Bread, Peace, and Kalashnikovs for Tibet (Not Necessarily in that Order)

Those Tibet protests continue to spread, although more outside Tibet proper than inside. Lhasa looks like an armed camp:

CNN reports on the spread of the protests to other regions:

The Chinese are making the best traction they can by reporting on the excesses of Tibetan protestors, while effectively keeping their own excesses off the TV screens. One thing the Chicoms do with great efficiency is censorship. They’re blacking out CNN, too:

And of course, the usual suspects — U.N., the I.O.C., the E.U., and the State Department — are proving themselves completely worthless yet again. The Tibetans have noticed the same thing. They’re protesting the U.N., which of course is led by the practiced appeaser and Chinese lapdog, Ban Ki Moon:

If the Tibetans had guns, of course, they could take on legitimate military and police targets instead of shopkeepers. If a polite society is an armed society, then an armed world would be a world in which governments would fear to go too far in suppressing the aspirations of their populations, and one in which there would be a consequence for refusing them a peaceful and democratic way to express popular will.

The best single contribution the world could make toward human rights and dignity in Tibet, Burma, Darfur, and North Korea would be the very thing that stopped the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia: guns. Show me how drum circles and “international institutions” are doing any better.

Update: The ChiCom regime and the North Korean regime share one strategy: both have successfully adapted to the disintegration of their socialist systems by playing the nationalism card (there’s nothing original about this; Stalin did the same thing during World War II). In China’s case, it’s casting the uprising as Chinese versus Tibetans, and that strategy works because of (a) there’s an element of truth to it, and (b) the nationalist, even racist, sentiments of many Han Chinese. Here’s a prime example of Han chest-thumping:

Not exactly a subtle message, or one that’s likely to generate much sympathy outside China. Who really knows what this guy thinks of the Chinese political system? But for now, his anger is successfully deflected by an ethnic conflict engineered and exploited by the regime itself. For extra fun, note where his maps draw their borders with Korea….