Hong Kong is over. So is the democracy movement.

Who didn't know China would laugh off the terms of their agreement with the Brits for them leaving the colony?

Neither the Brits nor anyone else will stop this.

China is way too powerful, both militarily and economically.

Hong Kong security law: Pro-democracy books pulled from libraries

Shooting in New Mexico

City of Albuquerque removes statue of Juan de Oñate

I do not support the taking down of this statue, statues of Columbus, or other statues erected essentially to celebrate the European peopling of the US and the Americas.

The indigenista Children of Zinn consider the white settling of the Americas to be an atrocity and racist crime all by itself, and insist there was a general white genocide of the natives though Indians are far more numerous today than ever in the past.

I don't endorse or in the least accept their view of this history.

All the same, it ought to be illegal to show up at any demonstration with a weapon.

Demonstrators illegally defaced and attempted to tear down a statue in an act of race hatred and a man attempted to stop them with physical intervention.

Shoved to the ground, he took out a gun and shot a demonstrator.

He was then surrounded by armed militia in camos and wearing riot gear.

The man was arrested.

There is some dispute about whether he was a member of the militia, who are being described in the media as vigilantes who showed up armed to prevent the crowd harming or taking down the statue.

The Republican Party continues to exist because white Democrats have no balls.

Republicans, on the other hand, have no brains.

The bourgeois revolution in China.

China Is Waging a Disinformation War Against Hong Kong Protesters

Right now, that makes it a kind of latter day Cold War between the dictatorship of the Communist Party on the one side and the protesters on the other.

With the local government of Hong Kong a weak player in the middle

What do they want, these protesters?

What did the protesters of Tiananmen want?

The Revolution of 1848 in China.

The French Revolution - or any one of several - in China.

Think of that, but scaled back to cover only Hong Kong.

For now.

It is a direct challenge to the party's exclusive hold on power.

What a provocation it must be to Chicom nationalist eyes to see in the Times a photo of a gray-haired protester in the street waving the Union Jack, the banner of the former Western, white, racist, European colonial power, or demonstrators rushing around the Hong Kong airport, a youth among them waving the Stars and Stripes, as viewers of CNN saw this morning.

The talking heads of mainstream American cable news, all in varying degrees conscious or unconscious Children of Zinn, are accustomed to demonstrators burning the US flag and interviewees and guests who revile it as a symbol of slavery, genocide, misogyny, homophobia, Christianism - or indeed, simply Christianity - and racism.

They hear and repeat, day after day, that it is the banner of an evil regime of white males that is only a recent outpost of a larger evil white thing of millenia, Western Civilization.

They must have to try hard not to gag, reporting on a courageous democracy movement of nonwhites for whom the Stars and Stripes - and the colonialist Union Jack! Colonialism! What, better a Brit colony than one of the last Red Empire in Beijing? - are symbols of exactly the free society and government they want.

Meanwhile, the Beijing tyrants, relying on the Great Firewall of China to make easier their task, are incensing nationalist sentiment against the demonstrators with dangerous success, portraying them as criminals and terrorists manipulated and funded by foreigners and particularly the CIA.

The clashes have been off and on, and more on than off, since early this year.

The government clearly is in no hurry to send in the tanks and would prefer to wait it out.

And that could work, given enough patience.

Chaos Grips Hong Kong’s Airport as Police Clash with Protesters

And this inane remark by the moron in the White House is both hilarious and disgraceful, exactly as you would expect.

We are so going to get another four years of this orange jackass.

Trump on Hong Kong protests: 'It's a tough situation … but I'm sure it'll work out'

“We’ll what see what happens,” Trump said before boarding Air Force One for an event in Pennsylvania. 

“But I’m sure it’ll work out. I hope it works out for everybody, including China, by the way.”

UK should give British nationality to Hong Kong citizens, Tugendhat says

What, does he think they want to be airlifted to East Anglia?

Trump isn't the only moron.

Eliot and her politics

Silas Marner, by George Eliot.

It is seldom that the miserable can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

Doesn't sound like a leftist, does she?

Have you heard of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa?

Her utter lack of sympathy with Molly, Godfrey's abandoned wife, speaks volumes.

Chapter 12, for example.

And why is Silas a miser, come to that?

For saving his money or for his anguish at its theft?

It is all he has to keep him from death from exposure or starvation.

But Eliot cannot see that, she cannot paint it into his character.

She sees him full of concern for his gold, but she, and so he, sees nothing of what it is for.

Or she sees it but gives it no weight, at all.

Out of the mouths of babes and indiscreet politicians

Of course, CNN is delighted to do him as much harm as it can, as quickly as it can.

What a wonderful stroke of the hatchet!

'Watermelon smiles' and 'piccaninnies': What Boris Johnson has said previously about people in Africa

Many are those who agree with his assessments of who is at fault for what.

Rather fewer are those who share the scornful dismissiveness of his "watermelon smiles" remarks.

Maybe Trump, though.

Who will ever forget his tirade about immigration from "shithole countries", referring to Haiti and various other places, including some African states.

Everybody but white people . . . .

is allowed to be a racist and espouse racist theories of this, that, and the other thing.

Indigenism, for instance.

'Stolen lands': dozens arrested as Hawaiians protest $1.4bn telescope

Absolutely brilliant television

Maybe not brilliant history, or brilliant political comment.

But amazing TV.

Black Earth Rising

How did John Goodman know to jump into this?

How on Earth did they find Michaela Coel, who is amazing in her role?

Wonderful.

Is this the best thing Blick has ever done?

Thank you, Netflix.

The limits of imagination

On AM Joy, Ms. Reid and the star of Black Panther, Chadwick Boseman, loved the film's depiction of an Africa technologically advanced but apparently never colonized politically or culturally.

But this alternative history is no more plausible than an imagined united, democratic, and modern India participating extensively, as it does, in the contemporary intellectual, scientific, and technological civilization of the globe, that never went through a phase of British colonialism.

No more than Roman roads without the Roman Empire, or Hadrian's Wall without Hadrian.

Libya reverts to tradition and the old ways

Protesters gather near Libyan Embassy after CNN report on slave auctions.

During its investigation, CNN witnessed a dozen men being sold at an auction outside of the Libyan capital of Tripoli. 

Some of them were auctioned off for as little as $400. 

Ultimately, CNN was told of auctions taking place at nine locations throughout Libya, but many more are believed to take place each month.

The Italians did better than this.

Come to that, so did Khaddafi.

Recall that the US constitution explicitly permits selling people into slavery as punishment for crime.

Bear that in mind when someone says the death penalty is ruled out by the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

Of course, understanding what on earth its author and supporters could have intended by that prohibition is rather complicated by the fact that punishment qua punishment is necessarily cruel.

So was it intended to prohibit only what is both cruel and unusual, as a literal reading would have it?

Of course, today, slavery as a punishment for crime would be both cruel and unusual.

But the later overrules the earlier, and the 13th Amendment permitting slavery as punishment came later than the eighth forbidding punishments that are both cruel and unusual.

Hmm.

Yes, she is a nutjob

Not everyone who slams Trump and the GOP is someone you'd want to sit next to on a plane.

Much less vote for.

San Juan Mayor: It May Be Easy To Disregard Puerto Rico Because We’re A US Colony

The attacks on Columbus are an attack on America

Statues for Lee, Jeff Davis, and the Confederacy were and are affirmations of slavery, white supremacy, racism, and Jim Crow, and few of today's whites are actually for any of those things.

But Trump, people on his side about those statues, and many of those on the other side, all said it was not really just about the Confederacy but about the whole history of the US, and of whites in America.

Some of them, like Pat Buchanan himself, tried to make the defense of the worst crimes of white racism and the defense of white America per se, and even of Western Civilization, the same cause.

They were wrong.

But not this time.

Statues to Columbus really are celebrations of the white peopling of the Americas and the rise of the greatest of the white settler states of the Western Hemisphere, the United States of America, itself.

You're not going to find a lot of white Americans - or others, if they are honest - who think the world would have been a better place had white America not happened, however ugly sometimes was the way it happened.

You're not going to find a lot of white Americans willing to agree the very existence of white America is and should be something calling for public shame.

Just how easy do the Dems want to make it for others to tar them as the party of nonwhites who hate whites and all their works, as Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter have been doing for years?

How far do they want to publicly make the old Zinnite cheer their motto, "Hey, hey; ho, ho. Western Civ has got to go"?

Emotionally satisfying for some Democrats, mostly nonwhites, I am sure.

But not actually faithful to the views of most Democrats, I am equally sure.

And politically it is just sooo not wise for Democrats to affirm old Jeremiah Wright's fervent cry, "God damn America!"

The white nationalist right has been defending Columbus and the white peopling of America for some years.

Trump Embraces the Culture War

Happy Columbus Day

Cities all over America, governed by Democrats and more heavily nonwhite than the country at large, are putting an end to their Columbus Day celebrations and parades and replacing them with festivities for Indigenous Peoples' Day.

What?

They're not happy Columbus discovered America?

They want to say the world would have been a better place had it not happened?

Phooey.

If they say that they are lying, by which I mean exactly that it is false and they know it.

Apart from Indians personally pushed aside or killed during the white peopling of the Americas, or blacks personally made slaves for or in the Americas, everybody in the world, including the descendants of both those groups, has been better off because of the white peopling of the Western Hemisphere and the rise of the greatest of the settler states, the United States of America.

But these people don't want to celebrate that?

Or perhaps they just don't dare?

They prefer to behave publicly in such a way as to endorse the idea that the white presence in the Americas is guilty and shameful.

No, rather than celebrate that they want to celebrate the so-called "indigenous peoples", the nonwhites who were already here when Columbus showed up.

Why, really?

Who doubts that if the Indians had been left to themselves over all these centuries they would be living here today just as they did when the white colonials started to arrive?

And what would they have contributed in that case to civilization and the world at large?

Not even their actual contributions, which in fact have mostly been to the inventory of the world's food crops.

No small thing, when you think about it; but, really, pretty much only that.

Anyway, "indigenous peoples" is just PC-speak for that other n-word, "natives," by which the racial bien-pensants mean whoever happened to be already there when the white people showed up, anytime during or after 1492.

But in actual fact, humans are indigenous (native) only to Africa, or all of us to the entire planet, and indigenism is a politically motivated hoax, a lie, and a weaponization of history by losers and their allies of the left.

And when you are praising someone it's pretty much routine to omit mention of his "dark history", even if it's Columbus, though that is not acceptable to the likes of Asian chick and CNN racial PC cop Holly Yan.

Trump's praise of Columbus omits dark history

Update.

Breitbart has four stories on this issue listed on its front page "trending now" section, today.

Four stories.

Of course, they have been stoking the war on Columbus for as long as there has been a war on Columbus.

Over a decade, now, surely?

Not quite the way it was

Ken Burns returns to take on Vietnam – 'a war we have consciously ignored'

The war in south-east Asia is now the subject of an epic 10-part, 18-hour series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.

. . . .

The origins of the conflict are now somewhat foggy in collective memory. 

A 1954 ceasefire agreement partitioned Vietnam into a communist north and anti-communist south. 

Trapped in the logic of the cold war, the US backed a series of corrupt regimes against the communist-led Vietcong in the south and their allies in the north who sought to reunite the country.

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson sent in thousands of air and ground forces in what was initially a popular move. 

But as the draft expanded and casualties mounted, public opinion turned against him and anti-war protests erupted against a backdrop of social unrest, racial discord and assassinations.

Bill Zimmerman, an anti-war activist, tells the documentary: “People who supported the war were fond of saying, ‘My country, right or wrong,’ [but protesters didn’t] want to live in a country that we’re going to support whether it’s right or wrong. So we began an era where two groups of Americans, both thinking that they were acting patriotically, went to war with each other.”

I thought then and think now that, for the Vietnamese themselves, better a corrupt regime than a red one.

Come to that, the Vietnamese were better off under the French than under the reds.

And Zimmerman is as delusional now as the organizers of the anti-war movement were at the time.

The hundreds of thousands who marched against the war were far from pro-communist or even anti-war.

They - we - were anti-draft, as became clear when the movement dried up and blew away as soon as the US government stopped using draftees.

They - we - were like Dick Cheney and most of the draft dodgers of the day.

We had other priorities.

As it happened, I ended up serving with the least bold of the draft dodgers with the Army Security Agency for three years.

And as I have written before, I think the US leadership, plutocrats and capitalists dominated by arrogance, terror, and hate in the van, drew our Cold War perimeter way further out than necessary with their "bear any burden, pay any price" nonsense and their blatant lie, all the more shocking for that, that there was nowhere so far away and insignificant that it was not of vital importance - "existential importance" as the liars and fools say now - to America that it not be communist.

It was totally unconvincing from the start that the US would be imperiled in the least way by Ho Chi Minh's successful unification of Vietnam under his communist rule.

The falling dominoes were not even going to include, much less get beyond, all of Southeast Asia.

True, it was also quite clear a communist victory would not be the best outcome for the Vietnamese of the South, any more than Ho's victory over the French had been best for those of the North.

But that was a war that, just as LBJ said early on, should have been fought by Asian boys and not Americans.

Too bad he didn't mean it when he said it.

Pretty dark, really

Just what was Conrad up to in his Heart of Darkness, 1899.

Yes, yes.

He opposed the massive hypocrisy of imperialism.

But not necessarily imperialism, nor even colonialism, judging just by this book.

Though obviously he saw and loathed all the horror of the Congo.

Via this book, he and white people in general have nevertheless been angrily denounced for racism.

As to the latter, racism - specifically, the idea of the racial inferiority of blacks to whites - has historically been used as an excuse for the most unspeakable crimes and the most inhuman rapacity.

That doesn't make it false, though it may well be that.

And it is certainly possible Conrad believed in the racial inferiority of blacks without for a moment buying it as an excuse.

In any case, he was a profound pessimist, atheist, amoralist, and even nihilist.

So what was he up to?

And a very fine writer.

Was that an apology for persecution and torture?

The Faithful and the Faithless

Too much credit to the Japanese Shogunate?

Would Anderson defend General Aussaresses, an important figure in the French use of torture, though not so much punitive as investigative, to deal with the Algerian FLN?

(The General was punished by the French Republic, staunch defender of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, not for using torture but for defending its use in a book.)

Or does he mean to defend the supposed aim of the Japanese, though not their methods?

Were the missionaries then, and are missionaries now, somehow in the wrong?

Come to that, does Anderson himself see Christian missionaries as colonialists or imperialists?

They were neither, though of course they were protected by both.

No free speech for them, and no free exercise?

How does Anderson see Western efforts to impose contemporary Western values - women's, gay, and LGBT rights, for example - on non-Western societies?

Barbara Ehrenreich of the absurd, holier-than-thou left helpfully checks in as Mercutio

Forget fear and loathing. The US election inspires projectile vomiting

On the liberal left, tragically, we do not have Bernie Sanders, who would have dispatched Trump’s populist pretensions with a wrist flick. 

But no, representing the side of tolerance, good government and cosmopolitanism, we have the very epitome of Democratic party elitism, a woman who labeled half of Trump’s supporters “deplorables”, a politician who is so robotic that any efforts to analyze her motives risk the charge of anthropomorphism. 

Consider her statement on the Standing Rock occupation in North Dakota, which could have been issued by an unmanned typewriter. 

As soldiers and police bore down on the protesters, she urged all parties – tribal peoples and the pipeline company that threatens their culture and habitat – “to find a path forward that serves the broadest public interest”.

What is she supposed to say?

Like Obama, Hillary wants the pipeline to go ahead, and she is right.

Native American cultures are primitive anachronisms and Native Americans are not snail darters whose tribal environments a silly congress has insisted must be preserved at all costs.

Cemeteries and holy objects get moved all the time to make way for highways, rail lines, and housing developments.

There is no reason to indulge indigenous peoples or their cultures one bit further than we would indulge the sensitivities of American Jews or Christians, Buddhists or Muslims.

Had we ever seriously intended to do anything of the kind the continent would still be inhabited by nobody but three to five million hunters, food gatherers, and stone age agriculturalists.

Is Mark Ruffalo an Indian?

Maybe a bit on his Mom's side.

Wouldn't be unusual.

Where it's been going all along

Call to topple Christopher Columbus statue from its Barcelona perch

Hey, hey.

Ho, ho.

They have more sympathy for Twain, To a Person Sitting in Darkness than for Kipling, The White Man's Burden.

None at all for the liberal imperialism of J S Mill.

But all of that concerns imperialism and the supposed civilizing mission that was cited in its justification, and justifies interventions today.

Colonialism, something quite different, is at issue in the attacks on the half millennium long white peopling of the Americas, of Oceania, and various other parts of the world.

As massive and destructive of indigenous societies and cultures as the Volkerwanderung was to the Roman world, but also its opposite because the European civilization that replaced utterly the native societies was so vastly and progressively their superior.

Which Israel to support?

A Democrat split over Israel?

A tiny one or something closer to full size?

How close?

The Israel created by the partition of 1948 was minute and extremely vulnerable, a mere fragment of historic Israel and far smaller in area than the Israel the Zionist movement and settlers hoped to re-create.

Recall that British Palestine covered a quite large territory all of which east of the Jordan River became today's Arab state of Jordan.

It is to that that they refer who say that there already is a Palestinian State, and that with the creation of Jordan a two-state solution was built in from the start to the Brit withdrawal from its Palestinian Mandate.

And it was always in the cards that by whatever and various means the restored Jewish State, the re-created Jewish National Homeland, was going to be demographically dominated by ethnic Jews, mostly from Europe.

If you are or ever were on board for Zionism at all, on board for a re-creation of Israel, you were on board for a late European colonialist adventure of which ethnic cleansing was an absolutely essential part - as in varying measures and by various means it had been integral to European colonialism (as distinct from imperialism sensu strictu) and, historically, for any policy of actual colonialism by anyone at any point in history or on the globe.

As for the Americas, think not only of the European peopling of the hemisphere but also its peopling by their predecessors who spent thousands of years of genocide, slave raiding, and ethnic cleansing among themselves before Columbus - and before the Vikings.

In Africa, of course, it was millions of years of genocide, slave raiding, and ethnic cleansing before the modern intrusions of Europeans.

True history.

What Mugabe has done to Rhodesia

Zimbabwe to print local ‘US dollar’ to ease severe cash crunch

Unbelievable.

Can't wait for the left's take on this racist moron

South Africa's Malema urges voters to fire warning shots at ruling party in local polls

Not literally, as this alarmist and deceitful headline alleges.

This guy actually is a socialist and aims at nationalization of South Africa's leading industries, playing on racism as other regimes play on anti-Americanism, xenophobia, anti-colonialism half a century after it disappeared from the global map, or jingoism as China, for example, continues to yell about the Boxer Rebellion and about The Opium War.

The Occidental allies of nations playing these cards echo their propaganda, for example they echo China whenever that country demands the West stop using fossil fuels, pay them for climate change damages, and allow them to continue to burn fossil fuels as wildly as they want.

It might be interesting and illuminating to ask Hillary and Bernie for comments about this guy and the policies he advocates.

About Hugo Chavez's Bolivarian Revolution.

Maybe even about the Sandinista's economic policies when they were in power.

Julius Malema, who seeks nationalization of mines and land and the curbing of white economic power, called on other opposition parties to unite with his Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) to break the grip of the ruling party [the ANC] at municipal polls this year.

. . . .

"South Africans must shoot warning shots now, through their votes," Malema told Reuters in an interview.

"It is an opportunity now for South Africans to show the ANC that they are tired ... that the ANC should begin to take them seriously, ahead of the national elections in 2019."

. . . .

Malema - who points to the Johannesburg Securities Exchange as a symbol of the capitalism and white power his party aims to dismantle - said the ANC was still relying on the memory of liberation hero and former president Nelson Mandela to woo votes.