Shock in China and Japan over Saddam’s Hanging

"The United States considers itself the patriarch of the world," it wrote. "Whenever someone doesn't please its eyes or obey its words, it will use its own ways to punish them, imposing sanctions or using force."
- xinhua, the official chinese news agency on the execution of saddam


The summum bonum of Chinese History

And this coming from a country world renown for human rights violations such as the harvesting of organs from prisoners, the execution of more people per annum than those carried out by the rest of the world put together, the using of thugs to clear land of its inhabitants, forced abortions officially imposed upon women bearing their second child, etc, etc.

Of course, the intention behind the aforementioned tirade is clear. It is a typical nationalist strategy to vilify other nations for the purpose of further reinforcing the local populace's patriotic gravitation towards one's own 'home and country'. When all other nations are perceived as relatively less desirable, 'our own home and country', despite its shortcomings, is still the preferred choice. This is that which makes citizens of such nations put up with far more injustices than they otherwise would.

The execution of Saddam gave the Chinese yet another opportunity to call for international respect for the sovereignty of nations and observance of the principle of non-intervention. It seems that those who cry out for non-intervention are usually those who flout this principle continuously when it comes to their own citizens and whom are well known for human rights violations. Those who do not keep hankering after international non-interference and observance of the principle of sovereignty are those who use their observable and verifiable observance of human rights to argue for non-intervention. These nations are those that supply Reason as an argument for non-interference as opposed to human-rights violating nations who use the principle of non-interference as a reason in itself.

This, however, is not surprising coming from a Chinese nation as its inhabitants are most adept at observing traditions for tradition sake – which is nothing more than a shortcut past critical thought. Such an unthinking people, socialised into such propensities via a culture that had been molded by the chinese elite over 2 millennia to perpetuate the status quo in the longest surviving state in the world, naturally view precepts and principles as reasons in themselves as it is the way of those who adhere to traditions simply because they are traditions. This is what we may view as the observance of a ‘culture of practice’ as opposed to a relatively open-eyed ‘practice of culture’. This elite-centred culture, that views all humanity as pawns for the self-aggrandizing ambitions of its leaders, are thus naturally shocked when the leaders of other nations, as opposed to the people, are treated in such a manner.


IHT

wiki - human rights in china