陈凯论坛 Kai Chen Forum
不自由，毋宁死! Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!
陈凯博客 Kai Chen Blog: www.blogspot.com
陈凯电邮 Kai Chen Email: elecshadow@aol.com
陈凯电话 Kai Chen Telephone: 661-367-7556
陳永苗先生在此文中所用词“道德”应换为“伦理”。 Morality 不是 Mores (social norms). 此定义十分关键。 望读者清晰划分。
Mr. Chen has a great article here. But his definition of "Morality" is confused with "Mores" or "Social Norms". Hereby I caution all of you to distinguish “Morality" from "Social Norms". --- Kai Chen
Taiwan's spy pilots honored for Cold War work 黑蝙蝠中队最终被授誉
The Black Bats' major function was to drop Taiwanese spies to incite mainlanders to rise up against communist rule — an enterprise that almost invariably ended in failure..
By Annie Huang, Associated Press
HSINCHU, Taiwan — They gathered quietly on a rainy night in the northern Taiwanese city of Hsinchu, six survivors of a secret cadre of pilots who risked their lives against the communist enemy during the darkest days of the Cold War.
Known as "The Black Bats," they say they were working for the CIA, a claim backed up by a photo of them posing with the then CIA station chief. Between 1953 and 1967 they flew more than 800 sorties over the Chinese mainland, dropping agents, testing radar responses, even collecting air samples from suspected nuclear test sites.
After decades in the shadows, they are now coming forward, encouraged by the planned establishment of a museum honoring their exploits in this high tech center that was once the base of their operations.
Though their main mission — laying the groundwork for an anti-communist insurrection — unquestionably failed, they are seen by many on this democratic island of 23 million people as national heroes, because they helped cement a crucial connection with the United States when their homeland needed all the big power help it could get.
The Black Bats' story first emerged in Taiwan in 1992 when China repatriated the remains of 14 crewmembers who died when their plane was shot down over the mainland in 1959. A few books on their exploits were published in subsequent years, including one by the Taiwanese Defense Ministry detailing their clandestine China overflights.
But the Bats had remained largely anonymous until the gathering early in June at Hsinchu's National Tsing Hua University, where hundreds of Taiwanese observed a minute of silence for the 148 Black Bats who didn't return from their missions and paid an emotional tribute to the few surviving members of the group.
"We owe our national and social stability to them, but we had never thanked them in public," said Tsing Hua humanities professor Lung Ying-tai.
The Black Bats were formed in 1953, just four years after Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces were defeated on the mainland by Mao Zedong's communists. That loss precipitated their wholesale retreat to this leaf-shaped island 100 miles off the Chinese coast.
During his more than 20 years in power on the mainland, Chiang had maintained an uneasy relationship with the United States — many historians accuse him of widescale corruption — but once on Taiwan, Washington embraced him as an anti-communist bulwark.
The CIA was a major link in the new Taiwan-U.S. connection, Black Bat veterans say, providing the group with P2V, B17 and B26 aircraft to carry out their mission of scoping out the communist enemy, and inserting agents on the mainland to promote an anti-communist insurrection.
The veterans proudly display photographs taken with Ray Cline, then the agency's Taipei station chief, and show other memorabilia supporting their claim of CIA sponsorship.
"There's no doubt about the cooperation between the Black Bats and the CIA," said Tseng Wen-shu, who helped organize an exhibition about the Bats at a municipally sponsored Hsinchu military museum.
A 2004 book co-authored by CIA Taiwan veteran James Lilley says the agency used aircraft to insert Taiwanese agents into the mainland, though it does not mention the Bats specifically.
The CIA did not respond to an e-mail asking about its connection to the group.
Seventy-seven-year-old Chu Chen, one of about 10 surviving Black Bats pilots, said crews were trained in Taiwan by Americans he later learned were CIA employees. Like others in the group, he kept his exploits secret until recently — even from members of his own family.
"If we had disclosed anything, we could have been shot as intelligence agents leaking secrets," he said.
Taiwanese defense expert Fu Ching-ping said the CIA purposely hid its connection to the Black Bats because of fear of being implicated in military forays against the mainland.
"They employed the Taiwanese pilots so they could deny any connection if the mission went wrong," he said.
The Black Bats' major function was to drop Taiwanese spies to incite mainlanders to rise up against communist rule — an enterprise that almost invariably ended in failure.
No figures are available on how many spies were dropped, but surviving Black Bat pilots say few ever returned to Taiwan.
Former navigator Chou Li-hsu recalled numerous infiltration missions and extolled the bravery of the agents.
"They tossed their weapons down first and then they jumped," he said.
Several former pilots also recounted close encounters with pursuing communist planes, which narrowly missed shooting them down.
Eighty-two-year-old Tai Shu-ching said that in five years of Black Bat service he flew 78 sorties over China, including one in 1960 in which eight communist airmen were killed when their planes crashed into a mountain during a futile chase of Tai's P2V.
"Unarmed we broke through the Iron Curtain in the darkness of the night," he said. "Each time, we were confident that we could get the mission accomplished."
Tai's 1960 encounter with his communist pursuers is described in detail in Fights to Protect the Motherland's Airspace, a book published in 2001 by China's People's Liberation Army.
Besides inserting agents, Black Bat aircraft also flew near Chinese radar installations to obtain their electronic signatures in preparation for possible American bombing missions of the mainland — missions that never took place.
Crews also helped the U.S. monitor Chinese nuclear weapons programs in the early 1960s by collecting air samples from suspected Chinese test sites.
Chu, the former pilot, said he flew his B17 on one such mission, but only learned its true purpose after the fact.
A Taiwanese defense expert, Andrew Yang of Taipei's Council of Advanced Political Studies, said programs like the Black Bats provided Washington valuable intelligence about China's secretive nuclear weapons program when the mainland was largely isolated from the rest of the world.
"Taiwan was an important source of information for the U.S. ... enabling it to avoid taking actions arising from misjudging the situation," he said.
In parallel with the Black Bats, another Taiwanese squadron — the Black Cats — flew surveillance missions over the mainland throughout the 1960s. These were high-altitude flights using U2 spy planes to photograph military establishments. At least five of the U2s were shot down by Chinese missiles before the squadron was disbanded in 1974.
Taiwan's Defense Ministry finally recognized the "important contributions" made by both the Cats and the Bats following the Hsinchu gathering.
"They ... provided crucial strategic and military intelligence that helped stabilize the Taiwan Straits situation," the ministry said in a statement. "We will never forget this chapter of our history."
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
By William R. Hawkins FrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, April 14, 2009
The April 2 Leaders Statement issued at the close of the G20 economic summit proclaimed, “We start from the belief that prosperity is indivisible; that growth, to be sustained, has to be shared.” A noble sentiment, but not one many of the participants actually believe. The Chinese certainly do not believe in sharing, as they are working hard to exploit the world-wide economic crisis to their own advantage. Beijing is staking out a position on the global stage as the strongest national economy so as to win entrance into international organizations and councils as a peer competitor to the United States. Its message is that the Western model has failed, and that American “hegemony” is at an end.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January, Premier Wen Jiabao blamed “inappropriate macroeconomic policies of some economies and their unsustainable model of development” for the current financial collapse. He admitted that the events have had a “rather big impact” on the Chinese economy, saying, “We are facing severe challenges, including notably shrinking external demand, overcapacity in some sectors, difficult business conditions for enterprises, rising unemployment in urban areas and great downward pressure on economic growth.” Yet, Wen nevertheless claimed that China would still be able to meet its 2009 target of 8 percent growth at a time when every other major economy is in recession. The Chinese economy grew 9 percent in 2008 while the U.S. economy declined by 1.1 percent.
Beijing's bravado impressed World Economic Forum Asian Department Director Frank-Jürgen Richter. He told The People's Daily, the official newspaper of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, “The US economy once had been the engine for world economic development, but now it is faced with predicament and plagued by chaos…. Then, who, after all, can replace the United States? Only China! China's economic situation is very good, not only its domestic situation is favorable, but also more and more overseas investments are turned to China which is hopefully to take the place of the United States in five years to become the main motive force for global economic growth.”
The key to China's perceived clout is its massive $2 trillion hoard of hard currency, mostly held in dollars, which is being added to constantly via its trade surplus. The U.S. has sent over $1.5 trillion to China since 2000 via its trade deficit. Everyone wants the Chinese store of capital and purchasing power to flow their way. By all reports, it was the main subject on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's agenda when she visited Beijing in February. She was literally begging Chinese leaders to keep investing in U.S. Treasury securities to fund the rapidly expanding Federal budget deficit. She was thus willing to downplay all the geopolitical conflicts between Beijing and Washington.
Clinton's appeal was not something that had just materialized from the Obama administration. The Bush administration was also begging for Beijing to send back to the U.S. the money American consumers had sent to China to buy imports. In his opening statement to the U.S.-China Strategic Economic Dialogue last June, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said, “We will discuss the best way to promote and protect bilateral investment and to counter protectionist pressures.” A major result of the SED was the launch of negotiations for a bilateral investment treaty. Such an agreement could minimize national security reviews and give Beijing a freer hand in the American market. The Joint U.S.-China Fact Sheet released at the end of the SED states that an Investment Forum “will focus on practical investor concerns, such as the process of investment reviews.” It is also stated that “the United States welcomes sovereign wealth fund investment, including from China.” This means the purchase by the Beijing regime itself of American productive assets in the private sector as well as government bonds.
The American public and Congress have found the specter of greater Chinese penetration of the U.S. economy alarming. When state-owned China National Offshore Oil Company attempted to acquire the Unocal energy firm in 2005, the House of Representatives passed a resolution against the deal, prompting Unocal to accept an offer from another American firm instead. The Unocal deal was one of the cases that led Congress to enact the Foreign Investment and National Security Act of 2007. This was the first major piece of legislation of the 110th Congress, passed unanimously in the House and by voice vote in the Senate. It placed particular emphasis on investigating deals involving state-owned firms or which involved shifting control of infrastructure to foreign hands. Unfortunately, President George W. Bush confirmed Treasury's dominant role in the process by executive order. His action ignored a warning from the Government Accountability Office that the process “in protecting U.S. national security may be limited because Treasury- as Chair of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States- has narrowly defined what constitutes a threat to national security.”
The first successful test of the improved CFIUS process involved a Chinese firm. Huawei Technologies tried to purchase a stake in 3Com, a U.S. firm that makes computer network security software for the Pentagon. When it became apparent that CFIUS was not going to approve the deal, due in part to objections raised by the Director of National Intelligence (who had been named as an advisor to CFIUS in the 2007 bill), the offer to buy 3Com was withdrawn.
But in an alarming turn, Treasury Special Envoy Alan Holmer told a Chinese audience last May, “we often hear concerns from China about the U.S. investment review process and whether the United States truly welcomes Chinese investment. U.S. legal authority in this area is narrowly targeted to address acquisitions that raise genuine national security concerns, not broader economic interests or industrial policy factors.” So the GAO warning remains valid.
The New York Times reported Feb. 21 that “China is taking advantage of the economic downturn to go on a major shopping spree, investing in energy and other natural resources that could give it an economic advantage it has never had before. Some economic analysts say they believe that China's investments pose a threat to competitors like the United States.” Recent investments include oil production in Brazil, Venezuela and Russia; and mining operations in Australia. With world demand down during the recession, there are bargains to be had for a country with as much cash on hand as China.
In the United States, Beijing has been buying Treasury debt, which is the less dangerous course from the American perspective. Policy should seek to contain Chinese capital within the public sector where investments do not confer any control. Still, even this is not without risks. Writing in the Spring 2008 issue of the Army War College journal Parameters, business economists Felix K. Chang and Jonathan Goldman argue that China's large block of Treasury securities gives it the power to disrupt U.S. financial markets. “No bombs need fall from the sky. Yet damage can be inflicted on the United States through market manipulation that would be as costly to recover from as any conventional attack,” they warn.
Yet there is danger is overstating the amount of leverage Beijing can use against Washington. For years, the State Department has argued that the U.S. could not push China on economic issues like the trade deficit, currency manipulation or intellectual property protection because Beijing's help was needed against North Korean weapons programs. North Korea's test of a nuclear device in 2006 and its recent test of a long-range missile indicate that China has been more helpful in protecting the Pyongyang regime from effective countermeasures than it has been in supporting Washington's non-proliferation efforts. Now the argument from Treasury is that the U.S. cannot pressure China on issues like North Korea (or Iran) for fear that Beijing will disrupt American financial markets.
China tested its clout in the run up to the G20 summit. On March 24, People's Bank of China Gov. Zhou Xiaochuan wrote on the bank's Web site that it was time to step back from the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency and consider a global currency controlled by the International Monetary Fund. Russia had actually opened this challenge earlier when Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev called for the ruble to become a regional reserve currency, while a new global currency was created.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner took some heat when he initially said that the Chinese proposal deserved consideration. He clarified his position on March 30 saying, “The policy of the United States is that a strong dollars is in the interests of the United States. I believe the dollar will be the principle reserve currency for a very long time to come.” According to the White House, the issue did not come up when President Barack Obama met with President Hu Jintao on the sidelines of the G20 summit.
The Russian proposal was a clumsy attempt to create a ruble bloc to link the old Soviet republics to Moscow. Beijing has been trying something similar. China and Argentina recently agreed to exchange 70 billion yuan ($10 billion), of their currencies for use in trade and investment. “Dollars will not be needed for trade,” said The People's Daily, adding, “This measure will play a positive role in improving regional currency stability, preventing financial risk and reducing the spread of the crisis.” What it will actually do is tie the two countries together on a barter basis, confirming Beijing's neocolonial trade pattern of exchanging manufactured goods for Argentine raw materials.
China is the world's third largest economy, but keeps its financial system isolated. The yuan trades only in China, which allows the central bank to set the exchange rate by fiat to gain a competitive advantage in export markets. The yuan cannot be a world reserve currency, or even be included in a basket of currencies used to stabilize international rates.
Beijing has fewer options about how to use its dollar hoard than the United States has in regard to how it conducts trades and governs foreign investments. In theory, China could diversify its reserves to hold more euros, pounds, or yen, but China owns too many dollars to sell without driving down their market value. This would bring on the very dollar devaluation they see as the capital loss risk of holding so many dollars.
And this still does not to mention the unmentionable. The United States could cancel (default) on any sovereign debt owed to Chinese entities should the tensions between the rival powers erupt into war.
Beijing has gotten itself into this trap because managing its reserves was not its top priority. It has been happy to hold market safe, low-yield Treasury securities. Its focus has been on boosting employment at home, building production capacity and expanding the trade surplus that supports domestic development. The growth in the real economy is what keeps the Chinese people loyal to the regime. Rising unemployment as exports decline has Beijing worried. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao told a cabinet meeting in January that, “The country's employment situation is extremely grim.” Public security directors from across the country have been summoned to Beijing to learn how to suppress rallies and strikes before they turn into riots.
Chinese exports in February slid 25.7 percent from a year earlier, leading to the close of thousands of factories and the unemployment of millions. It is estimated that 60-70 million Chinese work in export industries. Of the major nations, China is the most dependent on trade, having engineered its rise on the massive transfer of wealth from overseas gained from trade surpluses, foreign investment, and technology transfers. Beijing is responding to the decline in trade in two ways. First, it is trying to grab a larger share of falling world exports by resorting to even more cutthroat competition against foreign rivals, many of whom in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are friends of the United States. Mexico is also a Chinese export rival. The second response has been to launch a massive domestic stimulus package of government infrastructure projects and expanded bank lending.
President Obama has said on several occasions, including at the G20 summit, that other nations cannot expect to base their economic recoveries on continued deficit spending by reckless American consumers. The United States must reduce its $700 billion global annual trade deficits to rebuild its own strength, and its must stop subsidizing Beijing's rise with $260 billion trade deficits with China. U.S. imports have doubled since 1999, hitting $2.5 trillion in 2008. This number can be brought down by moving high-end production back home, but America will always be the world's largest importer even as accounts are brought towards balance. This gives Washington substantial leverage as it decides who will be granted access to the rich U.S. market. That privilege should go to America's friends and allies, not its rivals.
In her book Allies, Adversaries and International Trade Princeton political economist Joanne S. Gowa argues that it is a mistake to abandon the traditional practice of having “trade follow the flag” because interdependence is too risky with any government that cannot be trusted on political grounds. Gowa writes, “power politics is an inexorable element of any agreement to open international markets, because of the security externalities that trade produces....trade enhances the potential military power of any country that engages in it.” Trade with an ally makes both parties stronger, whereas trade with an enemy creates what Gowa calls “a security diseconomy.” Such a security diseconomy exists today with China and should be ended.
The Beijing dictatorship has based its legitimacy with the Chinese people on economic progress accelerated by exploitive trade policies and on the promise that it can restore China to its rightful place at the center of world politics. The United States still has the power to deny both of these goals to the communist regime, thus not only preserving its own preeminence but hastening true reform in China by discrediting its current model of development.
From Tiananmen Square to Freedom Square 从天安门广场到自由广场
20th Anniversary of Tiananmen Massacre “六四”二十周年纪念
- Kai Chen Speech on Freedom 陈凯演讲阐扬自由 -
Time: Saturday, March 28, 2009 2:00 pm 三月二十八日，星期六， 下午两点
Location: Taiwan Community Center, Rosemead, Los Angeles 台湾会馆，柔似蜜，洛杉矶
Features: Free DVD distribution "My Way" 免费DVD - “我的路” Book Sale: "One in a Billion - Journey toward Freedom" 书籍出售 “一比十亿 - 通往自由的历程” Distribution of literature on Freedom. 其他免费文献
Letters between Me and a Friend from the Left 陈凯与左派朋友间的通信
Dear Readers:
Below are some letters between me and a friend of mine from the left. They are very significant in terms of the current political atmosphere in America. I paste them here for you to read and enjoy. Best. Kai Chen
Since Ronald Reagan and the end of the Cold War (In my opinion the Cold War has never ended. It always continues in another fashion, in another arena. The challenge to human freedom from all angles/dimensions never ceases to continue.), there has developed an alarming apathy/indifference in America toward its own principles enunciated by the founding fathers. It is as though Americans have forgotten that precious motto "the price of freedom is our eternal vigilance". They somehow allow themselves to slip into a moral coma/dormancy, concerned only about their own material well-being. It is as though we are not spiritual beings creating our physical world and material values, but some material existence experiencing momentary spiritual illusions. I never came to America for my material gains (I would have stayed above others in terms of material gains if I were to remain in China). I came to America to fulfill my spiritual yearnings in pursuing my spiritual well being. And in searching and going after the meaning of my existence - true freedom and happiness, I have created great material environment for myself, my family and my fellow human beings.
Now it is all turned upside down. There is no where to retreat any more. America is the last hope and bastion for mankind to remain free on this planet earth. We must fight to keep America as what the founders intended it to be. The message I want to tell American public is invaluable for the health of this great nation, and in keeping America healthy and free, despotism and tyranny around the world will tremble and their days will be indeed numbered. I am very grateful for your assistance and enthusiasm. I only wish there were more people articulating what I want to say.
I read these letters with much admiration and respect for both the writer and the receiver.
Although I share some of the same views that you have regarding our native countries, I DO not always agree with the party we have on the right! Too many greedy Republicans have put our country in the brink of bankruptcy. I believe the answer lies somewhere in a balance which is what i think Pres. Obama. is TRYING TO DO! I say "trying" because already he is facing harsh criticism from those who have been in power for 8 yrs and have not succeeded doing it THEIR way!!!
Unfortunately, human beings being who they are sometimes get greedy and wily and before you know it the whole system is corrupt! I dont think they do it intentionally sometimes, in fact , I am sure they do not see themselves as doing anything evil, but they just think they deserve to BE in control. Maybe they see themselves as smarter, more responsible...etc.. whatever their rationalizations it is NOT RIGHT, nor correct on their parts!
The very reason that America is so great is because we have always upheld the value of every individual. I love this country so much!!! Like you we both came here to obtain freedom (real freedom). The system here has a great foundation...set in place by our founding fathers, lets follow their lead and PROTECT the rights granted by our documents. We cannot let ourselves get motivated by FEAR! Fear doesnt come from a good place. Love and compassion and truth will always lead us down the right path.
I entirely agree with you that since Ronald Reagan the Republicans did a poor job articulating the values of this great nation. Somehow they are playing the same dirty games often played by the left. We are not individuals with dignity anymore in their eyes. We are only some insignificant elements belonging to some social groups/cultural racial backgrounds, like helpless infants crying for milk from some omnipotent and omnipresent presence represented only by our parental government. Mr. Bush went to Beijing to kowtow to the tyrants which greatly disappointed me. Now Mrs. Clinton did the same thing and worse in Beijing, kowtowing to the tyrants while disregarding what this country should do to expand human freedom around the globe.
That is why now my message is so important to the Americans: Do not forget what this country is about. People on the right now lack the courage President Reagan had. People on the left have always been lack a direction: Somehow they think socialism is the acceptable way to go as the current administration exhibits. You and I both know socialism/communism is a dead end. People die and suffer indignities for nothing in that kind of system. That is why I always fight hard against the left in this country and elsewhere. Being poor or rich does not give anyone rights to take things away from any others. The communism uses people's lack of education and their naivety/evil to instill a man-eating mentality in their countries: Take away from the rich then you will become rich. That is evil. Indeed all the countries which follow such doctrines only get poorer, for no one creates values anymore. No one initiate anything anymore. People don't dig into themselves to find creativity and courage to start anything anymore. People start to look around to rob/put down on others. This is what I don't want to see happen in America.
Now it seems that this China Syndrome has infected America. Martin Luther King's dream now becomes a nightmare for people like me who come into this country, not for material gains by taking away from others, but by working hard to fulfill our dreams. Now we succeeded in our American dream and beyond, but somehow we have become the guilty. I don't feel that I have anything to apologize for to anyone. But the current administration is using the scare tactics I see so often in communist countries, robbing the rich to give to the poor, for nothing but their own political gain, for power thirst.
Being rich or poor does not have any moral connotations as the socialists and communists allege. How one gets rich or poor Does indeed have moral connotations. There will be grave consequences when you use pretenses to rob those honest people who work hard to get ahead. I see some rich people who are vicious. I see also great many poor people who are vicious. I see poor people who are good. I also see great many rich people who are good. To instill moral tone in one's material state of being is evil itself. I know the current administration, giving the direction it goes, will fail, for all socialist ideas have been proven by history not only failures, but great human misery, suffering and moral degradation.
This is what I want to tell people in my story. I only want to keep this country as the founders intended - expanding individual human freedom while limiting government's power. I have yet to see a government with unlimited power over its own people, making them state-dependent slaves, to be NOT corrupt. America is not an exception. It is amazing to see that before the Cold War ended, both left and right in America have a moral direction of anti-communism. Now the communism/socialism we fought so hard against with so much sacrifice around the globe gradually seeps through our lack of vigilance, our laziness and moral confusion/corruption. Marx and Lenin must be laughing hard in their graves while American founders are being tortured, turning in their graves.
I love to discuss these issues with you and Jon sometimes extensively. I hope we keep in touch.
A New Low of the Obama Administration on Tiananmen Massacre 奥巴马政要对天安门大屠杀的歪论
[David Bernstein, March 1, 2009 at 6:29am] Trackbacks
New Chairman of the National Council of Intelligence:
It's a fellow named Chas. Freeman who, among other things, is the former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and the president of a Saudi government-funded "public relations" organization, the Middle East Policy Council. Surely, the "no blood for oil crowd" is outraged by the appointment of someone with close ties to the Saudis to such a sensitive position?
Then there's this, an email Freeman wrote a few years back, uncovered by Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard, that argues that the Chinese acted with "ill-conceived restraint" before massacring unarmed demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. The only thing the Chinese murderers were guilty of was "overly cautious behavior." You have to read the whole thing to believe it [perhaps not coincidentally, Freeman also co-chairs the U.S.-China Policy Foundation, which agitates for closer U.S.-China ties]:
I will leave it to others to address the main thrust of your reflection on Eric's remarks. But I want to take issue with what I assume, perhaps incorrectly, to be yoiur citation of the conventional wisdom about the 6/4 [or Tiananmen] incident. I find the dominant view in China about this very plausible, i.e. that the truly unforgivable mistake of the Chinese authorities was the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip the demonstrations in the bud, rather than — as would have been both wise and efficacious — to intervene with force when all other measures had failed to restore domestic tranquility to Beijing and other major urban centers in China. In this optic, the Politburo's response to the mob scene at "Tian'anmen" stands as a monument to overly cautious behavior on the part of the leadership, not as an example of rash action.
For myself, I side on this — if not on numerous other issues — with Gen. Douglas MacArthur. I do not believe it is acceptable for any country to allow the heart of its national capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government, however appealing to foreigners their propaganda may be. Such folk, whether they represent a veterans' "Bonus Army" or a "student uprising" on behalf of "the goddess of democracy" should expect to be displaced with despatch from the ground they occupy. I cannot conceive of any American government behaving with the ill-conceived restraint that the Zhao Ziyang administration did in China, allowing students to occupy zones that are the equivalent of the Washington National Mall and Times Square, combined. while shutting down much of the Chinese government's normal operations. I thus share the hope of the majority in China that no Chinese government will repeat the mistakes of Zhao Ziyang's dilatory tactics of appeasement in dealing with domestic protesters in China.
I await the brickbats of those who insist on a politically correct — i.e. non Burkean conservative — view.
Surely, Obamaphiles who have been pushing for years to encourage U.S. policy toward China to focus more on human rights are up in arms?
In fact, while I'm sure such people do exist, a quick survey of blogs to the left of The New Republic shows that those who have chosen to comment are expressing contentment glee over Freeman's appointment. Why, because he is a "realist" about Israel, a polite way of saying he's expressed a fair amount of hostility both to Israel and its American supporters. Here's The Nation, TPM Cafe's M.J. Rosenberg, and Matthew Yglesias. And these are the folks that claim that Israel-related matters distort the neoconservatives' perspective on world events! In fairness, other liberal blogs are maintaining a studious, perhaps embarrassed, silence. It's entirely possible that some bloggers are mortified by Freeman, but are not prepared to "undermine" Obama and side with his "neoconservative enemies."
UPDATE: Here's Stephen Walt, of "The Israel Lobby" coauthorship fame, defending Freeman from his detractors. And here, in its entirety, is how Walt explains why it's okay for Obama to appoint an apologist for the Saudi and Chinese dictatorships, who until the day of his appointment was on the payroll of the former, to a very sensitive intelligence position: [sound of crickets chirping].
Apparently, no matter how otherwise appalling Freeman's appointment may be, the fact that he has acquired many of the same pro-Israel enemies as Walt (deservedly) has acquired serves as a sufficient defense. But of course, according to Walt, it is Freeman's critics who are "obsessed" with "their own narrow-minded vision of U.S. Middle East policy." Given that Walt is apparently unwilling to even address Freeman's dubious ties to and defenses of China and Saudi Arabia, the schoolyard taunt "it takes one to know one" comes to mind. But that's unfair to Freeman's critics, who have, in fact, focused attention not just on Freeman's hostility to Israel, but on his willingness to serve as the president of a propaganda outfit funded by a dictatorial foreign power, and his grotesque interpretation of the events in China in 1989, whereas Walt focuses his attention only on Israel-related matters, and even then fails to offer a substantive defense of specific criticisms beyond "the enemy of my enemies is my friend".
By Vasko Kohlmayer FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, February 27, 2009
Capitalism 101
In recent years we have been witnessing the rise of a trend, which has become more pronounced with the unfolding of the current economic crisis: An ever-growing number of our fellow citizens are becoming distrustful and suspicious of capitalism. As a result, capitalism is being increasingly seen by more and more people as exploitative, unfair, harmful and outright immoral.
Nothing could be further from the truth, however. Rather than a nefarious system that some allege it to be, the free market is in fact the basis and source of our national prosperity. This is because the free-market is the only known economic arrangement capable of generating that fundamental prerequisite of societal well-being: sufficient quantities of meaningful, well-paying jobs.
In his latest online guide The Cure for Poverty, Herbert E. Meyer – a popular lecturer and creator of the best-selling The Siege of Western Civilization – injects a dose of truth and common sense into the current climate of confusion, ignorance and deliberate deception. In this well-timed work, Meyer explains in rudimentary terms how capitalism works, and why it is such a superb engine of prosperity generation.
As Meyer points out at the outset, capitalism disperses its benefits through the efforts of entrepreneurs. But contrary to what many think, most entrepreneurs are not high-rolling financiers or industrialists. An entrepreneur is “anyone who launches any kind of business whatsoever – who sells goods or services and who doesn’t have an income until someone purchases these goods or services.”
Most entrepreneurs are just regular people we meet every day such as “that man down the street who opened a new auto repair shop last month… the woman who stopped by your house yesterday to see if you might be interested in buying some of those fancy cookies she’s baked, or that couple you hired last month to paint your house.” The boy next door who mows your lawn is also an entrepreneur and so are farmers, gas station operators and dentists.
While it is true that some entrepreneurs – like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, for example – become very wealthy, most don’t. But even though they never become rich or famous their activities bring about a tremendous social benefit – they create jobs:
In the last 25 years here in the United States, more than 30 million businesses have been started… Most of these businesses are still operating, some have gone out of business – and a few have grown so large and successful that the entrepreneurs who started them are famous and their companies are household names. And in the last 25 years these companies, together with all the older businesses in our country that started in precisely the same way as these companies started, have created more than 95 million new jobs for all of us.
This number is significant for several reasons. To begin with, US businesses have provided American families with the incomes to buy things they need and want, while at the same time providing an abundance of affordable products and services that make life in America so comfortable when compared with other places. We enjoy the highest standard of living thanks to the phenomenal performance of our free-market sector, which is freer, larger and more robust than that of any other country.
To put it another way, the material well being of a society – be it American or any other – is directly correlated with the degree of capitalism it allows in its economic sphere. The more capitalism a country has, the greater its affluence and vice versa, which is why free-market economies are far more prosperous than their centrally run counterparts. This is not a matter of argument or dispute; it is simply a matter of fact. One only needs to look at countries such as the Soviet Union, Cuba and North Korea on one hand and the United States, Australia and Ireland on the other.
The challenge, then, is to create an optimal environment for the free market to flourish. Although not all capitalist societies are configured along the exactly same lines, Meyer notes that all share a set of basic characteristics including “the rule of law, a modest level of taxation, competent regulation, and a government that protects its citizens by assuring the country’s defense while doing the everyday things a government is supposed to do, such as building roads and bridges, operating schools, and delivering the mail.” Meyer likens the sum of these conditions to a kind of free-market “atmosphere” conducive to the flourishing of capitalism.
But how do we maintain that favorable atmosphere? It is here things get tricky. This is how Meyer frames the challenge:
Because the free-market “atmosphere” that entrepreneurs require to survive and flourish is political and economic – rather than chemical, like the Earth’s atmosphere – there’s no one formula that any competent technician can look up in a textbook and then follow. Maintaining this “atmosphere” – monitoring it constantly and making the adjustments needed to sustain it as political and economic conditions change -- is as much an art as a science. It takes a combination of technical knowledge, hard work, vision, and that unquantifiable “gut feel” for what to do and when to do it.
Many readers will begin to worry once they realize who carries the ultimate responsibility for ensuring the smooth functioning of the free-market enterprise: “It’s the responsibility of our government’s leaders to get this combination right. Simply put, maintaining an ‘atmosphere’ that will result in more and better jobs is largely what we elect our government’s leaders to do.”
The obvious problem with this is that in recent years we have been electing leaders who have neither interest nor knowledge to maintain the right free-market atmosphere. There could be no better evidence of this than the latest “stimulus” bill, which stands our whole capitalist system on its head by seeking to designate government as the final guarantor of our national prosperity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that every generation must bring God down to earth. Emerson correctly observed that overtime people tend to lose sight of foundational truths and that in order to maintain the right perspective we must be periodically reminded of them. Emerson’s adage is also applicable to our current situation, for it is obvious that we as a nation have lost view of fundamental economic maxims and are going astray as a result.
The Cure for Poverty could not come at a better time. A primer on capitalism, this timely treatise reminds us in clear terms what accounts for this country’s affluence and prosperity. Those concerned about its future would do well to read Herbert Meyer’s free guide and ponder its basic but timeless truths.
One of my great complaints — regular readers have heard it for a long time — is that no one ever goes back: No one ever reviews what was said, takes stock, etc. For example, a senator says, “If Ronald Reagan deploys those Pershings, we will have nuclear war!” Well, did we?
This is the great power of Mona Charen’s book Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First. She cites chapter and verse; and everyone is on the record, accountable. (To read my review of that book — published in a March 2003 National Review — go here.)
Why am I bringing all this up? Well, advocates of granting the Olympic Games to China all said that having the Games would force the PRC to liberalize. It would be good for human rights, people said. Even Chinese authorities themselves said that the Games would cause them to liberalize!
That was the great selling point.
And what happened? Not only did the Games not have a liberalizing effect; they had the opposite — moving the PRC to crack down all the more. I documented this extensively in a five-part series on this site last August. You can find it in my archive, here.
And just the other day, I saw this headline, from the Falun Dafa Information Center: “Fueled by Olympics, Falun Gong Persecution Escalated Sharply in 2008.” You’re darn right it did (and the relevant article is here).
Now, there’s nothing wrong with guessing, or arguing, and being wrong. It may have happened even to me one time. And it was possible that the Games would have a liberalizing effect (although I always thought that was a foolish guess, for reasons I detail in the above-mentioned series). In any case, the granting of the Games to Beijing set the cause of human rights back.
And it would be nice if some of the advocates of those Olympics — and there were millions of them — would simply say, “Oops: Turned out to be wrong.” Why should they say this? Because I think there should be Mao-style self-criticisms? No. Because I like to say “I told you so”? No. It just seems to me that, before we glide on, we should review, take stock, so as to prevent similar errors or misjudgments in the future.
Isn’t that elementary? (And elementary, as you know, is one of the specialties of this column.)
A grandson of Ayatollah Khomeini has said some interesting things — and the Middle East Media Research Institute, as usual, has relayed them (here). An interviewer asked Hossein Khomeini, “In your opinion, is the regime ruling Iran today exactly the same Islamic republic that Ayatollah Khomeini wished for?”
And he said, “No, we certainly did not want such a thing. The religious people did not want this, and the non-religious did not either. Only people who are mentally deviant could possibly want such a thing. Nobody else would want a regime that, in the name of Islam, challenges all the rights of the people, and, in many cases, tramples those rights underfoot.”
Of course, Ayatollah Khomeini planned a nightmare, for all of us: for as many as he could lay his hands on. And he plunged many millions into that nightmare. Still, interesting, what the grandson said.
On Saturday, I spotted a headline that said, “Good news on the ocean front for a change.” I thought, “Boy, Obama moves fast: He has been in office less than a month!” The article said,
Some Pacific Island countries are successfully protecting their reefs, haddock and scallops are recovering in New England waters, and a few types of whales are even making a comeback.
“The news today is that there is good news” for the oceans, Nancy Knowlton of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Friday.
That doesn’t mean that people no longer need to be concerned about the future of the oceans and sea life, but she said it is time to move beyond the obituaries and recognize there is also progress.
Well, he said he would heal the waters, and lo . . .
In many music reviews for the New York Sun (2002–08), I decried the practice of shushing in concert halls. Someone would clap at an inappropriate moment, or a cellphone would go off, and others would immediately shush: which I’ve always found worse — more disruptive, more annoying — than the original offense.
With this in mind, an old colleague from the Sun sent me an article from the Guardian, here. It begins, “Museum attendants should be stopped from ‘shushing’ children and displays should be hung low enough for youngsters to see properly, according to a manifesto to make museums more family-friendly published today.”
I dunno. I’ll have to think about it. Probably some children in museums deserve to be shushed . . .
By William R. Hawkins FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, February 27, 2009
The global economic downturn, triggered by the U.S. financial crisis that sent tremors through European banks and plunged Japan into a deep recession, could not have come at a better time for China. The turmoil will pull the focus of rival governments inward. There will be no desire, and few resources available, to face new confrontations abroad for years to come. Beijing will use the time to continue its “peaceful rise” without fear of interference by other powers whose longer term interests are at risk as China creates a “multipolar” world it can shape to its advantage.
China is, of course, facing problems. Its economy is dependent on exports in a world where trade is shrinking. Beijing is clearly worried about the impact of declining overseas markets. During the last few months, more than 20 million migrant workers have become unemployed. Last year 2,400 factories in and around the vibrant coastal region of Guangzhou closed. Rapid, double-digit economic growth has become the main legitimizing theme of the Communist dictatorship, and there is a real threat of social unrest if the economy slows. At a meeting of the cabinet last month, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao told government leaders to prepare for trouble, “The country’s employment situation is extremely grim,” he said. More than 3,000 public security directors from across the country have been summoned to Beijing to learn how to suppress rallies and strikes before they turn into riots.
Yet, China’s trade surplus in 2008 set a new record, both in the aggregate and with the United States. Its aggressive export strategy, based on currency values set by the regime, massive subsidies, and dumping by state corporations that value jobs and production over profits, has meant that Chinese exporters can beat out foreign rivals to expand their share of whatever markets remain open. A $585 billion stimulus package was introduced in November; much of it aimed at labor-intensive construction projects. And China’s already largely closed market for imports is becoming more protectionist– even as Beijing demands that markets in America and Europe open further to its products.
China also has the world’s largest hard currency reserves, estimated at around $2 trillion, the result of accumulated trade surpluses. The United States alone has given China $1.5 trillion via its trade deficit between 2000 and 2008. This massive Chinese hoard of capital hangs over the debt-ridden world economy like the Sword of Damocles. In the ancient Greek fable, the wealthy and powerful ruler of Syracuse was constantly menaced by a sword that hung over his throne by a single horsehair. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton certainly behaved as if she was sitting under such a weapon when she visited China last weekend.
The United States and China sit on opposite sides of every arena of conflict across the globe, as well as represent contrary principles of government and human rights. Yet, none of these issues played a major role in the discussions between Secretary Clinton and Chinese leaders, and many were not even mentioned. Beijing was praised for its “positive” role in hosting the Six-Party talks on North Korea. These talks have served Chinese interests well, protecting the Pyongyang buffer state from any concerted foreign pressure and even getting sanctions lifted in exchange for very little in the way of verifiable changes in regime behavior. Chinese support for the Iranian regime and its nuclear ambitions, which have stymied sanctions and undermined international pressure, was mentioned only by Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi in the joint press conference of Feb. 21, not by Secretary Clinton. There does not seem to have been any mention of the genocidal Islamic dictatorship in Sudan, which is armed and funded by Beijing in exchange for control of its oil industry, despite Secretary Clinton’s long standing personal concern for what is happening there.
There was no public sign that Afghanistan was discussed in Beijing. China is strengthening its ties with Pakistan, providing new combat aircraft and warships. It is also giving Islamabad diplomatic support to resist U.S. pressure to take the offensive against Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan’s border region from which attacks are launched against U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Chinese arms are also the mainstay of the Taliban insurgents.
At the Feb. 21 joint press conference, Secretary Clinton said “it is essential that the United States and China have a positive, cooperative relationship. Both of us are seeking ways to deepen and broaden that relationship.” A great deal of attention was devoted to environmental issues, as if the U.S. side was trying to create a common enemy in “global warming” so as to form an alliance with China that would overshadow all the traditional geopolitical conflicts that divide the two nations.
Secretary Clinton has taken flak from the human-rights community for downgrading their concerns in China. This should not have been surprising, since her husband Bill Clinton did exactly the same thing. President Clinton changed his campaign rhetoric about using trade as leverage for reform in China once he was in office under pressure from the business community. That corporate pressure is still in full force, but is now reinforced by the need to keep Chinese capital flowing to fund the U.S. budget deficit, even though that money originated from American consumers. Secretary Clinton tried to assure Beijing’s leaders that their considerable investment in Treasury bonds would remain safe.
Yet, in a world where banks and factories are failing, the potential returns from buying distressed real assets to take control of future production could be irresistible. Two days before Clinton arrived in Beijing, Fang Shangpu, deputy director of China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange, said that China will encourage and assist its companies in expanding operations and acquisitions overseas. Beijing has for many years been buying up energy and other natural resources in Africa, Asia and Latin America, taking them off the market for exclusive use by Chinese industry. A considerable debate has been triggered in Australia by Aluminum Corporation of China’s (Chinalco) decision to invest $19.5 billion in British-Australian Rio Tinto Group and China Minmetals’ offer for a $1.7 billion investment in OZ Minerals Ltd. China Investment Corporation, the $200 billion sovereign wealth fund, is thought to be in talks with Fortescue Metals Group Ltd., Australia’s third-biggest iron ore exporter, about gaining a $3 billion stake.
The China Development Bank (CDB) is in final negotiations with Brazils Petroleo Brasileiro SA (Petrobras) to loan the company some $10 billion for deepwater energy development — a loan to be repaid in oil. Beijing’s approach is a resurrection of the 19th century colonial model. It buys raw materials and invests in infrastructure projects to develop trade routes, paid for by the export of manufactured goods on very favorable terms. Chinese mercantilism is not about profit in the sense used in Western capitalist theory. It is about the control of wealth and production capacity as the foundation of state power and international influence.
Beijing believes its rise to great power status is inevitable, but that it will take time to construct the economic, social and political foundations. During the period of emergence, China could be vulnerable to foreign pressure. It has played a wily came, posing as a fragile developing country that needs special treatment to alleviate poverty and establish a basis for reform; while at the same time using its economic and diplomatic clout to project its growing power and deter counteraction. This strategy has been very much in line with Sun Tzu’s ancient advice that, ““Warfare is the Way (Tao) of deception. Although capable, display incapability. When committed to employing your forces, feign inactivity.”
The “peaceful rise” line of propaganda was introduced over ten years ago in response to the “China threat” theory advanced at the time by Lee Kuan-yew of Singapore, whose strategic city-state built a dockyard designed for use by U.S. aircraft carriers in an attempt to pull American power back to Southeast Asia. In 2005, Beijing released a White Paper that tweaked the term from “rise” to “development” to make it sound less aggressive. A year earlier, Gong Li, vice director of the Institute of International Strategic Studies at the Central Party School of the Chinese Communist Party, had presented a conference paper arguing that only a minority of Chinese officials believe that common interests outweigh contradictions between Beijing and Washington. A majority believe that Washington could take action to “contain” China before it can become a threat to American “hegemony.” Beijing needed to buy time to grow strong in an environment of appeasement and accommodation. It will now have that time.
Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso, who as Foreign Minister in 2005 told a press conference that China was beginning to pose a "considerable threat" because of its military buildup, is about to visit the White House. But he has an approval rating back home nearing single digits as Japan spirals into recession. President Barack Obama, looking to reduce the budget deficit even as massive stimulus packages are being passed by Congress, is planning major cuts in combat aircraft programs, missile defense and naval shipbuilding– the very capabilities that would be needed to contain a China that is modernizing and expanding its military in these same areas. As twilight is falling on the West, Beijing sees a new day dawning in the East.
LINCOLN AND CHINA'S "ONE COUNTRY, TWO SYSTEMS" 林肯与“一国两制”
Repost on the Bicentennial Anniversary of Lincoln's Birthday
By Kai Chen 作者: 陈凯
2005-07-03 09:55:44 Reprint: 10/15/2011
China's communist party turned 84 and more and more young people are joining in as the government media claims. Does anyone believe that? If it is true, what do you think it is behind their motive to join the communist party? Do they truly believe in Communist ideology whose only purpose is to destroy Capitalism? Or do they join only to advance their career in making more money or gaining more power in climbing the political and social ladder? If the communist party's policy of "one country, two systems" stands, do you see the contradiction? Who is the "one country"? What are the "two systems"?
President Abraham Lincoln was an idiot, according to today's wise and smart Chinese communist party elite. Deng was smarter than Lincoln in his calling for "one country, two systems". Why fight a bloody war to preserve the Union if Lincoln was smart enough as the Chinese today. We can just compromise to have a big happy family and everybody can just go on with their own business, slavery or not, the Chinese will assert. And indeed China was the main sponsor of the first pure modern slave state — Pol Pot's communist Cambodia in the late 1970s. In that communist state, there was no money, no capitalism, no free movement of people. There was only unabated pure slavery of individuals for the benefit of the state. There was only murder and bloodshed as millions were slaughtered. As far as exploitation of labor goes, I have not seen any capitalist states taking more than half of an individual's income as tax as in the case of Yao Ming with the non-exploitative, good hearted socialist China.
Should Lincoln adopt a policy like China's, there would have been no American Civil War. Then again, there would not be an America as we know today for the American Constitution with its fundamental moral values of "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" for every citizen of the country would cease to exist. We would end up with a meaningless entity no one knows how to define, as today's China is.
Yet, the "one country, two systems" can only be adopted and proposed by those morally invalid and rationally inadequate. I bet the southern slave holders would have no trouble in accepting such a proposal if President Lincoln initiated it. The purpose of the southern slave holders would be happy to have accepted "one country, two systems" as a doctrain for coexistence. It would be to win them more time to survive and regroup till they would be strong again. This is exactly what motivated Deng and the Chinese communist regime to propose "one country, two system", for they never believed that such a scheme would ever work. But by deceiving the Chinese masses with their already weak sense of rationality through thousands of years of moral and intellectual degradation, the communists think they can get away with it and indeed for a large part they did get away with it. So now the Chinese communist party is successfully postponing its own demise, though they know somehow they will never prevent it. Sooner of later, they will be history. That is why they are hoarding money in overseas banks for themselves and sending their kids abroad just in case one day China collapses.
Many leftist thinkers in America and in the West in general also have proposed such a scheme of "one world, two systems" with free countries coexisting with despotic regimes. "Appeasement" during W.W.II and "detente" during the cold war are only two examples. Yet, it only led to disaster, war and human misery. 9/11 showed us that Clinton administration's detente with the world despotism, culminated by the rise of Islamic Fundamentalists, would only lead to unprecedented tragedies. I applaud President Bush's foreign policy of "spreading freedom around the world", for at least some of us have learned something from that tragic morning in September, 2001. There should be no compromise with communism and world despotism in mankind's search for life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. If you don't actively attack the dark forces fostered by human evils in their thirst for power and domination regardless of universal human values, the evil dark forces, like cancer cells or AIDS virus, will advance and swallow the world. There will never be "one country, two systems", nor will there be "one world, two kinds of values". Mankind can only advance with "one world with one value and one direction" that is human freedom.
To accommodate evil is to postpone the demise of evil. In China today it is the evil that is dictating the terms and formulating vocabulary for the Chinese masses. Sadly the Chinese masses are not wise enough and alert enough to reject such a scheme. The anemic world opinion and Western leftists are of no help either. They are deceiving themselves into thinking good and evil can coexist together peacefully, freedom and slavery can coexist without conflict, law and order can coexist with chaos and irrationality without creating confusion and misery, democracy can coexist with tyranny without human suffering and bloodshed... Wake up, people! Take your action and make your choice. Action or inaction will always have consequences even if you don't admit it.
President Lincoln was not wrong in attacking evil to preserve good. People of the world should learn from his courage and wisdom in advancing human freedom and pushing history forward. We are all in debt with him and we all owe him our gratitude. America indeed is "one country, one system, one value and one direction". The world's future will not diverge from the American experience and example.
Those slave-minded people always tend to enslave others. Those who castrate their own spirit and soul to serve the state and the powerful always dream of castrating others as well. --- Kai Chen
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Dear Visitors:
If "Serve the People" 为人民服务“has any meaning, it is to serve the master. Whenever a Chinese mention "人民” "People", it always means People as an entity to give individual meaning, and also people as an omnipotent power to control and constrain individuals.
With this definition of "People" as a Fascist "Organic Entity", anyone who is willing to serve it has to be defined as a "willing slave". And since slaves are not always willing, a "Whore" who sells his soul to serve a master is a more proper title for a person like 雷锋。
The most deplorable and regretable thing today is that many Chinese still identify themselves with 雷锋 and what he had represented - serving selflessly the nation, the people and the master-the Communist Party. I am very surprised to see today in many so called anti-communist websites and articles, people still use 雷锋to represent something positive and something to be emulated. With 张思德 died making opium for the communists, and praised shamelessly by Mao and his article, 雷锋 as a symbol and image is doing the same thing - numbing individual mind, rendering them helpless slaves and sacrificial animals on the collective altar. 雷锋，is not only making spiritual opium for the communists and Chinese nationalists, he is selling them.
雷锋，as an communist made image of perfect slave and whore, must be gone from the Chinese consciousness, before China can return to a normal state of relative sanity. Selfless whores and slaves can no longer be the models for the Chinese, and individual's self interests and uniqueness must be promoted not only as legitimate, but as the most moral.
The Chinese regime’s absolute monopoly over print and internet publications presents frequent challenges for Chinese writers, and renowned Chinese-Canadian poet and journalist Sheng Xue is no exception.
The Beijing-born writer is a member of PEN Canada, Canadian correspondent for Radio Free Asia, and recipient of the Canadian Association for Journalists Award for Investigative Journalism in 2000.
Nonetheless, throughout her writing career Sheng has been threatened, verbally abused, placed under surveillance, and even detained by the Chinese regime.
Since moving to Toronto in 1989, shortly after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, Sheng has published numerous news reports and commentaries in many Chinese-language media.
She has also published three books in Chinese: Unveiling the Yuan Hua Case, Seeking the Soul of Snow, a personal poetry collection, and her most recent, a collection of essays called Lyricism from a Fierce Critic.
The story of notorious smuggler Lai Changxing, Unveiling the Yuan Hua Case became a bestseller in Chinese communities overseas and caused a stir both inside and outside China. It was immediately banned by China's Propaganda Ministry.
Prior to publishing the book, Sheng said she got a call from a man who offered her $1 million for the rights to the book in order to prevent it from being published. The man said he was phoning on behalf of the Chinese regime.
She later learned that several individuals who had attempted to produce copies of the book in mainland China after buying it in Hong Kong were sent to prison.
Sheng said the Chinese Communist Party is afraid of the book because it reveals some “very high-level inside facts” on the regime.
The cover of Sheng Xue's Unveiling the Yuan Hua Case, which became a bestseller in Chinese communities overseas and caused a stir both inside and outside China. It was immediately banned by China's Propaganda Ministry. (Sheng Xue)
“The Chinese government is very fragile. On one hand, the regime appears to be rather strong, as it controls every aspect in China. However, on the other hand, the regime is very weak; it cannot undertake any kind of challenges.”
In 2006, Sheng tried to publish Seeking the Soul of Snow in Beijing because she had a lot of readers in mainland China, but without success. Because her name was on the regime's blacklist, the publisher would lose its license and be shut down if it printed her book.
“My essays, a lot of them, of course criticize the Chinese government. I want people to know and to learn more about the truth of China.”
However, through a friend’s help, the United Writer Press in Hong Kong agreed to publish the book.
Soon after, a document referring Sheng as “hostile” was issued by the General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP), and an extensive search was conducted for the book all over China, including in the entire media and school system.
In China, every publication has to go through GAPP, which has the legal authority to screen, censor, and ban any Chinese literature intended for sale on the open market.
“Something for sure is that I never believed in the Communist Party, even when I was small,” said Sheng.
“My essays, a lot of them, of course criticize the Chinese government,” said Sheng. “I want people to know and to learn more about the truth of China.”
During the Cultural Revolution, when she was five years old, Sheng and her younger sister were sent to live with relatives in the country for three years. She was humiliated and discriminated against at school because her family was labeled under the communist’s Five Black Categories blacklist.
“What I remember was being cold and hungry, and there was discrimination, bullying, and humiliation,” said Sheng. “Life was so miserable, so hopeless. I didn’t know what I could do; I didn’t know what was the meaning of my life. So I started to write poems for myself. It was like I got someone to talk to.”
Both of her parents were expelled from their jobs. Her father was dismissed from his university teaching position and was continuously persecuted. Her grandfather, who was the principal of Northeastern University before the communists took power, was forced to flee to Taiwan.
Sheng’s third book, Lyricism from a Fierce Critic, was published on August 8th, 2008, the day of the Beijing Olympics’ opening ceremony. She chose this particular day because she felt the Games were “a tool” used by the Chinese government to gain attention and power in the world.
However, on arriving in Hong Kong on August 6 to promote the book, she was detained by customs and questioned for a night. She was then sent back to Taipei, Taiwan, where she had her flight transfer.
Sheng said many Chinese people viewed the Olympics as something they could be proud of since they have little else to give them hope.
“Nothing can make them feel confident; therefore they take the athletic event as a way to display the glamour of a great nation. And many Chinese people want to use this glamour to satisfy their own glory. It’s so sad. I mean we can see that the Chinese society has lost its confidence … and lost beliefs.”
She said the blame for this, and for such things as the current poisoned milk scandal and the Chinese peoples' worship of money can be laid squarely at the feet of the Chinese Communist Party.
“Under the Chinese Communist Party, the worst in Chinese society over the past thousands of years all erupted, this is the significance. Because the Chinese Communist Party restrains compassion, persecutes compassion, and denounces compassion. The party wants the evil elements to bloom.” Last Updated
Missionary priest, born at Tremeloo, Belgium, 3 January 1840; died at Molokai, Hawaii, 15 April 1889.
His father, a small farmer, sent him to a college at Braine-le-Comte, to prepare for a commercial profession; but as a result of a mission given by the Redemptorists in 1858, Joseph decided to become a monk. He entered the novitiate of the Fathers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary at Louvain, and took in religion the name of Damien. He was admitted to the religious profession 7 Oct. 1860. Three years later, though still in minor orders, he was sent to the mission of the Hawaiian Islands, where he arrived 19 March 1864. Ordained priest at Honolulu 24 May of the same year, he was later given charge of various districts on the island of Hawaii, and, animated with a burning zeal, his robust constitution allowed him to give full play to the impulses of his heart. He was not only the missionary of the natives, but also constructed several chapels with his own hands, both in Hawaii and in Molokai.
Statue of Father Damien on Molokai
On the latter island there had grown up a leper settlement where the Government kept segregated all persons afflicted with the loathsome disease. The board of health supplied the unfortunates with food and clothing, but was unable in the beginning to provide them with either resident physicians or nurses. On 10 May 1873, Father Damien, at his own request and with the sanction of his bishop, arrived at the settlement as its resident priest. There were then 600 lepers. "As long as the lepers can care for themselves", wrote the superintendent of the board of health to Bishop Maigret, "they are comparatively comfortable, but as soon as the dreadful disease renders them helpless, it would seem that even demons themselves would pity their condition and hasten their death." For a long time, however, Father Damien was the only one to bring them the succour they so greatly needed. He not only administered the consolations of religion, but also rendered them such little medical service and bodily comforts as were within his power. He dressed their ulcers, helped them erect their cottages, and went so far as to dig their graves and make their coffins. After twelve years of this heroic service he discovered in himself the first symptoms of the disease. This was in 1885. He nevertheless continued his charitable ministrations, being assisted at this period by two other priests and two lay brothers. On 28 March 1889, Father Damien became helpless and passed away shortly after, closing his fifteenth year in the service of the lepers.
MY NOTE:
What this bio doesn't mention is that the hardest fight Father Damien had to fight was not against the poverty and disease of these abandoned people, but against the greed, denial and obstinacy of the catholic bishops and the government. Father Damien finally prevailed when the shameful conditions on Molokai could no longer be hidden from the world. But Father Damien' s dedication and selflessness became legend [size=18][/size]
By Daryl Cagle FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, July 02, 2008
I just got back from a speaking tour in China as part of a cultural exchange through the U.S. State Department, talking to college audiences about my political cartoons and what it’s like to be an editorial cartoonist in America.
The best measure of political freedom is political cartoons and whether cartoonists are allowed to draw their own leaders. Chinese cartoonists almost never draw their leaders, and my Bush-bashing cartoons seemed very foreign to Chinese audiences, who seemed genuinely concerned for my safety; they thought I was in danger from the politicians I lampooned. The questions were the same, wherever I went:
Q: Do your cartoons hurt your personal relationships with the politicians you draw?
A: No, I don't have personal relationships with the people I draw.
Q: Do you worry that your drawings will hurt the reputation of someone you have drawn?
A: No, if one of my cartoons hurts the reputation of a politician that I am criticizing, then I am pleased. (Sometimes the crowd murmurs when I say this. It doesn't seem to be what they expect me to say.)
Q: Do you ever apologize for your cartoons?
A: Sometimes, but only if I make an error or if the cartoon is misunderstood. Usually the people who are angry about a cartoon are the people I intend to make angry, and I am happy to make them angry. (The crowd murmurs at this answer, too.)
Q: Do you ever draw cartoons that are supportive of China?
A: No, I don't draw cartoons that support anything. I just criticize. In America we have a special term for positive, supportive cartoons, we call them: “greeting cards.”
Q: Now that you have visited China, and have learned more about China, will you be drawing cartoons that support China?
A: Probably not.
Q: What do you think about the terrible things that Jack Cafferty from CNN said about China? What can be done to make CNN apologize for these remarks?
A: Most Americans don't know Jack Cafferty and haven't read about his remarks, but most Americans have a negative view of China and would probably agree with Jack Cafferty's remarks. I wouldn't expect CNN to apologize. (The students murmur.)
It’s interesting that CNN’s Jack Cafferty is a big, continuing issue in China; the students all seem to know about the guy and seem personally insulted by him.
The students ask whether I am excited about the Olympics (no, I’m not) and what I think about the earthquake (it was terrible, but I wish President Bush had responded to Hurricane Katrina as quickly as the Chinese government responded to the earthquake).
I learned what the Chinese think are funny -- pigs and homosexuals. If I ever give a speech in China again, I’ll be sure to show all of my cartoons that feature pigs and homosexuals.
I didn’t show cartoons about China. I just wanted to show how I draw disrespectful cartoons about American leaders. That was enough to shock these audiences and show how different our press freedoms are. I was always asked how China is depicted in cartoons, and I answered that there are four symbols of China in international editorial cartoons: a panda bear, a Chinese dragon, the Great Wall, or the guy standing in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square –- the audience gasps –- many of the students have never seen the famous photo, and the subject of the Tiananmen Square “incident” is rarely discussed. At one speech, I mentioned the four symbols, the audience gasped, and one student jumped up, saying, “Oh! Oh! What kind of dragon?!”
I explained to the college kids about "censorship" in America, and that the government never censors cartoonists, but that freedom of the press belongs to the guy who owns the press and cartoonists often complain about their editors. This seemed to be a difficult distinction for them to grasp, in a country where the government owns or controls the press.
The Chinese have embraced capitalism; the country is booming, but the Chinese are eager to prove that economic freedom and political freedom are separate matters that don’t go together. The willingness of the Chinese to accept the restrictions on their press is shocking to my American sensibilities - just as my cartoons were shocking to the Chinese.
Daryl Cagle is a political cartoonist and blogger for MSNBC.com. He is a past president of the National Cartoonists Society and his cartoons are syndicated to more than 800 newspapers. His website is CagleCartoons.com.
Valentine's Day started in the time of the Roman Empire. In ancient Rome, February 14th was a holiday to honour Juno. Juno was the Queen of the Roman Gods and Goddesses. The Romans also knew her as the Goddess of women and marriage. The following day, February 15th, began the Feast of Lupercalia.
The lives of young boys and girls were strictly separate. However, one of the customs of the young people was name drawing. On the eve of the festival of Lupercalia the names of Roman girls were written on slips of paper and placed into jars. Each young man would draw a girl's name from the jar and would then be partners for the duration of the festival with the girl whom he chose. Sometimes the pairing of the children lasted an entire year, and often, they would fall in love and would later marry.
Under the rule of Emperor Claudius II Rome was involved in many bloody and unpopular campaigns. Claudius the Cruel was having a difficult time getting soldiers to join his military leagues. He believed that the reason was that roman men did not want to leave their loves or families. As a result, Claudius cancelled all marriages and engagements in Rome. The good Saint Valentine was a priest at Rome in the days of Claudius II. He and Saint Marius aided the Christian martyrs and secretly married couples, and for this kind deed Saint Valentine was apprehended and dragged before the Prefect of Rome, who condemned him to be beaten to death with clubs and to have his head cut off. He suffered martyrdom on the 14th day of February, about the year 270. At that time it was the custom in Rome, a very ancient custom, indeed, to celebrate in the month of February the Lupercalia, feasts in honour of a heathen god. On these occasions, amidst a variety of pagan ceremonies, the names of young women were placed in a box, from which they were drawn by the men as chance directed.
The pastors of the early Christian Church in Rome endeavoured to do away with the pagan element in these feasts by substituting the names of saints for those of maidens. And as the Lupercalia began about the middle of February, the pastors appear to have chosen Saint Valentine's Day for the celebration of this new feaSt. So it seems that the custom of young men choosing maidens for valentines, or saints as patrons for the coming year, arose in this way.
Let me introduce myself. My name is Valentine. I lived in Rome during the third century. That was long, long ago! At that time, Rome was ruled by an emperor named Claudius. I didn't like Emperor Claudius, and I wasn't the only one! A lot of people shared my feelings.
Claudius wanted to have a big army. He expected men to volunteer to join. Many men just did not want to fight in wars. They did not want to leave their wives and families. As you might have guessed, not many men signed up. This made Claudius furious. So what happened? He had a crazy idea. He thought that if men were not married, they would not mind joining the army. So Claudius decided not to allow any more marriages. Young people thought his new law was cruel. I thought it was preposterous! I certainly wasn't going to support that law!
Did I mention that I was a priest? One of my favourite activities was to marry couples. Even after Emperor Claudius passed his law, I kept on performing marriage ceremonies -- secretly, of course. It was really quite exciting. Imagine a small candlelit room with only the bride and groom and myself. We would whisper the words of the ceremony, listening all the while for the steps of soldiers.
One night, we did hear footsteps. It was scary! Thank goodness the couple I was marrying escaped in time. I was caught. (Not quite as light on my feet as I used to be, I guess.) I was thrown in jail and told that my punishment was death.
I tried to stay cheerful. And do you know what? Wonderful things happened. Many young people came to the jail to visit me. They threw flowers and notes up to my window. They wanted me to know that they, too, believed in love.
One of these young people was the daughter of the prison guard. Her father allowed her to visit me in the cell. Sometimes we would sit and talk for hours. She helped me to keep my spirits up. She agreed that I did the right thing by ignoring the Emperor and going ahead with the secret marriages. On the day I was to die, I left my friend a little note thanking her for her friendship and loyalty. I signed it, "Love from your Valentine."
I believe that note started the custom of exchanging love messages on Valentine's Day. It was written on the day I died, February 14, 269 A.D. Now, every year on this day, people remember. But most importantly, they think about love and friendship. And when they think of Emperor Claudius, they remember how he tried to stand in the way of love, and they laugh -- because they know that love can't be beaten!
人生而不平等，人被创而平等 We are not Born Equal, We are Created Equal
Kai Chen's Words 陈凯一言：
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." -- American "Declaration of Independence"
(我们尊崇这些自我验证的真理： 所有人被（造物造人者）创来平等。）--- 美国“独立宣言”
黎鸣先生有许多好的文章。 但“人人生而平等”是一个谬误的翻译。 “All men are created equal" 在美国的“独立宣言”中是“人被创来平等”的意思。 其中有着强烈的基督教宗教含义。 基于中文的表象化特点的局限，特别是中国文化中的无神论的腐蚀，大部分的中文对美国“独立宣言”的翻译是谬误。
我将黎鸣先生的好文章原文刊载如下，只是将“人人生而平等”改为“人人被创而平等”（All men are created equal)。 --- 陈凯
Mr. Li Ming wrote many good articles. But his translation from English text "All men are created equal" into Chinese (as "All men are born equal) is a gross distortion/mistake of the original meaning. "All men are created equal" in American "Declaration of Independence" has a strong Christian religious connotation. We are indeed created by our Creator in the spiritual/moral sense. Due to the defect of the Chinese language, a primitive pictorial/superficial (character based syllabic) language, and especially the culturally embedded atheism (or ancestor-worshiping) in Chinese tradition, most translations of American "Declaration of Independence" have many gross distortions and mistakes.
The Truth is: All men are NOT born equal. They have different abilities, attributes and characters by birth. But all men are indeed Equal before God (Our Creator). Truth, Justice, Liberty and Human Dignity are concepts only in the realm of Faith and Moral Beliefs. But though they cannot be proven by physical science to exist, they indeed exist. It is very difficult for a culturally "Materialized" physical society to understand "A Creator Created the World and Mankind". Therefore, we should be very careful when applying Chinese language to interpret Western concepts. Temporarily using English to check the meaning of the Chinese translation is a good idea. --- Kai Chen
過去的中國歷史，只是少數中國統治者們的歷史，他們壟斷了中國歷史道路的選擇權力。造 成這種長期中國歷史態勢的根源，即在中國人的思想的觀念之中，壓根兒就排除了自然賦予的“人人被创而平等”（All men are created equal) 的人類文化和文明發展的動力的源泉，而喪失了這股 自然動力源泉的中國歷史就完全只能在“人人永遠不平等”的“邪路”上“折騰”。可是西方人的歷史就不然，他們的兩個文明的源頭︰古希伯來文明的源頭和古希 臘文明的源頭，全都內在地深深地包含有“人人被创而平等”（All men are created equal) 的自然賦予的精神，前者借助于“上帝”，表達了人人在上帝面前平等的精神，後者借助于“真理”，表 達了人人在真理面前平等的精神；更加上16世紀之後，這兩種“平等”精神的有機結合，形成了人類史無前例的“新教倫理”之下的“資本主義精神”和“自然科學精神”。正是這兩種“精神”，飛快地加速了西方人類近代文化和文明的進步和發展。
站在今天21世紀的全人類共同的歷史平台上，回看西方和中國這兩股歷史行程的結局，它們二者之間文化和文明的巨大的落差，其實即是當今美國和中國文化和文明之間巨大的落差，而造成這種巨大落差的根源，即在于中國歷史只能是走在“人人永遠不平等”的“邪路”上的人類“折騰史”，而西方歷史，包括美國歷史，則是始終都走在“人人被创而平等”（All men are created equal) 的自然“陽光”大道之上的人類“進化史”。
為 什麼中國人會始終都只選擇“人人永遠不平等”的觀念呢？我的回答是堅定的︰因為孔子及其儒家的欺騙。我在前面的文章之中已經指出，兩千多年來的孔儒，其實 是一群職業性的政治騙子，他們惟一的“主義”即是“天命的血緣的宗法等級的專制主義”。他們利用“親親”包裹著“尊尊”，利用溫柔的“親情”掩蓋著殘酷的 不平等的“禮治”的專制，利用永遠都不可能實現的溫情的“許諾”，大量一廂情願的“美言”，遮蔽著王公貴戚們的永遠都在重復發生的種種現實中的惡行。中國人被孔儒們愚弄、欺騙了兩千多年，事實上也就是被王公貴戚們的專制主義殘酷地欺詐、壓迫了兩千多年。 這兩千多年來的孔儒和王公貴戚們的“欺騙”、“欺詐”和“壓迫”普通中國人的歷史，即是兩千多年來的真真實實的“中國折騰史”。由于這種“折騰”，中國人 全都變成了“愚民”，他們認賊作父，把中國歷史上最大的政治騙子孔丘尊稱為“萬世師表”，尊稱為“偉大的”中國“聖人”，一直到今天，他們還要繼續堅持“ 尊孔讀經”，他們還要把“孔子學院”推向全世界、全人類。這從本質的意義上說是什麼呢？是中國人自丑不知，是愚蠢地以自己“人人永遠不平等”的“中國折騰史”為真、為善、為美，是狂妄地反而要求西方人放棄他們的“人人被创而平等”（All men are created equal) 的“西方進化史”，來屈就中國“偉大的聖人”孔丘。世界上還有比這更丑陋的“文化”事件嗎？
認真地回顧中國古代的思想史，尤其先秦思想史，在中國古代還是有人認識到了“人人被创而平等”（All men are created equal) 的自然真理的。最明顯的即老子，其次是墨子，再其次是韓非子，然而無論是儒道之爭，儒墨之爭，以及儒法之爭，均以儒家最後的勝利而告終。
最關鍵的是孔儒對于老子的勝利，基本上等于徹底埋葬了“人人被创而平等”（All men are created equal) 的一切希望，老子的道德仁義，變成了孔子的仁義道德，實際上是完全消滅了老子“道德”之中包含的“人人平等”的珍貴價值。後來的道家，包括莊子以及東漢之後興起的道教，全都只不過是儒家的附庸，甚至變成了安撫中國人心靈創傷的麻醉的單方，或苟且偷生的精神毒藥。
由上面所述可見，兩千多年來的中國歷史，中國人（實質上是中國的極權統治者）選擇了儒家，因為儒家堅持“天命的血緣的宗法等級的專制主義”，事實上也即儒家堅持了“人人永遠不平等”的反自然觀念，為此，中國人（實質上是中國的極權統治者）反而拋棄了提倡“人人被创而平等”（All men are created equal) 的自然觀念的老子、墨子，以及也有類似觀念的韓非子。如此對孔子及其儒家的“選擇”，實質上也即對兩千多年來中國歷史的選擇。正是這種“選擇”產生了近代（19世紀中葉至20世紀中葉）一百年中國深深處于貧窮、落後、挨打的狀態的歷史。最近半個多世紀以來，雖然在“西化”的過程之中逐漸取得了一些成就，但即使在這個過程之中，儒家和法家的影響也依然是制造麻煩、制造折騰的最重要的歷史心理根源。上個世紀六十年代毛澤東的批孔，完全只是他個人政治上的需要，而並不是他真正對中國歷史的認識和重新加以選擇，尤其是當“四人幫”們以“法家”自命而來從事“反儒批孔”的時候，就更顯示出了他們的對歷史的“無知”和真實的“反動”了。“法家”們利用什麼“武器”來反儒批孔呢？在堅持“人人永遠不平等”的意識形態上，他們原本就是一丘之貉，他們反儒批孔的結果，絕對只會是更加赤裸裸的凶狠和殘酷。
俱往矣，中國過去的歷史應該終結了。21世紀以及未來中國的歷史之路，應該由全體中國人完全運用今天的眼光，重新加以選擇了。在“選擇”之中最最重要的觀念，即“人人被创而平等”（All men are created equal) 的自然真理，這既是我們選擇利用西方思想資源的準繩，也是我們選擇運用中國古代思想資源的準繩。很顯然，我們將重新解讀老子和墨子，我們將堅決批判和反對孔子及其儒家，對于韓非子及其法家的反動我們將同樣加以拒斥，對于他所表達的極其有限的“人人平等”的意識，我們固然可以有所同情，但在西方人法的精神面前，韓非子其實已經沒有什麼價值了。
除了“人人被创而平等”（All Men Are Created Equal) 的重要觀念之外，在重新選擇歷史的過程之中，全息邏輯規律的意識也將是極其重要的。關于這一點，伏羲和老子的思想資源將是我們中華民族特有的寶藏，我們一定要特別加以珍惜。對此，我將在我今後的文章之中逐漸加以闡述。
Why American films have ignored life under communism.
Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley | June 2000 Print Edition
Every so often someone in Hollywood uses his power to break the movie colony's rules. Consider this year's Total Eclipse. Odd as it may seem, this is the first serious American film set against the background of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, the deal that allied Europe's two totalitarian powers against the West and helped plunge the world into war. With an ally on the eastern front, Hitler sent his Panzers west while Stalin helped himself to the Baltic states and invaded Finland. A film like this could easily have turned out as big a didactic dud as the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's 1982 bomb, Inchon, with Laurence Olivier as Gen. Douglas MacArthur. But this time the verisimilitude of the script, carried by some outstanding performances, is the source of the film's dramatic power.
Dustin Hoffman's persuasive portrayal of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin obviously emerges from his close study of how power and perversity converged in the dictator. Likewise, Jurgen Prochnow sparkles as Hitler's foreign minister, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, and so does Robert Duvall as Vyacheslav Molotov, his Soviet counterpart. Duvall's delivery of Molotov's line that "fascism is a matter of taste" is a key moment, and deserves at least as much admiration as Duvall's famous quip from Apocalypse Now about the smell of napalm in the morning. The Molotov speech has drawn some objections for being over the top, but it was not invented by screenwriter William Goldman (Marathon Man); it's an actual quote.
The sheer unexpectedness of the film is almost as shocking as its content. In one of the film's more chilling sequences, the Soviets hand over a number of German Communists, Jews who had taken refuge in Moscow, to the Gestapo. Modern audiences may find this surprising, but that incident too is taken from the historical record. Indeed, former KGB officials are credited as advisers on the film, whose cast also includes some of their actual victims.
There has simply been nothing like it on the screen in six decades. It has taken that long for moviegoers to see Soviet forces invading Poland and meeting their Nazi counterparts. Audiences would likely be similarly surprised by cinematic treatments of Cuban prisons, the Khmer Rouge genocide, and the bloody campaigns of Ethiopia's Stalinist Col. Mengistu, all still awaiting attention from Hollywood.
Total Eclipse is rated PG-13 for violence, particularly graphic in some of the mass murder scenes, images of starving infants from Stalin's 1932 forced famine in the Ukraine, and the torture of dissidents. Director Steven Spielberg (Schindler's List) deftly cuts from the Moscow trials to the torture chambers of the Lubyanka. More controversial are the portrayals of American communists during the period of the Pact. They are shown here picketing the White House, calling President Roosevelt a warmonger, and demanding that America stay out of the "capitalist war" in Europe. Harvey Keitel turns in a powerful performance as American Communist boss Earl Browder, and Linda Hunt brings depth to Lillian Hellman, who, when Hitler attacks the USSR in September of 1939, actually did cry out, "The motherland has been invaded."
Painstakingly accurate and filled with historical surprises, this film is so refreshing, so remarkable, that even at 162 minutes it seems too short.
Never heard of Total Eclipse? It hasn't been produced or even written. In all likelihood, such a film has never even been contemplated, at least in Hollywood. Indeed, in the decade since the Berlin Wall fell, or even the decade before that, no Hollywood film has addressed the actual history of communism, the agony of the millions whose lives were poisoned by it, and the century of international deceit that obscured communist reality. The simple but startling truth is that the major conflict of our time, democracy versus Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism--what The New York Times recently called "the holy war of the 20th century"--is almost entirely missing from American cinema. It is as though since 1945, Hollywood had produced little or nothing about the victory of the Allies and the crimes of National Socialism. This void is all the stranger since the major conflict of our time would seem to be a natural draw for Hollywood.
Though of global dimension, the conflict encompasses millions of dramatic personal stories played out on a grand tapestry of history: courageous Solidarity unionists against a Communist military junta; teenagers facing down tanks in the streets of Budapest and Prague; Cuban gays oppressed by a macho-Marxist dictatorship; writers and artists resisting the kitsch of obscurantist materialism; families fleeing brutal persecution, risking their lives to find freedom.
Furthermore, great villains make for great drama, and communism's central casting department is crowded: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hönecker, Ceaucescu, Pol Pot, Col. Mengistu--all of cosmic megalomania--along with their squads of hacks, sycophants, and stooges, foreign and domestic.
A few English-language films have drawn on this remarkable material, especially book-into-film projects based on highly publicized works, among them One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (a 1971 British-Norwegian production) and, of course, Doctor Zhivago (1965). But many other natural book-to-film projects remain untouched, from the story of Stalin's daughter Svetlana (who left Russia for the West) to works by such high-ranking defectors as Polish Ambassador Romuald Spasowski (The Liberation of One), KGB agent Arkady Schevchenko (Breaking With Moscow), and persecuted Cuban poets Armando Valladares (Against All Hope) and Heberto Padilla (Heroes Are Grazing in My Garden). In light of the most recent revelations concerning the espionage of Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers' Witness is another obvious candidate.
The reason this ample supply of stories remains unfilmed is not ignorance. Though its films may not often reflect it, Hollywood is filled with knowledgeable writers and producers. The reasons lie elsewhere, especially in Hollywood's own convoluted political history, a history that has passed through many stages. Perhaps the most pertinent of those stages involves the "back story" of communism's own largely uncharted offensive in the studios.
The cinema's great potential for persuasion excited Stalin and his wholly-owned American subsidiary, the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), which lived off Soviet cash until it criticized Gorbachev's reforms as "old social democratic thinking class collaboration." Correspondence between American communists and their Soviet bosses can now be perused in The Soviet World of American Communism (1998). Editors John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Kyrill Anderson gathered newly declassified material from the Moscow-based archives of the Communist International (Comintern), the Soviet organization that controlled national communist parties. Members of the CPUSA made some documentary films in the 1930s, but nothing that could compete with the American commercial cinema, which the party set out to co-opt.
"One of the most pressing tasks confronting the Communist Party in the field of propaganda," wrote the indefatigable Comintern agent Willi Muenzenberg in a 1925 Daily Worker article, "is the conquest of this supremely important propaganda unit, until now the monopoly of the ruling class. We must wrest it from them and turn it against them." It was an ambitious task, but conditions would soon turn to the party's advantage.
The Depression convinced many that capitalism was on its last legs and that socialism was the wave of the future. In the days of the Popular Front of the mid-'30s, communists found it easy to make common cause with liberals against Hitler and Spain's Franco. In 1935, V.J. Jerome, the CPUSA's cultural commissar, set up a Hollywood branch of the party. This highly secretive unit enjoyed great success, recruiting members, organizing entire unions, raising money from unwitting Hollywood liberals, and using those funds to support Soviet causes through front groups such as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. "We had our own sly arithmetic, we could find fronts and make two become one," remembered screenwriter Walter Bernstein (Fail Safe, The Front, The House on Carroll Street) in his 1996 autobiography, Inside Out.
During the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, for example, actor Melvyn Douglas (Ninotchka) and screenwriter-director Philip Dunne (Wild in the Country) proposed that the Motion Picture Democratic Committee, a conclave of industry Democrats, condemn Stalin's invasion of Finland in late 1939. But the group was actually secretly dominated by Communists, and it rejected the resolution. As Dunne later described it in his 1980 memoir, Take Two: A Life in Movies and Politics, "All over town the industrious communist tail wagged the lazy liberal dog."
"There was never an organized, articulate, and effective liberal or left-wing opposition to the communists in Hollywood," concluded John Cogley, a socialist, in his 1956 Report on Blacklisting. As former party member Budd Schulberg (On the Waterfront) put it, the party was "the only game in town." But even though the Communists were strongest in the Screen Writers Guild, influencing the content of movies was a trickier matter.
Communist cultural doctrine cast writers as "artists in uniform," producing works whose function was to transmit political messages and raise the consciousness of their audiences. Otherwise, movies were mere bourgeois decadence, a tool of capitalist distraction, and therefore subjugation. Party bosses V.J. Jerome and John Howard Lawson (a co-founder of the Screen Writers Guild and screenwriter of Algiers and Action in the North Atlantic) enforced this art-is-a-weapon creed in Hollywood, as they had done earlier among New York dramatists. Albert Maltz (Destination Tokyo) was to challenge the doctrine in a 1946 New Masses article, arguing that doctrinaire politics often resulted in poor writing. Responding to the notion that "art is a weapon," Maltz suggested, "An artist can be a great artist without being an integrated or logical or a progressive thinker on all matters."
As a result of such heresy, the party dragged him through a series of humiliating inquisitions and forced him to publish a retraction. Maltz trashed his original article as "a one-sided, nondialectical treatment of complex issues" that was "distinguished for its omissions" and which "succeeded in merging my comments with the unprincipled attacks upon the left that I have always repudiated and combated." Maltz was to defend that retraction until he died in 1985.
Dalton Trumbo (Kitty Foyle), a Communist Party member and for a time the highest-paid screenwriter in town, described the screenwriting trade as "literary guerrilla warfare." The studio system, in which projects were closely supervised, made the insertion of propaganda difficult if not impossible. Hollywood did not become a bastion of Stalinist propaganda, except as part of the war effort, when Russia was celebrated as an ally. Ayn Rand, then a Hollywood screenwriter and one of the few in the movie community who had actually lived under communism, was to point out that, in their zeal to provide artistic lend-lease, American Communist screenwriters went to extraordinary and absurd lengths. In such wartime movies as North Star and Song of Russia (both 1943), they portrayed the USSR as a land of joyous, well-fed workers who loved their masters. Mission to Moscow (also 1943), starring Walter Huston, went so far as to whitewash Stalin's murderous show trials of the 1930s.
But if Comintern fantasies of a Soviet Hollywood were never realized, party functionaries nevertheless played a significant role: They were sometimes able to prevent the production of movies they opposed. The party had not only helped organize the Screen Writers Guild, it had organized the Story Analysts Guild as well. Story analysts judge scripts and film treatments early in the decision making process. A dismissive report often means that a studio will pass on a proposed production. The party was thus well positioned to quash scripts and treatments with anti-Soviet content, along with stories that portrayed business and religion in a favorable light. In The Worker, Dalton Trumbo openly bragged that the following works had not reached the screen: Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and The Yogi and the Commissar; Victor Kravchenko's I Chose Freedom; and Bernard Clare by James T. Farrell, also author of Studs Lonigan and vilified by party enforcer Mike Gold as "a vicious, voluble Trotskyite."
Even talent agents sometimes answered to Moscow. Party organizer Robert Weber landed with the William Morris agency, where he represented Communist writers and directors such as Ring Lardner Jr. and Bernard Gordon. Weber carried considerable clout regarding who worked and who didn't. So did George Willner, a Communist agent representing screenwriters, who sold out his noncommunist clients by deliberately neglecting to shop their stories. On a wider scale, the party launched smear campaigns and blacklists against noncommunists, targeting such figures as Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner, and Bette Davis.
These were among the many actors defying the party-backed labor group, the Conference of Studio Unions. The CSU, which was trying to shut down the industry and force through jurisdictional concessions that would give it supremacy in studio labor, clashed with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and its allies, who were trying to keep the studios going. Katharine Hepburn stumped for the CSU, reading speeches written by Dalton Trumbo, while Ronald Reagan, then a liberal Democrat, headed the anti-communists in the talent guilds.
These were the true front lines of the communist offensive, and bloody warfare broke out in the streets outside every studio. The prospect of communist influence in Hollywood got Washington snooping, but in classic style, the politicians got it backward.
The first head of what eventually became the House Committee on Un-American Activities was New York Democrat Samuel Dickstein. As the recently declassified "Venona" documents (decrypts of Soviet cables) reveal, Dickstein moonlighted for Soviet intelligence--not out of ideology but for money. Initially concerned with pro-fascist groups in the late 1930s, the committee after the war was dominated by right-wing Republicans, though its most loathsome figure was Mississippi Democrat John Rankin, a sulfuric anti-Semite.
In 1947, while investigating Comintern agent Gerhart Eisler, whose brother Hanns was a composer in Hollywood, the committee found movie people coming forth with stories of Communist Party intrigue and decided that there was enough to justify hearings. They selected fewer than 50 witnesses of various job descriptions and political profiles, including party heavyweights John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo.
Eager to exploit Hollywood for publicity, the committee stupidly made film content the issue, ignoring the party's vast organizing campaigns in the back lots despite convincing testimony from, among others, Walt Disney. More important, the committee ignored the reality that it wasn't what the party put into North Star and Song of Russia that really mattered but the anti-communist, anti-Soviet material it kept out.
While the committee welcomed the publicity, the beleaguered film industry circled the wagons. Studio bosses, although adamantly anti-communist, asserted defiantly that no congressman could tell them how to run their business. A celebrity support group, including such figures as Humphrey Bogart and Danny Kaye, journeyed to Washington to defend their own.
The hearings featured a series of angry harangues by Stalinist writers who came to be known as the Hollywood Ten. Dalton Trumbo, who joined the party during the Nazi-Soviet Pact and even wrote a novel, The Remarkable Andrew, to support the Pact, bellowed, "This is the beginning of the American concentration camp."
Such performances shocked the studio bosses and the celebrity supporters, who had been expecting an eloquent constitutional defense of freedom of expression. Party membership itself was not illegal, and members could have alluded to the wartime alliance with the Soviets. Many wanted to testify, a phenomenon Norman Mailer dubbed "subpoena envy." As director John Huston (The Maltese Falcon), who organized the celebrity support group, later learned to his dismay, CPUSA lawyers had decided on the confrontational strategy, largely to protect enforcer John Howard Lawson and others who had already testified to a California committee that they were not communists.
After another series of hearings in the early 1950s, studios produced a string of now largely forgotten, mostly low-budget anti-communist films, among them Big Jim McClain and My Son John, in which Helen Hayes informs to the government on her son, Robert Walker. These dealt with communism as a kind of domestic political mafia but left actual conditions under communist regimes largely unexplored. More important was Hollywood's internal reaction.
Studio bosses, fearful of bad publicity, announced that they would indeed fire communists, which they had previously refused to do. This was the beginning of the blacklist, Hollywood's version of the conflict of our time, enshrined in such films as The Front (1976), starring Woody Allen and Zero Mostel and written by Walter Bernstein, and the star-studded but bland Guilty by Suspicion (1991). Viewers of such fare could easily conclude that communism scarcely existed except as a source of boundless optimism in the hearts of the country's most creative writers. Much the same message emerged from Julia, the 1977 Jane Fonda vehicle based on an autohagiographical memoir by Lillian Hellman.
Over the years, a number of book-length accounts have taken up the cause, some written by relatives of the blacklisted, invoking "inquisition" and "red scare" in their titles and bristling with terms such as witch-hunt and McCarthyite. The senator from Wisconsin, it should be noted, played no role in Hollywood, whose anti-communists, mostly liberal Democrats, found him an impediment to their cause.
As it plays out in the movies, the blacklist story is vintage Hollywood: black hats vs. white hats. The evil government committee rides into town and, for no apparent reason, makes life miserable for a group of noble artists. In one subplot, the victims survive by selling scripts under fake names. The story carries considerable appeal, though it misses the irony that those who thought capitalism evil continued to take advantage of the kind of market that did not exist in the socialist regimes they extolled. Albert Maltz championed East Germany, while fellow Hollywood Ten alumnus Lester Cole favored that bastion of artistic freedom, North Korea.
By the 1960s the blacklist was over; Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger restored the names of blacklisted writers to the credits of the films they actually wrote. The Hollywood Ten and other communist writers were on their way, as Philip Dunne put it, to being "virtually deified." Dunne had been through it all and found the revisionist accounts so distorted that, he said, "I could almost believe that I was reading the chronicle of some mythical kingdom."
The legend of the blacklist, sanitized of all references to Stalin or to the Communist Party's actual record in the studios, became a continuing influence on Hollywood's political life. Hollywood had entered its period of anti-anti-communism, a well-known phenomenon in American cultural and intellectual life. Those motivated by this ideology have vilified such critics of the Soviet Union as Robert Conquest and Sidney Hook, while venerating such paleo-leftists as journalist I.F. Stone, whose 1952 Hidden History of the Korean War parroted the party line that South Korea invaded the North. Anti-anti-communism demonizes anti-communists, however truthful their revelations, as paranoid and on the wrong side of history, while praising apologists of totalitarianism as well-meaning idealists, however mendacious and servile their record. Such a vision is not likely to promote a meaningful cinematic treatment of communism.
Witness the longstanding campaign to prevent director Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront, East of Eden, A Streetcar Named Desire) from receiving a lifetime achievement award from the Motion Picture Academy. Kazan, a former communist, cooperated with HUAC and defended his position in a New York Times advertisement that called on liberals to take a stand against communism. Since Kazan's cinematic achievements are undeniable, his career violates a significant aspect of the Hollywood Ten legend: that those who defied the committee were brilliant artists and noble idealists, while those who cooperated were vile mediocrities who could build their careers only by destroying others.
Kazan finally received his award at last year's Oscars, but amid renewed controversy over whether he should receive any applause at the event. (Abraham Polonsky [I Can Get It for You Wholesale], a leading Hollywood Communist who led the assault on Albert Maltz, hoped in print that Kazan would be assassinated.) But though Kazan finally received his due from Hollywood, Stalin never has.
According to Hollywood, American anti-communism derived not from any deficiencies of socialism or threat from the USSR but from paranoia, xenophobia, and the nefarious influence of Nazis who entered the United States after the war. That was the theme of Walter Bernstein's 1988 The House on Carroll Street, which featured a score more appropriate for a '50s monster movie. Bernstein, incidentally, shows up in the Venona decrypts, which reveal that he was a willing collaborator with the KGB. If nothing else, such a revelation gives new meaning to the Hollywood phrase, "Have your agent call my agent."
On the rare occasion when life under communism is portrayed, its characteristic brutality is virtually never actually represented. Consider, for instance, Warren Beatty's Oscar-winning Reds (1981), a psalm to Lenin acolyte John Reed. In that film a character concedes that the Soviet regime "violates human rights" but none of these violations appears on the screen. Likewise, audiences don't see the Khmer Rouge murdering any of their nearly 2 million victims in The Killing Fields (1984). Indeed, the real villains in that tragedy, we learn, are Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and U.S. foreign policy.
A similar theme runs through Missing (1982), with Jack Lemmon, directed by Constantine Costa-Gavras, a man of the left who, unlike his Hollywood colleagues, is sometimes willing to address communist themes honestly. Costa-Gavras' 1970 film The Confession deals with the 1952 anti-Semitic show trials in Czechoslovakia that resulted in 11 executions. After hanging, the victims' bodies were incinerated; the film shows a policeman scattering their ashes on frozen roads around Prague, which was what actually happened. For Yves Montand, who played Czech Foreign Minister Artur London, The Confession was "a farewell to the generous sentimentality of the Left, a Left that had been blind to its own crimes and cultivates a messianic pose, proposing to bring happiness to human beings, even if it means slaughtering them."
But Hollywood has yet to show itself capable of portraying what The Black Book of Communism, a recent scholarly assessment of communist crimes, calls "politically correct mass slaughter." In Eleni (1985), John Malkovich hunts down a Greek communist responsible for the death of his mother, but much of the hostile action takes place off screen. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), while generally anti-communist in tone, includes only fleeting glimpses of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Odd as it may seem, one of the few Hollywood movies that does depict violence in communist countries on screen is a Disney film. The 1983 Night Crossing shows a daring escape from East Germany, Albert Maltz's version of the good society. Viewers see German border guards, whom John Hurt calls "pigs," gunning down those who flee. Material abounds for this type of film. Soviet Bloc archives are yielding their revelations about the Katyn Forest murders of Polish officers by Soviet forces, KGB assassination campaigns in the West, and the identity of Stalinist agents in Western governments. Vitaly Shentalinsky's 1996 book, Arrested Voices, documented Stalin's campaigns against writers and artists, whose victims included Itzak Feffer and Solomon Mikaels, both of whom had been showcased in Hollywood by Communists as evidence that anti-Semitism did not exist in the Soviet Union.
Films from former communist countries, the 1999 Thief among them, show that even the Russians are coming to terms with the communist legacy. But the circus surrounding Kazan's Oscar and other recent events suggest that Hollywood probably will not follow suit. The blacklist mythography casts too long a shadow, one in which a fuller appreciation of the epic battle between communism and democracy remains in the dark. "Hollywood Remembers the Blacklist," staged at the Motion Picture Academy's theater on the 50th anniversary of the 1947 hearings, featured Billy Crystal and Kevin Spacey in dramatic roles. Also appearing were Hollywood Ten veteran Ring Lardner Jr. and fellow party member and Song of Russia co-writer Paul Jarrico, who compared the Hollywood Ten's performance with the stand that Jefferson took against the Alien and Sedition Act. Actress Marsha Hunt said that "for over a decade, this was no longer the land of the free, nor the home of the brave."
This event was a colorized, multimedia version of Philip Dunne's "mythical kingdom," but for the anti-anti-communist Hollywood crowd, it proved the feel-good hit of the fall. Such events pass on the myths to younger filmmakers who see themselves not just as entertainers but teachers.
For instance, Tim Robbins' Cradle Will Rock, released last fall, takes its title from an agitprop musical written by Marc Blitztein, a doctrinaire Stalinist. The original work was welcomed by the 1930s Federal Theater Project, a group dominated by communists, precisely because of its Soviet-inspired Socialist Realism. The progressive Works Progress Administration (WPA) closed down the show out of budgetary considerations, though Robbins attempts to blame it on an axis of HUAC and capitalists allied with Mussolini and Hitler. The fascist-capitalist bosses, headed by Nelson Rockefeller, raking in the dough selling goods to Hitler, are also out to get muralist Diego Rivera, played by Ruben Blades. Audiences predictably stayed away from this film, but in Hollywood, the mythology of the left remains powerful enough to see such a project through production.
Late last year, the University of Southern California, whose film school is a kind of Hollywood employment agency, unveiled a sculpture garden honoring the Hollywood Ten as victims of the Cold War and champions of the First Amendment. The mythology has become a monument, a kind of museum of anti-anti-communism in a town that welcomed Daniel Ortega of the Sandinista junta but never took up the cause of a single Soviet or Eastern European dissident. The specter that once haunted Europe is gone, yet it still seems to hang over the palms of Southern California, an ideological smog that obscures the view for millions of filmgoers.
I'd rather be a hungry housefly, risking my life, flying around looking for food and joy, than be a worming maggot inside others' feces, never having to worry about where and who I am and where my next meal comes from. --- The self-confession of a Free Man.
I now understand that without our Motherland's support, without the Communist Party organization, without our leaders' care and love, an individual is nothing and will achieve nothing. I now understand my personal worth and values will only be realized in our struggle for Motherland. --- Wang Zhizhi.
Now you understand what I mean by "Slavery is a insidious codependency of the slave owners and the slaves themselves, not just slave owners oppressing the slaves". To rid off evil slavery, one must deal with this evil from both ends, from both supply and demand, from oppression and fear, from nihilistic institutions and meaningless individuals....
I don't usually call a person names, though I am very good at it and often did it when I played basketball. But today I permit myself to give a few derogatory names to one of my fellow sportsmen and his likes. The old habit dies hard.
Wang's self confession has raised the specter of the Chinese slave mentality. In his statement, he repeatedly claims that it is the nation, the party, the leaders that raised, supported, and reared him, and without these entities, he as an individual is nothing. Shamelessness is only too mild to describe this evil twist of truth: Who has raised whom?
In a Chinese mind, with its most poisonous aspect, somehow it always is the nation, the motherland, the emperor, the collective that raise and protect individuals, giving them their livelihood and meaning of their lives. But a clear-thinking mind would easily reach the opposite conclusion: It is the individuals who create and produce, not the collective. It is the individuals who support and raise the government and emperors, not the opposite. It is the individuals who give meaning to the collective, to the nation, to the motherland, not the opposite.
But why does the upside-down falsehood dominate the Chinese mindset? Addressing these two entirely opposite orientation of human values/anti-values are the purpose of forming my forum. To clear up/clean up the Chinese mindset from thousands of years of force-fed narcotic addiction takes a long time and great deal of effort. But one must start now and must start from each and every Chinese individual. Only this bottom-up reformation of mindset can allow the antidote to take effect toward the first step of moral and spiritual rebirth/health, toward a Cultural Renaissance, toward intellectual honesty, toward getting rid of codependency between a slave collective and the slaves themselves.
In Wang's vulgar and shameless self-confession, moral and spiritual degradation oozes from every pore of his being. To shield himself from humiliation, insult, self-loathing and the ultimate defeat as a professional athlete, he has no qualm in using his parents, his wife, his infant child to hide his own ugly self, his own fear. To protect his decaying self, he is willing to use any others, to use America, to use China, to use the Party, to use the Army, to use his own family, regardless of the destruction of his own soul and conscience, as long as using these will somehow alleviate the pain and suffering from the very deep recess of his mind and heart. [b]Wang is without doubt, like many Chinese, a USER. Using other human beings, using his own profession, using his own dignity, using anything in sight for his nihilistic, ugly and meaningless end is the only concern of his life.
Wang's only self-worth, as the Confucian ethics dictates, is in others' eyes. He is entirely void of self-awareness, self reflection, self respect and self-judging. For there has been no such thing in Chinese moral teachings as God and Conscience deep inside oneself. Being judged by others and especially by the power elite is the only criterion for one's own meaning of existence. Humans are simply not humans in Chinese tradition, they are only masses composed of flesh and blood. Each individual by himself has no meaning and no inner voices and values. All the voices of moral judgement are coming from above never from within, from motherland, from emperors, from fathers, from elders, from the collective, from everything but the person himself.
Wang as you can see, is a pathetic creature, created not by God, but by the Chinese party-state, Chinese tradition, Chinese cultural environment and the omnipotent/omnipresent collective. This is a stark contrast to the American value in which each individual is created by his creator and has inalienable rights and ability to understand his own conscience, his own meaning of life, his own actions and their consequences. Thus humans are born free and meaningful themselves, regardless others and the collective, no matter how old/ancient they are, how strong they are or how many they are.
If by now you still don't get my drift about the contrast in Chinese anti-values and American values, you are in deep voodoo.
Do you really think even after Wang made the self-demeaning confession, the Chinese people and authorities will truly respect/love him? No such thing. They are only using him, just as he is using them. They all know too well about this game of Users. In this game there is no respect, esteem, and dignity. Everybody is a whore. Everybody is a self-castrating Eunuch. Everybody is a slave to serve the omnipresent and omnipotent collective that represents absolute NOTHINGNESS. This nothingness of this "blackhole" has swallowed millions of innocent lives and continued to do so, as long as we as individuals refuse to understand its nature and origin, as long as we are still immersed/addicted in its poisonous smog.
The sports authorities in China of course will praise Wang for his destruction of 'self" to please the motherland, via this complete dehumanizing confession. But behind Wang's back, they look down on him, they talk down on him about his failure in America, about his lack of personal dignity. One word, they absolutely loath him, as much as they loath themselves. They know in this nothingness game, everyone comes out a loser, having sold their souls to the devil, having castrated themselves to serve the emperor, having little by little sunk into the deep of the collective quick sand. They absolutely loath their own state of existence, yet they wholeheartedly work for the master of the game - the nothingness, to have become a part of the Blackhole to castrate others, to swallow others, to demean others, until everyone becomes just like themselves - a soulless zombie.
This is the portrait of a Eunuch culture, a slave mentality, a prostitute's existence. This is what is called "Chinese Motherland".
I hope you enjoy my daughter Dominique's creativity and moral clarity. I am very proud of her. She is attending Brandeis University in Boston, playing basketball for the school's varsity.
[size=18]Position: G/F Year: Fr. Hometown: Los Angeles, CA High School: Marlborough School Height: 6-1[/size]
[size=24]High School: [/size]
Four-year letter-winner and three-year starter for the Marlborough School in Los Angeles...
Helped Mustangs to four-straight California Southern Section Division III & IV Championships...
As a junior, won the California State Division IV Championship...
Two-time first-team All-Conference selection in the Sunshine League... Earned California Interscholastic Federation First-Team All-Section honors as a senior...
Inducted into the Marlborough School Hall of Fame.
If you happened upon a bronze statue of Che Guevara on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan today, its creator, artist Christian Janowski, wants you to know that it is merely a representation of the Argentinean imperialist—it's actually a Barcelona-based street performer playing the revolutionary.
At the New York Times' City Room blog, David Gonzalez tartly explains Guevara's legacy to one clueless, yet curious, tourist snapping photos of the newly installed art work:
"That's Che Guevara, right?" said Sean Kelly, who was visiting from Ames, Iowa. "I'm kind of interested in his beliefs and the kind of stuff he did."
There were the executions when he presided over the prison at La Cabaña. Or his stated willingness to have let the missiles fly had they been under Cuban control, according to a newspaper interview cited by the biographer Jon Lee Anderson. And as several conservative commentators have noted, soon after the 1962 crisis, Che was preparing to export revolution while Cuban diplomats in New York were implicated in a plot to blow up, among other targets, department stores in New York City on the day after Thanksgiving.
When a passing bike messenger explains that Che was about "liberation," about societies where hipsters wouldn't have deliver packages to corporate fat-cats on fix-gear bicycles, but could start their own Williamsburg Social Club on that people's dime, Gonzalez helpfully adds that "For some Cubans, liberation means rolling the dice on a raft trip across the Florida Straits."
And oh, how The Times has changed: reason contributing editor Glenn Garvin on the paper's Castrophilic former Cuba correspondent Herb Matthews here.
Sat Oct 15, 2011 1:07 pm
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