Thursday April 10, 2008

I DO LOVE THEE SO THAT I WILL SHORTLY SEND THY SOUL TO HEAVEN. The even-when-you're-right-you're-wrong mode of conservative argument finds a new taker in National Review's Mark Krikorian, who thinks America should bow to our Chinese Olympic overlords and wants to know where Democrats get off spoiling the Party:

But does anyone think we'd be seeing all this commotion over Tibet in Paris and San Francisco if the ChiComs were still in their Maoist stage, sending educated people to work in the countryside and spouting all that revolutionary class struggle baloney? Of course not. It's only because China's in its Pinochet/Franco stage that lefty "world opinion" now has its knickers in a twist about their hip imaginary Tibetan friends, the monks of Shangri-la.

Contrast this unsupported "What If" to the well-documented change in conservative attitude toward China over the years: from rage at "Red China" to Nixonian accommodation to our present state, in which free-world corporations exploit China's ample cheap labor market, and rightwingers applaud because it feeds their ultimate fantasy: capitalism without freedom.

I seldom wonder if they have guilty consciences about it, but I think Krikorian might. What else explains this bit:

If you're a Tibetan trying to free your country from the clutches of the gangster regime in Peking, you'll take your allies wherever you can find them. But the trendiness and superficiality of this "free Tibet" business, from people who couldn't recognize Tibet if they tripped over it in the street, is striking.

Maybe he thinks the monks, despite all evidence, really prefer the slow road of laissez-faire liberation favored by conservatives, who really "get" them, to the noisome protests of hippies. Maybe he agrees with the Chinese that the Dalai Lama is a false leader to his people, something like Al Sharpton -- a peace pimp, or some such. Or maybe something inside Krikorian rebels against the accommodation he feels he must make with the grim demands of capital, and drives him to grotesque fantasies.