April 2020 – education and deconstruction.com

Patriot Number One

Americans believe in the two-party system. One on Friday, one on Saturday.

Insanely enough, Americans are not allowed to have parties anymore. Because, ironically, America is becoming like China!

The following is an excerpt from a China-bashing opinion piece penned by Newt Gingrich for the Fox News website, dated April 30, 2020. However, every occasion of “Chinese” has been replaced with “American” and “Communist” with “Two-Party” and vice versa.

“Chinese and their allies seem to forget that the heart of the rise of the American Two-Party [system] was a deep dedication to effective education and propaganda. They have had nearly a century of experience at waging intellectual and psychological warfare as the necessary foundation of winning and keeping power.”

The following is a quote from Bertrand Russell: “There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.”

During the Cold War, America always stoked the fear that all countries had the potential to fall to Communism like dominoes. Currently, the local leaders of this country, America (!)– have fallen into line like dominoes. At any time, either major American political party has possessed the power to reject this oppression, but instead, both parties have collaborated to encourage it. Because they are comprised of people who will say or do anything to get elected or reelected in the event there continue to be free and fair elections.

AS IS WELL KNOWN, A SIGN OF DEMOCRACY IS FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS. IF THE INCUMBENTS ALMOST AUTOMATICALLY WIN THIS FALL, IS THAT FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS?

From the early 1960’s into the 1970’s, only men of military age had reason to fear the power of the government. Currently, every man, woman and child has reason to fear. It is not just the president who has the potential to wield outrageous power, but all government leaders across the entire country, not unlike in China.

The United States is now at a turning point in its history. Either it will become even more like China in its totalitarian ways, or its leaders will get back to restoring its citizens’ freedoms.

It might be recalled that Chinese Communist dictator Mao Tse Tung took the following steps, among many other steps, in acquiring more and more power:

Land reform– seizing private property from wealthy capitalists and landlords to redistribute it among everyone else (but this actually resulted in famine in which tens of millions of people died; famine is probably one thing Americans won’t suffer from)

nationalizing businesses

having a state-approved, heavily armed military force roam the streets, arbitrarily violating peoples’ civil rights

Inviting citizens to air their grievances, and then arresting, jailing and torturing them for speaking out against the government

Eliminating free speech, freedom of the press, and the right to assemble, and

Reducing the number of China’s political parties to one: The Communist Party, and forcing people to join it or be even more oppressed

For more information, see the following posts:

The Most Wanted Man in China

The Man on Mao’s Right

Colors of the Mountain

Is the above what America wants to be??

One more thing– ironically, China is in the stage of its economic development that the United States was in, about a hundred years ago: industrialization and operating factories galore (of course, China also has modern electronic technology). But the poorest of China’s citizens have yet to form labor unions to protest unjust working conditions. Some people in the United States government are pushing for a return to American manufacturing, strangely enough.

Anyway, the Book of the Week is “Patriot Number One, American Dreams in Chinatown” by Lauren Hilgers, published in 2018. This book described the Chinese immigrant experience in very recent years for a rural-village couple who are now in their thirties, and a student, who settled in the Flushing section of New York City, in Queens county.

Born in 1983 in the rural village of Wukan near Shenzhen, Zhuang Liehong grew up in a poverty-stricken family. His father was a sometime crab fisherman. He was handed off from one extended relative to another in Hong Kong beginning when he was about six years old.

Zhuang ended his formal education with middle school, not wanting to impose the financial burden of high school tuition on his family. In the 1990’s, his hometown became the victim of eminent-domain abuse of sorts, when investors invaded with infrastructure and modernization projects as a result of Deng Xiaoping’s 1980’s economic initiatives.

Zhuang was elected to a seat on Wukan’s village council, and became a political activist. Autumn 2011 saw common farmers and former landowners protest in the streets against the local government’s stealing their properties in the name of money. However, they themselves weren’t entirely innocent of law-breaking, as they had engaged in illegal building on their former land, or had been “smugglers, gamblers, ticket scalpers.”

As is very common with such unrest, the local authorities bashed some heads, rounded up the worst offenders and sentenced a few of them to a few years in jail, and trampled on what would be considered “due process” in the United States.

A few years later, after Zhuang (and his wife) had executed his carefully planned scheme to flee to the United States, the local government also set up a bribery scandal that involved the village council, prompting more oppression of the community.

A possible legal way, then, for Zhuang to move permanently to the United States, was for him to apply for political asylum. More people from China than from any other nation apply for political asylum, followed by Guatemala, El Salvador and Egypt.

Read the book to learn of Zhuang’s family’s adventures in the United States, and of the adventures of a young female student who became friendly with Zhuang’s wife.

Where Have All Our Leaders Gone?

WHERE HAVE ALL OUR LEADERS GONE?

Sung to the tune of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” with apologies to the estate of Pete Seeger, and Joe Hickerson.

Where have all our leaders gone?

Secretly scheming.

Where have all our leaders gone?

Plotting revenge.

Where have all our leaders gone?

Planting stories, every one.

Can we trust anything?

Where has all the money gone?

Profits and patronage.

Where has all the money gone?

Honor among thieves.

Where has all the money gone?

Stimulus was two seconds of fun.

Aren’t we the guinea pigs?

Where have all the candidates gone?

They’ve stopped campaigning.

Where have all the candidates gone?

They’re attorney-huddling.

Where have all the candidates gone?

No more substance from anyone.

Do we know anything?

Where have all our freedoms gone?

Fallen by the wayside.

Where have all our freedoms gone?

We don’t know.

Where have all our freedoms gone?

MORE SURPRISES IN STORE, SO HOLD ON.

ISN’T HISTORY CYCLICAL?

Breaking News

The Book of the Week is “Breaking News, A Stunning and Memorable Account of Reporting from Some of the Most Dangerous Places in the World” by Martin Fletcher, published in 2008.

Fletcher began his career in his mid-twenties in the early 1970’s, when he found he was super-focused with a news camera. He recorded wars, famines and revolutions in the world’s hotspots. He himself was at peace only when he was telling the world about traumatic events involving mass deaths and ruined lives. He asked, “How could the world have stood by as so many were slaughtered, in so many places?”

Fletcher and his family’s permanent residence was in Israel. Fletcher interviewed dozens of bad guys (terrorists, dictators’ aides, etc.) and wrote, “These gunmen were not my friends; they were just professional sources. However much I might understand their plight, I kept reminding myself, these men wanted to kill my children and their friends.”

On a few different occasions, Fletcher had been following a developing story, but his news-organization employer sent him to get a scoop (which he got) only when the number of white people involved reached a significant number, or when their assets were threatened. In Zaire, he spoke into his tape recorder for a later NBC radio broadcast, to report on eighty Americans taken hostage and Zaire’s endangered vast mineral deposits, even though thousands of native Africans had already become casualties.

From 2001 to 2005, there was a rash of suicide bombings in Israel. The nation took precautions by stationing an armed guard at the door of its every cafe and restaurant; funding this through charging an additional fifty cents to every customer.

Fletcher spoke with the mother of a teenage girl who was killed in one of the attacks. The mother didn’t seek revenge but merely wanted peace. She personally knew Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu. She felt that he thought like a terrorist– provocative, petty, vengeful and mean of spirit. With his words and actions, he invited the enemy to blow themselves to glory, and kill his own side.

Read the book to learn the details of the author’s extreme career, of his near-death experiences, and the mentalities of the reporter and his subjects.

ENDNOTE: Fletcher was an old-school adrenaline-junkie-TV-journalist. His goal was to cover and convey a story about other people. In the next week or two, the leader of the free world doesn’t want the post-virus-scare re-opening of society to steal HIS headlines. Is it any wonder that attention whoredom among ALL Americans, “news” reporters included, is at an all-time high?

Pertinent Post

“P” post.

Present pandemic’s politics produced:

propaganda

president-promotion

provisions-portioning predicaments

panic

profiteering

paranoia

patronage pigs

pissed, persecuted people

poseurs

puerile politicians (petty power plays)

pained physicians

problematic prescriptions

pressured paramedics

pestered practices

poor populations

plus, predictably:

POPPYCOCK.

Ingrid Bergman, My Story

The Book of the Week is “Ingrid Bergman, My Story” by Ingrid Bergman and Alan Burgess, published in 1972.

Born in 1915 in Sweden, Bergman lived with extended relatives after her mother and father passed away, when she was three and thirteen, respectively. The father’s successful painting and photography-supply businesses were taken over by the family. When she was fifteen, a couple of friends in high places– and of course, passion and hard work– allowed her to get accepted to the Royal Dramatic School. Nevertheless, she quit to become a movie actress in Sweden.

David Selznick in America heard about her talent, and his wife set her wise as to Hollywood’s ways. Her advisors therefore negotiated a one-film contract rather than a seven-year contract. Bergman was the opposite of a prima donna on the set. Selznick was impressed and had his public relations people hold her up as a paragon of virtue and modesty. However, she refused to be typecast, insisting on playing all different kinds of roles.

Bergman wrote, “Another Hollywood thing I hated was the power of those two women, Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, the gossip columnists. Their power shocked me, and I thought it very wrong that the film industry had allowed them to build up to such an extent that they could ruin people’s careers and lives.” Sadly, there is nothing new under the sun in that regard. Gossip in American society has been used more often for evil than for good, especially in politics.

Anyway, in autumn 1946, Bergman got slammed for saying she wasn’t going to return Washington, D.C. because the theater there in which she was performing, banned blacks. Perhaps she was not a racist, but her immaturity in her personal relationships caused her first husband and first-born daughter endless anguish.

Read the book to learn of Bergman’s dream role, whether she got to play it, other roles she played, and about her families.

Nicholas Winton’s Lottery of Life

The Book of the Week is “Nicholas Winton’s Lottery of Life” by Matej Minac, published in 2007.

By chance, Nicholas Winton’s friend, Martin Blake suggested that Winton come to Prague instead of going on a ski vacation in Switzerland, to work on an interesting project on the eve of WWII.

Winton eventually gave up a good job in London at the Stock Exchange to rescue Czech children from the Nazis. He valued human lives more than South African gold. His belief was: “People often say that something can’t be done before they even try to do it, which is just an excuse to do nothing! Most things that seem impossible can actually be achieved by hard work.”

Winton must have enjoyed the challenge of overcoming obstacles, because the burden was on him to arrange the logistics, raise the funds and complete the paperwork.

There are a few ways that Winton’s situation is analogous to this nation’s current situation:

Winton was one of countless unsung heros during a time of multi-national turmoil. His major goal was to save lives, not to make money. Countless Americans on the “front lines” are making great sacrifices to save others– without hitting the social media to brag or push their opinions on the world. The people who truly want to help others are just doing their jobs.

Creatively, Winton did an end-run around British bureaucracy at the Home Office by founding a fictional organization to speed up glacial processes. It had to be super-discreet, though, because there were spies everywhere. Ironically, Americans have unlimited free speech through texting, email, and social media, but their every electronic utterance is recorded by the powers-that-be (who are all as politically entrenched as ever), so that communications are just as insecure as they ever were!

Obviously, Winton’s communications couldn’t always be completely honest if he was to save lives. It was wartime, after all. However, Americans with ulterior motives are pushing specific proposals that will likely benefit them financially, politically or both. Incidentally, with his overwhelming power and influence in certain circles, president Donald Trump is the new Oprah Winfrey. When he mentions a company or product, its stock or the product sells like hotcakes the same way that, when Oprah featured a book on her show, it sold like hotcakes.

Prior to vaccines, Americans accepted the fact that they might become ill or even die from diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, mumps, etc. In the last fifty years or so, money has corrupted medicine. A continuous propaganda campaign– the profit motive in the guise of life-saving treatments– has convinced Americans that it’s now inexcusable to die from disease.

Winton convinced Czech parents that everyone was in imminent danger and at least their children’s lives could be saved, as the Germans had total control of all the Czech regions by early 1939. Winton wasn’t lying when he told Czechs their lives were at risk due to wartime occupation by an evil enemy.

It’s impossible to prove that shutting down the entire United States would reduce the number of deaths from a pandemic. Especially when projected deaths have been, at best, incompetently calculated, and at worst, an object lesson in how to lie with statistics.

Clearly, WWII required there to be myths and misinformation in the media to avoid revealing state secrets to the country’s enemies. But that shouldn’t be the case with the pandemic. Yet it is.

Actually– myths and misinformation have always emanated from news sources from the beginning of time. In the last century, communications sources have only appeared to be more credible than now, because their language used to be more formal, more grammatical, and better written and formatted. The sources slanted information and got facts wrong just as often as now, due to pressure on them to get a story first, and make it entertaining and persuasive. The only slight difference is that currently, a larger percentage of content is opinions rather than information.

Winton eventually compiled a list of five thousand children to be rescued. Read the book to learn of the actual number of children he saved, what happened to them, the later fates of some of them, and what happened when a Czech documentary filmmaker found Winton about sixty years later.

The Man on Mao’s Right

The Book of the Week is “The Man on Mao’s Right, From Harvard Yard to Tiananmen Square, My Life Inside China’s Foreign Ministry” by Ji Chaozhu, published in 2008.

Born in 1929 in the Chinese village of Taijun, Ji lived a charmed early childhood, as his politically connected father was a law professor and commissioner of education. In 1937, his family was forced to move in with his paternal grandfather in Fenyang when the Japanese continued their siege of China.

By the end of the 1930’s, the family had fled from their palace to the United States. They moved into a tiny tenement in the East Village in Manhattan. One aspect of their living standards that was actually higher, was the modern plumbing.

Ji had a much, much older, politically connected brother– old enough to be his father– who purported to aid the Chinese Communists, then Americans, alternating between the two throughout his life. But his loyalties truly lay with the Communists.

Ji’s father behaved similarly, translating between English and Japanese for the U.S. Office of War Information after the Pearl Harbor attack, but also starting a secret pro-Communist Chinese newspaper sold in Chinatown. In 1946, he returned to China to become president of Peking University.

Ji learned English in a progressive private school. As he got older, he too began to believe that the Americans were imperialists, as they invaded Korea. He therefore quit Harvard in his junior year to return to China.

Ji had no problem enduring mean living conditions there– more than a hundred students in his Tsinghua University dorm had to share one bathroom. They had a communal bathhouse. A food shortage meant that his diet consisted of only sorghum, corn millet, dried sweet potato flour and pickled vegetables. There were no chairs in the cafeteria– students ate standing up.

When Mao Tse Tung’s Communist party took over China in 1949, the U.S. Seventh Fleet in Taiwan protected Chiang Kai-Shek, the corrupt, exiled leader of the defeated Nationalist party.

In April 1951, Douglas MacArthur was dismissed from his military leadership position by president Harry Truman for having grand plans to wage nuclear war against the Communists. Congress member Albert Gore, Sr. echoed MacArthur’s hawkish sentiments, proposing that the United States warn people to evacuate Korea, and then showering it with nuclear waste to force a stop to the war.

Ji began to attend self-criticism meetings and worship Mao as though he were a supreme being. But Ji wasn’t automatically accepted as a member of the Communist party because his reputation was tainted with Western values. His father and much, much older brother had worked for the American government in various capacities, and his family had lived in America for a time.

Nevertheless, Ji’s fluency in English, high-level education, and understanding of Western culture were major assets that few Chinese people had. So China’s Foreign Ministry recruited him to translate and take notes at the Korean peace talks in spring 1952. He and his fellow interpreters risked their lives in traveling to the site of the negotiations in Panmunjon in North Korea. They survived shelling, strafing and bombing.

Ji then survived the pressure to perfectly, manually type up the excessive number of revisions in Korean, English and Chinese that led to an almost-final written agreement in July 1953. This, after about two million war deaths over the course of two years, with neither of the multi-national sides making any significant progress geographically.

After a short stop at home, Ji was then sent to Geneva for more abuse, but without life-threatening dangers overhead.

Back in China, the landlords and the capitalists were under physical siege by the peasants in rural farming villages. Mao egged on the violence. However, in late 1956, after the common Hungarian people staged an uprising against their Communist oppressors, Mao realized he needed to take steps to avoid that kind of situation in China. So, “… for the first time, American magazines, books, and the occasional film became available. Before that, any Western literature or movies were banned.”

In a move that was nothing new under the sun, Mao gave the Chinese people a chance to air their grievances. One professor complained that Party members and cadres were living high on the hog while the peasants were starving.

Mao then wrote articles saying that the government then knew who the infidels were. He launched his Anti-Rightist campaign. A lot of bourgeois people were fired from their jobs, and sent to reeducation camps. Many people suicided, were executed or never heard from again. Unsurprisingly, the famine in China resulted in about thirty million deaths.

Beginning in the late 1950’s, over the next decade, Ji dutifully did the jobs he was assigned. For months at a time, he alternated between going to rural areas to help with manual labor, and sitting at Zhou Enlai’s side, sometimes even at Mao’s side– interpreting at diplomatic meetings.

In August 1966, a group of adolescents comprised of sociopathic sadists supplied with weaponry– also known as the Red Guards– terrorized anyone accused of disloyalty to Communist ideology (i.e., ownership by the dictatorial State, rather than ownership by private parties, of the means of production; plus other conditions). Anyone could be an accuser. Mao encouraged everyone to be snitches. The victims of violence also included embassy personnel of the former Soviet Union, India and Burma. Not to mention, in August 1967, people in the British consulate.

While ugliness raged in China and was exacerbated with U.S. intervention in Vietnam, there was a similarity with the two countries’ leadership. Zhou Enlai’s role under Mao was like vice president Hubert Humphrey’s under president Lyndon Johnson’s. The second fiddles both obeyed their bosses to keep their jobs, even though their bosses’s actions caused an excessive number of needless deaths and ruined lives.

Read the book to learn much more about the history of China, and Ji’s life and times.