Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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The antidote to all idiocy emanating from Friedman


Scott Johnson nails it: Thomas Friedman, you pitiful fool,

Friedman’s utopian daydream is a liberal fantasy that fits into a long and disgraceful tradition of protecting or celebrating Communists and Communism at the Times.

By contrast, journalist and China scholar Jonathan Mirsky is an honorable left-winger who has been a close and critical observer of the high price of Communism on the citizens of China. Mirsky’s essay on Liu Xiabo, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner, appears in the current New York Times Book Review under the headline “Exiled at home” and online under the headline “Liu Xiaobo’s plea for the human spirit.” Appearing in the Times, the essay can’t be given my fantasy heading for it: “Thomas Friedman, you pitiful fool.”

Liu Xiaobo’s book, No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems, has a foreword by Vaclac Havel.

Read the review, buy the book.

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NYTimes finally gets around to publishing an article about the evil of Mao

Frank Dikotter writes in the NYT’s op-ed page, Mao’s Great Leap to Famine

Historians have known for some time that the Great Leap Forward resulted in one of the world’s worst famines. Demographers have used official census figures to estimate that some 20 to 30 million people died.

But inside the archives is an abundance of evidence, from the minutes of emergency committees to secret police reports and public security investigations, that show these estimates to be woefully inadequate.

In the summer of 1962, for instance, the head of the Public Security Bureau in Sichuan sent a long handwritten list of casualties to the local boss, Li Jingquan, informing him that 10.6 million people had died in his province from 1958 to 1961. In many other cases, local party committees investigated the scale of death in the immediate aftermath of the famine, leaving detailed computations of the scale of the horror.

In all, the records I studied suggest that the Great Leap Forward was responsible for at least 45 million deaths.

Between 2 and 3 million of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed, often for the slightest infraction. People accused of not working hard enough were hung and beaten; sometimes they were bound and thrown into ponds. Punishments for the least violations included mutilation and forcing people to eat excrement.

Mao was fully in charge (emphasis added):

The term “famine” tends to support the widespread view that the deaths were largely the result of half-baked and poorly executed economic programs. But the archives show that coercion, terror and violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward.

Mao was sent many reports about what was happening in the countryside, some of them scribbled in longhand. He knew about the horror, but pushed for even greater extractions of food.

At a secret meeting in Shanghai on March 25, 1959, he ordered the party to procure up to one-third of all the available grain — much more than ever before. The minutes of the meeting reveal a chairman insensitive to human loss: “When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.”

Mao’s Great Famine was not merely an isolated episode in the making of modern China. It was its turning point. The subsequent Cultural Revolution was the leader’s attempt to take revenge on the colleagues who had dared to oppose him during the Great Leap Forward.

In a rare post, Instapundit says,

Communists are as bad as Nazis, and their defenders and apologists are as bad as Nazis’ defenders, but far more common. When you meet them, show them no respect. They’re evil, stupid, and dishonest. They should not enjoy the consequences of their behavior.

One of Instapundit’s readers thinks “it is possible to be a communist with the “good will,” i.e. to sincerely wish the best most prosperous future for everyone.” The thing is, the “good intentions” argument is done for.

Whether Marx or Lenin [typo corrected] had good intentions ever (which they didn’t), or whether Communist apologists “sincerely wish the best most prosperous future for everyone”, is besides the point: The moral blindness and lack of compass of anyone who can possibly defend the Communist system, knowing that Communism is directly responsible for the deaths of some 100 million people*, is indefensible as of itself.

———————————–

* Yes, here’s the footnote:
The Black Book of Communism estimates that perhaps 65 million people died in China under Mao.
That estimate has to be recalculated. Dikotter states,

In all, the records I studied suggest that the Great Leap Forward was responsible for at least 45 million deaths.

The Great Leap Forward started in 1958, lasted for a couple of years, and was followed by the bloodbath of the Cultural Revolution. Mao was in power from 1949 to 1976.

Cross-posted in The Green Room.

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Idiotic proposal of the day: A King and Queen for America

Nicholas Kristoff in the NYT wants a A King and Queen for America because

Our president is stuck with too many ceremonial duties as head of state, such as greeting ambassadors and holding tedious state dinners, that divert attention from solving problems. You can preside over America or you can address its problems, but it’s difficult to find time to do both.

Been there, done that, Nick.

Imagine being stuck for a lifetime of dufusness from The Tampon, or even from one of the more unruly Monaco offspring…at taxpayer expense.

Just this morning I was saying in the podcast, “let’s bow our heads and give thanks for presidential term limits.” Amen.

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Which one is it, Tom?

After hitting us with the idiot shtick on China, Friedman says he hates dictators:

Turkey and Brazil are both nascent democracies that have overcome their own histories of military rule. For their leaders to embrace and strengthen an Iranian president who uses his army and police to crush and kill Iranian democrats — people seeking the same freedom of speech and political choice that Turks and Brazilians now enjoy — is shameful.

As frequent readers of this blog know, I don’t post rumors; this time, however, I’ll post on a rumor.

The rumor is that the Obama administration gave a wink-wink nod-nod to Lula’s trip in the hope that Lula and Erdogan would come back convincing the Iranians to end the Iranian nuclear weapons program. The Friedman article hints at this,

Sure, had Brazil and Turkey actually persuaded the Iranians to verifiably end their whole suspected nuclear weapons program, America would have endorsed it. But that is not what happened.

Iran today has about 4,850 pounds of low-enriched uranium. Under the May 17 deal, it has supposedly agreed to send some 2,640 pounds from its stockpile to Turkey for conversion into the type of nuclear fuel needed to power Tehran’s medical reactor — a fuel that cannot be used for a bomb. But that would still leave Iran with a roughly 2,200-pound uranium stockpile, which it still refuses to put under international inspection and is free to augment and continue to reprocess to the higher levels needed for a bomb. Experts say it would only take months for Iran to again amass sufficient quantity for a nuclear weapon.

Instead, Lula and Erdogan played right into the mullahs’ hands:

So what this deal really does is what Iran wanted it to do: weaken the global coalition to pressure Iran to open its nuclear facilities to U.N. inspectors, and, as a special bonus, legitimize Ahmadinejad on the anniversary of his crushing the Iranian democracy movement that was demanding a recount of Iran’s tainted June 2009 elections.

Friedman says he wants Iran to be a democracy. Good. But he also says, hey, let’s have the USA be China for a day!

Which one is it, Tom?

———————————-

This will be the subject of today’s podcast at 11AM Eastern

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Hey, Tom, be thankful you were born before 1979*

Thomas Friedman hits us with the idiot shtick on a periodic basis:

I have fantasized—don’t get me wrong—but that what if we could just be China for a day? I mean, just, just, just one day. You know, I mean, where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions, and I do think there is a sense of that, on, on everything from the economy to environment. I don’t want to be China for a second, OK, I want my democracy to work with the same authority, focus and stick-to-itiveness. But right now we have a system that can only produce suboptimal solutions.

Matt Welch notices that

If know anything about America’s worst successful columnist, it’s that he won’t rest until he’s flogged a terrible idea again and again and again.

Over to you, Ed:

Hmmm… if Tom lived in China, would he be able to access the New York Times on the internet?

* According to Friedman’s bio,

He has two older sisters, Shelley and Jane.

Had any of them been conceived in China after 1979, two of them would not be alive now. China instituted its lethal one-child policy in 1979.

How’s that for a suboptimal solution, Tom?

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David Brooks: Don’t worry, be happy?

From the rarified halls of the New York Times, David Brooks encourages us to Relax, We’ll Be Fine, since

The United States already measures at the top or close to the top of nearly every global measure of economic competitiveness.

Jennifer Rubin read Brooks’s article and points out that America Is Not on Autopilot, and that

the political culture – and the policy choices it produces – can retard or shut off the very trends and phenomena that Brooks praises. Immigration could be choked off — as it was in previous eras of economic uncertainty. That economic dynamism that Brooks touts is not impervious to the regulatory, tax, and legal framework that political elites produce. In fact, it is the enormous uptick in debt, the growth of the public sector, the tax hikes, and the financial micromanagement that the Obama administration is pushing that threaten to make America a less productive, less dynamic, and less wealthy nation. That “decentralized community-building” that Brooks likes can be subverted by an overreaching federal government that seeks to regulate everything from the type of health insurance we must buy to the emissions that the local electric company can put out to the sorts of infrastructure projects that are funded.

In sum, the American social and economic culture that has produced tremendous wealth, upward mobility, and opportunity can be eroded by foolish policies. Similarly, our national security — which is a prerequisite for that blissful domestic environment — can be imperiled by a reckless approach that ignores looming threats, imagines our foes share common values, and alienates allies.

Perhaps Brooks was listening to Bobby McFerrin while writing his article, though,

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Reviewing Frank Rich

Former entertainment critic Frank Rich thought he’d be a good political opiner for the NYT, and it’s time he gets a dose of his own medicine after this beaut, The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged

Here are the reviews:
Michael Walsh:

Yes, just as predicted here and here more than a week ago, the former Butcher of Broadway indulges in one of his typical smear-by-association campaigns, and implausibly links Stack (who quoted from the Communist Manifesto in his suicide note) to the Right, instead of to the Left.

Ed Driscoll:

Rich has demonstrated at least twice now in the past five months, nobody is better at working the Memory Hole than the Gray Lady.

Robert Stacy McCain:

Of course, there is no prominent conservative whom Rich hasn’t similarly smeared in the 16 years since he forsook theater criticism for political commentary.

Noel Sheppard:

So, less than a year ago, Rich saw this movement as clearly anti-Obama. But now that the Tea Parties have indeed become a powerful force, the Times columnist views them as being almost equally opposed to Republicans as they are the current White House resident.

But the winner among the reviewers is John Hindraker’s article, Who’s obsessed and deranged?, which must be read in its entirety but starts with,

Frank Rich of the New York Times retired as a drama critic in order to take up his new role as the paper’s full-time drama queen. As an op-ed columnist for the Times, his assignment, apparently, is to write in such a hysterical fashion that Paul Krugman seems rational by comparison.

Go read it all.

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The NYT segregated shopping guide is out

… and available on line, too.

White NYT Readers, You May Skip To The Next Page!

This gift guide takes a holiday season celebrated by both Caucasians and people of color, and sets apart a page for gifts meant “by and for” a group of people defined only by the color of their skin.

Or, as Mary Katharine said,

in case you’d like to offend one of your friends or relatives by proclaiming via painfully stereotypical gift idea that the only thing you know about them is their skin color, and you assume that it defines them at the exclusion of all else.

For instance, the “Wise Latina” t-shirt:

wisetshrit.190

Time to pour some snark on this crap:
Happy (Segreagated) Holidays
NYT offers thoughtful gift guide for the minority in your life
Things White People Like To Buy (For People Of Color)
Where Da White Gifts At?!?, via Ed Driscoll.
New York Times Teaches You How to Buy Separate (but equal) Gifts!
NYT Dreaming of a Colored Christmas

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