Amerikai Magyar Hírlap, 2009 (21. évfolyam, 1-50. szám)

2009-10-09 / 38. szám

Hungarian Journal

Empire State Building - A Free Pass on Human Rights

Thursday , October 01, 2009 By Joseph Abrams

NEW YORK - New York is seeing red over the decision to turn the city’s highest beacon — and one of America’s symbols for free enterprise — into a shining monument honoring China’s communist revolution. The Empire State Building shone in red and yellow lights over New York City on Wednesday night to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the bloody communist takeover.

The tower is lit in white most nights, but nearly every week gets splashed with color to honor holidays and heroes — red, white and blue for Independence Day, green for St. Patrick’s Day, true blue for New York’s Finest. The building’s managers say they have honored a host of countries, including Canada, India and Australia, but as of Wednesday that list of honorees now includes one of the world’s last great authoritarian regimes.

Tourists were squirming as the city’s 102-story landmark — which gained a special significance for New Yorker’s after 9/11, when it again became Manhattan’s tallest building — was being converted into a shining red beacon for Chinese communism.

“I think it’s a bad idea,” said Dick Paasch, 69, from Billings, Montana. “The Chinese Revolution ... in the years 1958-1960, there were something like 26 million people starved to death. Why would we want to celebrate something like it. “I think the Chinese have come a long way since then, but I certainly wouldn’t celebrate the revolution,” he said.

Representatives for the building say it won’t incur any extra costs to use the colored floodlights, so taxpayers won’t have to pay a dime. But tourists thought it would have been better if the building would have stayed white this Wednesday. “It seems a little out of place in New York City, an American city, having communist colors,” said Cathy Crismore of Lancaster, California. “That doesn’t seem right.”

New York politicians have paid notice as well, and say they are let down by the light-up. Rep. Aathony Weiner, D-N.Y., said it was a mistake to pay tribute to what he called “a nation with a shameful history on human rights.” Historians of the revolution noted the unimaginable — and often forgotten — toll of the revolution and China’s communist rule, which has taken tens of millions of lives through years of war, famine, reeducation and wholesale slaughter.

“China gets treatment that other dictatorships can only dream of — a free pass on human rights,” said Arthur Waldron, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

The revolution and its aftermath may have been deadlier than any world war: though estimates vary, research from the historian Chang Jung shows that as many as 72 million people died as a result. During one five-year period alone, the Great Famine of 1958-1962, 36 million Chinese are believed to have starved as a result of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, a government policy meant to industrialize the nation.

During those years of ruin, peasants ate bark, maggots, bird droppings, human flesh — anything to survive — as government storehouses stood full with grain and other cereals, neither the first nor last in China’s troubled line of violations of human rights. “China remains strongly oppressive — but we make a lot of money, and we have a tendency to romanticize the country, confusing her brilliant cultural heritage with the current communist regime,” said Waldron. “Will we light it in honor of Tibet?”

About 40 protesters massed outside the Empire State Building Wednesday morning as China’s New York consul attended a ceremony the building’s managers said was to honor “the 1.3 billion Chinese people and the 60th anniversary of their country.”

“Because the Empire State Building is such a cultural icon, this touches a chord close to home for people,” said Lhadon Tethong, a leader of the demonstrators from Students for a Free Tibet.

Tethong said that the lights on the building “are a symbol of support for the Chinese state — for a totalitarian state,” which ignores the country’s “abominable record on human rights, on liberty.”

Waldron, of the University of Pennsylvania, said he thought there would be an outcry if another brutal regime were so honored by the tower.

“Would we have lit the Empire State Building for the USSR knowing what we do about the Gulag?”

US Congress Demands China Free Dissident Liu

WASHINGTON - The US Congress on Thursday called on China to free dissident writer Liu Xiaobo, the co-author of a bold petition calling for democratic reform.

In a resolution approved the same day that the Communist Party celebrated 60 years in power, the Congress said that Liu “has inspired millions of people in China and the world.”

“It is the sense of Congress that China’s government immediately release Liu Xiaobo and begin making strides toward true representative democracy,” said the resolution approved almost unanimously in the House of Representatives.

Liu, 53, a former university literature professor, was jailed previously for his involvement in the 1989 Tianan-men Square pro-democracy movement that was crushed by the army.

But he continued to write and was detained again in December just before the release of Charter 08, a petition which he helped organize.

Hundreds of intellectuals, scholars and dissidents signed the petition which called for political and legal reforms and respect for human rights in China.

Chinese state media announced in June that he Liu had been arrested for inciting subversion and the overthrow of the communist government.

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William Safire wrote a conservative column for the New York Times for three decades and the “On Language” column for its Sunday magazine.

William Safire, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and language maven for the New York Times, who first got noticed through the speeches he wrote for the Nixon White House, died Sunday at a hospice in Rockville, Md. He was 79.

Martin Tolchin, a longtime friend and former colleague at the Times, said Safire had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

For more than three decades, Safire wrote twice weekly as the resident conservative columnist on the Times op-ed page. He also wrote the popular “On Language” column in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, exploring grammar, usage and the origin of words. The column led to the publication of 10 books about words and language.

He arrived at the Times in 1973, fresh from his stint as a senior White House speechwriter for President Nixon. His catchy turns of phrase often outlived the context in which they were delivered. Perhaps the most memorable was the acidic and alliterative put-down he crafted for Vice President Spiro T. Agnew to describe those who opposed the Vietnam War. They were, he said, “nattering nabobs of negativism.”

Safire acknowledged in his inaugural column that his new role as a columnist sparked dismay among erstwhile colleagues.

“When word spread like cooling lava through the Nixon Administration that I was to become a columnist for the New York Times,” he wrote on April 15, 1973, “speechwriters who stayed behind wanted to know: ‘Will you continue to stand up for the President, the work ethic and the Nixon doctrine, or will you sell out to the elitist establishment and become a darling of the Georgetown cocktail party set?’ “

Safire, who puckishly assured his readers he never ducked the tough questions, said that his answer to both questions was “yes and no.” He encouraged his readers “to watch this space for further development.”

His new colleagues in the Washington bureau of the Times also were suspicious, even a little hostile, Tolchin said. “They all thought that if there was to be a new column in the Times, they should be the one to write it,” he recalled.

The hostility disappeared at a party for the bureau when, as Tolchin recalled, the small son of reporter James Naughton fell into a swimming pool and a fully clothed Safire dived in to rescue him. “From that moment on, Bill was fully accepted by the bureau.” Witty, playful and always provocative, Safire quickly developed a voice of his own. In the words of William Greider, writing in the Washington Post in 1977, he was “a gaudy flame on display in a gray museum.”

“I’m willing to zap conservatives when they do things that are not libertarian,” Safire told the Washington Post in 2004. “I was the first to really go after George W. on his treatment of prisoners. . . . The wonderful thing about being a New York Times columnist is that it’s like a Supreme Court appointment - they’re stuck with you for a long time.”

He was born William L. Safir (the “e” was added later) in New York City on Dec. 17, 1929. He enrolled at Syracuse University but dropped out after his sophomore year for financial reasons. At age 19, he caught on as a researcher and writer for New York Herald Tribune columnist Tex McCrary. He interviewed socialites, politicians and celebrities, including Mae West.

After working as a roving correspondent in Europe and the Middle East for WNBC radio and WNBT-TV, he was inducted into the Army, where he did publie relations work.

In 1955, he was named a vice president of Tex McCrary Inc., a public relations firm with clients including the construction company that built the “typical American house” for the American National Exhibition in Moscow. Then-Vice President Nixon officially opened the exhibition on July 24, 1959. Safire was able to corral Nixon and Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev in the kitchen showroom, where Nixon provoked the famous “kitchen debate” on the relative merits of capitalism and communism.

An Associated Press photographer, blocked by the crowd, tossed his camera to Safire over the heads of astonished Soviet guards, and the publicist snapped the famous photo of the two men engaged in their “debate.” The photo would be used to buttress Nixon’s reputation as a tough “cold warrior” in his 1960 presidential campaign against John F. Kennedy, the Democratic nominee.

Speechwriter and Pulitzer-Winning Columnist

William Safire Dies at 79