China

With the constant talk of the inevitable world domination by China, stories like this one remind us that "inevitable" is a mighty complicated word.

Hey guys, while you are out in the streets, openly claiming to live under the 4th Reich and sleeping in peace after publicly insisting that your government is the most evil since Pol Pot's, there really are countries that do things like this:

The spill occurred after an explosion Nov. 13 at the Jilin Petrochemical Co. that killed five workers and injured 70 more. The plant, a subsidiary of one of China's largest energy firms, China National Petroleum Corp., is located about 165 miles upstream from Harbin in neighboring Jilin province.

Party officials at the factory and in the Jilin government at first denied the blast caused any pollution, and continued to repeat such statements as recently as Monday.

But in one of several tough reports on Friday, the state-run China Youth Daily quoted an unidentified city engineer in Jilin saying party officials there were told of the chemical spill within eight hours of the explosion. Citing another unnamed source, it also said the Jilin officials released water from a reservoir into the river in an attempt to dilute the spill and fix the problem without alerting the public.

For all the dvd players and tennis shoes the Chinese are cranking out, they still treat their own citizens like cattle...well, that's silly of course, nobody would let their cows drink poisoned water. 

What happens now? With all the talk of the inevitable, here the unexpected. There, the unexpected. It is events like this that remind us, NOTHING IS INEVITABLE.
 
I expect Greenpeace will be chugging up the river next week to launch a protest.  NOT!

P.S. As I continue my history of this area, I am reading yet another book that describes in detail the horror of the Soviet Union. Not the singular horror of Stalin but the horror of Lenin (quote from a Lenin letter I read last night "We must kill more professors!") and living under a totalitarian regime as well. While the Soviet Union still stood, stories like those I am reading now were dismissed by the intellectual elite and sophisticated as the rantings of paranoid rightwingers. Now they are known as fact.

I believe that when the time comes for the communist government of China to step, or be pushed aside, it will equal if not surpass the USSR in past atrocities revealed.

How can people of any political persuasion march under the images of monsters of history?