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Mao Zedong’s Traveling Circus David Hanna

By on November 19th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/11/mao-zedongs-travelling-circus/
Brian DeMare is a cultural historian and teacher of modern Chinese history at Tulane University in New Orleans. His first book, Mao’s Cultural Army (2015), found the cultural revolution “to be a profoundly theatrical event”. It was also a profoundly murderous event and DeMare’s second book,  Land Wars, this time on Mao’s agrarian revolution, depicts similar excesses but does not sufficiently condemn them for what they were: a politically self-serving democide of the Party’s potential opposition in the villages of rural China.

Coined by Professor R.J. Rummel, whose research provides voluminous statistics on governmental killing, the word democide involves acts of genocide, politicide and mass murder. By necessity, the self-protective despotism of communist one-party rule entailed all three of them. While DeMare’s narrative does little to emphasise this point explicitly, his recounting of the Maoist bastardry which savaged rural China will do much to support that contention.

DeMare foregrounds Mao’s intuitive conviction that the Chinese peasantry could make or break the revolution, and DeMare’s varied researches and narrative style make Land Wars a highly informative and readable account of how a communist mastermind artificially induced an agrarian revolution. “Historians,” writes DeMare, “must engage Mao’s narrative of revolution in order to understand what truly occurred in rural China as the Communists came to power.”

The central theme of Land Wars is that Mao’s peasant revolution was a fantasy, a fiction which the Party’s “work teams” were commanded to convert into reality. While DeMare effectively “deconstructs and questions Mao’s narrative”, he simultaneously and mysteriously manages to affirm its reification. DeMare provides abundant and horrifying evidence that China’s agrarian revolution is, as he says himself, “nothing to be lionised” and yet despite a painstaking litany of revolutionary deceit, human rights abuses, theft, slaughter and rapine, he finds the overall results unworthy of “wholesale denunciation”.

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Two Parties, Many Paths By Richard Baehr

By on November 17th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/11/two_parties_many_paths.html

How America’s Political Parties Change (And How They Don’t), by Michael Barone, Encounter Books, 2019, 130 pages

Before American media began to worship at the feet of the statistics gurus (Nate Silver and others), Michael Barone was generally regarded as  the writer with the  greatest  insight into American politics, past and present. Barone’s  biennial “Almanac of American Politics”, a thick collection of essays and voting histories on the 50 states, and every Congressional district, provided the best short survey on how American politics was changing at the regional,  state and Congressional district level, with analyses of the current officeholders – Governors, Senators, Congressmen, and descriptions of the places they represented.  If you met Barone, as I have a few times, he could startle you by describing politics at a granular level – even down to towns or neighborhoods. 

But the failure of pretty much every public opinion poll or statistical forecast to accurately predict the  results of the 2016 Presidential election results has not diminished the enthusiasm for data analytics, now one of the hottest areas of study in colleges and universities. In Michael Barone’s latest book on America’s two major political parties , he addresses the  history of the two parties, the 2016 results, the forecasting failures and what may lay ahead for the two parties.

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The Houellebecqian Moment By Daniel Tenreiro

By on November 17th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/book-review-serotonin-michel-houllebecq-sociopolitical-moment/

The French provocateur’s latest novel, Serotonin, comes as his longstanding concerns have begun to manifest in the liberal societies he so harshly criticizes.

We are living in the imagination of Michel Houellebecq. The bête noire of French literature has spent decades deploring the erosion of Western mores that he believes resulted from the sexual revolution of the 1960s. His last novel, Submission, revolved around the election of a theocratic Muslim to the French presidency. Released on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo massacre, it was on one hand reviled as an Islamophobic tirade and, on the other, heralded as a prophetic portrayal of the decline of Europe. His latest, Serotonin (deftly translated into English by Shaun Whiteside), resumes the prophetic style, but his predictions seem less fantastical now.

Indeed, the rise of populism in the U.S. and Europe might as well have been choreographed by Houellebecq. The election of Donald Trump, Britain’s vote to withdraw from the European Union, and the rise of populist parties across Europe all constitute a repudiation of the ideology Houellebecq has railed against since the 1990s. And he is not displeased to see the “liberal world order” crumbling, as he explained in an essay for Harper’s earlier this year titled “Donald Trump Is a Good President.”

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Nikki Haley Has a Point By Michael Brendan Dougherty

By on November 11th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/nikki-haley-has-a-point/

In our constitutional order, unelected insiders do not set foreign policy.

Nikki Haley isn’t a Deep Stater. She’s not a saboteur. She wouldn’t undermine the duly elected president, no siree! That’s the message that comes along with Haley’s new memoir With All Due Respect. In that book, she gives the politician’s review of her career so far, shares some details about her brief Trump-era time serving as U.S. ambassador at the United Nations, and gives some ideas about her life story.

The juiciest detail is that then–secretary of state Rex Tillerson and then–White House chief of staff John Kelly approached Haley and tried to involve her in their intrigues to “save the country” from the president himself. She tries to explain their rationale. “It was their decisions, not the president’s, that were in the best interests of America, they said,” she writes. “The president didn’t know what he was doing. . . . Tillerson went on to tell me the reason he resisted the president’s decisions was because, if he didn’t, people would die.”

Haley rebuffed their approach, though she doesn’t say she reported their insubordinate attitude to the president. “I was always honest with the president, even when others around him weren’t.”

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake decodes Haley’s revelation for esoteric meaning. Yes, Haley is emphasizing that she wasn’t disloyal to the president, Blake notes. But she’s also confirming that concerns about Trump’s fitness and the wisdom of his decisions goes “right to the top.”

At The Week, Joel Mathis looks at the political implications of Haley’s disclosures. In “Nikki Haley Is Plotting a Loopy Path to the Presidency,” he sees her following a strategy that involves “a careful balancing act, simultaneously demonstrating her loyalty to Trump and her independence from him.” This is, Mathis contends, Haley’s way of playing to Trump’s base while also making it safe for people who don’t like Trump to trust her.

I think both observations are correct as far as they go. There is a political calculation at work in Haley’s book and the speeches that have gone with it. Interestingly, Haley doesn’t highlight her policy disagreements with Trump so much as her disagreement with his rhetoric and choice of words. In her book, Haley retells the story of the president’s reaction to the violence in Charlottesville after the tiki-torch parade. She said that at the time she felt that the president’s words “had been hurtful and dangerous.” And so she “picked up the phone and called the president.”

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A Walk in the Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left By Harold Goldmeier

By on November 10th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/11/a_walk_in_the_lions_den_zionism_and_the_left.html

I was on a speaking tour discussing “When Zionism Became a Dirty Word.”  My wife warned me that I will be walking into a lion’s den.

Susie Linfield was at a pleasant, tony New York dinner party, until she realized she was in the lion’s den as the only Zionist present willing to speak up.  The experience inspired her book, The Lions’ Den: Zionism from the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky (Yale University Press, 2019).  The book is a brilliant, intellectual, sociological exploration of eight popular, prolific thinkers and writers.  Her focus is on their ideologies regarding the modern Jewish people; our track-switch from religious faith to political and military creeds; and the great love of our life, the inamorata State of Israel.

Israel was conceived, founded, and remains in stewpots of controversy and derisiveness.  At the dinner party, one guest disparagingly dismisses the work of a particular journalist because, “oh, he’s a Zionist!”  Condescension fills the air.  Then Linfield retorts with, “‘Well, so am I.’  A frozen, stunned silence ensues … [as] they shoot pitying glances at my partner.”

Linfield’s subjects are not all consumed by anti-Israel ideology.  Maxime Rodinson, Albert Memmi, I.F. Stone, and Fred Halliday intellectually and ideologically struggle about Israel’s right to exist and the behavior of the Jews and Arabs.  “Rodinson was acutely aware of, and unsentimental about, the consequences of the Arab world’s underdevelopment, which is part of the realist Marxist tradition.”  The book “is not a general survey” of the Left’s relationship with Zionism or the relationship of Jews with the Left.  It is a series of portraits uncovering a rich, fraught, sometimes buried intellectual history, tackling “the Zionist Question.”  The points of view of her subjects are meticulously researched.  There are 34 pages of footnotes and an equally long bibliography.

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New book Palestinian Delusion makes the conflict easy to understand By Amil Imani

By on November 10th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/11/new_book_empalestinian_delusionem_makes_the_conflict_easy_to_understand.html

Robert Spencer’s new book, The Palestinian Delusion, under the “light of reason,” is an invaluable, accurate account that ranks as a most worthy scholarly work on the subject by a man of outstanding credentials, impeccable integrity, and unsurpassed qualifications.  This meticulously documented and comprehensive book is a treasure for anyone wishing to learn the truth of the Palestinian and Israeli conflict. 

Spencer methodically demonstrates not only that the Jews have the right to live in their ancestral homeland, but that the term “Palestinian” was invented.  “Invented people” may sound disturbing to some who have not taken the time to study historical facts.  However, truth is the best weapon against falsehood.  Spencer has carefully tied various historical origins with current events that provide facts and understanding about what is happening in our present time. 

Spencer states:

Another familiar theme of pro-Palestinian literature today is that the State of Israel exists on “stolen land”— stolen, of course, from the indigenous people of Palestine. In reality, the land is no more stolen than the Palestinian Arabs are its indigenous inhabitants. … Nonetheless, the myth has taken hold, and it is now widely taken for granted, in our age that has little historical memory and scant interest in gaining more, that the Palestinians are a genuine nationality and are the indigenous people of the land that Israel illegally occupies.

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Hitler’s Pawn: The Boy Assassin and the Holocaust by Stephen Koch

By on November 9th, 2019

On November 7, 1938, a 17-year-old Jewish boy named Herschel Grynszpan, distraught over the Nazi persecution of his family and thousands of other Polish German Jews, slipped into the German Embassy in Paris and used a gun he’d never fired before to shoot the first diplomat he saw. When the diplomat died two days later from the wounds, Adolf Hitler and his sinister propaganda henchman, Joseph Goebbels, changed the course of history by turning this one rash act of one Jewish teenager into a pretext for the Kristallnacht, the nationwide orgy of mass state-sponsored anti-Semitic criminality, violence, and murder that initiated the Holocaust. Scholarly accounts of the Kristallnacht, the Holocaust, and the Second World War ordinarily devote a few lines—sometimes even a couple of paragraphs—to Herschel’s story, noting how the Nazis exploited his brave but foolish “protest” to ignite the great pogrom.

In 1938, Europe was on the cusp of a political transformation. Western Europe’s worst fear—and it was a truly terrible fear—was the threat of another world war. After the murderous horrors of the first one, a second, even worse one loomed as madness that could kill millions, bringing the end of civilization. Europeans high and low went into deep denial, desperately convincing themselves that Hitler was somehow a normal, if distasteful, politician who could be handled and appeased. The Munich pact, long since a byword for diplomatic cowardice and disgrace, had been signed a mere month before the Kristallnacht, and for one fleeting month, the pact had been celebrated with delirious mass relief. Apart from Jews and others who had taken Hitler’s measure, the Munich Agreement was greeted by euphoric waves of joyful people—people by the hundreds of thousands literally dancing in the streets.

With the Kristallnacht, that dancing stopped. On November 9–10, when Hitler ripped off his mask of legitimacy and normality to reveal the true face of his fundamentally criminal regime, the pipe dream of a rational, appeasable Hitler died a swift, sickening death. Plenty of appeasers kept busy, but for most, the truth was clear: Hitler would stop at nothing. The fearsome return of war was probable, unavoidable, even inevitable.

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The Tyranny of Virtue Salvatore Babones

By on November 9th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/11/the-tyranny-of-virtue/

Whether it’s Bernie Sanders lauding the Swedish welfare state or Donald Trump demanding the release of an American rapper from a Swedish jail, Americans are fascinated by the Scandinavian home of dancing queens and flat-pack furniture, where sexual liberation seems to have been sublimated into a Freudian fixation on political correctness.

In PC Worlds the American anthropologist Jonathan Friedman, who is married to a Swede and formerly taught in Sweden, offers a rare tour of the “opinion corridors” of the Swedish intellectual elite in this morally compelling but unevenly written indictment of political correctness. Sweden, it turns out, is obsessed with proving its politically correct anti-racism, even to the point of unravelling its once close-knit cities in the cause of multicultural accommodation and closing its eyes to serious crimes ranging from car burning to gang rape, as long as they happen to have been committed by recent immigrants. In Friedman’s telling, Swedish intellectuals are so fixated on demonstrating their anti-racist credentials that perhaps the only plausible explanation is that they are trying to make up for their own deeply held, but publicly inadmissible, racist leanings. In short, he thinks they doth protest too much.

Some of what Friedman criticises as political correctness might pass these days for simple good manners: whatever your politics, blasphemy cartoons and ethnic put-downs are not very nice, even if liberals rightly abhor their prohibition. But today’s Sweden shows how much can go wrong when political correctness is taken too seriously by those who charge themselves with enforcing it. Friedman reports incidents in which self-appointed anti-racist vigilantes make “house calls” on those who have the temerity to contradict the PC party line, vandalising their homes and terrorising their families. Less frightening but potentially more damaging, universities and newspapers have been pressured—sometimes successfully—to dismiss students and fire employees who make factually correct statements about ethnicity, immigration and crime that contradict officially-ordained PC myths.

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The Rosenhan Study Was Bunk By John Hirschauer ******

By on November 9th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-rosenhan-study-was-bunk/

As Hilaire Belloc stated in an essay buried deep in 1941’s The Silence of the Sea, “Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.” One wonders just how many “deaths” have been caused by junk social science and bungled statistics. Consider:

David Rosenhan — Stanford professor of psychology, influential scholar, the rest — published his famous study “On Being Sane in Insane Places” in 1973. It came at the apex of the “first wave” of deinstitutionalization in the United States — John Kennedy’s last act as president was the Community Mental Health Act of 1963, a federal boondoggle which usurped state power and tried to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill via national mandate. He created a network of “community mental health centers” with federal funds, centers that he hoped would replace the state hospital as the locus of psychiatric care. The results were mixed; on one hand, plenty of individuals were mistreated in state hospitals, and still others never belonged there in the first place. Yet for the most seriously ill, the results were disastrous — the new “community mental health centers” Kennedy initiated had becomes hotbeds of political activism and had little time or interest for the violently disturbed. By 1973, many of those who were unnecessarily hospitalized in the past had already been discharged. But anti-institutional sentiment had reached a fever pitch among progressive academics; Mike Gorman, one of the architects of deinstitutionalization, admitted later in life that his “hidden agenda was to break the back of the state mental hospital.”

Rosenhan, caught in the spirit of revolution, instructed eight so-called “pseudo-patients” to play-act as schizophrenics and seek admission to mental hospitals. The subjects allegedly returned with a litany of horror stories — neglect, overmedication, squalor, uncaring staff — and Rosenhan further asserted that, if psychiatric professionals considered these fake patients insane when they were perfectly lucid, then the institutional psychiatry must itself be a sham. The study was cited time and again by activists eager to close “the asylums.” Today, with scores of drug-addled, mentally ill persons toiling on our streets, the fruits of this effort couldn’t be clearer.

Susannah Cahalan, author of the new book The Great Pretender, raises significant questions about Rosenhan’s study. She discovered, for instance, that one of the subjects contradicted the study’s findings outright — he told Cahalan that his experience at the institution was much different than Rosenhan let on. From her account in the New York Post:

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Lee Smith’s Book Will Make Patriots’ Blood Boil By Eric Georgatos

By on November 5th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/11/lee_smiths_book_will_make_patriots_blood_boil.html

Lee Smith: The Plot against the President.  Center Street: New York, 2019.  368 pp., $17.34 hardcover, $14.99 Kindle.

Lee Smith’s The Plot against the President is an invaluable contribution to the history of America in the Trump era.  Built upon the role and perspective of California congressman Devin Nunes as the tip of the spear that would unravel and expose the coup plot and its co-conspirators, it’s a thorough chronicling of how the traditional American-bred gut instinct of a San Joaquin Valley, California farmer provided the spark of discernment that ultimately uncovered the lies and liars who perpetrated (and are still perpetrating) the worst scandal in American history.

Every congressman and senator, and every American voter, ought to read Smith’s book.  Americans who detest President Trump’s personality and decorum will remain free to continue, but if they are honest, they will be absolutely repelled by the behavior of the higher-ups in just about every so-called American “institution” — the CIA, FBI, DOJ, State Department, and mainstream media, and yes, the Obama White House.  Concocting lies and leaks to the media, fabricating evidence, running “humint” scams to develop further lies and leaks, manipulating courts by withholding evidence and declaring half-truths, carrying out orchestrated personal threats against Nunes and anyone else who dared to expose the truth — these are nothing short of organized crime activities, with each and every one of these institutions directly and knowingly involved.

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