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Thread: The Commie Revolution Thread

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    ‘Crisis of Democracy’: N.Y. Times Op-Ed Supports Abusing Republicans in Public, Ignores Liberals Shooting, Beating Conservatives

    by Kristinn Taylor June 26, 2018 101 Comments



    The New York Times published an op-ed by Michelle Goldberg Monday night that supports the public abuse Republicans and Trump administration officials have been subjected to this past week. Goldberg’s op-ed is titled, “We Have a Crisis of Democracy, Not Manners“.




    A sample of liberal violence against conservatives in recent years: A Republican Congressman shot, a Trump supporter attacked, a limo set ablaze at Trump’s inauguration.
    The central premise is incorrect as the U.S. is a republic, not a democracy. Democracy is straight majority rule–mob rule, as has been witnessed this past week in mob actions against woman GOP government officials Sarah Huckabee, Pam Bondi and Kirstjen Nielsen.
    Goldberg’s article is intellectually dishonest as it falsely paints liberals as peaceful, unarmed saints, who have reached the limit of their saintliness, confronting evil Republicans.
    Goldberg opens talking about white racist Richard Spencer, whom the media has elevated from a nobody to use as a cudgel against the Trump administration. Curiously though, Goldberg writes about Spencer being kicked out of a membership gym rather than the infamous “punch a Nazi” attack on him last year seen in a viral video cheered by liberals. As many conservatives who loathe Spencer and his racism warned, liberals call all conservatives Nazis and were therefore justifying attacks on conservatives.
    Sure enough a few months after liberals proclaimed “punch a Nazi” was acceptable, a Democrat tried to mass assassinate a group of Republican Congressman and Senators, grievously wounding Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) and several others.
    That mass assassination attempt by a Democrat on Republicans just last year goes unmentioned in Goldberg’s article, even as Goldberg rightly calls out the murder of abortion providers.
    Goldberg does not mention riotous attacks on Trump supporters by liberals at President Trump’s inauguration last year.
    Also not mentioned by Goldberg are the many violent attacks by liberals on Trump supporters attending Trump campaign rallies in 2016.
    Goldberg chastises Trump for his intemperate comments encouraging violence against protesters repeatedly disrupting his rallies, but does not put them in the context that he was reacting to the continuous incivility of liberals at his rallies and their violent attacks on his supporters.
    Unmentioned by Goldberg is that a protester attempted to assassinate candidate Trump at a rally by trying to grab a gun off a law enforcement officer to shoot Trump. At another rally a deranged protester charged the stage as Trump was speaking, jumping over a barricade and reaching the edge of the stage before being stopped.
    Nor does Goldberg talk about Antifa, the violent organized wing of liberalism that riots and attacks conservatives in public. Goldberg falsely states that liberals have not protested Trump and conservatives while carrying “assault weapons” when that has occurred many times in states that allow open carry.
    See: Antifa: The hard left’s call to arms

    Image by John Mees, ABC Australia.
    And:

    Liberals are cheering Goldberg’s column because of passages like these:
    It’s a little more complicated when the professional racist is the president of the United States. The norms of our political life require a degree of bipartisan forbearance. But treating members of Donald Trump’s administration as ordinary public officials rather than pariahs does more to normalize bigotry than exercising alongside a white separatist.
    …Whether or not you think public shaming should be happening, it’s important to understand why it’s happening. It’s less a result of a breakdown in civility than a breakdown of democracy. Though it’s tiresome to repeat it, Donald Trump eked out his minority victory with help from a hostile foreign power. He has ruled exclusively for his vengeful supporters, who love the way he terrifies, outrages and humiliates their fellow citizens. Trump installed the right-wing Neil Gorsuch in the Supreme Court seat that Republicans stole from Barack Obama. Gorsuch, in turn, has been the fifth vote in decisions on voter roll purges and, on Monday, racial gerrymandering that will further entrench minority rule.
    All over the country, Republican members of Congress have consistently refused to so much as meet with many of the scared, furious citizens they ostensibly represent. A great many of these citizens are working tirelessly to take at least one house of Congress in the midterms — which will require substantially more than 50 percent of total votes, given structural Republican advantages — so that the country’s anti-Trump majority will have some voice in the federal government.
    But unless and until that happens, millions and millions of Americans watch helplessly as the president cages children, dehumanizes immigrants, spurns other democracies, guts health care protections, uses his office to enrich himself and turns public life into a deranged phantasmagoria with his incontinent flood of lies. The civility police might point out that many conservatives hated Obama just as much, but that only demonstrates the limits of content-neutral analysis. The right’s revulsion against a black president targeted by birther conspiracy theories is not the same as the left’s revulsion against a racist president who spread birther conspiracy theories.
    …Faced with the unceasing cruelty and degradation of the Trump presidency, liberals have not taken to marching around in public with assault weapons and threatening civil war.
    …Instead, some progressive celebrities have said some bad words, and some people have treated administration officials with the sort of public opprobrium due members of any other white nationalist organization. Liberals are using their cultural power against the right because it’s the only power they have left, and people have a desperate need to say, and to hear others say, that what is happening in this country is intolerable.
    Sometimes, their strategies may be poorly conceived. But there’s an abusive sort of victim-blaming in demanding that progressives single-handedly uphold civility, lest the right become even more uncivil in response. As long as our rulers wage war on cosmopolitan culture, they shouldn’t feel entitled to its fruits. If they don’t want to hear from the angry citizens they’re supposed to serve, let them eat at Trump Grill.”
    They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
    “As a general rule, the earlier you recognize someone is trying to kill you, the better off you’ll be.”

    "You think a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a sheet of glass."



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    Despite Handling Of Freddie Gray Case, Marilyn Mosby Wins Primary Toward 2nd Term


    Elections have consequences.
    Via Fox News:
    Baltimore’s top prosecutor won her Democratic primary Tuesday, assuring her of a second term despite criticism over what critics say was her botched 2015 prosecution of six police officers in the death of a black man named Freddie Gray.
    The victory effectively hands the job of state’s attorney to Marilyn Mosby because the city is dominated by the Democratic Party and no Republican filed to oppose her.
    Mosby, 38, had to fight off concerns about her handling of the prosecution of six police officers, who faced charges after Gray, 25, died April 19, 2015, one week after suffering a spinal cord injury while being transported in a police vehicle following his arrest for possessing what was said to be an illegal knife.
    The death of Gray triggered riots and protests, as many members of the community believed that rough treatment by police had contributed to his death.[…]
    Still, Baltimore residents expressed overwhelming support to Mosby, precisely over her role in the case.
    “Honestly, she had my vote when she charged those police. Nobody is above the law, and when she charged them it made me feel like more of a citizen,” one resident said.
    “If the Baltimore city police doesn’t like her for charging their officers, then she’s definitely my candidate,” another voter said.
    Keep reading…
    They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
    “As a general rule, the earlier you recognize someone is trying to kill you, the better off you’ll be.”

    "You think a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a sheet of glass."



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    They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
    “As a general rule, the earlier you recognize someone is trying to kill you, the better off you’ll be.”

    "You think a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a sheet of glass."



  4. #484
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    Bill Ayers‏ @WilliamAyers









    Bill Ayers Retweeted Michelle Gunderson
    We say fight back. New times, new strategies and tactics, but the struggle for peace and freedom, Joy and justice continues. The people, yes!

    Bill Ayers added,




    Michelle Gunderson @MSGunderson
    #Janus @CTULocal1 @AFTunion @KarenLewisCTU @SharkeyCTU1 @DanJMontgomery





    3:54 PM - 27 Jun 2018




    Thread by @Debradelai: "(1) Let me tell you what a terrorist asswipe means when he talks about the struggle for "Joy." (2) In 1968 a group of vermin in Chicago foun […]"

    15 tweets 7 hours ago




    Embed Saul Montes-Bradley @Debradelai Follow Read on Twitter



    165 subscribers






    (1) Let me tell you what a terrorist asswipe means when he talks about the struggle for "Joy."


    (2) In 1968 a group of vermin in Chicago founded the "Students for a Democratic Society" or SDS.

    What did they mean by "democratic"? This:

    "Elections don't mean shit."


    (3) In 1969 they called for riots to "bring the war home". It ended with four days of mayhem. scores shot, uncounted wounded.

    Even the Black Panthers condemned the anarchy and irresponsibility of these chaps.

    And the SDS was no more.

    So they became the "Weather Underground."


    (4) In 1970, Three asswipes got blown up in a bomb factiry in New York's Greenwich Village.

    Police later found 57 stick of dynamite, four unexploded bombs, detonators and timind devices.

    Unfortunatelly, Billy Ayres was not among them.


    (5) The FBI was still looking for them to answer for their little bout of "Joy" in Chicago wile they were having fun in New York.


    (6) Soon they spread the joy from CA to NY.

    By 1975 they had blown 25 bombs, including some in the Capitol, Pentagon, State Department, police stations, lawyers offices...

    Busy little bees.


    (7) Their Joyful campaign continued until 1981, when they carried a robbery of a Brinks truck that ended in three murders.

    One of the wounded guards, Joe Trombino, barely survived his wounds, only to die in the World Trade Center on 9/11.

    legacy.com/sept11/story.a…


    ( By 1985, the attackes ceased, but most of the asswipes remain on the lamb.


    (9) In that year, Susan Rosenberg and Linda Evans were caught transporting 740 lbs of explosives they intended to use in more bombings. Rosenberg was sentenced to 58 years in prison, Evans got 40.

    No dice. Billy the Goat Clinton pardoned them in January of 2001.


    (10) bernardine Dohrn, Bill Aers' wife, got 10 months for failing to cooperate.

    She was responsible for the murder of a policeman in 1970, but, what the heck, Billy has friends...


    Brian McDonnell was killed by shrapnel in the 1970 bombing of Park Police Station. San Francisco Police Department - HistoryCollection.co Brian McDonnell was killed by shrapnel in the 1970 bombing of Park Police Station. San Francisco Police Department https://historycollection.co/photos-...ce-department/







    (11) None of these asswipes paid for their crimes.

    Some were pardoned by Bill Clinton, some by the Obamination, and some got plea deals ridiculously low.

    Any search online will give you the dreadful truth.


    (12) Bill Ayers and his murderous wife, Bernardine Dohrn, became "professors" in Chicago, and it was in their living-room that one of their proteges launched his candidacy to the Senate.

    Yep. The Obamination. No wonder he was later in a pardoning mood.


    (13) Bill Ayers is not repentant.

    He still believes "elections don't mean shit" and the stupid people must accept his communist views or suffer the consequences.

    This murderous a-hole is on the lose.


    (14) But, unlike the 70's, when he was a criminal on the lamb, the Democratic Party has now painted a patina of respectability.

    The mainstreaming of terrorism as it were.


    (15) But make no mistake.

    When this terrorist on a communist Jihad says "We say fight back. New times, new strategies and tactics, but the struggle for peace and freedom, Joy and justice continues," he means the violent overthrow of the government.

    That is his aim.

    FINIS
    They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
    “As a general rule, the earlier you recognize someone is trying to kill you, the better off you’ll be.”

    "You think a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a sheet of glass."



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    Pirro: ‘Well-Funded’ Forces ‘Doing Whatever Is Necessary to Make Socialism Happen’ in America




    30 Jun 2018

    http://www.breitbart.com/video/2018/...en-in-america/ Saturday, Fox News Channel “Justice” host Jeanine Pirro responded to the protests for open borders and people calling to disband U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
    Pirro argued the push for open borders is an agenda to “change our country at its very core” and is an attempt to move the country towards socialism.
    “Right now in America, there are forces dug in, organized and well-funded doing whatever is necessary to make socialism happen. Today’s demonstrations are part of an ongoing step-by-step agenda to change our country at its very core,” Pirro stated.

    They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
    “As a general rule, the earlier you recognize someone is trying to kill you, the better off you’ll be.”

    "You think a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a sheet of glass."



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    MSNBC’s Jennifer Rubin: Sarah Sanders Should Be Harassed Publicly For “Life,” Millions Need To “Pressure” Collins, Murkowski

    But she’s not lying and shouldn’t be harassed for pretending to be a Conservative.
    Via Newsbusters:
    On Sunday’s AM Joy, MSNBC contributor and Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin declared that Sarah Huckabee Sanders deserves a “life sentence” of being harassed publicly as she asserted that the White House press secretary “has no right to live a life of no fuss, no muss” because of her negative interactions with the press.
    The phony conservative columnist also freaked out over the possibility of abortion being banned, and suggested Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins are “phony pro-choice women” if they vote for President Donald Trump’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court.
    Keep reading…
    They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
    “As a general rule, the earlier you recognize someone is trying to kill you, the better off you’ll be.”

    "You think a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a sheet of glass."



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    The Myth Of Obama’s Disappearance: He’s Behind The Current Protests


    Via NY Post:
    If you believe recent media accounts, the former Democratic president has suddenly transcended the political fray. It’s as if a newly “Zen-like” Barack Obama is content to just write his memoir and let Donald Trump and Republicans write the next chapter of history.
    In a cover story asking “Where is Barack Obama?” for example, New York magazine concluded that the 44th president has “virtually disappeared” from the political scene and is sitting idly by as his legacy is dismantled piece by piece. From an exclusive interview, the periodical concluded Obama was “modeling his political engagement out of office after George W. Bush’s” — that is, staying out of the rough-and-tumble of politics, maintaining distance from his former office and resigning himself to be an elder statesman fading into the sunset.
    Don’t buy it.
    Obama is doing far more to shape the political landscape than is visible. In fact, for an ex-prez, he’s taking an unusually active role in politics, including helping radical protest groups fight Trump and his policies and devising a scheme to flip the GOP majority in the House and permanently turn red seats blue.
    Keep reading…
    They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
    “As a general rule, the earlier you recognize someone is trying to kill you, the better off you’ll be.”

    "You think a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a sheet of glass."



  8. #488
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    China: Surviving the Camps

    Zha Jianying
    Li Zhensheng/Contact Press Images
    Provincial Party Secretary Wang Yilun, being criticized by Red Guards from the University of Industry and forced to bear a placard with the accusation “counterrevolutionary revisionist element,” Harbin, China, August 23, 1966By now, it has been nearly forty years since the Cultural Revolution officially ended, yet in China, considering the magnitude and significance of the event, it has remained a poorly examined, under-documented subject. Official archives are off-limits. Serious books on the period, whether comprehensive histories, in-depth analyses, or detailed personal memoirs, are remarkably few. Ji Xianlin’s The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which has just been released in English for the first time, is something of an anomaly.
    At the center of the book is the cowshed, the popular term for makeshift detention centers that had sprung up in many Chinese cities at the time. This one was set up at the heart of the Peking University campus, where the author was locked up for nine months with throngs of other fallen professors and school officials, doing manual labor and reciting tracts of Mao’s writing. The inferno atmosphere of the place, the chilling variety of physical and psychological violence the guards daily inflicted on the convicts with sadistic pleasure, the starvation and human degeneration—all are vividly described. Indeed, of all the memoirs of the Cultural Revolution, I cannot think of another one that offers such a devastatingly direct and detailed testimony on the physical and mental abuse an entire imprisoned intellectual community suffered. After reading the book, a Chinese intellectual friend summed it up to me: “This is our Auschwitz.”
    To mentally relive such darkness and to record it all in such an unswervingly candid manner could not have been easy for an elderly man: Ji was over eighty at the time of writing. In the opening chapter, he confessed to having waited for many years, in vain, for others to come forward with a testimony. Disturbed by the collective silence of the older generation and the growing ignorance of the young people about the Cultural Revolution, he finally decided to take up the pen himself.
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    Originally published by an official press in Beijing in 1998, during a politically relaxed moment, The Cowshed probably benefited from the author’s eminent status in China. A celebrated Indologist, Ji was also a popular essayist and an avowed patriot who enjoyed good relations with the government. With genial, grandfatherly manners, he had become, in his august age, one of those avuncular figures revered by the public and loved by the media. The book has sold well and stayed in print. But authorities also quietly took steps to restrict public discussion of the memoir, as its subject continues to be treated as sensitive. The present English edition, skillfully translated by Chenxin Jiang, is a welcome, valuable addition to the small body of work in this genre. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of that period.
    Reading Ji’s account again, however, has also renewed some of my old questions and frustrations. How much can we really make sense of a bizarre, unwieldy phenomenon like the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution? Can we truly overcome barriers of limited information, fading historical memory, and persistent ideological biases to have a genuinely meaningful and illuminating conversation about it today? I wonder. The delicate circumstances surrounding Ji’s memoir in China, in a way, demonstrate both the entangled complexity of the events and the precarious state of historical testimony.
    Like other ordinary Chinese, Ji had no idea what the Cultural Revolution was all about when Mao Zedong launched it in 1966. Son of an impoverished rural family in Shandong, Ji had managed, through diligence and scholarship, to get a solid, cosmopolitan education in republican China. Having spent a decade in Germany studying Sanskrit and other languages, Ji returned with a Ph.D. to teach at China’s preeminent Peking University, where he soon became the chairman of its Eastern Languages Department. Though disliking the corrupt Chiang Kai-shek regime, he stayed away from politics, a field he’d never had any interest in. But when the Communists came into power in 1949, like most educated Chinese at the time, Ji saw hope for a stronger nation and more just society.
    Being a political drifter, however, was no longer an option. Under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), mass mobilization and political campaigns became a national way of life and no one was allowed to be a bystander, least of all the intellectuals, a favorite target in Mao’s periodic thought-reform campaigns. Feeling guilty about his previous passivity, Ji eagerly reformed himself. He joined the Party in the 1950s and actively participated in the ceaseless campaigns, which had a common trait: conformity and intolerance of dissent. In the 1957 Anti-Rightist Movement, more than half a million intellectuals were denounced and persecuted, even though most of their criticisms were very mild and nearly all were Party loyalists. The fact that Ji was able to stay out of harm’s way was probably due to two factors: his poor peasant background and his reputation as one who never stuck his neck out and toed the Party line sincerely.
    In fact, he was doing just that in the first year of the Cultural Revolution. Peking University was quickly transformed into a chaotic zoo of factional battles, with frantic mobs rushing about attacking professors and school officials labeled as capitalist-roaders-in-power. A bewildered Ji tried his best to keep a low profile by hiding in the crowds. But he had a vulnerable spot: he abhorred a cadre named Nie Yuanzi, the leader of the dominant Red Guard faction on campus. Although every faction in China claimed loyalty to Chairman Mao, Nie enjoyed a special status: she penned the very first big-character poster of the Cultural Revolution, attacking certain Peking University officials and received Mao’s personal endorsement for it. Disgusted by her bullying style, Ji decided, in an uncharacteristically rash moment, to join her opponents’ faction. This was a fatal mistake. Nie’s followers took their vengeance immediately: they raided Ji’s home one night, smashing furniture and digging up, inevitably, some ridiculous evidence that Ji was a hidden counterrevolutionary.
    From that moment onward, Ji’s life became a dizzying descent into hell. The ensuing chapters in the book are the most shocking and painful to read. There are many searing, unforgettable vignettes. Ji’s meticulous preparations for suicide, which was aborted only at the last moment by a knock on the door. The long, screaming rallies where Ji, already in his late fifties, and other victims were savagely beaten, spat on, and tortured. The betrayal by his former students and colleagues. An excruciating episode in the labor camp: Ji’s body collapsed under the strain of continuous struggle sessions; his testicles became so swollen he couldn’t stand up or close his legs. But the guard forced him to continue his labor, so he crawled around all day moving bricks. When he was finally allowed to visit a nearby military clinic, he had to crawl on a road for two hours to reach it, only to be refused treatment the moment the doctor learned he was a black guard. He crawled back to the labor camp.
    A noteworthy feature of The Cowshed is its entangled theme of guilt and shame. In memoirs about Maoist persecutions, authors typically portray themselves as either hapless, innocent victims or, occasionally, defiant resisters. The picture is murkier in Ji’s recollection. He writes about Chinese intellectuals’ eager cooperation in ideological campaigns and how, under pressure, they frequently turned on one another. He mocks his own “aptitude in crowd behavior” and admits that, until his own downfall, he had also persecuted others:
    Since we had been directed to oppose the rightists, we did. After more than a decade of continuous political struggle, the intellectuals knew the drill. We all took turns persecuting each other. This went on until the Socialist Education Movement, which, in my view, was a precursor to the Cultural Revolution.
    And what was his involvement in the Socialist Education Movement? “Without quite knowing what I was doing, I joined the ranks of the persecutors.”
    To Ji, this is a forgivable sin because if he and many other Chinese intellectuals have been guilty of persecuting one another, it was largely because the intellectuals as a class had been compelled to feel deeply guilty and shameful about themselves. Ji described how this was achieved through the fierce criticism and self-criticism sessions, a unique feature of the Maoist thought-reform campaigns. Ji’s own ideological conversion was accomplished through such a ritual.
    Impressed by the Communist victory and early achievements, he blamed himself fervently for not being sufficiently patriotic and selfless: he was selfish to pursue his own academic studies in Germany while the Communists were fighting the Japanese invaders; he was wrong to avoid politics and to view all politics as a tainted game, because the Communist politics was genuinely idealistic and noble. Only after beating himself up about all his sins did he manage to pass the collective review and gain acceptance as a member of the “people.”
    Ji describes the overwhelming sense of guilt as “almost Christian,” which led to a feeling of shame and induced a powerful urge to conform and to worship the new God—the Communist Party and its Great Leader. Afterward, like a sinner given a chance to prove his worthiness, he eagerly abandoned all his previous skepticism—the trademark of a critical faculty—and became a true believer. He embraced the new cult of personality, joining others to shout at the top of his voice “Long Live Chairman Mao!” Through this process, millions of Chinese intellectuals cast off their individuality. For Ji, the feeling of guilt became so deeply engrained that, even after he was locked up in the cowshed, he racked his brain for his own faults rather than questioning the Party or the system.
    Ji was obviously not a shrewd political animal or a deep thinker. Admitting that his eyes were finally opened only after the Cultural Revolution ended, he refrained from analyzing the larger political picture or interpreting the motives of those who launched the chaos. But he clearly felt that the country on the whole had failed to learn a real lesson from what happened. Toward the end of the memoir, he writes:
    My final question is: What made the Cultural Revolution possible?
    This is a complicated question that I am ill-equipped to answer; the only people in a position to tackle it refuse to do so and do not seem to want anyone else to try.
    Ji was of course alluding to the Chinese government’s quiet ban on any deep probing of the subject, a policy still in effect today. First and foremost is the question of Mao. Everyone knows that Mao is the chief culprit of the Cultural Revolution. Well-known historical data points to a tangle of factors behind Mao’s motivation for launching it: subtle tension among the top leadership of the CCP since the Great Leap Forward, which led to a famine with an estimated thirty to forty million deaths; his desire to reassert supremacy and crush any perceived challenge to his personal power by reaching down directly to the masses; his radical, increasingly lunatic vision of permanent revolution; his deep anti-intellectualism and paranoid jealousy. But, from the viewpoint of the Party, allowing a full investigation and exposure of Mao’s manipulations would threaten the Party’s legitimacy. If the great helmsman gets debunked, the whole ship may go down. Mao as a symbol is therefore crucial: it is tied to the survival of the Party state.
    Then there is the thorny issue of the people’s participation in the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards were only the best-known of the radical organizations. At the height of madness, millions of ordinary Chinese took part in various forms of lawless actions and rampant violence. The estimated death toll of those who committed suicide, were tortured to death, were publicly executed, or were killed in armed factional battles runs from hundreds of thousands to millions. This makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to bring all of the perpetrators to account.
    Consequently, the situation has been handled in a manner that reflects both cynical and pragmatic calculations: After arresting and blaming it all on the ultra-leftist Gang of Four, the government officially condemned the period as a “ten-year disaster,” tolerated a short period of limited public ventilation, then moved to contain the damage. It’s one of those noiseless bans done through internal control; investigation, discussion, and publication have been variously forbidden, discouraged, or marginalized. Over time, the topic has faded away as though it all happened quite naturally.
    This situation is especially unsatisfying and unfair to those who suffered untold atrocities. Most of the teachers who were beaten up by their Red Guard students never received an apology. Most of the scholars who were tortured in the countless cowsheds continued, as Ji did, to live and work among their former persecutors. Some of the former perpetrators thrived in the new era, building successful careers and lives.
    Ji himself worried about “stepping on people’s toes.” After writing the first draft of his memoir in 1988, he kept it in a drawer for years, for fear it might be viewed as a personal vendetta. He then revised it heavily, toning down his prose and keeping most of the persecutors unnamed. He said he wanted no revenge, just to write a honest historical document, so that young Chinese would know the past and would not let it happen again. He sounded apologetic about letting his emotions get the better of him in the earlier draft. Still, the reader can probably catch a strange tone of sarcasm and self-mockery in the narrator’s voice.
    I found Ji’s tone odd and puzzling at first until it occurred to me that this is not an uncommon rhetorical device in Chinese writing or talking: to control seething anger or to deflect unbearable pain, one often turns to black humor or sarcastic hyperbole. A Chinese elementary school teacher who was tortured and jeered at in public struggle sessions during the Cultural Revolution told me that the sense of physical and psychological violation was so ferocious it felt like being gang-raped. He had nightmares about it for years. Later, a friend pointed out that he would adopt a facetious tone whenever he spoke about the experience. “I hadn’t noticed the tone myself,” he told me. “I think I turned it all into a joke because I can’t bear the pain and the shame with a straight face.”
    Ji also seemed to suffer a survivor’s shame. Many scholars and writers committed suicide in the early part of the Cultural Revolution to avoid the indignities they faced, and he repeatedly mentioned his ambivalence about his failed attempt at suicide. This has to do with an ancient code of honor for a Confucian scholar. In the memoir, Ji recalls his first encounter after the Cultural Revolution with the senior apparatchik Zhou Yang. Zhou had supervised the persecution of many intellectuals until he himself was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. Zhou’s first words to Ji were: “It used to be said that ‘the scholar can be killed, but he cannot be humiliated.’ But the Cultural Revolution proved that not only can the scholar be killed, he can also be humiliated.” Zhou roared with laughter, but Ji knew it was a bitter laugh.
    Ji Xianlin died in 2009. Two years after his death, a Peking University alumna named Zhang Manling who had been close to Ji published a piece about their friendship and made a few unusual revelations. In 1989, after the students began their hunger strike on Tiananmen Square, Ji and several other Peking University professors decided to publicly show their solidarity with the youngsters by paying them a visit. Ji, the oldest and most famous of the professors, traveled in high style: sitting on a stool on top of a flat-backed tricycle, which was fastened with a tall white banner that said “Rank One Professor Ji Xianlin,” the seventy-eight-year-old Ji was peddled by a student from the west-side campus across the city. When they finally arrived in Tiananmen Square, the students burst into delighted cheers.
    During the post-massacre purge, at all the faculty meetings where everyone was forced to biao tai (declare their position), Ji would only say: “Don’t ask me, or I’ll say it was a patriotic democratic movement.” Then one day, Ji walked off from his campus residence, hailed a taxi, and asked to be taken to the local public security bureau. “I’m professor Ji Xianlin of Peking University,” Ji said to the police on arrival. “I visited Tiananmen Square twice. I stirred up the students, so please lock me up together with them. I’m over seventy, and I don’t want to live anymore.” The policemen were so startled they called Peking University officials, who rushed over and forcibly brought Ji back to campus.
    It was, again, one of those high-pressured, terrifying and tragic moments in China’s long history. But this time, acting alone, Ji lived up to the honor of a true Confucian scholar.
    They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
    “As a general rule, the earlier you recognize someone is trying to kill you, the better off you’ll be.”

    "You think a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a sheet of glass."



  9. #489
    Join Date
    Sep 2009
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    Dem Rep. Keith Ellison Demands Amazon Ban Books Not Approved By Far-Left SPLC…


    Ellison starts a book-burning protest in 3… 2… 1…
    Via Fortune:
    Prime Day is here, but Amazon is facing backlash for selling merchandise promoted by known hate groups. Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Tuesday, voicing concerns about the company’s income from such items.
    “I would like to know whether Amazon is committed to ceasing the sale of all products that promote hateful and racist ideologies,” wrote Ellison. “For a company with a policy prohibiting the sale of ‘products that promote or glorify hatred, violence, racial, sexual, or religious intolerance or promote organizations with such views,’ there appear to be a disturbing number of groups with hateful, racist, and violent agendas making money using Amazon’s platform.”
    Ellison said that hate groups have been on the rise since the election of Donald Trump, and Amazon has historically failed to prevent hate groups and associated individuals identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) from making money on its platform. Ellison lists a range of the products in question available on Amazon, including children’s toys, clothes, and Kindle books.
    “The availability of all the material listed in the aforementioned report indicates to me that either Amazon is willfully refusing to enforce its own policies against the sale of racist products, or its sheer size makes it impossible for the company to police itself,” wrote Ellison. “In either event, Amazon must immediately cease doing business with groups that promote racist violence.”
    They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
    “As a general rule, the earlier you recognize someone is trying to kill you, the better off you’ll be.”

    "You think a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a sheet of glass."



  10. #490
    Join Date
    Sep 2009
    Location
    Slave Region 10
    Posts
    113,807

    Default

    RINO Gov. John Kasich: We Need More Republicans Willing To Stand Up To Trump…


    No, we don’t.
    Via The Hill:
    Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) is saying that more members of the Republican Party need to be willing to stand up to President Trump.
    “It’s been pretty lonely out here,” Kasich told The Guardian in an interview published on Friday, alluding to how he is one of the few members of the GOP to consistently criticize the president.
    “Not that I mind walking a lonely road, I’ve done it most of my career, but always would be good if you had more people who are willing to stand up and say that’s the wrong direction,” Kasich added.
    Kasich, who ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2016, goes on to voice how he became a vocal opponent of Trump’s because of “political principle.”
    “I’m not a Johnny-come-lately to this,” Kasich said, adding that “most of the people have been upset with [Trump], and then endorse him and then they get upset with him. I just have not operated that way.”
    “I did not feel public pressure to have to go and support somebody that I was not convinced was going to pull the country together,” he said.
    They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
    “As a general rule, the earlier you recognize someone is trying to kill you, the better off you’ll be.”

    "You think a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a sheet of glass."



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