“GENEVA — China has long won diplomatic allies in the world’s poor countries by helping them build expensive roads and ports. Now, it appears to have similarly won over a needy country in Europe.At a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council this month in Geneva, the European Union sought to draw renewed attention to human rights abuses in China — only to be blocked by one of its member countries, Greece.
A spokesman for the Greek Foreign Ministry in Athens called it “unproductive criticism.” ”
Is the question now how to punish Greece? Maybe not. Nicholas Kistof’s op-ed Sunday, about the black man in California on death row, though many are sure he was framed by the Sheriff’s office, suggests that we are in need of focusing on our own human rights abuses.
Unfortunately, I have just seen the play Titus Andronicus, by William Shakespeare, in its movie form of 1999, and have much to digest about the cruelty and evil of human kind.
One can love China and the United States, and yet, want to hold both to a high level of moral and political leadership. Shakespeare writes in Titus Andronicus about the fragility of leadership, and the abundance of evil and corruption in human centers of power. I do not advocate surrender to evil and corruption. We need to sharpen our weapons, even if only pencils and keyboards, and prepare multiple scenarios for how to attack an army of windmills.
