As I said the other day, being an environmentalist in China is not easy and potentially bad for your health. A mob reportedly beat up a local environmentalist who called for government officials to swim in a heavily polluted river in China.
We’d written about the river’s plight a week ago (check out the photo of the river to the right).
Interestingly, the man who was assaulted was not the local business person who offered big money ($32,000) to a government environmental official if he’d swim in the polluted river, but instead they targeted a 60 year old activist who had backed the call.
We’re not immune “to two weights, two measures” in the US either (e.g., Wall Street getting away with economic destruction, while the little guy pays the price) but for the most part, it doesn’t involve street violence.
It looks like someone is not interested in cleaning up the river.
“The whole thing lasted four or five hours until the police arrived. My father got hit in the head by six or seven people, with their fists. He is now feeling dizzy and sleeping all the time,” she added, claiming the attack had been orchestrated by local officials.
Calls to the mobile phone of the local Communist Party chief went unanswered on Wednesday.
We’re heading that way fast… only with more guns.
I foresee life as a meme for the bizarre “[You] used the internet, you always use the internet!” said by the mob.
China’s path to prosperity and national independence has been betrayed at every juncture by the CCP, a rancid collection of Stalinist’s and Maoist’s with a choke hold on government. They’re not plutocrats like Democrats and Republicans here but they might as well be.
It’s almost inevitable at this point that they’ll follow the Russian Stalinisit’s and try to liquidate the extremely deformed Chinese workers state and reintroduce capitalist norms. .
China: everything old is new again. In spite of its ritzy, world class cities China is still a backward hell hole of human abuse and explotation.
That’s exactly what I was thinking. Except it’s not that far off.
Consider what happens whenever someone stands up as an object case for any kind of social reform — like that family without health insurance, who then had to endure harassment for weeks. “OMG, they have granite countertops! Fraud!” Or that guy in Newtown CT getting death threats because he took in a bus driver and a bunch of kids after the school shooting massacre. (Heck, right anybody who gets national attention in advocating for any gun control laws gets death threats now.) Or the very real danger anybody involved in providing safe & legal abortions has to face every day.
Or let’s get closer to the topic at hand: How many perfectly peaceful environmental activist groups have been investigated by the FBI in recent years as possible eco-terrorism suspects?
We can expect that here — and worse — when the Teabaggers and gun nuts are in control.