No Link for Misguided Misinformation – Part 2/5

September 23, 2011

Kier’s rant continues with, “My wife’s Chinese but there’s no way I’d consider my son applying for anything other than Western citizenship—as a Chinese he’d simply be a subject of the Party to read what is allowed, express ideas which are permissible and conduct himself in a manner that has been cleared.”

My wife is Chinese too, and she has a better understanding of what happened and why most Chinese older than 30 (born well before 1980) see Mao in a different light.

Most Chinese that lived through the Cultural Revolution era understand this better than most and once all the facts were weighed, many in China felt that Mao was not the great monster the West makes him out to be.

In another post, I explained why Mao may have made some of his disastrous decisions in Mao and Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Did Mao and the Party he led make mistakes during The Great Leap Forward?


Stalin deliberately caused the deaths of millions of peasants and  then confiscated their land. In 1950, Mao allowed the peasants to judge the wealthy landowners, convict and then execute them for crimes against the peasants. Then China divided the land among the peasants after the wealthy landowners were gone. In 1958, Mao collectivized rural China into large communal farms but never rounded up the peasants and starved them deliberately as Stalin did.

Yes, but those mistakes did not have goals to execute and exterminate millions of people by starving them as Stalin did in the USSR or what Hitler’s Nazi Party did in Germany.

In fact, the five-year plan that mapped out The Great Leap Forward was cancelled in 1960s after knowledge of the starvation reached the leadership of China’s Communist Party.

The Party leadership then stepped forward and managed to find countries willing to defy American’s complete embargo of China, such as Canada and Australia, which provided enough imported wheat and other food to feed China’s rural population, and most Chinese living in major cities had no idea what was going on in rural China.

China has a long history of droughts and famines and loss of life due to events caused by nature. Plans for the Great Leap Forward did not take into account the possibility of a drought and famine.

Continued on September 24, 2011 in No Link for Misguided Misinformation – Part 3 or return to Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

No Link for Misguided Misinformation – Part 1/5

September 22, 2011

An anonymous individual named “Kier” left a scathing comment for a post I wrote of China’s Great Leap Forward, but I deleted the comment so there would be no link back to his Blog, since links help build search engine rank.

However, I copied and pasted Kier’s comment into this four-part series, so I could respond to it.

I am doing this to make a point. Kier’s opinion and accusations of Mao are an example of the beliefs of many ignorant people in the West.

Kier wrote, “A population the size of Canada wiped out in horrific circumstances in a mere three years but, as that was a blip in Mao’s life and didn’t prevent him from penning pretentious lines far from the terror, that’s all right then.“

Correct me if I’m wrong, but drought and floods cause crop losses, which leads to famines. In China, the famine that took place during China’s Great Leap Forward was caused by a mixture of droughts, floods, government bungling, lack of communication, and a complete embargo of China by the United States and its allies.


In the West, for decades, the media has focused on exaggerating and blaming the loss of life during China’s Great Famine of 1959-1960 on Mao Zedong. If there had been no droughts and floods those years, which are common in China, there would have been no famine.

Kier provides no details of The Great Leap Forward, and what was happening in China, which I provided in China’s Great Famine (1959 – 1960) Fact or Fiction.

In fact, there is no evidence to support Western claims of 30 to 70 million deaths during those years, while scholars have studied the documents that exist and say the loss of life may have been closer to 15 – 20 million.

Kier makes no mention of the fact that the Chinese Communists won the Civil War in 1949 and eight years later,  The Great Leap Forward was implemented as part of a five-year plan, which started in 1958. Due to bumper crops the first year, it was considered the beginning of a success story, which led to errors in judgment by the central government and Mao.

There are rumors that Mao learned of the famine and ignored it, but there is no proof those rumors/accusations are true.

Then in 1959, there were droughts and floods, which are considered an act of nature.  If you have read the four part series I wrote of China’s Great Famine, then you would have learned more of the complex circumstances that contributed to this tragedy, which included a “complete embargo” of China by the US, but we never hear about that in the West. The reason for the embargo was to cause suffering among China’s people hopefully leading to unrest that might topple China’s Communist Party.

Continued on September 23, 2011 in No Link for Misguided Misinformation – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

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The Politics of Fear – Part 5/5

September 18, 2011

The prescription that leads to a successful “noble or big lie” is keeping people semi-literate or illiterate so it is more difficult to recognize the “Politics of Fear”.

However, what is literacy and how do we define it? There are no universal definitions and standards of literacy. Unless otherwise specified, the most common definition is the ability to read and write at a specified age.

In addition, literacy is learned, while illiteracy is passed along by parents who cannot read or write, and in 2003, 5% of Americans that read Below Basic did not graduate from high school, 44% spoke no English before starting school, 39% are Hispanic/Latino adults, 20% are African-American/Black adults, 25% are age 65+ and 21% have multiple disabilities.

But, at 18, many of these illiterate people are eligible to vote and votes can be influenced with little and BIG lies—especially when the voter reads at Basic or below, which is more than 40% of the population of the United States.


Manufacturing Consent: Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies

NCES.ed.gov says that in the United States, “14% of the people read ‘Below Basic’, which means no more than the most simple and concrete literacy skills; 29% read at the ‘Basic’ level, which means these people can perform simple and everyday literacy activities; 44% read at the ‘Intermediate’ level, which means they can perform moderately challenging literacy activates, and 13% of readers are ‘Proficient’, which means many of these readers can perform complex and challenging literacy activates” and are the most difficult to fool.What is more shocking is that compared to the rest of the world, the U.S. is doing well.

According to the latest International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), between 19% and 23% of American adults performed at the top levels for each of the three literacy scales: document literacy, prose literacy and quantitative (number) literacy. Sweden is the only country that scored higher. People that are literate and read often are harder to fool.

Yet, many Americans are being left behind. The same survey found that between 21% and 24% of U.S. adults performed at the lowest level. Source: Education-Portal.com

The state of literacy in America explains why neoconservative voices such as Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck may influence millions of listeners and talk to them as if they cannot think or reason.

In fact, Rush Limbaugh often says on his neo-conservative radio talk show that he will do the thinking for his audience so they do not have to, and his audience may be as large as 30 million—which is a large number of votes to influence.

This also may explain why ABC World News started their piece about China’s first aircraft carrier with, “the U.S. government directed a pointed question at the Chinese military: Why would you need a warship like that?”

Since China is now the world’s number one energy consumer and the second largest economy, why not, if it is in China’s national interest to have an aircraft carrier?

In addition, if Brazil, France, India, Italy, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Thailand and Britain all have one or more aircraft carriers, why can’t China join that club?

How is this a threat to America, which has twenty aircraft carriers?

What we have is simple language for simple minds to generate fear and control public opinion. If you read the ABC World News piece, you will notice they don’t mention the other countries that have aircraft carriers or how many the U.S. has.

Return to The Politics of Fear – Part 4 or start with Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

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The Politics of Fear – Part 4/5

September 17, 2011

In Part 1, the Nazis and US neoconservatives were mentioned together in the lead paragraph. In this post, a connection between the two will be made.

Adolf Hitler’s primary rules were: “never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”

Then Liberty Defined.org says, “Present-day champions of the noble lie are the neoconservatives, and their influence is strongly bipartisan. The principle of lying and deception for the people’s “benefit” is endorsed by each administration regardless of party. The lies are considered noble since a cohesive society is sought. Modern-day neoconservatives have been largely influenced by Leo Strauss, who studied and was influenced by Plato and especially by Machiavelli. According to the neoconservatives, lying is reserved for the nobility; it’s not for the common person who may lie on an IRS form. Lying is reserved for the powerful and those who claim they are the only ones who can take care of the ignorant masses.”

In addition, journalists, such as Seymour Hersh, have declared that Strauss endorsed noble lies, “myths used by political leaders seeking to maintain a cohesive society”.

This topic was also dealt with in The Crusading Spirit In Modern America: George W. Bush and the Radical Conservative Elite by Richard J. Bazillion

Bazillion makes a strong case in his scholarly work linking these two men, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, to America’s neoconservative movement.

Schmitt joined the Nazi party in May 1933, and is sometimes referred to as “the crown jurist of the Third Reich.” His ideas had a powerful influence over neoconservatives. Crusading Spirit links these dangerous Straussian ideas to the George W. Bush Whitehouse and many of the president’s influential advisors (including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Abram Shulsky, Stephen Cambone, Elliott Abrams, Stephen Hadley, and Douglas Feith–page 65).

The most important tool of the “noble lie”, which was endorsed by Hitler, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss is illiteracy.  When individuals are ‘Proficient’ readers and are capable of performing complex and challenging literacy activities, these individuals are difficult to fool.

However, when we discover how many readers in America are ‘Proficient’, we learn why neoconservatives may not want the public schools to be successful, which explains the demonizing of America’s public school teachers and their unions.

Continued September 18, 2011 in The Politics of Fear – Part 5 or return to Part 3

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

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The Politics of Fear – Part 3/5

September 16, 2011

As long as there is no law to insure balance and honesty in the media, Americans are ripe to fear almost anything and China is a tempting target to induce fear and loathing by manipulating public opinion.

Since the history of Sinophobia in the United States starts with the California Gold Rush (1848 – 1855) leading to the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), which formalized this prejudice into a law that would not be removed from the books until 1965 (eighty-three years later) during the Civil Rights era, China is a perfect target since the demonizing was started in the 19th century.

Due to this early demonizing, during the later 19th and early 20th century, many Chinese were relentlessly beaten just because of their race, and in 1884, the Chinese Exclusion Act was amended in Washington D.C., so it would apply to all ethnic Chinese regardless of their country of origin.

As the years went by, other amendments were added to the Chinese Exclusion Act making the law more restrictive for the Chinese.

Political Scientist Corey Robin wrote Fear: the History of a Political Idea in 2004, published by Oxford University Press, which may also help explain why there is so much antagonism toward China in the United States.

On August 17, 2011, KPFA’s Against the Grain, a radio program about politics, society and ideas talked with Robin about how “fear dominates our society. Fear of crime, fear of the poor, fear of foreign terrorists, to which we might add fear of our government and fear of our bosses.”


Watch the Young Turks reveal Glenn Beck‘s lies.

Newsday said, “Robin argues that whereas Hobbes and Arendt appreciated the political dimensions of fear, Montesquieu and Tocqueville relegated the idea to the realm of the psychological—a view of fear that has endured, blinding us to the self-serving ways elites deploy fear for political ends.”

Steven Lukes, Professor of Sociology at New York University, said, “Corey Robin provides an acute and sustained analysis of the very idea of fear, of the role of fear as an instrument of political rule and of its unacknowledged prevalence within our liberal democratic institutions.”

The National Post said, “Brilliant…. What he does in Fear is show us, by carefully plotting the progress of modern fear politics from the Enlightenment to present day, that we are as dependent on fear as a political vehicle, if not more so, as we are the charades of left/right/middle factionalism.”

Robin mentions that fear is a method used by political groups and individuals to advance themselves and/or their political and religious agendas.

One example is Glenn Beck, who often incites violence and fear with lies and fear mongering (for more about Glenn Beck, watch the embedded video with this post).

In addition, according to former Fox News producer Charlie Reina… Fox News’s editorial policy is set from the top down in the form of a daily memo: “frequently, Reina says, it also contains hints, suggestions and directives on how to slant the day’s news – invariably, he says, in a way that’s consistent with the politics and desires of the Bush administration.”

Moreover, the December 17, 2010 issue of The Atlantic said, “One alleged news network fed its audience a diet of lies, while contributing financially to the party that benefited from those lies. Those who work for Fox News are not working for a journalistic enterprise. They are working for the communications department of a political party.”

Without an honest, trustworthy media reporting honest and balanced news, how can a democracy that depends on a literate and informed public survive?

In fact, how will China rid itself of being seen as a demon by many in America?

Continued September 17, 2011 in  The Politics of Fear – Part 4 or return to Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

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