Comment

...Chinese journalists employed by the government's official propaganda organs broke ranks to report fully—and sympathetically—on the uprising...

...not a casualty had been claimed by violence...

...Before his involvement in drug trafficking and other unsavory pursuits became an international scandal, the Reagan Administration did its best to enlist him in the contra war against Nicaragua—and he was eager to oblige...

...At the risk of sounding like the last devotees of the despised L-word, we reassert that crime is a social problem...

...The government in the North has followed a systematic policy of starving the South, and the rebels in the South, as Bonner points out, have also employed "tactics that are condemnable by any civilized standard...

...Tiananmen Square can be cleared and tidied up, the dead hurriedly carted off for instant and anonymous cremation...

...Their weapons were banners and bullhorns, leaflets and posters, slogans and statements to the press...

...The square, an imposing expanse on ceremonial occasions, was cluttered with half-dismantled tents and the fetid debris left by tens of thousands of squatters...

...It was a stupid and self-defeating response to a hopeful, peaceful protest...

...Brit Hume on ABC's World News Tonight for May 2 said that while Bush sometimes spoke loudly, he had not yet learned to carry a big stick...

...And the media retaliated...

...What needed to change was a structure, a system, a whole way of looking at the world...

...We've already got more arrests than we can deal with/ —Mark Kleiman, former drug-policy analyst for the Department of Justice, quoted in Newsweek...

...But this is not headline news, and the nightly newscasts do not show the bony ribs and fly-ravaged eyes as they did several years ago when neighboring Ethiopia suffered from famine...

...So whom will it rob...

...But something special also set the Chinese students apart from many of their predecessors and contemporaries: After weeks of the most fervent protest, not a blow had been struck in anger...

...But chances are, you'll hardly a hear a word about it...

...What needed to come was a society based on human autonomy and dignity...

...Ask a politician what to do about crime, and hell say, "Hire more cops...

...The media have been putting the price tag at $1.2 billion, but they're overlooking the annual cost—more than $1 billion—to feed, house, and guard all those extra prisoners...

...A very weak hunger striker uttered, 'We are still waiting, but we don't have much time...

...One day in May, a Chinese graduate student—a doctoral candidate in engineering at the University of Wisconsin—delivered to The Progressive's office an article he had translated from the People's Daily overseas edition...

...Big Shtick For the first four months of the Bush Administration, the media seemed to long for Ronald Reagan...

...Now the Bush Administration has appointed itself custodian of democracy and protector of human rights in Panama, riding roughshod in traditional U.S...

...The "one" was Deng Xiaoping, at eighty-four still the dominant force in the People's Republic, and to the students the symbol of everything they were rebelling against...

...What cops produce are more arrests...

...The question was, one student said, whether one or one billion would prevail...

...Noriega was, after all, a CIA hireling during his ascent to power, and profited handsomely from his friendships in the highest reaches of the U.S...

...Perhaps it's "famine fatigue"—news managers decline coverage because they assume that Americans can take only so much African plague before moving on to Cheers and LA...

...Can the billion prevail...

...Nature is not the principal culprit...

...All this drew cheers, of course, from Congressional Democrats (who find that Noriega, like Libyan strongman Muamar Qaddafi, makes an easy target for bipartisan wrath) and from the media, who were thrilled to see Bush wielding a big stick at last...

...The hard-liners in charge of China have invoked the brute force at their command and dealt a bloody blow to the hopes of the billion...

...We're talking billions here—$1 billion just for the new Federal prisons we'll need for all these extra criminals, plus pay for 1,600 additional Federal prosecutors and 825 new Federal agents...

...Perhaps that was the most extraordinary aspect of this momentous episode: Even after martial law had been proclaimed, even after it became clear that the ruling hard-liners had carried the day against those more disposed to recognize the need for change, even after troops had been called out to encircle the great square, the protesters kept the peace...

...That has happened before, in China and elsewhere, and it will doubtless happen again...

...The new President wasn't staging events for the nightly news, didn't speak in sound bites, didn't even have a theme du jour...

...He said the money was no problem...

...New restrictions can be imposed, new punishments inflicted, new barriers raised...

...Crime is a problem—a big problem and growing...

...The square belongs to them...

...Leave it to Raymond Bonner, the intrepid reporter for The New Yorker, to expose the political roots of the Sudan's calamity...

...Curiously, no one in the mass media has called for the use of America's big stick against any of those entrenched regimes...

...or Chile, where the Pinochet government continues on its brutally repressive course...

...The impact is likely to be severe on China's fragile economic experiments as well as on its volatile political system...

...But politics, too, may play a part...

...It's a Crime All right...

...Is it so in people's hearts...

...The Administration certainly isn't planning to rob Rambo...

...Apple Jr...

...Government...

...That put the Chinese rebels in grand company— the company of those who stormed the Bastille 200 years ago and those who stormed the Czar's Winter Palace early in this century...

...They said George Bush was weak, directionless, passionless, and hopelessly pragmatic...

...the company of those who demonstrated in Seoul even as the protests in Tiananmen Square were happening, and those who debated in the new Soviet legislative body, and those who rallied in Lhasa and in Gaza for the right to govern themselves...

...But the irony for the Panamanian people is not, as Jeff Greenfield suggested, that they need the intervention of the United States to rid themselves of Noriega, but that their dictator is, to a considerable extent, a monster of Washington's making...

...Instead, however, the Chinese rulers chose a course of intransigence and suppression that may have catastrophic consequences in the immediate future, and that will surely exact a heavy price for many decades to come...

...If the President has a few billion dollars to throw around, he should throw them at the schools, the homeless, the day-care centers, all the dying infrastructures of society that are failing people, who then turn in despair to drugs and crime...

...The principal cause of the famine has been a war—a war that has been largely ignored in the West...

...The few who remained huddled miserably together, weakened by hunger strikes and squalid sanitation, sweltering in the noonday sun or buffeted by the chilly night winds...

...Maybe not in the short run, though the issue remains undecided as this magazine goes to press...

...or South Korea, where students demonstrate for democracy with as much fervor (though not with as much press coverage) as their counterparts in Beijing...

...Still, the protesters bravely sang the "Internationale," and when they raised their bullhorns to address each other and the world, they spoke of solidarity between students and workers, of reviving the dream of the revolution their parents and grandparents had made, of putting an end to corruption and privilege, of taking power away from the old men who stubbornly insisted that they—and they alone—knew what was best for all of their compatriots...

...Being here, I feel everything is noble and beautiful.' "The demonstrations and hunger strike were still going on at midnight...

...Why this disparity in coverage...

...Mary, presumably—if we can put that name to the little that's left of social programs...

...History, remember this day: May 17...

...Where have we heard that before...

...fashion over the principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs of another nation...

...Anxiety and reason, anger and waiting, agony and hope...

...The United Nations tried to get more than 100,000 tons to southern Sudan this spring, but only about half got through...

...A savage wave of repression may well be in the offing...

...And in mid-May, Jeff Greenfield, the poor man's Ted Koppel, mused in his syndicated column: "Am I the only one who felt an unaccustomed twinge of regret" when Bush didn't overthrow Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega...

...And he just didn't seem to fit the media's image of a forceful, interventionist President who could take on not only his domestic opponents but America's international adversaries...

...It was an account of the previous day's activities in Tiananmen Square, "collectively reported by the reporters of the People's Daily," and it ended this way: "Associate Profesor Wu Xiaochang of the Central Art Institute had intended only to come see his son...

...People rallied to the rebels' cause, carrying food and cloth'If Chinese are presented a choice between a rich society and a fair one, their choice would not automatically be the former, as the demonstrating workers holding aloft Mao's portrait have made clear/ —Chinese Journalist Lu Ming, in a dispatch for Pacific News Service 'The first order of business for LIC [low-intensity conflict] planners must be to participate in the formulation of a strategy that provides specific political objectives...

...In short, he didn't make good copy or provide good visuals...

...The famine in the Sudan is not like other famines that have troubled Africa," Bonner writes...

...This, remember, is the year we were planning to get serious about the Federal deficit...

...Ethiopia is a socialist country, and its famine reinforced the Western bias that left-wing governments are cruel and inefficient...

...He said, 'Poor as we intellectuals are, we still maintain our values and courage...

...The Panamanian people, already suffering severe hardships because of the economic sanctions imposed by the United States, have been given to understand that they will face the full force of U.S...

...Sudan has one of the few functioning democracies in Africa," testified Kenneth Brown, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, before the House of Representatives earlier this year, "though there is little participation by the largely non-Muslim southern population due to the civil war...

...Government finally got around to discussing the appalling scale of famine in the Sudan last October, it did so only to praise the rulers of the Sudan and fault the rebels, though Bonner demonstrates that the government of the Sudan bears the bulk of the responsibility...

...But the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square knew that their problems were not caused by one man and would not be solved by replacing him...

...The familiar portrait of Mao Zedong gazed down on them impassively, but now Mao had a rival: a makeshift replica of the Statue of Liberty...

...The purpose, said an unnamed State Department official, was to advance prospects of attaining "a comprehensive political settlement...

...Ironic, isn't it, that from the point of view of people without power or food or hope, their best friend might be the big stick of a superpower...

...Navy, writing in the May issue of Military Review ing and moral support to Tienanmen Square...

...With the whole world watching, the communist chieftains of the People's Republic availed themselves of the standard tactics of medieval tyrants and fascist dictators...

...As if in direct response to such demands for Bush big-stickery—and it probably was in direct response—the Administration stepped up its pressure on Noriega, carefully leaving open the possibility of military intervention and cancellation of the treaty that will eventually give Panama control of its canal...

...vindictiveness so long as Noriega remains in power...

...And then there's the money...

...It's totally irrelevant...

...As a result, tens of thousands more will die...

...The Bush solutions have been tried before, and they don't work...

...But the billion will be back, more determined than ever...

...For the long run, however, there should be no doubt...

...The U.S...

...Almost everyone involved in the democracy movement agreed that even minimal concessions by the government would have ended the impasse in the Tiananmen Square...

...Still, there are places where the Bush Administration prefers not to swing the world policeman's billy club: South Africa, for example, where the abuses inflicted by apartheid make Panama's troubles seem trivial...

...But it will surely remember June 4, the day when many thousands of troops, soldiers of that same people's army that would—it was said—never fight against the people, smashed their way into Tiananmen Square, directing their submachine-gun fire at crowds of demonstrators and spectators, killing hundreds, thousands—nobody knows how many...

...Unlike Reagan, he wasn't doing the media's job for them...

...Silent Famine Last year, 250,000 people died of starvation in the Sudan...

...On the day President Bush unveiled this monstrosity, Attorney General Richard Thornburgh touted it on the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour...

...He said the Administration would not rob Peter to pay Paul...

...The strategy must overcome—rather than merely complain about—domestic political and economic objections/ —Lieutenant Commander Charles P. Mott, U.S...

...And, having savored the satisfaction of wielding a big stick, Bush seems ready to embark on further adventures: The New York Times reported at the end of May that the Administration will seek Congressional support for covert military aid to noncommunist forces fighting against the government of Cambodia...

...Even soldiers sided openly with the students, prompting some to exclaim in the exhilaration and exuberance of the moment, "The People's Liberation Army will never fight against the people...

...And perhaps history will...

...Why do we keep on hearing the same old stuff: Throw the book at the perpetrators, throw money at the criminal-justice system...

...Government supports the Sudan's rulers in the North...

...Today, tens of thousands more are on the brink...

...Depicting such a politically sensitive story would take more rectitude than the networks usually muster...

...wrote in The New York Times that Bush "can talk softly, but can he carry a big stick...

...Rain started to drizzle during the night and the temperature on the Square dropped noticeably...

...It's appropriate to ask whether those who wield power ever learn anything...

...Ultimately, the Chinese rulers behaved the way rulers usually do when their grip on power is threatened: They deployed the full force of the state's military apparatus against their own subjects...

...But once there, he sat down and joined the hunger strike himself...

...Typically, when the U.S...

...Man is...

...The crime package recently proposed with much hoopla by the Bush Administration is the cliche doubled and redoubled: Stiffen penalties, abolish probation and parole, execute people right and left-lock 'em up and throw away the key...

...Why does no one ever think of anything creative to do about it...

...It's a civil war, with the rich Arab North confronting the poor black South...

...The Sudan, however, is a Western ally, and it shares responsibility for starving its own people...

...The next day, R.W...

...It would have taken little more than an admission by the Communist Party that some mistakes had been made and a pledge of openness in the future...