Send protest HERE
And to beg this creep to stop throwing poets in prison you have to call him 'Your Exellency.' Not what come's outta my mouth when I think about these bloated thugs.
There goes my cultural excange invitation to China...
Thanks to Ron Silliman for his link to the PEN American Center: Liu's Poems
And to beg this creep to stop throwing poets in prison you have to call him 'Your Exellency.' Not what come's outta my mouth when I think about these bloated thugs.
There goes my cultural excange invitation to China...
Thanks to Ron Silliman for his link to the PEN American Center: Liu's Poems
There's a link to Paul Auster reading three of the poems. He reads well... almost as well as anyone might hope for... only slightly rushed. Not so much the speaking of the lines... but misses implied pauses, merging the reading into a single stream of sound.
Jacob, Liu Xiaobo received hundreds of thousands of US government funding via the NED in the past five years? Please see the NED's China grants for Independent Chinese Pen Center and Minzhu Zhongguo magazine, which Liu heads.
ReplyDeleteIf Liu is American he'd be in violation of Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). Pray tell, why would we lament Chinese money corrupting our political process, while sending many folds more to China, to corrupt their political process?
This is by no means a simple human rights case. Liu took foreign money the Chinese government has every right to prohibit (as we do under FARA.)
My reading of the verdict is that the Chinese court decided Liu's political speech exceeded the limit of free speech, in part due to the prosecution evidence showing Liu received foreign remittance.
I grant, there are many in the U.S. who offer the same sort of specious excuses to crush those who challenge their sense of entitled privilege. We've had 8 years of American neoliberal fuckwits defending the indefensible, and it doesn't look one bit prettier coming from Chinese government goons and their apologists than it does from Americans. Human rights supersede national rights.
ReplyDeleteIf artists and poets aren't free to create without government goons telling them what they can or can't say, then that government has forfeited its legitimacy. I don't speak as an American, but as a fellow human being and a poet and as such, recognize no national borders.
I'm outraged by what has been done to Xiaobo in no small measure because I know damn well what would likely happen to me if I lived under such petty self-serving tyrants.
And why do you post anonymously? What are you afraid of? Crawl out your dark hole and live in the light of day. Rejoice in the words of your poets instead of throwing them in prison!