RUTHFULLY YOURS

Sisters separated by war forge new identities as they are forced to choose between family, nation, and their own independence.

Jun and Hong were scions of a once great southern Chinese family. Each other’s best friend, they grew up in the 1930s during the final days of Old China before the tumult of the twentieth century brought political revolution, violence, and a fractured national identity. By a quirk of timing, at the end of the Chinese Civil War, Jun ended up on an island under Nationalist control, and then settled in Taiwan, married a Nationalist general, and lived among fellow exiles at odds with everything the new Communist regime stood for on the mainland. Hong found herself an ocean away on the mainland, forced to publicly disavow both her own family background and her sister’s decision to abandon the party. A doctor by training, to overcome the suspicion created by her family circumstances, Hong endured two waves of “re-education” and internal exile, forced to work in some of the most desperately poor, remote areas of the country.

Ambitious, determined, and resourceful, both women faced morally fraught decisions as they forged careers and families in the midst of political and social upheaval. Jun established one of U.S.-allied Taiwan’s most important trading companies. Hong became one of the most celebrated doctors in China, appearing on national media and honored for her dedication to medicine. Niece to both sisters, linguist and East Asian scholar Zhuqing Li tells her aunts’ story for the first time, honoring her family’s history with sympathy and grace. Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden is a window into the lives of women in twentieth-century China, a time of traumatic change and unparalleled resilience. In this riveting and deeply personal account, Li confronts the bitter political rivals of mainland China and Taiwan with elegance and unique insight, while celebrating her aunts’ remarkable legacies.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/this-is-war/

Free trade with a hostile nation is a losing game.

The following is an excerpt from Jonathan Pelson’s new book, Wireless Wars: China’s Dangerous Domination of 5G and How We’re Fighting Back.

Why didn’t the regulators and government authorities in the United States and Europe stop the damage from Huawei? Why did they allow the Chinese company to sell their gear in the U.S., and all over the world, at prices that were clearly below cost, low enough to take business from most competitors, and so low they destroyed the margins on competitors who had to slash their own prices to win the business? Shouldn’t countries prevent foreign companies from entering and dominating their markets, selling products below cost? And shouldn’t countries put up trade barriers to block foreigners if their home country doesn’t also open its markets to imports?

This is often the response from governments, whether in the Americas, Europe, or elsewhere. Leaders come to the aid of domestic industries, decrying unfair competition. Companies under threat try to position themselves as “strategic,” and warranting protection. Somehow, the truly strategic telecom sector failed to earn this designation. But should any sector block foreign suppliers, even if those suppliers are selling their products at unreasonably low prices?

There aren’t simple answers to these questions, says Mike Munger, an economist and former chair of the department of political science at Duke University, where he continues to teach political science, public policy, and economics. He argues that trade deficits aren’t a problem, and he makes the case for continuing to trade even when a partner subsidizes their products and puts up barriers to yours.

“My trade deficit with Kroger’s supermarkets is gigantic,” he deadpans. “I buy a ton of groceries from them and they never buy anything from me. The last time I tried to sell them some of my stuff, they called the cops.” Munger says that if one party has something of value and the other party has money they want to exchange for it, no voluntary exchange is bad.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/17/statesmen-at-the-helm/

A review of “The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation”,
by Daniel J. Mahoney (Encounter, 242 pages , $30.99)

With epic understatement, James Madison wrote in 1787 that “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm,” prophetically consoling his future countrymen for the catastrophic presidency of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. 

In his new book, The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation, Daniel Mahoney writes not just about “enlightened statesmen” but about great-souled statesmen, with philosophic gifts and the full complement of cardinal virtues. Such men and women are not just unusual. They are rare—and indispensable: “On rare but vitally important occasions, democracies need such men of virtue and honorable ambition to preserve and perpetuate free and civilized human life.” 

Mahoney thinks Solon, Pericles, Cicero, and George Washington were such statesmen. Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Nelson Mandela, for all their gifts, virtues, and importance, were not. Daniel Mahoney takes seriously his highest duty as a student of politics—to remind himself and his readers of true greatness. He offers chapters on Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Charles De Gaulle, and Václav Havel, with helpful “Sources and Suggested Readings” at the end of each chapter. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/lockdown-socialist-plan-take-away-your-freedom-mark-tapson/

When COVID-19 first reared its ugly head a mere couple of years ago (seems like much longer, doesn’t it?), the Trump-hating Left recognized that here was a crisis too good to waste, to paraphrase Obama’s former Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel. As Cheryl Chumley observes in her new book Lockdown: The Socialist Plan to Take Away Your Freedom, “Democrats, progressives, globalists, collectivists, socialists, and Marxists saw opportunity to reshape an entire world.” Lockdown, from Humanix Books, is her damning overview of how the power-lusting Left manipulated and exploited the pandemic to kickstart their Great Socialist Reset.

Chumley is the online opinion editor for The Washington Times, an Army vet, a journalist, and author – most previously (2020) of Socialists Don’t Sleep: Christians Must Rise or America Will Fall. If you are unfamiliar with her writing, Ms. Chumley pulls no punches in her takedowns of the Left, and makes no apologies for her Christian perspective on political events. She is not reticent about identifying as “evil” the forces wreaking ruin in the world today; nor is she vague about their aim: leftists “want total and complete lockdowns of individual freedoms, individual rights, individually held liberties so they can stage their reset and reshape a new America, a new world, more in line with their collectivist and elitist beliefs. It’s called destroy, then rebuild. What they’re destroying is the Constitution; what they’re trying to rebuild is cultural Marxism and communist control.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/06/27/the-crushing-of-tibet/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=third

When the Iron Bird Flies: China’s Secret War in Tibet, by Jianglin Li (Stanford University Press, 576 pp., $35)

The recent depredations of the People’s Republic of China in East Turkestan/Xinjiang have had the unfortunate effect of obscuring and displacing a similar oppression that the Chinese perpetrated in another region: Tibet. More than half a century before it began persecuting the Uyghurs, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) engineered and executed a brutal, enduring domination of Tibet that persists today. But while the Tibetan cause enjoyed its heyday in the West in the 1990s, the region has largely faded from the headlines since.

Jianglin Li, a historian of Tibet, seeks to remedy this forgetfulness. In When the Iron Bird Flies, a masterly account of the CCP’s invasion and subjugation of the Tibetan regions in the 1950s, Li exhumes decades of archival Chinese records and interviews survivors of the onslaught. She tells the story through the eyes of the overwhelmed and ultimately defeated Tibetans, as well as from the point of view of the CCP officials who quelled their hard-fought rebellion.

While even the Chinese-nationalist government had sought to integrate Tibet into the Chinese body politic in the first half of the 20th century, the story truly begins with Mao Zedong’s rise to power. He was determined, no matter the cost, to swallow the Tibetan provinces of U-Tsang, Amdo, and Kham — which form more than a fifth of contemporary China by area. On January 2, 1950, Mao, visiting Moscow, cabled the CCP Central Committee, noting that “although the population of Tibet is not large, its international status is crucial. We must occupy Tibet and reform it into a people’s democracy.” Not for Mao the traditional religious and herding lifestyle of this peaceful people of the northwest steppe; they must be fundamentally remade in the image of Socialist Man.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/06/how_secret_soviet_killings_led_to_covid_tyranny.html

As the mournful notes of the cello brought the four minutes of The Dying Swan to a close at The Hague on January 24, 1931, the audience was in tears.  Throughout the performance, there had been no dancer — only a moving spotlight emphasizing the absence of Anna Pavlova, the ballerina the world loved.  She had died the day before, of a mysterious lung infection that began almost immediately after her train had left Paris.  She’d told doctors she suspected she’d been poisoned.  Unable to reach a diagnosis, they treated her symptoms but failed to save her.

For Soviet émigrés of the time, the empty stage, the melancholic music, and the spotlight sans performer were poignant symbols of the hundreds of thousands of “liternoye” killings — secret, disguised liquidations staged as natural deaths or suicides — ordered by Joseph Stalin.  His targets were not just rivals in the USSR, but also dissident writers, intellectuals, artists, and performers living abroad.  In fact, from the 1920s to the outbreak of World War II, while Stalin was carrying out purges in the USSR, the émigré community witnessed several mysterious deaths and disappearances.

Stalin worked by the dictum “communism must eliminate what it cannot control.”  “Liternoye” killings were different from the genocides and massacres he oversaw: the liquidation of kulaks, the Holodomor — deaths caused by famine-related decisions in Ukraine — and the purge of nationalities.  Unlike those, “liternoye” killings resulted in deaths from seemingly natural causes.  They would be followed by hasty disposal of bodies and either advantageous glorification (as for  Lenin, a presumed victim of Stalin) or damnatio memoriae (complete erasure from the records and history).  Quite often, hard-to-detect poisons and bioweapons were used for these murders.

https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-708406

They met on January 20, 1942, at a luxury villa on park-like grounds overlooking Lake Wannsee, a recreation site a half-hour’s drive from Berlin. Built by a wealthy industrialist, the villa was now held by an SS foundation. They were 15 top Nazi officials – among them nine lawyers and eight with doctorates. In that idyllic setting, in a meeting that lasted 90 minutes, they decided the “Jewish question” – how to deport 11 million people to labor camps and kill any who survived. If they differed, it was on the details. Never on the intent – mass murder.

Holocaust expert Peter Longerich’s illuminating book Wannsee: The Road to the Final Solution begins by describing the meeting on that wintry day. The description brings out Nazi cynicism and cold-bloodedness: convening at a pleasure spot to plan genocide. Longerich draws on the only remaining record of the meeting: the “minutes” prepared and distributed by Adolf Eichmann with instructions for destruction after review. 

One minister disobeyed, and his copy was discovered by the US Army in 1945. The document summarizes the main lines of discussion and the decisions reached; it estimates Jewish populations in 30 countries, sets out specific territories where fit Jews should be made to work in labor gangs subjected to “natural wastage”; and it says survivors would be disposed of in an unspecified manner.

The participants at the Wannsee Conference, called by Gen. Reinhard Heydrich, broadly represented all facets of the Reich. They did not actually initiate the Holocaust; it had already been haphazardly set in motion by disparate factions of the Nazi machinery. What they achieved was consensus. Those horrified by plans for exterminating Jews were pressured into compliance as evidence of their commitment to the Nazi goal of purifying the German volk.

Reichstag president Hermann Göring had made Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA), directly responsible for the “Final Solution.” But even before the Wannsee Conference, deportations had begun, at Fuhrer Adolf Hitler’s behest, in October 1941. The first death camps had already been built. Agencies of the Reich were carrying out uncoordinated campaigns of mass murder and competing to propose radical solutions. The conference defined “Jewishness” for the Nazis’ base purposes, decided on what to do with half-Jews, and created an RSHA-led master plan for eliminating Jews. It channeled intention into a systematic extermination program.

Right from the time they came to power in 1933, the Nazis instituted discriminatory policies to remove Jews from public life, boycott their businesses, impose curfews on them, force them into labor, and harass, humiliate, intimidate and exploit them. Enacted in 1935 and imposed the next year, the Nuremberg Laws included statutes that forbade marriage and sexual relations between Jews and Germans and decreed that only those of pure German blood were eligible to be citizens of the Reich.

According to Longerich’s book, the conference should be seen in the context of two significant factors: the outbreak of the Second World War and the rivalry between Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler, another architect of the Holocaust.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/31/confronting-conformity-and-collectivism-with-david-mamet/

EXCERPTS

Leftist film and theater critics (are there really any other kind?) have had a hard time accepting Mamet’s political views, yet they’re caught in their own “Catch-22,” an existential condition that plagues every leftist. They can’t help but admire Mamet’s work and see the significance of it, yet they issue disclaimers upon disclaimers about how it’s “unfortunate” and “sad” that Mamet has lost his political way. It’s a hallmark of a leftist pseudo-intellectual to “gift” the conservative with a heap of pity and condescension in an effort to induce an apology and contrition from the said conservative.

Today, American culture is even more dismantled. With Barack Obama, America started to put all of these academic theories into practice, and now, political correctness has reached another level of absurdity. In his typical style (a blend of cultural analysis, memoir, and drama), Mamet explores the current social and political predicament in Recessional: the Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch. He touches upon many subjects: media, Judaism, wokeness, Donald Trump, literature, and inevitably, COVID. The political game has changed and Mamet is fully aware of this. The book is not so much an argument against leftism (since categories of “Left” and “Right” have changed or in some cases, been erased) as it is a way to bring down conformity, collectivism, and mediocrity. These three components are what drive Mamet’s thoughts, implicitly and explicitly.

The problem of culture is not simply political, claims Mamet, but also religious. He’s not saying that everyone needs to find God, hitting us over our heads with a two-by-four, but the Jewish tradition from which he bases his beliefs clearly guides his thoughts and analysis. He’s rightfully aware that what is causing much of the chaos in our world is man’s refusal to see perennial aspects of human nature. We are fallen beings, and in many ways (as Qohelet/Ecclesiastes tells us) “What has been will be again/what has been done will be done again;/there is nothing new under the sun.” Some people have no humility and seek false idols so they can worship them and feel better about their own mediocrity and inadequacies.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/06/13/western-civ-has-got-to-stay/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

Editor’s note: This essay is adapted from Mr. Murray’s new book The War on the West.

Our hemispheric tradition should contemplate itself before continuing the suicide

It is now over 30 years since the Reverend Jesse Jackson led a crowd of protesters at Stanford University with the chant “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.” Back then, Jackson and his followers were protesting against Stanford University’s introductory humanities program “Western Culture.” They proposed that there was something wrong with teaching the Western canon and the Western tradition. But it was what happened next that was so striking. The university swiftly gave in, replacing the study of Western culture with the study of many cultures. What happened at Stanford in 1987 was a sign of everything to come.

In the decades that followed, nearly all of academia in the Western world followed Stanford’s lead. The history of Western thought, art, philosophy, and culture became an ever less communicable subject. Indeed, it became something of an embarrassment: the product of a bunch of “dead white males,” to use just one of the charming monikers that entered the language.

Since then, every effort to keep alive, let alone revive, the teaching of Western civilization has met with sustained hostility, ridicule, and even violence. Academics who have sought to study Western nations in a neutral light have been prevented from doing their work and subjected to intimidation and defamation, including from colleagues. In Australia, the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, whose board is chaired by former prime minister John Howard, has had great trouble finding any universities to partner with. And that tells us something about the speed of this great shift. Just a couple of decades ago, a course in the history of Western civilization was commonplace. Today it is so disreputable that you can’t pay universities to do it.