Posted on 04/20/2003 12:33:20 AM PDT by sarcasm
BEIJING Chinese authorities ordered doctors in Beijing to hide patients with severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, from World Health Organization (WHO) experts last week in an attempt to downplay the epidemic, Chinese doctors and other sources said yesterday.
Authorities transferred about 40 SARS patients to a hotel on the grounds of one hospital and at another facility bundled more than 30 SARS patients into ambulances to prevent the WHO team from finding them, the sources said.
A worker at the Zihuachun Hotel, on the grounds of Hospital No. 309, said several dozen patients were taken to the hotel Tuesday morning, the day WHO officials visited two military hospitals. The patients were moved back to the hospital that evening, he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.nwsource.com ...
And what a quite valuable lesson it is, would be, and will be (hopefully) for all, including "our own".
It's high time for our nation to promote the virtues of freedom, honesty and good will to the people of the world.
It is clear that our past policy of keeping freedom to ourselves has been a disasterous failure.
I'll grant you that! But in the 50's there were no biological weapons programs by foreign countries, nor the threat of such.
And besides, Jim, there wasn't as much travel between countries and continents as there is today.
I'd love to have lived as an adult in the '50s BTW.
WHO are our best spokesmen on this subject?
Would they be Rush, Hannity, Glenn Beck and a myriad of like-minded talk-show hosts around the country?
If not them and their message - then who and what?
... we *still* got Cholera freom across 'the big pond' in 1932 ...
As to travel - what was the total figure for emigration *into* the United States (and many of these emmigrants brought with them al manner of contagion) over the course of our history?
But how new is this really? What the Chinese leaders are apparently turning China into is very much like what the media generally call a "right-wing" dictatorship: some economic freedom, no political freedom, lots of bureaucracy and corruption, and brutal treatment of those viewed by the government as enemies. [Needless to say, despite the media appellation, this has nothing to do with true right-wing political thought based on principles of individual liberty.]
An epiphany indeed. Brilliant thinking.
Canada is not a democracy.
Freedom of speech is a requirement of a democracy.
As for barbarism
I know a little about that as well
I went to public school in Canada.
Your point is well-taken, but -- and maybe I'm flogging a dead horse here -- there is so much more freedom of speech in Canada than in China that any similarities one can point out are going to be very strained. I'm certainly not defending the path away from true liberty that Canada has chosen (along with western Europe and the U.S., to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the country). But these Western countries are not totalitarian states.
Yes, there are problems with the Western democracies (or so-called democracies). But equating them with China or with other similar dictatorships obscures the truth about the dictatorships. It unintentionally runs parallel to the left-wing agenda of claiming that all societies have equal claim to our moral and political approval. It also obscures the arguments needed to try to bring the West back to the philosophy of freedom, because our problems (and therefore the ideas we need to reach for solutions) are very different from those of the dictatorships.
And what a quite valuable lesson it is, would be, and will be (hopefully) for all, including "our own".
No arguments here. The most effective means for an independant nation to learn to the values of freedom and capitalism is to suffer under totalitarianism and economic slavery. See Iran's current situation.
It's high time for our nation to promote the virtues of freedom, honesty and good will to the people of the world.
But here you do a complete 180 turn and announce that only through EXTERNAL means, namely us, can such an event happen. Indeed the US even has a duty to spread our values, however optimal they are, onto other nations that might not have learned to appreciate their precise value? What if a population is too stupid and hate filled to "want" liberty? See the Palestinians. That said, where in the Constitution is it mentioned that we should democratize the rest of the world? Shouldn't we concentrate on what IS mentioned in that document?
It is clear that our past policy of keeping freedom to ourselves has been a disasterous failure.
How you can make that statement with regards to SARS is beyond me. The region in which the disease came from is notorious for breeding such vile things. What, its our fault that the people living in that region aren't interested in toilet paper, sanitation and 21st century habits of cleanliness? We need to send in the 4th Div? Besides our foreign policy over the past 50 years has done precisely what you claim it hasn't albeit for non-alturistic reasons. Our victory in the Cold War for one, the Afghan campaign for another and now Iraq.
Well, the process of "democratization" is certainly not going to happen, it seems, without any EXTERNAL influence, as I see it, as most folks just git along to get along.
Moreover, the socialist-based media doesn't help educate the people of any given nation about the importance of self-reliance and freedom.
My main point is that it's up to us to influence the people of other nations how to fight for freedom, because otherwise they will not know, unfortunately, how to go about it.
The genious of the advent of our nation was a kind of a coincidence of converging values and philosophies. You may disagree with what I say, but if you think that a representative republic will spontaneously appear on the globe as a result of previous tyrrany in the modern age, I think you are mistaken.
Keep in mind that when the Americans fought the Revolutionary war, they did not have complete support of the people.
To repeat my premise: The people of the world need our support to become and stay free.
Thanks for the reply.
Dec31,99
While what you say is very true, most western "democracies", especially "socialist" ones employ a kind of widespread censorship of rightist values, such as support for unadulteraded news accounts, individual freedoms, familial freedoms, religious freedoms, under the guise of political correctness, especially in cities and the educaqtional establishment.
The marxist unions keep a firm hand on the media and the government-run, taxpayer funded educational establishments, and they get away with it.
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