Absolutely mind-blowing, bombshell article in today’s WP. (Thanks to Josh Marshall for the alert.) Washington must be totally abuzz. The 60-year-old National Security Council official under Bush who now says….well, check it out for yourself. When I see this sort of thing, I can’t help but wonder whether I was conned into wondering if the war in Iraq had some justitication. (That said, I’m still glad Saddam’s gone. It’s just that it seems we were sold a bill of goods, at least in regard to WMD.)

Signs of hope. A columnist I love and hate gets it totally right on today:

Why doesn’t Alan Simpson include in his critique of the religious right their obsessive hostility to any recognition of gay citizens? He’s right about the politics of abortion; and he is on the record saying the same things about gay equality. And yet he still balks. But in some ways, the gay issue is the primary one that the far right will insist on using to gin up their base and make life difficult for president Bush. They will treat the long-overdue reversal of blatantly discriminatory sodomy laws as some kind of assault on the family. And they will surely try to respond to any civil recognition of gay relationships with a truly poisonous bid to amend the federal constitution to keep marriage from including all citizens, gay and straight. Their threat to a sane conservatism is as profound as their indifference to fomenting deep social division. At some point, the president must realize this. Let’s hope it’s not before it’s too late.

But tell us, what if the president doesn’t realize it in time? What then? Will sane conservatives like you still support a president who supports “truly poisonous” amendments to the constitution? Because as far as this topic goes, I see no way out. Our president has sold his soul to the too-far right, and there is no reclaiming it. I truly hope I am wrong on this, but it appears that Bush has passed the point of no return. What then?

And so we come at last to Singapore, the strange city-state that so many of us associate with rattan canes and a tough dictatorship and no mercy for gum chewers.

It’s not quite accurate. In fact, it’s totally wrong. I mean, sure, if you are dumb enough to commit a felony you may face the cane, and chewing gum is prohibited, and the government is in essence a dictatorship. But Singapore is much, much more than these disparate parts, which for most citizens and vistors here are irrelevant. Singapore is in many ways a beautiful little paradise, perhaps the closest thing to utopia on the planet.

So many dictators have tried to create a utopia, and in so doing managed instead to create hell on earth. The Soviet Union was the first attempt of the last century, wherein Stalin managed to liquidate a huge chunk of the population and make the Gulag Archipelago his legacy. China under Mao was another, with the Cultural Revolution and inconceivably dreadful famines the result. Maybe the most awful in terms of sheer horror was Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. All of these social experiments draw striking similarities and you can only wonder why we are so incapable of learning from the past. The very last living example of a utopia imposed from the top down, a living, breathing nightmare, is today’s North Korea.

So how does this relate in any way to Singapore? I’m not yet sure if my argument is valid, but I do see a parallel: As with the above examples, Singapore as it is today is founded on the vision of one man, former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. He envisioned a city with green trees and green grass everywhere, a city with no crime, where the trains and buses run on time and the people live in harmony with one another. The people would be free, but the wise and benevolent dictatorship would protect its citizens, its children, from obviously dangerous influences — narcotics and stimulants, pornography, dirty words, unsocial beahaviour (like spitting and putting used chewing gum where it doesn’t belong), etc. Crime would be dealt with swiftly and mercilessly.

Being the liberal that I am, aspects of this vision bother me. Everything here is censored by a government that knows more than its citizens. If you bring video tapes into the country, be prepared for the customs agents to take them and watch them and cut out any segments with nudity or foul language. (And they send you a bill for doing this.) I hate censorship, and yet….

There can simply be no denying that Lee Kuan Yew’s vision has materialized and succeeded. Crime is all but unknown here. The city is lush with greenery, perfectly trimmed and manicured; everything about the city has been made to suit Lee’s vision, and, amazingly, I have to admit there is a lot to say for it. Yes, the beauty is entirely man-made, but it works.

The attitude of the Singaporeans toward the imposition of this vision on their nation and on their lives is most interesting. From all I can tell, most of the citizens are thrilled with it. They admit some freedoms are restricted, but they believe that the payoff makes it well worthwhile. They are protected by a loving and paternalistic government that knows better than they do — a government that can indeed be tough when the situation warrants it, but that will in general be their friend.

The media can usually say what they please, but it is understood that they can go only so far when it comes to criticising the government. If they cross that line, foreign media can be threatened with expulsion and on occasion have to pay up hefty fines. (Of course, compared with China it’s a bastion of free speech, where there is never a worry that jotting an essay can land you in a dungeon for a good portion of your life.)

There are many examples of how exquisitely the government has choreographed life here. The public transportation system is immaculate and ingenious. To stem rush hour traffic, every car is equipped with an infra-red detector that automatically “taxes” the owner if the car goes past certain intersections during rush hour. It works. Traffic is minimized. There are also occasional signs along the highway that read, “Report discourteous driving.” Thus, one rarely witnesses discourteous driving.

The net minus is that Singapore is a sterilized, somewhat antiseptic place, at least on its surface. It could sure use some of the earthiness of Hong Kong. But the net plusses are truly awe-inspiring. The no-nonsense approach to SARS, for example, was vintage Singapore: video cameras were installed outside the homes of those in quarantine and stiff sentences imposed for violators, and it worked. (In the case of SARS, the government did much more, including a 24-hours-a-day SARS information TV channel and a massive public education campaign.)

So for the time being I am impressed with Singapore. I’ve only been here a few weeks, and maybe I’ll see some of these illusions shattered. For now it looks pretty good, especially after my last host country.

A reader has helped explain the Greg Packer phenomenon to me, and steered me to this link, which does help explain why Packer is always on hand when a quote is needed. The writer ads, “This is a case of journalistic laziness on the New York press’s part, and surprise, surprise, on Ann Coulter’s part. Greg Packer’s at every important New York event and the press know he’s always good for a quote. Ann is trying to create a SCLM conspiracy where one doesn’t exist. She knows the yahoos who read her column religiously don’t know any better.”

I never thought I’d actually cite Ann Coulter as a serious resource, but she has, according to Mickey Kaus’s column today, made an extraordinary find — and I checked it out on google and it is indeed extraordinary.

Again and again, in the NY Times but also on ABC News and in Newsday and other media, the man-on-the-street who is interviewed to comment on breaking news, from 911 to just about anything you can imagine, is a mystery man named Greg Packer. It is absolutely amazing. Article after article, Greg Packer. Most of the articles say he is from Huntington, NY. It has to make you wonder, do the media make everything up? Does Greg Packer even exist? If so, is it by some unearthly coincidence that reporters always single him out for comment? Very, very strange.

This is an actual email I received minutes ago, from a Nepal email address (.np):

Dear Sir,
I want to requist you to send me the details about peaking duck and name of Peaking duck Manufacturer .

Regards,
Baburaja Rawal,
Production Manager
Valley Cold Store Pvt. Ltd
Nayabazar, Kathmandu-16
Nepal,
Gpo. 19454

My only email from Kathmandu; a new first.

Superb opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal by Brad Adams, executive director of the Asian division of Human Rights Watch, about the Chinese government’s spectacularly evil efforts to cover up the story of AIDS spreading through the province of Henan from 2000-02. The epidemic was the result of illegal plasma collection in the province’s rural villages (a topic I wrote about at length here). The party member who ordered the incident hushed up was promoted and honored recently for his “important contributions to the development of the province’s sanitation industry.”

Adams describes how journalists travelling to Henan were detained by the police and expelled, while the Chinese press was ordered not to report anything at all about the epidemic. He writes:

Why would anyone lie about such a vast epidemic? The answer is simple: Covering up the spread of a stigmatized disease like AIDS might help to ensure that investment continued to pour into impoverished provinces like Henan. The Henan blood scandal sent a clear message to other local officials: if you have an epidemic, cover it up, and you’ll be rewarded.

[Sorry I can’t link; this is from the print version.]

It’s kind of amusing that there is a whole fringe that equates the CCP with the government of the US. As any reader of this site knows, I am no fan of President Bush, but to write that citizens in America are treated by their government in a manner that in any way resembles the way the Chinese are treated by the CCP — it’s not only laughable, it’s scary. And infinitely dumb. Three of our big-name whistleblowers were named Time’s Man of the Year recently; in China, they’d be wasting away in jail unsung and unknown, if not shot in the head.

Looking back at the previous post’s last sentence, I cringe that I could write copy that sounds so self-righteous and pompous. Sorry.

Some Young Turk bloggers have seen fit lately to trash the protesters at Tiananmen Square, who included not only the students who started the protest but the doctors and policemen and Chinese citizens from all walks of life who saw the cause as noble enough to merit risking their own lives, and joining in. While I have acknowledged that the students were forming their own mini-politburo and had no organization or set goals and the whole thing was becoming a mess, it was nevertheless an outcry that resonated around the world with greater sonority than any other I’ve experienced in my entire lifetime. It was more forceful than the ebullient joy of the Europeans as they tore the Berlin Wall to the ground. It was greater than Nelson Mandela’s ascension to leadership in a land that had so recently treated its blacks as inferiors. In my entire life, I have never, ever seen anything as immensely moving and earthshattering as the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.

I hadn’t planned to post about this. A reader of my site emailed and asked if I could help him find a copy of the famous photograph, above, of the anonymous man blocking a row of tanks, which I cited earlier. I found it along with an article in Time magazine that was so beautiful, so heartbreaking I simply found myself typing…. Here is how the article begins:

Almost nobody knew his name. Nobody outside his immediate neighborhood had read his words or heard him speak. Nobody knows what happened to him even one hour after his moment in the world’s living rooms. But the man who stood before a column of tanks near Tiananmen Square–June 5, 1989–may have impressed his image on the global memory more vividly, more intimately than even Sun Yat-sen did. Almost certainly he was seen in his moment of self-transcendence by more people than ever laid eyes on Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein and James Joyce combined.

The meaning of his moment–it was no more than that–was instantly decipherable in any tongue, to any age: even the billions who cannot read and those who have never heard of Mao Zedong could follow what the “tank man” did. A small, unexceptional figure in slacks and white shirt, carrying what looks to be his shopping, posts himself before an approaching tank, with a line of 17 more tanks behind it. The tank swerves right; he, to block it, moves left. The tank swerves left; he moves right. Then this anonymous bystander clambers up onto the vehicle of war and says something to its driver, which comes down to us as: “Why are you here? My city is in chaos because of you.” One lone Everyman standing up to machinery, to force, to all the massed weight of the People’s Republic–the largest nation in the world, comprising more than 1 billion people–while its all powerful leaders remain, as ever, in hiding somewhere within the bowels of the Great Hall of the People.

Yes, the protest became a bickering, grandstanding mess. But that did not and never will detract from its fundamental magnificence. For all their jockeying and in-fighting, the students and those who joined them deserved better than to be shot in the back. Those who defend the government and criticise the students, to the point of implying they had it coming, remind me so much of old conversations I heard in NYC coffee houses defending Stalin and arguing how much good he had done for his country. Bullshit.

Yeah, I know this topic kicks my emotions into high gear. But that’s what blogging is for me, getting in touch with my strongest feelings and putting them “on paper” with as much honesty, accuracy and integrity as I can.

More posts about Tiananmen Square:
Tiananmen Square revisited
The story behind the Tiananmen Square “tank man” photo
Reappraising Tiananmen Square

Magnificent commentary piece in today’s Straits Times on the sins China committed in lying to its citizens about SARS.

Columnist Ching Cheong writes, “What sparked the crisis was an official circular issued to all Chinese media last October. This told state media to black out negative news so that the CCP 16th party congress in November could be convened successfully….The stark fact is that the blackout was carried out on orders from the very top for a clearly political purpose.” . She expresses deep skepticism that the Chinese leaders have learned from the debacle and sees them continuing their pattern of blaming others, as even today they are perpetuating a myth that somehow the US caused SARS intentionally to divert attention from the Iraq war. (Can’t they come up with something better than that?) How ironic, she says, that it took an article in a US publication, Time, to expose the CCP’s evils

I wish this story were available online. It is when I read pieces like this that I want to say to the young idealists dazzled by the myth (the lie) that China has changed, “Look — here is China doing exactly what it’s done since the days of Mao, trying to manipulate the public consciousness so that they (the government) remain utterly free of criticism or blame. The only real change has been cosmetic. You can watch CNN now in China (if you are one of the infinitesimal sliver of the population that can afford it), but you can also go to prison for making the slightest criticism of the government….”

Want to continue but have to run. Later.