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]]]]] US CRAWLS BACK TO TOAST BUTCHERS OF BEIJING [[[[[[[[
By Patrick J. Buchanan (1/5/1990)
[From Human Events, 30 December 1989, p. 10]
[Kindly uploaded by Freeman 10602PANC]
As U.S. National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and Deputy
Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger executed their kowtows
before the 85-year-old regent of the Middle Kingdom, Deng
Xiaoping played his role perfectly.
``Deng was jovial as ever,'' one U.S. official confided to the
New York Times, ``but seemed to have some difficulty focusing on
people. While he usually looks people directly in the face, his
eyes sort of glazed over Scowcroft.''
And why should he not be contemptuous of these Americans, who,
with all their bombast about freedom and human rights, needed but
six months, after that night of terror in Tiananmen Square, to
come crawling back to the Great Hall of the People?
``In both our societies,'' Scowcroft said in his oleaginous
toast, ``there are voices of those who seek to redirect or
frustrate our cooperation. We both must take bold measures to
overcome these negative forces.'' Then, to sustained applause,
he concluded, ``We extend the hand of friendship and hope that
you will do the same.''
Among those ``negative forces'' are millions who voted for Mr.
Bush expecting something better than the unbuttoned embrace of a
tyrant whose tanks ran over the bodies of college students who
had offended him by building a crude replica of our Statue of
Liberty.
Secretary of State James Baker and Press Secretary
Marlin Fitzwater now describe what happened last June as a
``tragedy.'' Orwell's observation comes to mind: ``In our
time, political speech and writing are largely the defense
of the indefensible.''
What happened last [3-4] June was not a tragedy; it was a
massacre, and a damned bloody atrocity ordered by a regime that
holds power only as a legacy from the greatest mass murderer of
the 20th century, Mao Tse-Tung [1893-1976], whose crystal
sarcophagus yet sits in the place of honor in the very square
where freedom died a bloody death.
How to defend this renewal of ``friendship''?
Well, it is privately argued, in a world where Moscow remains
a great nuclear power and strategic threat, America and China
need one another. Even though we have our ``disagreements,'' as
the great men like to put it, we collaborated in Afghanistan, and
Beijing gives us critical intelligence on Soviet missile tests,
in return for U.S. military aid.
But why must secret collaboration with such a regime mean we
call them ``friends''?
An argument can be made that the superintendent of the Chicago
police would have been right to pay off Bugs Moran in the '20s
for information to convict Al Capone. That is the real world.
But, even in the real world, there is no need to invite Moran
over to celebrate Thanksgiving with the family, and toast him as
a ``friend.''
Americans are supposed to stand for something in this world;
that something is freedom, human dignity and human rights.
Our country was a beacon to those students; many had studied
here; we were the model of what they, in their way, wanted to
bring to China. That their Statue of Democracy was modeled on
our own Statue of Liberty was an immense tribute to the United
States. And they went to their deaths, that terrible night in
Tiananmen Square, standing up for the things for which we
Americans have always stood.
The ones still alive, in prison and penal colonies, what must
they think of us, as they read about how the two ex-partners from
Kissinger Associates came to toast the men who ordered the tanks
to run them down?
Even in terms of cold pragmatism, this was a mistake.
American may well need a relationship with China. But what is
China? Is it these old men, desperately clinging to power with
their cold and clammy hands? Or is it the millions of young
people, now silent, who gathered in Tiananmen Square? As the
statues of Lenin and Stalin fall all over Europe, can anyone
think Deng Xiaoping is the wave of the future?
The true tragedy here is that Mr. Bush has elected to play the
inside game of balance-of-power politics, of Big Power diplomacy,
when the whole world is passing it by.
Even the casual student of history can see we are living in
revolutionary times. The monstrous edifice of communism, built
by Lenin, Stalin and Mao, and their lesser epigones, Ho, Castro
and Ortega, is cracking and crumbling. The place in history that
beckons Mr. Bush is to be the President who presided over the
global collapse of the Communist empire, and the global triumph
of freedom.
In a matter of weeks, we have seen them trundled off to the
graveyards of history: Kadar, Honecker, Jakes, Zhivkov, Husak,
Krenz. One day they will be followed by Deng, Castro, Ortega,
and, yes, Gorbachev, who is a transition figure from communism to
freedom. For it is not simply Stalinism that the people of
Europe are casting off. It is ``socialism with a human face'' as
well. In the Baltic republics and Russia, the clamor is not for
glasnost or perestroika, but freedom and democracy. Why cut
deals with the losers, when we are on the winning side of
history?
And what is the signal sent to Gorbachev? Go ahead, send your
tanks into Lithuania, and you will face but six months' probation
for human rights violations, after which the Americans will be
coming over to call you ``friend,'' and to disparage those
``negative forces'' back in the United States, who simply cannot
see the big picture.
* * *
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