90 Miles From Tyranny

Monday, June 22, 2020

Our Freedoms Are Under Attack...

How Cultural Revolutions Die—or Not

Unlike coups or political revolutions, cultural revolutions don’t just change governments or leaders. Instead, they try to redefine entire societies. Their leaders call them “holistic” and “systematic.”

Cultural revolutionaries attack the very referents of our daily lives. The Jacobins’ so-called Reign of Terror during the French Revolution slaughtered Christian clergy, renamed months, and created a new supreme being Reason.

Mao cracked down on supposed Western decadence like the wearing of eyeglasses and made peasants forge pot iron and intellectuals wear dunce caps.

Muammar Kaddafi’s Green Book cult wiped out violins and forced Libyans to raise chickens in their apartments.

The current Black Lives Matter Revolution has “canceled” certain movies, television shows and cartoons, toppled statues, tried to create new autonomous urban zones, and renamed streets and plazas. Some fanatics shave their heads. Others have shamed authorities into washing the feet of their fellow revolutionaries.

But inevitably cultural revolutions die out when they turn cannibalistic. Once the Red Guard started killing party hacks too close to Mao, it began to wane.

If toppling Confederate statues is required, what then about Nancy Pelosi’s own mayor father, who once as Baltimore’s mayor dedicated honorific statues to Confederate generals?

If racists understandably do not deserve their names on national shrines, what to do with the iconic liberal graduate program at Princeton, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs? It was named for a president who did more to further segregation and racial prejudice than any chief executive of the 20th century.

Stanford and Yale, coveted brand names of the progressive professional classes, are named after what protesters now deem racists.

It is easier to target Fort Bragg, the iconic military base named after a Confederate general, racist, and military mediocrity than to see one’s MBA or Ph.D. lose its Yale luster, or to confess that a liberal presidential icon perpetuated racism.

Once a cultural revolution gets going, there can be no contextualization of the past, no allowance for human frailty, no consideration of weighing evil vs. good.

Eventually, the architects of cultural upheavals always make two miscalculations:

‘Stunning’: Barr hits establishment media for ‘bovine silence’ on collapsed Russiagate narrative

Attorney General William Barr hit the establishment media in an interview aired Sunday for what he called its “bovine silence” regarding the debunked narrative of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government.

In an interview on “Fox Sunday Futures,” Barr also asserted that the various government investigations into the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Kremlin were the “closest we have come to an organized effort to push a president out of office” since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Barr has long questioned the FBI’s decision to open a counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign in July 2016. He appointed John Durham, the U.S. attorney for Connecticut, to conduct a review of the investigation and other surveillance conducted against Trump campaign associates.

He said in the Fox News interview that Durham’s probe will yield some results “hopefully before the end of the summer.”

Watch Part 1:

Barr leveled his most pointed critique against the establishment media, which he accused of pushing the conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin.

“It’s like not even a ‘Whoops,’ and they’re just on to the next false scandal,” Barr said in the interview.

“It’s been stunning that all we’ve gotten from the mainstream media is sort of bovine silence in the face of the complete collapse of the so-called Russiagate scandal, which they did all they could to...

The New Orthodoxy of Lies

American structural racism takes a number of forms, some of them quite subtle. So, apparently, does gratitude.

The lies have been around for half a century, wafting through America’s elite institutions until, in the last few years, they began to coagulate into an orthodoxy—a process that has reached its culmination in just the last few weeks.

Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va.) says America invented slavery. CNN’s Don Lemon says: “If you grew up in America, you came out of American soil, considering the history of this country . . . how can you not be racist?” The New York Times’ Pulitzer-winning “1619 Project” says that America was founded on slavery and racism.

Lies—outrageous lies. America, uniquely among all nations, was founded on freedom. Like virtually all other nations up to that time, it inherited the stain of slavery. Our Founders recognized this contradiction. Three generations later, in an unprecedented war, 400,000 white soldiers died fighting to free black slaves. But now it’s racist to say so.

Racist to say that the first European settlers in North America didn’t introduce slavery to the New World, because the practice of enslaving members of defeated tribes was already common among American Indians.

Racist to say that white Americans didn’t enslave blacks, because American slaveholders bought blacks who’d already been enslaved back in Africa by other blacks.

Racist to say that Africans also held over a million white European slaves between the years 1500 and 1800.

Racist to say that slavery, long vanished in America, still exists in Africa.

Racist to say that while America has a history of slavery and a legacy of racial prejudice, we’ve overcome it in our institutions.

Racist to say that black Americans today enjoy an unprecedented degree of prosperity and freedom.

Racist to point out that we elected a black president—twice.

Corporate Cowardice

Yes, some whites still dislike blacks. Some blacks dislike whites. But not many. When people like Al Sharpton and the leaders of Black Lives Matter insist that racism remains a major aspect of American life and blame current problems on past injustices, they’re selling lies.

Do we see spokespeople for other races doing this? Do we even see other races, by and large, havingspokespeople?

When I was growing up in New York, I had a lot of Jewish friends, and they’d all lost relatives in the Holocaust. They mourned their losses. They said, “Never again.” But they didn’t try to leverage their tragedy to win societal brownie points or to accuse “all gentiles” of anti-Semitism.

After the Vietnam War, “boat people” came to America. Some of them had fought Communism alongside U.S. troops; all had suffered reversals owing to the war. When they came to America, many couldn’t speak English. But they didn’t hold protests. They didn’t riot. They found jobs or started small businesses. They worked hard and encouraged their kids to study. And next thing you knew, those kids were winning national spelling bees.

And their fellow Americans cheered them. Far more than the citizens of many other countries, including the Nordic lands that are celebrated by the Left as moral lodestars, Americans are ready to embrace as fellow Americans any foreigners who enter their country legally, learn the language, work...

China's one child policy has led to an overpopulation in the Chinese male population.

India's Dowry Culture and Ultrasound technology has led to an overpopulation of the Indian malepopulation.

The two largest population's on earth and all that frustrated testosterone.

Beijing is enraged over current widespread Indian media reports that the Indian Army has been given orders to shoot or use "complete freedom of action" in hostile engagements with Chinese PLA forces along the disputed Ladakh border region.

The reports come following last week's major border incident with China that resulted in 20 Indian Army troops killed, and an undisclosed number of Chinese PLA casualties in the disputed Galwan Valley area of East Ladakh.

Chinese state-media Global Times editor Hu Xijin called out the reports, saying that if the new 'rules of engagement' are true, it's a serious violation of prior treaties implemented for deescalation.

Indeed multiple headlines in major Indian newspapers asserted that Indian troops have been issued the new controversial orders.

The Hindustan Times for one, had this to say:

A significant change in Rules of Engagement (ROE) by the Indian Army following the Galwan Valley skirmish that left 20 Indian soldiers dead gives “complete freedom of action” to commanders deployed along the contested Line of Actual Control (LAC) to “handle situations at the tactical level,” two senior officers said on Saturday on condition of anonymity.

The commanders will no longer be bound by restrictions on the use of firearms and will have full authority to respond to “extraordinary situations” using all resources at their disposal, said one of the officers cited above.

Essentially troops will be able to fire on opposing Chinese troops if they feel under threat without consulting higher level officers or the national chain of command.

Obviously this holds the potential for more such deadly escalations as happened a week ago, considered the most severe Chinese-India clash along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in a half-century.

June 16 satellite image showing Chinese military personnel in the Galwan Valley. Souce: 2020 Planet Labs/AFP/Getty Images

The Guardian reported that Indian soldiers actually "fell to their deaths" after being knocked off a narrow ridge:

The hand-to-hand combat lasted hours, on steep, jagged terrain, with iron bars, rocks and fists. Neither side carried guns. Most of the soldiers killed in the worst fighting between India and China in 60 years lost their footing or were knocked from the narrow Himalayan ridge, plunging to...