Posted On: Thursday - June 13th 2019 10:42AM MST
In Topics: Commies History China Liberty/Libertarianism
(continued from this post)
Peak Stupidity does tend to have long introductions to posts, and as an example, what I wanted to write here didn't make it into the last post on China and the Tiananmen Square protests and crackdown of 30 years back. Here we go then.
No, their one didn't come with a poem on it about "huddled masses" or some crap, either.
As I wrote, the big protest movement in China that started May 4th of 1989 could have been like any number of likely hundreds that any big country with a 5,000 year history should expect. That it was made into a demand for more "democracy" was probably just a good meme for these Chinamen, as throughout a lot of their long, often isolated, history, there either was no such thing in the world or they were in no position to have heard about it. In the midst of the Mao-created craziness in the 1950's through 1970's information about the outside was not easy to obtain. In 1989 however, there had already been a decade since Chairman Mao died, and, more importantly, Chinese people from the mainland were starting to get around. Personally, I'd seen the first Chinese visitors to the University in the early 1980's and by right at 1989 I have memories of more students from the Chinese mainland. Before that, even in NY City Chinatown, the Chinese people you'd run into were from Hong Kong, or otherwise Taiwan, then the Republic Of China (written on the back of our small toys).
Therefore, I maintain that the Chinese people had gotten some solid info. from those who'd spent time in America, back when it was a whole lot closer to a free country than it is, spit ... now. (What a shameful difference 30 years has made!) We WERE something of a beacon of freedom and liberty still, and I could see the Chinese students back in Peking and other universities getting their hopes very high after their movement had been building nicely. As I wrote in the previous post, it got the ex-Cold Warrior American's hopes up too.
In that picture up top, one can see that Lady Liberty symbol, as the meme of "democracy, democracy!" became somewhat of a demand, rather than just the usual cries for an end to the endemic corruption in a central government. Now, that's a lost cause, as, well, it's endemic. It is a never-ending thing, and you may stop one certain corrupt practice in this branch here, but, if you're going to have a central government with a lot of power, than you will have those abusing it. So, sure, overhaul the whole thing, and set yourself up with a Constitutional Republic, like that of that amazing place a colleague of your Professor visited for a year-long stint studying material science. That doesn't fly too well with The Party though, hence the crackdown.
No matter what the words out of 10's of thousands of Chinese student's mouths, and what their large-character posters said, in June of 1989, I don't think these people really understood what it would take to have anything resembling the America of 1989, much less 1959. The problem is that, in that 5,000 year history that they are so proud of, the Chinese have NO (ZERO) history of running governments in democratic, much less republican or libertarian fashion. It is just not in them.
There have always been literate, intelligent "Mandarins" and "Cadres", lots of them honest, perhaps, during the many dynasties over the millennia in the Middle Kingdom. That the smarter Chinese guys were in the government is something the Chinese are proud of. As I pointed out in some post I cannot find right now, here in America, in general, it's been the stupid people that end up in the government. Maybe that is, and maybe it's not, something to be proud of, but here's the point: smart or stupid, what you need is government employees that CAN'T DO MUCH ... TO YOU! To have that situation, the central government especially must be very small. As the protesters in Tiananmen Square chanted about "democracy", the example they looked up to was forgetting the same things that these Chinamen and their ancestors never knew.
Ancestors of most American, at least before the latest, and maybe also the century-back great immigration waves, came from a long history of steady curtailment of government power. The Magna Carta was signed 814 years back in Great Britain. It's not been 5,000 years but damn near a millennium. If not having any ancestors from Mother England, at least one could be descended from a few generations of assimilated Americans that were steeped in the ideas of small-government liberty in civic institutions and the schools of yesteryear.
That seems to be the case no longer, as the number of un-assimilated foreigners climbs to record levels. The situation here can't be blamed solely on immigration either. Per the political orientation graphs displayed by blogger Audacious Epigone a few days back, we've got more people who see themselves as liberal (in the modern sense) than can be explained by immigration, as, in fact, a higher percentage of the Blue-Squad seeing themselves as such are white vs. other, and immigration is almost entirely non-white.
No, the Chinese were never in a position, pretty much genetically, I'd say, to turn their country into a real democracy, much less a Constitutional Republic, even with America to emulate 30 years back. Nowadays, China is so mighty economically, and their people as arrogant as always, that they don't want to emulate us anyway. It's just as well. Really, at this point, nobody has anybody to emulate. I'm starting to think that the wonderful limited government set-up that our Founders made for us is a once-in-history fluke.
Here's the future of America's "Democracy" Movement and OUR Lady Liberty:
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