Mass Amnesia

A colleague recently suggested that China’s Communist Party reminded him of traditional Chinese dynasties like the Ming and the Qing. In light of this, maybe we should call China’s current regime the Hong dynasty, Hong being the Mandarin word for red.

But no, this isn’t quite right, because red symbolizes communism, and the Chinese Communist Party, whatever it is, is most definitely not communist. In fact, capitalists are playing such prominent roles in the leadership today that a name change is called for. Maybe “ the Chinese Capitalist Party?”

               What do we workers want? More money!

               When do we want it? Now! *

Since Deng Xiaoping pushed China so decisively down the capitalist road, it might make sense to say that the Mao era (1949-1976) represented the Hong dynasty and what we are seeing now is the “Qian” or “Money” dynasty. The pattern whereby a ruthless warrior spills rivers of blood to unite the nation, rules tyrannically, and then sees his dynasty fade shortly after his death is a familiar one in Chinese history. It happened with the first emperor’s Qin dynasty (221 BCE) and again with the Sui (581-618 CE). So is this pattern being repeated, with Mao’s brief but bloody regime being replaced by the more enduring dynasty founded by Deng Xiaoping?

Another colleague suggested that the Chinese Communist Party is not like a traditional dynasty so much as it is like many other right-wing dictatorships of modern times. Such dictatorships concentrate political power in the hands of a small elite which hide their decision-making behind closed doors, control the media, intimidate the populace, and enrich themselves while pretending to “serve the people.”

Imperial Japan of the 1930s and 1940s was a typical right-wing dictatorship. The government of Imperial Japan controlled all the nation’s media and used it to spew out self-serving propaganda. In addition to this, it used military force to intimidate or gun down any civilians who dared to protest its rule. And this is exactly what the Chinese Communist Party did 25 years ago on June 4, 1989, in the incident known internationally as the Tiananmen Massacre.
 

Louisa Lim has just written The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited about the slaughter of civilians in China on June Fourth and about the systematically brutal and pervasive efforts by the Communist Party to cover up the slaughter. Covering up its sins with misinformation, violence and threats is also what the Imperial Japanese authorities would have done in their day, hence my argument that the CCP is acting like the Japanese during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945).
 

An ongoing source of trouble for the party’s cover-up is the Tiananmen Mothers, a group of women whose sons and daughters were gunned down by the “People’s Liberation Army” in 1989. One woman, Zhang Xianling, spent months trying to dig up the story of her 19-year-old son’s murder. What she found out, after struggling to locate witnesses of the killing, was that her boy was out in the streets taking pictures on the night of June 3 and that a soldier saw him and shot him in the head. The wound did not kill him immediately, so he lay for hours on the pavement as the life slowly ebbed out of him. Whenever any citizens asked permission to take him to the hospital, the soldiers threatened to kill them if they approached the dying boy.

Finally his body was removed and buried by the soldiers in a shallow grave on the grounds of the high school where he was a student. This proved problematic when the boy's corpse, and a couple others buried nearby, began to produce a stench that made it impossible to hold classes in the school. At the same time, bits of their clothing began to poke through the surface of the earth. So the bodies were disinterred and moved to another grave site.

Eventually Ms. Zhang located the site of her son’s ultimate burial and had his remains cremated. To this day, in memory of her son and as a gesture of protest against the Communist Party, she regularly visits the place where he was killed. The authorities are so hostile to this behavior that they have installed a security camera trained on the spot of the boy’s murder just for the purpose of deterring her.

And that’s not all they do. They periodically prevent her from participating in activities that they fear will remind people of the killings, and have guards watching her round the clock. According to Lim, “this five-foot-tall, 76-year-old grandmother poses enough of a threat that an escort of state security agents, at times as many as 40 strong,” follows her as she goes to the dentist or the vegetable market.

Since the government has worked so hard to keep the younger generations of Chinese ignorant of the June Four killings, Ms. Zhang’s guards often have no idea why they are watching her. Once, after she explained to a young female guard why she was being watched, the woman walked off her post in disgust.

It is the ignorance of China’s younger generation about the June Four Massacre that justifies the word “amnesia” in Louisa Lim’s book. Whole generations of Chinese are growing up with no knowledge of the slaughter that was brought down on Miss Zhang’s son and hundreds of others 25 years ago this week when they protested against the corruption and lack of democracy in the Chinese Communist Party. The party, it seems, has succeeded in hiding the reality of this massacre from an entire generation. Even the Imperial Japanese authorities would no doubt be impressed with the effectiveness of the CCP policies that have accomplished such a massive forgetting of history.

In conclusion I have to express my sympathy for the Tiananmen Mothers and my admiration for their courage. May their struggles be rewarded someday soon.

Hu Yaobang, a liberal reformer whose death triggered the Tiananmen protests. Does he not deserve the honor of the Chinese people?

*Picture by Jon Berkeley 

Your Brain on Testosterone

Michael Lewis’s 1989 book, Liar’s Poker, offers a brilliant inside view of the criminal and virtual criminal behavior of Wall Street investment banks. “Virtual criminal behavior” (my expression, not Lewis’s) is behavior that should be against the law but isn’t because Wall Street money - due to its political influence - spawns laws that facilitate stealing from the public.

Lewis is clearly not very proud of some of his actions at Salomon Brothers where he worked as a bond trader. One that I remember in particular was his selling of crappy AT&T bonds to a German sucker named Herman, promising they were a good deal. What Lewis only discovered later was that the bonds were guaranteed losers. He had been encouraged by higher ups to sell them because Salomon owned them and wanted to unload them on a customer so they, Salomon, wouldn’t have to eat the loss. That’s how investment banks, and Wall Street generally, work: they find ordinary citizens, cultivate their trust, then steal from them. Meanwhile they spend a fortune on key political campaigns in order to make sure their stealing can continue uninterrupted by federal agents.

In addition to insight into the specifics of Wall Street criminality, Lewis reveals the testosterone-heavy language of the Wall Street trader. Before he suckered Herman into buying the crappy bonds, Lewis was known as a geek, a pathetically wimpy and unmasculine figure. Once he made the sleazy sale, he was on his way to becoming what Wall Street calls “a big swinging dick,” that is, a success. It was possible for women to become big swinging dicks, but they rarely did. I wonder how those who did felt about the language.

This imagery, where success and domination suggest a penis of unnatural dimensions, reminded me of what Lyndon Johnson said after bombing parts of North Vietnam to smithereens. “I didn’t just screw Ho Chi Minh,” he bragged, “I cut his pecker off.”

I’m not sure how Johnson felt about himself and his own pecker after he had to slink out of the White House in 1969. He may have felt like a dick, but surely not a big swinging one.

I am by no means the only one to be struck by the connection between success in competition on one hand and masculinity with all its appendages thereunto appertaining on the other. Joshua Goldstein, for example, has written an entire book on this topic: War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa.

I think of war as a kabuki of destructive stupidity and a fertile breeder of personal tragedy. But, since I am also in possession of a penis, I wish I could find a valid way to take exception to the presumed connection between these two entities.

There is, unfortunately, a connection between masculinity and aggressiveness. But it isn’t rooted in the penis; it’s testosterone, an anabolic steroid generated mainly in the testes. It makes men horny and contentious. (Women less so, since their bodies only generate about 12% as much testosterone as do men’s.)

There was an ad back in the 1970s designed to discourage drug use that focused on egg imagery. It opened with a man holding an ordinary egg while he intoned, “This is your brain.” Then, he cracked the egg and dropped it into a frying pan where it immediately began to sizzle. He then continued, “This is your brain on drugs.”

I never found that ad particularly convincing since I like fried eggs much better than raw ones, but nevertheless I did not become a drug addict.

Anyway, I would like to propose a new ad, one aimed strictly at men, with images something like this:

This is your brain.

This is your brain on testosterone.

Of course, women are capable of leading nations in war as did Golda Meir for Israel and Margaret Thatcher for the Britons. And, speaking of Britons, there was the famous warrior queen Boudicca who threw her bad, fighting self into fierce battle against the Romans.

                    Warrior Queen Boudicca on the Rampage

But these are exceptional cases. Most war promoters, like most Wall Street traitors [sic], are men. Of course the way we construct masculinity in our society, how we perceive and think about it, is at least as significant as the effects of any anabolic steroids that course through men’s veins. But still, this biochemical gender difference is a cross-cultural constant and it closely correlates with some pretty nasty behaviors.

Both capitalism and war are largely testosterone-driven systems. The hyper-competitive mentality of testosterone-afflicted Wall Streeters encourages them to act in ways that normal people consider pathologically anti-social. The same also happens all too often on the battlefield. Who can help us overcome this madness? Well, I guess today is as appropriate as any day for me to express my wish that more female voices be heard amidst the current cacophony of self-aggrandizing baritones. Happy Mother’s Day.

2016: Bush v. Clinton

Is April of 2014 too early to make presidential predictions for 2016? Well, not for me because I am a political junkie.

It’s going to be Jeb Bush vs. Hillary Clinton. 

I feel sure that they both plan to run and that nobody in their respective parties is capable of stopping them.

So who would win a Bush v. Clinton race? I think Hillary has the edge. Now, before you call your bookie, I should point out that my record on predictions is not stellar. In 1980, when the GOP nominated Ronald Reagan, I felt that Carter was a shoo-in for re-election. I had lived in California for six years of Reagan’s governorship, so I knew him to be a class-A doofus of very limited intelligence. “The American people don’t want a not-too-bright doofus for president!” I confidently told myself.

I was wrong.

So, Nate Silver, I am not. But here is my thinking. Hillary’s main weaknesses are her age and the baggage that comes with connections to a controversial political family. Jeb being in his sixties (albeit not as deep into his sixties as is Hillary) will somewhat ameliorate her vulnerability on the age issue.

As for the, “Haven’t we had enough of that family?” factor, only Jeb Bush invalidates that point against her. In fact he more than invalidates it, given the obvious comparison between the disastrous W. presidency as opposed to the economically sound, balanced-budget Clinton era.

Where the Electoral College is concerned, I expect that Jeb will take Florida since he’s still fairly popular here, and Hillary will take Pennsylvania. The winner of Ohio, as usual, will be the winner of the general election.

Jeb has an advantage in being married to a Hispanic woman and having mastered the Spanish language. He may attract more Hispanic voters than the typical GOP candidate. But Hillary has the advantage of being the first viable presidential candidate who can confidently claim to truly get women’s issues.

In the end, I believe Hillary has the edge mainly because of this: Jeb has to deal with the Republican Party. The Tea Party will hammer him during the primaries and probably force him to move right on a number of issues. In order to get the nomination, he may have to take nutty positions on gay marriage, global warming or immigration. Ultimately, the GOP may split into two, with one faction forming a new, officially independent Tea Party, while the other tries to maintain an Eisenhowerish moderate conservative position. Such a split might bring about a Republican resurgence, but I expect this would only happen after the 2016 election.

I will say up front that I sincerely hope that our next president is Hillary, or some other progressive Democrat. This is partly on general principles, but very specifically because the next president is going to shape the Supreme Court in a big way. The latest justices appointed to the Supreme Court have been on the young side, and this is no doubt because both W and Obama wanted to have their influence on that court be enduring. And one thing this country does not need is a Supreme Court that goes on for decades making decisions like Citizens United and McCutcheon - decisions that guarantee ever more corruption in our electoral politics.

May God (or Nate Silver or someone like that) save us, then, from another Bush presidency.