Truth Collective

From China’s Other Massacre by Michelle Tsai for Foreign Policy:

“The Nanjing massacre remains a raw nerve for the entire nation. The Japanese atrocities constitute the most violent event in modern Chinese history and remain seared in the country’s collective memory as an episode of national suffering and humiliation. In the Chinese view, the episode has yet to conclude because Japan has neither fully acknowledged nor adequately apologized for its wartime wrongdoings.

“To the Chinese public, Japan has become worse and worse,” said Shi Yinhong, an international relations professor at Renmin University in Beijing. “Compared with before, Japan remembers less and less about the massacre and is distorting past history.” Of course, the Chinese Communist Party has been fairly successful in committing its own distortions. Tiananmen has nearly been bleached from China’s history, at least in the domestic sphere. It’s virtually impossible to find Chinese-language books or articles about the event, and Internet censorship aims to block all content related to the subject. (On Tuesday, China’s “Net Nanny” went into overdrive and blocked major sites like Hotmail, Twitter and Flickr.) Without official acknowledgment of how the military used force against student demonstrators, it’s no surprise the Tiananmen tragedy hardly exists for many Chinese.

For China, the Nanjing massacre was the culmination of two centuries of nonstop humiliation. Starting from the mid-1800s with the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion, China suffered a string of shameful military losses and unfair treaties at the hands of foreign powers. Today, China’s rise as a major world player in economics and politics is undeniable. But the lessons of the recent past have led China to be hyper defensive on matters of sovereignty. Thus, even as pride and nationalism grow, this powerful state’s collective ego remains more than a little bruised.”

The myths that human rights activists tell you about child soldiering.

Another one from FP:

“Americans are a can-do people. They tend to believe that if something does not work, it needs to be fixed. Unless, that is, they are talking about the war on drugs. On this politically fraught issue, Washington’s elites and, indeed, the majority of the population, believe two contradictory things. First, 76 percent of Americans think the war on drugs launched in 1971 by President Richard Nixon has failed. Yet only 19 percent believe the central focus of antidrug efforts should be shifted from interdiction and incarceration to treatment and education. A full 73 percent of Americans are against legalizing any kind of drugs, and 60 percent oppose legalizing marijuana.

This “it doesn’t work, but don’t change it” incongruity is not just a quirk of the U.S. public. It is a manifestation of how the prohibition on drugs has led to a prohibition on rational thought.”

full article.
Walt wrote something similar awhile ago.

Part 2 of the interview from Democracy Now. If you haven’t seen it, be sure to check out the first part.

from his blog:

One does not need to look far down the road to see the point where a two-state solution will no longer be a practical possibility. What will the United States do then? What will American policy be when it makes no sense to talk about a two-state solution, because Israel effectively controls all of what we used to call Mandate Palestine? What vision will President Obama and Secretary Clinton have for the Palestinians and for Israel when they can no longer invoke the two-state mantra? There are only three alternative options at that point…

…

Bottom line: If the two-state solution dies, as seems increasingly likely, the United States is going to face a very awkward set of choices. That’s one reason why Obama and his team — as well as Israel’s friends in the United States — should move beyond paying lip-service to the idea of creating a Palestinian state and actually do something about it. But it’s hard to be optimistic that they will.

the rest.