With Malice Toward None - American Style

Henry C.K. Liu hliu at mindspring.com
Sat May 15 06:36:44 PDT 1999


Apologize to China?

By William Buckley

Published May 12, 1999

The big mistake was to apologize.

It's OK to regret killing three

Chinese in the embassy in Belgrade, but

what is one apologizing for? It is as

nonsensical as the words one hears on an

airline. "We apologize for the late arrival."

That gives off the sound of the pilot having

come in late, or getting lost. You do not

"apologize" if fog or dispatch instructions

made you late, and you do not apologize if a

bomber unintentionally bombed a foreign

embassy.

But then there was obviously something

more afoot than the death of three Chinese.

The Chinese government, it quickly

transpired, was if not directly behind the

anti-U.S. riot, (a) tolerant of it, and (b)

pleased by it. We are talking about hundreds

of thousands of people whose parents lived

through the Cultural Revolution and may

have been among those many thousands

who told marauding Red Guards that the

neighbor over there had been seen listening

to a foreign broadcast, leading to public

execution. The idea that the wretched

Chinese, 35 million of whose progenitors

paid for China's love affair with Maoism, are

shocked by the accidental death of three

journalists causes one to wonder.

During the 1930s, Henry Wallace, as

secretary of agriculture, ordered the

slaughtering of pigs, in an effort to maintain

the price of pork. There was a great uproar.

Wallace countered with the only witticism

ever attributed to him. "You'd think," he said

about his critics, "they were all related."

We couldn't, one supposes, really expect the

president of the United States or even the

secretary of state to say it, but someone

"close to the White House" might usefully

have been quoted: "Under strict

understanding of anonymity, the source said

that the unofficial government line is: What is

Peking complaining about? If the Chinese

are against random killing, they should be

exercised about what Milosevic is doing. A

second White House source said it would be

helpful to the cause of human freedom if

Peking organized a volunteer force to go to

Kosovo to fight the aggressor. 'They could

call it the Belgrade Memorial Expeditionary

Force,' he said."

We learn that the Chinese government is in

fact continuing what the Cultural Revolution

types did routinely. It was to picture the

United States as an imperialist power

insensitive to the rights of other people and

prisoner to the capitalist/imperialist

imperative to commit aggression. The Wall

Street Journal reports that the identical thing

is going on in Russia, with readers and

viewers enjoined by state media to believe

that NATO, led by the United States, is

engaged in crude imperialism. Counter facts,

of course, have not the faintest possibility of

prevailing against the official line.

Here is a true challenge to U.S. diplomacy.

We have been courting the Chinese

throughout the tenure of Mr. Clinton. If it

were youth acting on their own impulses, we

could ignore the event -- youth were born to

be ignored, when they give way to political

impulses. But this is not what is going on. We

have not heard Official Peking raise its

authoritative hand and say, "Stop!

Comrades, the United States government

has expressed its regret and will pay

damages to the aggrieved families." We have

to deduce that the Peking government thinks

it productive to antagonize the United States.

Which requires us to answer the question:

Why?

The protest might have been generated by

some kind of nationalist scorn for defective

Western intelligence. The CIA was using old

maps, and should have been using

up-to-date maps that marked with a big X the

Chinese embassy. But then one thinks back

on the line used by National Review 40 years

ago: "The attempted assassination of

Sukarno had all the appearances of a CIA

operation. Everyone in the room was killed

but Sukarno."

In fact, any attempt at such finely calibrated

bombing as to guarantee immunity is

surrealistic. Wars inevitably swoop down on

people who are not engaged in them, and

while true regret can be expressed at

incidental casualties, it is unreal to expect

either that there will be none such in the

future, or that a heavy obligation in

conscience rests with the offender. The

NATO alliance, led by Mr. Clinton, has a

great deal to be achingly remorseful about,

but none of it has to do with the object of

concern of rioting young Chinese.

Write to William Buckley at Universal

Press Syndicate: 4520 Main St., Kansas

City, Mo. 64111.



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