Sarah Palin is not a Washington, Lincoln or Roosevelt

March 20, 2011

 

Sarah Palin once again opened her mouth and demonstrated her ignorance of history—this time China’s and the world.

While she was in India, Time magazine said of Sarah Palin, “Her personal appeal was apparent to those who attended the event.’She said the right things,’ said Kiran Aurora a retiree from New Delhi. ‘I don’t know if she’s Presidential material, but she’s charismatic.’…”

Time magazine said, “While lauding India’s democratic rise and economic liberalization, she expressed concern over China’s growing economic influence and militarization. She described Chinese ownership of American debt as ‘dangerous’ and questioned the country’s new military buildup.”

Palin said, “I personally have huge military concerns about China. They are stockpiling ballistic missiles, submarines, new age ultra modern fighter aircraft. Is that all for a defensive posture? How could that be when you don’t see a tangible outside threat to that country?”

If Sarah Palin knew history, she would know that “no threat today” does not mean “no threat tomorrow”.

With history as our teacher, we quickly learn that there are no guarantees for the future and that even America is not safe from change.


Is Sarah Palin America’s next Ronald Reagan?

In fact, America has changed much since 1776 when the Founders created a Republic where only 10% of citizen were allowed to vote in national elections.  Today America has become the democracy the Founding Fathers feared.  What started out as 13 states spread along the east coast of North America has grown into a global empire that has hundreds of military bases around the world.

Global Research says, “With more than 2,500,000 U.S. (military) personnel serving across the planet and military bases spread across each continent, it’s time to face up to the fact that our American democracy has spawned a global empire.”

After we add together the distruction and millions of deaths from the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan then include what America, Britain and France are doing in Libya, we have more evidence that explains why China has a right to a strong modern military.

After all, the best offense is a strong defense.

A look at China’s history from the early 19th century starting with the Opium Wars (started by Great Britain and France then later joined by America); the invasion to suppress the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 (American troops also took part in that invasion of China), and two wars with Japan ending in 1945 with the conclusion of World War II, China has good reasons to maintain a strong military for potential future threats.

Every country should have a strong, modern military, which may be the best deterrent to an invasion and war.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The KMT–CIA Heroin, Cocaine Pipeline to the US

March 20, 2011

The CIA, in an alliance with the Nationalist Chinese (KMT), addicted millions of Americans on drugs such as heroin and cocaine to finance a covert war against the spread of Communism.

The KMT’s leader was the brutal, authoritarian dictator Chiang Kai-shek of Taiwan, which the US still supports. Chiang Kai-shek ruled Taiwan with an iron fist until his death.

However, it wouldn’t be until the 2000 presidential election in Taiwan that the KMT’s hold on power came to an end there.

I first learned of the KMT-CIA drug pipeline into the US in the early 1980s when I read of Congressional hearings leading to the closing of Air America, a covert airline owned by the CIA that was one of the methods used to move illegal drugs out of Southeast Asia and into the hands of US citizens.

While writing of all things Chinese, I forgot about the Nationalist (KMT) Chinese generals that worked with the CIA during the Vietnam war to supply American troops in Vietnam and addicts in the US with heroin and cocaine in trade for weapons.

After the Chinese Communists under Mao won the Civil War in 1949, a large force of KMT troops in southern China fled to the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia, which is located in Laos, Thailand and Burma. That’s when the KMT became involved in the drug trade with the CIA.

For reminding me of this dark chapter of America’s history (which evidence says is still an open book), I thank a ’21st Century Marco Polo, who is a committed and experienced human rights and legal education professional with a history of working internationally throughout the Asia-Pacific region.

Kevin Ryan writing for 911 Blogger.com reviewed American War Machine written by Peter Dale Scott.

Ryan writes, “This book examines a wide-ranging number of covert US operations since World War II, and, among other things, demonstrates that many of these operations were intimately connected with, and dependent on, illicit drug trafficking….”

The Senophobic, American capitalist obsession with everything Communist led the US down this dark path that introduced an expressway of  heroin and cocaine into the US in what may contribute to the eventual failure of the most successful and powerful democracy in the history of humanity.

I have embedded a four part series of an audio transcript of a 60 Minutes broadcast of the CIA controlled drug trade.


60 Minutes on CIA Drug Smuggling – Part 1

 


60 Minutes on CIA Drug Smuggling – Part 2

 


60 Minutes on CIA Drug Smuggling – Part 3

 


60 Minutes on CIA Drug Smuggling – Part 4

To understand the impact on US society, Drug Rehabs.org says, “The trafficking of illicit drugs burdens various components of domestic financial sectors as individuals and organizations frequently engage in illegal activates to generate income in order to purchase drugs or finance drug trafficking operations. Mortgage fraud (think 2008 financial crises which originated in New York), counterfeiting, shoplifting, insurance fraud, ransom kidnapping, identity theft, home invasion, personal property theft, and many other criminal activates often are undertaken by drug users and distributers to support drug addictions…”

Did you know that Mao, after winning the Chinese Civil War (1926 to 1949) between the Communists and Nationalists, ended drug trafficking and drug use in China in about 24 hours?

Illegal drugs wouldn’t return to China until after Mao’s death when China joined the WTO and opened its doors to world trade.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

2 Comments | America, American culture, business, capitalism, China, Chinese history, Communism, economy, environment, military, politics, Taiwan | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Digging Deep into History to Glimpse the Future

March 19, 2011


In Weighing History in Stanford Magazine, Joel McCormick reviews Why the West Rules–For Now, a book that took a decade for Ian Morris to research and write.

Morris is a Stanford classicist-prehistorian-archaeologist (that’s quite a mouthful).


There are charts in the Stanford piece (first link above) and in this video that compares the rate of development between the West and East.

 

In his book, Morris challenges scholars to look at the bigger picture. He uses information and statistics from biology, sociology, and geography to conclude that geography has more of an impact on history than humans do (which includes a political system such as democracy).  That doesn’t mean humans have no impact–just less than geography.

The questions his book asks and attempts to answer deals with why the Western world dominates, and what happens as the East catches up.

Morris looks back thousands of years to compare the rate of development and social progress of the West to the East and shows that the West domesticated animals, cultivated plants, developed fortifications, and full farming in some cases thousands of years before it appeared in the East.

Then the Roman Empire collapsed, and the East advanced socially to hold that position until the 19th century—for almost two thousand years.

Morris was quoted saying, “Scholars with old points of view will hold onto what they believe until one morning you wake up and say, ‘This anomaly is just too big to ignore anymore.'”

What Morris came to believe while writing his book was that China will be the world’s largest economy in 19 years and No. 1 in terms of GDP by 2103 at the latest and possibly earlier.

He points out facts that even during Mao’s failed Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, China was moving slowly forward because Mao rid China of the warlords that were stopping progress of any kind.

McCormick writes, “China’s economy got a huge break when Mao expired (died) in 1976, clearing the way for Deng Xiaoping…”

“In the way we define great men,” Morris says, “Deng Xiaoping counts as a great man. But he didn’t have to be all that great. He just had to prevent people from doing really stupid stuff.”

Princeton historian Harold James called Morris’s book, “the first history of the world that really makes use of what modern technology can offer to the interpretation of the historical process…a path-breaking work that lays out what modern history should look like.”

McCormick’s review ends with a quote from Morris, who says that maybe something unforeseen will happen and America will rule for a few generations more and maybe bungling idiots will interrupt China’s rise… or maybe we will incinerate ourselves in a Third World War.”

In fact, examples of bungling leaders may be seen recently in the US and China prior to 1976 and for most of the 19th century. The US elects its leaders due to popularity while China, since the 1980s, has appointed leaders through merit while China thrives and America sinks into debt and political bickering.

However, that does not mean the situation might not reverse as Morris suggests. All it would take for America would be another Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt or George Washington.

In China’s Greatest Emperors, we may see how empires collapsed when great leaders did not appear often enough.  This same factor was one reason the Roman Empire vanished.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar. 

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The Challenge of Developing China

March 19, 2011

In a virtual conversation with several others at Understanding China, One Blog at a Time, hosted by an anonymous American working (or once worked) in China, an incident at a McDonalds in China of a baby defecating in a washbasin is mentioned.

This led to a series of comments where Ontario Mike says he is “sick of hearing of China…” or Omar Tabee who said, “China has one of the most barbaric and backwards histories mankind has known.”

Tabee’s statement was one of the most ignorant I’ve read since writing this Blog. Historical facts say otherwise. For more than two thousand years until the 19th century, China was the most powerful, wealthiest and most technologically advanced nation on the earth. Then in about a century, the West shot ahead of China during the industrial revolution.

My comments, which Ontario Mike called “long winded”, were an attempt to explain why China is the way it is and some of its history.  Without knowing a country’s history, you cannot fairly judge that country, its government or its people.

In May 2010, I wrote a series of five posts about the importance of electricity bringing China into the modern world.  

In fact, in 1952, China’s electrical generating capacity was almost nonexistent and most of the people in China lived as they have for millennia—some still do.

In China’s Electric Challenge, I wrote about what it would take to bring electricity to China’s 1.3 billion people and how difficult that task was going to be. It wasn’t until after Mao’s death in 1976 that China seriously started building electrical power plants and extending the grid. The first step was to provide electricity to urban China, which had a population larger than the United States and China did it faster than the US did a century earlier.

Then in Electricity is the Key, I posted a chart showing the electrical generation projections for China from 2010 to 2030 and mentioned the gap in living standards between rural and urban China was due to the lack of electricity and paved roads in remote areas far from urban centers.

In VOLTING all of China into the 21st Century, I compared China to the United States. I also wrote of China’s plans to extend the grid to rural China until China’s night sky looked like America at night, and I included photos so readers could see the difference between the US and China.

As a further comparison, I wrote America Electrified (a two part series) that covers the time and effort it took to build America’s electrical power grid.

Thomas Edison built the first power plant in 1882. Forty-five years later, the first power grid was established in one state, Pennsylvania, and it wouldn’t be until after World War II and the 1950s that America would extend the electric grid to most of the country.

It took America almost seventy years to build a power grid and China didn’t start building one until the 1980s with about five times the people to hook up. As can be seen from America’s history, modernization takes time.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

1 Comment | America, China, Chinese history, economy, environment, science | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The “Turkish Solution” Applies to China

March 17, 2011

I read an interesting post at Pajamas Media written by Stephen Green.

In Egypt Should Employ the ‘Turkish Solution’, Green explains what confuses many in the West and especially Americans.

The gulf between American beliefs and the reality of the developing world is often wide and foggy.

In fact, the average American cannot understand why the rest of the world isn’t up in arms demanding democracy such as the one that exists in the US today.

It is as if the average American is ignorant of their history, which is probably true.

In 1776, the United States was not what it is today. Many act as if all it takes is to flip a switch and the citizens of any country may form a democracy similar to those in Europe and North America without consideration that it took more than two centuries for the US to evolve from a republic into the democracy it is today.

That’s why Stephen Green’s “Turkish Solution” is worth reading.

The United States started with leaders such as George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.  No other country applied pressure on the US to become a republic. It was an internal decision.

Like Atatürk, the father of Turkey’s Republic, Deng Xiaoping was the father of China’s current one party republic. Under his guidance, China wrote a new Constitution in 1982 setting term and age limits for officials serving in the Communist Party, which has more than 70 million members.

Today in China, decisions are made by consensus and not by one man as they were under Mao’s leadership for twenty-six years and China is building a legal system that did not exist 30 years ago.

In the early 1980s, China also embarked on a goal of improving education and raising literacy to well above 90%. That goal has not been reached yet but China is close to achieving it.

Deng Xiaoping was correct in 1989 when he said China wasn’t ready to become a democracy.

In 1976 when Mao died, 80% of China’s population could not read yet literacy is vital to the success of a democracy.

Ignorant citizens do not make good decisions when they vote.

The next challenge China faces is to find leaders with the vision of a Washington, Atatürk or Deng Xiaoping.

Democracy is not born from outside pressure. It must come from inside China as it did for America and Turkey and it is best if democracy arrives peacefully and not on oceans of blood.

China has already had its century of madness where it was bathed in blood. Enough is enough.

Discover Dictatorship Defined

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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