To Be Anti-Castro is To Be Pro-Cuba

By Jay Nordlinger in National Review:

I have been getting mail — spam — from the US-China Business Council. You know the type: Walk on eggshells around the Chinese Communist Party. Don’t do anything to upset them. We’re all gonna make our money, nice ’n’ quiet, and no one had better utter a word about the gulag, Tibet, or anything like that.

(How about the fact that China imprisons the 2010 Nobel peace laureate?)

One of the council’s e-mails was headed “State leaders ignoring anti-China rhetoric, pursuing Chinese investments.” When someone says “anti-China,” you have to consider what he means. In the Cold War, people who spoke up for human rights were sometimes called “anti-Russian.” It was said that they “hated Russia.” Actually, they were pro-Russian, and pro-Russia — to the extent of wanting people in that country to have rights.

Foes of the Kremlin were also accused of “poisoning the atmosphere of détente.” Remember that one? If you mentioned Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, or Shcharansky (as his name was then spelled) — if you mentioned the boot stomping on the human face — you were told, “Are you trying to poison the atmosphere of détente? Do you really want to start a war?”

Similarly, people who favor democracy and human rights in Cuba — i.e., are pro-Cuban — are sometimes called “anti-Cuban” or “anti-Cuba.” To be anti-Castro, in my book, is to be pro-Cuba.

The “People’s Republic of China” — which is not a republic and whose people have no say whatsoever — is a one-party dictatorship with a gulag (laogai). When a business council says “anti-China,” remember that those accused of being “anti-China” may well be pro-China, pro-Chinese — pro-human.

Another way to put this is: The CCP does not equal China, though, of course, it pretends it does. Why should people in free countries pretend along with them?