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M19 Tibet Protest at the Chinese Consulate 1450 Laguna St off Geary 4-5

Date:
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Time:
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Event Type:
Other
Organizer/Author:
joseph_one@hotmail.com
Location Details:
Chinese Consulate 1450 Laguna St off Geary 4-5

End the Chinese Occupation of Tibet!!!!!

The Tibetans have launched an Intifada.. Chinese authorities are responding with brute force today to peaceful protests and Tibetans have reported tanks in the streets, homes burning and gun shots. Thousands of armed troops have sealed off the three major monasteries where nonviolent protests were initiated on Monday and Chinese police continue to fire live ammunition into crowds of unarmed Tibetans. Eye-witnesses in Lhasa say that up to 80 Tibetans are dead, 26 gunned down outside Drapchi prison.

China continues to be one of the worse human rights abusers in the world. In addition to their long standing occuaption and cultural genocide of Tibet, China is at the forefront of the exploitation of the African continent, with direct foreign investment investment of 1.595 billion last year alone. The goal of the Chinese govt is 100 billion by 2010. The largest recipient of China's "aid" is the Sudan. And aid comes with a price- it is used to secure access to the oil, mining and timber resources of Africa.

Join us at the Chinese Consulate at 4:00 and send the message “Enough is enough!” “Hands off Sudan.” “Hands Off Tibet” “Stop Supplying arms to Burma” . Bring your own signs, flags and banners, and then we’ll march down to the Civic center to join the peace rally at 5:00
Added to the calendar on Tue, Mar 18, 2008 5:04AM

Comments (Hide Comments)
Chinese official are taking great pains to restrict access to information regarding the uprising- internet access and you tube has been shut down.

The authorities have amade exhaustive efforts to ensure that as few people as possible, inside or outside China, hear any but the official version of that unrest.

Foreign journalists have been banned from traveling to Tibet and prevented by the police from reporting on protests by Tibetans in other Chinese provinces. Domestic newspapers, TV programs, and Internet sites have carried only articles produced by the official news agency. International TV networks such as CNN and the BBC have been blacked out by censors.

The policy marks a sharp setback for moves the Chinese government had been making recently to be more open. In particular, the way foreign reporters have been prevented from reaching the scenes of protests runs counter to regulations introduced last year that were designed to ensure free reporting, in line with a promise the Chinese made to the International Olympic Committee.

Please join us at the Chinese consulate tomorrow and say with one voice "End the Occupation. Free Tibet"
by wikileaks / GS
Censored Tibet March 2008 protest videos - AVI format
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Censored_Tibet_March_2008_protest_videos_-_AVI_format

Breaking all censorship – the Wikileaks goal
I’m with them, one-hundred and ten percent

Oaxaca, Mexico, Tuesday 18 March 2008
Friends,

Absolute freedom of communication among all the world’s peoples is The Rock-Bottom Necessity we must achieve if we are to have any realistic hope of changing the savage dominant global society in which most of us are living into a humane world for all peoples. In this struggle the Wikileaks group is exemplary. Today I got from them an e-mail on censorship by the Chinese government. Following their e-mail are some personal, slightly critical comments.
___________________________________________

Subject: Wikileaks releases 35 censored videos of the Tibet protests
From: Julian Assange. julian [at] wikileaks.org
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2008 11:53:53 -0400
To: George Salzman george.salzman [at] umb.edu

Wikileaks Press Release
Tue Mar 18 10:00:00 GMT 2008

Wikileaks has released 35 censored videos relating to the protests in Tibet and has called on bloggers around the world to help drive the footage through the so called 'Great Firewall of China'.

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Censored_Tibet_March_2008_protest_videos_-_AVI_format

The transparency group's move comes as a response to the the Chinese Public Security Bureau's carte-blanche censorship of youtube, the BBC, CNN, the Guardian and other sites carrying video footage of the Tibetan people's recent heroic stand against the inhumane Chinese occupation of Tibet.

Wikileaks has also placed the collection in two easy to use archives together with a HTML index page so they may be easily copied, placed on websites, emailed across the internet as attachments and uploaded to peer to peer networks.

Censorship, like communism, seems like a reasonable enough idea to begin with. While "from each according to his ability and to each according to his need" sounds unarguable, the world has learned that these words call forth a power elite to administer them with coercive force. Such elites are quick to define the needs of their own members as paramount. Similarly "from each mouth according to its ability and to each ear according to its need" seems harmless enough, but history shows that censorship also requires an anointed class to define this 'need' and to make violence against those who continue talking. Such power is quickly corrupted.

The first ingredient of civil society is the people's right to know, because without such understanding no human being can meaningfully choose to support anything, let alone a political party. Knowledge is the driver of every political process, every constitution, every law and every regulation. The communication of knowledge is without salient analogue. It is living, unique and demands its rightful place at the summit of society. Since knowledge is the creator and regulator of all law, its position beyond law commands due respect.

James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and other Enlightenment framers of the US Bill of Rights understood this well when they began the First Amendment's constitutional protections of speech and of the press with 'Congress shall make no law....'.

As knowledge flows across the world it is time to sum great freedoms of every nation and not subtract or divide them.
___________________________________________

The Wikileaks folks implied criticism of communism is flawed in its evident belief that the concept "from each according to his ability and to each according to his need" necessarily “call[s] forth a power elite to administer them with coercive force.” The Wikileaks statement is urging us to move in a very good and essential direction, freedom of communication unencumbered by any elite power structure. This is precisely what those who believe in anarchist-communism advocate and work towards. No nation-state has ever existed, so far as I know, that was communist, despite some states declaring themselves to be Communist (with a capital C!). We ought to recognize that anti-communism is an important component of the ideology of capitalism. That in and of itself doesn’t imply that it is bad, because there are parts of capitalist ideology that are good. But this is not one of them.

Sincerely,
George

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