Democratic Republic of East Timor. 10 years from Independence. East Timor ping.
Democratic Republic of East Timor. 10 years from Independence. East Timor ping.
Christopher Hitchens lays out it much better than I ever could, but one of the things I find most frustrating and damning about the left is its twisted attitudes toward East Timor. Its independence was a cause celebre amongst those we might call "causeheads," primarily, because of claims over CIA responsibility. Yet the elephant in the room that the left never, ever seemed to want to discuss was the fact that the root cause of the horrors was Islam and its inability to accept lands they deems as "formerly Islamic" to be ruled by other religions. I used to enjoy disarming college mush heads when discussing East Timor by arguing that I totally support military intervention to support the Catholic enclave and especially to defeat Islamic imperialism. To a man, they @#$%^ing hated it when I would say that.
Similarly, I recall discussing the Sudan back in the late 90s. Other than a couple of GOP senators, nobody in the US was talking about the genocide. When I would bring it up with the "coffee and chomsky" crowd in college, I was always accused of "only being interested because they're killing Christians who probably deserve it."
Same goes for Tibet. I stand with many leftists in supporting a free Tibet, but the left doesn't see Communism or progressivism as a chief problem. And certainly, they cannot bring themselves to accept that non-Westerners might be driven by racism. One of the funniest and most telling sites I saw in my college days was when some college Republicans joined in a Free Tibet protest and got shouted at for having anti-communist signs.