February 18, 2016
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Mind you, the Canadians aren”t the only hypocrites braying over the deported Chinese dissidents. U.S. government officials and journalists have been up in arms about it as well. Time, Slate, CNN, and, of course, The New York Times have all weighed in this month on the plight of Dong and Jiang. Again and again, outraged protectors of human rights have pummeled the Thai government for its decision to deport the two men. “What kind of a nation would deport people to a country that plans to imprison them for merely stating politically unpopular opinions?”
Well, the U.S., for one.
At the exact same time that Canada was showing its love of human rights by throwing Zundel into a dungeon for two years, the U.S. government was considering what to do with Germar Rudolf. In the early 1990s, Rudolf, then a chemist at the world-renowned Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart, was asked by the defense team of a Holocaust denier on trial in Germany to prepare a forensic report about Auschwitz. Unfortunately for Rudolf, preparing a purely scientific report to aid in the defense of a denier on trial is itself a criminal act in Germany, and soon the young chemist found himself facing fourteen months in prison. Rudolf fled Germany and settled, legally, in the U.S. He married a U.S. citizen, and they had a child.
Naturally, Germany decided to”how did CNN phrase it in reference to the actions of the Chinese government?””go global in its pursuit of dissidents.” Germany demanded that the U.S. hand Rudolf over for the crime of writing his forensic report, and, wouldn”t you know it, the U.S. complied, ripping Germar from his family and shipping him back to Germany, where he spent four years in prison for writing a booklet that is not only legal in the U.S. but readily available. To put a finer point on it, Rudolf was deported to Germany by the U.S. to be imprisoned for speech that is completely legal in the U.S.
As Rudolf attempted to fight deportation, I covered his case for a documentary film I was producing (the movie also included footage of Zundel from inside his Canadian maximum-security home). At the time, I received only scorn and criticism from the U.S. and Canadian “human rights” advocates I approached for comment. Oh, sure, I tried my best to explain that the Rudolf and Zundel cases had an importance beyond the fate of those two men, that a precedent was being set, and that other governments would take advantage of it and demand the return of other dissidents who had escaped prison sentences for other thought crimes, but my “Jewsplaining” fell on deaf ears.
Even now, as China is going to town on escaped dissidents, there is a reluctance by pretty much everyone in the North American “mainstream” (left, right, and center) to acknowledge the precedents set by the Zundel and Rudolf cases, or even to acknowledge that the cases existed. But the fact remains, all this bellyaching about “global dissident pursuits” is bunk. The U.S. and Canada have no problem at all with cross-border critic-grabbing and critic-deporting. And while the North American press may be deaf, dumb, and blind to the hypocrisy emanating from Ottawa and D.C., one suspects that the Chinese are all too keenly aware of it.
It’s hard to fault them for paying attention, especially when they seem to be the only ones.
