HVK Archives: US willing to sell its soul to China for filthy lucre
US willing to sell its soul to China for filthy lucre - The Free Press Journal
M.V. Kamath
()
July 2, 1998
Title: US willing to sell its soul to China for filthy lucre
Author: M.V. Kamath
Publication: The Free Press Journal
Date: July 2, 1998
Ask any man in the street anywhere in the world which of the two
countries - China and the United States - is more powerful and
the instant reply would be: the United States, of course! And
the reply could not be more wrong. In recent weeks China has
shown without the shadow of doubt that it is the stronger of the
two and can call the shots. The United states is eating out of
Chinese hands with unbecoming meekness. That, it is doing so
without the slightest sense of shame makes the situation even
more disgusting. What is worse is that in bowing low before the
Chinese, President Bill Clinton has the full support of American
intellectuals! And who says that?
Not the Prime Minister of India; not his representative, Jaswant
Singh. The charge is made by no less then A.M. Rosenthal, a
former editor of the New York Times writing for the same paper.
In his column On My Mind (5 June) he wrote: eneath the scandals
about the Clinton Administration's betrayal of democracy in
China, its abandonment of human rights as an international
priority, its strengthening of Chinese missile forces with
American money and engineering, its acceptance of campaign funds
>from Beijing and its carefully blind eye towards the Chinese
sales of nuclear technology that suddenly bring the threat of war
in Asia - beneath all that is the fact that he got all the help
be needed, from America's own political, economic and
intellectual leadership.
But why was this help given so ungrudgingly? Writes Rosenthal -
and he should know: he American public was generally uncaring,
passive or supportive, in the inane belief that his (Clinton's)
betrayals and appeasement policies were creating huge profits for
the United States=94. The reality was that, as Rosenthal noted,
Beijing iled up a $ 50 billion trade surplus over the United
States! To recover that money the US has to go begging to China
for opening its markets to American goods. And die Chinese are
doing everything to tell Clinton how he has to behave.
He was received at Tiananmen Square where there was a massacre in
June 1989 of which so much was made by Washington as an example
of the debasement of Human Rights. The Chinese deliberately chose
to receive him there to show how little they care for American
opinion. Secondly, China asked that Clinton make no third
country stopovers either enroute to China or on return. It is
like India telling Clinton that if he wants to visit India he
should not make any stopover in Pakistan or any other country!
That would rouse the US State Department and the White House but
in this case Clinton meekly submitted to the Chinese demand. A
more humiliating submission on the part of an American president
cannot be imagined. Originally Clinton was planning to make a
stop-over in Japan to brief America's closest ally on what
transpired in Beijing. Now he won't be able to do that. The only
place Clinton will be allowed to visit is Hong Kong. That too is
a clever ploy intended to show that the concept of one-country-
two-systems works and that Taiwan too, could use this model!
Incidentally when China's president Jiang Zemin visited the
United States last year his only port-of-call en route was in
Hawaii where he went to see Pearl Harbour just to rub in the
point that both China and the United States shares a common past
of Japanese aggression. The Japanese must have liked it to be so
singled out! That's not all. Clinton has gone to the extent of
suggesting that China must be involved in any south Asian
settlement, which is plain impertinence. India has not asked for
China's intervention at any stage. Why should it, when China is
seen as an aggressor because of its encroachment on Indian
territory? And, what is worse, has been aiding and abetting
Pakistan in its nuclear ambitions? What moral right can China
ever have in being a mediator in the Indo-Pak differences?
Clinton should have known that pretty well, but he has chosen to
ignore the fact in a way most demeaning to the US.
It was to this that Rosenthal referred to when he wrote, among
other things, that "the American public cannot absolve itself of
appeasement responsibility and just enjoy the shame of Bill
Clinton, assuming he feels any. Americans, said Rosenthal, "have
to make sure that investigations and hearing continue even if
they lead to jail for those who took Chinese money and
impeachment for those who permitted it."
Rosenthal defended India in a way when he said that US)
Administration decisions to help Chinese technology carry
missiles to target and to ignore Chinese dispatch of nuclear
technology to Pakistan led India to prove its own nuclear
capabilities by testing them. According to Rosenthal, ndia
dropped huge hints to let Washington know in advance, but the
poor fellows failed=94. Bill Clinton did not want to hear anything
against China as indeed his administration is now anxious to make
excuses on behalf of Beijing, saying it is now behaving properly.
Consider this exchange between a correspondent and the US State
Department spokesman James Rubin at a press briefing on June 8:
Correspondent: Did the Secretary (of State) raise the issue (of
nuclear non-proliferation) with the Chinese Foreign Minister?
Rubin: Let me say that Secretary Albright was very pleasantly
surprised at the cooperative spirit that the Chinese showed with
a real problem the world faces. It's very easy to focus on the
past and what may or may not have happened ten years ago, 15
years ago or 20 years ago. .... What's happening today is the
Chinese Government has been helpful and supportive in trying to
deal with one of the biggest dangers .... whether it's on
missiles, on the Non-Proliferation Treaty and nuclear weapons,
whether it's chemical weapons, whether it's a whole series of
detailed negotiations related to technology transfer, the Chinese
Government today behaves in a way that would have been
unthinkable ten years ago.
This is like bolting the stable after the horse has bolted! There
must be loud laughter in the Chinese Foreign Office at American
naivete! In these ten years China fully helped Pakistan in
fashioning nuclear bombs, in making missiles and in transferring
technology. After that it is now cooperating with the United
States, a joke too tragic to laugh over. Is it that it is only
the United States that wants something - trade and dollars - from
China and China wants nothing, so it can call the shots?
That is manifestly not true. China wants as much from the US as
the United States wants from China. China wants the American
trade which is lucrative. It wants American technology as never
before. It wants the US vote at the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund and American support for admission to
the World Trade Organization (WTO). Yet it is Beijing that has
got the Clinton Administration exactly where it wants it. That
is a conundrum unless the plain and simple answer is that China,
having given campaign funds to the President and his party, is
now out to blackmail him.
Rosenthal put it pretty straight when he wrote: "Money: taking
political contributions from the Communist apparatus is moral
treachery, at least. Yes - and US businesses and economic
lobbies ceaselessly manipulate and despoil our political life by
using scores of millions of dollars to buy the services of US
politicians for the China lobbies. Are we made?" By what it is
doing - and has been doing - the US is showing that it has no
principles worth the name. Only eighteen months ago, a best-
seller in Beijing was entitled: "Say No to the US" and among US
academia a popular work was "The Coming Conflict with America".
A nation without principles is like a boat without rudder. By
America's own definition it is a "rogue state" utterly without
any principle or compassion or sense of international
responsibility. In June 1945, the then US Secretary of State
Henry L. Stimson easily got President Truman's sanction for
perhaps history's most abominable atrocity, the nuclear bombing
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (in contemptuous defiance of
international law banning military attack on non-belligerent
civilians) on the plea that the US then had 'the role of the
Almighty, the sovereign ruler of the world". While reproving
Stimson for blaspheming God; Truman however was to say that it
had been "fore-ordained" and that "ever since the atom bomb
became a reality there hasn't been a day when I haven't thanked
the Lord for his great mercy for making our country His deputy on
earth".
And Truman told Stimson to hold a church service, before the
nuclear bombs were sent to Japan! One commentator has said that
he does not know whether to laugh or cry over t such spiritual
smut but Truman was deliriously happy - and so was Winston
Churchill when informed of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
After all, they were not Christians, were they, the Japanese? And
they were challenging the might of the Anglo-Saxon supremacy,
weren't they? What mercy could they be entitled to?
So, unprincipled US is finding excuses to befriend China and to
turn a blind eye on Chinese help to Pakistan and to Iran. Money
talks. China apparently wants to spend $ 60 billion by the year
2020 to build 40 nuclear plants bought from the United States and
which holy mouth will not water at such prospects? American
industry can get rich but so what if India; in the process gets
hurt? India does not have a $ 50 billion positive balance of
trade with the United States, does it? That, in the final
analysis, is the bottom line.
It is no use arguing the matter with Washington. It knows what
it wants and it also knows how to get it and what is more, it has
the media under its control and can black-guard any nation that
does not accept the US as the land of undying virtue. There is
very little that India can do considering that the international
media is controlled by white, largely Anglo-Saxon (Associated
Press, United Press, Reuters) interests. That does not mean that
the Indian media should not attempt to expose American
pretensions, whatever the success rate be. For filthy lucre the
United States presently seems willing to sell its soul to China.
That China has no pretensions to principles either only shows the
highly amoral world in which we live. It has a lesson for India
if only Delhi is willing to learn from it.
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