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Business so far this year has astonished even the most perennial optimists, wrote finance reporters E.K. Burger and A.M. Leinbach in June 1929. It wasnt true. That March had seen days of unsettling free-fall in the stock exchange: Burger and Leinbach were writing fiction in the pages of The Magazine of Wall Street, serving a narrative that refused to anticipate the nasty shocks that came four months later, when the stock market collapsed under its own lies and the Great Depression officially began.Ad Policy BOOKS IN REVIEW

Radical artists and writers, many of whom had been roused to politics by the Russian Revolution a decade prior, spent the years after the crash trying to create models of art that could reflect the economic circumstances of people around them. The plight of the suffering became a reliable theme in mainstream art and literature. Three and a half years into the Depression, the critic and fiction writer Michael Gold reviewed Union Square, a novel by the then-popular author Albert Halper. They say it is a proletarian novel, or better the proletarian novel, Gold wrote, but ladies and gentlemen, too bad. Union Square, which follows destitute itinerants living in and around the eponymous square, was just the stale Bohemianism already picked over by liberal novelists of the past. Gold saw the book as lacking social passion, merely synthetic, like a Hollywood movie. He understood that the novel was propped up by a system of inequality and exploitation. Gold excoriated those who claimed belief in freedom and fairness but shied away from saying as much in their books.

Two years after that novel was published, another book began to appear in the cheap cafeterias around 14th Street. As scholar Floyd Cheung notes, H.T. Tsiangs 1935 novel The Hanging on Union Square bore striking similarities to Halpers. (Each protagonist wanders around the same few blocks of Manhattan, encountering similar character archetypes along the way.) But Tsiang, unlike Halper, didnt shy from the label of proletarian literature. Tsiang pursued it past subtlety, literary realism, and marketability. No ones a hero, I think, one of his characters says. Were just workers! Gold sneered at the lack of politics in Halpers book, writing, Not a worker in the novel. Not a person who suffers as the masses suffer today. Not one bitter cry of rage against capitalism! Tsiang was ready to answer his challenge.

The Hanging on Union Square follows Mr. Nut, an aspiring businessman with just a nickel and a 10-cent check in his pocket. He spends his days ambling around Union Square, getting lightly swindled by his friend Mr. Wiseguy and pestered by communists pushing various party publications, like The Daily Worker. (Another pesterer is selling copies of his novel China Reda book Tsiang wrote and sold in the same cafs.) Though desperate for food and shelter, Mr. Nut furiously distances himself from the activists who offer him help and fraternity, insisting that he is a Capitalist, until he finds himself mixed up with the police. A black communist rushes to his defense, and the cops beat them both. The blood of the colored race and the blood of the white race that fell on the cement pavement were of one color, Tsiang writes. Bloodied and chastened, Nut realized also that Communists were not necessarily bad people. In effect, Hanging is a Knstlerroman for communism.

Tsiangs book is as densely populated as the neighborhood where it takes place, but characters with real names are few and far between, and the handful of names were given are more like labels: Miss Stubborn, an organizer for the Communist Party; Mr. System, her predatory former boss; Miss Digger, who likes getting men to spend their money; Mr. Wiseguy and Mr. Ratsky, two more bad guys. Mr. Nut, the wacky naf, is caught between all these figures as the conflict between workers and bosses escalates. Though his natural instinct is to hedge, hes forced to make decisions and take sides as the stakes of his choices become increasingly clear. Tsiang isnt shy about articulating these consequences, with scenes of elite debauchery (financial, sexual, moral) set in sharp contrast to the miseries of Depression-era New York, in an order that makes it obvious that one follows from the other.

Hanging takes place over a few days. Most of it follows Nut dipping in and out of cafs and potential places to spend a night. Tsiang keeps us updated on his location at all times, and Mr. Nut never strays far from the square where he begins and ends his adventure. We see New Yorks speakeasies, its movie theaters, its private clubs where the entertainment supposedly rivals that of Paris. Nut spends time in the apartments of a lonely poet, a sex-crazed book critic, a desperate mother, and a sadistic magnate. He joins political marches to the square and stumbles past assemblies to aid the Scottsboro Boys, nine black teenagers in Alabama falsely accused of raping two white women. We see the frustrations of Communist Party bureaucracy, staffed by college-graduate sympathizers, the millionaires son[s] and well-known writers who see in their party membership an opportunity for publicity. Hanging offers a portrait of a New York City for the rich and the poor, the immigrant and the native-born, the newly homeless and the seasoned itinerant.

Tsiangs oddball style and plainspoken politics make his purpose clear: to live up to the calling of revolutionary literature and strip away the artifice of the bourgeois novel, which naturalizes the unnatural human relations and inhuman conditions of life under the free market. In a few decades, the CIA and instiutions like the Rockefeller Foundation would invest heavily in artists, magazines, and MFA programs to steer American art away from politics, social issues, and Soviet realism. But before American schoolchildren learned to show, not tell, Tsiang, Gold, and their cohort of proletarian writersincluding Langston Hughes, Agnes Smedley, and Richard Wrighttried to tell America what it really looked like.Related Article

Born in 1899 in China, Tsiang grew up in an era of revolution. In 1911, Sun Yat-Sen helped topple the 300-year-old Qing dynasty. As a young man, Tsiang joined Suns party, the Kuomintang, which soon split into conservative and communist-leaning factions. A member of the partys left wing, he hurried into exile after Chiang Kai-Shek took power, ducking into the United States through a loophole for students in the Chinese Exclusion Act. Tsiang attended Stanford, Columbia, and the New School without ever completing a degree. Instead, he spent his time agitating, editing a Chinese newspaper in the Bay Area and following the political struggles of workers in New Yorks Chinatown. Eventually, the combination of his political activity and disregard for the terms of his visa caught the attention of immigration authorities, and he was interned on Ellis Island for several months. He was spared from deportation after a letter-writing campaign by his friends and spent the rest of his life in America, under FBI surveillance. Until a few years ago, his most faithful readers were the federal agents on his case.

To the extent that Tsiang is remembered, its as a Chinese writer, not a proletarian one. As The New Yorkers Hua Hsu writes in his biography of Tsiang, A Floating Chinaman, Tsiangs career-long struggle was to get Americans to take the complexities of Chinese society seriously, in contrast to the sympathetic but sentimental depictions from Western writers like Pearl Buck. Hsu says Buck and her work haunted Tsiang throughout his life in America, especially her best-selling novel The Good Earth, which won her a Pulitzer and the Nobel. The veneer of naive good intentions that covered the books lazy stereotyping and colonial airs infuriated Tsiang, compounded by its rabid reception in America. Her novels immensely popular, flattened vision of China inspired many of his books most vicious passages. (In one particularly odd moment in Hanging, Miss Digger declares her intention to go to the Orient and conduct research, improving upon the work of an unnamed journalistclearly Buck.) Hanging was reissued this year as part of Penguins Asian Pacific American Heritage Month series, though apart from Miss Diggers speech theres very little mention of China or even Chinese Americans in it. Mr. Nut describes himself, defensively, as very Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic and Yankee. Hanging holds race, like everything else, at enough of a distance to make it unfamiliar. Though racism in the book is as real as capitalism, racial identity seems flexible with the right mind-set. (Mr. Wiseguy does facial exercises to make himself look more Aryan.)

Tsiangs relentless criticism often turned inward. Anonymous versions of the author make frequent appearances in his work as single-minded madmen hovering around societys margins. In a later novel, And China Has Hands, Tsiangs stand-ina fervent, irritating poetis tossed out of a public debating hall, where the topic of the night is What Is Proletarian Literature and Who Pays the Printing Bills? The poet is lonely, furious, and always marginal, vaguely aware that onlookers think hes embarrassing his Chinese peers. Its unmistakably Tsiang. Over the course of his life, he floated in and out of school, employment, social circles, political commitments, and his own novels. Both a desperate hanger-on and a bitter drifter, Tsiang had too much personality.

His books are filled with broad archetypes: Tsiangs characters are single-minded, personifying cardinal virtues and sins. They are greedy or slothful or brave or righteous. One may be a stand-in for the fight against racism, another for feminist struggle, a third for Chinese American labor rights. This substitution of type for character was in keeping with much leftist art in the first half of the century. Proletarian literature was stripped of the bourgeois ideologies scaffolding most cultural products, ideologies that only aestheticized unjust relations within the art and legitimized an unequal society in real life. This honesty took different forms, depending on the artists and their mediums. For novelists, it often meant sacrificing many of the qualities that defined the novel itself. As Raymond Williams argued, the concept of the proletarian novel took a while to find footing, as the central tensions of novels had been inheritance and propertied marriage. Working-class writers, even into the 20th century, were more likely to write memoirs or popular poetry, according to Williams.

And although its written as a novel, The Hanging on Union Square hews more closely to the conventions of drama. (In fact, Tsiang found more success when he staged it several years later.) It moves from spectacle to spectacle without dwelling too much on the interior. Poetic interludes conclude its first three acts, and each act has a refrain, repeated at the beginning of each scene. The poems are repetitive ditties; they seem meant to be put to music or read in a call-and-response with the reader. The climax of the novel is a literal dramathe titular hanging in Union Squarestaged by Mr. Wiseguy and Mr. System to solve the three problems they see facing Depression-era America: unemployment, sky-high suicide rates, and the escalating mania of the rich for entertainment.

The same problems preoccupied Tsiangs social-realist contemporariesthe Steinbecks and the dos Passosesbut unlike them, Tsiang had little interest in steely, self-serious misery. In the book, as in his life, he is constantly cheeky and self-deprecating. Not only did Tsiang refer to himself as an annoying peddler of his own books, but the original cover of Hanging resembled a madmans conversation with himself, Hsu writes. Its all text, no images: three words (YES, NO, and SO) printed large across the cover, with smaller italics legible on closer inspection, so that the cover reads YES the cover of a book is more of a book than the book is a book, I sayNO, and SO with no title or author name. The books first pages are full of tepid, bemused half-praise and rejection notices from publishers. Tsiang had trouble publishing his works and resorted, for the most part, to publishing them himself.

Editors, publishers, and even sympathetic friends were bewildered by Tsiangs eccentricities, his brashness in demanding recognition, his internationalist politics, and his relentless drive to joke, even at his own expense. Mr. System, Hangings central villain, bemoans how nowadays a poet writes as if he were doing bookkeeping. This, in fact, is exactly how Tsiang writes. His sentences account for their subject and verb without ambiguity, and he repeats himself when he wants to be clear. At one false plot peak, Mr. Nut ended the story literarily, non-propagandizingly and publishablybut of course, the book goes on, and the publishability of the book is lost.

Tsiangs politics suggest that the books focal points would be plot and characteryet, despite himself, Tsiangs manic spirit animates his voice. A potential romance between Mr. Nut and Miss Stubborn is perhaps the books most naturalistic plot point, sending Mr. Nut into a state of love-addled confusion. Untying tied the tie tighter, he muses. But like everything else, it ends with politics, reflected in Miss Stubborn. As a revolutionist, and as a communist, Stubborn was of the opinion that there was love for the biological reason, for the artistic reason, and for the political (revolutionary) reason. She has little interest in bourgeois gender conventions, which reduce women to objects. As an It, a girl had to be passive. As a revolutionist and as a communist, Stubborn felt she must overthrow this tradition and stand up and become She.

The idea is one to chew on, but its almost outcharmed by its deliverylove for the artistic reason! The parenthetical (revolutionary)! Stubborns determined description of herself as a revolutionist and as a Communist! Every aspect of the book, from the structure of its sentences to its narrative arc, is in service to its politicswhich are really in service to Tsiangs personality.

The assertiveness of the book cows its readers into believing that it doesnt vacillate wildly between poles. But the narrative coheres around its internal tensions, as when Tsiangs apparent allergy to sentiment runs up against his desire to depict the dire straits of poor families or when his mechanically plotted sentences and distaste for poetizing give way to startling lyric detaila stockingless girl, an undercover cop given away by his policemans neck, a husky cafeteria patron who sat at a corner table, enthroned.

After his radicalization at the hands of the police, Nut is more attentive to the suffering of the poor. Whereas he once preferred to think of himself as an out-of-work businessman who scorned those who, like him, could not make ends meet, he becomes a witness to inequality, a flneur of the proletariat who watches as people fail to connect with one another and families starve through a bitter winter.

Ordinary people have written, almost with religious awe, of the wondrous despair through which they lived in the 1930s, Vivian Gornick writes in The Romance of American Communism. Other, not so ordinary people have written of the equally wondrous spiritual exhilaration they experienced during the Thirties. In Hanging, Tsiang manages to convey the sense, echoed by party members at the time, that communism was a system that could orient its believers like none other. Tsiang scrupulously tracks Mr. Nuts location for us, but Nut knows where he is (and where hes going) because of the constant flow of peopleworkers, radicals, and the police chasing themto Union Square. The reader understands that this is what Tsiang believes communism can do for people: help locate themselves in society and imagine and act upon a path to a freer world.

Though the books formal aspects range from jarring to quaint to delightful, they all reflect the infectious freedom with which Tsiang wrote. His flinging disregard for the fashionable and the novelistic are thrilling, but so are the serious, deep convictions underlying them. For anyone with revolutionary sympathies, its an emotionally stirring book, proving that representation and interiority arent all that moves us; so can the eviction of a family named Stubborn, or an unnamed poet pleading for intimacy. Thats what Tsiang wanted, after all.

But theres also a despair in reading the book that Tsiang didnt anticipate: the feeling of a lost New York, a Union Square where thousands regularly gathered, lined with union buildings, the offices of The Daily Worker, and the dingy cafeterias where the Nuts and Stubborns of the world gathered. After the rallies and riots of the 1860s, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the architects of many of New Yorks great public spaces, redesigned the square to meet the public requirement of mass-meetings. Though they really intended it for military assemblies, New Yorkers took them at their word. Ten thousand workers gathered in the square to celebrate the first Labor Day in 1882.

Halper, the Union Square novelist whom Gold excoriated, remembered that in the early 1930s (when Tsiang was writing) there were weekly leftwing parades which frequently ended with clubbings by the police. On Saturday mornings I could see the mounted cops in the side streets, bunched together, resting, healthy-faced, chatting cheerfully before the afternoons action. The Daily Worker building was at that time covered in signs calling for class struggle and for people to Fight Police Terror, Unemployment, and War Preparations, and for the Defense of the Soviet Union. When you gathered for a demonstration at one end of the park, you could see those signs from any angle, along with the heads of the thousands of people alongside you.

Now, as Whole Foods and Barnes & Noble face off across the park, its impossible for protesters, when they gather, to see from one end of the plaza to the other. A thicket of cars surrounds the square. At the entrances to its interior stand barricades erected by the business-improvement district. Theyre covered in blue cloth, printed, like a bitter punchline in Hanging, with the words Welcome to Union Square. Tsiang would know better than to believe that fiction.

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H.T. Tsiang, the Flneur of Socialist Fiction - The Nation

Most understand that socialism conquered its first country, Russia, in 1917 under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin and has always been a revolutionary doctrine never content to allow any people to choose another way. Eighteen months later it was organized to do the same in America. Yes, colluding with Russia has been a part of our history for more than 100 years, but it has been the socialists who colluded. We see three times in the 20th century when its imprint was most evident: after World War I, after World War II and during the Vietnam War. Space permits only a brief summation of each.

"It was in 1919 that a majority of the membership of the Socialist Party of the United States voted to join the Comintern, established by the Bolsheviks." It was on Aug. 31 that splinter socialist groups formed the Communist Labor Party of America under the leadership of John Reed and Benjamin Gitlow. They quickly attached themselves to labor unions, especially the International Workers of the World (IWW), famous for its use of sabotage and violence in protesting World War I.

Allegiance to The 21 Conditions of the Russian Comintern was required for membership, so those joining were loyal to the Bolshevik Revolution and its ideology above our own government. One of these 21 conditions read: "Every party wishing to belong to the Communist International must systematically and persistently develop a communist agitation within the trade unions." Iron discipline and periodic cleansing rid them of the less revolutionary.

Any enemy of the Soviet Republic was their enemy. They understood that propaganda was their main weapon and it was to be used in spreading the communist ideology and eventually overthrowing the U.S. government (Steve Byas, "Communist Party USA Is 100 Year Old This Year," New American, May 20, 2019).

When Lenin encouraged world revolution in 1919, loyal communists went to work everywhere. In America, they called for labor union strikes across the nation "urging the workers to rise up against the government of the United States." Some 2,600 strikes resulted, with more than 6,000 arrested. These were accompanied by a wave of bombings, some 36 bombs mailed to prominent politicians in April 1919 alone ("Send Death Bombs to 36 U.S. Leaders" Chicago Tribune, May 1, 1919). In June, another eight bombs of 25 pounds of dynamite each were sent to mostly prominent government officials (Wreck Judge Nott's Home, The New York Times, June 3, 1919). In 1920 "a wagonload of explosives was detonated on Wall Street, killing 38 people and injuring 200 others" (Byas). Attorney General Mitchell Palmer's own home was bombed twice.

Most history textbooks undermine these events and villainize Palmer, omitting that the raids were conducted under the authority of numerous states as well as the federal government. The Constitution defines treason as giving aid and comfort to the enemy which does allow the death sentence. In kindness, many found guilty were offered one-way transportation to Russia on the Buford, the ship nicknamed the "Soviet Ark." Many chose to go there. The only death sentences given for the sabotage and violence of the Red Scare was to radicals Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti and that for the murders of Frederick Parmenter and Alessandro Berardelli -- not for their political affiliation.

The Great Depression brought the nation to its knees and the socialists, modeling the Russian led USSR, openly planned conquest. William Z. Foster, head of the Communist Party USA, in his book, "Toward Soviet America," wrote of what "the American Soviet government" would look like. It would nationalize education.

"The studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of bourgeois ideology. The students will be taught on the basis of Marxist dialectical materialism, internationalism."

All religious schools and churches would be abolished. God would be banished and all property collectivized (Byas). So much of what he advocated then has been implemented under socialism and liberalism.

With a philosophy mirroring socialist Russia, America was awash with spies for the Kremlin. Benjamin Gitlow, who defected from the Communist Labor Party of America he cofounded, confided, "The Communist Party of the United States is proud of the spies it has supplied to the Soviet government out of its own ranks" (Byas). Remember, it was socialists Ethel and Julius Rosenberg who passed atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union for which they were executed in 1953. Communist State Department wonder boy Alger Hiss also passed atomic secrets to Russia, played a major role in communist victories under Franklin Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference and became acting secretary-general of the UN in 1945, among other things.

The third major attempt to communize, thus overthrow our system of government, was during the Vietnam War. I have in my possession hundreds of Senate and House Hearings of American socialists colluding with Russia. So prevalent was the problem that U.S. News and World Report published "Communism and the New Left" in 1970 with chapters on how socialists exploited war, blacks, disorder, youth and labor. A favorite chapter is "Spying for Russia." We lost the Vietnam War, primarily because of the socialist enemy within America. Consequently, South Vietnam and Cambodia were turned over to the communists.

Also in my possession are at least a hundred books about U.S. socialists colluding with Russia. It is a very old story.

Harold W. Pease, Ph.D., is a syndicated columnist and an expert on the United States Constitution. He has dedicated his career to studying the writings of the Founding Fathers and applying that knowledge to current events. He taught history and political science from this perspective for more than 30 years at Taft College. To read more of his weekly articles, visit http://www.LibertyUnderFire.org. Opinions expressed are those of the author.

Print Headline: Collusion with socialist Russia is nothing new in U.S.

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Collusion with socialist Russia is nothing new in US - Westside Eagle Observer

In this short but timely monograph, Vijay Prashad examines the impact of the October Revolution on the Third World. He states that the book is not a comprehensive study but provides an insight into the significance of the revolution for the working classes and the peasantry living under colonial domination.

Chapters 1 and 2, titled Eastern Graves and Red October respectively, examine Lenins views on communism and provide an overview of how the Bolsheviks came to power. Based on Lenins writings, the chapters show how the October Revolution transferred power to the hands of the working class and the peasantry, and how the oppressed masses were able to develop administrative structures that provided the foundation for the Soviet organisation.

Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6 investigate how the October Revolution influenced the people of the Third World. Vijay Prashad successfully connects a strike organised by workers in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1908 to a peasant revolution in Mexico in 1911 under the leadership of Emiliano Zapata. On both occasions, workers were fighting to change the unbearable working conditions introduced by imperial rule. Thus, the October Revolution inspired several anti-imperial uprisings, including the one in Egypt led by Saad Zaghloul Pasha and the May Fourth Movement in China.

Vijay Prashad shows that the literary and cultural spheres of the Third World were also influenced by the October Revolution. For example, artists such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siquerios depicted through their paintings the struggle faced by peasants in Mexico and how they brought about a revolutionary change. In India, the revolutionary poet Nazrul Islam, whose outlook was a combination of radical nationalism, anarchism and nationalism, was influenced by the October Revolution. However, the author does not address this in detail.

Vijay Prashad also discusses other revolutionary artists from China to Chile who were influenced by the October Revolution and found new ways to depict the lives of workers and peasants oppressed by either colonial domination or old aristocrats. The author argues that the October Revolution and the communist movement appealed to people because both pledged to end imperial rule and class domination. To illustrate this point, he uses several examples from M.N. Roy to Dada Amir Haider Khan and Ho Chi Minh. Ho Chi Minh worked in hotels in France and the United States before becoming the founder of the French Communist Party. He studied at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV) and returned to Vietnam to start the revolution.

Similarly, several Indian muhajirs who went to Istanbul to protect the Caliphate of the Ottoman Empire also turned to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). An early communist leader from India, Muzaffar Ahmad, indicated that 17 of these muhajirs went to the KUTV where they were influenced by the communist movement. They established a link between communism and pan-Islamism.

However, while the author seems to give the impression that Muzaffar Ahmad himself went to Central Asia and returned as a communist, this was not the case. Ahmad wrote about the muhajirs and was transformed from a radical journalist to an early communist, as indicated by Suchetana Chattopadhyay in her book An Early Communist.

The author briefly describes how the October Revolution influenced the womens movement. On March 8, 1927, Zhenotdel activists came out on to the streets of major Uzbek cities and fought for womens liberation.

The revolution also improved womens literacy in Central Asia from almost nil in 1917 to 99 per cent in 1970. Moreover, communist women outside the USSR also fought for womens liberation and shaped the world of the womens communist movement.

Finally, the author shows how the communist movement was part of the anti-colonial struggle in Third World countries. Despite sanctions, Fidel Castro was able to diversify sugarcane production and improve the lives of the people of Cuba. Also, the USSR trained 3,000 Cubans in agronomy and 900 Cubans as engineers. The Third World acknowledged the significance of the USSR, and communism became a dynamic movement of social change. The growth of the Indonesian Communist Party, the largest outside the Socialist Bloc, could only be halted through a genocidal coup by the Indonesian military establishment, aided by the Western powers, in 1965.

Throughout the book, Vijay Prashad persuasively links the communist movement to the anti-colonial struggle in Third World countries. The USSR and the communist organisations supported the fight of the colonised subject-peoples from the Caribbean to South-East Asia against the British, Dutch, and French colonial empires. In other words, communism in Third World countries originated from and was inextricably linked to peoples movements for self-liberation. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the Communist Parties of the Third World acknowledged the importance of the USSR and how it mobilised people against fascism.

However, Vijay Prashad acknowledges that anti-colonial movements linked to communism also failed on several occasions as they had to struggle with immense repression in the face of imperial domination.

By discussing the impact of the October Revolution on the Third World, Vijay Prashad acknowledges the limitations of the USSR and how it did not enhance the democratic aspirations of the people. Rather, bureaucracy and stagnation bolstered the divisions and contradictions within it.

Moreover, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, social wealth gave rise to a capitalist oligarchy. Third World countries were hit hard. The USSR disengaged from Afghanistan, Nicaragua and Angola. Countries such as India surrendered to the International Monetary Fund, which led to political and religious violence.

The book provides a nuanced understanding of socialist democracy and culture. Vijay Prashads prose is poetic and absorbing. The book, by combining the authors own personal involvement with the communist movement in Calcutta (now Kolkata) with rewarding insights, gives hope to those engaged in the fight against the autocratic fascist governments that have developed in the Global South with the generous assistance of Western liberal imperialism. This writer looks forward to reading a detailed monograph from Vijay Prashad on this topic in the future, which connects the October Revolution to peoples movements in the Third World.

Nilanjana Paul is Assistant Professor, the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

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Impact of Red October - Frontline

January 13, 2019 (The Catholic Thing) China is a large, strange, complex, contradictory thing, even before you get to the large, strange, complex, contradictory, and murderous form of Communism that has come to dominate its various peoples. No one understands it very well. But those closest with a real say the Hong Kong protesters who know what submission to Beijing means, andTaiwanese voters who roundly resisted mainland pressurein elections this weekend are united in believing that China is simply not to be trusted.

Its worth trying to think through why the Vatican seems to have a different view.

Living in Washington, Ive met any number of sincere and dedicated public figures, as well as many scamps, scalawags, con men, and outright liars. But the few encounters Ive had with Chinese officials set the gold standard for shameless lying particularly about religious persecution.

Evensecular journalists with little love for religionroutinely report these days on Chinas increasing outrages against believers. Their reports tend to focus on religious groups Western secularists favor the 1 million Uighur Muslims in China, for example, who are now beingbrainwashed in re-education camps.

Journalists are much less interested in Chinas 100 million Christians (Protestants and Catholics). Or how religious bodies are being brutally sinicized, even forced incredibly to re-write their scriptures to bring them in line with Communist ideology.

Last week, a Congressional committee on China issueda blistering report, which began: Observers have described religious persecution in China over the last year to be of an intensity not seen since the Cultural Revolution. It documented how not only foreign religions (i.e., Christianity and Islam) are being squeezed, but even traditional faiths like Buddhism and Hinduism are under a full-court press against religion now.

Just the next day, Pope Francis gavehis annual address to diplomats, and did not utter a word about Chinese persecution. Indeed, his 2019 address to the diplomats claimed that the Vaticans Provisional Agreement with China is the result of a lengthy and thoughtful institutional dialogue that led to the determination of certain stable elements of cooperation between the Apostolic See and the civil authorities. [Authors Correction: An earlier version of this column mistakenly attributed this quotation to the 2020 address. RR]

How is such stone-blindness possible?

Theres an answer perhaps inAHidden Life, Terrence Malicks moving new film about the martyrdom of Franz Jgersttter, an Austrian Catholic whose conscience would not allow him to swear allegiance to Hitler. Ive had an interest in him since I wrote my bookThe Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century.

Amea culpa: He was one of my very favorites among many modern heroic and holy figures, almost totally ignored by historians. But I had to write about him as a historian myself, with only the broad outline of his personal struggles as he thought about how his wife and children would have to cope without him. How his friends and fellow villagers regarded him as a traitor (they, of course, felt guilty that they had compromised with evil and took it out on him and his family). How, as the Nazis never tired of telling him, his death would change nothing; no one would ever know about it; his stubbornness would only bring suffering to those he loved.

Some have criticized the slow, lengthy treatment of these matters in the film. But how else to convey what its really like to live under relentless persecution, day after day, and deal with tortures and doubts to a degree that would drive most of us mad?

But even that was not the worst. Franzs pastor and bishop (Joseph Fliesser of Linz) nervously suggested he be obedient to public authorities, as St. Paul counseled (Rom. 13). These men were not monsters, or Nazi shills. They did not intend to destroy the Church, but thought that by passively going along they were actually saving as much of the Church as could be saved, in terrible circumstances. There was also personal cowardice, of course, mixed in with the other motives. They were wrong, massively wrong, as anyone can see today.

Something similar is going on in China right now. The Vatican, by its accord with an evil government, has essentially told Chinese Catholics that they are wrong to remain independent of a regime they see quite clearly is murderous and hell-bent on forcing the Church to be re-defined along lines that will make it harmless to government interests.

Reliable sources say that the same instruments of manipulation officials used so effectively in imposing the one-child policy are now carrying out the sinicization of religious bodies.

So where are the bold Catholic voices protesting the intimidation and taming of the Church? We have Hong Kongs retired Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, who just issued a heartfeltletter to all the Catholic Cardinals, which ends on a personal note to each of them, Your Eminence,can we passively witness the murder of the Church in China by those who should protect and defend her from her enemies? Begging on my knees, your brother. . .

Theres been silence about this letter to say nothing of the horrors it describes at the highest levels in the Vatican, i.e., Cardinal Parolin, the Secretary of State, who worked out the Provisional Agreement with China, and Pope Francis himself.

Weve heard from Parolin that we must be patient and keep up hope, but the facts on the ground are beyond dispute: the Church has been had. The belief that dialogue which like diplomacy has become something of an idol in certain internationalist circles is possible with certain forms of evil will someday be seen, as is clear already to many of us, as a foolish experiment that many Chinese and not only Chinese Catholics will pay for with their liberties and lives.

And it wont stop there because other malefactors around the world are watching. If you have to suffer and perhaps die anyway, better to do so like Franz Jgersttter as he told his captors, as a free man, although he was imprisoned than to accept a false peace, which is, sooner or later, only the peace of the graveyard.

Published with permission from The Catholic Thing.

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Vatican doesnt understand that communist China will never compromise - Lifesite

Just over an hour prior to Tuesdays latest 2020 Democratic presidential debate, longtime Democrat and former Clinton official James Carville appeared on MSNBCs Hardball to unspool his latest takes of lunacy.

This time, he insisted that Trumpism is the greatest threat this country has faced since the fall of communism and Republicans cannot ever be trusted to save the United States.

Carville declined to make the case for Bennet, but instead attacked Trump by claiming that, instead of radical Islamic terror thats killed thousands of Americans in the last three decades, its Trump and Trumpism thats the greatest threat this country has faced since the fall of communism and the only way to deal with it is defeat it resoundingly.

He added that it will not only need to be defeated at the polls, but decimated in the same way that itd look like Clemson looked last night against his LSU Tigers.

Later and in closing out their discussion, Matthews screeched with the utmost faux concern for the Republican Party (click expand):

MATTHEWS: What happened to the Republican Party? The opposition party

CARVILLE: They dont exist.

MATTHEWS: from your thinking, the party that wasn't evil, it wasn't stupid. Now, I mean, I noticed in the whole day of defending Trump, not a single Republican member of the House, and they're all some of them smart, not one of them said one good thing about Donald Trump personally. Nobody nobody spoke for his character. Nobody said he's a good, honest, guy. I mean, it was immaculate, immaculate. Not a single positive comment. And yet, they bow to him like he's the emperor of Siam. They bow to him without ever respecting him personally. How do you explain?

Similarly falsely claiming to have an interest in the future of a vibrant GOP, Carville stated that the Republican Party that you and I knew does not exist because [t]here's only Trump and Trumpism.

He added that, when it comes to stopping Trump, [i]t is up to the Democrats to eradicate this scourge and save the United States since [t]heres no Republican going to come up and save us.

Matthews then complimented Carville without missing a beat that he [s]peaks integrity and true partisanship.

Okay, sure, Chris.

To see the relevant transcript from MSNBCs Hardball on January 14, click expand.

MSNBCs HardballJanuary 14, 20207:50 p.m. Eastern

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Michael Bennet here you are, the pro, Im building you up and you come into this race in mid-January now and youre picking a candidate now? Why? This late? Why this one?

JAMES CARVILLE: Because I think I think that Trump and Trumpism is the greatest threat this country has faced since the fall of communism and the only way to deal with it is defeat it resoundingly. If Michael Bennet is the Democratic nominee, you're going to get 55 percent of the popular vote and youre going to pick up 55 senate seats. It will be the end of Trumpism. Trumpism doesn't have to just be defeated at the polls. It has got to be decimated. It's got to look like a beaten arm. It's got to look like Clemson looked last night. Beat and ready to quit and Michael Bennet is the best choice among any Democrat to accomplish that.

(....)

7:54 p.m. Eastern

MATTHEWS: What happened to the Republican Party? The opposition party

CARVILLE: They dont exist.

MATTHEWS: from your thinking, the party that wasn't evil, it wasn't stupid. Now, I mean, I noticed in the whole day of defending Trump, not a single Republican member of the House, and they're all some of them smart, not one of them said one good thing about Donald Trump personally. Nobody nobody spoke for his character. Nobody said he's a good, honest, guy. I mean, it was immaculate, immaculate. Not a single positive comment. And yet, they bow to him like he's the emperor of Siam. They bow to him without ever respecting him personally. How do you explain?

CARVILLE: Right. Look, the Republican Party that you and I knew does not exist. There's only Trump and Trumpism. The Republicans are going to do nothing about it. It is up to the Democrats. It is up to the Democrats to eradicate this scourge, and the way to do that is by massive and humiliating election defeat. Theres no Republican going to come up and save us. Thats not going to happen. Everybody keeps waiting. Well, you know, pretty soon, maybe Rob Portman will say something. They're not going to say something. They're scared to death.

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

CARVILLE: And the Democrats have to save the United States. That's it. There's no other choice. The Republicans are not going to do it for you.

MATTHEWS: Okay. Spoken like a great partisan, sir. Thank you, James Carville.

CARVILLE: Geaux Tigers.

MATTHEWS: Speaks with integrity and true partisanship.

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Carville Rages on MSNBC: 'Trumpism Is the Greatest Threat' to America Since Communism - NewsBusters