George Bush gave a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars this week, attacking critics who say he went to war in Iraq for oil. Mr. Bush says his invasion was to spread democracy.
“Dictatorships seem orderly,” he said. “When one man makes all the decisions, there is no need for negotiation or compromise. Democracies are sometimes messy and seemingly chaotic, as different parties advance competing agendas and seek their share of political power. We’ve seen this throughout our own history. We’ve seen this in other democracies around the world.”
What does Mr. Bush see in China? On New Year’s Eve, Microsoft Network (MSN) shut down a web site operated by Zhao Jing, also known as Michael Anti. Mr. Zhao posted comments protesting the firing of three editors of the Beijing News. In China, where there is no democracy, journalists are fired for deviating from the government line and bloggers who call attention to it have their web sites shut down – by the American companies that host them.
China’s government is deplorable, so why would Bill Gates’s Microsoft help China silence dissent? In a January 4th post on his blog, MSN Spaces Manager Michael Connoly wrote: “In China, there is a unique issue for our entire industry: there are certain aspects of speech in China that are regulated by the government. We’ve made a choice to run a service in China, and to do that, we need to adhere to local regulations and laws. This is not unique to MSN Spaces; this is something that every company has to do if they operate in China.”
Read his words carefully: “We’ve made a choice to run a service in China….. we need to adhere to local regulations and laws.” Sounds like Abu Ghraib or My Lai or Nuremberg – not our fault; we were just obeying the law. George Orwell pointed out in 1944 that “‘against the law’ is not a synonym for ‘wrong.’”
Many responders to Mr. Connoly’s post pointed out that Mr. Zhao’s web site was in Chinese, but the server it was hosted on wasn’t in China. Even if one can excuse Microsoft for being so craven as to agree to enforce the laws of a repressive government, what excuses Microsoft for enforcing China’s laws outside China?
Unfortunately, Microsoft is not alone in this. Any company that wants a piece of the Chinese market, companies like Google, Cisco and Yahoo!, have also agreed to censor words like “Tibet independence,” “Tiananmen massacre” and, of course, “democracy.”
Read those words carefully. American companies censor the word “democracy” for the people who most need to read it. Why? Because America is not a democratic country, America is a capitalist country. When democracy conflicts with capitalism, capitalism wins, every time.
Why is there no outrage over this? Where are the “freedom loving” Fox news commentators and congressmen who scream loud and long about “freedom fries” and “attacks on Christmas”? Anyone who advocates the teaching of evolution in American classrooms runs the risk of being called a “communist,” but when American billionaires help the world’s largest communist nation stifle dissent, all that is heard is the winter wind blowing through the empty halls of Congress.
It gets worse. In November 2004, journalist Shi Tao was arrested for sending an e-mail to a U.S. web site detailing the censorship orders the Chinese government issued to journalists regarding the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. In April 2005, he was sentenced to 10 years at forced labor. The evidence that convicted Mr. Shi was turned over to prosecutors by Yahoo!.
Yahoo! spokeswoman Mary Osako told the BBC, “Just like any other global company, Yahoo! must ensure that its local country sites must operate within the laws, regulations and customs of the country in which they are based.”
Translation: “If this was Holland in 1944, we’d be telling the Gestapo where to find Anne Frank and her family.”
If your e-mail address ends in yahoo.com or gmail.com or msn.com, you’re supporting this. I know you don’t mean to and you don’t want to but now that you know, you may feel a moral obligation to do something about it. If you’re not a subscriber to the above services, you may want to pass this along to someone who is.
A month ago in this space, I called on the U.S. government to pay reparations to African Americans for slavery, for the pragmatic reason that failure to pay reparations diminishes our moral authority and enables the continuation of slavery. If we fail to use our moral authority when opportunities present themselves, we will lose the authority to act in our own defense.
Internet service providers are helping China silence voices of dissent and claim they’re just obeying Chinese law. In the U.S., Internet service providers, telecommunications companies and airlines have complied with illegal requests from the government for private information about citizens.
Our government spies on its citizens without due process. Our government throws people in prison for indefinite periods without charging them. Our government runs networks of ghost prisons and tortures prisoners, in violation of national and international law. The people in the Bush administration who would make a totalitarian nation of the U.S. are watching China, they’re watching the response of American companies to China and they’re watching the response – or non-response – of American citizens.
What You’re Paying For
George Bush gave a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars this week, attacking critics who say he went to war in Iraq for oil. Mr. Bush says his invasion was to spread democracy.
“Dictatorships seem orderly,” he said. “When one man makes all the decisions, there is no need for negotiation or compromise. Democracies are sometimes messy and seemingly chaotic, as different parties advance competing agendas and seek their share of political power. We’ve seen this throughout our own history. We’ve seen this in other democracies around the world.”
What does Mr. Bush see in China? On New Year’s Eve, Microsoft Network (MSN) shut down a web site operated by Zhao Jing, also known as Michael Anti. Mr. Zhao posted comments protesting the firing of three editors of the Beijing News. In China, where there is no democracy, journalists are fired for deviating from the government line and bloggers who call attention to it have their web sites shut down – by the American companies that host them.
China’s government is deplorable, so why would Bill Gates’s Microsoft help China silence dissent? In a January 4th post on his blog, MSN Spaces Manager Michael Connoly wrote: “In China, there is a unique issue for our entire industry: there are certain aspects of speech in China that are regulated by the government. We’ve made a choice to run a service in China, and to do that, we need to adhere to local regulations and laws. This is not unique to MSN Spaces; this is something that every company has to do if they operate in China.”
Read his words carefully: “We’ve made a choice to run a service in China….. we need to adhere to local regulations and laws.” Sounds like Abu Ghraib or My Lai or Nuremberg – not our fault; we were just obeying the law. George Orwell pointed out in 1944 that “‘against the law’ is not a synonym for ‘wrong.’”
Many responders to Mr. Connoly’s post pointed out that Mr. Zhao’s web site was in Chinese, but the server it was hosted on wasn’t in China. Even if one can excuse Microsoft for being so craven as to agree to enforce the laws of a repressive government, what excuses Microsoft for enforcing China’s laws outside China?
Unfortunately, Microsoft is not alone in this. Any company that wants a piece of the Chinese market, companies like Google, Cisco and Yahoo!, have also agreed to censor words like “Tibet independence,” “Tiananmen massacre” and, of course, “democracy.”
Read those words carefully. American companies censor the word “democracy” for the people who most need to read it. Why? Because America is not a democratic country, America is a capitalist country. When democracy conflicts with capitalism, capitalism wins, every time.
Why is there no outrage over this? Where are the “freedom loving” Fox news commentators and congressmen who scream loud and long about “freedom fries” and “attacks on Christmas”? Anyone who advocates the teaching of evolution in American classrooms runs the risk of being called a “communist,” but when American billionaires help the world’s largest communist nation stifle dissent, all that is heard is the winter wind blowing through the empty halls of Congress.
It gets worse. In November 2004, journalist Shi Tao was arrested for sending an e-mail to a U.S. web site detailing the censorship orders the Chinese government issued to journalists regarding the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. In April 2005, he was sentenced to 10 years at forced labor. The evidence that convicted Mr. Shi was turned over to prosecutors by Yahoo!.
Yahoo! spokeswoman Mary Osako told the BBC, “Just like any other global company, Yahoo! must ensure that its local country sites must operate within the laws, regulations and customs of the country in which they are based.”
Translation: “If this was Holland in 1944, we’d be telling the Gestapo where to find Anne Frank and her family.”
If your e-mail address ends in yahoo.com or gmail.com or msn.com, you’re supporting this. I know you don’t mean to and you don’t want to but now that you know, you may feel a moral obligation to do something about it. If you’re not a subscriber to the above services, you may want to pass this along to someone who is.
A month ago in this space, I called on the U.S. government to pay reparations to African Americans for slavery, for the pragmatic reason that failure to pay reparations diminishes our moral authority and enables the continuation of slavery. If we fail to use our moral authority when opportunities present themselves, we will lose the authority to act in our own defense.
Internet service providers are helping China silence voices of dissent and claim they’re just obeying Chinese law. In the U.S., Internet service providers, telecommunications companies and airlines have complied with illegal requests from the government for private information about citizens.
Our government spies on its citizens without due process. Our government throws people in prison for indefinite periods without charging them. Our government runs networks of ghost prisons and tortures prisoners, in violation of national and international law. The people in the Bush administration who would make a totalitarian nation of the U.S. are watching China, they’re watching the response of American companies to China and they’re watching the response – or non-response – of American citizens.
What are you going to do about it?
© Mark Floegel, 2006