History and its lessons we ignore!

Today the nobel committee awarded this year's peace prize to one Chinese national "Lu Xiabao". This is the first time I am watching such a ceremony and unfortunately it was incomplete because of the absence of the prize winner himself. In other words he was conspicuous by his absence. None of his relatives and friends were present on the occasion. It seems that the Chinese government has put him in jail and imposed a 11 year sentence on him.
Here comes the interesting part. He did only one thing for which he was awarded nobel peace prize on one hand and a 11 year sentence on the other, and that one thing is to raise his voice against the Chinese government on behalf of the weak and downtrodden. One action and two extreme reactions.

In the award ceremony the person who addressed the gathering had rightly criticised China on its unwillingness to realise that peaceful protests and valid dissent is as important as discipline and compliance to the incumbent constitution. Just because a country is an economic and military super power it can not turn a blind eye to the indispensable needs of its citizens and human rights is an important part of it. If imprisoning Lu is not enough, it went ahead and decried the nobel committee's decision to give the prize to Lu and by influencing around 40 nations not to attend the ceremony, China has brought itself upon the ignominy of an immature state not withstanding its economic and military might.

The same kind of mistakes were committed by erstwhile USSR, and now a fading super power called USA. Both, during the course of history were blinded by pride and an insatiable greed to gain control over anything and everything they could lay their hands upon. Only now do they realise that ones stature is not based on GDP or military might but based on the extent of empowerment of its people. Both the nations taught us these lessons and we humans, the most intelligent species should have learned the lesson by now. But no, we don't learn our lessons as is shown by China and by thus doing so, history repeats itself. When a person begins to hate himself the road to degeneration has already begun and the same is true for a nation. When a country tries to suppress the voice of its people, though its economic curve may point northward in the short term, its social curve falls to depths pulling the entire nation down.

Once Abraham lincoln famously said "Anybody can stand adversity. But if you want to test the character give him power". China did struggle a lot and survived the last century to become a major player in this century. But the real test has only started now because it's only now that it has great power. If God has equipped us with a neck, he surely meant us to stick it out. So all the nations should at-least voice their opinions against this immature stance taken by China and hope that sanity prevails in the end.