Fantastic! What better place to criticize your own countrymen than in a foreign country?
Mayor Bloomberg is saying that xenophobia in America is endangering the county's future and is "really very dangerous."Some of the deficiencies that Mr. Bloomberg has announced about himself:
"It is staggering the damage that is being done to America, I think, by the anti-immigrant kinds of movement that you see in some parts of our country," he said yesterday, after delivering a speech at Fudan University in Shanghai.
"Our country was built by immigrants and if we don't keep a supply of immigrants coming in we are not going to have a future," he said.[1]
None of his business.
For starters, what is a municipal chief executive doing in China talking about a matter of national policy, to wit, immigration? Not that the people who are responsible for U.S. immigration policy seem to care all that much about their responsibilities, mind you. But foreign policy is definitely not on his list of municipal job responsibilities last anyone heard.
Strange choice of venue.
Even if you allow the mayor some leeway in view of his impending run for . . . or stumble toward . . . the presidency, it's still a puzzle to me why he chose to talk about that over there. "There" being China where they must either be scratching their heads or laughing up their sleeves at Mr. Bloomberg.
How this kind of a speech is going to play to his advantage back "home" is anybody's guess. He's either running for President — of China — or doing his best to firm up Chinese campaign financing support for his impending U.S. campaign.[2]
Ignorance of Chinese realities.
Talking about the "evils" of xenophobia to the Chinese is simply to identify oneself immediately as an idiot.
If any ethnic group has a sense of its innate self worth it has to be the Han Chinese.
For example, there is no Muslim problem in China (of any magnitude, that is) because the Chinese simply don't permit such a problem to exist. No huge doubt there. No soul searching about "the other."
Moreover, Chinese grow up learning about their 5,000 years of history and the wonders of their civilization. The Chinese appreciate where they come from and who they are, and justly so. (It seems only America's politicians and academics are in doubt about America's national accomplishments.)
Ignorance of China's historical experience.
Mr. Bloomberg apparently does not know that Chinese school children are taken to the scene of the Old Summer Palace that was destroyed by foreigners in 1860 and 1900.[3] This is done to teach them about China's humiliation at the hands of foreigners.
The 1900 incident involved a multi-national foreign military expedition that took control of Beijing,[4] which irritated not a few Chinese at the time.
Kaiser Wilhelm II's order to the German troops in China was:
Make the name German remembered in China for a thousand years so that no Chinaman will ever again dare to even squint at a German.[5]This probably still irritates a few die hards like, oh, the present Chinese government.
The Opium Wars, or the Anglo-Chinese Wars (1839-1842 and 1856-1860) forced China to accept the British opium trade on Chinese territory. At the conclusion of the first one, Britain forced the Chinese to sign the "Unequal Treaties" that forced open Chinese ports and resulted in the ceding of Hong Kong to Britain, which occupied and controlled Hong Kong from 1842 to 1997.[6]
The Japanese invasion of China was also a humiliation to China and resulted in widespread death and destruction. The Rape of Nanjing is an infamous event entailing rape, looting, and the killing of between 150,000 and 300,000 Chinese.[7]
In 1950s, the U.S. approached the Chinese border in Korea and Chinese troops suffered massive casualties in combat with those foreign forces.
Nor should I omit mention of the Great Wall of China — a blooming monument to Chinese xenophobia and one of the few man-made objects visible from the Space Shuttle.
Yes. Talk to the Chinese about xenophobia and establish your credentials right away as a person with a serious substance abuse problem. Probably 85% of what China's foreign and domestic policy is about is making sure that foreigners don't rape, kill, and exploit the Chinese people again.[8] Tell them about those low life Americans who worry about foreign invasion and foreign domination.
Ignorance of Chinese language.
It's true, mastering the entire Chinese language is a tall order even for an American politician. Be that as it may, I said the Chinese are laughing up their sleeves at the mayor because the universal Chinese slang term for a foreigner is yang gweizi or "foreign devil." A Chinese porter once delivered the Colonel's steamer trunk to his stateroom in steerage in Hong Kong harbor with the announcement to my Chinese fellow passengers that it belonged to the gweizi. Those delightful people told me this later — and told me that one of them admonished the porter that he shouldn't speak thus. But it's still the way Chinese will describe a foreigner, even if it's without malice and is actually a rather humorous term. Or can be.
Usual canard.
Then there's the usual insinuation that Americans are brimming with hatred and fear of foreigners. In the mayor's evident view, no American can engage in a natural and reasonable questioning of immigration policies and their economic, political, and cultural implications of immigration without its being a manifestation of naked hatred and fear.
Q: What about the fact that one-third of the prisoners in federal prison are illegals?Ignorance of American history.
A: You evidently fear and hate immigrants.
American was not built by immigrants unless you count the Mongol hordes as "immigrants" to the countries they conquered. The English and Europeans who came to North America conquered it in the way that people who take over real estate do. They stole it fair and square, in the immortal formulation of Sen. Hayakawa, who was speaking about America's suzerainty over the Panama Canal. People seem confused about this. It is only late in the day that relatively small numbers of people were let in or invited in as a matter of national policy as set by the then dominant people of English origin.
Wild assertion.
I simply don't understand the mayor's assertion that "if we don't keep a supply of immigrants coming in we are not going to have a future." What is the basis of this conclusion that this particular nation cannot exist by depending solely on the citizens and residents already within its borders?
What human resource is it that we simply must have to survive but which can only be imported? The only thing I can think of is the built in problem with our Social Security scheme that, as with all Ponzi schemes, requires the addition of new payors to keep the system going. I can think of no other reason for this kind of thinking, unless it is to pander to immigrant groups already within the U.S.
Based on this speech, would the phrase "presidential timber" leap to your mind?
Notes
[1] "Bloomberg Condemns Xenophobia in America." New York Sun, 12/13/07 (link omitted).
[2] For which there is ample precedent. "1996 United States campaign finance controversy." Wikipedia.
[3] "Today, the destruction of YuanMingYuan is still felt within China as a vivid symbol of foreign aggression and humiliation." YuanMingYuan (Old Summer Palace). See also this excellent site: "Old Summer Palace." By R. Todd King, Summer 2004.
[4] "Boxer Rebellion." Wikipedia.
[5] Id.
[6] "Opium Wars." Wikipedia.
[7] "Nanking Massacre." Wikipedia.
[8] Which should not be taken to mean that the other 15% isn't pretty scary all by itself. Also, for insight into how China's own government has done far more killing of Chinese than foreigners and into Chinese hypernationalism see "Importing Sino-Fascism?" by John Derbyshire, VDARE.com, 9/13/00.
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