Not unlike my colleagues within the Living In China community of bloggers, I was troubled by the shutdown of mainland Chinese blog hosting services such as BlogCN and Blogbus. I have much the same distaste for governmental interference in personal freedoms as do most westerners born and raised under less authoritarian systems. Indeed, I was so troubled by it that I was the first blog within the Living in China community to post the full English translation of the Tiananmen Square protest letter.
I am also troubled by the apparent blocking of non-mainland blog-hosting platforms such as Typepad and Blogs.com. For the two years that I have been in China, it has annoyed me that several universal webhosts have been unavailable to me: Blogspot for one, along with all personal websites hosted on Lycos, Angelfire, Yahoo, and AOL (the central government seems to have a problem with completely unmoderated webhosts). Not to mention firewalling the website of CBS Television ever since "60 Minutes" rankled Jiang Zemin.
However, none of this troubled me as much as the foolish, reckless, empty, but dangerous threats I read today at Rebecca MacKinnon's Techjournalism written by one of our own: Andres Gentry. First, let us quote them:
"…sometimes we must recognize when others do not seek to engage with us peacefully, wish to do us great harm, and who believe the best way to slay an idea is to slay the person who holds that idea. If that is the case then the most honest response is to defend yourself, with violence unfortunately, and to take the fight to them. Fight we must until the enemy unconditionally accepts our right to speak freely, disagree freely, and govern freely."
Friends, throughout my career as a journalist and author I have had more than a little cause to defend the First Amendment rights of free speech and a free press. To my knowledge, I am the only journalist in America who has TWICE been ordered to take the witness stand and reveal sources and unpublished research materials and ordered incarcerated when I refused.
But much more to the point, I know more than a bit about “violence” in pursuit of a cause. I know about authorities using guns and billy clubs and jail cells during the civil rights movement in the American south; I know about making the personal choice to fight a “revolution,” and the consequences of my choice. I know what bullets and clubs and whips do to human flesh, and what jail cells do to the human spirit.
I most certainly know that there are times when violent revolution is the only choice available to oppressed men and women. But I also know what it means: It means death and great suffering. Therefore, a call to arms should never be made lightly or in haste.
Vowing to “fight them,” as this Mr. Gentry does publicly, is a call to arms that I am certain he is not prepared to risk for himself. While he is obviously a fool, he probably is not stupid. Also, based upon some of his posts about his paranoia over being stared at because he is a round-eyed white man in China, I surmise him to be a coward.
So, who is he endangering with his threat "to take the fight to them"? Not himself. He is a "foreigner," the Armed Police will simply escort him to an airport and send him and his puffed up chest home to momma. But how about the Chinese natives who are curious and thwart the firewall and read his words and are somehow found out? They will pay the consequences of Andres Gentry, he who writes like a man with a paper asshole.
I wonder if he knows that what he wrote would be illegal in America? It is illegal to advocate the violent overthrow of the United States Government.
In closing I should point out that he was not singled out for oppression, he flatters himself far too much; the hosting service he uses was shutdown because it is unmoderated and cannot be easily, selectively censored.
