Long forgotten: the Goddess of LIberty at the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

~

Only a couple of months after the international protests of the torch relay and violence in Tibet, you gotta look long and hard to find evidence of China’s oppression of the Tibetan people. Or, for that matter, it’s own people. In a country where Google searches for dangerous words like ‘democracy,’ ‘Dalai Lama’, ‘Tiannamen’ or ‘Tibet’ are censored (with our cooperation), in a country that makes its own labor-force so dirt cheap it’s cheaper to ship our products halfway around the world and back than make ’em in our own backyard, in a country that killed one in six Tibetans in 1959, forcibly sterilized women (including, er, nuns), burned Buddhist libraries and defecated on Buddhist statues…in a Communist nation founded by a man who killed more than Hitler and Stalin…combined…in a country that’s mowed down the forests of Tibet and buried tons of nuclear waste in the mountains from whence water originates for more than 1/3 the population of the entire planet…the New York Times leads off an ‘incisive’ look into the state of China as the Olympics approach by remarking on the poor air quality.