We Should Be Lighting Candles, Not a Building

Good Morning Gentle Readers,

Today marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Chinese Communist state. Depending upon whose numbers you want to plug in, the Chinese Communists, primarily under Mao, are responsible for the demise of somewhere between forty-eight and seventy-five million human beings (not counting forced abortions and dead Tibetans). Keeping score? That's considerably more than the ovens at Auschwitz or Stalin's killing fields.

The folks over at the Empire State Building will commemorate the occasion by swathing the building in red and yellow light. Got that? An American celebration of the most successful genocidal regime of the twentieth century.

Several years ago TWC shared a bit of bread and wine with this guy who was quite the charming and effusive dinner companion. I thought, Dude, this guy is pretty cool. Turns out Alan Charles Kors was a bit more than a cool guy. Indulge me, Gentle Readers, while I share a couple of his thoughts.....

No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an apologist for those who did this to them. No one pays for them. No one is hunted down to account for them. It is exactly what Solzhenitsyn foresaw in The Gulag Archipelago: No, no one would have to answer. No one would be looked into. Until that happens, there is no after socialism.

The West accepts an epochal, monstrous, unforgivable double standard. We rehearse the crimes of Nazism almost daily, we teach them to our children as ultimate historical and moral lessons, and we bear witness to every victim. We are, with so few exceptions, almost silent on the crimes of Communism. So the bodies lie among us, unnoticed, everywhere.

The bodies lie among us, unnoticed, everywhere. A powerful image. A powerful truth. And those fashionable lefites who wandered America's tax supported universities back in the day clutching a copy of the Little Red Book, this is what Mao meant when he said Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.....

You shoulda listened to John Lennon, cuz if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao.....You ain't gonna make it with anyone, anyhow.

But, in the end, the Chi-Coms are done. Trade, markets, and  Elements of Capitalism 2.1 will finish off those octogenarian Mustache-Petes in Peking, or Bejing, or whatever the hell that city is. China is poised to become the new economic juggernaut and our current leadership is inadvertently helping that along by hobbling the American economy with misguided and destructive policy.

No matter. Just as McDonalds took over Red Square in Moscow, trade and innovation will finish off the communist model in Bejing. America is moving one way and China another. Ships in the night, or so they say.

Let's celebrate millennia of Chinese culture but let's not peg it to the anniversary of a sixty year old dystopia maintained at gunpoint by a homicidal madman.

Bonus:

As Ever,

TWC