SF right to give torch bum rush
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and the people who work for him were smart to cut the Olympic Torch route in half and get that phony flame out of town as fast as they could. People were getting ready to tear into each other over the silly thing, without really knowing what they were talking about.
The leaders in China, meanwhile, must be scratching their heads over why people in free countries who rant and rave as the torch passes them aren’t rounded up and sent off to build dams or dig their own graves. These are third-generation totalitarians who are used to getting their way in their own country, regardless of what anybody else says.
For all that China is adopting some capitalist ways, the fact remains that it is a political and military creation of one of the worst despots ever to set foot on the planet. Mao Tse-tung and his cronies were murderers, plain and simple, who made the notion of power growing out of the barrel of a gun a frightening reality. It is hard to know who was the worst communist dictator — Mao or the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin. The number 60 million murders comes to mind in each case. They both made Hitler, with 12 million victims, seem amateurish.
Where the former Soviet countries are trying to work their way out of communism and return to the company of civilized peoples, the Chinese communists make no such effort. They continue to oppress their own people, they continue to support despots abroad, they wink at economic crimes such as copyright violations and patent theft.
And we go along with it, in hopes they will see the error of their ways. Maybe that is right, but don’t take your eyes off them.
