I have an “old” friend who often takes conservative theories, opinions and conjecture fueled by emotions, and believes in them as if God wrote them with His own hand.
In addition, many people believe any claim if it supports their own biased opinions and will attack anyone that disagrees with them no matter how valid the evidence presented. However, when it comes to China, that reaction is understandable due to Western democracies partnership with capitalism, which is the polar opposite of communism/socialism.
It makes sense that many in the West will bend over backwards (even fabricate evidence) to demonize anything from a rival seen as evil that was already demonized for decades during the West’s Cold War with global communism.
In other words, prejudice in the West of any country linked to socialism/communism is hard wired to be biased.
In this case, Mao has been tried and convicted in the court of public opinion of the crime of mass murder based on exaggerated theories and opinions supported by inflated evidence.
I wrote on this topic before in China’s Great Famine (1959-1961) Fact of Fiction. That doesn’t mean I was finished with it. If you shake a few trees, something falls out and you learn something new and compelling on a controversial topic, it’s time to return to the subject.
This time, I went looking for recent books about China and ran into several titles that perpetuated the myth that thirty to forty-five million (or more) people died during the Great Leap Forward (GLF) when in fact there may have been no massive loss of life due to the GLF — at least not in the numbers the mostly biased Western theorists and sources keep inflating higher in book after book, which is an example of the old saying that if you tell a lie enough it grows like cancer into a malignant, evil false truth.
droughts cause famines, people starve and die
In Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (April 1998), Jasper Becker claimed, “Population statistics made public since 1979 reveal that at least 30 million people starved to death in the wake of Mao’s Great Leap Forward.”
However, in one sentence the US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health reveals that Becker’s claim is a fraud. “Though population, disease and mortality statistics of modern China are spotty and sometimes questionable, common consensus among the researchers is that since 1949 the public health situation in China has improved tremendously.”
Then in Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China (May 2005), Ralph A. Thaxton Jr. says, “This book documents how China’s rural people remember the great famine of Maoist rule, which proved to be the worst famine in modern world history.”
If we examine “modern world history”, Thaxton’s claim is easily dismissed.
From Griffith University, Australia, Poverty, by David C. Schak, Associate Professor
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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.
Subscribe to “iLook China” Sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top of this page.
In August 2010, I ran a twelve part series on Sun Tzu’sThe Art of War starting with Part 1. In this post, I’ve brought together the series in one post and added more content.
The reason for revisiting Sun Tzu’s The Art of War has to do with a recent study by The Pew Research Center, which says, one in three Iraq and Afghanistan veterans of the post-9/11 military see these wars as a waste.
Then NPR’s Jackie Northam reported as the wars drag on, interest among Americans has dropped from 90 percent supporting the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan before the war started to 25 percent today.
Northam quotes Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center. “The public soured on the decision to go to war in Iraq by 2004, when not only were there no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) found, but all of a sudden, the cost of that war began to increase, [and] casualties began to be rather substantial.”
In addition, Fair Game (2010), a movie of CIA operative Valerie Plame and her husband, who wrote a 2003 New York Times op-ed piece on the topic of WMD in Iraq, alleged that the Bush administration had manipulated intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion of Iraq—an accusation of fraud in the White House.
According to the wisdom of Sun Tzu, these three points are enough to indicate a “high” possibility of defeat for the United States.
So, who better to turn to than Sun Tzu to see if the goals of these wars are possible to achieve.
It is time to reexamine the master that West Point cadets study. Sun Tzu dates to China’s Warring States Period (476 – 221 BC). Traditional accounts place him in the Spring and Autumn Period of China as a military general serving under King Helu of Wu (544-496 BC).
You have to be good to still be taken seriously about 2500 years after your death.
There are three key principals to The Art of War.
1. Know your enemy and know yourself — understanding your opponent is crucial to victory.
2. Sun Tzu prizes the general who can outwit instead of outfight his opponent — to subdue the enemy without fighting is the height of skill.
3. Avoid what is strong. Attack what is weak.
In the case of President George W. Bush, when he went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is now clear that he did not know his enemy (or much at all about the culture and politics of the Middle East and of Islam).
Bush also resorted to subduing his enemy with force instead of outwitting him—as if President Bush was capable of outwitting Al-Qaeda, since finding the weakness of an organization that is like smoke would be a challenge to any president.
As for Sun Tzu, around 500 BC, the King of Wu summons him, one of the greatest military minds in history, to save his kingdom from a more powerful enemy.
Sun Tzu was a warrior and a philosopher. He was important because he had a cohesive, holistic philosophy on strategy.
Sun Tzu tells the King of Wu he can defeat the enemy with a smaller army. Doubting him, the king challenges Sun Tzu to turn the palace concubines into a fighting force and Sun Tzu accepts.
Sun Tzu shows the concubines what to do, selects the best two students and puts them in charge of the others. When Sun Tzu orders the exercise to begin, the woman laugh.
He tries again but the concubines laugh again.
Sun Tzu says, “If instructions are not clear and commands not explicit, it is the fault of the general. But if the orders are clear, and my orders are clear, it is the fault of the subordinate officers.”
Without warning, Sun Tzu beheads the two concubines he had selected to lead the others. To Sun Tzu, war is a matter of life and death. This is the key principal of his teachings. Once understood, everyone from the general to the solider will be motivated to win.
However, in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States fought wars with rules that hamper victory and ignore the fact that war is a matter of life and death.
Instead, politics and public opinion decide the rules of the battle field.
While the bodies of the first two concubines are still warm, Sun Tzu appoints two new concubines to lead the others. This time the concubines follow his orders without hesitation. The king of Wu is convinced and appoints Sun Tzu commander of the Wu army.
Sun Tzu now must train an army of 30 thousand troops to fight a force ten times larger.
The state of Wu has only 33,000 troops while Chu can field a force of 300 thousand.
Outnumbered ten to one, Sun Tzu could build his defenses and wait for the attack. However, he does the unexpected. He invades Chu.
He doesn’t attack Chu’s main army. Instead, he attacks outposts and weaker targets. When Chu sends an army to fight, Sun Tzu slips away emphasizing maneuver, surprise and deception.
After every battle, Sun Tzu learns more about his enemy.
During another war more than two thousand years later, Sun Tzu’s ultimate secret becomes more evident. In the mid 1960s, the world’s largest super power is fighting in Vietnam—a country smaller than the state of Montana.
The American general sees the battlefield like a chessboard where armies stand and fight. However, Vietnam has no clear objectives to attack and destroy.
The Communist general understands Sun Tzu and uses the Viet Cong in hit and run attacks against fixed US positions.
Sun Tzu said, “It is more important to outthink your enemy than outfight him. In war, numbers alone confer no advantage. Do not advance relying on sheer military power.”
The US commander breaks these rules.
Sun Tzu liked the enemy to maneuver and respond to his moves. This way he was in charge of the battlefield.
A US report after the Vietnam War revealed that 80% of the time, it was the North Vietnamese and Vietcong who decided where and when to fight.
Sun Tzu said, “Once you know the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses, you can avoid the strengths and attack the weaknesses.” At the beginning of the war, almost 80% of Americans supported it.
As the Vietnam War continued with mounting US causalities, that support at home shifted against the war, which achieved another of Sun Tzu’s rules, “The skillful leader subdues enemy’s troops without any fighting. One does not win wars by winning battles.”
Although the North Vietnamese and Vietcong did not win battles, they won the war by turning the American people against it. To achieve this goal, the North Vietnamese commander was willing to lose ten men for every American killed.
In the end, the US lost 53 thousand troops and the North Vietnamese and Vietcong more than a million with several million more noncombatants killed as collateral damage to the American bombing.
Sun Tzu felt spies were important, and he devoted one chapter to spies. He said, “Use your spies for every kind of business,” and the North Vietnamese and Vietcong followed that advice.
Sun Tzu said, “An accurate knowledge of the enemy is worth ten divisions.”
He also said, “Let your plans be as dark as night – then strike like a thunderbolt.” The Tet Offensive in January of 1968 was that thunderbolt.
Sun Tzu said, “Keep plans as dark as night.”
The NVA (North Vietnamese Army) and Vietcong did this by moving supplies and troops through miles of tunnels built in the 1950 and 60s.
Deception was also one of Sun Tzu’s rules.
To achieve deception, the NVA and Vietcong announced they would honor a cease-fire on January 31, 1968, the Tet New-Year Holiday.
Sun Tzu said, “In battle use a direct attack to engage and an indirect attack to win,” meaning to deceive your enemy so you can win your real objective.
To achieve this goal, the NVA launched a surprise attack on Khe Sanh, a remote US base, one week before the Tet Offensive.
The South Vietnamese and American military are surprised when the NVA launches the Tet Offensive. At first, it looks like the Vietcong will win, but the NVA ignored one of Sun Tzu’s rules—moral influence.
Moral influence means a leader must have the people behind him to win.
During the early days of the Tet, the Vietcong rounded up and brutally assassinated several-thousand South Vietnamese government workers and killed many Catholic nuns losing the support of the people.
However, in America, watching the violence of the Tet Offensive on TV turned more Americans against the war.
Eight years later, in 1975, Saigon falls to the NVA and America loses the war even though the US had military superiority.
It is about 500 BC in China and Sun Tzu’s hit-and-run campaign against the state of Chu is working. The Chu prime minister is starting to lose support and the moral of his troops is dropping.
Throughout the countryside of Chu, there is fear of where Sun Tzu will strike next. When the larger Chu army threatens one of Sun Tzu’s allies, Sun Tzu uses another rule of war, “To move your enemy, entice him with something he is certain to take.”
Then, when his own forces are surrounded, Sun Tzu says, “Put the army in the face of death where there is no escape and they will not flee or be afraid – there is nothing they cannot achieve.” See The Long March
What happened to Sun Tzu in China when his small army was surrounded also happened on June 6, 1944 when allied troops in World War II invaded Europe during D-day.
Sun Tzu says, “All warfare is deception. If you can deceive your enemy before battle, you are more likely to win.”
That’s what General Eisenhower did before the invasion of Normandy. To succeed, the allies used deception to convince the Germans the attack would not take place in Normandy.
Sun Tzu says, “It is essential to seek out enemy agents who have come to spy against you and bribe them to serve you.” In The Art of War, double agents are the most important spies.
That is what the Allies did in World War II before the Normandy Invasion of France. No one used double agents better than the British did.
Britain turned almost every spy Germany sent during the war. These double agents made the Germans believed the invasion would take place at Pas de Calais and not Normandy.
Sun Tzu says, “The way a wise general can achieve greatness beyond ordinary men is through foreknowledge.” The allies had foreknowledge because they broke the German code and knew what the Germans were thinking and planning.
Sun Tzu would have praised the allied preparation for the invasion and the use of deception but he would have condemned the actual assault.
Sun Tzu says, “When a falcon’s strike breaks the body of its prey, it is because of timing. When torrential water tosses boulders, it is because of momentum.”
Sun Tzu believes that the best attack can be ruined if momentum is lost, and he would have predicted the cost of lives during the Normandy invasion more than two-thousand years before it took place.
During the invasion of Normandy, the allies survived on death ground exactly as Sun Tzu predicted by fighting together and never giving up.
Sun Tzu meant when you put troops in a combat position where they must fight or die, there is no choice but to fight.
Another reason the Allies succeeded during D-day was another of Sun Tzu’s rules of war. He said, “It is essential for victory that generals are unconstrained by their leaders.”
The allied command structure gives total authority to General Eisenhower as supreme commander.
However, Germany under Hitler did not have the same command structure.
Hitler had set up a confusing system of overlapping authority so no one had total control over the military leaving Hitler the only one who made final decisions.
Hitler’s command structure is a perfect example of what Sun Tzu says about “no interference from the leader”.
The allies in France are bogged down in difficult terrain. The combat losses are horrible and little progress is made.
The solution is found in Sun Tzu’s rules of war. “Make your enemy prepare on his left and he will be weak on his right.”
The allies will follow this rule.
Sun Tzu says you must behave like the snake. When your enemy attacks, you must be flexible.
Throughout the invasion of Normandy, France, Sun Tzu’s rules of war guide the Allies to victory. The Allies used deception, foreknowledge, and a superior command structure that motivated the army to fight as one.
Sun Tzu says, “The winning army realizes the conditions for victory first then fights. The losing army fights first then seeks victory.”
More than two thousand years before the Battle of Normandy, the battle between the kingdoms of Wu and Chu raged on.
Even with a smaller army, Sun Tzu is not worried. He has split his army. While the Chu army is surrounding his smaller force, the main part of his army is moving toward the unprotected Chu capital.
The Chu commander turns from the smaller Wu force under Sun Tzu’s command and rushes back to save the capital.
Sun Tzu says, “No nation has ever benefitted from prolonged war.” The American Civil War is Sun Tzu’s nightmare scenario. Possibly the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the same since so many of Sun Tzu’s rules of war have been ignored.
Sun Tzu says, “Those skilled in war bring the enemy to the field of battle. They are not brought by him.” This will happen to General Robert E. Lee in 1863.
China’s Sun Tzu says if the orders are unclear, it is the fault of the commanding general.
General Lee told one of his generals to “Attack when you think it is practical.” That general decides it is not practical and does nothing.
At the Battle Gettysburg, Lee did not give clear orders.
Robert E. Lee made a tactical mistake when he did not follow Sun Tzu’s rule to “Move only when you see an advantage and there is something to gain. Only fight if a position is critical.”
Sun Tzu says, “When the enemy occupies high ground, do not confront him. If he attacks downhill, do not oppose him.” Robert E. Lee did not listen and decides to attack the Union positions on the high ground.
General Longstreet disagrees. He does not want to attack the high ground. Instead, he wants to go around the Union Army toward the North’s capital, Washington D.C.
Sun Tzu says, “There are some armies that should not be fought and some ground that should not be contested.”
After two days of horrible losses, Robert E. Lee orders what is left of his army to attack uphill a third time. General Longstreet urges Lee not to do this. Lee ignores him.
On the third day of Gettysburg during Picket’s charge up another hill, only 5,000 survived of 12,000 troops. Sun Tzu would have been horrified.
Sun Tzu says, “When troops flee, are insubordinate, collapse or are routed in battle, it is the fault of the general.”
Sun Tzu sees a commanding general as someone intelligent and cunning and never rash or arrogant, which is the opposite of the commander of the Chu army more than two thousand years ago.
Sun Tzu won the war against Chu, which had an army ten times larger than his. He did this through preparation, deception and indirect attacks.
After winning the war against Chu, Sun Tzu retires and writes The Art of War.
The first line of Sun Tzu’s rules of war says, “War is a matter of vital importance to the State. It is a matter of life and death, survival or ruin.
As I finished the series on Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, I thought of President Lyndon Johnson who invaded Vietnam (1950 to 1975)—a war where a super power lost to a third-world country as Chu did to Wu about twenty-five hundred years ago.
Nations that fought with the United States lost more than 300 thousand troops with almost 1.5 million wounded. North Vietnam and the Communists lost almost 1.2 million troops and more than 4 million civilian dead. Source: Vietnam War – Wiki
President G. W. Bush rushed into a war in Iraq and Afghanistan on faulty evidence, which may have been based on lies. For these wars, the casualties and losses continue.
Several American presidents ignored Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.
Since World War II, America has spent more than 23 trillion dollars fighting wars and in defense. The U.S. won the Cold War against Soviet Russia without fighting.
Too bad the citizen of the US, Presidents Johnson and G. W. Bush did not learn from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.
China’s Sun Tzu said, “Sometimes, the best way to win is not to fight.”
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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.
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Did you know Dennis Prager wrote on Creators.com that, “Consider the facts (I’m surprised he used this word): Tibet, at least 1,400 years old, is one of the world’s oldest nations, has its own language, its own religion and even its own ethnicity. Over 1 million of its people have been killed by the Chinese, its culture has been systematically obliterated, 6,000 of its 6,200 monasteries have been looted and destroyed, and most of its monks have been tortured, murdered or exiled.”
All of Prager’s emotionally driven claims such as “killed, obliterated, looted, destroyed, tortured, murdered or exiled” have been proven wrong, but most of Prager’s Parrots are not interested in the facts. I say that Prager owes China an apology.
In fact, Tibet was not a nation until 1911 when the British convinced the Dalai Lama to declare freedom from China, after having been ruled by China since 1279 AD during the Yuan Dynasty, then the Ming Dynasty starting in 1368 AD and last the Qing Dynasty until its collapse.
All the “facts” are there for anyone willing to trust the experts and sources such as Sir Robert Hart (1835 – 1911) and a piece written for the October 1912 National Geographic Magazine by an expert Western trained medical doctor named Shaoching H. Chuan, M.D. that happened to spend two years in Tibet starting in 1907 after the last Qing emperor ordered him there to deal with a cholera epidemic.
In addition, Prager forgot to mention that there are more than sixty spoken languages in China and one written one. China has 56 minorities and each has its own language as the Tibetan minority does. It’s been this way in China for more than 2,000 years.
In fact, by not mentioning America’s native minorities, it is my opinion that Dennis Prager is a hypocrite and deceitful.
North American native tribes and nations were free and governed themselves for more than ten thousand years (much longer than the 1,400 years he claims Tibet governed itself before 1950) before Europeans arrived and drove them from their land.
If you visit Native American Nations, you will discover how many spoke their own languages and many still do — the only difference is today native Americans live on reservations and the US Department of the Interior is responsible for the administration of programs relating to Native Americans, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians.
One example is the Navaho Nation, the largest Native American reservation in the United States, which is in Arizona. The Navaho Nation covers 27,425 sq miles (71,000 km2) with a population of about 174,000.
The Navajo Nation, like Tibet, is a semi-autonomous Native American-governed territory within the United States.
Another example is the Cherokee Nation, which had its own written language developed early in the 19th century by a mixed-blood Cherokee called Se-Quo-Yah, so the Cherokee Nation would be considered educated, literate and capable of governing itself as an equal, independent nation.
However, this did not stop the United States from breaking treaties and waging war with the Cherokee Nation to exploit the natural resources of their land. It’s called conquest and anyone that studies history knows this is a natural part of the evolution of all species including man.
How is this situation different from Tibet and China? Native Americans had their own religions too and were not allowed to practice them by the United States, while China allows Tibetan Buddhists to practice their religion within a semi autonomous territory, which is administered by a CCP government agency similar to the US Department of the Interior.
Another fact that Prager conveniently left out of his opinionated rant of an essay is that after 1976, China rebuilt many of the Buddhist temples in Tibet that were destroyed during Mao’s Cultural Revolution when religions in China were banned and the entire population suffered.
Today, there are seven-major religions in China including Christianity and Islam.
Rush Limbaugh, the host of the number-one conservative talk-radio show, explains how talk-radio works.
Michael Orion Powell writes, “Prager is a good example of what happens when a commentator ties himself to one side of the political spectrum permanently.” By Seattle standards, Michael Powell calls himself a conservative, but by actual conservative standards (as defined by talk show hosts such as Dennis Prager), he says he is a raving liberal.
In addition, decades ago, I too listened to Rush Limbaugh and then deserted him for Dennis Prager.
I eventually fled Prager too, after I questioned his emotionally driven opinions and compared them to the facts of experts discovering that he was often wrong and misleading. Now that I’m an ex-Prager Parrot, I guess that makes me a leftist-liberal prone to hysteria that fears death even though I support the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees the right to bear arms (weapons such as rifles and pistols).
So, we either trust the emotionally-driven opinions of conservative talk show hosts such as Dennis Prager (with a major in Middle Eastern Studies and History who also studied about Russia), or trust 1,500 of the world’s most distinguished senior scientists, including the majority of Nobel laureates in science.
And the truth is, there is a chance the experts could be wrong about Global Warming, since it is only a theory supported by facts, but are we willing to risk ignoring them as Prager and his Parrots argue?
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”, sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top right-hand side of this page and then follow directions.
Dennis Prager says that liberal and/or leftists tend to trust experts more, are more likely to revere and even “worship” nature, while fearing death more than a conservative. Does this sound like a stereotype?
Pay attention to the emotional words Prager uses to drive his fans to accept his opinions. To a conservative, born again Christian reading that someone “worships” nature over God is a mortal sin and unforgivable.
This is how Prager manipulates the emotions of those that believe what he preaches. Has any expert studied if conservatives fear death less than liberal-leftists? I doubt it.
He infers that if we allow the leftist-liberals to focus too much on reducing carbon emissions to deal with the potential threat of Global Warming, which he infers is a hoax, we will “lose the war” against “Islamic fascism” that threatens the free world.
Wow! That is HUGE leap of flawed logic. Imagine how “lose the war against Islamic fascism” is going to inflame the emotions of his conservative audience driving them to believe his opinions.
In addition, how is this going to happen? Well, by too many of us wasting our time working to cut back on carbon emissions reducing pollution so Global Warming may not threaten the world we live in.
To discover more of Prager’s fraud, I suggest watching To Hell and Back and discover that only one percent of the American population is fighting the war in Afghanistan and Iraq—to stop Prager’s “Islamic fascism” from taking over the world.
In addition, if we develop alternative forms of energy and break our Middle Eastern oil habit, won’t that help defeat Prager’s “Islamic fascism” by cutting off the West’s money from flowing into the Middle East?
Prager Claims “Equality” Isn’t American (because controversy is the bread and butter of talk radio)
If only one percent of Americans are fighting the war against Prager’s “Islamic fascism”, then why can’t the other 99% deal with the potential threat of Global Warming “possibly” caused by carbon emissions as supported by facts gathered and interpreted by many experts—In 1997, Science Daily reported that more than 1,500 of the world’s most distinguished senior scientists, including the majority of Nobel laureates in science, signed a consensus declaration urging leaders worldwide to act and prevent potentially devastating consequences of human-induced global warming.
However, in his Global Warming essay, Prager urges us to ignore these experts—that is unless we want to be seen as a hysterical, death fearing leftist-liberal.
In addition, if you click on that link To Hell and Back, you will discover from the video that many of America’s troops believe the wars (in Afghanistan and Iraq) is wrong.
A recent Pew research poll found that a third of American veterans who served after 9/11 believe the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are not worth fighting.
Did you know that in Townhall.com, Dennis Prager wrote, “The president (of the US) does not wish to annoy China’s dictators prior to his upcoming visit to Beijing.”
However, Prager is wrong again. If we use the accepted definition of a dictator, one does not rule China. It is a one-party Republic and China’s leaders are selected by the consensus of 70 million Communist Party members—a decision based on the merit of the individuals running for the position (instead of the popularity contest of American politics), which I wrote about in Dictatorship or one-party-republic.
It is obvious why Prager used the word “dictator” to describe China’s government—to stir emotions driving his fanatical followers (Prager’s Parrots—used as a metaphor) to accept his opinions.
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.
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To understand Dennis Prager and his flock of Parrots (used as a metaphor), one must know the difference between facts, theories and opinions.
A fact has undisputed evidence to support its truth and is driven by rational thought. In science, “fact” is an objective and verifiable observation. For example, several centuries ago, many in the West held an opinion that the earth was flat and that the sun and stars revolved around the earth until explorers (such as Christopher Columbus) and scientists proved that wasn’t true.
A scientific theory is a well-confirmed hypothesis that explains a large body of facts inspired by a large body of research. When the body of research is convincing, many people accept the theory as a potential fact.
Since most of our objective and verifiable observations come from experts and/or scientists, according to Dennis Prager, if you believe these experts about Global Warming, you would be a hysterical leftist-liberal that trusts what the traditional media reports as news.
An opinion is based on a belief or personal view and varies according to an individual’s knowledge, experience, culture, beliefs and is driven and reinforced by emotion. An opinion may also be a simple, uniform message designed to be acceptable to a large number of people. An opinion is not a fact, because opinions have not been proven or verified.
As we know, Google returned to Chinaon China’s terms. Did Prager later apologize for his praise of Google’s Sergey Brin after Goolge backed down? Prager says he suspects China needs Google more. Wrong again. China has Baidu, which is a search engine with about 76% of the search traffic in China.
In the Global Warming essay, Prager says, “Observers of contemporary society will surely have noted that a liberal is far more likely to fear global warming than a conservative.”
In the previous opening sentence of his essay of Global Warming, Prager defined the difference between liberals and conservatives in a simple generalization, which is an opinion and he has no facts to support what he claims.
However, to Prager and his fans, if you fear global warming, you are a leftist-liberal and are prone to hysteria. He then goes on to say that leftists also believes what The New York Times and other liberal news sources report, which means if you are a liberal, you will believe almost anything you hear or read in the mainstream media.
However, Gallup reported in September 2010 that “Distrust in U.S. Media edges Up to Record High” saying, “For the fourth straight year, the majority of Americans say they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly.”
The Gallup study also reveals that 33% of conservatives had a great deal of trust in the media while 46% of liberals had little or no trust.
Hmm, if we return to Prager’s opinion (I meant essay), we see that he said, “Liberals rarely question the authority of the mainstream media,” but when we examine the facts gathered by experts working for Gallup, this isn’t true.
Do you see the difference between Prager’s opinions and the facts, and how he relies on reinforcing his opinions by using terms that manipulate emotions?
Did you know that Prager wrote in the Jewish World Review that Mao “butchered” 60 million Chinese? But there are no facts from eye witnesses to support the claims and opinions that Mao deliberately “butchered” any Chinese. To discover more, I suggest you read China’s Great Famine – Fact or Fiction.
From Griffith University, Australia, Poverty, by David C. Schak, Associate Professor
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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.
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