We Should Take the Beam Out of Our Own Eye Before We Criticize the Mote in Our Brother's Eye
by John Lawrence, January 28, 2021
Biblical passages never lose their relevance. This is from Matthew 7:5. Before we start preaching to other countries about how they should reform themselves, we need as a country to remove the cancer that is threatening to overthrow our own democracy. We have met the enemy, and it is us. Homegrown Americans with all the benefits of a public school education are threatening legislators so that they don't even feel safe at work without security details. The Department of Homeland Security is more concerned with domestic terrorists than they are with foreign terrorists. Social media is a menace to society. There is something wrong when people can make millions or even billions of dollars threatening democracy and the rule of law. In my opinion media that proliferates lies, conspiracy theories and hate speech should be shut down. Other societies would not stand for it. Hate speech is not free speech.
Yet the US tries to preach to the rest of the world about their shortcomings. The US has criticized China, for example, for its treatment of the Uyghers, its annexation of Hong Kong, trade policies vis a vis the US etc. The US ignores, however, that for the vast majority of Chinese, their government is doing just fine. It's not as if the US has always treated minorities fairly whether they be Native Americans, Black Americans or Asian Americans. And now we are seeing how freedom of speech and freedom of assembly combined with freedom of gun ownership can result in a toxic cocktail that can explode at any minute. But some Americans are apoplectic that China, a purported Communist country, is now out competing the US to become the world's largest economy. Measured by the more refined yardstick that both the IMF and CIA now judge to be the single best metric for comparing national economies, the IMF Report shows that China's economy is one-sixth larger than America's ($24.2 trillion versus the U.S.'s $20.8 trillion).
The National Register reports:
"So what? If this were simply a contest for bragging rights, picking a measuring rod that allows Americans to feel better about ourselves has a certain logic. But in the real world, a nation’s GDP is the substructure of its global power. Over the past generation, as China has created the largest economy in the world, it has displaced the U.S. as the largest trading partner of nearly every major nation (just last year adding Germany to that list). It has become the manufacturing workshop of the world, including for face masks and other protective equipment as we are now seeing in the coronavirus crisis. Thanks to double-digit growth in its defense budget, its military forces have steadily shifted the seesaw of power in potential regional conflicts, in particular over Taiwan. And this year, China will surpass the U.S. in R&D spending, leading the U.S. to a “tipping point in R&D” and future competitiveness."
In addition China has pulled 850 million people out of poverty in the last 40 years. In that same time frame, US wages have stagnated and the US has had a growing homelessness problem. Most Chinese are very happy with these developments. In the book, Has China Won?, the author, Kishore Mahbubani states: "The Chinese people fear chaos. It is the one force that in the past brought China to its knees and brought misery to the Chinese people. Clearly, America is suffering chaos now. President Donald Trump has been a polarizing and divisive figure. American society has never been as divided since the Civil War ... Chinese culture values social harmony over individual empowerment. American culture is the opposite."
Kishore argues that the Chinese Communist Party should be called the Chinese Civilization Party because it clearly values the 2000 year Chinese history much more than it values Marxist-Leninist ideology. Most of the Chinese people value their growing prosperity and freedom within their own personal sphere much more than they resent the Chinese government for exerting a heavier hand while the American government allows more freedom to its citizens which has led recently to chaos. Stability, for the Chinese, is an overriding value. It behooves the US, at this juncture in history, to get its own house in order. Joe Biden is trying to do just that. In addition to the chaos created by Donald Trump, there are immense challenges in terms of the pandemic and global warming. These issues require global cooperation not another Cold War. The US should celebrate China's obvious success instead of chiding it for human rights especially in light of the historical and ongoing human rights violations of the United States itself.
