I shall yield to the temptation to package up a handful of them in a single piece. Here goes with three outrages from the past week.

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LEARNING TO KOWTOW

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Now my worst suspicions about Iceland have been confirmed. Jiang, the president of China, visited Iceland June 12 to 16. (Why? A five-day trip to Iceland? By the president of China? If anyone has an explanation for this, please let me know.*) Preparatory to Jiang's visit, the Icelandic government banned all [practitioners] of the Falun Gong [group] from the country. "To prevent large demonstrations our puny police forces can't control," was the official explanation. This is hard to swallow. Whatever you think of the Falun Gong people (for the record, I think they are harmless [people]) they have no record of violent demonstrations. At any rate, the Icelanders spared no effort to keep the [people] out, sending police to U.S. cities to screen customers at offices of Icelandair, the state airline. Some [practitioners] who turned up in Iceland anyway -- including five U.S. citizens -- were arrested.

After a lot of negative publicity, Iceland released those they had arrested. A hundred or so more had got in anyway, somehow, and a demonstration took place. It was peaceful.

The ChiCom bosses are frightfully sensitive to criticism. When Jiang visited Switzerland in March 1999, he was shocked that Tibetan protesters were allowed to demonstrate within earshot of him. "Don't you have the ability to run this country?" he snarled to the Swiss justice minister, apparently unable to understand why the demonstrators had not been flattened by tanks, as they would have been in China. Later, in a speech to the Swiss parliament, he told them: "You have lost a good friend. ... I have been president of the People's Republic of China for 10 years and have visited many countries in this capacity. Everywhere else I have been received warmly."

It is not an easy thing to pinpoint what is most loathsome about these thuggish apparatchiks, but surely near the top of the list is the way they think they can browbeat and insult the citizens of free nations in the same way they do their own long-suffering people. If I were running a country that was to be graced by a visit from Jiang, and the Chinese ambassador showed up in my office during the preparations with a demand that no demonstrations mar the occasion, I know what I should say. Minus a few colorful intensifiers, it would be along the lines of: "If your President-Elected-by-Nobody doesn't like the way free peoples conduct their affairs, tell him to stay in his own country."

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http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshire061802.asp

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