Sipsey Street Irregulars: Throwing away the Mandate of Heaven.

Friday, January 22, 2016

Throwing away the Mandate of Heaven.

Hong Kong’s Missing Booksellers

The fear and outrage that is spreading in Hong Kong is feeding anti-Communist and separatist sentiments there. This should worry Beijing, and so should the condemnation it has received from Western governments. (Mr. Gui is a naturalized Swedish citizen, and Mr. Lee holds a British passport.) But the fallout was also so predictable that one wonders how China’s leaders, supposedly grandmasters of strategic machination, went about this political calculus.

The Chinese government’s questionable management of its financial markets recently has already suggested that it is seriously disconnected from reality. And now it is using brute force to snuff out a tiny Hong Kong publisher of two-bit political gossip. Is the Communist Party simply becoming more ruthless in quashing dissenting voices, or is its political judgment slipping?

1 comment:

Chiu ChunLing said...: The breath-taking ignorance of the reality of CCP rule in China is to be expected of the NYT.

China is not a free nation. Nobody has any rights, and dissidents are disappeared and killed by the thousands as a matter of course. This is precisely why so many leftist politicians in the West envy the Chinese government.

The CCP isn't riding a tiger or balancing on a wire or whatever ridiculous metaphor for tenuous control analysts love to employ. There won't be any serious challenges posed by internal dissent until China has a large population of discontented combat veterans from wars with other nations returning home, a development that should be the better part of a decade away. Until then, everything that happens can easily be handled by using unlimited force...and the CCP is not shy about doing just that.

But there are inevitable foreign image problems as a result, and that should be the question we ask. What does Beijing's willingness to be spoken ill of by the usually adoring NYT tell us?; January 23, 2016 at 1:21 AM

"Progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress."

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. -- H.L. Mencken

"The Fate of Unborn Millions. . ."

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army-Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; that is all we can expect-We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die." -- George Washington to his troops before the Battle of Long Island.

"We will not go gently . . ."

This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can't be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won't be done. The Founders' Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.

But I tell you this: We will not go gently into that bloody collectivist good night. Indeed, we will make with our defiance such a sound as ALL history from that day forward will be forced to note, even if they despise us in the writing of it.

And when we are gone, the scattered, free survivors hiding in the ruins of our once-great republic will sing of our deeds in forbidden songs, tending the flickering flame of individual liberty until it bursts forth again, as it must, generations later. We will live forever, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, in sacred memory.

-- Mike Vanderboegh, The Lessons of Mumbai:Death Cults, the "Socialism of Imbeciles" and Refusing to Submit, 1 December 2008

"A common language of resistance . . ."

"Colonial rebellions throughout the modern world have been acts of shared political imagination. Unless unhappy people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people, protest remains a local affair easily silenced by traditional authority. Usually, however, a moment arrives when large numbers of men and women realize for the first time that they enjoy the support of strangers, ordinary people much like themselves who happen to live in distant places and whom under normal circumstances they would never meet. It is an intoxicating discovery. A common language of resistance suddenly opens to those who are most vulnerable to painful retribution the possibility of creating a new community. As the conviction of solidarity grows, parochial issues and aspirations merge imperceptibly with a compelling national agenda which only a short time before may have been the dream of only a few. For many Americans colonists this moment occurred late in the spring of 1774." -- T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.1.

Sipsey Street Irregulars

Friday, January 22, 2016

Throwing away the Mandate of Heaven.

1 comment:

Blog Archive

Followers