In bitter irony for China, North Korea furthers U.S. strategic goals

From - http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/10/us-korea-usa-china-idUSBRE93903U20130410?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews

Nobody but Kim Jong-un knows what he hopes to achieve with his saber-rattling campaign, but the young North Korean leader probably didn't set out to aid the United States, the sworn enemy of three generations of Kims, at the expense of his country's main ally, China.

In a boon for U.S. policy that can only add to China's frustration with Kim, North Korean bellicosity has helped reinforce an American strategy of rebalancing its security policies toward the Asia-Pacific region.

To a China that often sounds more wary of Washington than of Pyongyang, months of North Korean missile and nuclear tests followed by a daily stream of bloodthirsty war threats may be worrisome, but the U.S. reaction is even more troubling.

"We understand what kind of regime North Korea is, but we also understand that North Korea is playing games," said Sun Zhe, director of the Center for U.S-China Relations at Beijing's Tsinghua University.

"Most importantly, we are complaining that the United States is using military drills as an excuse to continue to do this (rebalancing), putting up B-2s and other advanced weapons systems," he said.

B-2 and B-52 bombers, radar-evading F-22s and anti-missile system vessels like the USS John S. McCain represented the initial U.S. response to North Korea's repeated, explicit threats to launch nuclear strikes against the United States.

The U.S. also said it would shift THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System) to defend Guam from missile attack. And Tokyo's Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper said Japan would permanently deploy Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) anti-missile systems in Okinawa to counter North Korean missiles.

Mao's "Great Leap Forward" resulted in great famine

From - 

‘Tombstone’ by Yang Jisheng, translated from the Chinese by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian - http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2012/11/03/review-tombstone-the-great-chinese-famine-yang-jisheng-translated-from-chinese-stacy-mosher-and-guo-jian/yuFFCEmLIxORRuesm3LjXI/story.html

"Mao’s Great Leap Forward, designed to make China the world’s leading communist state, generated the worst famine in history. Until recently, the West knew little about the causes and magnitude of the disaster, which killed tens of millions in four years.

As a veteran Chinese journalist, Yang Jisheng recounts in his book “Tombstone” how for decades officials blamed “natural calamity” for the massive population loss; references were made to epidemics, “and no mention of starvation was allowed.” Yang has conducted a sweeping investigation and amassed information from dozens of archives to produce a comprehensive history of the Great Chinese Famine. He intended his book as a monument to the millions of victims, including his own father.

The original two-volume version of “Tombstone,’’ double the size of the English edition, appeared in 2008 in Hong Kong and has already run to eight printings. The book is banned in mainland China where no full famine account has ever been published, “an offense to the memories of tens of millions,” writes Yang.

Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian, was the first to disclose to the West the true dimensions of this man-made tragedy. In his 2010 award-winning “Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62’’ Dikötter holds Mao responsible for the deaths of 45 million people, who were starved and beaten to death in pursuit of a utopian paradise.

“The masses are slaves,” a party cadre was quoted as saying, “and they won’t do anything unless beaten, berated, or deprived of food.” Local cadres had unlimited power to rape, ransack homes, deny food, beat and kill those who stole out of hunger or those not blindly obeying. The draconian system generated waste and destruction. Peasants received inflexible commands about plowing depth for seeding and planting density, directives that lead to crop failure.An admirer of Stalin, Mao imposed collectivization and industrialization on backward China, emphasizing high production targets and speed. But unlike Stalin, he mobilized peasants to work in both agriculture and industry, turning the entire country into a vast gulag. Millions of private farms across China were forcibly consolidated into gigantic communes, the state seizing private land and assets without compensation; opponents were beaten and killed. Private property was seen as an impediment to communism; about 40 percent of all housing was destroyed. The regime sanctioned an unprecedented persecution of peasants across China, their lives sacrificed to unworkable goals dictated by the supreme leader.

Mao promoted people’s communes, which allowed for an extraordinary concentration of state power. By putting every aspect of peasant lives under the party’s control the system created conditions for the famine. By the end of 1958, 90 percent of the rural population was forced to take meals in communal canteens; cooking implements were confiscated. When supplies ran out and kitchens closed, peasants were left without the means to survive.

Unrealistically high production targets and procurement quotas were the key elements that generated the famine. Faced with political pressure, the cadres exaggerated crop yields. When the myth of peasants hiding grain was created, army detachments were sent to extort every kernel.

At the Lushan Conference of 1959 Mao was made aware that his economic policies had “descended into chaos,” causing starvation. Instead of changing direction, Mao defeated “the anti-party clique” and purged his prominent critic, China’s defense minister Peng Duhai. After the conference Mao’s policies were intensified, extending the impact of the Great Famine.

Party secretaries never traveled to the countryside where desperation was total and cannibalism rampant. To cover up evidence of the famine local cadres had mass graves stomped flat and crops planted on top. With millions dying, the cadres entertained at lavish feasts and had meals delivered to luxury hotels. Survivors remember: “We were swollen with starvation, while the cadres were swollen with overeating.” Officials responsible for millions of deaths were merely transferred to other bureaucracies — unfairly, as some of them judged, since they merely acted on party orders.

Yang’s book can be compared with Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago,” since its evidence was also bravely collected under Communism with the goal of helping dismantle the totalitarian system that had sanctioned mass killings. This system has outlived itself, writes Yang, who believes China should disavow its Communist ideals and erect memorials to the victims of the Great Famine."

LENIN AND GERMAN ASSISTANCE FOR THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION

How the butterfly's wings change the course of history! If the Germans had not helped to move Lenin and his  team move from Switzerland into Petrograd and hence start the Russian Revolution, the first world war may have been shorter; but in all probability Russia may not have turned communist. What that would have meant for human history only a physicist who believes in alternative universes may be able to say; and maybe not even then!

From: http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/bolshevik_revolution/chapter_03.htm

"It was not until the Bolsheviks had received from us a steady flow of funds through various channels and under varying labels that they were in a position to be able to build up their main organ Pravda, to conduct energetic propaganda and appreciably to extend the originally narrow base of their party.

Von Kühlmann, minister of foreign affairs, to the kaiser, December 3, 1917

In April 1917 Lenin and a party of 32 Russian revolutionaries, mostly Bolsheviks, journeyed by train from Switzerland across Germany through Sweden to Petrograd, Russia. They were on their way to join Leon Trotsky to "complete the revolution." Their trans-Germany transit was approved, facilitated, and financed by the German General Staff. Lenin's transit to Russia was part of a plan approved by the German Supreme Command, apparently not immediately known to the kaiser, to aid in the disintegration of the Russian army and so eliminate Russia from World War I. The possibility that the Bolsheviks might be turned against Germany and Europe did not occur to the German General Staff. Major General Hoffman has written, "We neither knew nor foresaw the danger to humanity from the consequences of this journey of the Bolsheviks to Russia."¹

At the highest level the German political officer who approved Lenin's journey to Russia was Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, a descendant of the Frankfurt banking family Bethmann, which achieved great prosperity in the nineteenth century. Bethmann-Hollweg was appointed chancellor in 1909 and in November 1913 became the subject of the first vote of censure ever passed by the German Reichstag on a chancellor. It was Bethmann-Hollweg who in 1914 told the world that the German guarantee to Belgium was a mere "scrap of paper." Yet on other war matters — such as the use of unrestricted submarine warfare — Bethmann-Hollweg was ambivalent; in January 1917 he told the kaiser, "I can give Your Majesty neither my assent to the unrestricted submarine warfare nor my refusal." By 1917 Bethmann-Hollweg had lost the Reichstag's support and resigned — but not before approving transit of Bolshevik revolutionaries to Russia. The transit instructions from Bethmann-Hollweg went through the state secretary Arthur Zimmermann — who was immediately under Bethmann-Hollweg and who handled day-to-day operational details with the German ministers in both Bern and Copenhagen — to the German minister to Bern in early April 1917. The kaiser himself was not aware of the revolutionary movement until after Lenin had passed into Russia."

DRM and asbestos curtains meet the Shah of Iran

Exploring the law of unintended consequences by Scott Granneman, SecurityFocus

DRM and asbestos curtains meet the Shah of Iran

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/21/unintended_consequences/

Social media triggers revolutions

Social media - Twitter, Facebook, Sina Weibo, etc - was invented for people, usually young ones, to communicate with each other electronically. They have succeeded extremely well.


But the inventors could not have envisaged that SM users would use it to do more than chat about their daily lives and exchange their views about the best movies, restaurtants and sound tracks. They certainly could not have imagined that SM would have the unintended consequence to ignite revolutions, to change the world.

I am, of course, talking about the so-called Arab Spring, which started in Tunisia, moved to Egypt and Libya, causing regime changes that their citizens could not have imagined possible for many more years to come.  SM nearly caused changes in Yemen and Bahrain and may be doing so in Syria as well. See http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/facebook-and-twitter-key-to-arab-spring-uprisings-report

There was both hope and fears that users of Sino Weibo would ignite a 'Jasmine Spring'. But that did not happen. Nevertheless, interactions have led to several dodgy factories being shut down or refused planning permission, several cases where persecution of dissidents or victims of miscarriages of justice by local authorities were overturned by central authorities. One does not know how much of the current moves by the Chinese Communist Party to rein in spending by officials, corruption, reversals of local injustices, exhortations to listen to the people, and even talk of major reform and move towards democracy is caused by or, at least, strengthened by SM interactions. By I am sure these interactions have not hindered such thinking and pronouncements. See http://chindia-alert.org/2012/05/19/how-chinas-300m-microbloggers-are-shaking-the-system/

Just as the invention of the printing press led to greater freedoms, either of religion or from political repression, so SM is proving to be another turn of the wheel towards greater awareness of wrongs and the garnering of popular support to overcome them. And just as the church in the Middle Ages could not stop the printing press, so today's authorities cannot stop SM. I'm afraid the 'rabbit is out of the hat' and Pandora's Box has been opened. No power on earth can get the rabbit back into the hat or shut Pandora's Box, at least not also getting SM back in it before shutting it.

Hanging on until it's too late

From Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/07/us-syria-crisis-idUSBRE8610SH20120807?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FtopNews+%28News+%2F+US+%2F+Top+News%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

One of the unintended consequences of President Assad's decision not to make any substantive reforms s that in due course he may not only lose his position but perhaps his life as well. This will follow the precedent of Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein, and many other dictators faced with intractable opposition.

Riyad Hijab is sworn in as new Prime Minister by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (R) in Damascus in this handout photo distributed by Syrian News Agency (SANA) June 26, 2012.

Credit: Reuters/SANA/Handout

By Khaled Yacoub Oweis

AMMAN | Tue Aug 7, 2012 3:51am EDT

Syrian forces pressed on with their offensive against rebels in the largest city Aleppo after the prime minister fled the country, denouncing the "terrorist regime" of Bashar al-Assad.

The defection of Riyad Hijab - who like most of the opposition hails from the Sunni Muslim majority - was a further sign of the isolation of Assad's government around an inner core of powerful members of his minority Alawite sect.

Opposition figures, buoyant despite setbacks in recent weeks of fighting around Damascus and Aleppo, spoke of an extensive and long-planned operation to spirit Hijab and his large extended family across the border to Jordan.