China’s stooges

Our last few postings here at Useful Stooges may have led some readers to think we’re under the impression that only athletes, teams, sports leagues, and sports-related firms have been doing a yeoman’s job of defending the Communist Chinese regime. Let us reassure our readers that we labor under no such illusion. In fact it is no secret that some of the largest U.S. companies manufacture many of their products in Chinese sweatshops and/or make handsome profits on the Chinese market, and thus feel a strong compulsion to maintain friendly relations with the Chinese government – and consequently are not about to risk their income by standing up for the freedom fighters of Hong Kong.

In connection with the bowing and scraping of sports figures to the Beijing regime, we’ve already mentioned Nike, the sneaker company, which pays millions in endorsement deals to some of the biggest names in the hoops game. In September, as Fox Business reported, Nike’s CEO, Mark Parker, made a pretty straightforward declaration: “Nike is a brand of China, for China.” As Fox noted, Nike’s revenue in China during the third quarter of this year was no less than $1.7 billion. No wonder, noted Fox Business, that “Nike has gone silent on the controversy surrounding the NBA and China.” In fact it did more than go silent: after Daryl Morey, GM of the Houston Rockets, sent out a tweet supporting the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, Nike “pulled its Houston Rockets merchandise from five stores in Beijing and Shanghai.” Mustn’t offend the sensitive feelings of Chairman Xi and his cohorts.

Then there’s Apple. In an October 17 piece, Wired noted Apple CEO Tim Cook’s efforts to position his firm as “the Patron Saint of Privacy, the company willing to protect user data while others profit from it.” Yet whereas “Apple refused to help the FBI break into an iPhone that belonged to one of the alleged perpetrators of the 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attack,” it has been considerably more cooperative with Beijing, eliminating an app that was used by pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong and that came under criticism by People’s Daily, the official Chinese Communist Party newspaper. As we’ve previously noted, Apple obligingly made it impossible for Apple users in Hong Kong and Macao to access a Taiwan flag emoji. Also, in 2018, bigwigs at Apple ordered TV program developers in its employ “to avoid portraying China in a poor light.”

Of course Apple is not alone in the last-named regard. China has become a lucrative market for American films. It finances a good many of them. It owns U.S. theater chains. Hollywood studios and producers are therefore exceedingly careful not only to scrub scripts clean of anything that might be offensive to the Chinese government, but to include pro-China propaganda. A recent article at the Heritage Foundation website quoted an observation by Stephen Colbert that in the disaster movie 2012, “humanity is saved because the Chinese government had the foresight to build life-saving arcs,” and that in Gravity, “Sandra Bullock survives by getting herself to the Chinese Space Station.” As Heritage’s Tim Doescher put it – chillingly – “Hollywood is relying more and more on the Chinese markets to make profits on movies. That means our films are being written with China in mind.” As a result, noted Heritage’s Mike Gonzalez, “we get shown a very benign view of China, in which China is a normal country, no different from Paris, or Britain, or Germany.” We also get a view of the world that omits what Gonzalez called “the three Ts”: “Tiananmen, Tibet, and Taiwan.” Also omitted is Richard Gere – who was a top Hollywood star until his outspoken support for Tibet got in the way. In short, when it comes to China, there’s a lot of useful stoogery going around – and as China’s financial, military, and cultural power increases, and as it buys up more and more shares of more and more Western firms, we can fully expect that stoogery to increase massively.

Posted on October 31, 2019October 18, 2019 by usefulstooges 4

Cleveland’s favorite son is Beijing’s golden boy

The ongoing spectacle of rich American athletes and powerful sports organizations spitting on the democratic capitalist system that made possible their free and privileged lives – all the while giving succor to the prison wardens who govern Communist China – has been nothing less than chilling to observe. One can hardly stop wondering: are these people as cold-heartedly craven as they sound, gladly accepting the big payouts they get from Beijing because a whole lot of Chinese people happen to love American basketball while caring nothing at all for the armies of Chinese workers of China the profits from whose underpaid labor enables Xi & co. to buy their loyalty? Or are these U.S. sports stars just plain ignorant, possessed of some vague notion that the Chinese system is pretty much the same as America’s, or that the differences between them are just cosmetic distinctions that only a racist would focus upon?

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve written about hoop heroes like Charles Barkley who’ve rushed to stand by China. Now it’s time to turn to LeBron James, who has played for the Cleveland Cavaliers, Miami Heat, and L.A. Lakers, and is considered by many observers to be the greatest basketball player ever. In response to one of the very few good guys in this story – namely, Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey, who’d dared to express his solidarity with the freedom fighters of Hong Kong – James sneered that Morey “wasn’t educated” on the topic and should have kept silent. By way of explaining his remark, James told reporters that comments like Morey’s could harm some people “not only financially but physically, emotionally and spiritually.” A curious angle indeed, given that all Morey had done was to stand shoulder to shoulder with people who, by standing up for their liberty against a brutal totalitarian system, were risking their very lives. What seemed to concern James was that bringing up the harsh monstrous reality of the Chinese system could hurt the feelings of his NBA confreres while they’re on their way to the bank to cash their checks from China. It’s hardly irrelevant here that LeBron himself has an exceedingly profitable lifetime endorsement deal with Nike, many of whose sneakers are manufactured in Chinese sweatshops by slave laborers, some of them children.

James even went on to complain, in one tweet, that Morey’s support for Hong Kong had caused the Lakers to have a “difficult week” during a recent China tour. Many of his Twitter followers pointed out that the demonstrators in Hong Kong and the Uighurs, a Muslim group over a million of whose members are at present religious prisoners in China, have also been having a “difficult week.” Indeed, ever since China went Communist seventy years ago this month, untold hundreds of millions of its people have led highly difficult lives, and tens of millions have been subjected, at the orders of Mao and his successors, to brutal and violent deaths for their deviations from official ideologies. James also had some choice words for those who cheer on the Hong Kong inhabitants’ fight for freedom of speech, and who have defended Morey by pointing to his freedom of speech: “Yes,” wrote James, “we do have freedom of speech, but there can be a lot of negative that comes with that too.” Let’s just close with that one — and try to imagine the mental operations that can lead an American to say such a thing in all seriousness.

Posted on October 29, 2019October 18, 2019 by usefulstooges 2

Charles Barkley joins the China crew

Yet more celebrities have lined up to defend business deals with the world’s largest totalitarian state. One of them is Charles Barkley. On October 10, TMZ reported that in the view of Barkley – the former power forward for the 76ers, Suns, and Rockets, and currently a sports commentator – anyone who criticizes the NBA for its zero-tolerance policy toward criticism of China, which includes ejecting from games those who express support at an for the people in Hong Kong who are protesting Beijing’s attempt to crush their freedom, is an “idiot,” a “jackass,” a “fool.” Try to follow this logic, which Barkley served up on the Dan Patrick Show: “you guys have been killing Colin Kaepernick for the last X amount of years,” but now “you want to control what happens in a foreign country?”

Kaepernick, of course, is the mediocre football player who worships the memory of Che and Castro and who started the whole business of “taking a knee” during the National Anthem as a way of protesting the unjust killing of black persons by white cops. Never mind that when you take into account the size of the different population groups, white cops don’t kill any more blacks than they do whites. There is evidence, indeed, that white cops are more careful about pulling a gun on a black person than on a white for fear they’ll end up being branding racists all over the news media. Besides, what Kaepernick was disrespecting was the Star-Spangled Banner and hence, by extension, the U.S. – a free country in which he has been able to become a rich man on the basis of a set of modest athletic skills. As for Barkley’s claim that “you guys” – presumably the media? – had been “killing” Kaepernick for taking a knee, au contaire: whereas Kaepernick’s less-than-spectacular talent on the gridiron had kept him pretty obscure, once he began taking a knee he won praise from all the usual suspects, collecting awards from GQ, Sports Illustrated, the ACLU, the Puffin/Nation Institute, Amnesty International, and Harvard. Yes, a lot of disgruntled fans, understandably turned off by his ingratitude and lack of patriotism, stopped watching NFL games. That’s their right.

Abe Vigoda as Tessio in *The Godfather:* “Tell Michael it was just business.”

But how to compare Kaepernick’s self-aggrandizing demonstrations against America, for which he risked no official punishment whatsoever, with the Hong Kong protesters, who are literally risking their lives by standing up for freedom? Bradley’s excuse for NBA honchos who side with the tyrants of China against the people in Hong Kong whose very freedom is under threat was simple: “They have billions of dollars at stake,” he said. “It’s a business decision. I understand the NBA. The players and the owners both got billions of dollars at stake.” Ah yes, the famous old distinction that keeps cropping up in The Godfather: “It’s not personal, it’s business.” This is indeed how the Mafia operates, and it’s how the American creeps who get rich off of Chinese slave labor defend the indefensible.

Posted on October 24, 2019October 13, 2019 by usefulstooges 2

Nike: selling shoes, selling Communism

There is no more powerful beneficiary of the useful stoogery of various Americans than the increasingly powerful Xi regime in Communist China. As we’ve seen in recent days, while hundreds of thousands of brave people in Hong Kong are risking their lives in protests against Beijing’s growing effort to crush that city’s freedoms, shameless creeps in the NBA and at ESPN, aware that China pays big bucks to broadcast American basketball games, have variously condemned the Hong Kong protests, chosen to stay silent about them, or played moral-equivalency games, equating America’s failings with those of a totalitarian dictatorship that imprisons millions of its political enemies and religious minorities.

On October 11, Tucker Carlson devoted much of his hour-long Fox News evening program to the NBA apologists for China. The focus was largely on Steve Kerr, coach of the Golden State Warriors, who is apparently well known for the predictable PC opinions that he shares on Twitter and elsewhere. Kerr, noted Carlson, routinely acts as if his reflexive echoing of received elite opinions makes him some kind of fearless hero of the oppressed. But when asked at a recent presser what he thinks about China, which actually does oppress on the largest scale ever known to man, and which Carlson quite properly called “the largest police state in the history of the human race,” Kerr hedged. When first asked about China, Kerr dodged it; the second time around, however, he opted for a bit of moral equivalence, suggesting that America’s “record of human rights offenses” was comparable to China’s. Only a fool or a shameless liar could say such a thing. Guesting on the same episode of Carlson’s show, John Daniel Davidson of the Federalist pointed out that Kerr’s brother is a China scholar – so it’s not as if the coach is clueless about the true nature of the Beijing regime.

As Carlson put it, the NBA is “beholden to China.” The league has actually banned its own players from speaking about China while on tour in that country. Carlson also noted another dog that hasn’t barked: Mark Cuban, the billionaire who owns the Dallas Mavericks and who is famously outspoken, has stayed mum on the question of China.

Carlson brought on a guest, radio host Jason Whitlock, who made a fascinating argument: the ultimate problem, he said, doesn’t lie with the NBA; it lies with Nike, the sneakers company whose products are cheaply manufactured in Chinese sweatshops by veritable slaves, worn and advertised by NBA stars who have lucrative promotional contracts with the shoe manufacturer, and sold at handsome prices around the world, with China, of course, being one of its largest markets, if not the largest. “Basketball exists to sell shoes,” charged Whitlock, who maintained further that “Nike is control of basketball.” Hence the refusal of everybody connected to Nike to breathe a negative word about totalitarian China.

Posted on October 22, 2019October 12, 2019 by usefulstooges 2

More NBA toadying

And on it goes. In recent posts we’ve contrasted the courage of Hong Kong protesters – who are putting their lives on the line to risk the growing encroachments on their freedoms by the government in Beijing – with the readiness of American individuals and firms that do business with China to sell out the idea of liberty for a buck.

Sam Wachs and his wife before being ejected from the arena

Since American sports are so big in the PRC, many of these latest stories of cravenness and cowardice have had to do with athletics. We’ve seen that the NBA and ESPN have both been lightning-quick to sacrifice any pretense of principle in order to avoid offending Xi’s tyrannical regime. Well, here’s more. On October 10, Reason magazine’s Eric Boehm reported that two different sports arenas in the U.S. had ejected fans protesting the Communist Chinese attempt to crush liberty in Hong Kong. On October 8, it happened at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center, where Sam Wachs and his wife, who had bought tickets to a preseason game between the Philadelphia 76ers and a visiting Chinese team, the Guangzhou Loong Lions, displayed small signs reading “Free Hong Kong.” Security guards were quick to give the Wachses the heave-ho.

The next night, the same Chinese team were in Washington, D.C., for another game, in this case against the Washington Wizards. This time there were several protesters. They wore t-shirts bearing slogans in support of the Hong Kong protesters and unfurled a “Free Hong Kong” banner. When the banner was confiscated, they waved a homemade sign reading “Google Uighurs,” a reference to the current internment by the Communist Chinese government of more than a million adherence of that Muslim minority. That effort, too, was quashed.

As Boehm pointed out, the NBA’s aggressive treatment of what was frankly a small number of protesters at a couple of U.S. basketball game has only served to draw attention to China’s perfidy and to the NBA’s eagerness to do China’s bidding. On October 10, the New York Post ran an op-ed by one of the Washington protesters, Jon Schweppe, who explained that he and some friends had decided to stage a protest at the Washington game after reading about what happened to the Wachese in Philadelphia. The sight of NBA thugs “groveling to a totalitarian regime and censoring…fans” in Philadelphia, of all places, “home of the Constitutional Convention and the Liberty Bell,” had gotten his dander up. Would the NBA, he wondered, dare to treat supporters of freedom the same way in the nation’s capital?

That tiny Uighurs sign that was too much for the NBC bigwigs

The answer came quickly. When he and his pals unfurled their banner, they were told by NBA reps: “We respect your freedom of speech, but…we don’t have any stance on [Hong Kong]. So we’re just asking not to have any signage related to that in here tonight.” The little sign about the million-plus imprisoned Uighurs didn’t please the NBA bosses either. “My friend,” writes Schweppe, “pleaded that we were simply seeking to educate some of the NBA officials, coaches and players, many of whom had expressed ignorance about the issue. It was in vain: The supervisor still confiscated the sign and told us that if we continued to disrupt the game, we would be ejected.” Instead, Schweppe and his friends just chose to leave. Good for them for standing up for freedom. Shame on the NBA for putting its profits first.

Posted on October 17, 2019October 11, 2019 by usefulstooges 0

Now it’s ESPN’s turn to bow to Beijing

The bowing and scraping to China doesn’t stop. Last week we wrote about how Apple has removed the Taiwanese flag emoji from IPhones sold in Hong Kong. We mentioned that Google and Microsoft, as everybody knows by now, happily jigger their products in accordance with Chinese censorship. Then there’s Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, who, when he dared to express solidarity on Twitter with the freedom protesters in Hong Kong, saw his whole world came crashing down on him. His team owner, the NBA, the Chinese Basketball Association, a Chinese broadcaster with which the NBA has a lucrative deal, and a bunch of Chinese companies that manufacture NBA-branded clothing – all of them, shamefully, took Morey to task for giving freedom a thumbs-up.

Next thing you knew it was ESPN’s turn. On October 9, the show SportsCenter, which is aired on that network, showed a map of Communist China that included within its borders the island of Taiwan, part of the Philippines, and the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. The map also included the notorious “nine-dash line,” whereby Communist Chinese maps indicate its utterly unfounded claims to the South China Sea. When called on its use of this map, ESPN refused comment, as did the Disney Organization, its principal owner.

Let’s look at this disgraceful episode piece by piece. Of course, Communist China officially claims Taiwan as part of its territory, and has never renounced its supposed right to take the island by force, although Taiwan is in fact an independent – and a free – country, and no map other than one produced in Communist China would include it as part of Communist China.

The red line indicates China’s South China Sea claims.

As for the South China Sea, Communist China has been more and more aggressive about it in recent years, treating much of it as its own property even though if you look at a map – a real map, not a Chinese map – you’ll see that the sea stretches far south of China, and is bordered on the east by the Philippines, on the west by Vietnam, and on the south by Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, and Indonesia. In order to bolster its territorial claim to most of this body of water – which is comparable to the U.S. claiming the entire Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea – China has actually created artificial islands in the Spratly Islands, an archipelago in the South China Sea that contains settlements and military establishments owned by Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Brunei.

And what about those bits of the Philippines and India? What exactly is on the minds of the bullies of Beijing? No wonder the countries of east Asia are trembling at China’s increasing pushiness. That ESPN map was no mistake, any more than the maps of the Middle East put out by Muslim countries that just happen to omit Israel. Indeed, looking at that bogus China map, it is hard not to be reminded of the way in which the Third Reich, after it had attained a certain level of power, began to grab one chunk of neighboring territory after another, painting more and more of Europe a bright red, with a big swastika right smack in the middle. Make no mistake about it: Chairman Xi and his crew plainly want to paint their neighborhood red too. And when it happens, don’t expect the cowards at ESPN to object.

Posted on October 15, 2019October 10, 2019 by usefulstooges 1

The NBA: a fully owned subsidiary of the PRC

Writing on Tuesday about the courageous stance of the people of Hong Kong, who have taken on the totalitarian tyrants of Beijing in the name of personal liberty, we concluded with the observation that sensible people in the Western world, who were lucky enough to be born in freedom, should look upon the bravery on display in Hong Kong with respect and humility.

Well, somebody admired the folks of Hong Kong. The other day, Daryl Morey, general manager of the Houston Rockets basketball team, tweeted “Stand with Hong Kong.” But the owner of the team, one Tilman Fertitta, rushed to Twitter to say that Morey wasn’t speaking for the team. Former Houston Rocket center Yao Ming, who now heads the Chinese Basketball Association, suspended its relationship with the Houston team. Several Chinese companies that churn out merch for the NBA, including athletic wear manufacturer Li-Ning, also expressed outrage at Morey’s tweet. Ditto Tencent, a Chinese firm that has paid the NBA $1.5 billion to broadcast its games for the next five years. The NBA itself was quick to distance themselves from Morey’s anti-totalitarian sentiments, with league honcho Mike Bass lamenting that Morey’s tweet had “deeply offended many of our friends and fans in China, which is regrettable.” Bass added that “We have great respect for the history and culture of China and hope that sports and the NBA can be used as a unifying force to bridge cultural divides and bring people together.”

In the end, Morey deleted his pro-freedom tweet and feebly assured all and sundry that he had not meant to offend anybody. “I did not intend my tweet to cause any offense to Rockets fans and friends of mine in China,” Morey tweeted on Monday. “I was merely voicing one thought, based on one interpretation, of one complicated event. I have had a lot of opportunity since that tweet to hear and consider other perspectives.” Could any of this be more pathetic? Yet this is the world we live in, where a Communist tyranny wields such power that an American citizen dare not speak up for freedom for fear of outraging Beijing. Sports like basketball and baseball are all tied up in a lot of people’s minds with American patriotism. But to the people who run the NBA, it’s clear, the greenbacks they get from Beijing are more important than the red, white, and blue.

Nor is this cowardly, craven attitude restricted to the NBA. On October 7, it was reported that Apple had removed the Taiwanese flag emoji from the newly updated keyboards of iPhones sold in Hong Kong and Macau, China’s other so-called “special administrative region.” Did Apple do this on its own initiative, or was it following orders from Beijing? Whatever the case, as the Quartz website put it, when viewed “against the backdrop of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests, the move exemplifies continued corporate subservience to the Chinese government.” The Quartz article further noted that Google and Microsoft, which earn zillions in income from everywhere else in the world, are so greedy that they, too, happily bow to Beijing – in their case, producing Chinese versions of their technologies that accord with the censorious dictates of Xi Jinping’s regime. In short, Chinese money talks. And American freedom be damned.

Posted on October 10, 2019October 9, 2019 by usefulstooges 2

What is happening in Hong Kong?

This is our 800th post here at Useful Stooges. It is a landmark for our site, and consequently we have decided to devote this post to an especially crucial ongoing development in the never-ending history of the human struggle for freedom.

Ever since the United Kingdom handed Hong Kong back to the People’s Republic of China in 1997, the onetime colony’s spectacular success as an international financial hub and robust center of corporate activity has obscured the fact that it is, in fact, ultimately subject to the authority of the world’s most powerful and dangerous totalitarian regime.

Hong Kong’s history is rich in irony. Its acquisition by Britain in the early nineteenth century was, frankly, an imperialistic land grab. But by the mid twentieth century, it was, thanks to that land grab, a tiny outpost of democratic capitalism and individual liberty on the coast of the planet’s most populous Communist country. Its population was overwhelmingly ethnic Chinese, but they were ethnic Chinese who were glad to be living in a free and wealthy enclave under British rule rather than under Red China’s heavy tyrannical thumb.

Yet the fact that people in Britain – and, by extension, Hong Kong – lived in freedom while people in China did not was hardly dispositive. As China’s power grew, it began to demand that Britain give up control of this wealthy jewel. Fearing that China might retake Hong Kong by force, the British government agreed in 1984 to return it in 1997 on the proviso that its people would be permitted to keep living in liberty until the year 2047. This was the famous “one country, two systems” agreement.

The result has been a often uneasy hybrid. On the one hand, Hong Kong’s legal system differs from China’s. It belongs to the WTO, issues its own passports, and sends its own team to the Olympics. There remains a tight customs border between Hong Kong and the rest of China, and Chinese citizens are not permitted to move to Hong Kong. On the other hand, the city is policed by the People’s Liberation Army – a fact that has been of crucial importance in recent weeks, when all of Hong Kong, it seems, has risen up in protest against the bullies of Beijing.

It started with a proposed law that would permit the extradition of people from Hong Kong who are wanted for crimes on the mainland. Until now, rather remarkably, there has been no extradition agreement between China and Hong Kong – yet another indication of the degree to which Hong Kong has remained a separate entity. Such a law, of course, if applied aggressively, could spell an end to Hong Kong’s distinctive Western-style freedoms. Protests began in March of this year and grew in scale and violence over the course of the spring. Quite rapidly, the focus of the demonstrations broadened; they weren’t just about the bill but about Beijing’s authority generally. So it was that on the day after the bill was suspended on June 15, a massive protest took place; July 1, the 22^nd anniversary of the return of Hong Kong to China, occasioned another large-scale public display; August 5 saw a general strike and yet another huge demo.

At first, Beijing held back, not wanting to do anything that the world would compare to the Tienanmen Square massacre, which took place exactly thirty years ago, in 1989. But police gradually grew more aggressive, and yet another full-scale protest on August 18 took aim at police brutality. Meanwhile, from August 12 to 14, a sit-in at Hong Kong International Airport all but closed it down. On August 23, protesters formed a human chain 50 kilometers long that stretched across much of the metropolis. As of October, the people of Hong Kong were still coming out in force, with a number of violent protests occurring on the first of the month, which marked the 70^th anniversary of the PRC’s founding.

Sensible people in the free world should recognize the extraordinary, months-long exhibition of love of liberty and hatred of tyranny by the people of Hong Kong as a reminder of their own good fortune, a reminder that free societies are the product of centuries of struggle and development, a reminder that freedom should never be taken for granted and sometimes needs to be fought for. The brave and inspiring actions by the people of Hong Kong should also shame the leaders of Silicon Valley tech empires who blithely adapt their products to conform to Chinese censorship laws. American politicians, retired politicians, and their family members who are willing to lobby for the tyrants of Beijing in exchange for impressive cash payoffs should also have trouble looking at themselves in the mirror. Indeed, it’s fair to say that most of us in the Western world, while snapping up Chinese imports at cheap prices, have given far too little thought to the factory workers who manufacture those products and who can fairly be described as slave labor. Nor have we reflected sufficiently upon our own roles, as bargain-happy consumers, in helping Chairman Xi and his crew to build up their wealth and power to such an extent that their autocratic empire now represents a serious economic and military threat to the U.S. and its free allies.

Posted on October 8, 2019October 4, 2019 by usefulstooges 1

Castro in Vietnam: A forgotten chapter

Recently, author Jamie Glazov reposted a 2016 article of his about one of the lesser-known chapters of Communist history: the involvement of Cubans in the torture of American prisoners of war in Vietnam. On the occasion of Fidel Castro’s death, Glazov called attention to what he called “the direct and instrumental role Castro played in the torture and murder of American POWs in Vietnam during the Vietnam War.” As Glazov noted, America’s mainstream news media – which have tended to soft-pedal the evil of Castro’s regime and more than a few of which (as we’ve pointed out at this website) have celebrated Communist Cuba for the supposed quaintness and charm of its broken-down buildings and infrastructure – have virtually ignored this dark episode.

We’re not talking here, mind you, about a couple of Cubans who were sent over to Vietnam to help run POW camps. No; in fact, at the height of the Vietnam War, the number of Cubans in North Vietnam numbered in the thousands, and at least some of them were part of what Castro called the “Cuban Program” at the Cu Loc POW camp in Hanoi, which came to be known to inmates as ‘the Zoo.’” Among the goals of the “Cuban Program” was “to determine how much physical and psychological agony a human being could withstand.” For this purpose, Castro’s minions picked out US servicemen as “guinea pigs” to be worked on by a torturer, who like his comandante was named Fidel, and who was “trained in psychology and prison control in Russia or Europe.” Among the victims of Fidel’s brutality was a F-105 pilot, Lt. Col. Earl Cobeil, an F-105 pilot, whom a fellow POW, Col. Jack Bomar, described as follows:

The man could barely walk; he shuffled slowly, painfully. His clothes were torn to shreds. He was bleeding everywhere, terribly swollen, and a dirty, yellowish black and purple from head to toe. The man’s head was down; he made no attempt to look at anyone. . . . He stood unmoving, his head down. Fidel smashed a fist into the man’s face, driving him against the wall. Then he was brought to the center of the room and made to get down onto his knees. Screaming in rage, Fidel took a length of black rubber hose from a guard and lashed it as hard as he could into the man’s face. The prisoner did not react; he did not cry out or even blink an eye. His failure to react seemed to fuel Fidel’s rage and again he whipped the rubber hose across the man’s face. . . . Again and again and again, a dozen times, Fidel smashed the man’s face with the hose. Not once did the fearsome abuse elicit the slightest response from the prisoner. . . . His body was ripped and torn everywhere; hell cuffs appeared almost to have severed the wrists, strap marks still wound around the arms all the way to the shoulders, slivers of bamboo were embedded in the bloodied shins and there were what appeared to be tread marks from the hose across the chest, back, and legs.

Cobell died. So did many others. Of course, no one who is remotely familiar with the systematic, sadistic violence perpetrated by Che Guevara and others on behalf of the Castro regime could be terribly surprised that Castro was capable of arranging such a violent project. At the same time, one never quite gets accustomed to the fact that a popular current presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, is a lifelong Castro fan; ditto the late celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain; that the mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, honeymooned in Havana; that Barbara Walters, the longtime host of American housewives’ favorite TV show, The View, had a cozy relationship with Fidel, whom she described as “charming”; that network reporter Lisa Howard had a veritable romance with him. It is one of the enduring, and sick, facts of life that some people who are lucky enough to live in liberty are capable of an irrational attraction to totalitarian tyrants.

Posted on October 3, 2019September 28, 2019 by usefulstooges 1

Trump vs. Beijing

There are many ways of measuring the advance of the Chinese economy in comparison with that of the United States. But one of them is this: in 2019, for the first time, the number of Chinese companies on the Forbes Global 500 list exceeded the number of U.S. firms.

When the rulers of China decided to turn their country into an international economic powerhouse, there was a widespread assumption that the adoption of capitalism by the world’s largest country would inevitably result in a transition from Communism to democracy.

That hasn’t happened. China has gotten rich – and a few million managerial-class Chinese people have gotten rich, too – by exporting cheaply made goods to the West and by using sky-high tariffs to keep out Western products. But at the same time it has remained resolutely totalitarian, and its blue-collar workers – you know, those proletarians whose welfare is theoretically at the heart of the entire Marxist project – continue to be drastically underpaid in comparison to their Western counterparts, which of course is why China can sell its manufactured goods so cheap.

In any event, the fact that a Communist country, for the first time in history, either has the planet’s largest economy or is close to it, should be a cause for deep concern throughout the free world.

It isn’t. Not yet. Not really. President Trump, who has tried to rein in the Chinese dynamo by raising U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports – although those tariffs are almost nothing compared to the Chinese tariffs on U.S. goods – has been accused of waging a trade war. In fact he’s simply making a modest effort to come somewhere near evening out what has for all too long been a very uneven situation.

Anyway, China has thrived. Which would not be a bad thing if not for the fact that, as Bill Gertz of the Washington Free Beacon putitin a September appearance on The Mark Levin Show, Chinese President Xi Jinping has turned his country into a “communist nightmare.”

Gertz, who has written a new book entitled Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China’s Drive for Global Supremacy, told Levin that Xi “has his eyes set on global hegemony, he wants China to be the dominant superpower in the world, and in order to do that, he has to diminish the power of the United States.”

Some Americans in positions of authority recognize that. Most do not. Too many of them are distracted by thoughts of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where the vodka-addled population is taking a nosedive and the economy is no bigger than that of Texas.

On the Levin program, Gertz praised Trump for taking on China – not only by fighting for fair trade but by “cracking down on China” when it comes to “law enforcement, intelligence gathering, and spying.” Gertz didn’t claim to have a crystal ball, but he contended that just as the USSR collapsed, so might China: “with a little bit of pressure” of the sort being exerted by Trump, “the whole thing could come crumbling down in Beijing.” Which would be a magnificent development for the oppressed, brutalized, and painfully unfree people of China, and would also make the whole free world breathe a good deal more easily.

Posted on October 1, 2019September 19, 2019 by usefulstooges 1