No dignity, none left.
The premier of China addresses the Greek Parliament and is exalted by the MPs because he said he dipped bread in olive oil and he liked it.
Then, the president of the parliament of the country that gave birth to democracy awards the Golden Medal of the Hellenic Parliament to the premier of a country where there are no free elections and no freedom of expression, where human rights are being trampled upon and where thousands of people are jailed and tortured for disagreeing with the regime.
If this isn’t a peculiar sense of humor on behalf of the Greek government, then it is a desperate move in the face of bankruptcy.
Translated from a post by Pitsirikos. Photo from the press release of the Hellenic Parliament.
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Yakob are discussing. 
Yakob 12:04 on January 25, 2012 Permalink |
Your disgust is misplaced. It follows the direct line of imperialism: “democracy” as a condition of progress, civilization. Whiteness. In what sense can the government of China be seen as somehow less deserving of state ritual prestige than, say, one of the white power regimes of the West, whose discourses of openness and transparency and human rights are effective props for masking and accelerating the grotesque genocides and penetrating objectifying modes of social control and possibility- and voice-erasing power moves of reality? Your disgust is grotesquely misplaced, and is racist. I am disgusted.
plagal 15:44 on January 25, 2012 Permalink |
You like the word “disgust” too much, eh?
If bourgeois democracy is not a condition of progress (which it is compared to, say, feudalism or fascism), internationalist Worker’s Democracy is. And the Chinese regime killed it in its cradle. The current bureaucratic-capitalist rulers of China are no different from the western imperialists and in their treatment of their own working class, they are hard to distinguish from the old mussoliniites. Whiteness has nothing to do with this: Chinese multinationals are buying off in a firesale the formerly nationalized assets (ports, dockyards, etc) of the “bankrupt” Greek state, bringing down wages, doing layoffs, worsening the conditions of the working class. The Chinese Premier appears in the parliament selling trinkets to the natives, flattering them with stories of dipping in olive oil and getting applause for liking it. Do you think if this were the white-as-cream German chancellor, as it more often than not is these days, my reaction would be any different? Or if it were “our own” Greek PM?
PS. I’m curious as to how you dug up this very old post?