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QUOTE OF THE DAY:

-Ecclesiastes

PERMANENT EVOLUTION

Jinghao Zhouwriting on the In The National Interest websitehas Four Observations on how the market is transforming Communist China.

This is a key change. The shift from a totalitarian society in fact under Mao ZeDong to a nominal totalitarian but in practice merely authoritarian society under Deng Xiaoping has brought China to a crossroads. To go backward is to risk the economic growth that keeps both social peace and legitimizes the rule of the CCP in the eyes of the populace; to go forward much further is to build a middle-class that will eventually, as in South Korea and Taiwan, demand and win multiparty democracy and overthrow the system erected in 1949.

JUDITH KLINGHOFFER a noted historian who blogs on HNN sent me an intriguing email regarding history education and the Holocaust. It seems that in Austria students are learning about the Holocaust by having each student research the fate of a particular Austrian Jew who fell victim to the Nazis.

Totalitarians who plan genocidal programs require a period of demhumanization and alienation where through political programming, their intended victims are transformed psychologically into an inimical ” other” in the eyes of the loyal followers. Hitler began speaking of Jews in eliminationist terms in 1919. Pol Pot outlined his class-based genocide decades earlier. Austria’s history program, reverses that legacy and for the students, changes the Jewish victims of the Holocaust from a collective abstraction to real human beings with whom identication and empathy comes more readily.

CAERDROIA has a provocative post on ” cultural marxism ” – the bastardized, quasi-religious movement infecting our institutions of higher learning so that they produce thoughtless and time-wasting exercises in nihilism like ” whiteness studies ” ( an incoherent brew of anti-white racism and hate-America polemics). Some of the more radical Women’s Studies programs are equally goofy, overtly political and without educational merit.

Here’s a money quote from Caerdroia:

“In any evangelistic movement, there are only two ways to end the movement. Either a competing axiom set must arise, which makes a better fit with the needs of the people exposed to it, or the evangelists must be killed. It is in the nature of evangelism to be persistent and coercive. Otherwise, an evangelist is unlikely to convert anyone to his belief system. It is also in the nature of evangelistic movements to be based on logically-shaky foundations, because if the foundations were logically formed, evangelism would be unnecessary; reason would be sufficient to convince people of the utility of the belief system. “