Recently, in what constitutes the modern equivalent of an old-fashioned Texas showdown, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban met in the middle of the Twitter community’s Main Street and exchanged fire.
The genesis of the dispute was conservative talk radio host Mark Davis’ statement that he would be “out” if Mavericks players took a knee during the national anthem in a show of support for the Black Lives Matters movement. Not surprisingly, Cuban defended his players by responding to Davis with “Bye.”
Not surprisingly, too, Senator Cruz took exception to Cuban’s cavalier attitude toward Texans who believe kneeling for the national anthem is disrespectful. This led to Cuban questioning Cruz’s manhood. Cruz responded in kind.
Though initially about the anthem controversy, the most noteworthy aspect of this Twitter shootout at the “I’m OK, You’re Not Corral,” occurred when Cruz challenged Cuban to criticize Communist China, in general, and Beijing’s mistreatment of Hong Kong and the Uyghurs in particular.
After Cuban affirmed his support for Black Lives Matter, claimed America is systemically racist, and accused Cruz of not doing enough to stop the COVID-19 pandemic (which Cuban failed to note originated in Communist China), he espoused the amoral canard corporate titans have long used to justify their complicit silence about oppression in the face of massive profits: “But I have never gotten involved in the domestic policies of ANY foreign country. We have too much to do here.”
Cuban and his fellow corporate titans find Communist China’s predatory trade practices offensive because they adversely impact American corporations’ ability to make a buck. What does not offend Cuban and his fellow corporate titans is Communist China’s systematic crushing of the Hong Kong people’s liberty and its relocating of Uyghurs by the trainload into concentration camps in order to exterminate their culture and their persons. All that has no impact on these American corporations’ ability to make a buck from this evil regime.
Once again, ignorance of the lessons of history is bearing bitter fruit.
In his exceptional book, The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, And an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War, author A. J. Baime provides the lesson:
The auto industries were not unique; other industries, such as banks and technology companies, were functioning similarly in Nazi Germany. When one GM stockholder raised concern, the company’s chairman, Alfred Sloan, defended the contracts and the profits, which were critical to the balance sheets, especially during the Depression. The politics of Nazi Germany “should not be considered the business of the management of General Motors,” Sloan said. “We must conduct ourselves [in Germany] as a German organization.” GM had obligations to its stockholders, Sloan said. “We have no right to shut down the plant.”
The Detroit automakers and the American corporate community of the Greatest Generation ultimately redeemed themselves by helping to destroy the evil their businesses once abetted. Today, Cuban and his venal, elitist ilk lack even the pretext of a Great Depression or a lack of information about what is happening to human beings in Communist China.
When it comes to China, these corporate titans have proven themselves moral midgets by trotting out the old trope of “non-intervention” to rationalize their venality in enriching themselves through trade with these tyrants—an immoral position that would have prevented them from speaking out against any genocide, be it in Nazi Germany, Rwanda, or Communist China.
Unconscionably, to such virtue-signaling corporatists, black lives matter but Chinese lives do not. And while in America “silence is violence,” in Communist China “silence is golden”—literally.