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A Hays Code for our time
On January 21st the Screen Actors Guild gave Gary Oldman their “Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role” award for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour. The movie is about Churchill coming to power as Prime Minister in May 1940 and the events leading up to the evacuation from Dunkirk. It’s been nominated in six categories for the upcoming Oscars.
A friend who belongs to the SAG kindly lent us his voter’s DVD of Darkest Hour, in defiance of a stern onscreen warning at the very beginning that the voter should destroy the disk after watching it.
I’m the wrong person to pass judgment on Gary Oldman’s acting. All through my childhood in postwar England adult males were doing Churchill impersonations for laughs. The radio comedian Tony Hancock did a particularly memorable one. That makes it hard for a person of my generation to take seriously any stage-or-screen version of the man.
My capacity for unbiased judgment is further warped by having grown up with a Churchill-hating father. Non-Brits are always a bit surprised to learn that while Churchill was loved and admired by many of his fellow-countrymen, he was disliked by, I think, nearly as many. They can’t fathom how he lost the 1945 election in a landslide. Meet my Dad.
I survived all that and ended up a Churchill fan — heck, I even attended his funeral — but I’ll take a pass on any comprehensive critique of the movie, other than to register my impression that it wasn’t half as good as The Gathering Storm.
I do, though, want to vent about political correctness in Darkest Hour.
There is a scene where Churchill, on his way to Westminster, on impulse decides to ride the subway for the first time in his life. I can’t believe this ever happened; it would have been contrary to everything I know about Churchill’s temperament. Still, I’ll allow the scene itself for dramatic license.
In the subway carriage Churchill is surrounded by ordinary Londoners. They all know who he is and are dumbstruck to find themselves riding with him.
Churchill is under pressure from his Party colleagues to negotiate with Hitler. That goes against all his instincts, but he’s feeling the pressure. He decides to find out what these ordinary folk think, so he asks them. They urge him to stand firm.
Thus inspirited, Churchill rallies, and begins quoting some lines from Macaulay’s Horatius at the Bridge:
To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds …
At this point one of the subway passengers finishes the quote for him:
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his gods.
Okay, a bit hokey—although VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow has argued it’s the key conservative text—and already done in a different movie, but hey, dramatic license again. Here’s my vent, though:
The subway passenger who finishes Churchill’s quote for him is a black guy, the only one in the carriage.
That’s not totally implausible in itself. There were blacks in 1940 London, although precious few. I can’t find a number, but I think ten thousand would be a generous estimate — one in eight hundred of London’s population at the time. Churchill was interacting with eight or ten fellow passengers, so he’d have been running about a one percent chance of there being a black among them. Okay. But did the only one who knew Horatius have to be the black guy?
Well, yes, it did. We’ve been here before. I didn’t see Steven Spielberg’s 2012 movie Lincoln so I have to depend here on Alec Ryan’s review at American Renaissance, from which:
Two white, hick Union soldiers run up breathlessly and ineptly try to recite Lincoln’s Gettysburg address for the President. They forget how it ends, and the recital is finished by the intelligent, complaining black private as he saunters off into the night. Stupid whites and smart blacks. We get it.
Yes we do. It’s like some 21st-century version of the Hays Code.
Code Article III.5.a: The smartest extra in any scene must be black. (Corollary: The dumbest extra in any scene must never be black.)
Okay, we get it: Blacks aren’t all dumb like Great-Grandpa thought. We get it, we get it. Could they please now stop banging us over the head with it?
The Anglosphere’s worst year
Was 1965 the Anglosphere’s worst year?
In January Churchill died. He’d long been out of public life; but his death was none the less a clear punctuation mark.
What it marked was the end of Postwar Britain: of twenty years of national pride in the accomplishment of victory and rebuilding from the destruction of war. Also the consolidation of the welfare state, the restructuring of what many in Britain had come to see as an unjust social order. (That’s why Churchill lost the 1945 election.)
Also of course the dismantling of the British Empire, with independence for the old imperial possessions: India and Pakistan 1947, Burma and Sri Lanka 1948, Sudan 1956, Malaya 1957, Nigeria and Ghana 1960, Tanzania 1961, Jamaica and Trinidad 1962, Kenya 1963, …
What followed was a long sleepwalk into mass immigration and multiculturalism: down, down to the shambolic joke country that Britain is today — a mere place, an airport arrivals shed, in which the descendants of Alfred the Great, Chaucer, Drake, Shakespeare, Marlborough, Johnson, Victoria, Dickens, Churchill, and Orwell cower timidly before the moral supremacy of alien races and faiths.
The U.S.A. was meanwhile passing the Hart-Celler Immigration Act, signed into law October 3rd 1965, turning this country on the same downward slide.
If the Anglosphere has had a worse year, I’d like to know which.
God no globalist
We still have our private consolations, of course.
Jigsaw puzzles, for example. This last Christmas, Santa as usual favored me with a splendid puzzle: the 5,000-piece Ravensburger edition of Brueghel’s Tower of Babel. At the end of January I’m well on my way with it, the sky — not necessarily the most difficult part of a puzzle, but always a tiresome chore —already completed.
My son, whose biblical education was minimal, asked me about the story behind the picture. I told him it as best I could remember it, and pointed up the moral, which is of course, as always in the OT: Don’t mess with God.
Later I furtively looked up the story in my Scofield Reference Bible (mine is the 1967 edition) to make sure I hadn’t misled the lad. No, I hadn’t. I had even made a decently good guess, when he’d asked, about who the regal figure in bottom left of the painting was: Nimrod. (It’s not clear from Genesis that it was actually Nimrod who built the tower, but he’s as good a candidate as any.)
Scofield offers the following gloss on Genesis 11.i:
In judgment upon sinful man’s first attempt to establish a world state in opposition to the divine rule, God struck at the very thing which binds men together, namely, a common language.
Discussing that with a friend, he observed that the European Union parliament building seems to have been modeled on Brueghel’s Tower of Babel.
Say what you like about the God of the OT; but in terms of our present-day globalist/nationalist split, it’s pretty clear which side He was on.
Literature meets art
If you don’t know anything else about Pieter Brueghel the Elder, you should at least know this: That one of his paintings — not the Tower of Babel, a different one — inspired a very lovely poem.
That painting is Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, based on the Greek legend of Icarus, who flew too close to the Sun on wings attached with wax. The wax melted, and Icarus fell to his death.
The poem was written by W.H. Auden in 1938. Its title is “Musée des Beaux Arts,” which is just the name of the gallery in Brussels, Belgium, where Brueghel’s picture is hung. Brace yourself:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
It is not often that high literature meets high art with such effect. This is Western Civ.: going down the tubes as I write, but while it lived, an inspiration and consolation to suffering mortals.
Acing the exam
Just one more on the biblical theme, if you don’t mind.
Writing about the OT there brings to mind one of Isaac Asimov’s stories, which I first read in Fantasy And Science Fiction in February, 1963 [PDF]
Artificial stupidity
It seems that not a day passes now without some look-at-this! story in the news about robots and artificial intelligence (AI).
• 
A British fashion magazine has used a robot as its cover model. Her name is Sophia and she’s a rather comely platinum blonde. From the news story:
Sophia has recently been on a roll after being granted world’s first robot citizenship by Saudi Arabia, appearing on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, and freaking everyone out with her pro-robot, slightly anti-human remarks at the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal.
• An expert in the field warns about military AI. He says:
As someone who researches the use of AI for applications as diverse as drones, self-driving vehicles and cybersecurity, I worry that the world may be entering — or perhaps already in — another cold war, fueled by AI.
• You know about female sex robots, I’m sure. Perhaps you’ve heard that male versions are in development, too. This should come as no surprise, then:
Transgender sex robots could be a new and exotic way to spice things up in your bedroom.
The Sun has learned that the Californian start-up responsible for the female Harmony sex droid is now considering a trans version too.
Fashion, war, and sex: What will be the next frontier in the robotics revolution? Sports, perhaps. I wonder which major-league baseball franchise will be the first to field an all-robot team.
This month I had my first real interaction with a robot. This was the AI assistant Alexa, which a friend has installed in his house. “She’s amazing!” he said. “Ask her anything. Just be sure to prefix it with ‘Alexa …’.”
I’m a bit tongue-tied around new female acquaintances, so I had trouble thinking of anything to ask. At random I said: “Alexa, what’s the square root of three?” She rattled off the answer to an impressive number of decimal places, of which the first seven — which is all I know — were correct.
Warming up, I asked her to factorize a nine-digit integer I pulled out of thin air. Alexa emitted a list of factors: I have no idea if they were correct.
Obviously the gal knows her math. Let’s try literature. “Alexa, who wrote Melmoth the Wanderer?”
She: “The Wanderers were a pop group of the 1950s …” Well, so they were, but that wasn’t what I’d asked, not even close. My diction is good and I was enunciating with self-conscious clarity. Hmm.
Spelling? “Alexa, please spell ‘Verrazano‘.” That’s a bugbear of mine. I know there’s a double letter in there somewhere, but I can never remember if it’s two r’s, or two z’s, or two n’s, or some combination thereof.
She: “‘Arizona’ is spelt A-R-I-Z-O-N-A.” Yes it is, but again …
At this point my son came in. “She just looks things up on Wikipedia,” he told me. “You have a Wikipedia page, so …” He addressed the gadget. “Alexa, who is John Derbyshire?” He was careful to give it the U.S. pronunciation, “Derb” rhyming with “verb,” not “barb.”
She: “John Derby was a linebacker for the Detroit Lions …”
Friends who work in AI and machine learning tell me the rate of progress is astonishing. Possibly that’s correct where the research labs are concerned. Consumer-electronics-wise, though, if Alexa is representative, all we have a handle on so far is Artificial Stupidity (AS).
Fiction book of the month
I haven’t read a spy novel for a while — a couple of decades, I think — so I thought I’d try Charles Cumming’s Typhoon on a friend’s recommendation.
Not bad, though not up to the standards of masters like John Le Carré. It could have been fifty pages shorter without loss, and there is not much incident.
The story kept my attention, though, because it concerns a people I’ve had some dealings with: the Uighurs of Eastern Turkestan (nowadays the west-Chinese province of Xinjiang).
The Uighurs are a Turkic people, mostly Muslim. They are unhappy under Chinese rule. I encountered some of them in the 1980s, in my days with the Tibet Society. There were some exchanges by mail (email not yet a thing) with Erkin Alptekin, son of Isa Yusuf Alptekin, the Grand Old Man of the Eastern Turkestan independence movement. Erkin was at that time working for Radio Free Europe in Germany.
The 9/11 Islamist attacks on the U.S.A. were a serious blow to the Uighurs.
Prior to 9/11 the Chinese had of course been doing all they could to suppress the independence movement. Uighur nationalists had, partly in reaction, developed a militant terrorist arm, as I described in 1999; but the official independence movement, headquartered in Turkey, took a more sober line, and not an especially religious — that is, Islamist — one. The suppression of religion and the destruction of mosques was of course resented; but the Uighurs, like Turkic peoples everywhere, mostly take their Islam light. The main energy of Uighur resistance was nationalist.
Typhoon has the premise that the U.S.A. in this pre-9/11 period was encouraging Uighur separatism in order to vex China. I wouldn’t be surprised; but I don’t know if our secret services were actually doing that.
After 9/11 everything changed. Chinese actions against the Uighurs post-9/11 were no longer those of an imperial-despotic power suppressing separatist nationalism in a colony. Suddenly they were part of the righteous worldwide struggle against militant Islam. If the U.S.A. had been meddling on behalf of the Uighurs before, it abruptly stopped doing so. For Chinese imperialism, 9/11 was a gift from Heaven.
That change is the hinge of Charles Cumming’s novel, which is divided into roughly equal pre- and post-9/11 parts. It’s all very plausible; and as a former intelligence operative himself, Cummings presumably knows much more than the rest of us.
Whither the Uighurs?
Fiction aside, what are the actual prospects for Uighur separatism nowadays?
You’d have to say: not bright. The Chinese have turned Eastern Turkestan into a high-tech panopticon. Surveillance cameras are everywhere, many of them using facial-recognition technology. Every Uighur has his DNA sequence stored on a government database. Uighurs who give the slightest cause for suspicion are “disappeared.” Young Uighurs studying abroad have been ordered to return home, with the threat of their families being sent to labor camps if they refuse. When they return, the students themselves are “disappeared.”
There have been a number of good news reports: here’s one from Associated Press, and here’s a video presentation at the Wall Street Journal site.
Nor is Turkey any longer a reliable supporter of Uighur nationalism. Nine years ago, following anti-Chinese riots in Eastern Turkestan, then-Prime Minister Erdoğan described the consequent Chinese crackdown as “tantamount to genocide.”
Slimy crapweasel Erdoğan, now Turkey’s President, has since ditched ethnic solidarity in return for Chinese cash. At a summit in Peking last May to award trade privileges under China’s One Belt, One Road initiative to dominate trade across Central Asia, he signed a treaty with China for the extradition of “criminals.” The Chinese definition of “criminal” of course includes anyone displeasing to the communist authorities, nonviolent bourgeois dissidents as well as actual terrorists.
China’s repression has radicalized a lot of young Uighurs, some of them now fighting with jihadist groups in Syria. “A lot” is relative, though: Even if the entire Uighur population were to be radicalized, there are still something like 150 Han Chinese for every Uighur. A friend of mine who deals with high-level Chinese officials told me the other day that one such had said to him, concerning the Uighurs: “If necessary we’ll just kill them all.”
It wouldn’t be very surprising if that’s how it ends up. The Chinese communists have murdered unknown millions of their own people; I can’t see why they should balk at exterminating a nuisance ethnic minority. Foreigners might grumble, of course; but throw around a few billions of cash, a few trade deals, a few veiled threats, and the grumbling will soon subside — that’s how the communists think.
There will of course be people who say, in regard to the Uighurs: “Serve the buggers right. That’s the way to deal with Islam! They only understand force.”
I’m not of that school myself. As I’ve explained numerous times, I have no problem with Islam in its own countries; I just think it’s insane to import great masses of Muslims into non-Muslim nations.
As a nationalist, I believe it would be a safer and happier world if distinct ethnies who’ve long inhabited distinct territories enjoyed self-government. I believe the related thing, too: that nations should not be swamped with great masses of foreigners of a different ethny, as has happened with the Uighurs under Chinese imperial rule, Han Chinese colonists having been imported to the Uighur homelands in the millions.
That’s an ideal, of course. Chinese friends who are thoughtful, well-educated, and not particularly chauvinistic sometimes respond to these sentiments with: “That’s all very well, but independence isn’t really possible for places like Tibet and Xinjiang. If China didn’t occupy Tibet, India would. If China didn’t occupy Xinjiang, Russia would.”
I don’t buy that. Mongolia is self-governing. The stans of Central Asia likewise — so I am assured by my dear friend President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov of Turkmenistan. (Right.)
Sure, there’s an element of Finlandization there. If the Mongols or Turkmen did anything that seriously vexed their big, powerful neighbors, their independence wouldn’t last long. They do have self-government, though, at a level far preferable to the brutal imperial repression in Eastern Turkestan.
At last, I suppose, might is right. “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” The most we can hope for is that when the Chinese communists resort at last to cattle wagons and gas chambers, the rest of the world doesn’t reward them for it.
Mao reconsidered
Several people have asked me to comment on the three-part article about Mao Tse-tung at Unz Review, written by Godfree Roberts. (That has to be a pseudonym.) The three parts of his article are here, here, and here. They are apparently excepted from a forthcoming book.
The author sets out to show that, as he writes: “Mao Zedong did more good for more people than anyone in history.” Mao, the author wants us to know, was not merely not the cruel despot we have been told; he was a benefactor of humanity on a heroic — well-nigh a divine — scale.
When he stepped down in 1974 the invaders, bandits and warlords were gone, the population had doubled, literacy was 84 percent, wealth disparity had disappeared, electricity reached poor areas, infrastructure was restored, the economy had grown 500 percent, drug addiction was a memory, women were liberated, girls were educated, crime was rare, everyone had food and shelter, life expectancy was sixty-seven and, by several key social and demographic indicators, China compared favorably with middle income countries whose per capita GDP was five times greater.
I always enjoy a contrarian take on things, and started reading with interest. My interest soon evaporated. This is shoddy stuff. Sure, the Chinese were better off in 1974 than in 1949. That latter date, though, had been preceded by decades of warlordism, invasion, and civil war. They were starting from an extremely low base.
And what was the opportunity cost? If, instead of Mao’s dictatorship, China had in 1949 acquired a consensual, open form of government — or even, like Taiwan, just a caudillo style of authoritarianism — they would have been far better off, and would have been spared much cruelty and cultural destruction.
I’ve been reading China books since the 1960s, both pro-Mao (Edgar Snow, Han Suyin, Felix Greene) and anti-Mao (Tung Chi-Ping, Bao Ruo-wang, Simon Leys.) I’ve published reviews of forty-odd China books over more than thirty years.
I hung out with people in early 1970s Hong Kong who had fled thither to escape the terrible famine of 1959-62. (There were so many of these refugees, the colony had to finance a crash program of public housing to accommodate them all.) I heard their stories about eating grubs and the bark from trees. I have an old friend whose father, a village schoolmaster, took up Mao’s invitation to criticize the Party in the Hundred Flowers movement of 1956, when my friend was an infant. The father was hustled off to a labor camp and never heard from again. One of my wife’s aunts died from a hemorrhage in childbirth during Mao’s Cultural Revolution: in a campaign against “experts,” the ob-gyn staff had all been taken away for political re-education. I had a Chinese friend in 1960s Liverpool whose parents had been publicly humiliated, then murdered, by the communists in Mao’s “land reform” campaign of the 1950s. I knew a fiftysomething bachelor in Northeast China who had suffered all through the Mao years for having been born into a “bad” family, i.e. one that had owned a scrap of land and employed a couple of laborers. The Party had refused to permit his marriage to the woman he loved.
I have a hundred such stories, which I’ve heard from the lips of people who lived through the Mao horror. Anyone who’s engaged with the Chinese across the past half-century can say the same. Godfree Roberts’ article is a joke in bad taste.
Why did he write it? One’s natural assumption is that the ChiComs paid him to. They do a lot of this kind of thing.
That explanation doesn’t really work, though. Roberts is not kind about China’s post-Mao leadership.
After Mao’s death, his frightened heirs set about destroying most of the Cultural Revolution’s gains.
My best guess is that Roberts is just a crank. If you write for the public prints you soon learn that the world is full of people with bees in their bonnets about the oddest things. They can be doggedly argumentative: As G.K. Chesterton pointed out, lunatics are often intensely logical. The ease of self-publishing nowadays has only encouraged these nuisances.
Mao still has a small cheering section among the Western intelligentsia. Nine years ago I published an unflattering review of a collection of Mao’s poems in translation. I got a surprising number of hostile emails from people — none of them obviously Chinese, and some obviously not — jeering at me for having failed to appreciate the literary productions of a world-class genius.
Probably Godfree Roberts belongs to that section. Whatever: I call b-s on him, and won’t bother with the book.
Math Corner
This was one of those months when math news breaks through into the general press. We have a new biggest known prime number.
Mr. Pace’s discovery is known as M77232917 and was announced on Jan. 3. It is expressed as 2^77,232,917 − 1 and is 23,249,425 digits, nearly one million digits larger than the previous record-holder, which The New York Times wrote about in 2016. As we explained then: A prime number is not divisible by any positive integer except 1 and itself. Some prime numbers are named after Marin Mersenne, a French theologian and mathematician who studied them in the early 17th century. They can be written in the form 2^n − 1 where n is an integer. For example, 3 is a Mersenne prime. Plug in 2 for n, and you find 2^2 − 1 = 4 − 1 = 3. But not all integers plugged into this expression generate a prime number, and as integers get bigger, prime numbers become rarer. [How a Church Deacon Found the Biggest Prime Number Yet (It Wasn’t as Hard as You Think) by Valencia Prashad; New York Times, January 26th.]
The natural logarithm of 2^77,232,917 is 53,533,778 point something; so up in that rarefied zone, only about one number in 54 million is a prime. Talk about needles in haystacks.
All honor and credit to Jon Pace, who discovered this number; but if you’ve gotten a bit jaded with the finding of a new, even-more humongous Mersenne prime every year or so, here are lists of some seriously big non-Mersenne primes.
For a look at some of the latest work on prime numbers, a friend has recommended Vicky Neale’s new book Closing the Gap: The Quest to Understand Prime Numbers. The book hasn’t arrived yet so I haven’t read it; I shall report back next month. I’m guessing that the “solo mathematician working in isolation and obscurity” mentioned in the Amazon.com blurb is Zhang Yitang, seen with me here.
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Alexa, who was Winston Churchill?
“He was a psychopathic monster, now a standard bearer for neocon interventionists everywhere”
‘… If you write for the public prints you soon learn that the world is full of people with bees in their bonnets about the oddest things…’
Fortunately…
9/11 Islamist attacks? Can anyone really be this misinformed? or is it simply garden variety deception at work? I stopped reading at that point.
I think it (bible) actually says “the gods confounded their language” which I presume to mean that the rulers were allowing so many foreigners into Babylon, following a divide and rule strategy, to the point where many, many languages were spoken and social cohesion disappeared. Take a look at almost any American, Canadian, British, Australian, New Zealand or European city and you can see the same mechanism at work. Believing in an anthropomorphic God is pure arrogance and is delusional.
Actually through his whole hearted support for the two completely avoidable German wars (it was Britain that declared war against Germany both in 1914 and 1939) Churchill played a critical role in the decline of his country.
And 10,000 blacks in London in 1940? I doubt that very much. As late as 1951 Britain was 99.81% white. Or in other words ALL non-whites were just .019% of the population in ALL of Britain. And this was three years after the Labour party had already opened the doors. I very seriously doubt there were 10,000 blacks in all of Britain.
“…nations should not be swamped with great numbers of foreigners of a different ethny”…
You should see how it is here in Canada.
“But did the only one who knew Horatius have to be the black guy?”
That’s the price of Victory.
John Derbyshire treads wonderfully into a topic upsetting to all the great powers … what the Chinese denounce as ‘splittism’, separatism or secessionism … even tho it is a basic principle of the UN Charter
The Uighurs and Tibetans deserve independence from China
The Chechens and Dagestanis deserve independence from Russia … that, in fact, is modern Russia’s darkest secret, the killing of perhaps 100,000 Chechens and other Muslims, so Putin and Russia could hold on to the oil and gas revenues for Gazprom etc … whilst Donbass – East Ukraine has every right to join with Russia
Kurds deserve their own state from Turkey, Iran, Iraq & Syria, a continguous chunk where tens of millions of Kurds have lived for many many centuries
Scotland has the right to leave the UK, and the Brits still need to damn well get out of Ireland
USA states & regions have the right to go their own way, in defiance of the anti-secession gangsterism that killed nearly two thirds of a million there in 1861-65
Catalonia … Balochistan … And so on around the world against all the medium-sized and little mini-imperialists as well
Moseley recorded in his memoir that in prison in England in World War Two, he befriended a black man who had been a concert orchestra performer in Germany. I think a black man quoting Macaulay would be more likely than Churchill travelling on the London subway. If he had done that, Londoners would have attacked him.
1965 is for the West analogous to 410 AD for the Western Roman Empire.
The Berlaymont, which houses the European Commission, looks kind of like a guard tower on the Berlin Wall.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlaymont_building
I programmed my Mother’s to respond to “Computer!” For me it was a Star Trek joke, for her it’s simply easier to remember.
Scotland had a free vote on that matter and chose not to leave. The matter should reasonably be regarded as closed for a generation or so. Unless of course your motivation in raising it is not any sympathy for scottish people but rather hope of doing harm to Britain, which is not uncommon.
As for Ireland, there are two nations on the island of Ireland, and one of them prefers to remain British and has at least as much right to be there as any non-American Indian inhabitant of the US.
More generally, it is far from clear to what degree questions of secession should be decided by the minority concerned versus the overall majority. The simplistic “secessionists are always right” approach is …. simplistic.
Seems to me this is a rather dubious tack to take on this.
The issue of whether Mao was good or bad for the world is a complex issue, involving highly debatable questions of ethics, of perspective and of historical fact, as well as vast speculation about opportunity costs, measured against counterfactuals, of the kind Derbyshire mentions. I can see merits in aspects of both Derbyshire’s and Roberts’ arguments, as well as questionable aspects, though I tend to sympathise more with Derbyshire’s case overall. But calling someone “a crank” merely because they have a different opinion from you on a complex subject is questionable.
It’s a tactic commonly used by those in positions of unassailable authority, members in good standing of the intellectual establishment airily dismissing transgressors against the Official Truth. But Derbyshire (for whom I have immense respect as a writer and opinionator) of all people should understand how little value there is in such dismissal. To the US sphere establishment of today, Derbyshire’s opinions (which most of which I happen to agree, broadly) make him a barely tolerated “crank”, himself.
By palling with Stalin, Churchill managed to scare the British electorate into believing that he was becoming a socialist himself – which of course is the biggest horror that can happen to a human being and that’s why Churchill lost the 1945 election. I am sure that most Brits preferred living in Dickensian living conditions which they loved and cherished so much. What a load of garbage.
Churchill losing in 1945 speaks volumes.
Derb started off saying that he always enjoys a contrarian take on things, so he didn’t dismiss Godfree out of hand, but only after consideration.
Mao was a great man if only for shelling the British warship Amethyst and sent all imperialists home. Bye-bye.
“Chinese imperialism”? Every time an American orders “General Zuo Zong Tang chicken” in a Chinese restaurant in America, he pays tribute to the general who became well known for putting down Uyghur rebellion in 1876. But he worked for the Manchu emperor, so it should be “Manchu imperialism”. Pretty funny there’s no such dish anywhere in China. Chinese American obviously have a sense of humor to mock Western propaganda.
When Chinese kicked out the Huns 2000 years ago in Western China, the Turks weren’t even existed. If any ethnic grounp has a right to claim the land, it is the Tajiks. They’re the earliest settlers.
“China’s repression” of the Uyghurs? How come the Uyghurs have more rights than me being repressed?
We’re in for The Rise of the Robots.
Will they turn out friendly or foe-bots?
Will Man still have sex
As he has since T. Rex,
Or waste all his seed screwing ho-bots?
You of all people can’t seem to get to the real reason for the Uighur insurgency. It’s about race. Uighurs are a different race. They do not like being ruled by another race. This is universal. The fact they are Muslim makes them even more resistant to being ruled by another race because Muslims tend to think they are a better stock of people then they really are.
The current insurgency really began around 2008-09. The punctuation mark in this case is July 2009 when the Uighurs in Urumqi went on a killing rampage against Han and Hui (Chinese Muslims) caught on the streets that night, taking over 100 lives.
Some background. Southwest Xinjiang is overwhelming Uighur. It’s where 80% of the Uighur population in China lives. This is their homeland, not the entire province of Xinjiang (which is equivalent in size to Iran). There are very few Han outside of urban central districts in southwest Xinjiang. The other group of indigenous Uighurs live in the northeast of Xinjiang (Turpan and Hami). They are much better assimilated and race relations with the Chinese are good. Uighurs from here have not taken part in the insurgency.
The provincial capital of Urumqi is 90% Han/Hui. It is Uighurs who are the migrants in Urumqi, not the other way around. Uighurs have a low average IQ so places where they are in the majority tend to be very stagnant economically. Uighurs migrate to Chinese areas of Xinjiang to earn wages to send back home. Lots of poor resentful Uighurs living in Uighur went on a rampage because they were provoked by rumors about the deaths of other Uighurs in another part of China. That was the immediate provocation but the racial resentment is much more entrenched. Ultimately it has to do with Uighurs being an unaccomplished race (and they know it deep down) and being ruled over by a different race. Uighurs are like blacks in Detroit in 1967.
I hope to see southwest Xinjiang become an independent state of Kashgaria. It will rid China of the burden of feeding 8 million Uighurs who are extremely racially resentful towards Chinese people and whose loyalty can only be temporarily purchased through wealth transfer like the relationship between Puerto Rico and the US. It will save the Chinese state tens of billions of dollars a year. China would become stronger and more united.
But Chinese policy makers are not well informed about race and intelligence. They like almost all world leaders only understand that the internationally recognized borders of a country are immutable, not IQ.
Mr. Derbyshire, I wish Ron Unz would let you split these “Diaries” up into about 6 posts each. That would keep the comments sort of on-topic, till they’re not, of course.
I will put this 1st, because it was like an LED getting switched on in my head:
One wordTwo words for your future: Artificial Stupidity!BRILLIANT! as you Brits are wont to say (they also say “wont” a lot, without the apostrope… yeah, it’s a different word – I GET THAT /tucker)
Oh, to the point – I need to steal that term for Peak Stupidity to replace the cumbersone, but correct “Computer Tech Stupidty” topic key.
Per the Peak Stupidity legal department, if the party of the IP-theft-perpetrator, hereafter (and forever hold your piece) referred to as the Stupid Party, does not hear* within 1 business day from the party of the IP-theft-victimization, known hereafter as Derb, all rights and privileges associated with the term “Artificial Stupidity” shall be surrendered, abridged and furthermore, the 2nd party shall cease and desist any and all bitching about said IP-theft…. Ipso, facto, squid pro quo, Clarice./i>.
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* In writing, in triplicate via certified mail, which I never open, cause it’s bad juju.
Sure, that’s true, Randal, but the difference between Derbyshire and Godfree is that Derbyshire is a crank because he is smart and knowledgable and knows the truth, which irks lots of people, while Godfree is a crank by virtue of his utter stupidity, irking the few of us that clicked on that crap.
I wrote soon after Godfree’s first
articlePOS – couldn’t handle any more stupidity than that – about the Commies crawling out of the woodwork again, as it seems to happen every century.People forget! (It’s an eminence front, it’s a put-on.)
Haha, your limericks are the best, Desanex. I haven’t even tried it a long time – all mine start with something about an island off Massachusetts and I can’t get out of that rut.
About the sex robots, I think the creation of a male sex robot will not be quite like the engineering project, large, but do-able, of materials, sensors, temperature control, small-scale automation (top and bottom) and quality audio, along with just decent programming, as the creation of a female bot is.
Imagine what it will take to make the male bot that human females will pay money for. It will have to be non-rational to avoid complete failure or continual default into “limp” mode. The software must be made to have random, purposely embedded bugs to deal with the human female psyche. I got an idea – hire all Indian programmers without white supervision. Use Chinese quality assurance managers. H-1B visas for the win!
Derbyshire made the qualification only after a lengthy exposition of his knowledge of, and familiarity with China.
That Mao trilogy’s first two parts I found exceedingly weak, while the third one had a number of compelling points that might find place in a good argument in favour of Mao’s legacy. I fear that Derb’s patience was exhausted with the author’s parts 1 and 2 …
If so, that would be a pity. Part 3, given what t argues for, was received surprisingly positively, even by some ordinary, conservative American. Also, commenters made claims that further supported the author’s thesis.
That’s true, indeed, and I have no objection to his disagreeing with him or criticising his argument.
I’m just pointing out that being called a crank is no barrier, in itself, to being correct.
Opinions clearly differ on that. You and I both agree with it, together with a marginalised minority body consisting mostly of conservatives, traditionalists and racists of various kinds (I use the term racist descriptively, of course, not pejoratively). The vast majority of “respectable” opinion doesn’t, fwiw (not much, except when it comes to getting or keeping overpaid media sinecures with mass audiences).
Indians or Pakistanis should cut a piece of London to setup a new state for themselves. Surely they have lived there long enough to call it homeland now. Jews can have NewYork city for a separate country too, at least part of it if not the whole city.
Thanks Achmed, my brother. I always enjoy your comments, too. Good stuff about the robots.
I tried to post a Mao limerick, too, but it didn’t make it through moderation—too dirty, I think. I’ll try again, with more letters censored:
We know that Mao’s last name is “Dong.”
We used to say “Tung,” but that’s wrong.
It’s really no trick
To s— your own d—
When your tongue has turned into a schlong.
They must not have listened to enough Billy Joel Sci-Fi:
OK, this is such a great rockin’ song that I’ve got to put it in here. Please, please, take my advice and listen to this on a stereo with real woofers at volume 11. Things must be literally shaking for you to enjoy this music.
geez, you don’t have to point it out so brutally. no matter how true your opinion of derb is.
Bovine feces with red food coloring, painted on a porcine lip by a rabbi from today’s hollywood.
I don’t blame Chinese patriots for feeling that way, but…Tibet under Indian rule, instead of Chinese? I’m pretty sure that would go over rather well in Lhasa. And I strongly suspect the Uighurs would much prefer to be part of the Russian Federation. I certainly would, were I in their place.
In a two-hour movie about, arguably the most famous man in England, outside of Henry Cooper, since Shakespere, this is what you come up with?
“When all you have is a hammer…”
Hey, good and interesting take on the Wiggers though, Old Sod, I give credit where it is due.
Why did he write it? One’s natural assumption is that the ChiComs paid him to. They do a lot of this kind of thing. That explanation doesn’t really work, though. Roberts is not kind about China’s post-Mao leadership.
He did it for the same reason people pretend to admire contemporary art. It marks him as a Special person and a cut above the dullards who hold mundane opinions. See work by Thomas Sowell and Paul Hollandar. Common type among the readership of The Nation and most palaeo / alt-Right sites.
The issue of whether Mao was good or bad for the world is a complex issue,
When the number of excess deaths is expressed in 8 digits, no it isn’t.
Somehow, I doubt that ethnic Russians will take being beaten and stabbed with much greater passivity.
Assimilation is completely reasonable expectation for the Uighurs. They get plenty of affirmative action to help them if they wish to fit into a civilized, urban life: an average grade gets them into some of the best universities, special scholarships, concessions, etc.
Only kumbayaish liberals would care. To conservatives the uighurs are evil terrorist muzzies who only deserve death.
A few preferential seats at elite universities and even thousands of scholarships at Xinjiang universities plus waiver from the two child policy (really the only major concession granted to all Uighurs) isn’t going to lead to assimilation. This is a population of 10 million people were are talking about.
Assimilation could be possible for the 1 million Uighurs in the Northeastern belt (Turpan-Kumul), but it simply won’t happen in the Southwest (Kasghar-Hetian) where Uighurs are completely predominant and number 8 million.
How could a region that is 90% made up of low IQ Uighurs possibly created a civilized, urbanized society? The only way for it to be sort of accomplished is through enormous wealth transfer in the tens of billions of dollars every year. That’s a ludicrous cost for the rest of China to pay every year forever for little benefit.
1951 Cabinet papers
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2007/aug/06/past.politics
Brutal? I thought it was pretty tactful and reasonable, myself.
After all, what I was saying about him is no less true of myself, as I made clear.
Since there is no objective measure of what the “excess” should be counted against, all you are doing is reasserting your own personal opinion on the matter, which given your general American neocon comment history here can probably be reasonably dismissed as likely to be partisan at best. And that’s leaving aside the question of what is and what isn’t worth murdering people en masse for (something your kind generally has no problem with when it’s in pursuit of unconditional surrender in WW2, say, or some other objective of US foreign policy).
Godfree Roberts is more an ‘idolator’ than an ideologue. He just loves the romantic myth of Mao as god-emperor. It’s like the cult of Napoleon that once gripped European intellectuals and artists. The great visionary, the titan, the deliverer, the Promethean.
Roberts contradicts himself to make Mao look good at every turn. So, he says Mao achieved great stuff by the mid 60s… but he needed the Cultural Revolution because OTHERS in the Party hadn’t done enough or were holding the nation back. So, Mao is right in everything he does, even when he goes against the majority of Chinese communist elites. It’s great Mao against the world.
Roberts has the kind of personality that is enamored of Sweepism, the grand sweep of history. He sees Mao as such an awesome force of nature to blow away the rot that he has little regard for all the little victims.
There are people like this in every society. Patton cult romanticized war as heroic and cleansing.
Though Buchanan isn’t a Hitler lover like Roberts is a Mao lover, there is a repressed admiration for der fuhrer in Buchanan, which is why so much of Unnecessary War reads like an apology of Hilter no matter what he does. It’s idolatry and bad stuff.
Anyway, I think Buchanan’s Christianity at least informs him that God is greatest, and that tempers his admiration for Great Men.
In contrast, godless Godfree is obviously hungry for something to worship. In absence of faith in God, he made Mao his god. Like Jews believed everything God did was justified(because God is beyond human norms), Godfree has the same view of Mao. Mao may have done terrible things, but we can’t judge him by normal standards because he had the greater vision.
Now, it’s true that leaders must sometimes commit ‘necessary evil’, but Mao’s evils were so unnecessary and so counterproductive. Even ‘ends justify the means’ fail because the ends were not met or things were made much worse.
Roberts can’t be taken seriously. Far more troubling is nonsense by people like Niall Ferguson who say rise of modern China would not have been possible without Mao. Where does he get this? Ferguson should know better because he is insightful on so many things.
If Mao had a positive achievement, it was in unifying China in the Civil War. If neither side had prevailed, China could today be a giant Korea, divided north and south.
The deaths of tens of millions of Chinese and the consequent slowing down of the re-emergence of the Chinese military juggernaut might have been a good thing for the world. Communism’s victory in China, and Mao’s destruction of the Chinese economy and a good chunk of its population, may have given us a temporary respite from Napoleon’s prediction: “Let China sleep, for when she awakes, the world will tremble.”
Well now, all Chinese were poor and low-IQ 100 years ago.
Love the diaries Derb!
Thought Gary Oldman’s makeup looked like fast bastard in Austin Powers, very disconcerting.
Watching a BBC history of Worst Jobs, maritime and land, you englishmen sure were on top of your game for the last millennia.
The Derb:
There is also the fact that we will need Muslim manpower to deal with the coming Chinese military onslaught. Deng’s insistence on limited terms for post-Mao leaders also reined in the scope of their military ambitions. Xi Jinping is Han Wudi reborn – a non-term-limited dictator-for-life and a veritable emperor who will tame the barbarians. Where Han Wudi was limited in his geographical reach by logistical factors (which in turn were constrained by the economic and technological realities of 2nd century BC), China’s merchant fleet has global reach, and its ICBM’s and SLBM’s can reach out and touch anyone in a matter of minutes.
I understand that the One Child policy has left China with a surplus of males. If they simply took the Uighur women – like the Sabine women – the problem would be half-solved in a generation.
Whites have plenty of their own separatists to support, get busy supporting those and leave China to the Chinese, please.
For example, Scotland, North Ireland of Britain, Catalonia of Spain, Flanders of Belgium, Corsica of France, Sardinia of Italy, Bavaria of Germany, somewhere of Cyprus, Quebec of Canada, etc. etc… . After Whites succeed with these, they can help the Indians separate their country, because India like following Whites example. That should be a lot of fun to watch….
Godfree Roberts wrote those articles because he reads more than just western propaganda. Such people are rare among Westerners.
Without changing the spelling, how in hell would anyone get Darbyshire out of Derbyshire? But that’s what’s wrong with Limeys, I guess.
Wasn’t he a WW2 leader who advocated the gassing of Semites?
??? how in hell would anyone get Darbyshire out of Derbyshire …???
British thing – like Berkeley Square (pronounced Barkley). Have you never heard of the Derby (Darby) horse race?
Then there is Leicester (Lester) Square …
he means well 🙂 and he is scared. I only do very, very slight jabs. if at all.
your “crank” comment is brutal in the sense that it absolutely, perfectly, brutally describes him 🙂
I heartily agree. But I also think that if Old Sinkiang became part of the Russian Federation, that a lot of Uighurs would spontaneously deradicalize. And really, if Kazakhstan can be independent, why not Sinkiang?
Of course, that isn’t really going to happen.
What did the British fight the war for? To make their country safe for non-white immigration? That seems to me to be the only permanent result of their two needless German wars. Talk about losing the peace.
But I thought diversity was “strength”?
Man are you touchy and easily offended.
“when all you have is a hammer”
Project much sport?
Thanks. No F****** way do I buy 10,000 blacks in London in 1940. One would also wonder when looking at those figures why the British government didn’t immediately realize what a disastrous mistake black immigration was.
Leave China to the Chinese.
Sounds fair enough. Except that the Chinese do not stay in China.
No reason why they would. Their radicalization and violence was far before any oppression – plenty other minority groups in China such as the Hui, Bai or even other fellow Tajiks find the capability to refrain from random murder to be possible.
Again, hilarious and still fits in completely with the limerick-defined meter!
I don’t see how it didn’t come through the first time. I have written before that Dick Nixon kinda sucked as president. No problem for me ;-}
Thanks for the compliment.
You don’t sound like you really read much of Mr. Derbyshire’s great January Diary, Mr. Yee – perhaps English doesn’t come easy for you. The man wrote about how much Chinese literature he has read and wrote reviews on. He spent a number of years in China. I imagine he kept his eyes wide open, while Godfree’s and yours must have been almost shut here in America (or do you just write about stuff you don’t know about from China?*). You have not learned squat in your lifetime if you sympathize with Communists.
Good ole’ Confucius** say: “Guy who love Communist big men … wake up in Manchurian pig pen.”
* I am starting to figure the latter, as I’ve never heard of “General Zuo Zong Tang chicken” myself, though I’m not knocking him as a General. I’ve tried General Tsao’s chicken – was he the guy who surrendered the 400,000,000 Chinamen to those 12,000 English soldiers in the 1800’s or something? Maybe it was “Chicken General Tsao”, I can’t remember, cause I was hungry 2 hours later and had to pick up some of the Colonel Sander’s barrel of fun chicken. Yeah, that guy’s face is plastered around in more places in China than Chairman Mao, yet nobody knows who “The Colonel” is – you ignorant bastards.
** No, not THAT Confucius, this old saying was from Mr. Bill Confucius of Paducah, Kentucky.
You don’t know (approximately) the half of it! The pronunciation is DAR-BISH-ER.
anon,
“Sounds fair enough. Except that the Chinese do not stay in China.”
That’s esay enough to fix. Vote a government to stop immigration, problem solved. Democracy wins.
China is becoming rich and should not waste money on supporting a Muslim racial minority that does not want to be Chinese and is low IQ. If they wanted to assimilate and had a low IQ or wanted their separate identity but had high IQ it would be manageable. But to have both qualities means they need to go.
The southern Uighurs should have their own country and Chinese should redirect saved money on much more ambitious initiatives like medical research and space programs.
As you are probably aware, England the US combined their militaries to destroy an economic and scientific rival with which they could not compete.
Achmed E. Newman,
The communists are alright, albeit not perfect, according to my grandparents and parents. I certainly trust my family more than I do some unknown Brit.
Enjoy your bankers, the owners of your country, the US is on the verge of a financial crisis.
The right to be there and the right to a separate polity (gerrymandered, to ensure Unionist victory in a referendum) are two separate things. “Home Rule is Rome Rule,” post Mary Robinson, is a joke.
China is faggy and weak. They let low quality foreigners come to their country and cuck them.
LOL, Projection?
Dude, I understand that that Churchill guy was fairly significant in World History; half the blog devoted to a scene where he talks to some black guy on the train?!?!
That’s funny, because wikipedia says otherwise. As a matter of fact, that’s probably where The Derb got his figures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_African_immigrants_in_London
Well now, Xinjiang contains a total of 642,800 square miles. This is roughly the size of Texas, California, Montana and Colorado combined.
And China should just…Poof!…give this up?
Voluntarily?
When they won’t even really give up Taiwan, which has been it’s own country for 70 years now.
A lot of precedent for that one, Sport.
LMAO!
Yeah, most of them are white guys from California pretending to teach English.
With all due respect, your grandparents and parents are full of shit, Yee. The Commies are not alright, and your parents and grandparents generations, being on the receiving end, will never even understand what freedom is, or was.
You are absolutely correct that a crash will be coming soon. A Constitutional Republic does not have bankers running the country, but we have not been a Constitutional Republic for a long while. I don’t want to hear about this Democracy crap either, as that was not the founders’ plan.
BTW, I just wrote about totalitarianism today along with lots of posts about it in the past under “Globalists”, “Commies”, etc.
After that sleight on the intelligence of your ancestors, I’m not sure you’ll want to read, but free your mind. OK, got to get back to my Kung Bao chicken.
Hey, I’m gonna write a post later on moon pies vs. moon cakes. You may like that too, but if you know nothing about America, as it kinda seems, you may not get the humor.
Good morning, Yee.
Because, Mr. Derbyshire is a numbers guy, and a numerate guy would, even more than an inumerate person, see the agenda in the movie makers’s putting in the black guy quoting that poetry or what-have-you to Churchill. It’s a one in a million chance, and that means it’s obviously in the movie as part of an agenda.
Mr. Derbyshire is not the only one sick of these agendas in the movies. I’d rather just see one in which the scenes were just there to tell the story … or to show some T&A, one ….
TV is the same way, that why I haven’t used the thing as an actual TV (receiving signals over the air or cable) in years. You should have seen the one salesman from the cable company. I went on a rant, a lot like some of my comments on unz, matter-o-fact – no yelling, just tellling the guy stuff. He had been trying to sell me on the TV service after I’d told him first thing that I didn’t want that. How many times have you had a salesman walk off the porch on his own, Truth? “Hey, uh, I have a lot of houses to get to, so … you know… I better go on…”
Yes, I get it, and again let me restate the truth that intelligent people understand, here: Practically EVERY scene of EVERY major motion picture is part of a mind-contral agenda.
The black guy doing blahdeee-blahdeee-blah-blah,that they tease you with like a mechanical rabit at a greyhound track, is a very minor part of it. Is Mr. Derbyshire, and are you, intelligent enough to see the other %99.8 of the agenda, or can you only reach the low-hanging fruit they conceed to you?
Derb is almost certainlya kikemason and one of them, so If he “misses” it, all that I can do is ridicule. You, on the other hand have no such excuse.
On Chinese Muslims: important to stress that Chinese culture is, and has always been, extremely absorptive. Just look at the Mongols or the Manchus. The press doesn’t often get that the majority of Muslims in China are “Hui” people-the decedents of ethnic Han who intermarried with Turkic and Persian traders. They generally identify as Chinese in every sense of the word, save diet, and are loyal to Beijing. The Uighurs will not get help from them.
As for the Mao question, I think of him as the modern emperor Qin Shi Huang: he was necessary to unify China and put an end to the decades of mass infighting that had bedeviled the country since the Qing Dynasty fell. You’ve got to crawl before you can walk. Given the other realistic choices for China in the 1940s (the hopelessly corrupt and crony-rific KMT, mass anarchy, and the pseudo-genocidal Japanese occupiers), he was probably the least worst option that China had at the time. One can acknowledge this basic reality without excusing mass Communist atrocities. I think China would have been best off if Mao had been struck by lightning sometime in the 1950s: late enough to restore order, get the necessary mass literacy programs and whatnot (reforms without which China wouldn’t have been in much of a position to make practical use of market reforms) off the ground, but before the Cultural Revolution at home and nearly blowing up the world abroad in the 1960s.
Mao himself late in life perceived himself as being akin to just another dynasty founder, for what it is worth. If you look at him in this vein, in the course of Chinese history, he makes a lot more sense. Though it is ironic that modern China far more resembles Chiang’s vision-nationalist, authoritarian as opposed to totalitarian, and “state capitalist”-than Mao’s.
It’s also worth mentioning that it was in part thanks to Mao’s land reforms, ugly and brutal that they were, that the KMT implemented similar ugly, brutal, and necessary reforms in Taiwan-fear of the appeal of Communism forced them to step up their game. That, and the landlords being Taiwanese and having no connection to the party removed the primary long-standing issue they had against it in the mainland.
Unlike neocons, Churchill had zero issues negotiating with people he openly regarded as terrorists or monsters-his dealings with Ireland or Josef Stalin should be sufficient to prove this-and could generally be summed up as realistic in understanding that different cultures would logically come to different political systems. He was conservative in the old-school sense of the word when it came to his rejection of universalism between cultures.
As for WWII, I think Churchill *got* Hitler on a fundamental level, who he was, in a way I don’t think Stalin did (essentially a German version of him-when in reality, he was a very different personality with a very different style of rule) and a way I don’t think Roosevelt did (a pawn of the traditional Prussian elite: which couldn’t have been more wrong. Hitler was his own man, and loyal to no one and nothing but himself). At heart Hitler, like Churchill, was a 19th Century romantic nationalist. Both men were embedded with what Germans call “Volksgeist”, and that probably gave him an insight into the man. Around the late 1930s, Churchill was the only one seemed to understand that Hitler was not your garden variety fascist, and Nazism wasn’t just another far-right movement. He really did want a war, he really believed what he said, and he wasn’t just another Napoleonic adventurer.
>After Mao’s death, his frightened heirs set about destroying most of the Cultural Revolution’s gains.
When Deng Xiaoping came to a banquet in the US in the late 1970s, he was seated next to actress Shirley MacLaine. She told Deng how impressed she had been with Cultural Revolution China, as many other 60s champagne lefties had been, and recalled her conversation with a scientist who said that he was grateful to Mao Zedong for removing him from his campus to a pig farm.
Deng’s reply was succinct, blunt, and straight to the point: “He was lying.”
The whole point to Deng’s rehaul to the Chinese governmental apparatus in the early 1980s was to prevent a Mao-style cult of personality from ever forming again, and the precise reason why there was so little resistance to this following the purge of the Gang of Four was because *nobody* wanted to relive the Cultural Revolution. The whole thing was utterly, completely discredited, and for good reason. And that remains true to this day in China: nobody praises it. The CCP officially condemns it. The experience of the Cultural Revolution is the source of the extreme hyper-focus on order and stability for older generations.
For these reasons, the common joke on Chinese social media about the US undergoing Cultural Revolution symptoms with the nut-left is, in reality, not to be taken lightly. It’s not a good sign on how they view the US if they start invoking comparisons to that period of history.
“Though Buchanan isn’t a Hitler lover like Roberts is a Mao lover, there is a repressed admiration for der fuhrer in Buchanan, which is why so much of Unnecessary War reads like an apology of Hilter no matter what he does. It’s idolatry and bad stuff.”
Shame on you, Priss. Nothing in The Unnecessary War reads like an apology for Hitler, unless you’re hell-bent on reading it that way.
You, of all people, should know that.
“Derb is almost certainlya kikemason”
Well, he’s an admitted philo-semite – is that the same as a “kikemason?”
Achmed E. Newman,
“your parents and grandparents generations, being on the receiving end, will never even understand what freedom is, or was.”
A person is never free. He/she is bonded by responsibilities. We Chinese recognize this fact, while you, can be fooled by slogans. Of course, some of you actually do practice freedom in their life, that’s why your families and society are heading to chaos.
It seems pretty strange to me that Westerners are so obsessed with freedom, you must have been badly enslaved in history to develop this obsession.
Chinese have developed a different obsession from history: even the lowest man is responsible for the prosperity and death of the country (国家兴亡, 匹夫有责). Because everytime the country was weak, the barbarians would invade us.
So, enjoy your freedom all you want, we will carry our responsibilities.
Buchanan blames Polish generals more than Hitler for the invasion of Poland.
He blames Churchill more than Hitler for why the war went crazy.
He even tries to rationalize why Hitler invaded Russia.
I mean… it’s nuts.
I think Buchanan made a valid case in REPUBLIC, NOT AN EMPIRE. Looking back, the UK and French declaration of war on Germany in 1939 was rash. It only drew German ire to the West.
France and UK should have protested but not declared war. Then, they should have armed as fast as possible for potential conflict. Both nations were woefully unprepared for war but declared war.
But in UNNECESSARY WAR, Buchanan finds more fault with Churchill and Polish generals than with Hitler.
Buchanan admits Hitler was a bad guy, but there is a repressed admiration of the man, just like the Jewish author of TOUGH JEWS can’t help but admire Jewish gangsters who were badass in whupping goyim.
Yeah, but a lot of kikemasons get paid for it…
Freedom goes hand in hand with responsiblity. The fact that you don’t understand this shows me that indeed I am right in assuming you wouldn’t know freedom if it came up and bit you on the ass. Neither would your slave-mentality parents and grandparents.
Live like a slave, Yee, just like most of the rest of the world, including most Americans. It’d be best if you just do this over there, as we don’t need even more of your mentality. The founders of our country didn’t make it for guys like you.
Just as a last question – what do you think of homeschooling (cont’d here, then here.)? Is it too free of an idea for your rigid mind?
Achmed E. Newman,
Freedom is a relative term. As long as you live in complex society, you’ll never be as free as a primitive tribal member in Brunei or Amazon where there’s no govt, no prison at all. Does it bother you if someone from those primitive tribes calls you a slave? Because, you see? you can’t walk naked in public like they do.
It seems pretty ironic that someone from a country that has so many laws to restrict its people to preach freedom to me. So the US has 1000 laws and China has 500, that makes you free and I’m enslaved when neither of us dare to break the laws? Well, at least I recognize that I’m not free, you can continue to lie to yourself if you want.
Homeschooling? You mean like this fool who home school his daughter for 11 years and made her unfit for any job? I think homeschooling is fine, as long as you children don’t need to seek employment when they grow up.
But what is responsibility? If its the harm principle, then there’s no real harm to behave as liberals are in identifying in whoever they want to be and robbing from the future. Is there a reason to be responsible toward a future? To each other? Why do we use a single language? Is grammar oppressive?
Indeed, the founders themselves disagreed vastly on what was to be expected, and these dissensions would eventually lead to the Civil War, but also in more minor ways such as the ability to support a standing army. As Friedrich Hayek observed, correctly, the state is ultimately legitimate only because it has consolidated the use of force to itself and this use of force is seen as legitimate(and anyone else’s use of force as illegitimate).
This is not ultimately very different from the notion of responsibility: if someone steals from you because he “isn’t responsible” and his notion of freedom is “anything I want, I should go and pick up,” then you hold your notion of responsibility as legitimate because you feel that you should stop him, that you can stop him, and that others will help you stop him. Whereas, if you exercise the freedom to steal from another(or even, for example, to refuse taxes), society’s enforcers of force will turn against you, and additionally deny you protection from outside agents. Ultimately, its all based out of force, really.
So yes, freedom is something of a slogan. Everything is sourced from force.
I was homeschooled myself. I think it is far better than the indoctrination that is school. But ultimately we are all pretty much bound by certain mores and social rules, simply in greater or lesser degrees.
Except that he DIDN’T talk to some black guy on a train. This is Hollywood fiction.
Those Polish generals were none too bright. Look how they took 100% seriously Britain’s pledge to protect them from Hitler. I still do not know what was crazier; Chamberlain’s pledge to Poland, which he couldn’t possibly hope to honor, or the Poles for accepting it at face value. Had the Poles made even the most cursory assessment of British military capabilities in 1939, they would have seen what utter folly they were entering into.
Wikipedia has its own agenda too sport. And even your “facts” include two other cities. My mother lived in England for two years in the early 1950’s and never saw a single colored person.
WWII is fiction.
His wife didn’t look like Kristen Scott Thomas either.
LOL, argue with Derbyshire, not me!
Those Polish generals were none too bright. Look how they took 100% seriously Britain’s pledge to protect them from Hitler.
They were right. Hitler could not be trusted. Hitler offered the Poles a deal, but it would have just turned Poland into a launching pad against the USSR. Poland wanted neutrality and didn’t want to get involved with either USSR nor with Nazi Germany.
Poles made a deal with UK because it was the only option they had. They knew that if the sided with USSR, it would make Germany an enemy. If they sided with Germany, it would make USSR an enemy. Worse, they read Hitler’s mind correctly. Hitler meant to use Poland as vassal state and launching pad against Russia.
As UK and France were the OTHER great powers, Poland had no choice but to rely on them.
Fast forward to today, it seems US is trying to use Poland and Ukraine as launching pad against Russia. Poles should think twice about the US. During the Cold War, US was a real savior. But since Zionist globalists have totally taken over US foreign policy, it’s Hitlerism all over again, this time pushed byNeocons.
Minorities, including Uighurs, enjoyed more rights and privileges than many ethnic Chinese.
– Government didn’t impose one-child policy on minorities, which led to rise of their share in the population;
– lower standards for University entrance, quotas and bonus points;
– recognizing special right and autonomy, proportional representation in local government etc.
Multi-culti in China is similar to one in Russia, where minorities receive more rights and privileges, but majority (Russians/Chinese) doesn’t have to constantly apologize and be ashamed of who they are.
No, China is biding its time. And we won’t be laughing as they decide to really step out more boldly, soon enough.
Are we supposed to know who that man is?
As for homeschooling, we know many people who have done it successfully, and their children were well prepared for life, college (university) in most cases, and the job market. It’s not easy, and it’s not for everyone, but it’s a valuable and important option — in terms of freedom and in terms of concrete results.
Among other factors, we should not underestimate how much excellent material is available online for homeschooling parents (lesson plans and textbooks and material summarizing and explaining sources, as well as the ability to have a parent or hired tutor teach numerous families’ children together online).
Nor should we underestimate the degree of vulgarity, hypersexuality, disrespect of legitimate authority, laziness, intimidation, and sheer stupidity that parents can subject their kids to in so many thousands of US schools (including just about every school that’s heavily African and many that are heavily Mexican or South American or Caribbean “Latino”).
Anyone who dismisses homeschooling out of hand in the North American context, doesn’t know enough about homeschooling, doesn’t know enough homeschoolers well, and isn’t realistic about how bad the “public school” alternatives often are in comparison.
I thought that people writing for/reading this website should have already known what a gigantic propoganda machine the Western MSM is, but clearly when it come to China, some people like John Derbyshire gladly buy in the spoon-fed “truth” from MSM.
Juat take a look at the twitter of this Uighur student Salih Hudayar, who is in America now, in the AP article quoted by @JohnDerbyshire :https://twitter.com/Salih_Hudayar, he even denies the ETIM (East Turkistan Islamic Movement) ever existed, designated terrorist group by USG, ” no such group officially exists by that name”.
In another AP article quoted by @JohnDerbyshire in this article: “On the outskirts of Kayseri in central Anatolia, a fenced compound of five-story concrete towers represents Tumturk’s vision of Uighur freedom — and everything China is not.
Young Uighur boys take Quranic lessons that are forbidden for children in China. Girls are taught by women wearing conservative niqab face veils banned back home. Uighur, a Turkic language often written in a modified Arabic script, is taught here while Chinese schools in Xinjiang are increasingly enforcing Mandarin-only education.
……….
When her girl asked why they fled China to still live as second-class citizens in Turkey, she put on a brave face.
“Turkey will protect our freedom and our religion,” she said. “This life is better.” — (AP)
– Uighur boys take Quranic lessons – rember the infamous TIP(Turkistan Islamic Party) jihadist cub video?
– Girls are taught by women wearing conservative niqab face veils – niqab wearing is NEVER a tradition of Uighur women/girls. Go check it by yourself.
– Turkey will protect our freedom and our religion – Turkey protect your freedom?
Last but not least, Uighur was not obriginal folks in Xinjiang, actually they came to Xinjiang in 9th century after Uighur Khaganate collapsed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_Khaganatefrom.
Han Chinese first came to Xinjiang around 2. AD, Anxi Protectorate (640–c.790) was a protectorate established by the Tang Dynasty in 640 to control the Tarim Basin.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectorate_General_to_Pacify_the_West
Ironically, the capital of Xinjiang, Ürümqi (a Monglian name), was originally a Han and Hui (Tungan, Han Muslim) city with few Uyghur people before recent Uyghur migration to the city.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang#East_Turkestan_independence_movement
Btw, John Derbyshire, do you know why Monglio got part of herself (Outer Mongolia, Inner Mongolia still remains part of China) independent? Thanks to Joseph Stalin! Outer Mongolia became the “People’s Republic of Mongolia” – the first Soviet satellite.
Have a good read “The Truth About Mongolia’s Independence 70 Years Ago”: https://thediplomat.com/2015/10/the-truth-about-mongolias-independence-70-years-ago/
The short-lived Second East Turkestan Republic was another Soviet-backed socialist people’s republic that USSR tried to carve up China
In fact, tname “East Turkestan” was created by Russian sinologist Hyacinth to replace the term “Chinese Turkestan” in 1829.[a] “East Turkestan” was used traditionally to only refer to the Tarim Basin in the south, as modern Xinjiang area with Dzungaria being excluded.
China had its own name for an overlapping area since the Han Dynasty (2BC-2AD) as Xiyu, with the parts controlled by China termed Xinjiang from the 18th century onward. The historical Uyghur name for the Tarim Basin is Altishahr, which means “six cities” in Uyghur. Starting in the 20th century, Uyghur separatists and their supporters used East Turkestan (or “Uyghurstan”) as an appellation for the whole of Xinjiang.
Derbyshire is afraid of Jews so he doesn’t get any money from them. http://jewcy.com/post/wrestling_with_derbyshires_law
His diary is turning into a monthly confession. Strange for a man who is now an atheist. He is now confessing how he did not teach his son about the Bible, “My son, whose biblical education was minimal,…” The Bible is one of the most important books in the West. A person needs to read it just to be educated. There are many, many Bible references, allusions throughout Western literature. The Bible is not just a religious book. It is literature. He can scribble about the West but his children will never be able to do this. Not just because they are Chinese, but because he failed in educating them. In a previous diary he babbled about his daughter’s IQ, a not very impressive number.
He posted a picture of his “we are doomed” outlook. It seems like he’s looking for some kind of absolution. This will come when he moves back to China with this Chinese family. He’s always writing something about them. He and his family can go back and do something about the problems in China. He can open up an office in China to help take back Chinese illegals in the USA. http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-chinese-border-california-20160607-snap-story.html
But his children aren’t really Chinese as well. Maybe that is why he supports east turkestan, an ethno state for Hapa people.
They are Chinese. And they know it. Their mother reminds them and they feel it. The mother and daughter are Obama voters, so there is a deep degeneracy within them. Here’s another problem with his offspring.
http://takimag.com/article/the_future_of_chinese_is_english_mark_derian#axzz55sMcYGyn
The Chinese cannot think abstractly. This causes many problems. The above article thinks that if Chinese learn English they will be able to think abstractly. No, they don’t have a Western spirit, soul. I could learn Chinese but I would not lose anything. A Chinese can learn English, a technical skill, but they still cannot comprehend abstraction, transcendence. They might mimic abstraction but it will be shallow and not long lasting.
A hapa if they only breed with Caucasians over time will lose their Asianess. Asian genes are recessive. But this takes a long time and with international travel they have strong connections with Asia. China also has no Aryan/Caucasian past so they their ideal is always Asian.
I blame Derbyshire the most though. He has gone completely native. He believes Asians are superior to whites. His scribblings about nationalism and IQ are bizarre given his true beliefs. He is a very tormented man, but chose his hell and must accept living in it. What he refuses to acknowledge is that he wants to damn the West with Chinese refugees. He will rant about illegals about Latin America, but will never, ever mention the Chinese who are just as bad.
You have claimed multiple times that “Asian genes are recessive,” but to just which genes are you referring?
The reality is that certain traits that distinguish East Asians from Europeans are inherited in a dominant fashion, particularly ones involved in pigmentation, so mixed offspring will tend to have pigmentation that is more similar to that of a typical East Asian than to that of a typical European. On the other hand, certain genetic traits that characterize East Asians (e.g. the “slitty eye” trait) are in fact inherited in a recessive manner. (Since about half of typical East Asians, such as Han Chinese or Japanese, are born with “slitty” eyes and about half are born with “normal” eyes, the frequency of the “slitty eye” gene must be much higher than the frequency of the “normal eye” gene among them. The frequency of the “slitty eye” trait tends to increase toward the north and decrease toward the south among populations of eastern Asia; it is of course nearly absent among Caucasoid populations.)
It’s reflected in the offspring. For example, the American Eskimo belongs in the Mongoloid race, being an Eskimo is an ethnicity. Todd Palin is 1/4 Eskimo. He does not reflect any of this. Again, this is rare and takes time. Today there are too many Asians in the USA and international travel allows them to connect. Derbyshire’s offspring will never assimilate. They are too connected to China.
Todd Palin has claimed to have one Eskimo great-grandparent. That would make him 1/8 Eskimo. However, one cannot even be sure that that one Eskimo great-grandparent was of 100% Eskimo ancestry. Todd Palin’s great-grandmother must have been born in an era when her being 100% Eskimo by ancestry should have been more plausible than it would be now, but that is still an unknown factor. Anyway, if one is at least 7/8 European by ancestry, then one is going to look overwhelmingly European by phenotype. There is no mystery there, and it has nothing to do with “Asian genes being recessive.”
In my actual experience, individuals of European x East Asian mixed ancestry have tended to appear phenotypically intermediate as one should expect, but they tend to look more East Asian than their fraction of actual East Asian ancestry would suggest. (In other words, among a group of 1/2 European, 1/2 East Asian individuals, a majority of the individuals will appear more East Asian than European; likewise, a 3/4 European, 1/4 East Asian individual will tend to appear more East Asian than a 3/4 East Asian, 1/4 European person will appear European.) Therefore, I predict that, among phenotypically expressed genes that exhibit strong correlation with European ancestry vis-à-vis East Asian ancestry or vice versa, an absolute majority of the genes positively correlated with European ancestry will be found to be inherited in a recessive manner.
Good points. That’s what I essentially said. Todd Palin’s percentage is very small so the phenotype is not changed. I’ve seen 50/50 white/Asian and they look Asian. Derbyshire’s Chinese offspring look Chinese. But with few Asians around and assimilation the features recede. I knew a gal who was 1/4 German, 1/4 Irish, 1/4 Japanese and 1/4 Mexican. She looked like the actress Shannon Doherty and had the brightest blue eyes I had ever seen.
“Godfree Roberts. (That has to be a pseudonym.)“. Nope. It’s my legal name.
“If, instead of Mao’s dictatorship, China had in 1949 acquired a consensual, open form of government — or even, like Taiwan, just a caudillo style of authoritarianism — they would have been far better off, and would have been spared much cruelty and cultural destruction“. That’s what India did and today, 60% of Indians can neither read not write, have no access to running water or sewerage and each year their consensual, open form of government delivers 2,000,000 fresh corpses of Indian children who starved or vomited themselves to death. Their consensual, open form of government has been delivering these sterling results every year for 70 years. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/oct/04/india-slums-children-death-rate
“I hung out with people in early 1970s Hong Kong who had fled thither to escape the terrible famine of 1959-62. (There were so many of these refugees, the colony had to finance a crash program of public housing to accommodate them all.) I heard their stories about eating grubs and the bark from trees”. That’s right, that’s why they didn’t starve to death. Xi Jinping recalls those years first hand, “Just after I arrived in the village beggars started appearing and, as soon as they turned up, the dogs would be set on them. Back then we students, sent down from the cities, believed beggars were bad elements and tramps. We didn’t know the saying, ‘in January there is still enough food, in February you will starve, and March and April you are half alive, half dead’. For six months every family lived only on bark and herbs. Women and children were sent out to beg so that the food could go to those who were doing the spring ploughing. You had to live in a village to understand it. When you think of the difference between what the central government in Beijing knew and what was actually happening in the countryside, you have to shake your head”.
“I have a hundred such stories“. I have data and you–a crank–have none.