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(Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 He settled in New York City where he quickly learned that there was no market for his eloquent and powerful English language attacks on the Soviet Union. To this day, he writes without fear or favor or the conventions of polite society. He chaired the "Alternative to the New York Times Committee" in 1980, challenged the editors of the New York Times to a debate (which they declined) and became a columnist for the New York City Tribune. His columns are today read in both English and Russian.)
January 16, 2005
I don't know who you are — I am addressing any Chinese man or woman. Nor am I concerned with your sociopolitical views.
Suppose you believe that the present form of government in China is the best possible for the country and that a vast majority of the Chinese people share your belief. So its present form of government will remain in China, and democracy or constitutionalism will remain in the West, and most Chinese and most Westerners will live happily in peace and friendship.
Please tell me how you want me to call the present form of government in China. Dictatorship was a good word in the 19th century, but in the 20th it turned into a curse, though Marx, Lenin, and Mao spoke positively of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Absolutism? Kung, the great Chinese sociopolitical thinker who lived about 25 centuries ago, advocated absolutism more convincingly than did the West European thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes. But you will perhaps reject the term “absolutism” as well.
Perhaps, “socialism,” the official term of Marx, Lenin, and Mao, will do?
So Westerners will flourish under whatever they call their form of government in the West, and you under whatever you call your form of government in China. Here I could put a fullstop in this letter after my best wishes for the Western New Year — and the Chinese New Year, which comes later, as I know because I celebrate annually the Chinese New Year as well.
But there is one historical detail.
The form of government called democracy, or constitutionalism, is immune to an easy overthrow because the U.S. president, for example, is “overthrown” every 4 or 8 years, while the U.S. Congress is “overthrown” all the time, senator after senator and representative after representative. On the other hand, the form of government called dictatorship or absolutism or “socialism” is a pyramid standing on its apex, and the entire pyramid collapses, as happened when Gorbachev was removed from the apex of the pyramid of dictatorship in Russia in 1991. The Soviet pyramid of dictatorship had existed since 1917, and it had been protected for 73 years by the armed forces, the police, and the secret police. There was no crash, roar, thunder, or rattle. The pyramid growing up from strength to strength for 73 years suddenly dissolved like a wisp of smoke, and Gorbachev became a nobody, lecturing in the West because the West has never understood that he reversed Stalin's outdated territorial expansion in order to concentrate on the development of post-nuclear superweapons, deciding the destiny of the world, just as nuclear weapons in 1945 decided the destiny of Japan despite its vast territorial expansion.
What happened in Russia in 1991 to provoke the dissolution of the globally powerful dictatorship? An earthquake? No! A famine? No! The NATO bombing of Moscow for 78 days? No!
Gorbachev had been developing post-nuclear superweapons to rule the world, and predicted in his speeches that “life will become meaningful for all mankind for the first time in history.” Had he obtained post-nuclear superweapons, able to destroy or neutralize the Western (and Chinese) means of nuclear retaliation, he would have become the sovereign of the world. As it is, I am asked: “Is he alive?”
The moral is that a dictatorship, absolutism, “socialism” can establish world domination and may dissolve like a wisp of smoke.
So, why did the globally powerful Soviet empire, preparing for world domination by means of post-nuclear superweapons, suddenly dissolve like a wisp of smoke?
In 1918 the Soviet “proletarian state,” establishing “socialism” to establish “communism,” was a world fashion. Communist parties sprang up in all countries. Hungary became Soviet, and Germany was expected to become such. Later, Roosevelt's spouse, the First Lady, went to Soviet Russia and then published a book that could move Stalin to tears of gratitude. Roosevelt's ambassador in Moscow praised Stalin to the skies, as did Walter Duranty, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times in the 1920s. At one time one quarter of voters voted Communist in France, and one third in Italy.
How to save the democratic West? Way back in 1918 Winston Churchill began to organize the invasion of Russia to destroy “the Bolshevism bacillus,” infecting, subverting, Sovietizing the West.
But fashions come and go. As of 1989, the very word “communism” had disappeared from public pronouncements. Even China doesn't call itself “communist” internationally and is not called “communist” by the West officially. The official West applies to China only Western terms, such as “president” or “government,” creating the false impression that the legacy of Marx, Lenin, and Mao does not exist in China. West university “experts” on China mislead the public by announcing that this legacy is going away, and democracy will appear in China ere long. They regard the permission of private enterprise as a sign of coming democracy though private enterprise existed in ancient Eastern tyrannies for millennia, Lenin permitted private enterprise in 1921, and Hitler relied on it throughout his rule.
As a translator into English I lived in Moscow among those who had emigrated from the United States and other English-speaking countries in Stalin's Russia and became translators into English. Has a single Westerner emigrated in the last 55 years to post-1949 China? Is there a single Westerner who is a Communist on the pattern of the Chinese Communist Party or at least a “fellow traveler”?
On the other hand, there has appeared “the democracy bacillus”: rising on Tiananmen Square was a huge replica of the Statue of Liberty. You see? The “supreme leaders of China” have to destroy “the democracy bacillus” or their form of government will dissolve like a wisp of smoke, as did the globally powerful Soviet form of government in 1991.
Now, my dear Chinese friend: as a disciple of great Kung you may despise democracy. But a fashion is a fashion. In vain did the sophisticates tell the Hungarians in 1918 that the Soviet “proletarian state,” its “socialism,” developing into “communism,” and the rest of it is absurd nonsense. The Hungarians established “a bolshevist dictatorship of the proletariat,” and only a foreign invasion destroyed it in 1920.
As a result of the Tiananmen movement, the powerful empire of China could dissolve like a wisp of smoke. This is why “the supreme leaders” of China have been developing since 1986 post-nuclear superweapons: to destroy “the democracy bacillus” not only in China, but in the West as well.
Tiananmen Square could have been encircled by the police and “security police” to prevent newcomers, water, and food from getting into the Square, and in several days the Square would have been empty. But that would not have been enough to prevent another epidemic as a result of infection by “the democracy bacillus.” So they moved in mechanized armor against unarmed dissidents.
Or take Taiwan. I do not believe that China cannot exist without Taiwan as its dependency. The “supreme leaders” of China have been trying to make Taiwan their dependency because it is another source of the “democracy bacillus” — of subversion by the very fact of its independent democratic existence. Well, the West is a vast trans-Atlantic Tiananmen Square or Taiwan, is it not?
You see, my dear Chinese friend? It is impossible to have dictatorship-absolutism-“socialism” and democracy-constitutionalism living in peace and friendship in the same globalized world: democracy-constitutionalism has become globally fashionable and subverts by its very existence dictatorship-absolutism-“socialism.”
The geostrategically absurd wars on Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq or other escapades of the West do not threaten “the supreme leaders' power” in China. What threatens it is the fact of existence of the fashionable democracy-constitutionalism, of “the democracy bacillus” in the West, which can be dealt with — not with mechanized armor as was the Tiananmen Square gathering, but with post-nuclear superweapons such as nano assemblers.
(Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 He settled in New York City where he quickly learned that there was no market for his eloquent and powerful English language attacks on the Soviet Union. To this day, he writes without fear or favor or the conventions of polite society. He chaired the "Alternative to the New York Times Committee" in 1980, challenged the editors of the New York Times to a debate (which they declined) and became a columnist for the New York City Tribune. His columns are today read in both English and Russian.)
January 16, 2005
I don't know who you are — I am addressing any Chinese man or woman. Nor am I concerned with your sociopolitical views.
Suppose you believe that the present form of government in China is the best possible for the country and that a vast majority of the Chinese people share your belief. So its present form of government will remain in China, and democracy or constitutionalism will remain in the West, and most Chinese and most Westerners will live happily in peace and friendship.
Please tell me how you want me to call the present form of government in China. Dictatorship was a good word in the 19th century, but in the 20th it turned into a curse, though Marx, Lenin, and Mao spoke positively of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Absolutism? Kung, the great Chinese sociopolitical thinker who lived about 25 centuries ago, advocated absolutism more convincingly than did the West European thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes. But you will perhaps reject the term “absolutism” as well.
Perhaps, “socialism,” the official term of Marx, Lenin, and Mao, will do?
So Westerners will flourish under whatever they call their form of government in the West, and you under whatever you call your form of government in China. Here I could put a fullstop in this letter after my best wishes for the Western New Year — and the Chinese New Year, which comes later, as I know because I celebrate annually the Chinese New Year as well.
But there is one historical detail.
The form of government called democracy, or constitutionalism, is immune to an easy overthrow because the U.S. president, for example, is “overthrown” every 4 or 8 years, while the U.S. Congress is “overthrown” all the time, senator after senator and representative after representative. On the other hand, the form of government called dictatorship or absolutism or “socialism” is a pyramid standing on its apex, and the entire pyramid collapses, as happened when Gorbachev was removed from the apex of the pyramid of dictatorship in Russia in 1991. The Soviet pyramid of dictatorship had existed since 1917, and it had been protected for 73 years by the armed forces, the police, and the secret police. There was no crash, roar, thunder, or rattle. The pyramid growing up from strength to strength for 73 years suddenly dissolved like a wisp of smoke, and Gorbachev became a nobody, lecturing in the West because the West has never understood that he reversed Stalin's outdated territorial expansion in order to concentrate on the development of post-nuclear superweapons, deciding the destiny of the world, just as nuclear weapons in 1945 decided the destiny of Japan despite its vast territorial expansion.
What happened in Russia in 1991 to provoke the dissolution of the globally powerful dictatorship? An earthquake? No! A famine? No! The NATO bombing of Moscow for 78 days? No!
Gorbachev had been developing post-nuclear superweapons to rule the world, and predicted in his speeches that “life will become meaningful for all mankind for the first time in history.” Had he obtained post-nuclear superweapons, able to destroy or neutralize the Western (and Chinese) means of nuclear retaliation, he would have become the sovereign of the world. As it is, I am asked: “Is he alive?”
The moral is that a dictatorship, absolutism, “socialism” can establish world domination and may dissolve like a wisp of smoke.
So, why did the globally powerful Soviet empire, preparing for world domination by means of post-nuclear superweapons, suddenly dissolve like a wisp of smoke?
In 1918 the Soviet “proletarian state,” establishing “socialism” to establish “communism,” was a world fashion. Communist parties sprang up in all countries. Hungary became Soviet, and Germany was expected to become such. Later, Roosevelt's spouse, the First Lady, went to Soviet Russia and then published a book that could move Stalin to tears of gratitude. Roosevelt's ambassador in Moscow praised Stalin to the skies, as did Walter Duranty, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times in the 1920s. At one time one quarter of voters voted Communist in France, and one third in Italy.
How to save the democratic West? Way back in 1918 Winston Churchill began to organize the invasion of Russia to destroy “the Bolshevism bacillus,” infecting, subverting, Sovietizing the West.
But fashions come and go. As of 1989, the very word “communism” had disappeared from public pronouncements. Even China doesn't call itself “communist” internationally and is not called “communist” by the West officially. The official West applies to China only Western terms, such as “president” or “government,” creating the false impression that the legacy of Marx, Lenin, and Mao does not exist in China. West university “experts” on China mislead the public by announcing that this legacy is going away, and democracy will appear in China ere long. They regard the permission of private enterprise as a sign of coming democracy though private enterprise existed in ancient Eastern tyrannies for millennia, Lenin permitted private enterprise in 1921, and Hitler relied on it throughout his rule.
As a translator into English I lived in Moscow among those who had emigrated from the United States and other English-speaking countries in Stalin's Russia and became translators into English. Has a single Westerner emigrated in the last 55 years to post-1949 China? Is there a single Westerner who is a Communist on the pattern of the Chinese Communist Party or at least a “fellow traveler”?
On the other hand, there has appeared “the democracy bacillus”: rising on Tiananmen Square was a huge replica of the Statue of Liberty. You see? The “supreme leaders of China” have to destroy “the democracy bacillus” or their form of government will dissolve like a wisp of smoke, as did the globally powerful Soviet form of government in 1991.
Now, my dear Chinese friend: as a disciple of great Kung you may despise democracy. But a fashion is a fashion. In vain did the sophisticates tell the Hungarians in 1918 that the Soviet “proletarian state,” its “socialism,” developing into “communism,” and the rest of it is absurd nonsense. The Hungarians established “a bolshevist dictatorship of the proletariat,” and only a foreign invasion destroyed it in 1920.
As a result of the Tiananmen movement, the powerful empire of China could dissolve like a wisp of smoke. This is why “the supreme leaders” of China have been developing since 1986 post-nuclear superweapons: to destroy “the democracy bacillus” not only in China, but in the West as well.
Tiananmen Square could have been encircled by the police and “security police” to prevent newcomers, water, and food from getting into the Square, and in several days the Square would have been empty. But that would not have been enough to prevent another epidemic as a result of infection by “the democracy bacillus.” So they moved in mechanized armor against unarmed dissidents.
Or take Taiwan. I do not believe that China cannot exist without Taiwan as its dependency. The “supreme leaders” of China have been trying to make Taiwan their dependency because it is another source of the “democracy bacillus” — of subversion by the very fact of its independent democratic existence. Well, the West is a vast trans-Atlantic Tiananmen Square or Taiwan, is it not?
You see, my dear Chinese friend? It is impossible to have dictatorship-absolutism-“socialism” and democracy-constitutionalism living in peace and friendship in the same globalized world: democracy-constitutionalism has become globally fashionable and subverts by its very existence dictatorship-absolutism-“socialism.”
The geostrategically absurd wars on Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq or other escapades of the West do not threaten “the supreme leaders' power” in China. What threatens it is the fact of existence of the fashionable democracy-constitutionalism, of “the democracy bacillus” in the West, which can be dealt with — not with mechanized armor as was the Tiananmen Square gathering, but with post-nuclear superweapons such as nano assemblers.
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