O.k., already, if the hype is accurate, by typing the above words from a computer in China, I've earned myself a one-way ticket to a jail, torture centre or re-education programme. Previous blogs featuring the word Lhasa in the title should have slammed me there already. So anyone who is reading this should already have an idea that my use of the word "hype" above was somewhat justified.
A friend this morning alerted me to the Amnesty site which calls for people to get together to fight to pull down the Great Firewall surrounding China's Internet. The fact that I was able to access this site, FROM CHINA, free to sign up if I so desired and that nothing in it was deleted should also give pause for thought.
Before I actually logged on, and reflecting solely upon the information my friend sent me - that there was a movement which wanted to unban all sites - I was already in a bit of a moral dilemma. Yes, technically, I believe in the right of free speech. When you have been born and brought up in the countries which pioneered free speech you are ready to champion the cause for all those whom we've come to regard as repressed. When it never actually affects you personally, its easy to take a moral stand on many of the social questions that cause so many of us angst. But I've spent a huge chunk of my life living in countries where such rights do not exist - and in terms of day to day life and social organisation, it becomes really difficult to take a stand. It seems that the more I see of life and the further I travel to experience it, the more I begin to doubt whether any of us are really qualified to take a moral stand on anything which we don't experience personally. A statement which would have shocked the person I used to be to the core.
I spent a long time (far too long) in South Africa - mostly post Mandela. I did arrive there in the last days of the old regime, however, and was immediately plucked out of the waiting queue in front of Customs at the airport and thrown into a cell, where I was held - with no explanation, no water, no toilet facilities - for around 12 hours. Well, that's one of the reasons everyone hailed Mandela you'll probably be thinking. He brought freedom and peace and tolerance.
No. He didn't.
At the risk of tearing down idols, the truth is that he was never really anything more than a figurehead and, once in power, ensured that the eyes of the rest of the world slid happily away from South Africa and focused elsewhere. Not, unhappily, on Rwanda because that was far too big a mess ever to get ones head around, and not, until the last few years, on Zimbabwe; - but far away onto Bosnia thus leaving South Africa to slide further and further into violence, corruption and repression.
As a (hopefully) illustrative segue back into life immediately after Mandela took over: the streets of Durban which, when I first arrived was a modern, fairly safe international capital city instead became a no-go area. Wimpy bars were terrorist target areas, rubbish bins were removed as they harboured bombs, beggars (both black and white) slept in the streets, people were knifed, shot and attacked in broad daylight. In the seaside town where I lived army Caspars were parked at the ends of the streets, sometimes we were unable to leave town because the highways became battle grounds, little boys could not access public lavatories unless their mothers were prepared to find them dead and bleeding with their little genitals removed and every kid, while not knowing perhaps who Tigger and Eeyore were, could spot an AK47 from 100 paces. Every garage in the street harboured at least 4 refugees - some up to 15 and we all, black and white attended weekly funerals of those we held dear.
During this time my father died and I flew back to England to make funeral, and other, arrangements. At a gathering of typical middle-class, upwardly mobile and very socially-concerned friends and acquaintances one evening I was handed a glass of Australian wine with the remark that though it was o.k. to drink South African wine again, people had discovered other brands out of the sheer desperation of being voluntarily deprived of their favourite tipple while they were "doing their bit" to protest apartheid. My mind flashed back to the land my children were living in and the way of life that none of these complacent, well-meaning idiots could comprehend and I had to go outside for a while to get myself together.
It was useless to tell these good people what they had done. They expected me to applaud the hardship they had endured in declining South African wine and signing pledges. They would never understand that the thousands and thousands of workers and families they had put out on the streets and condemned to slow death when the businesses closed down were their fault. Or that the violence of our lives initiated by street kids had caused the murder or so many of my own friends and acquaintances. Or that the mothers of South Africa, black and white, cursed them from the bottom of their souls. To this day people come up to me to tell me how they did their bit and, in their eagerness and expectation of my thanks and appreciation never dream that I won't fall upon their necks with glad cries and hail them as heroes.
I expect I sound bitter in the above. I am. I learned some terrible lesson the hardest of ways and my two children unwittingly learned them along with me. Those lessons, the sights we saw, the things we endured, will stay with us until the day we die. And the unquiet ghosts of all our dead haunt us still.
From South Africa to China is a huge step and the two situations in both countries are very different. But when I accessed that Amnesty site this morning my mind played strange tricks on me - my thoughts went straight back to the days we, my sons and I, have all put behind us now but that are an indelible part of who we are. Once again people with no complete understanding of the complexities of certain issues are being asked to step in and become pro-active. Once again well meaning citizens whose only desire is to change the world for the better are taking stands. Once again the brilliance of the white and the emptiness of the black sides of an issue are masking the shades of grey that lie between. And I, personally, have no idea what the right thing is to do.
The argument that Internet sites are monitored in China affects me not one whit. It would be an extremely naive person who did not know that the Internet sites of all countries are monitored by various governmental agencies. That FBI involvement with Wikipedia allows it to change, delete and provide misinformation is a cause never fought against. The fact that with the amendment of laws through the Howard and Bush governments key words flag posters in Australia and USA is no secret. If that were to be argued as a reason for change in China it would have to be a global movement against all governments.
But the censorship question? Ah, there I am caught indeed. Yep. Ladies and gentlemen there are indeed sites in China regarding which the firewall proves impenetrable to all but, one imagines, the most dedicated hacker. These are porn sites - kiddie porn most especially. I look around me to Australia and UK and the USA and I find that my knee-jerk reaction against censorship is here tested to the limit. Do I want to be part of a movement which would result in 1.3million more people in the world having access to and increasing the demand for the kind of industry that such sites represent? Do I want the little kids I see everyday to be as much at risk as the little kids in First-world countries? Do I think that Chinese society needs to live with the knowledge that their precious One Child families are so endangered?
Naturally, it would, in turn, be naive in me to assume that it was only porn and sex sites that were impenetrable. Of course there are political sites that are also banned. Not being a political activist I have no idea of which sites these are. In teaching Journalism classes I have never come across any sites that were not available. In my day to day dealings I am aware of no areas I may not go. So I am simply not qualified to gauge how many of our rights are being denied by the places we cannot go. I can, quite comfortably, say it doesn't affect either me or the majority of citizens. Yes. theoretically I can see why the fact that complete freedom is not available could be considered indicative of repression.
But, practically, I think of my students and the young people of China. Slowly their innocence is being stripped from them and they are beginning to discover the facts of life for themselves. I have complete faith in them however. It is their country, their government, their future. I feel perfectly confident that they will never countenance a halt to the increasing changes that are occurring in this country. They are not puppets but thinking, intelligent young men and women who, since the Lhasa coverage, are looking around them with different eyes. Sadly, I look with them at the world outside their borders where rights and justice and freedom are loudly proclaimed and see the accompanying sides of those coins: the drug culture, the paedophilia networks, the fact that corruption and greed and repressive ideas like fundamentalism are as rife under the name of democracy as they are under any other name.
I will not be adding my name to any Amnesty lists, I think. I don't wish to wear a badge on my site which would signal that I know what is right and what is wrong when I am so clearly undecided. I have learned my lessons not only in South Africa but in the trouble spots of the world to which my fathers job led us throughout my life. And I, as well as Pandora, am well aware that once one has lifted the lid, no power on earth or in the heavens can put all the undreamed of or unknown demons back in the box. I remember that Pandora was unaware of what consequences her actions would have and I know that in the current climate there are no guarantees that, whatever ones intentions, one won't allow the demons out too.
A friend this morning alerted me to the Amnesty site which calls for people to get together to fight to pull down the Great Firewall surrounding China's Internet. The fact that I was able to access this site, FROM CHINA, free to sign up if I so desired and that nothing in it was deleted should also give pause for thought.
Before I actually logged on, and reflecting solely upon the information my friend sent me - that there was a movement which wanted to unban all sites - I was already in a bit of a moral dilemma. Yes, technically, I believe in the right of free speech. When you have been born and brought up in the countries which pioneered free speech you are ready to champion the cause for all those whom we've come to regard as repressed. When it never actually affects you personally, its easy to take a moral stand on many of the social questions that cause so many of us angst. But I've spent a huge chunk of my life living in countries where such rights do not exist - and in terms of day to day life and social organisation, it becomes really difficult to take a stand. It seems that the more I see of life and the further I travel to experience it, the more I begin to doubt whether any of us are really qualified to take a moral stand on anything which we don't experience personally. A statement which would have shocked the person I used to be to the core.
I spent a long time (far too long) in South Africa - mostly post Mandela. I did arrive there in the last days of the old regime, however, and was immediately plucked out of the waiting queue in front of Customs at the airport and thrown into a cell, where I was held - with no explanation, no water, no toilet facilities - for around 12 hours. Well, that's one of the reasons everyone hailed Mandela you'll probably be thinking. He brought freedom and peace and tolerance.
No. He didn't.
At the risk of tearing down idols, the truth is that he was never really anything more than a figurehead and, once in power, ensured that the eyes of the rest of the world slid happily away from South Africa and focused elsewhere. Not, unhappily, on Rwanda because that was far too big a mess ever to get ones head around, and not, until the last few years, on Zimbabwe; - but far away onto Bosnia thus leaving South Africa to slide further and further into violence, corruption and repression.
As a (hopefully) illustrative segue back into life immediately after Mandela took over: the streets of Durban which, when I first arrived was a modern, fairly safe international capital city instead became a no-go area. Wimpy bars were terrorist target areas, rubbish bins were removed as they harboured bombs, beggars (both black and white) slept in the streets, people were knifed, shot and attacked in broad daylight. In the seaside town where I lived army Caspars were parked at the ends of the streets, sometimes we were unable to leave town because the highways became battle grounds, little boys could not access public lavatories unless their mothers were prepared to find them dead and bleeding with their little genitals removed and every kid, while not knowing perhaps who Tigger and Eeyore were, could spot an AK47 from 100 paces. Every garage in the street harboured at least 4 refugees - some up to 15 and we all, black and white attended weekly funerals of those we held dear.
During this time my father died and I flew back to England to make funeral, and other, arrangements. At a gathering of typical middle-class, upwardly mobile and very socially-concerned friends and acquaintances one evening I was handed a glass of Australian wine with the remark that though it was o.k. to drink South African wine again, people had discovered other brands out of the sheer desperation of being voluntarily deprived of their favourite tipple while they were "doing their bit" to protest apartheid. My mind flashed back to the land my children were living in and the way of life that none of these complacent, well-meaning idiots could comprehend and I had to go outside for a while to get myself together.
It was useless to tell these good people what they had done. They expected me to applaud the hardship they had endured in declining South African wine and signing pledges. They would never understand that the thousands and thousands of workers and families they had put out on the streets and condemned to slow death when the businesses closed down were their fault. Or that the violence of our lives initiated by street kids had caused the murder or so many of my own friends and acquaintances. Or that the mothers of South Africa, black and white, cursed them from the bottom of their souls. To this day people come up to me to tell me how they did their bit and, in their eagerness and expectation of my thanks and appreciation never dream that I won't fall upon their necks with glad cries and hail them as heroes.
I expect I sound bitter in the above. I am. I learned some terrible lesson the hardest of ways and my two children unwittingly learned them along with me. Those lessons, the sights we saw, the things we endured, will stay with us until the day we die. And the unquiet ghosts of all our dead haunt us still.
From South Africa to China is a huge step and the two situations in both countries are very different. But when I accessed that Amnesty site this morning my mind played strange tricks on me - my thoughts went straight back to the days we, my sons and I, have all put behind us now but that are an indelible part of who we are. Once again people with no complete understanding of the complexities of certain issues are being asked to step in and become pro-active. Once again well meaning citizens whose only desire is to change the world for the better are taking stands. Once again the brilliance of the white and the emptiness of the black sides of an issue are masking the shades of grey that lie between. And I, personally, have no idea what the right thing is to do.
The argument that Internet sites are monitored in China affects me not one whit. It would be an extremely naive person who did not know that the Internet sites of all countries are monitored by various governmental agencies. That FBI involvement with Wikipedia allows it to change, delete and provide misinformation is a cause never fought against. The fact that with the amendment of laws through the Howard and Bush governments key words flag posters in Australia and USA is no secret. If that were to be argued as a reason for change in China it would have to be a global movement against all governments.
But the censorship question? Ah, there I am caught indeed. Yep. Ladies and gentlemen there are indeed sites in China regarding which the firewall proves impenetrable to all but, one imagines, the most dedicated hacker. These are porn sites - kiddie porn most especially. I look around me to Australia and UK and the USA and I find that my knee-jerk reaction against censorship is here tested to the limit. Do I want to be part of a movement which would result in 1.3million more people in the world having access to and increasing the demand for the kind of industry that such sites represent? Do I want the little kids I see everyday to be as much at risk as the little kids in First-world countries? Do I think that Chinese society needs to live with the knowledge that their precious One Child families are so endangered?
Naturally, it would, in turn, be naive in me to assume that it was only porn and sex sites that were impenetrable. Of course there are political sites that are also banned. Not being a political activist I have no idea of which sites these are. In teaching Journalism classes I have never come across any sites that were not available. In my day to day dealings I am aware of no areas I may not go. So I am simply not qualified to gauge how many of our rights are being denied by the places we cannot go. I can, quite comfortably, say it doesn't affect either me or the majority of citizens. Yes. theoretically I can see why the fact that complete freedom is not available could be considered indicative of repression.
But, practically, I think of my students and the young people of China. Slowly their innocence is being stripped from them and they are beginning to discover the facts of life for themselves. I have complete faith in them however. It is their country, their government, their future. I feel perfectly confident that they will never countenance a halt to the increasing changes that are occurring in this country. They are not puppets but thinking, intelligent young men and women who, since the Lhasa coverage, are looking around them with different eyes. Sadly, I look with them at the world outside their borders where rights and justice and freedom are loudly proclaimed and see the accompanying sides of those coins: the drug culture, the paedophilia networks, the fact that corruption and greed and repressive ideas like fundamentalism are as rife under the name of democracy as they are under any other name.
I will not be adding my name to any Amnesty lists, I think. I don't wish to wear a badge on my site which would signal that I know what is right and what is wrong when I am so clearly undecided. I have learned my lessons not only in South Africa but in the trouble spots of the world to which my fathers job led us throughout my life. And I, as well as Pandora, am well aware that once one has lifted the lid, no power on earth or in the heavens can put all the undreamed of or unknown demons back in the box. I remember that Pandora was unaware of what consequences her actions would have and I know that in the current climate there are no guarantees that, whatever ones intentions, one won't allow the demons out too.
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