RUTHFULLY YOURS

Xi Jinping appears to be building a personality cult around him as Mao did (Li Tao)

CHINA is moving towards one-man rule as the state media step up demands for personal loyalty to President Xi Jinping, a departure from the Communist party’s collective leadership of recent decades.

Last week the party’s flagship newspaper issued a call for Xi to have the power to “remake the political landscape of China”. The article, supposedly written by one of a literary group, was put out on a social media account run by the People’s Daily. It said all communists must be loyal to Xi and “line up with the leadership”.

The campaign to enshrine Xi as the infallible “core” of authority is worrying many inside the political elite and coincides with China exerting its military muscle and possibly preparing to change its nuclear weapons strategy.

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has just stationed surface-to-air missiles on a disputed island in the South China Sea. The Chinese expansion comes as Barack Obama rallies Asian nations to support free navigation in the strategic waterway. The prospect of one man dominating the party, the state and the army in China could be the most challenging test in the next American president’s in-tray.

Xi’s grand plans include a total reorganisation of the Chinese military command structure that has included an internal debate about its nuclear weapons. Xi recently formed a dedicated PLA rocket force to control the nuclear ballistic missile arsenal. A report for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a US-based group, says China may be considering placing its nuclear forces on alert, which means that, like America and Britain, its weapons would be ready to fire on command.

The outrage is that Hijab Solidarity Day will be taking place under the auspices of the City of Ottawa, the capital of Canada. It is not the role of a democratic government to celebrate religious symbols or to help religions proselytize.

The government’s acceptance of an Ottawa Hijab Solidarity Day amounts to accepting a radical legal system that is completely contrary to Canada’s democratic values, and crosses the line that separates Church and State. Endorsing the hijab is endorsing the first step of an extremist ideology that leads to and condones honor killings, female genital mutilation (FGM) and the oppression of women.

In 2007, Aqsa Parvez, a 16-year-old Pakistani Muslim living in Toronto, was strangled to death by her father. Her crime was that, as a free woman in Canada, she chose not to wear a hijab. In another case in Canada, in 2012, four Muslim women were murdered by their own family for refusing to wear a hijab and preferring Western clothing.

This Thursday, February 25, 2016, the city of Ottawa will be holding a public event celebrating the hijab, Islam’s physical repression of women.

The City for All Women Initiative (CAWI) organization, backed by the City Council of Ottawa, is hosting the Ottawa Hijab Solidarity Day celebration, also called “Walking with Our Muslims Sisters,” at City Hall. According to CAWI, the main purpose of this event is to encourage non-Muslim women to wear a hijab to understand life as a Muslim woman.

The outrage is that such an event will be taking place under the auspices of the City of Ottawa, the capital of Canada. Under Islamic Shari’a law, the hijab is an expression of the suppression of women and is used as a tool to persecute women by their male counterparts.

The actual number of crimes in Germany committed by migrants in 2015 may exceed 400,000.

The report does not include crime data from North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state in Germany and also the state with the largest number of migrants. North Rhine-Westphalia’s biggest city is Cologne, where, on New Year’s Eve, hundreds of German women were sexually assaulted by migrants.

“For years the policy has been to leave the [German] population in the dark about the actual crime situation… The citizens are being played for fools. Rather than tell the truth, they [government officials] are evading responsibility and passing blame onto the citizens and the police.” — André Schulz, director, Association of Criminal Police, Germany.

10% of the migrants from the chaos in Iraq and Syria have reached Europe so far: “Eight to ten million migrants are still on the way.” — Gerd Müller, Development Minister.

Migrants committed 208,344 crimes in 2015, according to a confidential police report that was leaked to the German newspaper, Bild. This figure represents an 80% increase over 2014 and works out to around 570 crimes committed by migrants every day, or 23 crimes each hour, between January and December 2015.

The actual number of migrant crimes is far higher, however, because the report, produced by the Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA), includes only crimes that have been solved (aufgeklärten Straftaten). According to Statista, the German statistics agency, on average only around half of all crimes committed in Germany in any given year are solved (Aufklärungsquote). This implies that the actual number of crimes committed by migrants in 2015 may exceed 400,000.

Moreover, the report — “Crime in the Context of Immigration” (Kriminalität im Kontext von Zuwanderung) — includes data from only 13 of Germany’s 16 federal states.

The report does not include crime data from North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state in Germany and also the state with the largest number of migrants. North Rhine-Westphalia’s biggest city is Cologne, where, on New Year’s Eve, hundreds of German women were sexually assaulted by migrants. It is not yet clear why those crimes were not included in the report.

The report also lacks crime data from Hamburg, the second-largest city in Germany, and Bremen, the second most populous city in Northern Germany.

Further, many crimes are simply not reported or are deliberately overlooked: political leaders across Germany have ordered police to turn a blind eye to crimes perpetrated by migrants, apparently to avoid fueling anti-immigration sentiments.

According to the report, most of the crimes were committed by migrants from: Syria (24%), Albania (17%), Kosovo (14%), Serbia (11%), Afghanistan (11%), Iraq (9%), Eritrea (4%), Macedonia (4%), Pakistan (4%) and Nigeria (2%).

The catastrophic failure of Peronist populism was sealed at last by November’s presidential elections and the victory of conservative free-marketeer Mauricio Macri. In the Vatican, however, one can only wonder if the brilliantined dictator’s direct and indirect influence lives on
History is a fair-minded goddess. The Soviet Union got nowhere in the seventy years it applied for, and which the goddess granted, to change the world. In compensation, a leader is now at the helm of the Russian government able to restore a sense of national pride and achievement which augurs well for the future and, all things considered, is vastly preferable compared to what the Soviets had to offer. German Nationalism and Socialism put the hand up, got the nod, but ran out of puff in less than the thousand years they had asked for. To make amends history showered the ruined country with more than a sufficiency of economic prosperity.

Argentine populism staked its claim in 1946, was given the call, and for the following sixty-nine years, in and out of government, with or without its founding leader or any of his wives, retained a pre-eminent political position mostly influenced by the Justicialista ideology bequeathed by Juan Perón and principally responsible for bringing the country to its knees. The catastrophic failure of Peronist populism was sealed in November’s presidential elections with the victory of the conservative advocate of free-market economics, Mauricio Macri, whose victory preceded by only a few days the equally decisive triumph of the opposition in the Venezuelan parliamentary elections. Taken together, these two events mark a definitive turning point in the political climate of Latin America, away from the clownish antics of Chávez and the corrupting populism of the Peronists towards a restoration of economic sanity and civic virtue.

Macri brings to his high office valuable experience gained during a successful career in business followed by three impressive terms as the elected mayor of Buenos Aires, which ranks as the principal political office outside the national presidency. It is also quite probable that the consolation that history has up her sleeve for Argentina’s melancholy populist twilight is the appointment of an Argentinian Jesuit to the Holy See, as many of Pope Francis’ public pronouncements are alarmingly consistent with what his Peronist compatriots have been uttering during the past seven decades and it is therefore apposite for his arrival in the Vatican to become immortalised as Perón’s last hurrah.

Stalin’s dissident daughter might well have found sanctuary in Australia. Instead, it was a publisher’s rich advance that drew her to the US, where she eluded the same Soviet gorilla who tried to bundle Mrs Petrov back to Moscow, but never the curse of her father’s infamy
In the comedy Children of the Revolution (1996) Judy Davis’s character bonks Joe Stalin in the 1950s and their love child, Joe, gains a career in the Australian police union. In the real world Australia came quite close to adopting Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, as a political refugee in 1967. Svetlana, then 41, was an unwelcome arrival by taxi at the US Embassy in New Delhi, demanding asylum. The US was trying to mend fences with the USSR, and Washington wanted her thrown back to the unforgiving Soviets.

Too late, they were told: she was already on Qantas to Rome. Actually, the flight had been delayed two hours and Svetlana was still in the departure lounge. The sequel is laconically described in John Blaxland’s “The Protest Years: The Official History of ASIO” (Vol 2, 1963-75), published last October.

Occasionally ASIO was approached by the Americans to consider resettling defectors. Generally, the Australian Government looked favourably on requests to resettle such people but there were instances when it objected.

In 1967, for example, the Americans approached [ASIO director-general Charles] Spry to see if Australia would be prepared to grant asylum to Svetlana Iosifovna Stalin, the daughter of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Spry advised the Minister for External Affairs, Sir Paul Hasluck, and the Secretary of the Prime Minister’s Department, John Bunting, that a number of factors had to be taken into consideration before agreeing to the request, although ‘the difficulties of looking after her would not be insuperable’. Australia had plenty of experience looking after the Petrovs.

Hasluck acknowledged that the principal argument in favour of granting the request was ‘to please the Americans’, but believed that acceding to the request would have significant repercussions on relations with the Soviet Union and South-East Asian countries. Hasluck saw more disadvantages than advantages, and Prime Minister Holt agreed. In the end, soon afterwards, she settled in the United States.

Svetlana defected on March 6, 1967. The flurry of memos began when Svetlana was holed up in secrecy and stateless in Rome. New Zealand turned down a concurrent US request to take her. South Africa offered residence but she refused. Moving on to Switzerland, she had a US-organised disguise as “Fraulein Carlen”, an Irish tourist. The cover was so weak that an ex-Soviet circus performer, now an Australian citizen, mailed her a marriage proposal.

petrov mrsSvetlana made it to New York on a six-month tourist visa. She’d been hiding her manuscript Twenty Letters to a Friend and a US publisher offered $US1.5 million for the rights. This windfall meant she needed no official subsidies and could enter and live in the US as a private citizen.