Muddling Toward Maturity Blog

THE SILENCE OF POPE FRANCIS ON COMMUNIST CHINA & HONG KONG

Please follow this link to a 5 minute video of Jimmy Lai,  a sincere  Roman Catholic, a godly man, who laments the failure of Pope Francis to speak up on behalf of Christians in China.   

William McGurn  writes:

Jimmy Lai has embraced his destiny. Last Wednesday the founder of one of Hong Kong’s most popular newspapers, Apple Daily, was arrested on ginned-up fraud charges. On Thursday he was clapped into jail as a national security risk. Thus did a man who started the week a Hong Kong billionaire end it a Chinese dissident.

Mr. Lai’s jailing has provoked condemnation from figures as diverse as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky and New York Rep. Eliot Engel. They have been joined by journalists, activists and politicians such as the Labour Party’s Sarah Champion and other members of Parliament who on Monday raised Mr. Lai’s plight in Britain’s House of Commons.

But there is one place where China’s bullying elicits only silence: the Vatican. Which is strange, because Jimmy Lai is not only Hong Kong’s most well-known champion of democracy; he is also its most prominent Catholic layman. At a moment when he and his family most need their shepherd, Pope Francis is MIA. . . .

THE DEADLIEST VIRUS IN THE WORLD: COMMUNISM

 

 

CURRENT AFFAIRS

**  Is Attorney William Barr President Trump's lap dog?  No.   The accusation stems from the incessant anti-Trump propaganda campaign.   See:  "AG Barr does hand-to-hand combat with NPR"

**  Good News: AG Barr is investigating the domestic terrorists.

**  Bad news from China:   China Trying to "Rewrite the Biblc, Force Churches to Sing Communist Anthems.

** Hypocrisy!   Minneapolis city council members who voted to defund police are getting taxpayer-funded private security.

** Black Lives Matter leader:  "If America doesn't give us what we want we will burn down this system."

** "Teen Vogue Magazine Pushes Marxism on Its Young Readers"

**  Horrible News for Democrats:  After a Month of Leftist Rioting, Looting and Arson Trump's Approval with Black voters Remains at 28%

**  Black Lives Matter Rally with no black people.   A black Republican couple look on from a distance and laugh.  

THE PATH TO TOTALITARIAN AMERICA - WE ARE WELL ON THE WAY

Rod Dreher has been doing yeoman work tracing the conditions that gave rise to the totalitarian Communist and Nazi regimes.  He is studying the social and ideological conditions that incubated and fostered these movements.  In September Dreher will publish the results of his research in a new book, Live Not By Lies.  [Note:  Many will recall Dreher's 2018 book that stirred great interest, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation.]

In a current blog post, Dreher writes:  Last year, I spoke to a Soviet-born scholar who teaches in an American public university. . . .   This morning, she sent me this e-mail, which I reproduce here with her permission:  [my emphases]

I know from your blog that the work on your new book is going well and I’m glad because, boy, it’s so needed. I’m observing some disturbing developments on my campus, and we are really not one of those wokester schools for spoiled brats one normally associates with this kind of thing.

 

This academic year I’ve had an opportunity to work with some early-career academics. These are newly-minted PhDs that are in their first year on the tenure-track. What’s really scary is that they sincerely believe all the woke dogma. Older people – those in their forties, fifties or sixties – might parrot the woke mantras because it’s what everybody in academia does and you have to survive. But the younger generation actually believes it all. Transwomen are women, black students fail calculus because there are no calc profs who “look like them,” ‘whiteness’ is the most oppressive thing in the world, the US is the most evil country in history, anybody who votes Republican is a racist, everybody who goes to church is a bigot but the hijab is deeply liberating. I gently mocked some of this stuff (like we normally do among older academics), and two of the younger academics in the group I supervise actually cried. Because they believe all this so deeply, and I’d even say fanatically, that they couldn’t comprehend why I wasn’t taking it seriously.

 

The fanatical glimmer in their eyes really scared me.

CUBAN-AMERICAN SEES AMERICA MOVING TOWARDS COMMUNISM

Gini Thomas of the Daily Caller reports:

Filmmaker and American citizen Agustin Blazquez never thought his native Cuba would become a communist country, but now he sees the same radical shift happening in America.  

In a video, Agustin Blazquez says The  left has been clever by using “very non-threatening words,” like liberal, progressive and concerned citizens, for advancing government control of American lives. The truth about Cuban politics is hard to find because of media spin and propaganda dominating American discourse.

For Blazquez, watching American youth embrace avowed socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders for president, strikes him as “absurd.” It is the end result, he says, of the cultural marxist education and media propaganda that has anesthetized too many Americans who do not defend the values that made America exceptional.

Watching President Barack Obama travel to Cuba, he says, made him “want to throw up.” This was a “betrayal to victims of communism,” the filmmaker of “Covering Cuba” says. Blazquez adds there are “so many [Nelson] Mandelas” in Cuban prisons, who are tortured, denied medical attention and abused. Yet, prominent black elites from America, including most incredibly to him, the Congressional Black Caucus, are wined and dined by the political elites but are blind to their “betrayal of blacks in Cuba.”

JONAH GOLDBERG ON "MEIN KAMPF," "THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO," LEFT-WING PRESS AND THE TUCSON KILLINGS

Since I've never read Hitler's Mein Kampf, I was happy to read Jonah Goldberg's overview with comments relevant to the Tucson killings.  He writes:

Lots of friends and foes have been emailing me to talk about Liberal Fascism in  light of the fact that Loughner liked both the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf. I’m taking a pass on all that largely because I think it’s entirely irrelevant. Also, I have zero interest in hawking even a single book in this context.

But about those other books. When I meet young people who brag about having read Mein Kampf, my first reaction is that they’re lying, for one reason or another. And after further conversation, I usually come away feeling my initial reaction was justified.

MARY EBERSTADT REVIEWS GEORGE WEIGLE'S "THE END AND THE BEGINNING: POPE JOHN PAUL II — The VICTORY OF FREEDOM, THE LAST YEARS, THE LEGACY"

Mary Eberstadt lauds George Weigle's new biography covering the last years of Pope John Paul II.  She titles her comprehensive and excellent review, "The Cold War Pope."   She writes:  (my emphases)

It is now just over ten years since his bestselling first volume, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II, chronicled in just under 1,000 pages the story of Karol Wojtyla’s pre-papal life and the first 22 years of what would turn out to be a papacy of almost 27. Now a second volume, The End and the Beginning: The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy, both completes the story and delivers something important and new — an irresistible Cold War story of drama and intrigue at the highest (and lowest) levels.

Eberstadt continues:

Based in part on just some of what the author calls the “vast archive” of information recently available from the infamous kgb, Stasi, and Polish secret police files, this volume sheds light on one of the most dramatic historical and political tales to issue from a century bursting with them: namely, “Karol Wojtyla’s forty-year struggle against communism — and communism’s forty-year effort to impede Wojtyla’s work and destroy his reputation.” It is a story for believers and nonbelievers alike, and one reminiscent of the absorbing fictions of John LeCarre, Charles McCarry, and other masters of the Cold War genre. The difference, of course — as The End and the Beginning goes to show — is that the 40-year battle between Wojtyla and the communists was not some idle literary imagining, but rather the realest show on earth.

If you have any interest at all in learning about Pope John Paul II and how he "waged war" against the Communists, read the rest of Eberstadt's review.  If you want to read more selected quotes from my blog,  click the "continue reading" button below.

HEROISM - REMEMBERING THE ROMANIAN PROTESTS THAT BROUGHT DOWN THE COMMUNIST REGIME

Chuck Colson tells the riveting story:

"A Candle in the Darkness"  Twenty Years Later

By Chuck Colson|Published Date: December 24, 2009

This Christmas Eve, reflect with me on what it means to be a light in the darkness.

Listen Now | Download

As people across the world tonight light Christmas candles at Christmas Eve services, my mind goes back to another Christmas 20 years ago in Romania, when the country was still in the grip of communist tyranny.

The story begins with Laszlo Tokes, pastor of a fast-growing reformed church in the city of Timisoara. His powerful preaching had caught the attention of communist officials, and they began a strategy of suppression. They stationed police officers around his church, machine guns cradled in their arms. They hired thugs to

TODAY MARKS THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL

UPDATE  - Ed Morrissey over at HotAir has terrific coverage, including a YouTube video of President Reagan giving one of the most impassioned speeches ever delivered by an American President.  There are other videos also.   Go to this website immediately!  That President Obama (or even Vice-President Biden) are not participating in the commemoration is, in Morrissey's words, "disgraceful"!

-Original post) -  I posted previously concerning Prsident Obama's failure to appear in Berlin to mark the occasion.  Now I would like to simply record Bill Bennett's remarks on the significance of the Berlin wall's collapse:

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But even that phrase doesn’t do the story justice: The wall did not fall—it was pushed. I’m currently writing a history of the past 20 years, and have a good deal about the Berlin Wall in that book—here is some of what will be published:

In 1961, the East German government erected a physical Iron Curtain, an ugly combination of cement and electrified fencing with armed guards, an internal barricade that separated the two nations and their brethren on each side. But at midnight, 9 November 1989, the government of East Germany finally gave permission to its citizens to peaceably pass through the gates of the Berlin Wall. East Germans “surged through, cheering and shouting, and were be met by jubilant West Berliners on the other side. Ecstatic crowds immediately began to

"1984" - THE BOOK THAT SAVED THE WEST FROM COMMUNISM

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the book's publication.  David Pryce-Jones gives the historical background of the book and concludes:

"1984," it seems to me, had the effect of saving the English-speaking intelligentsia from the Communist snares and delusions rampant on the continent of Europe, and any future totalitarian society will be obliged to ban it just as the Soviet Union did. That’s an immortal achievement.

COMMUNISM'S DEBILITATING EFFECT ON THE HUMAN SOUL

Jay Nordlinger received a letter which he published today:

Mr. Nordlinger,

A couple of years ago I returned from a 27-month tour in Ukraine with the Peace Corps. One of the goals of the Peace Corps is to have volunteers live at the same level as the locals. That gave me the opportunity to experience personally the lingering effects of Communism.

Fifteen years on and the middle class live in conditions that American poor would turn up their nose at. Communism not only scarred those who lived through it, but they pass their distorted view of life to new generations. A man from Holland – there to train workers of a shipyard his company purchased – told me that he wished he could fire everybody over 30. The older workers cannot be retrained and have a negative effect on the work ethic of younger employees.

Since my return I will not even engage in an argument with people over whether Communism is good or bad. Their belief in its viability instantly informs me of their ignorance and I refuse to debate them. I guess that sounds arrogant, but would I be arrogant if I refused to debate our need for oxygen? Some of us know some irrefutable facts that others will never comprehend.

YANG JISHENG, CHINA'S "SOLZHENITSYN," EXPOSES THE GREAT CHINA FAMINE

Anne Applebaum reports on "the first proper history of China's Great Famine, a catastrophe partly engineered by the Chinese Communist Party and its first leader, Mao Zedong."

"I call this book Tombstone," the author, Yang Jisheng, writes in the opening paragraph. "It is a tombstone for my father who died of hunger in 1959, for the 36 million Chinese who also died of hunger, for the system that caused their death, and perhaps for myself for writing this book."

"Tombstone" has not been translated. Nevertheless, rumors of its contents and short excerpts are already ricocheting around the world (I first learned of it recently in California, from an excited Australian historian). Based on a decade's worth of interviews and unprecedented access to documents and statistics, "Tombstone" -- in two volumes and 1,100 pages -- establishes beyond any doubt that China's misguided charge toward industrialization -- Mao's "Great Leap Forward" -- was an utter disaster.

In addition to the Applebaum article, see this article, linked in the quote two paragraphs above.

SEN. TED KENNEDY (TRAITOR?) AND THE KGB

In short, Senator Ted Kennedy reached out to the Soviet leadership in a bid to counter and undermine President Ronald Reagan and his foreign policy.  Treason?  You decide.  The story, discussed by Paul Kengor and reproduced in his book The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, is based on a fully-vetted May 14, 1983 letter discovered in the Central Committee archives of the former USSR.  Need it be said the document has been totally ignored by the main stream media?   

Regarding the letter in question, Kengor says:

What's the Situation on University Campuses Today?

In a speech given at the November 2006 "Restoration Weekend" in Florida, David Horowitz offered a comprehensive overview of the political indoctrination now found on university campuses.  He reports on the progress that the "Academic Bill of Rights" is making across the nation.  It's a liberal approach to education that eschews tyrannical indoctrination.   In the course of his address,  Horowitz mentions the Marxist approach so common on campuses today:

At every university I go to, I ask, “Are you taught that there are race, sex, and class hierarchies?” The hands always go up because that is what they are taught. It’s an idea derived from the Communist Manifesto. If you

"FROM THE GULAG TO THE KILLING FIELDS" - REVISITED

On April 21st, I put up a post on Paul Hollander's book From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States.  Now, today, Jamie Glasov offers an insightful interview with the editor, Paul Hollander,  that is well worth reading.   Hollander says,

My motivation for putting this book together is quite straightforward and longstanding.  I have been impressed (and dismayed) for many years, indeed decades, by the phenomenal and profound Western (esp. American) ignorance of communist systems in general and the deprivations they imposed on their people in particular.

I found especially noteworthy and puzzling the contrast between this ignorance (and the very limited interest) and the lively (and fully justified) preoccupation with the Holocaust. In the introduction to the book, I discussed at some length the differences and similarities between the Holocaust and the communist mass murders and tried to explain the different moral responses in the West. . . .

The Anthology may be considered a "landmark" because there is nothing like it; nobody has before brought together such writings in one volume; moreover these writings represent experiences from every single communist system, extinct or surviving, from Albania to Vietnan.  Many of the selections are also of considerable literary merit.

Read the whole interview.

FROM THE GULAG TO THE KILLING FIELDS

I've just received notice of a book about to be published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).  Edited by Paul Hollander, and titled From the Gulag to the Killing Fields:    Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States,  advance materials say

It gathers together more than forty dramatic personal memoirs of Communist violence and repression from political prisoners across the globe.   From these compelling accounts several distinctive features of Communist political violence can be discerned.   The most important, argues Hollander, is that communism was "violence with a higher purpose"—that is, it was devised and undertaken to create a historically superior social system that would not only abolish scarcity, exploitation, and inequality, but would also create a new and unique sense of community, social solidarity, and personal fulfillment.

Nothing, of course, was allowed to stand in the way of this effort to radically and totally transform the human condition—least of all human beings. 

I have no doubt this is a tremendous book, and one I would like to read.