Contents

Ortega, Again
by Otto J. Reich

France: The Cost of Multiculturalism
by Lt. Col. Gordon Cuculla

The Left Hates Inequality, Not Evil
by Dennis Prager

Dead But Not Gone
by William S. Lind

Good Night and Good Luck
by Ann Coulter

A Teen’s Take on China
by Nathan Helms

Happy New Year!

Ortega, Again
by Otto J. Reich

Twenty years ago this summer, Washington’s hottest debate centered on the Contras’ war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua—and how to keep the nations of Central America from falling into the hands of Marxist terrorists or right-wing death squads. It was the equivalent of today’s Iraq debate. The eventual victory of freedom in Nicaragua came at a cost of tens of thousands of lives—and it is now in jeopardy.

The hard Left in Latin America has learned its lessons: It is no longer trying to gain power by force, because it fears (with just cause) the unmatched power of the United States and the willingness of recent Republican presidents to use it in the defense of freedom; it is therefore resorting to political warfare to regain power, and one of its battlefields is again Nicaragua.

In many ways the fight 20 years ago was simpler. On one side, the Sandinistas—armed, organized, trained, and supported by the USSR, Cuba, and an assortment of international terrorist groups—were determined to impose a Communist dictatorship. On the other side, the armed Contras and the unarmed Nicaraguan resistance—supported by the U.S.—were trying to prevent Nicaragua from falling into the totalitarian abyss. Today’s battle is more complicated: Two bad actors of the 1980s, Daniel Ortega and Arnoldo Alemán, are trying to wrest power from the duly elected president, Enrique Bolaños. Alemán and Bolaños were anti-Sandinistas, but that is where the similarity ends. After a successful run as mayor of Managua, the then-popular Alemán became president in the mid-1990s and proceeded to treat the country as his personal fief and bank, as the Somoza family had done before him—stealing food from the mouths of a population that years of war and Sandinista misrule had turned into the poorest in the region.

Suddenly Alemán resembled more the kleptomaniac, autocratic Ortega than the democrat he had claimed to be. Since his election, Alemán had stolen so much money that he needed protection. Who better to provide it than Ortega, who controlled the Sandinista congressmen and most of the judicial branch? One might well ask how a despicable party boss like Ortega can control a nation’s judiciary. The answer lies in the agreement signed late on the night the Sandinistas—unexpectedly—lost the 1990 election. Ortega’s first reaction to his defeat was to refuse to accept the verdict of the people and to threaten to remain in power by force. But the presence of many international observers prevented such an obvious self-coup. So, to relinquish the presidency, Ortega demanded a disproportionate number of congressional seats and retention of the judges the Sandinistas had installed during their eleven years of rule. The vast majority of the judges now answered to Ortega.

Like Alemán, Ortega also needed protection: He had been accused of massive human-rights violations during his ten years as leader, for which the Sandinista-controlled Assembly amnestied him. Later, his stepdaughter publicly and convincingly accused him of sexually abusing her over many years. Ortega now needed the support of the person whose party had gained control of a majority in the Assembly to avoid the legal complications of the abuse charges: the corrupt Arnoldo Alemán. In 2000, Alemán and Ortega decided to enter into a Pact.

In essence, the Pact was an attempt to put the entire government under the control of those two party strongmen, while at the same time leaving in place the façade of independent democratic institutions. In January 2002, President Bolaños took office and soon launched an internationally recognized anti-corruption campaign. Against great odds, and in spite of the fact that Ortega and Alemán controlled the National Assembly and the Supreme Court, Alemán was convicted on corruption charges.

The Ortega-Alemán alliance has been striking back at President Bolaños with a vengeance. First, Ortega used his control of the judges to release Alemán from prison, and to allow him to serve his corruption sentence under house arrest at Alemán’s own luxury ranch. Then, in October 2004, the two Pact leaders attempted a legislative coup d’état. They tried to bring trumped-up charges of election-finance violations against Bolaños, in order to remove him from office. An immediate outcry from much of the international community and Nicaraguan civil society cut this attempt short. Finally, in November 2004, Ortega and Alemán decided that if they could not seize control of the executive branch of government they would simply strip it of its power. The National Assembly began to pass a series of laws and constitutional “reforms” designed to transfer a great deal of power to the National Assembly: The effect would be to create a “mega-legislature” more powerful than any legislative body in the Western Hemisphere, and to leave the executive branch virtually powerless.

In a normal democracy, Bolaños could have turned to the Supreme Court for protection against a naked power grab by the legislative branch. But the Nicaraguan Supreme Court is one of the most discredited institutions in the country: Because of the Pact, its members have been personally selected by Ortega or Alemán, and they respond to orders from their party bosses. La Prensa, Nicaragua’s largest most respected newspaper, had this to say on June 6 about the Supreme Court: “The worst part of this fight between the Executive and the Legislature is that the Judiciary cannot resolve it, because it is not independent, rather it obeys one of the parties of the conflict and therefore it lacks the authority and credibility to judge and resolve such a case.” To understand the character of the Nicaraguan Supreme Court, it helps to know that it may be the only supreme court in the world on which three sitting justices have had their U.S. visas revoked because of corruption.

Under these circumstances, President Bolaños was left with few options if he wished to defend the bedrock democratic principle of separation and independence of powers. He appealed to the Organization of American States, which in 2001 had adopted the Inter-American Democratic Charter, committing all member nations to be “representative democracies.” Article 3 of the charter requires that OAS member states have “separation of powers and independence of the branches of government.” Bolaños also brought suit against the National Assembly in the Central American Court of Justice (CCJ). The regional court ruled early in 2005 that the attempted constitutional reforms violated the OAS Inter-American Democratic Charter, two Central American treaties, and Nicaragua’s own constitution. The National Assembly responded by ordering up an instant ruling from the ever-compliant Nicaraguan Supreme Court claiming the CCJ did not have jurisdiction, despite the fact that Nicaragua is a signatory of the treaty. On April 1, the presidents of all the Central American nations jointly issued a statement supporting President Bolaños.

The new secretary-general of the OAS, former Chilean foreign minister José Miguel Insulza, is trying to find a peaceful solution to the crisis—which is now nearing a boiling point. There are currently two competing sources of authority in the country: President Bolaños, backed by the Central American Court of Justice, much of Nicaraguan civil society, and the international community; and the Ortega/Alemán-controlled National Assembly, backed by the rubber-stamp Supreme Court, the National Prosecutor’s Office, and National Comptroller’s Council, all headed by appointees of the Pact.

No one can predict how this crisis will end; violence is possible. The police and the army are currently taking their orders from Bolaños, but the Pact is pressing to convince the police that they must obey orders from the courts. If the Pact convinces the police to switch sides, Ortega and Alemán can complete their planned takeover of the executive power. There is little doubt that the Sandinista party, with its history of orchestrating violent street demonstrations for political effect, could try to make Nicaragua ungovernable and attempt to remove Bolaños from office. The Pact would be in virtual control of all branches of government, and the way opened for the manipulation of a fraudulent Ortega “election” to the presidency in 2006.

Nicaragua is a test case for the OAS’s new Inter-American Democratic Charter. Two of democracy’s cleverest enemies in Central America—Ortega and Alemán—have refined a technique of hollowing out democratic institutions from the inside in order illegitimately to rule a country from their position as political party bosses. We may soon get an indication of whether the OAS has been able to keep pace with the times, and has evolved techniques and methods of its own to confront successfully these new types of challenges to democracy in the hemisphere. Friends of freedom and democracy should be paying close attention, and supporting Nicaragua’s elected leader, Enrique Bolaños. The neighborhood’s enemies of freedom are also watching, and probably doing more than that.

—National Review, July 18, 2005, p. 26f

France: The Cost of Multiculturalism
by Lt. Col. Gordon Cuculla

George Washington eloquently set forth the classical American policy on immigration in an address he delivered before an Irish association in December 1783. In his remarks, Washington stated that our borders were open, not just for the wealthy and educated, but also for the “oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions,” who were free to enjoy “a participation of all our rights and privileges—If,” he concluded, “these newcomers comported by American standards” of “decency and propriety of conduct.” That is, they had to assimilate to their new country’s values; then they would be accepted on an equal basis with those who came across on the Mayflower. This policy prevented the kind of quasi-civil war currently raging in Europe, yet today, some Americans want to change our policies based on Old Europe’s fatally flawed model.

Columnist Mark Steyn, in a November 3 interview with talk show host Hugh Hewitt, discussed the current alarming situation in France—the Muslim riots that subsequently spread to Denmark and Belgium. These are the opening shots, Steyn says, in the start of a “Eurabian civil war.” The root cause of Muslim disaffection is non-assimilation. This happened for two reasons: Islamic fundamentalist immigrants chose not to assimilate and conscious government policy instituted by their host nations encouraged their separatism. Decades of multicultural secular humanism have excised Judeo-Christian core values from Old Europe, and a lethal element of separatist Islamofascism filled the void. This is a harsh, parasitic movement that intends to destroy its host. Indeed, in some cases the hosts have actually enacted rules to prevent such assimilation and to recognize the immigrant culture as equal to or preferable to the host.

This muddle-headed policy Steyn recounts, has resulted in hostile enclaves within states. In realistic terms “you’re dealing with communities that are totally isolated from the mainstream of French life, where all kinds of practices that wouldn’t be tolerated [take place].” Alex Alexiev, of the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, and a major contributor to the newly released War Footing, agrees.

“There may be as many as 1,000 Muslim enclaves in France alone. They have become states within states. Many practice Shari’a law inside of the enclave. As many as 400 enclaves are so closed that even French police fear to enter during daylight. At night, it is strictly mob rule.”

Alexiev made this analysis more than a year before the contemporary French riots erupted. Steyn notes that several years prior to the riots, he toured sections of Muslim ghettos outside of Paris. They were the most appalling slums he had ever seen, worse even than some notorious Third World pits. “I was more afraid inside these places than in any place I’d been in the Middle East, including Baghdad recently,” Steyn told Hugh Hewitt.

For what conceivable reason can a country like France have voluntarily abrogated sovereignty over large sections of its internal territory on a de facto basis? Alexiev points a finger to simple population figures as a prime factor: aging, non-reproducing Frenchmen versus youthful, procreating Muslims. He has studied European demographics for years. The numbers, Alexiev contends, are intentionally obscured by various countries, especially France, “but if you know how to look for them, you can find them.” His greatest concern is that using commonly accepted demographic models European countries have voluntarily slowed reproduction to the point where certain populations may be “unrecoverable.” Alexiev cites France, Holland, much of Scandinavia, and Italy as most alarming cases. Europeans are reproducing at a rate so low that they are no longer replacing themselves, much less expanding. By the end of the century some countries may be entirely depopulated of “classic” Europeans.

Can the trend be reversed? It may be too late, considering that the Europeans may have passed the tipping point. Given the explosive birthrate among the Muslim populations along with an open immigration policy bordering on national suicide, the transition of Europe to Eurabia may well be unstoppable by anything other than extraordinary intervention. It is precisely that kind of intervention that concerns Ralph Peters, author of New Glory, a look at where these trends lead. Europe—especially France, Peters contends—have a “blood-drenched history.” When European countries get pushed too far, they typically solve their domestic problems through war or by unrestrained internal repression. One need not look further back than the Holocaust to see the results, but historians relate centuries of blood-letting and ongoing discrimination by Europeans against Jews and other minorities.

There is a real fear among observers that the anti-Semitic, anti-foreign movements that came close to electoral victory in France are going to resurge as a result of the riots and the undeniable threat that Muslims pose to France. With both the Socialists and the neo-Fascists opposed to assimilation as a policy (the former can think only in terms of more welfare and appeasement, the latter in terms of removal) the political battle lines are drawn. Peters’ contention is that they may well be drawn in blood within a few short years if a sufficiently cruel element of French politics comes to power bent on deportation or elimination of the immigrant, “foreign” population.

Today, there are many who promote Euro-socialist values as a legitimate replacement for America’s Constitutional guarantees drafted by the Founding Fathers. For years they tried to make their case, despite tanking economies, social and moral bankruptcy, and military impotence that swept Europe into virtual irrelevance. Now nominally European citizens are taking arms against their own. Perhaps this is the ultimate cost of non-assimilation.

—FrontPageMagazine.com, November 23, 2005

The Left Hates Inequality, Not Evil
by Dennis Prager

If you want to understand the Left, most of what you need to know can be summarized thus: The Left hates inequality, not evil.

As one raised as a New York Jew (who, moreover, attended an Ivy League university) and therefore liberal—it took me a while to recognize this fatal moral characteristic of the Left. But the moment I realized it, it became immoral not to oppose leftist values.

It is neither possible nor virtuous to be devoid of hatred. Even those who think it is always wrong to hate must hate hatred. The question therefore is not whether one hates but what (or whom) one hates.

For example, on the basis of the value system that I hold (Judeo-Christian), I try to confine my hating to evil. By evil I mean the deliberate infliction of unjust suffering on the undeserving; cruelty is the best example of such evil.

Those who hate evil hated the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union, after all, was a made-up country, created by a band of gangsters called Bolsheviks and Communists. They murdered between 20 million and 40 million innocent people, spread their totalitarianism around the world, and thereby rendered hundreds of millions of people slaves and automatons.

From the 1930s to the 1950s, liberals and social democrats vigorously opposed communism. But the rest of the world’s Left, especially its intellectuals and artists, not only did not oppose communist governments, they were the greatest defenders of communism.

By the end of the Vietnam War (begun and prosecuted by liberals), however, most liberals abandoned anti-tyranny, anti-evil liberalism and joined the rest of the Left. Since the late 1960s, with very few exceptions (one is Sen. Joseph Lieberman), “liberal” and “Left” have become synonyms. (That is why The New York Times characterizes the Nation, a far-left journal, as “liberal.”)

Thus, when President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” the liberal world condemned him. The Cold War, once regarded as an epic battle between freedom and tyranny, came to be regarded by liberals as an amoral battle between “two superpowers.”

Likewise, liberals almost universally mocked President George W. Bush when he labeled Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, North Korea and Iran an “axis of evil.” It takes a mind that either has little comprehension of evil or little desire to confront it to object to characterizing three of the worst regimes in modern history as “evil.”

How else can one explain the Left’s enchantment with Fidel Castro, the totalitarian ruler of Cuba? Clearly his evil is of little consequence. What matters to people on the Left is that there is free health care and almost universal literacy in Cuba. Whereas non-leftists believe that it is far better to be illiterate but free, leftists believe that it is better to be a literate slave.

Today, this inability to either recognize or to hate evil is manifested in the liberal opposition to the war in Iraq. As I pointed out in a previous column, opponents of the war should be asked to at least acknowledge that America is fighting evil people and an evil doctrine in Iraq. But even that is difficult, if not impossible, for most people on the Left.

As noted above, everyone hates someone, and that includes people on the Left. The problem is that because they don’t hate evil, they hate those who oppose evil. That is how liberals went from anti-communist to anti-anti-communist. To paraphrase one of the greatest moral insights of the Talmud, those who show mercy to the cruel will be cruel to the merciful. So, George W. Bush, not the Islamic terror world, is the Left’s villain; life-embracing Israel is the Left’s villain, not their death-loving enemies; and religious Christians who note moral weaknesses within the Islamic world are the real danger, not the moral weaknesses within the Islamic world.

To be fair, it should be noted that confusion over evil and insufficiently hating it are not confined to the Left. There are religious people who conflate sexual sin with evil and/or advocate automatic forgiveness of all evildoers, even when no repentance has taken place.

But the inability to acknowledge the greatest evils, let alone to join in fighting them, is the defining characteristic of the Left. That is why former Vice President Al Gore just announced that global warming was a worse threat to humanity than terrorism. He really believes that. As do the great many people on the Left whose moral passion focuses more on gasoline prices, drug prices, health care prices, and other expressions of material inequality than on people and movements dedicated to murder. That is why Robert Redford and friends from Hollywood can celebrate Fidel Castro. Castro may imprison political opponents, and most Cubans may have no right of dissent, but they are economically equal.

—FrontPageMagazine.com, November 22, 2005

Dead But Not Gone
by William S. Lind

It sometimes happens that the worst characteristic of an otherwise valuable book is its title. Such is the case with Paul Gottfried’s latest work, The Strange Death of Marxism. Instead of Marxism’s obituary, what Gottfried has actually written is the story of its transmutation into—well, into exactly what remains in dispute. Whatever it might best be called, it is clearly the basis for the political correctness and multiculturalism that have become the state ideology in most of Europe and the United States.

Along the way, Gottfried does chronicle the death of classical, economic Marxism-Leninism both in and beyond European Communist Parties. There are no surprises here; postwar revelations of Stalinist horrors coupled with a rising prosperity that enabled European workers to join the middle class undermined the powerful French and Italian Communist Parties of the 1950s, along with those in most other countries. Maoist and Castroite attempts to internationalize the workers’ revolution by translating it into Third World liberation kept Marxism-Leninism on life support for a while, but it was already brain dead. By the time the Soviet Union fell in 1989, classical Marxism had long since been stuffed and mounted, like Lenin. Not even the Chinese Communist Party takes it seriously anymore.

Were that the main substance of Gottfried’s book, it would amount to little more than the usual ho-hum academic work. In fact, it is very much more. What Gottfried really presents is the history of Marxism’s bastard offspring, political correctness, and the institution most responsible for its birth, the Frankfurt School. In so doing, The Strange Death of Marxism joins Lorenz Jäger’s superb new biography of Theodor Adorno in making the intellectual history of the most radical of anti-Western ideologies accessible to a nonacademic audience.

Gottfried traces the rise of PC and multiculturalism through Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukacs, the Frankfurt School, and others, showing how Marx’s economic determinism evolved into an obsession with the unholy trinity of “racism, sexism, and homophobia,” which now demands endless sacrifices. The first way station was what Gottfried calls “neomarxism:”

Neomarxists called themselves Marxists without accepting all of Marx’s historical and economic theories but while upholding socialism against capitalism, as a moral position …. Thereafter socialists would build their conceptual fabrics on Marx’s notion of “alienation,” extracted from his writings of the 1840s …. [they] could therefore dispense with a strictly materialist analysis and shift … focus toward religion, morality, and aesthetics.

What happened next is a matter of dispute, more over terminology than anything else. As Marxism became PC and multiculturalism, did it turn into cultural, as distinguished from economic, Marxism, or did it, as Gottfried contends, move so far beyond Marx as to constitute post-Marxism? Gottfried writes,

Is the critical observation about the Frankfurt School therefore correct, that it exemplifies ‘cultural Bolshevism,’ which pushes Marxist-Leninist revolution under a sociological-Freudian label? To the extent its practitioners and despisers would both answer to this characterization, it may in fact be valid … but if Marxism under the Frankfurt School has undergone [these] alterations, then there may be little Marxism left in it. The appeal of the Critical Theorists to Marx has become increasingly ritualistic and what there is in the theory of Marxist sources is now intermingled with identifiably non-Marxist ones …. In a nutshell, they had moved beyond Marxism … into a militantly antibourgeois stance that operates independently of Marxist economic assumptions.

Here Gottfried is both right and wrong. He is correct that the cultural Marxism we know as political correctness has left Marxism-Leninism and orthodox Marxist economics behind. It did so early; by the late 1910s, Gramsci and Lukacs perceived that culture was not merely “superstructure” but a separate and important variable, and in 1930 Max Horkheimer, the Frankfurt School’s new director, said that the working class would not be the basis of a revolution.

But Gottfried writes, “In defense of this project as a Marxist one, it might be said that its practitioners regarded themselves as revolutionary disciples of Marx and took pains to place their work into a Marxist framework.” Perhaps we should simply take them at their word.

While much has been written about the Frankfurt School’s move from Germany to the United States after Hitler came to power and its subsequent influence here, Gottfried breaks some new ground in his look at the boomerang effect. How is it that Jürgen Habermas, Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s successor at the Frankfurt School, has good things to say about America? As Gottfried writes,

Immigration reform for the benefit of Third World populations, followed by laws aimed at curbing discrimination against racial minorities and recognition of feminist and gay rights, began in the United States about ten to fifteen years earlier than in Western Europe.

Far from being a bastion of church-going cultural conservatism, the United States has become the world leader of the culturally Marxist revolution, to the point of attempting to impose secular democracy and women’s rights on the Islamic world by force of arms. Gottfried rightly traces European cultural Marxism back to the American-designed re-education of the Germans after World War II, of which Habermas proudly proclaims himself an heir. If some European countries have now gone farther than the U.S. in making cultural Marxism the state ideology—any dissent from which risks a term in prison—America had much to do with injecting the poison into the European body politic. This time it was Horkheimer and Adorno who arrived on the sealed train.

In his last chapter, Gottfried argues that the “soft despotism” of cultural Marxism, the spirit of Huxley’s Brave New World, is a political religion. That is a fair description of ideology in general; all ideologies are anti-Christ, false Christianity promising heaven on earth through man’s own efforts. Despite labeling cultural Marxism “post-Marxism,” Gottfried acknowledges that “the appeal of a Communist god remains a critical point of reference for explaining the current European parliamentary left.” The transmuted effect of this god is that

Those who are secure in their pure intentions also understand the pervasive evil of their Euro-American or German identity. It is something that must be devalued and eventually removed from human relations, in the transition to a global society that will ‘enrich’ the Western world by replacing it.

Nor is this goal confined to the European Left:

Prominent American neoconservative journalist and author Stephen Schwartz has argued in the National Review that those who are fighting for global democracy should view Leon Trotsky as a worthy forerunner.

In the end, Gottfried ends up proving the opposite of the thesis in his book’s title. Uncle Karl may be buried, but he’s far from dead.

—The American Conservative, October 10, 2005, p. 33, 34

Good Night and Good Luck
by Ann Coulter

As noted here previously, George Clooney’s movie, Good Night, and Good Luck, about pious parson Edward R. Murrow and Sen. Joseph McCarthy, failed to produce one person unjustly accused by McCarthy. Since I described McCarthy as a great American patriot defamed by liberals in my 2003 book, Treason, liberals have had two more years to produce a person—just one person—falsely accused by McCarthy. They still can’t do it.

Meanwhile, I can prove that Murrow’s good friend Laurence Duggan was a Soviet spy responsible for having innocent people murdered. The brilliant and perceptive journalist Murrow was not only unaware of the hundreds of Soviet spies running loose in the U.S. government, he was also unaware that his own dear friend Duggan was a Soviet spy—his friend on whose behalf corpses littered the Swiss landscape.

Contrary to the image of the Black Night of Fascism (BNOF) under McCarthy leading to mass suicide with bodies constantly falling on the heads of pedestrians in Manhattan, Duggan was the only suicide. After being questioned by the FBI, Duggan leapt from a window. Of course, given the people he was doing business with, he may have been pushed.

After Duggan’s death, Murrow, along with the rest of the howling establishment, angrily denounced the idea that Duggan could possibly have been disloyal to America.

Well, now we know the truth. Decrypted Soviet cables and mountains of documents from Soviet archives prove beyond doubt that Lawrence Duggan was one of Stalin’s most important spies. “McCarthyism” didn’t kill him; his guilt did.

During the height of the Soviet purges in the mid-’30s, as millions of innocents were being tortured, exiled and killed on Stalin’s orders, Murrow’s good pal Duggan was using his position at the State Department to pass important documents to the Soviets. The documents were so sensitive, Duggan had to return the originals to the State Department before the end of the day. Some were so important, they were sent directly to Stalin and Molotov.

On at least one occasion, Murrow’s dear friend Duggan sat with his Soviet handler for an hour as the handler photographed 60 documents for the motherland. In other words, Duggan was the kind of disloyal, two-faced, back-stabbing weasel you rarely see outside of the entertainment industry. (He certainly was perceptive, that Murrow.)

All this time, people Duggan knew personally were being falsely accused and executed back in the Soviet Union. Duggan expressed concern about Stalin’s purges with his Soviet handler, but he didn’t stop spying. As Allen Weinstein describes it in The Haunted Wood, Duggan was mostly concerned about being falsely accused by Stalin himself someday.

Because of Murrow’s good buddy Duggan, innocent people were killed. Not just the millions murdered during the purges while Duggan was earning “employee of the month” awards from Stalin. At least one man was murdered solely to protect Duggan’s identity as a Soviet spy.

Ignatz Reiss had been the head of Soviet secret police in Europe. As such, he was aware of Soviet agents in the U.S., including Duggan. But unlike Duggan, Reiss was stunned by Stalin’s bloody purges. In 1937, Reiss defected from the Soviet Union, threatening to expose Duggan if they came after him. It was his death warrant.

Two months later, Soviet secret police tracked Reiss to a restaurant in Switzerland. According to the official memo describing Reiss’ murder, Soviet agents dragged Reiss out of the restaurant, shoved him in a car, shot him and dumped his body by the side of the road. (Or, in Soviet parlance, he was “debriefed.”)

Soviet officials later happily informed Duggan’s handler in America: “(Reiss) is liquidated, (but) not yet his wife. ... Now the danger that (Duggan) will be exposed because of (Reiss) is considerably decreased.” Despite all Clooney’s double-sourced fact-checking, he missed the part about Murrow’s good friend Duggan being an accomplice to murder.

To hear these liberals carry on, “McCarthyism” was the worst thing that ever happened in the history of the universe. No one has ever been so persecuted or so heroic as Hollywood actors in the ’50s.

At the exact same time as these crybabies were wailing about McCarthyism, there was much worse going on in the parts of the world so admired by the Hollywood left. It’s not as if we have to go back to the Peloponnesian War to find greater suffering than that of Hollywood drama queens during the BNOF under McCarthyism.

I believe anyone would find it preferable to have been a “target” of McCarthy in the ’50s than to have been an ordinary citizen living in the Soviet Union, Hungary, Poland, the Ukraine, or any nation infected by the Red Plague.

Thanks to McCarthy, and no thanks to Murrow, the worst horror to befall an American citizen in the ’50s was the dire prospect of losing a movie credit—although, since then, I suppose having to watch a George Clooney movie would run a close second.

—Human Events, November 21, 2005, p. 6

A Teen’s Take on China
by Nathan Helms

Today, the United States stands almost alone in the world. Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a generally aggressive foreign policy, have led even formerly close allies like South Korea and Germany to embrace anti-Americanism in some respects. America is looking for new friends and partners in commerce and diplomacy to bolster its economy and help implement its world policies.

Some believe such an ally is to be found in the People’s Republic of China, a powerful country with an apparently bright future. This belief is, however, based on erroneous assumptions. China is not America’s friend, but her adversary. China and the U.S. have diametrically opposed ideologies, different world agendas, and economic incongruities that make the two counties not merely rivals, but opponents. U.S. policy should reflect this reality.

Politically, the two countries are virtual opposites. The United States is a champion of democratic self-rule, while China and her communist allies are opponents of such democracy. China lacks freedom of religion, keeps political parties illegal (other than the Communist Party), prevents genuinely contested elections, and forever increases government control of the business sector (up from 65 percent a few years ago to 80 percent).

Such anti-democratic controls are repugnant to American beliefs and values. Solely on an ideological basis, it is impossible to treat China as an ally.

China is also America’s rival for strategic reasons. In 1996 and again in 2001, China openly threatened, by military games and missile tests, America’s ally and trade partner, Taiwan. China has seized leadership of the communist world and is a growing influence over other Asian nations.

In May 1999, the Cox Report by the House Committee on U.S. National Security Concerns stated, “The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has stolen classified design information of the United States’ most advanced thermonuclear weapons. …[PRC penetration] almost certainly continues today.”

Recently, China has hindered U.S. policy regarding North Korea. China directly funds North Korea’s military enterprises, spending millions of dollars daily. In recent talks seeking to remove nuclear programs and weapons from the rogue state, China—the only nation capable of pressuring North Korea into dismantling its weapons programs—was unwilling to act. Chinese foreign policy, therefore, like its sociopolitical ideology, is a problem for America.

The greatest threat China poses to the United States is economic. China’s enormous population of 1.3 billion is increasingly urban and industrialized. It operates thousands of factories and churns out enormous quantities of cheap, low-quality goods. Granted, this does have positive effects for many enterprises because of the decrease in costs. It also, however, means a decrease in quality and, more important, results in thousands of jobs vital to the American working class being outsourced to China—an estimated 26,000 in 2004 alone.

American companies cannot compete with Chinese wages as low as 25 cents an hour, so many have moved their manufacturing operations to China or changed the focus of their businesses.

In this case, Chinese economic competition has not benefited America. In contrast, during the 1960s and ’70s, Japan provided stiff competition to the United States, but in quality, rather than simply price, which, in turn, prompted great efforts to improve quality on the part of American companies, raising the standard in technology and industry universally.

Chinese competition does not do this at all, but rather competes only with pricing and only at the low end of the market. It simply eliminates American competitiveness. This, coupled with the outsourcing of American jobs, serves to make China a significant economic antagonist to the United States. To combat this, the United States should raise tariffs and limit the extent to which the American market is flooded with Chinese goods, or face the severe consequences of increased declines in our own manufacturing capacity.

Whatever China’s future brings, official United States policy should be wary. Napoleon greatly cautioned anyone who would make an enemy of China. It is not a power to be taken lightly. Because of the sociopolitical, strategic, military, and economic rivalries between the two countries, both now and foreseeable, American policy toward China must be one of cautious antagonism.

The huge red dragon of China is no docile pet, but a nascent colossus.

—Dallas Morning News, November 23, 2005, p. 23A

The World Affairs Council of Greater Dallas announced its winners last week in its Bickel & Brewster International Essay Contest. This essay, by Nathan, a junior at Cistercian Preparatory School in Irving, won first place.