Letters to the Editor
ondelette
Published Letters: 2259 Editor's Choice: 19
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Oh, boy, you really are out on a tightrope
[Read the article: "Fringe liberal bloggers"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In China for example the "cultural revolution" snowballed from legitimate complaints against corrupt government, that grew into a lynch mob where anyone educated was considered a conspirator, and the majority of Chinese continue to be dirt poor.
This is even more not real than your U.S. history. The Da Zhonghua Wenhua Geming or Great Chinese Cultural Revolution, was started by Chairman Mao and other senior Communist Party figures (principally the so-called "Gang of Four") to instill revolutionary spirit and dialecticism among the youth of the country, whom he felt did not have the commitment to the revolution that the long marchers had. It grew into a faction in a war, they fought pitched battles with the PLA Southern Army, you know, with tanks and guns and so forth. They had never been moderate, and were never hijacked, and had never represented poor starving peasants. The war ended with a (disputed) casualty figure of about 14 million. The actions against the educated consisted mostly of them being "sent down" to work in the farm collectives, while farmers were brought in to staff the universities.
Your history conveniently supports centrism, but it isn't accurate.
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@healthyskeptic
[Read the article: "Fringe liberal bloggers"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]That must be another one of your history as accident dissertations I suppose. I suppose the tanks just fought on thier own, without any people with political beliefs inside. Right?
Why did Maoist extremism win in China as opposed to a more reasonable centrist revolution?
I think you are confusing the Chinese Revolution with the Great Chinese Cultural Revolution. The first was going on in some form or other from 1895 to 1949. It's principal components were the overthrow of the Qing dynasty 1911, the presidency of Yuan shikai, the fall of the Republic in the North and the period of warlordism, the retreat of the Kuomintang (Republican government) to Taiwan in 1949. The second was from 1966 to 1976, and was fomented by the government, which created the Red Guard, mostly out of student populations, and started an internal conflict to instill the principles of Hegelian dialecticism in the younger generation.
Why did Mao prevail? He conducted a model insurgency, not taking from the people, growing their own food, not pillaging, until the warlords and Chiang Kai-Shek looked so bad the people turned against them. During the period between 1945 and 1949, Chiang went into the record books by breaching the dikes of the Huang ho (Yellow River) causing 887,000 civilian casualties in 4 days, the most of any singleton manmade disaster. Plainly speaking, Mao was not fighting a "reasonable centrist revolution", but warlords so extreme and dictatorial that in one case one of them traded most of the food in his province for a railroad, and so money hungry that when the Japanese invaded, they largely thought they were justified because they held sales slips for a large part of the Chinese territory. He won against rampant corruption to the point of cruelty, not against centrists.
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@certifiedprepwn3d
[Read the article: "Fringe liberal bloggers"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]ondelette - if you are still working on the thinking in metaphors thing- I am working on something on that topic for the choco'bang - it will probably be a day or two. But, wanted to thank you for formulating the questions here at the comment page - food for thought.
I missed the choco'bang set up, can I get a reference?
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@Anonymous @8:52
[Read the article: Face of a psychopath]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Good analogy. You forgot the part where the people whose house you busted into had firebombed your house the day before, killing 3000 or so people.
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How stupid are you people?
You're right, MH forgot about that you busted into the wrong house, and the people next door were the ones who's heads you had wanted to crack, because they torched your scooter, not the people you busted in on.
How stupid are we?
The conditions laid for negotiations on ramping down their nuclear program by Iran were that we 1) remove them from the list of Axis of Evil countries, and 2) not ask them to make all the concessions before the negotiations start. Neither one of these pre-conditions would cause any harm to anyone except the Bush Administration's own very bruise prone ego. But the Bushies said no. There is plenty of time during negotiations to demand, cajole or threaten, and still get things done. Establishing negotiations can also defuse other problems, and can even get more reasonable people in place on the other side. Not even talking is far stupider than anything anyone on this post believes. So the answer to your question is:
Not stupid at all.
Have a nice day.
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Yes on Colin Powell
[Read the article: Face of a psychopath]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]His silence since 2005 was overly wrong and overly respectful, and his speaking out now may be partly self-serving, but maybe Colin Powell can inspire some of his fellow Republicans (or what the heck, maybe some Dems) to join him in speaking out for sanity.
All of these silences are for a longer time than we would like (his and, say George Tenet's), but we do need their help. Powell's speech at the U.N. was tragic, but I think it was a case of GIGO. He wasn't looking at the most considered opinions of the CIA analysts when he was preparing it, and we will probably never know why.
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Re: Can we unite around one issue
[Read the article: Face of a psychopath]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"that innocents should not be killed" is less than what the Geneva Conventions hold as a central tenet. They hold that anyone who is not engaged in the combat, even a prisoner of war who is hardly innocent, should not be killed or mistreated.
That innocents should not be killed is the least we could do.
Especially since in tribal, or re-descending into tribal, cultures, killing innocents creates more "non-innocents" who want your blood. Khoon ka badla khoon.