RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/04/why_sun_yatsen_was_an_american_thinker.html

In modern Chinese history, Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) holds a unique place. He led the revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty in 1911; devoted his life to championing an independent and democratic China; and was a revolutionary leader and a man of vision. Sun remains the only political leader honored by both mainland China and Taiwan. What’s fascinating about Sun, but little known in America, is that his birthplace, formal education, medical training, religious faith, and political values made him a true American.

Sun’s elder brother concealed the fact that Yat-sen was an American. His family would claim that he was born in China because a Chinese identity was crucial to his mission for China’s future but contemporaneous records show that he was an American citizen by birth. The National Archives at San Francisco verified on April 29, 1904, that Sun had US citizenship. The American Institute in Taiwan also confirms that Sun Yat-sen was born in Hawaii.

When Sun was 4 years old, his parents took him back with them to China. Then at age 12, he sailed on a British steamship back to Hawaii, to live with his elder brother. Sun received his secondary education at the ʻIolani School under the supervision of the Church of Hawai’i.

At 18, Sun wanted to convert to Christianity. He was baptized in Hong Kong by Rev. C. R. Hager, an American missionary. He began studying Western medicine at the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese. At 22, he joined a group of revolutionary thinkers called the Four Bandits. They founded the Furen Literary Society, which emphasized discipline, purifying the character, and learning from the West. In 1892 Sun graduated with a medical doctorate degree from the University of Hong Kong, a globally respected educational establishment in the British territory.

In 1894, Sun wrote a petition to the Qing Viceroy of Zhili, Li Hongzhang, presenting his ideas for modernizing China but was refused an audience. That same year, he founded a nationalist party in Hawaii, the Revive China Society. It would later be renamed the Kuomintang.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18415/putin-apologists

The second charge related to NATO’s alleged rush to included Ukraine, or what [Professor John] Mearsheimer calls “reckless expansion”, provoked Putin is equally absurd.

For almost two decades, Russia made no objection to NATO enlargement that included former members of the Warsaw Pact. Under Putin, Russia even concluded a deal for cooperation with NATO on issues of mutual security with the Helsinki Accords as historic reference. In 2002, Putin met NATO Secretary-General George (Lord) Robinson and quipped that “maybe it is time NATO invited Russia to become a member.”

In NATO’s 2008 Bucharest summit, both Georgia and Ukraine expressed the desire to apply for membership but were quietly told not to submit formal applications. The undeclared reason was the persistence of irredentist problems both had with Russia. Putin interpreted that as a rebuff to Kiev and Tbilisi by NATO and invaded Georgia, snatching South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

What would Putin do if China invaded Russia to regain control of territory that was once Chinese?

If we accept that what once belonged to one state can never belong to another, Crimea must be handed over to Turkey as successor to the Ottoman caliphate….

Who do you think is to blame for the war in Ukraine?

For the Blame-America-International the answer is simple: the culprit is the United States.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chabads-ukraine-communism-ussr-tsar-de-nazification-russia-invasion-hasidic-movement-jewish-community-repression-persecution-antisemitism-refugee-11648745664?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

History has been a battleground between Russia and Ukraine for years, and the story of the Jews has been part of that fight. This can be heard today in Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric about “de-Nazification” or Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s exhortations, amid Russian bombing, to remember Babyn Yar’s murdered Jews. But the past is more than a backdrop for geopolitical maneuvering.

The founding of the Hasidic movement by Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov (1698-1760) in what is today western Ukraine revolutionized Jewish life. And Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson—the Rebbe, or the seventh leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement—was born in Ukraine 120 years ago and later helped spark Judaism’s post-Holocaust religious revival.

The Rebbe was born in Mykolaiv on April 18, 1902, to Rabbi Levi Yitzchak and Chana Schneerson. His maternal forefathers had been the city’s chief rabbis since 1854. During a 1905 pogrom, his mother hid in a cellar with other women, whose children’s terrified screams risked attracting the anti-Semitic marauders outside. Years later, she would recall her 3-year-old son soothing the other children.

In 1908 Levi Yitzchak Schneerson was elected chief rabbi of what is now Dnipro. There the future Rebbe celebrated his bar mitzvah while helping his parents care for Jewish World War I refugees forcibly expelled from the Russian Empire’s western provinces. But Czarist persecution paled in comparison with the destruction of Jewish religious and communal life under communism.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-real-economic-warfare-looked-like-russia-ukraine-world-trade-great-britain-11647637729?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has accused the West of waging economic warfare. Many in the West have agreed, celebrating the supposedly unprecedented nature of Western sanctions as evidence that the West isn’t dead yet. But these claims on both sides are overwrought. There are precedents: The U.S. government froze the assets of Japan’s central bank in July 1941. And we could go back further still, to a time when the world knew better than it does today what this kind of warfare could achieve.

The only previous period when the world economy was as globalized as it is now was in the early 20th century, before World War I. Then as now, advanced industrial nations depended on access to the global trading system for sociopolitical stability. Globalization was characterized by high volumes of international trade, driven by cheap oceanic transportation and facilitated by cable and wireless communications and sophisticated financial instruments.

These made possible long-distance supply chains and just-in-time ordering (then known as “hand to mouth”). The system lowered costs and reduced consumer prices, but it was fragile. If an economic shock occurred, its effects were bound to propagate swiftly throughout the entire system. All of this should sound familiar.

Britain, the hegemon of the day, had a uniquely powerful capacity to turn the propagation of shock to its advantage. British companies dominated the infrastructure of the global trading system: international financial services, shipping and telecommunications. Taking what would now be called a “whole of government” approach, the British government realized the strategic opportunity latent in this dominance well before 1914 and planned accordingly.