China blocks iTunes access, Tibet album suspected

"There aren't any native Indian albums condemning the mass murder over their people by the United States."

Actually, there are. At least dozens, perhaps hundreds. Just this past week, a famous Native musician, Buffy Sainte-Marie (http://www.creative-native.com), who has been singing (and speaking) in most definitive terms about such issues for some fifty years, performed to large audiences at the huge, internationally-prominent Indian Market in Santa Fe, New Mexico (http://www.santafeindianmarket.com).

And how many native Tibetan albums condemning the mass murder of Tibetans can be found in China? Show me.

"Don't forget what happened in Northern Ireland in the 1950-70 period."

As for Northern Ireland, that messy situation is of a far different kind. The problem there is that a group of colonists who were moved into Ireland several centuries ago from England and Scotland, as part of the British government's effort to eradicate Irish cultural identity - an exact analog of the Chinese government's present policies in Tibet - were left behind when the British were driven out of (most of) Ireland in the 1920s. Though they live on Irish soil, they do not want to be part of Ireland, and they've had enough political clout to force the British government to support their insistence on remaining separate from the Irish Republic. And, of course, to help them maintain their hegemony over the (Catholic) Irish people in the Northern Counties they occupy, whom they regard with contempt.

A better analog to that situation would be the Russian colonists who comprise nearly 40% of the population of Latvia (mostly living in the capital Riga), who are now crying racial discrimination because after reclaiming its independence Latvia wishes them to learn the Latvian language and integrate into that nation.

Should Tibet ever reclaim its independence, I'm sure we would hear the same complaints from the Chinese colonists who now comprise the majority of the population of Lhasa - none of whom bother to learn the language of or anything about the "primitive savages" they rule - who would of course bitterly resent the loss of their dominant status.

As for the Falklands and Gibraltar, like Northern Ireland they don't *want* independence from Britain. As for Wales and Scotland, in fact they are claiming increasing autonomy nowadays - the very autonomy China promised Tibet in 1951 and never delivered, indeed quite the opposite - and may well become at least de facto independent in time.

I understand the point you are trying to make, but you might as well at least get your facts straight.

The logic of this oft-repeated argument somewhat escapes me. If what was done to the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas by the European colonists in the last 500 years was a crime (and I fully agree it was, and remains), then how does that make China doing the same to Tibet *not* a crime?

In the 19th century and earlier, such colonialism was simply accepted; hardly anyone saw anything wrong with it. These days attitudes have changed somewhat. The Chinese themselves have complained bitterly about their treatment by the Western imperial powers and Japan during their "Century of Humiliation".

Yet the very minute they finally ejected all the imperial powers from their territory, they immediately set out to create their *own* empire, and ever since have been enthusiastically doing in Tibet, East Turkestan, Mongolia and elsewhere just what the imperial powers did to them.

Chinese people nurse a particular grudge again Japan, which briefly conquered and occupied most of China in the 1930s-40s. And what did Japan do in China (and Korea, and elsewhere in their short-lived empire)? They invaded, occupied, colonized and plundered the land, killed or imprisoned those who resisted, and forced the rest to koutou and struggle to imitate their masters just to survive.

In Korea and Taiwan, the people were forced to take Japanese names and educated in Japanese, presumably to make them into ersatz Japanese people, though the real Japanese still treated them with contempt. And they rationalized it all with the claim that they were bringing the benefits of modern civilization to benighted primitives. Sound familiar?

Sorry, I don't buy it. What's good (or bad) for the goose is good (or bad) for the gander.

The real irony is that the Chinese have it fully in their power to defuse the confrontation over Tibet in a minute. All they'd have to do is fulfill the commitments they themselves made in the "17 Point Agreement", which China unilaterally composed and forced on the Tibetans at gunp