From the mouths of great thinkers

“Every single great idea that has marked the 21st century, the 20th century and the 19th century has required government vision and government incentive,”




Communism, Fascism, Japanese Imperialism, Maoism, the Great Leap Forward, Prohibition, Stalinism, Khmer Rouge, the Great Society, state-sponsored terrorism, the faith-based global warming cultists, universal health care, hate speech laws Euro-statism and the Che' Cafe' approve this message.


H/T: W.C. Varones

Some red meat for ya on a Tuesday

So what does world-wide adulation and praise get the President? Only comparisons to a communist tyrant that killed tens of millions of his own countrymen. Hey, this isn’t a tea party thing – this cotton is from the source.

(if embed no worky, please click here)



KT has a reading recommendation for Obama's communication director, Anita Dunn.

This first authoritative expose of the 1958-1962 famine prompted by China's collectivization plan, "The Great Leap Forward," comes at a time when the cult of Mao is alive and well inside China, and while agents of Chinese influence are able to arrange audiences with a President. Via his painstaking research and reporting that included two treks through interior Chinese provinces, Becker tells how the famine occurred because ill-trained peasants were forced to undertake a gigantic and centralized industrial and agricultural expansion. The new factories, canals, and irrigation systems failed spectacularly, and in contrast to propaganda boasts of having economically outstripped the U.S., when in reality the populace was driven by starvation to cannibalism, slavery, and madness.

And what's this? Another Mao-o-phile in the White House? Gateway Pundit has more, here.

Few things puzzle us more than supposedly educated people holding murderous thugs like Mao and Che and their ideology in any regard whatsoever.

Quote of the Day

“We, the Chinese human-rights activists, are like the Jews were in Nazi Germany. We can be arrested, jailed, killed at any moment at the Communist Party’s whim. Why the Western media, political leaders, and intellectuals do not support us more is a mystery to us. When we all disappear, you will ask yourself why you did not do more. But it will be too late then.”

It has become conventional wisdom in some quarters that the Maoist brand of communism is derived from the Chinese culture itself, that the Chinese Communist Party is heir to ancient cultural traditions within China.

However, in East Asia that is home to disparate cultures and societies that have nevertheless witnessed human disasters as Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in China, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the boat people of Vietnam and the concentration camps of North Korea, there has been only one constant: Communism.

As we noted with respect to the ironies of Keynesian economics, the irony of the Chinese urban bourgeoisie maintaining their standard of living on the oppression of the rural Chinese would not be lost on one Karl Marx.

But ideology only counts for so much when it is power and stability that is sought by government rather than freedom and liberty being protected by that government.

Totalitarian enough

Its comforting to know that we’re not the only country with some eminent domain issues. You see, China has them also.

A couple of poor old Chinese ladies have been sentenced by the Beijing police to “re-education through labor” for having the temerity to apply for a legal protest in a designated area there in the city. They are doing so because they are none too pleased about what they feel is the government reneging on a deal that would’ve put them up in tonier digs as their former homes had been razed to facilitate Olympic-themed development near Tiananmen Square.

Unfortunately, they are living in a ramshackle apartment on the outskirts of the city and their demands for compensation have gone unanswered.

Well, not unanswered entirely, of course. Both Ms. Wu, 79 and Ms. Wang, 77 have been allowed to return to their “home” but have been warned they could be sent to a detention center at any moment. Keep that overnight bag packed and by the door, ladies.

Officials say that they received 77 protest applications but that nearly all of them were dropped after the complaints were “properly addressed by relevant authorities or departments through consultations.”

If by “properly addressed” one means threats, intimidation, arrests, strong-arming and jail time, then, yes, all 77 applicants have been “properly addressed.”

And as an example of not quite grasping the realities of one’s surroundings, the authors of linked article from the New York Times ponder,
“It is unclear why the police have detained people who sought permission to protest.”

Perhaps Li Fangpin, a lawyer who has been arrested and beaten for fighting for representation of rights advocates can help out the authors: “For Chinese petitioners, if their protest applications were approved, it would lead to a chain reaction of others seeking to voice their problems as well,”

We always find it charming when people in the thick of the struggle find it necessary to break things down to the most elementary of levels for their more obtuse Western observers.

To be as charitable to the Chicomms, our hosts this past fortnight, as we can be, no government wants their dirty laundry aired… its just that constitutionally-based democracies appear to have a higher threshold of pain when it comes to this sort of thing.

P.S. B-Daddy noted in a comment in an earlier post that the term “Arbeit macht frei” is a German phrase meaning “work brings freedom” and which graced the entrances of Nazi Germany’s most infamous concentration camps and whose philosophical underpinnings parallel that of the “re-education through labor” of the Chinese.

We mention this because there are great similarities in the philosophies and ideological execution of all the great totalitarian strains of faith be it fascism, Stalinism or Maoism.

P.P.S. The title of this post is in reference to Nicolas Kristof’s equivocating over the term “totalitarian” which we took to task, here.

H/T: B-Daddy and Hedgecock

Define Revolution

We’re kind of surprised it took this long but now after “The Motorcycle Diaries”, the Che’ floodgates have been opened. Steven Soderbergh’s two-part Che’ biopic, “The Argentinian” and “Guerilla”, played at Cannes and “Chevolution”, a look at the mass marketing of the iconic Che’ image have been making the festival rounds… no word on when they are showing at your local suburban multiplex – check your local listings.

As “The Motorcycle Diaries” focused on the pre-Cuba Che’, Soderbergh’s movies will be the first to depict Che’ as what this article calls “the legendary Argentinian-doctor-cum-internationalist-revolutionary.” It is noted, they neglected, “Head of Cuban Prison System”, “Castro’s strong-man”, “murderer”, “common thug” and “most-likely rapist”… hey, if the Left can gloss over some inconvenient truths about their man then certainly we can take some dramatic license with his life and accomplishments, as well.

Anyway, so what are we to make of the marketing of Che’ and the supposed irony of Che’ being co-opted in total by capitalism? Are we to take some solace that his Maoist reputation has been permanently soiled by the taint of green (the other “green”) or should it trouble us further that his “brand” which ultimately represents the restriction of free trade and commerce and repressions of liberty, thought and speech, has gone Main Street?

Frankly, it’s a lot of both so we remain torn. We love the fact that “Che’” has become the ultimate sell-out and Madison Avenue shill but we remain discouraged that through the years and with increasing frequency and vigor his actions and motives have been entirely glossed-over and worse, hailed as virtuous.

So until such time when we can come up with an equally market-viable and intellectually and morally empty response to all that is Brand Che’ we offer only, “Revolution..? We got your Revolution right here, pal.”. Oi!