There have been some brutal physical assaults on Chinese people recently in Vancouver, Toronto, New York and London, ostensibly over the COVID-19 epidemic. Physical attacks against innocent Chinese have escalated over the unsubstantiated fear that China is deliberately spreading the lethal coronavirus. At the same time, and not coincidentally, rarely a day goes by that major media outlets don’t launch yet another vitriolic attack on China, thus enabling these brutish attacks.
It has become a virtual cliche that China violates human rights with disdain in their country, and this cliche is now at the core of any trade discussions between China and Canada. Canada also trades with the U.S., yet during trade talks with that country we never hear about the human rights of the million-plus innocent civilians slaughtered in Iraq. This slaughter of Muslims by the American military is still going on today in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan and Libya.
The U.S. invaded and slaughtered over two million Vietnamese a few years before that, and yet we never heard of protecting the human rights of the Vietnamese, while we discussed trade with the U.S. The brutal human rights abuses over the past few years in Central and South America by the American military and its CIA are but an addendum to the full-frontal assaults on Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam.
Now, we have Black Lives Matter, a movement that has developed after almost 400 years of slavery and brutality in the U.S. and has fixated on white police officers shooting and killing unarmed black men on the streets of America. The lynching, torturing, raping and killing of innocent Blacks has gone on for 400 years, and yet when one courageous black quarterback began a peaceful protest against this violence, he was vilified and blacklisted (excuse the pun) by the very same media that rages over human rights in China.
We in Canada don’t need to look to faraway China for our excuse to become apoplectic over human rights abuses. We need only look across our border to the U.S. to see a shopping cart full of diabolical racist behavior appearing on our TV screens every night.
Patrick O’Neil
Nelson