Daily Archives: June 28, 2017

Im not an expert on American history and any examples in here may well be inaccurate and not strictly chronological, but they are used to illustrate an overall point of view. The fundamentals of the Constitution were to promote life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The Bill of Rights stipulated that Congress may not make rules to take away freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to bear arms, the right to form peaceful assemblies, or to take away lives or freedom of property unfairly.

All of this was justifiable given the religious persecution and government oppression that the early colonists struggled to escape from. According to Kris Kristofferson, freedoms just another word for nothing left to lose. But I believe our unbridled freedom has lost us a lot, particularly as it relates to moral and ethical standards and concern for our fellow man.

So what have we done with this freedom?

We saw a land with enormous potential from sea to shining sea. We went west in a spirit of free enterprise. We cut down forests, tilled the soil and fenced the land to establish farms and ranches. We imported cheap Chinese labor to build our railroads. In the scramble to establish the biggest piece of the pie, we denied the American Indians their freedom and denied untold numbers of Africans their freedom. Our manifest destiny spread across the continent to the Pacific Ocean and when the dust cleared, we had denied Mexico about one-third of its territory, including nearly all of present-day California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico.

Then, ironically, we imported cheap Mexican labor to cultivate our crops which they still do today for below minimum wages, while suffering the stigma of illegal immigrants. It took a civil war to grant African Americans a euphemism for freedom. The Native Americans still struggle to protect their sacred grounds and eke out an existence on barren reservations.

Gold in California and oil in Pennsylvania encouraged more free enterprise, more scrambling for the good life, and the rise of monolithic companies generating vast wealth for a privileged few. By the time anti-trust laws were established the damage was already done. Now we work for companies that continually reduce employee benefits and pensions to increase profits. We are encouraged to secure our futures by investing in 401ks that depend on ever increasing shareholder value that, paradoxically, depend to some extent on cutting more benefits and services. Demands to increase shareholder value encourage unscrupulous corporations and banks to sell bogus investments, derivatives and mortgages without underlying asset value.

The point is that we became so involved in our freedom of choice and entrepreneurial wealth creation that we are now all complicit in this mess by closing our eyes to the truths of inequality and the social consequences. Weve ignored the shifts in policy that continue to create a bigger and bigger gap between the haves and the have-nots. Weve watched as the government gave tax breaks to the rich, cut programs to the poor, and refused to raise the minimum wage. In 2015, 43.1 million people lived in poverty with the highest poverty rate among blacks and Hispanics. Approximately 15.3 million, or 21 percent, of all children under the age of 18 were in families living in poverty. We are the only country in the civilized world that does not provide universal healthcare to its people. Even communist Cuba provides free healthcare and education. We have created a vicious cycle in which the underprivileged, social injustice and the government deficit continue to grow while the middle class hangs on to its fast fading dreams of the good life. With a growing population and diminishing resources we continue to strive for an ever more elusive piece of the pie and create social unrest in the process. Is it any wonder that drugs and crime increase in impoverished inner cities and immigrant communities?

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It was Plato who said that democracy would not work because, given a choice, the average person chooses what pleases him rather than what is good for him. I happen to believe in democracy but I think our two-party system creates a situation where the majority tends to get what is good for them but not necessarily good for society. We the people put these people in power and have watched as politicians strive to retain power by pandering to whatever is popular. As a social conscience develops in the majority we vote Democrat. As government spending and taxes are increased to pay for social programs we sense a reduction in our standard of living and government intrusion on our freedom of choice. So the majority turns to the Republicans for tax breaks and curtailment of government regulations. The results are good for the party in power but not necessarily good for society as a whole. Increasingly over the last decade, the polarization between the parties, the inability to compromise, and the vetoing of the opposing partys agenda, has lead to a legislative stalemate and an exacerbation of societal problems.

When I became a United States citizen in 2011, I had high hopes that under President Obama we would begin to see the social changes outlined in his book, The Audacity of Hope, come to fruition. Instead the intransigence of the Republican Party and its avowed intention to obstruct his agenda has lead us where we are today. Enter Donald J. Trump, who cashed in on the Washington stalemate by vowing to drain the swamp and make America great again. His ultra right-wing agenda might make a proportion of Americans richer and the country more powerful. But by declaring war on immigrants, curtailing the freedom of the press, criticizing the judiciary, appointing right-wing judges, creating cabinet posts for his family, and surrounding himself with not so veiled white supremacists, he has all the trappings of an autocrat and is disliked, or even hated, by a majority of the country. This will further exacerbate the already volatile situation existing with the underprivileged and we should be wary of some form of revolution.

Perhaps there is no simple solution but perhaps it is time to sacrifice some of our personal freedom for what is good for society. As Obama once stated to Oprah Winfrey, We are all connected as one people and our mutual obligations have to express themselves not only in our families, not only in our churches, synagogues, and mosques, but in our government, too. If we can come up with a bipartisan commission to investigate something as serious as the links between Trump campaign advisers and the Russian government, why cant we employ a bipartisan commission to resolve other issues of national importance like health care and the judiciary? Instead of endless partisan scrambling for votes and changing voting rules to suit the situation, we should recognize that only by true bipartisanship can we be sure that government is of the people, by the people and for all the people.

If we must retain a two-party system, why not get rid of the electoral college and appoint a Democrat and a Republican from each state in both the House and the Senate? Admittedly that would have the potential for more stalemate but if legislation is to get passed at least it would force an element of compromise. As for the president, election should be by a simple majority of voters.

Michael Carr/Vallejo

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Michael Carr: A government for the people - Vallejo Times Herald

Horrified by images of American students shouting down and physically attacking speakers on their campuses, some commentators have reasonably invoked memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The problem with that analogy is that it is simply lost on most readers, including most younger than middle age.

So what exactly was this Cultural Revolution thing anyway? The U.S. media does a wonderful job of recalling atrocities that they can associate with the Right, while far worse horrors stemming from the Left vanish into oblivion. In reality, not only does the Cultural Revolution demand to be remembered and commemorated, it also offers precious lessons about the nature of violence, and the perils of mob rule.

In 2019, Communist China will celebrate its seventieth anniversary, and in that short time it has been responsible for no fewer than three of the worst acts of mass carnage in human history. These include the mass murders of perceived class enemies in the immediate aftermath of the revolution (several million dead), and the government-caused and -manipulated famine of the late 1950s, which probably killed some 40 million. Only when set aside these epochal precedents does the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 seem like anything other than a unique cataclysm.

By the early 1960s, Chinas Communist elite hoped for an era of stability and growth, modeled on the then-apparently booming Soviet Union (remember, this was the immediate aftermath of Sputnik). The main obstacle to this scenario was the seventy year old leader Mao Zedong, whose apocalyptic visions held out hopes of revolutionary transformations almost overnight, of a near immediate move to perfect Communism. Mao himself loathed the post-Stalin regime in the Soviet Union, seeing it as a revisionist system little different from Western imperialism. In an ideal world, Mao would have been kicked upstairs to some symbolic role as national figurehead, but he proved a stubborn and resourceful foe. He outmaneuvered and defeated his revisionist Party rival Liu Shaoqi, who became a symbol of all that was reactionary, moderate, and imperialist. Brutally maltreated, Liu was hounded to death.

So far, the conflict was the bureaucratic backstabbing typical of Communist regimes, but Mao then escalated the affair to a totally different plane. From 1966 onwards, he deliberately incited and provoked mass movements to destroy the authority structures within China, within the Party itself, but also in all areas of government, education, and economic life. Mao held out a simple model, which perfectly prefigures modern campus theories of systematic oppression and intersectionality. Even in a Communist Chinese society, said Mao, there were privileged and underprivileged people, and those qualities were deeply rooted in ancestry and the legacies of history. Regardless of individual character or qualities, the child of a poor family was idealized as part of the masses that Communism was destined to liberate; the scion of a rich or middle class home was a class enemy.

The underprivileged poor peasants, workers, and students had an absolute right and duty to challenge and overthrow the powerful and the class enemies, not just as individuals, but in every aspect of the society and culture they ruled. In this struggle, there could be no restraint or limitation, no ethics or morality, beyond what served the good of the ultimate historical end, of perfect Communism. In a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the oppressed need observe neither rules nor legality. Even to suggest such a constraint was bourgeois heresy.

What this all meant in practice is that over the following years, millions of uneducated and furious young thugs sought to destroy every form of authority structure or tradition in China. To understand the targets, it helps to think of the movement as a systematic inversion of Confucian values, which preached reverence to authority figures at all levels. In full blown Maoism, in contrast, all those figures were to be crushed and extirpated. Bureaucrats and Party officials were humiliated, beaten or killed, as was anyone associated (however implausibly) with The Past, or high culture, or foreign influence. Pianists and artists had their hands broken. Professors and teachers were special targets for vilification and violence, as the educational system altogether collapsed.

Anarchistic mobs replaced all authority with popular committees that inevitably became local juntas, each seeking to outdo the other in degrees of sadism. Some class enemies were beaten to death, others buried alive or mutilated. In parts of Guangxi province, the radicals pursued enemies beyond the grave, through a system of mass ritual cannibalism. Compared to such horrors, it seems almost trivial to record the mass destruction of books and manuscripts, artistic objects and cultural artifacts, historic sites and buildings. The radicals were seeking nothing less than the annihilation of Chinese culture. Within a few months of the coming of Revolution, local committees had degenerated into rival gangs and private armies, each claiming true ideological purity, and each at violent odds with the other. Such struggles tore apart cities and neighborhoods, villages and provincial towns.

Outside the military and that is a crucial exception the Chinese state ceased to function. The scale of the resulting anarchy is suggested by the controversy over the actual number of fatalities resulting from the crisis. Some say one million deaths over the full decade, some say ten million, with many estimates between those two extremes. Government was so absent that literally nobody in authority was available to count those few million missing bodies. China became a textbook example of the Hobbesian state of Nature and a reasonable facsimile of Hell on Earth. Only gradually, during the early 1970s, were the Chinese armed forces able to intervene, sending the radicals off en masse into rural exile.

Chinas agony ended only after the death of the monster Mao, in 1976, and the trial of his leading associates. From 1979, the country re-entered the civilized world under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, who is today lionized as a great reformer. That portrayal is correct but we should never forget that as an architect of the earlier Great Famine, Deng had almost as much blood on his hands as did Mao himself.

So extreme was the violence of the Cultural Revolution that we might reasonably ask whether any parallels exist with the contemporary U.S. However ghastly the suppression of free speech at Middlebury College and elsewhere, however unacceptable the rioting in Berkeley, nobody has as yet lost his life in the current wave of protests. But in so many ways, the analogies are there. As in the Cultural Revolution, American radicals are positing the existence of historically oppressed classes, races and social groups, who rebel against the unjust hegemony of others. In both cases, genetics is a critical means of identifying the two competing sides, the Children of Light and Children of Darkness. If you belong to a particular race, class or group, you hold privilege, whether you want to or not. Consistently, the radicals demonize their enemies, invoking every historical insult at their disposal, no matter how inapplicable: Berkeleys would- be revolutionaries describe themselves as Antifas, Anti-Fascists, as if any of their targets vaguely fit any conceivable definition of fascism.

For the oppressed and underprivileged, or those who arrogate those titles to themselves, resistance is a moral imperative, and only the oppressed can decide what means are necessary and appropriate in the struggle for liberation. The enemy, the oppressors, the hegemons, have no rights whatever, and certainly no right of speech. There can be no dialogue between truth and error. Violence is necessary and justified, and always framed in terms of self-defense against acts of oppression, current or historic.

Presently, our own neo-Cultural Revolutionaries are limited in what they can achieve, because even the most inept campus police forces enforce some restraints. If you want to see what those radicals could do, were those limitations ever removed, then you need only look at China half a century ago. And if anyone ever tells you what a wonderful system Communism could be were it not for the bureaucracies that smothered the effervescent will of an insurgent people, then just point them to that same awful era of Chinese history.

If, meanwhile, you want to ensure that nothing like the Cultural Revolution could ever occur again, then look to values of universally applicable human rights, which extend to all people, all classes. And above all, support the impartial rule of law and legality. The Cultural Revolution may be the best argument ever formulated for the value of classical theories of liberalism.

Philip Jenkins teaches at Baylor University. He is the author of Crucible of Faith: The Ancient Revolution That Made Our Modern Religious World (forthcoming Fall 2017).

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So You Want a Cultural Revolution? - The American Conservative