Limousine Bolsheviks

Viva la Revolution -  Rolf Schulten/ullstein bild via Getty Images

Winston Marshall visits Cuba and reports on the flotilla of effing morons who think they are helping. He isn't kind.

Communist China

United Front-Linked Organizations Identified by Country

Jamestown posted this story by Cheryl Yu about China's United Front System today (Google search). It's a little long (3000 words, more or less), I just read the executive summary which I copied and pasted below. How do combat this kind of invasion?

Harnessing the People: Mapping Overseas United Front Work in Democratic States

Executive Summary: 

• The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has created a global network of individuals and organizations as part of its united front system. In four democratic states—the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany—this network includes more than 2,000 organizations. These constitute latent capacity that the Party can mobilize to advance the Party’s agenda.
• Beijing’s network is the product of protracted co-optation of existing civil society organizations overseas and the global expansion of domestic united front elements. The Party has spent decades assiduously cultivating overseas Chinese community organizations, co-opting local leaders and institutions to embed its preferences within civil society. Even groups that previously spent decades supporting the Republic of China (Taiwan) now fly the flag of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
• The Party leverages this global network to support its primary goal of national rejuvenation. According to the Party’s definition, rejuvenation entails unification with Taiwan and making the PRC the global leader in terms of national power. United front work supports this goal by contributing to the PRC’s diplomatic, economic, scientific, and even military development, as well as the Party’s ability to respond to crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
• This includes engaging in malign and illegal activities in foreign countries. Overseas groups with ties to the united front have directly supported illicit technology transfer, espionage, talent recruitment, and voter mobilization on Beijing’s behalf. These groups also engage in transnational repression, monitoring, harassing, and/or intimidating dissidents, ethnic minorities, and other critics of the Party.
• In democratic countries, these groups influence political decision-making by conditioning stakeholders to consider Beijing’s interests and sensitivities. United front organizations have been instrumental in shaping the approaches of local governments and political actors, particularly where oversight is weak. They have influenced legislation and public statements, and managed official engagements with the PRC.
• Where the CCP encounters opposition, the united front functions as a political weapon to isolate, neutralize, or counter Beijing’s critics. The united front system leverages its network of organizations to remove impediments to the achievement of core CCP ambitions through influence, subversion, co-optation, and coercion. These goals include building support for and neutralizing resistance to the annexation of Taiwan.
• Constraining the CCP’s ability to interfere in democracies requires active transparency. Much of the CCP’s united front activity is at least partially visible in democratic societies. Better education and information sharing could help officials and the general public recognize risks and avoid entanglement. United front groups are rarely listed in existing foreign agent registration systems, limiting the ability of governments to monitor or investigate them.

Joseph McCarthy may have been a slimeball, but it kind of looks like he was right about the commies.

Doonesbury

Doonesbury September 29, 2024

This comic showed up in the Sunday paper. I used to enjoy Doonesbury, but sometime in the last ten years he became afflicted with TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) and he hasn't been any fun since.

I'm posting this one because he's accusing Trump of all the things the Biden haters have been saying about Biden for the last few years, which is kind of weird. One, I have never heard anyone accusing Trump of these things before. Okay, I don't listen to any of the main stream / liberal media, so maybe they have been saying this stuff all along but I just didn't hear any of it. The other is that I have been hearing accusations that the Democrats are out and out lying about all kinds of things.

None of these rumors and inuendo has any bearing on whether he can do the job. Anyway, this comic was like getting hit in the face with a dead fish. Wake up Pergelator! Smell the stink!

While we are talking about propaganda, the default screen on Microsoft's browser is covered with news stories which annoys me to no end. First of all, I don't need any more news, I get plenty from my regular sources, I don't any more distractions. The other is Bill Gates. I don't like and I don't trust him and I certainly don't want to hear anything he has to say, and you know just his looming presence is enough to sway what's showing up on the screen. Google may be guilty of many things, but at least the home screen is just white space. Yes, I know it's my own fault, I said I was going to install Linux, but my head needs to be in the right space to tackle that. Basically, I'm not yet frustrated enough with Windows to take that step, but it's coming.

And the Leonid Brezhnev Memorial Award goes to ...

Stolen entire from Borepatch on account of it's so great:

Leonid Brezhnev

And the Leonid Brezhnev Memorial Award goes to ...

So UK Prime Minister Keir "Two Tier" Starmer has decreed that people saying hateful things will be jailed because their speech is actually violence, and he's making room for them in His Majesty's prisons by releasing violent criminals because their violence is actually speech, you guys.

Some big shot police constable has even said he was going to go all 1775-Bunker Hill on Americans for their speech, which is totally violence.  Ooooh kaaay,

All this totalitarianism reminds me of a joke from the Soviet Union, back in the day.  It was said about Leonid Brezhnev (and likely others).  I've somewhat rewritten it for modern times.  See if you can tell the difference.

So this guy goes to Red Square Hyde Park Speaker's Corner and yells "Leonid Brezhnev Keir Starmer is a senile fascist old fool!"  Of course, the police swarm him and drag him off to Ye Olde Gaol.  He is sentenced to ten years and ten days in durance vile - ten days for slander and ten years for revealing State Secrets.

Maybe I gave away my edits right there ...

And so the Leonid Brezhnev Memorial Award for Totalitarianism goes to Brit PM Keir Starmer, for fascism above and beyond the call of duty.  Well done you dirty commie bastard.

Empire of Lies

George Carlin's First Rule

JMSmith explains how the dirty commies work. He uses a couple of fancy words. I had to look them up.

anamnesis - the remembering of things from a supposed previous existence (often used with reference to Platonic philosophy).
• epigones - a less distinguished follower or imitator of someone, especially an artist or philosopher. "the epigone's habit of exaggerating his master's voice"

Here's his post: 

Remembrance False and Otherwise

“I cannot forget that widely organized lying about the past which is one of the chief activities of the epigones.”

Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography (1930)*

The key word in the foregoing sentence is organized. There will always be adventitious lying about the past, as there will always be historical untruths engendered by lazy ignorance, wishful thinking, and the natural human love of spouting off; but organized lying about the past is altogether different.

Organized lying is altogether different because it aims to permanently alter collective memory, and organized lying works because a false collective memory is engendered and sustained by repetition. More particularly by repetition that appears unorganized. Organized lying (propaganda) works to the degree it infiltrates everyday discourse and is unwittingly passed along by dupes in their casual conversations.

We find shills more persuasive than salesmen because we do not see that the shill has an interest in selling us what the shill is in fact selling us. This is because his sales pitch is disguised as a casual remark, and in this disguise slips past our skeptical sales resistance. But a salesman must share his commission with his shill, so he seeks to recruit shills who will spread the disguised sales pitch unwittingly and for free. These second-order shills are the dupes who, unbeknownst to themselves, pitch sales in their casual conversation.

It is important to remember that organized lying includes organized silences, and that the power of organized silences also comes from repetition. When circumstances repeatedly demand that a memory be publicly recalled, and when that memory is instead repeatedly not recalled, private recall of that memory begins to fail. This is one aspect of what we now call gaslighting. It is very hard for a man to keep a memory if others do not recall and confirm that memory when circumstances demand that that memory be recalled and confirmed.

Christ instituted the eucharist because he knew that a conspiracy of organized lying and silences would try to put the memory of Christ “down the memory hole,” as George Orwell would say. “Do this,” Christ said, “in remembrance of me.” The conspiracy that St. John called the Synagogue of Satan would, Christ correctly foresaw, undertake organized lying and silences about the past. It would engender and sustain a false collective memory by means of repeated lies—mostly in the mouths of paid and unpaid shills—and by gaslighting silences that would cause Christians to believe they were losing their minds.

* * * * *

“The history of the church as written down by the medieval apologists is a model of scientific treatment compared with the historical investigations of the epigones.”

Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography (1930)**

Epigones, as you know, are the mediocrities that follow in the train of a cultural or religious genius. Indeed, we call many epigones mediocrities only out of courtesy. Many lack the energy and wit that is required to discover that they are repeating the falsehoods of a conspiracy of organized lying, and many lack the conscience that is required to feel shame if they did, by some accident, make this discovery. These epigones are just obedient functionaries—what Trotsky called “apparatus men”—in the organized empire of lies.

The ”red pill” is what Eric Voegelin called anamenesis, the Platonic principle that knowledge is not so much discovered as unforgotten. The conspiracy of the empire of lies creates collective amnesia; anamnesis is the “red pill” by which memory is restored. Theodore Parker was a Platonist theologian who described anamnesis as

“a reminiscence of what the soul knew in a higher state of life before it took the body.”

A Christian articulation of the same idea might be:

“a reminiscence of what the soul knew in a higher state of life before it took the Fall.”

But my subject here is mundane historical anamnesis, the essence of which is:

“a reminiscence of what you once knew in an earlier state of life before the empire of lies.”

Biden Camp Throwing Their Weight Around, Again

I've been getting some pushback from people I know about RT, well screw that. I like RT, I think they publish some very good stuff. They also publish a lot of stuff about the Ukraine war, but I don't read any of that because I expect that, like 99% of the stuff published about active conflicts, it's all bullshit.

You may have heard that Elon Musk wants to prosecute somebody, I dunno, major media outlets? The Federal government? over censorship of anything to the right of center. And since whoever is in charge in Washington D. C. has been calling the shots in Europe, we get this fun little bit:

WATCH full Zakharova interview before ‘far right’ magazine ban

The German outlet Compact was quashed in its home country days after publishing a conversation with the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman

RT has published the full 80-minute video of an interview that Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova gave to the German magazine Compact.

This week, the German government banned the publication and began a police investigation into its associates, after accusing it of fueling “far-right extremism.” Zakharova claims that the crackdown could have been a response to the interview.

Compact correspondent Hansjorg Mueller asked the spokeswoman which “red lines” Berlin might cross in Ukraine to trigger direct retaliation by Russia. He also wondered if Moscow could withdraw from the Two Plus Four Agreement – the multilateral treaty that allowed the reunification of Germany in 1990.

The German government did not mention either Russia or the Zakharova interview in its announcement of the crackdown on Compact. Instead, it accused the outlet of undermining the constitutional order in the country with its content.

Some German media linked the move with the surging popularity of the anti-migration, nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Mueller served in the German parliament in 2017-2021 as a member of the AfD faction.

You can watch the interview by following the link. The two people (Maria and the reporter) are speaking some foreign gibberish, but there are subtitles. If the subtitles are crawling by too fast (or too slow) you can adjust the playback speed. I didn't watch it, I don't have the patience. I like my news in short, succinct paragraphs.

While we are on the subject of 'whoever is in charge in Washington D. C.', Sarah A. Hoyt has a fine idea for a novel.

P. S. 'Dirty Commies' is the best label I could think of for this post. Just to be clear I am not referring to the Russians, but the Biden administration.

More Dirty Commies

Some crazy Chinese nationalists at the piano today insisting on their image rights.

Pretty great piece on what's wrong with the world:

The Left can’t understand why normal people are angry…

 

Commies

Oil derricks in the Baku oil field in Azerbaijan in 1912. ETH-Bibliothek Zürich

Reading The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars by Maurice DeKobra. It's 1927 and our man, Prince Séliman, has gone to meet with the Soviet leader in Berlin, one Leonid Vladimirovitch Varichkine, in an attempt to rescue Lady Diana's fortune in the form of 15,000 acres of oil fields from the Bosheviks. These two are in conversation and Varichkine lets loose with this:

"Really and truly, my friend, you are naive. Living is high since the War - but human life is cheap. When 20 million men have been the victims of inimical capitalists, what difference does it make if a few thousand Russians are incarcerated for the sake of severe principles? When hatred, violence, envy, an abject egotism have circulated at their own free will among civilized people, who has any right to reproach us for not having conducted our Revolution with a shepherd's staff in our hand and Pan's pipes to our lips? Believe me the world is always kind to successful tyrants and moral mud is only thrown at the heads of political failures. Take, for example, your dear Kerensky, the White Hope of the Western Liberals - he missed his mark, and you all reproached him bitterly for having been hypersensitive. All he would have had to do would have been to hang every one of us - Lenin and his following. With about 50 pretty little executions without trial, he might have been able to smash the egg of Communism under his heel; the constituency would then not have been overthrown by the sailor Jelesniakof, and you would have looked up to Kerensky as the greatest Statesman in the world. Revolutions are not made with mittens. A social Revolution conducted along legal lines is a toy constructed for the use of dyspeptic socialists nourished on noodles and black bread."

Add in the political infighting, treachery and murder going on in House of the Dragon and it is no wonder I am of a cynical frame of mind. 

Notes:

• Kerensky has a page in Wikipedia.
• Jelesniakof is mentioned in the book Lenin by Mark Aleksandrovich Aldanov.
• Nikolay Krestinsky was the Soviet Ambassador to Germany from 1923 to 1930.
• Prince Séliman and Leonid Vladimirovitch Varichkine both seem to be entirely fictitious.

The oil fields in question are near Tbilisi, Georgia:

Georgia, Armenia & Azerbaijan between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea

P. S. Totally unrelated to this post, but I just came across a story about a priest murdered in Derbent which is on the above map, in Russia, on the Caspian Sea just above the border with Azerbaijan.

Mass

Josef Váchal’s Cry of the Masses (source: vachal.cz)

We operate according to our beliefs. There is the good old American stand-by - work hard, save your money, be a good citizen and you can have a safe, comfortable life. Or we profess a belief in God, or in bourbon , as in 'I believe I'll have another drink'. What we believe might be the most important part of who we are. Joseph posts a long quote from The Quest for Community by Robert Nisbet on Arimathea that has a few words to say on the subject. Here is an excerpt:

“Masses,” writes Dr. Arendt, “are not held together by consciousness of common interest, and they lack that specific class articulateness which is expressed in determined, limited, obtainable goals. The term masses applies only where we deal with people who either because of sheer numbers, or indifference, or a combination of both, cannot be integrated into any organization based on common interest, into political parties, or municipal governments, or professional organizations, or trade unions.”

The essence of the masses, however, does not lie in the mere fact of numbers. It is not the quantitative but the qualitative aspect that is essential. A population may be vast, as is that of India, and yet, by reason of the stability of its social organization, be far removed from the condition of massdom.

What is crucial in the formation of the masses is the atomization of all social and cultural relationships within which human beings gain their normal sense of membership in society. The mass is an aggregate of individuals who are insecure, basically lonely, and ground down, either through decree or historical circumstance, into mere particles of social dust. Within the mass all ordinary relationships and authorities seem devoid of institutional function and psychological meaning. Worse, such relationships and authorities come to seem positively hostile; in them the individual can find not security but despair. “The despair of the masses,” concludes Peter Drucker, “is the key to the understanding of fascism. No ‘revolt of the mob,’ no ‘triumphs of unscrupulous propaganda,’ but stark despair caused by the breakdown of the old order and the absence of a new one.”

Oppression

Keep Portland Tiered

The bottom tier of society has been hit with a triple whammy since I graduated from high school fifty years ago. First Nixon opened China. Might have been good for the Chinese in mainland China, but it killed the heart of US manufacturing. Second was automation. The third is this pandemic. No wonder there are riots. There are a whole bunch of people with nothing to do and nothing to lose. The business about bad cops is just an excuse.

Ignoring the underclass is what enables the communists to get a toehold and start their revolutions. That's what happened in Russia a hundred years ago. Recently we've seen it throughout Latin America and in Southeast Asia. Capitalism has its faults, but Communism is much worse.

A negative income tax might help. Or maybe we should bring back the ancient Egyptian's sun god and go back to building pyramids.

P.S. As I was driving into Portland Friday I saw a wedding cake delivery van with the slogan 'Keep Portland Tiered' emblazoned across the back. It's obviously a play on the popular slogan of 'Keep Portland Weird'.

Denise Ho

Denise Ho at the Adam Smith Institute in London, UK

Denise, aka HOCC, is a Hong Kong pop music start turned political activist. Brian has a few words to say about her and the situation in Hong Kong.

Very impressive.
Short summary. The protests continue, and the way for her side to win is to universalise the struggle, turning it from a merely local battle, which China is bound to win, into a global argument, which China is a lot less likely to win. Hence her presence in London (and many other spots around the world) to tell people about what’s happening in Hong Kong.
I heard another talk about Hong Kong on Monday that covered a lot of the same ground. My question then (which I thought rather than actually asked) was: What can we do to help? Answer, from Denise Ho this evening: a lot. Because “we” means everyone else in the world who wants to help.

Okay, if Brian and Denise agree, then I guess I need to step up, so here's my contribution.

Via Brian Micklethwaite's New Blog