My worry stems back to an older issue, one which has been surfacing more in recent years -- in Canada, the US, Britain, France, Germany -- you name it. In Canada it took the form of the RCMP pepper-spraying and jailing demonstrators; the latter opposed to a military dictator guilty of crimes against his country's people.

In Britain, last fall a similar white-washing occurred when Chinese President Jiang Zemin visited. One American man wrote asking why the West was "kowtowing" to a communist state, a country which "regularly thumbed its nose at human rights" and makes no secret of its "war preparations against the West." He had hoped the West, especially Britain with respect to Germany, had learned its lesson from the events leading up to and including World War II. He continued by acknowledging our "make nice" attitude with China for purpose of trade and profit, with the West becoming more like the dictatorships it trades with when we prohibit free speech and demonstration.

And the list doesn't stop with Indonesia or China. Consider North Korea, with its communist government starving its citizens, yet asking for foreign "humanitarian-famine" aid ... and getting it! What does the government do with the money it saves? With hands freed from responsibility to its citizens it builds weapons -- like the missile it flew over Japanese territory in August 1998. Now the US, South Korea, Japan, and the EU are proposing to build two more "peacetime nuclear reactors" in a move to get North Korea to stop its suspected nuke program. Hello?!

We're legitimizing totalitarian regimes left and right. Regimes that would not, could not, stand by themselves if Western nations stood strong. They would bankrupt like every other bunch of thugs, screaming and crying for humanitarian aid from the West, the paradise of humanity. We're selling out. We're saying again that morality is *#@%* and meaningless. We're selling out long term for short term gains.

In the case of China, it builds to the sky, perhaps the most rapid development in the history of mankind, built by Western expertise and dollars, and who takes the credit? The communists. With 'their accomplishments' they swell with pride then turn around to slap us in the face with our "immoralities", our "inconsistencies", our "fallacies".

Is it going to be different 'this time'? Have we truly entered a "new paradigm" where the modern gospel of Free Trade redeems all? Or are we building the foundations -- again -- for the next war? And I wonder, with so much promise on the horizon, are we going to be set back decades -- again -- while we settle old morality issues with bigger guns, bombs, and more capable missiles?

As Asian nationalism is at an all time high I wince to think at what kind of war could happen with modern weaponry in the most populated areas on earth. And in an era of increasing globalism the thought of a war being limited to Asia alone is childish. Like I said, with so many cross-currents of right and wrong in the world and in many individual countries, I am unsure where all this is going.

In China I want to believe that the communists are simply a reactionary phase, embraced by the Chinese because idiot Western foreign policy in the mid-19th to mid-20th century pushed them to breakpoint. And with China firmly back in the reigns of its own territory, having consolidated and strengthened itself from 1949 to the late 1970s in isolation, it is now irreversibly opening up to the world, confident it can now handle a greater degree of freedom.

I want to believe this. And I think this is what many Westerners in leading positions would like to believe too. I want to believe the Chinese are not the equivalent of Hitler's Germany, that the Chinese are more civilized ... but aren't these the same kind of thoughts the British held when dealing with Nazi Germany? -- "Surely they can't mean it." The similarities exist and that's what makes me uneasy.