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Charles, 67, Bournemouth

Occupation Former diplomat turned speech writer

Voting record Always Conservative. Charles voted for Brexit: I was one of the few diplomats who did

Amuse bouche While working overseas, Charles borrowed some wallabies for a reception for Fosters lager. No one had seen one at a diplomatic party before

Occupation Complaints adviser for an NHS trust

Voting record Always Labour, and remain in the EU referendum

Amuse bouche Chris much prefers Grease 2 to Grease. Its deeper, stronger, a feminist film, and the songs are better

Chris We had a chat about what we did. He told me the places hes been and the things hes done. It wasnt intimidating, but I did think: Im over my head a bit.

Charles I asked what Chriss motivating principle is, where he comes from when hes approaching anything. He said something like sympathy, empathy, passion, those sort of words. I come from a place which is more about the consent of the governed under what basis are rules set, and who sets them? Thats a big foundational disagreement, you might say, between heart and head.

Chris Our biggest difference was in how we view the world and how we want to change it. For me its more about rights, social justice, wanting a fairer and more equal society. He talked a lot about his hatred of communism.

Charles I have lived in communist countries and seen the results. The idea is that the end justifies the means; there are no limits to government. The spirit of communism is alive and well, and pops up in all sorts of places in some of these cancel culture things, the ideological uniformity in US universities, for example.

Chris He said the reason he didnt like the left is that they are mean-spirited and always assume the worst in people. Thats my experience of the right.

Charles What I dislike is the angry, aggressive, obnoxious left. Chris didnt seem to be part of that at all he seemed to have a libertarian instinct of some sort, which was fine. We could sit down and talk about ideas.

Chris We agreed about how divided and tribal the country is in the way we talk about issues, and how that is driven by social media.

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Charles Everyone is living in echo chambers and the algorithms are making it worse. They serve up the stuff they know you like because they want to send you advertising.

Chris We talked about taking the knee, which I support if someone wants to show their solidarity with people who suffer racism in football. It became a thing in 2020 and 2021 when enmity and violence against the black community was a world issue. If it had been before George Floyd was murdered by the police, and people just said they wanted to show solidarity and drive out racism, I dont think it would have had that much attention.

Charles Youve got all these people taking the knee. What attitude do you take to the people who dont take the knee? The way its presented is that if you somehow challenge it, or laugh, or boo or whatever you do to show your disapproval, then you are ipso facto a racist. Its a sort of all-or-nothing view, and that to me is obnoxious.

Chris Its not just a leftwing issue. Poppy outrage is driven by the right. Every year, TV presenters get complaints if theyre not seen to be wearing poppies or not wearing them early enough.

Charles Chris hit back over the net pretty well there, but its not clear to me that its analogous. If you dont wear a poppy, I dont go around saying youre anti-patriotic; theres no mass movement of people demanding everyone wears poppies in the same way as you would be attacked if you said taking the knee was ridiculous.

Chris I was a little bit disappointed afterwards because I didnt feel I had said enough. I felt he bamboozled me a bit. At one point I thought: What am I doing here? I have nothing to say.

Charles He seemed to go away with some things he hadnt thought about before, and to some degree I did, too. I dont know if hes a vegan or a vegetarian, but he seemed unimpressed by his courgettes, which made me warm to him, because everyones unimpressed by courgettes.

Additional reporting: Sarah Hooper

Charles and Chris ate at Arbor at The Green House, Bournemouth

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Originally posted here:
Dining across the divide: He talked about his hatred of communism a lot - The Guardian

Information is Beautiful

According to a disturbingly pleasant graphic from Information is Beautiful entitled simply 20th Century Death, communism was the leading ideological cause of death between 1900 and 2000. The 94 million that perished in China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Afghanistan, and Eastern Europe easily (and tragically) trump the 28 million that died under fascist regimes during the same period.

During the century measured, more people died as a result of communism than from homicide (58 million) and genocide (30 million) put together. The combined death tolls of WWI (37 million) and WWII (66 million) exceed communism's total by only 9 million.

It gets worse when you look at the lower right of the chartThe Natural Worldwhich includes animals (7 million), natural disasters (24 million), and famine (101 million). Curiously, all of the world's worst famines during the 20th century were in communist countries: China (twice!), the Soviet Union, and North Korea.

Communism is a killer. And yet some still say they support the idea:According to a 2011 Rasmussen poll, 11% of Americans think that communism would better serve this country's needs than our current system.

See original here:
Communism Killed 94 Million People in 20th Century - Reason.com

Argentine Ambassador to China Sabino Vaca Narvaja scolded those who demonize communism and praised the Chinese Communist Party in an interview given to Chinas state-run Global Times on Tuesday.

Opposition to communism is reviving the misconceptions of the Cold War, Vaca Narvaja lamented.

The interview is part of what has become a growing emphasis in Argentine foreign policy of obsequious statements about China under socialist President Alberto Fernndez, who himself venerated mass murderer Mao Zedongs corpse during a Beijing visit this year.

Without the Communist Party, there would be no new China. These lyrics succinctly capture the fundamental reason why China has achieved unprecedented progress in human history, said Vaca Narvaja to Global Times, referencing the lyrics of one of the most long-standing pieces of musical propaganda used by the Chinese Communist Party.

Vaca Narvaja stated that he heard the song during the centennial anniversary of the Chinese communist party at Tiananmen Square in 2021 the site where the historical massacre of thousands of students and demonstrators took place.

In this June 5, 1989, file photo, a Chinese man stands alone to block a line of tanks heading east on Beijings Changan Blvd. in Tiananmen Square. (AP Photo/Jeff Widener)

The ambassador, who adopted the Chinese name Niu Wangdao as his own, was appointed as the head of the Argentine diplomatic mission in China in 2020. The pro-China ambassador has been instrumental in strengthening Chinas influence over the South American nation since 2021, starting with the arrangement that allowed China to send 15 million doses of a Chinese coronavirus vaccine product by the firm Sinopharm to Argentina.

Sabino Vaca Narvaja, who has never been shy with his affinity towards communist China, is the son of Fernando Vaca Narvaja, a former member of the left-wing guerrilla Montoneros who shares a granddaughter with Argentinas far-left Vice President Cristina Fernndez de Kirchner (no relation to Alberto Fernndez).

The Argentine ambassador has been heavily criticized in the past for his excessively pro-China stances. Vaca Narvaja has stood in defense of Chinas genocide of the Uyghur people by claiming that there is harmony in Xinjiang.

In reality, China has illegally detained between 1 million and 3 million Uyghurs and other minority groups in occupied East Turkistan since 2017 in concentration camps, forcing the detainees into inhumane conditions that include physical and sexual abuse, torture, slave labor, and force sterilization. China has also engaged in mass sterilization campaigns to limit the number of non-Han ethnic people born in the region.

A protester from the Uyghur community living in Turkey, holds an anti-China placard during a protest in Istanbul. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

Vaca Narvaja was also quick to condemn Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) for visiting Taiwan this month.

We are sure that this visit has been a provocation for China, and a problem for the entire international community, the ambassador claimed.

In this photo released by the Taiwan Presidential Office, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, center left, and Taiwanese President President Tsai Ing-wen arrive for a meeting in Taipei, Taiwan, Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2022. (Taiwan Presidential Office via AP)

The government of Argentina backed Vaca Narvajas condemnation of Speaker Pelosis visit shortly afterwards.

President Fernndez traveled to Beijing in February to meet with dictator Xi Jinping and officially joined Chinas predatory Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) during that meeting. President Fernandez availed himself of his official visit to Beijing to lay a wreath in honor of Mao, believed responsible for the killing of tens of millions of people, at his mausoleum.

Cases of Argentine ambassadors siding with the countries theyve been sent to over their own are not limited to just China alone. On Tuesday, the Argentine ambassador to Venezuela, Oscar Laborde, tacitly sided with the socialist regime of Nicols Maduro by stating that the Venezuelan-Iranian cargo airplane suspected of having ties with Iranian terrorism which the Argentine goverment seized on August 11 was instead kidnapped, echoing the narrative espoused by Venezuelas socialist regime over his countrys own.

During her presidency, Fernndez de Kirchner also faced accusations of cutting deals with the government of Iran to help it cover up its role in the deadliest terrorist attack in the nations history, the 1994 bombing for the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA). The prosecutor who built the case against Kirchner, Alberto Nisman, was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head the day before he was scheduled to present his findings against Kirchner to the Argentine Congress in 2015.

Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitterhere.

Here is the original post:
Argentinas Ambassador to China Rails Against Demonizing Communism in ...

Many conservatives, and all conservative politicians, worship the hallowed ground on which the late Margaret Thatcher walked.

A visit to Old Blighty is not complete until they have been to Westminster Abbey to kneel at her tomb, only to discover that the Iron Lady was cremated and her ashes buried at the Royal Hospital Chelsea next to those of her husband.

While staunch Labor supporters might chant the rhyme, Thatcher Thatcher, the milk snatcher among her adoring crowd she is fondly remembered for two other endearing exploits: her harsh response to exercises of trade union power, and her military response to Argentinian claims regarding the Falkland Islands.

Margaret Hilda Thatcher was Britains longest-serving Prime Minister of the 20th century, serving from 1979 until her resignation in 1990. If her memory is both loved and hated in almost equal proportions, it cannot be denied that she was able to reach out at election time in a way that appealed to that trait in the British character that usually signals their great moderation; they generally put up with inconvenience until a tipping-point is reached.

There was, however, one particular act for which Mrs Thatcher was responsible that can only now be seen to have been most ill-advised. Its worldwide implications surfaced in 2019 when the people of Hong Kong became the front line of the global battle against Beijings communism when tyranny was imposed on the island under the national security law. Within two years, the people of Hong Kong lost their liberties and became the subjects of the brutal communist state.

As the island slipped below the communist horizon, it has been forgotten that the communist takeover would not have been possible without extreme violence enabled by Margaret Thatchers error. It was the Iron Lady who permitted Hong Kong to be handed back to the communists after being outmaneuvered during the negotiations. In particular, it was falsely reckoned that the British leases from pre-communist governments would expire giving government to Beijing.

The cunning since adopted by the communists has been to rewrite the history of Hong Kong in a way that emphasises Chinas sovereignty over the island since time immemorial. It is reported that Beijing will introduce a new history book to Hong Kong schools that denies Hong Kong was ever a British colony.

The disaster of the islands takeover is detailed most clearly in Louisa Lims book, Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong. The advantages of British rule over the island are detailed in the book, as are the three fatal mistakes that sealed Hong Kongs fate.

Negotiations between the British government and the Chinese communists were commenced by Mrs Thatcher in 1982 as the 1997 end of leases from the Qing empire in 1842 loomed on the horizon.

The first mistake was the result of British bias that denied to Hong Kong democratic rule and when the last governor tried to do so, it was too late. The second mistake was British naivety about the intentions of Beijing which allowed them to be out-negotiated. The third mistake, however, was a failure to allow Hong Kongers to be involved in the negotiations. Although Margaret Thatcher told the British Parliament that the final agreement was acceptable to the Hong Kong people, those people never had any say in it.

Despite the communist claims to sovereignty, the successor to the Qing empire, the Republic of China, had given up claims to Hong Kong and Kowloon. The communist Chinese claims were based on their 1949 victory by force over the Chinese nationalists, a victory facilitated by Soviet-gifted of weapons. Maos CCP was able to exercise brute power over the Chinese people, but they had no claim to Hong Kong under the lease without the British governments agreement. The original owner of Hong Kong was dead and buried and the people of Hong Kong were entitled to the land on which they dwelt.

As Louisa Lim explains, the chief British negotiator at the time, Percy Cradock, bought completely the threat by Beijing to use force to take over Hong Kong if the negotiations failed. Instead of fighting for the peoples interests, Cradock sought to secure a form of wording that allowed Thatcher to give ground to the Chinese demands without losing face.

As a result, while the British thought that the agreement allowed the people of Hong Kong to choose their own leader, Beijing simply denied it had ever agreed and the clauses in Mandarin were ambiguous, something that the involvement of Hong Kong people could have avoided. This led to the massive protests of the Umbrella Movement in 2014.

It is worth remembering that despite the brutal suppression of the people of Hong Kong, there were no Hong Kong Lives Matter protesters on the streets, even when Daniel Andrews government sought to take a share of Beijings Belt and Road honey trap.

Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.

Continued here:
Thatcher failed to protect Hong Kong - The Spectator Australia

Culture

REVIEW: Give Me Liberty: The True Story of Oswaldo Pay and His Daring Quest for a Free Cuba

What would I be willing to risk or endure in order to live a life where free political discussion and action is possible? This is a question that readers of David Hoffmans Give Me Liberty might put to themselves after thinking through the life of Oswaldo Pay and his battle with communist tyranny in Cuba.

Pay was 13 years old when the Castro regime seized his fathers newspaper distribution business in 1965. Oswaldos father Alejandro was arrested. This was the beginning of a campaign against private businesses that lasted three yearsthe implementation of a socialist morality that denounced and punished vendors and businessmen as parasites. Young Oswaldo had been the only boy in his class to refuse entry into the Jose Mart Pioneersthe communist youth organization in Cuba. The familys observant Catholicism only added to the stigma the Pays experienced. Alejandro was released after one week and told his family not to express any complaint. He recommended a strategy of public compliance. He urged his children to do well in school, work hard, and prepare for the future. "You have to yieldin order to triumph," he said. This was not a strategy Oswaldo would adopt.

Hoffman interweaves two other stories around the central tale of Pays confrontation with the communist regime. First, he encapsulates Cubas post-colonial history, focusing in particular on the story of the Cuban constitution of 1940. We meet Gustavo Gutirrez, an advocate for constitutional democracy who wrote a draft constitution for Cuba in the mid-1930s. Important for Pays story, a key provision of Gutierrezs draft found its way into the Cuban constitution of 1940: new laws could be proposed by congressmen and Senators, but also by citizensin this latter case, the initiative would require the endorsement of "at least ten thousand citizens having the status of voters."

Second, Hoffman explores Fidel Castros rise to power and his construction of Cuban communism. Castro initially presented himself as an agent of Cuban democracy, promising elections in the aftermath of a successful revolutionary seizure of power. He even pledged to make the 1940 constitution the "supreme law of the land." By May 1961 he declared that constitution dead and promised a new "socialist constitution" that would introduce "a new social system without the exploitation of many by man." This purported end of exploitation would of course require extraordinary levels of surveillance and coercion. Already in 1960 Castro put in place Committees for the Defense of the Revolutionwhat he called a "system of collective vigilance." These organizations could be found in neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools. Hoffman calls them the "foundation stones of the police state" as they created a vast network of monitors and informants. By the mid-1960s the regime had built the UMAP (Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Produccin) labor camp system to house anyone hostile or even potentially hostile to socialist revolution.

Oswaldo Pay ended up cutting sugar cane in one of the camps in the summer of 1969. After a year he was flown to the Isle of Pines, which housed a prison complex built in the 1920s where he would work breaking rocks in a quarry 10 hours a day. The restrictions here were less onerous than in the UMAP system, so Pay and some of his fellow prisoners were able to explore the small town of Nueva Gerona on the weekends. They stumbled on a library across the street from a church and read Orwells Animal Farm, Pasternaks Doctor Zhivago, and the works of the Spanish philosopher Jos Ortega y Gasset. These men who had been declared enemies or deviants found a refuge and "reveled in the freedom to think and talk." As Hoffman puts it, "The forced labor camps attempted to reeducate and retrain the outsiders, to coerce them to believe in the revolution. But for Oswaldo Pay, the experience was the opposite. They had not conquered his soul. They had nourished it."

Its not clear whether Pay would share the sentiments of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (one of his heroes), "Bless you, prison, for having been in my life," but he did find the atmosphere in Havana suffocating by contrast. He hoped to study physics at university but campus life was so conformist and ideologically charged he couldnt stand it. "They didnt kick me out but they asphyxiated me," he noted. He eventually got a degree in electrical engineering via night school in 1983. Shortly thereafter he found his vocation through the Catholic Church.

Castros revolution had brought the Church to the brink of destruction. Prior to the revolution there had been about 1 priest for every 9,000 people in Cuba. By 1980 that figure was about 1 priest for every 45,000. Fewer than 1 percent of Catholics were practicing. In 1985 the archbishop of Havana, Jaime Ortega, invited Pay to be one of 173 delegates to a conference on the future of the Cuban church. With his then-fianc Ofelia, he prepared a document called "Faith and Justice." In it he argued that Catholics must be free to speak the truth about injustice and oppression and to resist being pushed to the margins of society. He presented his ideas at a meeting of the delegates before the conference and was immediately denounced.

Just over a decade later Pay launched the Varela Project, a citizen petition demanding freedom of assembly, amnesty for political prisoners, the right to engage in private enterprise, and the establishment of a new electoral code allowing for free elections. The movement culminated in Pay submitting a formal citizens petition to the National Assembly on May 10, 2002with over 11,000 signatures.

Pays stature grew internationally as he was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Human Rights and Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament. He met with Vclav Havel and Pope John Paul II, and the Varela Project continued adding signatures to its petition. Cuban state security was not unprepared for this challenge. In the 1980s a Cuban named Jacinto Valds-Dapena had gone to Potsdam to study with the StasiEast German state security. There he learned a strategy for dealing with dissidents known as Zersetzung or decomposition. He brought back to Cuba techniques of covert psychological warfare to infiltrate dissident movements, sow distrust among members, and exploit envy and jealousy. Hoffman relates the grinding battles between Pay and his allies and Cuban state security in riveting detail.

Oswaldo Pay died in a car crash on July 22, 2012a crash many suspect was orchestrated by Cuban state security. Like many prominent dissidents of the 20th century, Pay embodied an extraordinary combination of courage and humility. Hoffmans book is a powerful antidote to delusions about the reality of Cuban communism. Perhaps more importantly, its a study of character in actiona test of virtue in a soil of unfreedom. One hopes that the seeds of virtue left by Pay will bear fruit soon.

Give Me Liberty: The True Story of Oswaldo Pay and His Daring Quest for a Free Cubaby David E. HoffmanSimon & Schuster, 544 pp., $32.50

Flagg Taylor, a professor in the department of political science at Skidmore College, was editor, most recently, ofThe Long Night of the Watchman: Essays by Vclav Benda, 1977-1989, and hosts the Enduring Interest Podcast.You can find him on Twitter: @FlaggTaylor4

The rest is here:
The Courage to Counter Castro - Washington Free Beacon