Points to Ponder Index

Genocide Forgiven

We were given a brief flashback to the horror that is the government, past and present, behind the curtain in China this past week.  With the willing compliance of the world press, today’s international academia, the political class and many in both U.S. political parties we are delivered  revisionist history about the government that is the largest mass-murder in recorded history.  Of course that same government is now the bank for an enormous amount of U.S. government debt, and the country that was “given” more former U.S. industry and U.S. jobs in the last 35 years than any other.

For those who are too young, those who have never been taught, and those who would like to forget, the Chinese Communist Government murdered or starved more than 70 million of its own citizens for political reasons from 1949 to present and is still doing it without trial in the remote provinces. Of course, hundreds each month are executed with trials of the Kafkaesque type.

Recent scholarship from more than one source agrees on that 70 million number while films of present day China, and news stories that the world media wants you to see, show shopping malls and a Western-style social experience with a backdrop of unparalleled further growth and what appear to be smiling and happy populations without a care in the world

Chairman Mao ran this enterprise now totaling 1.3 billion people personally from 1949-1976, his successors kept the same policies in place, but even with some revisionist history from the “reformed” Communist Party that runs China today, the practices and policies of suppression, denial of human rights and control of information are the first priorities of that government.  When that does not work for some activist types, they are simply removed permanently.

You see, if a government kills enough of its citizens, keeps few records or manipulates those it does and controls not only its own press, but that of most of the world indirectly, you can pull off almost anything.  The only genocide we continue to reflect on is the one the German Nazi government perpetrated from 1933-1945 and that is because they proudly kept records of everyone they rounded up, even the train numbers that took them to their executions, and we got the records when we defeated them. Hitler was a piker on the stage of genocide with a mere 7 million of his own and other country’s citizens. His political team saw how to use socialism and one party control, and combine it with falsified government data from a controlled media to keep the citizens misinformed.  It worked like a charm and his propaganda minister was reported to have stated with pride “A lie repeated often enough becomes truth.”

Joe Stalin in Russia used the same guidelines, and his associates in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics far outdid the Germans from the 1920s to 1953.  Using the same “rules of extermination” for those who would not follow the dictates of the one political party government, they imprisoned starved and shot political dissidents publically and held society captive with fear within a walled country; while sending propaganda about economic socialist miracles to the West.  While they eliminated as many as 30-40 million of their own, many saw the Stalinist model as one to emulate, actually believing the propaganda, and in some cases rationalizing that “a few may have to be eliminated, as you have to break some eggs to make an omelet”.  Walter Duranty of the New York Times got a Pulitzer Prize for just such rationalized writings in the 1940s and 50s.

But the Chinese model has been perfected to the point that no one even thinks about the monstrous tactics of the past and present, but what took place recently when a Chinese dissident tried to seek refuge in the U.S. embassy should be a reminder. While the whole story is yet to be told, we know that the family of the dissident was immediately threatened, they were followed by government agents, and massive pressure on the U.S. allowed our leaders to lose control of the situation and he lost his sanctuary. The Chinese government controls the press and the internet and restricted the use of key words so that the story became more difficult to tell.  The Administration is between a rock and hard place as they want China’s money to keep flowing as our economy continues to flounder and national debt balloons geometrically; with China holding the largest portion of any one entity.

So we regularly remind ourselves and others how we had to put 12 million in uniform and lost 450,000 to stop the first organized mass murder in Germany and Japan, gave a pass to another empire that was doing the same and pretended we were not watching for the first 20 years and then fought a Cold War to tell the world what was wrong with that picture.

But China, they get a pass - - a pass so egregious that the young Chinese either don’t believe what their own government has done, or worse, they accept it as the legitimate cost of the better lifestyle they enjoy today.  70 million exterminated and that does not include the forced abortions and sterilizations over 60 years of China’s enforced One-Child Policy. That policy is the very issue the blind dissident who wanted sanctuary in our embassy was protesting.

The entire world has willingly turned the page on these atrocities and the press has been an integral part of the revisionist history. Several well-researched narratives are available for the factual story, but none of them are permitted to be sold in mainland China.

For a world where many claim they prioritize human rights, civil rights, women’s rights, and democratic methods of government, an awful lot have looked the other way for economic gain.  Of course Marx said that emerging socialist countries might have to forcibly exterminate up to 25% of their populations until the citizenry could be “re-educated” to one-directional thinking.

Looks like the Chinese have killed and controlled enough for enough years that all is forgiven.  Minor and recorded genocides we remember, but those big ones are just the cost of doing business.

Jim Foster

Editor