Ronald E. Yates's Blog, page 64

Reflections, June 2020

When I observe what is happening to America—the country I grew up in, that I was educated in, and that I served as a soldier—I am appalled. Anarchy, violence, looting. This is NOT the nation I know and love. This is an aberration, a disfigurement of our Republic.

When I hear elected politicians threatening to desecrate the graves of Confederate soldiers, tear down statues and smash monuments to our past, what they are actually saying is they want to erase and rewrite America’s history. But history is indelible and permanent. It happened. You cannot change it to fit some 21st Century politically correct narrative.  What you can do, is learn from it.  

Abraham Lincoln, followed by President Ulysses S. Grant worked assiduously to repair the damage done by the Civil War—the bloodiest war in our history. Part of that restoration was the Reconstruction of the South and appeals to “bind the nation’s wounds” and care for the widows and children of fallen soldiers from both sides of the conflict.

One of the more poignant policies implemented by Lincoln was to bury Confederate and Union dead next to one another in cemeteries. It was a symbolic gesture aimed at healing the deep wounds of the Civil War—a war that was fought to end slavery and which claimed the lives of more than 600,000 soldiers from both sides. Soldiers and veterans can understand the rectitude and reverence that sheathes that sentiment. Conniving politicians and radical demagogues who never served in the armed forces and who never watched buddies die in combat, cannot.

America’s past is a checkered one. No doubt about it. Slavery, discrimination, lynching. They are stains on our history; blemishes on an imperfect nation. Yet, America remains the only country where people can strive freely for a more perfect union, where they are free to speak their minds, to protest, to worship as they wish, to be individuals, to pursue happiness, and to hold elected officials accountable without fear of retribution.

Today, there are those who want to rip our nation apart and divide us into belligerent tribes based on race, religion, ethnicity, wealth, poverty, achievement, failure, livelihood, and political power. As a firm believer in America’s motto: E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One) I will fight the tribalists to my last breath.  

For the next several days I am reposting commentaries from Americans of all races and occupations who are as concerned as I am about this attempt to obliterate our country from within. I hope you will find them as illuminating and significant as I have.

 

Reflections June 2020

By Joseph M. Valenzano, Jr.

In response to the riots, looting and destruction of property by insurrectionists following the death of a five-time criminal named George Floyd, several well-known retired and active duty General Staff Officers and Admirals have chimed into the rising incendiary rhetoric of Black Lives Matter to announce that the names of military bases named after members of the Confederacy must be changed.

They state that these bases must be renamed because the individuals whose names the bases bear, were associated with the Confederacy and were “traitors”. Really? And our new modern military leaders, retired or otherwise, suddenly have come to this conclusion 150 years after the end of our great Civil War?

Many of these modern-day leaders trained on these bases. Did they feel that way as young PFC’s or did this just come upon them in 2020?

Whatever happened to Abraham Lincoln’s exhortations to “bind the nation’s wounds and…care for his widow and children”?

Didn’t Congress declare that soldiers fighting for the Confederacy were entitled to honorable burial and full military recognition?

Did the Generals and Flag Officers today making these bold statements and demands consider these historical facts?

What names will now be ascribed to military bases such as Bragg, Benning, Lee, Stewart, Hood?

Will there be a push to recognize the “heroes of Black Lives Matter” to give them all a more “current look and feel”.

Give me a break.

Don’t our military leaders have more important things to deal with than renaming bases as a gesture to mollify the demands of a few misguided people?

I have the utmost respect for General David Petraeus, a West Point Graduate, but his contention that those who fought for the Confederacy…Robert E. Lee, George Pickett…were traitors is just plain wrong and indefensible. It is also unnecessary. Statues and monuments of General Lee are all over West Point!

Recently, NASCAR and the United States Marine Corps have decided to abolish flying or using the Confederate Flag. This flag has been flown proudly for over 160 years and many sons and daughters of the South have given their lives in the defense of our freedoms.

The Confederacy happened as did the Civil War; it is a historical fact. You cannot change the past by rewriting it; you can only learn from it.

The Civil War happened. Slavery happened…and, incidentally, slavery continues to exist in today’s world…with black slave owners involved in buying and selling slaves in Africa.

If we continue down the path to destroy monuments and flags and artifacts from our past, how in God’s name will we be able to learn from the mistakes we have made?

Where do all these attempts to rewrite history to conform to what we believe should have happened stop?

Who is next?

Already statues and monuments to Christopher Columbus have been torn down in fits of radical rage, and there is a movement afoot to remove Christopher Columbus from history because he is “believed to be someone who treated the Indian poorly’. Says who? And if he did, perhaps there was a good reason.

Once again, you cannot reinvent history, you can only learn from it.

Much of the circulating information about Christopher Columbus is historically inaccurate and it neglects the many positive aspects of Columbus’ explorations and has placed this information totally out of temporal context. His accomplishments as a daring navigator and explorer are unquestioned and he is emblematic of the millions of immigrants and their pursuit of economic opportunity, religious freedom and hope for a better life. To Italian-Americans like myself “to the world he gave a world” But it is not just Christopher Columbus whose monuments are torn down or desecrated.

The real question is….who’s next? Following the logic of the mob, why not destroy any history about some of our founders like Jefferson, Adams….at least seven of our Founding Fathers were slave owners.

And how about Winston Churchill or General Dwight Eisenhower. He was Supreme Allied Commander and didn’t he keep the army segregated in WWII?

Do you see how ridiculous this all is? Where does it all stop?

Revisionist history serves no useful purpose.

Now we learn that epic movies like “Gone with the Wind” must no longer be shown. The TV show “Cops” is to be discontinued after 25 years. Unbelievably, ”Paw Patrol” is now slated for the junk heap.

Recall, that the tremendously successful and highly educational literary work “To Kill a Mockingbird” was removed from high school educational curriculums a few years back, all because it has “racial overtones.’ There were great life-long lessons learned from the study of this work. What changed?

Armed insurrectionists (there is no other way to describe these individuals) have occupied a seven square block area in Seattle, Washington. The Mayor calls this nothing more than a “block party” and the governor of the state of Washington says “he doesn’t know anything about it”, but these officials tell President Trump to mind his own business!

The insurrectionists have already made their demands well known: They want the elimination of the entire police department, the closing of jails and release of all prisoners, elimination of all fines, free education, reparations for blacks and a host of other ridiculous demands. Fascinating, don’t you think?

And all around the nation, primarily in Democrat-controlled cities and states, hardened criminals are being released from prison over fears they will contract the coronavirus while priests and ministers are being arrested and fined for giving sermons and grandparents walking with their grandchildren are being detained and fined.

I find this very troubling. Don’t you? Mayor DiBlasio in New York City just declared himself to be the greatest mayor in the entire nation. He must think he is Idi Amin. Anyone hear from that despot lately?

If you are not concerned and troubled by all of these things, you have not been paying attention to the lessons of history. The riots, lootings, desecration of churches and monuments, and the destruction of private property have absolutely nothing to do with the death of George Floyd.

Mr. Floyd’s death was tragic but he is no hero or martyr. He was a repeat criminal having served five prison sentences, one a five-year term for robbing a pregnant woman’s apartment and holding a gun to her stomach. He was not a nice man.

More to the point is that far more blacks are killed by blacks in the United States than blacks killed by whites.

One thing I am certain of…as Americans, this cannot stand. We should not…cannot….view these things with apathy. All of this strikes at the core of who we are and the values we hold dear. If it is allowed to continue, we will no longer be a nation of laws but a nation of anarchy.

And if we permit the defunding of police departments, we will be consumed by chaos which is precisely what the enemies of our country desire. The consequences of defunding police departments are both depressing and ominous.

Joseph M. Valenzano, Jr., is a writer & blogger; businessman; and  Professor of business, economics & accounting. He has spent more than 40 years in the publishing and communications industry, holding senior executive positions at McGraw-Hill, Elsevier-NDU, and The Thomson Corporation.

A Message from Police: America, We Are Leaving

Travis Yates is not one of my relatives, at least not one that I am aware of, but given the anarchy and insanity that is gripping and devastating our country today, I would be proud if he were. Yates is a cop in Tulsa, Oklahoma who has been ruthlessly attacked by the media because he has argued that systemic racism in American police departments doesn’t exist. He has referenced research by the National Academy of Sciences and others that back up his opinion.

Of course, in today’s highly partisan and dishonest media, facts no longer matter. Or as Joe Biden likes to say: “We choose truth over facts.” In other words, don’t let facts get in the way of whatever you believe the truth is. Being “right” isn’t about having the right information, it is about mouthing the pre-approved emotional response to a perceived crisis. How do you have “truth” without “facts”? Don’t facts literally define the truth?  Read on:

By Travis Yates

This is the hardest thing I have written.

I grew up in a law enforcement family. My father worked his way up to the rank to Captain at the Ft. Smith (AR) Police Department. As I kid I remember going with him on Friday to pick up his check and I was in awe of these superheroes he worked around.

They were funny and fun to be around. Men and women of all races all with the same mission, to make the community safer.

My dad sacrificed a lot and so did my late mother. Whether it was the week-long surveillance or wiretap or chasing drug runners across the country, he gave it all for my family and worked plenty of extra details to never let our family be without. Some would call that privilege but where I grew up, it was called hard work.

[image error] Travis Yates

The kids at school thought it was cool what my dad did and while he sometimes asked me if anyone gave me a hard time, they never did. There was respect among all….even the kids in shop class.

I didn’t grow up wanting to be a cop but one fateful night, as a freshman in college, that all changed.

I went on a ride-along and my life’s journey would never be the same.

After four years of college, my dad wanted me at an agency that respected that education so I moved to Tulsa (OK) at 21 years old and never looked back.

I didn’t know anyone and all I knew was what I saw my dad do: work hard and treat people with respect. I saw a lot of other cops working hard as well and doing all they could to keep the community safe.

27 years have passed and if you would have told me the condition of law enforcement today, I would have never believed you.

It’s not that law enforcement has changed for the worse but everything around it has.

The mentally ill-used to get treatment and now they just send cops. Kids used to be taught respect and now it’s cool to be disrespectful.

Supervisors used to back you when you were right but now they accuse you of being wrong in order to appease crazy people.

Parents used to get mad at their kids for getting arrested and now they get mad at us.

The media used to highlight the positive contribution our profession gave to society and now they either ignore it or twist the truth for controversy to line their own pockets.

We used to be able to testify in court and we were believed. Now, unless there is video from three different angles, no one cares what you have to say.

With all this talk about racism and racist cops, I’ve never seen people treated differently because of their race. And while I know that cowards that have never done this job will call me racist for saying it, all I’ve ever seen was criminal behavior and cops trying to stop it and they didn’t give a rip what their skin color was.

[image error] The Founder of Blue Line Bears Is Broken As She Recognizes That The World Hates Her Dad Just For The Uniform That He Wears.

I’ve seen cops help and save every race, gender or ethnicity you can think of and while that used to mean something, no one cares anymore.

I’ve been called every name you can think of and many of them with racial overtones and it’s never come from cops. I’ve watched African American cops take the brunt of this and even talked one rookie out of quitting after he was berated by a lot of cowards that had the same skin color as him.

I’ve heard words I never heard before being a cop.

Uncle Tom, Cracker, Pig and the N Word just to name a few. I’ve heard them thousands of times and never once did I see a police officer retaliate.

They just took it.

Despite that, it’s been the greatest opportunity of my life to do this job. I would have recommended it to anyone and I secretly hoped one of my kids would do it one day.

They would have been a 4th Generation Cop.

But today, all of that is over. I wouldn’t wish this job on my worst enemy. I would never send anyone I cared about into the hell that this profession has become.

It’s the only job where you can do everything right and still lose everything.

It’s the only job where the same citizens you risk your life for hate you for it.

It’s the only segment left in society where it’s cool to discriminate and judge, just because of the uniform you wear.

You never get to explain.

You can never reason with them.

The nasty words have now turned into rocks and bottles and gunfire.

I’ve watched it happen to those around me and I have seen the total destruction of their lives.

Being a cop is a walking a time bomb and you could get cancelled or prosecuted on the very next call, even if you do everything right.

No profession has to deal with that.

Doctors kill 250,000 people a year. They call them “medical mistakes” because society understands that they do a very difficult job under high stress and they must make the best possible decision in the moment.

Law enforcement is tasked with the same and we are highly successful. Despite the most violent society we have ever seen, fewer than 1,000 suspects are killed a year. And 96% of those are attacking us with weapons and all but a few others are attacking us with their cars or their fists.

I’ve seen cops risk their own lives when they shouldn’t have, just to keep from taking a life.

They never get the credit that other professions get.

Cowards are all around us. From chiefs to sheriffs to politicians, no one has our back.

Now, the little we have, we are told they are going to defund us or even abolish us. Citizens with a political agenda will reign over us and all you have to do is wake up and put on a uniform to be a racist.

This weekend I received death threats for just doing my job. It would have been outrageous a decade ago and made national news.

Now, it’s just a Monday.

There will be more threats, more accusations of racism and more lies told about us.

I used to talk cops out of leaving the job. Now I’m encouraging them.

It’s over America. You finally did it.

You aren’t going to have to abolish the police, we won’t be around for it.

And while I know, most Americans still appreciate us, it’s not enough and the risk is too high. Those of you that say thank you or buy the occasional meal, it means everything.

But those of you that were silent while the slow turning of the knives in our backs happened by thugs and cowards, this is on you.

Your belief in hashtags and memes over the truth has and will create an environment in your community that you will never expect.

If you think Minneapolis will turn into Mogadishu and that it is far from you, it’s coming.

And when it does, remember what your complicity did.

This is the America that you made.

[Major Travis Yates has been in law enforcement since 1993 and is one of the most sought-after speakers in the profession. A recipient of the International Police Trainer of the Year Award, and one of the most published authors in the law enforcement, Travis has written a “must-have” book on Police Leadership entitled “The Courageous Police Leader: A Survival Guide for Combating Cowards, Chaos & Lies (www.stopcowards.com)]

Click on the link below to see a short interview with Travis Yates by Tucker Carlson.

https://news.yahoo.com/tulsa-police-maj-travis-yates-005651786.html

Link to Travis Yates’s Web Page:

https://www.stopcowards.com/

 

 

UC Berkeley History Professor’s Open Letter Against BLM, Police Brutality, and Cultural Orthodoxy

An anonymous black professor at U.C. Berkeley has penned an open letter against the current narratives of racial injustice underpinning the BLM movement and ongoing protests over the death of George Floyd. Its authenticity was confirmed by Kentucky State University Assistant Professor of Political Science, Wilfred Reilly, who says he was sent a copy of the letter along with Stanford University economist Thomas Sowell.

As an Emeritus Professor and Dean at the University of Illinois, I know the courage it takes to author such a candid letter in the repressive, hidebound milieu of the academy where free speech and opinions outside of the accepted liberal orthodoxy are punished by marginalization and even dismissal. Speaking out against the tyranny of the insular majority on college campuses is not for the faint of heart. Whoever this history professor is, is to be commended for having the nerve and resolve to express opinions that are rare within the academy. I am, therefore, not surprised that he wishes to remain anonymous.

In absentia lucis, Tenebrae vincunt. 

Dear professors X, Y, Z

I am one of your colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. I have met you both personally but do not know you closely, and I am contacting you anonymously, with apologies. I am worried that writing this email publicly might lead to me losing my job, and likely all future jobs in my field.

In your recent departmental emails, you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them.

In the extended links and resources you provided, I could not find a single instance of substantial counter-argument or alternative narrative to explain the under-representation of black individuals in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice system. The explanation provided in your documentation, to the near exclusion of all others, is univariate: the problems of the black community are caused by whites, or, when whites are not physically present, by the infiltration of white supremacy and white systemic racism into American brains, souls, and institutions.

Many cogent objections to this thesis have been raised by sober voices, including from within the black community itself, such as Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly. These people are not racists or ‘Uncle Toms’. They are intelligent scholars who reject a narrative that strips black people of agency and systematically externalizes the problems of the black community onto outsiders. Their view is entirely absent from the departmental and UCB-wide communique.

The claim that the difficulties that the black community faces are entirely causally explained by exogenous factors in the form of white systemic racism, white supremacy, and other forms of white discrimination remain a problematic hypothesis that should be vigorously challenged by historians. Instead, it is being treated as an axiomatic and actionable truth without serious consideration of its profound flaws, or its worrying implication of total black impotence. This hypothesis is transforming our institution and our culture, without any space for dissent outside of a tightly policed, narrow discourse.

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A counter-narrative exists. If you have time, please consider examining some of the documents I attach at the end of this email. Overwhelmingly, the reasoning provided by BLM and allies is either primarily anecdotal (as in the case with the bulk of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ undeniably moving article) or it is transparently motivated. As an example of the latter problem, consider the proportion of black incarcerated Americans. This proportion is often used to characterize the criminal justice system as anti-black. However, if we use the precise same methodology, we would have to conclude that the criminal justice system is even more anti-male than it is anti-black.

Would we characterize criminal justice as a systemically misandrist conspiracy against innocent American men? I hope you see that this type of reasoning is flawed, and requires a significant suspension of our rational faculties. Black people are not incarcerated at higher rates than their involvement in violent crime would predict. This fact has been demonstrated multiple times across multiple jurisdictions in multiple countries.

And yet, I see my department uncritically reproducing a narrative that diminishes black agency in favor of a white-centric explanation that appeals to the department’s apparent desire to shoulder the ‘white man’s burden’ and to promote a narrative of white guilt.

If we claim that the criminal justice system is white-supremacist, why is it that Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and Nigerian Americans are incarcerated at vastly lower rates than white Americans? This is a funny sort of white supremacy. Even Jewish Americans are incarcerated less than gentile whites. I think it’s fair to say that your average white supremacist disapproves of Jews. And yet, these alleged white supremacists incarcerate gentiles at vastly higher rates than Jews.

None of this is addressed in your literature. None of this is explained, beyond hand-waving and ad hominems. “Those are racist dog whistles”. “The model minority myth is white supremacist.” “Only fascists talk about black-on-black crime”, ad nauseam.

These types of statements do not amount to counterarguments: they are simply arbitrary offensive classifications, intended to silence and oppress discourse. Any serious historian will recognize these for the silencing orthodoxy tactics they are, common to suppressive regimes, doctrines, and religions throughout time and space. They are intended to crush real diversity and permanently exile the culture of robust criticism from our department.

Increasingly, we are being called upon to comply and subscribe to BLM’s problematic view of history, and the department is being presented as unified on the matter. In particular, ethnic minorities are being aggressively marshaled into a single position. Any apparent unity is surely a function of the fact that dissent could almost certainly lead to expulsion or cancellation for those of us in a precarious position, which is no small number.

I personally don’t dare speak out against the BLM narrative, and with this barrage of alleged unity being mass-produced by the administration, tenured professoriate, the UC administration, corporate America, and the media, the punishment for dissent is a clear danger at a time of widespread economic vulnerability. I am certain that if my name were attached to this email, I would lose my job and all future jobs, even though I believe in and can justify every word I type.

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The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people. There are virtually no marches for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires explanation and demands solution. Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is.

No discussion is permitted for nonblack victims of black violence, who proportionally outnumber black victims of nonblack violence. This is especially bitter in the Bay Area, where Asian victimization by black assailants has reached epidemic proportions, to the point that the SF police chief has advised Asians to stop hanging good-luck charms on their doors, as this attracts the attention of (overwhelmingly black) home invaders. Home invaders like George Floyd. For this actual, lived, physically experienced reality of violence in the USA, there are no marches, no tearful emails from departmental heads, no support from McDonald’s, and Wal-Mart. For the History department, our silence is not a mere abrogation of our duty to shed light on the truth: it is a rejection of it.

The claim that black intraracial violence is the product of redlining, slavery, and other injustices is a largely historical claim. It is for historians, therefore, to explain why Japanese internment or the massacre of European Jewry hasn’t led to equivalent rates of dysfunction and low SES performance among Japanese and Jewish Americans respectively. Arab Americans have been viciously demonized since 9/11, as have Chinese Americans more recently. However, both groups outperform white Americans on nearly all SES indices – as do Nigerian Americans, who incidentally have black skin. It is for historians to point out and discuss these anomalies. However, no real discussion is possible in the current climate at our department. The explanation is provided to us, disagreement with it is racist, and the job of historians is to further explore additional ways in which the explanation is additionally correct. This is a mockery of the historical profession.

Most troublingly, our department appears to have been entirely captured by the interests of the Democratic National Convention, and the Democratic Party more broadly. To explain what I mean, consider what happens if you choose to donate to Black Lives Matter, an organization UCB History has explicitly promoted in its recent mailers. All donations to the official BLM website are immediately redirected to Act Blue Charities, an organization primarily concerned with bankrolling election campaigns for Democrat candidates.

Donating to BLM today is to indirectly donate to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. This is grotesque given the fact that the American cities with the worst rates of black-on-black violence and police-on-black violence are overwhelmingly Democrat-run. Minneapolis itself has been entirely in the hands of Democrats for over five decades; the ‘systemic racism’ there was built by successive Democrat administrations.

The patronizing and condescending attitudes of Democrat leaders towards the black community, exemplified by nearly every Biden statement on the black race, all but guarantee a perpetual state of misery, resentment, poverty, and the attendant grievance politics which are simultaneously annihilating American political discourse and black lives. And yet, donating to BLM is bankrolling the election campaigns of men like Mayor Frey, who saw their cities devolve into violence. This is a grotesque capture of a good-faith movement for necessary police reform, and of our department, by a political party. Even worse, there are virtually no avenues for dissent in academic circles. I refuse to serve the Party, and so should you.

The total alliance of major corporations involved in human exploitation with BLM should be a warning flag to us, and yet this damning evidence goes unnoticed, purposefully ignored, or perversely celebrated. We are the useful idiots of the wealthiest classes, carrying water for Jeff Bezos and other actual, real, modern-day slavers. Starbucks, an organization using literal black slaves in its coffee plantation suppliers, is in favor of BLM. Sony, an organization using cobalt mined by yet more literal black slaves, many of whom are children, is in favor of BLM. And so, apparently, are we. The absence of counter-narrative enables this obscenity. Fiat lux, indeed.

There also exists a large constituency of what can only be called ‘race hustlers’: hucksters of all colors who benefit from stoking the fires of racial conflict to secure administrative jobs, charity management positions, academic jobs, and advancement, or personal political entrepreneurship.

Given the direction our history department appears to be taking far from any commitment to truth, we can regard ourselves as a formative training institution for this brand of snake-oil salespeople. Their activities are corrosive, demolishing any hope at harmonious racial coexistence in our nation and colonizing our political and institutional life. Many of their voices are un-ironically segregationist.

MLK would likely be called an Uncle Tom if he spoke on our campus today. We are training leaders who intend, explicitly, to destroy one of the only truly successful ethnically diverse societies in modern history. As the PRC, an ethno nationalist and aggressively racially chauvinist national polity with null immigration and no concept of jus solis increasingly presents itself as the global political alternative to the US, I ask you: Is this wise? Are we really doing the right thing?

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As a final point, our university and department have made multiple statements celebrating and eulogizing George Floyd. Floyd was a multiple felon who once held a pregnant black woman at gunpoint. He broke into her home with a gang of men and pointed a gun at her pregnant stomach. He terrorized the women in his community. He sired and abandoned multiple children, playing no part in their support or upbringing, failing one of the most basic tests of decency for a human being. He was a drug-addict and sometime drug-dealer, a swindler who preyed upon his honest and hard-working neighbors.

And yet, the regents of UC and the historians of the UCB History department are celebrating this violent criminal, elevating his name to virtual sainthood. A man who hurt women. A man who hurt black women. With the full collaboration of the UCB history department, corporate America, most mainstream media outlets, and some of the wealthiest and most privileged opinion-shaping elites of the USA, he has become a culture hero, buried in a golden casket, his (recognized) family showered with gifts and praise. Americans are being socially pressured into kneeling for this violent, abusive misogynist. A generation of black men is being coerced into identifying with George Floyd, the absolute worst specimen of our race and species.

I’m ashamed of my department. I would say that I’m ashamed of both of you, but perhaps you agree with me, and are simply afraid, as I am, of the backlash of speaking the truth. It’s hard to know what kneeling means when you have to kneel to keep your job.

It shouldn’t affect the strength of my argument above, but for the record, I write as a person of color. My family has been personally victimized by men like Floyd. We are aware of the condescending depredations of the Democrat party against our race. The humiliating assumption that we are too stupid to do STEM, that we need special help and lower requirements to get ahead in life, is richly familiar to us. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t be easier to deal with open fascists, who at least would be straightforward in calling me a subhuman, and who are unlikely to share my race.

The ever-present soft bigotry of low expectations and the permanent claim that the solutions to the plight of my people rest exclusively on the goodwill of whites rather than on our own hard work is psychologically devastating. No other group in America is systematically demoralized in this way by its alleged allies. A whole generation of black children is being taught that only by begging and weeping and screaming will they get handouts from guilt-ridden whites.

No message will more surely devastate their futures, especially if whites run out of guilt, or indeed if America runs out of whites. If this had been done to Japanese Americans, or Jewish Americans, or Chinese Americans, then Chinatown and Japantown would surely be no different to the roughest parts of Baltimore and East St. Louis today. The History department of UCB is now an integral institutional promulgator of a destructive and denigrating fallacy about the black race.

I hope you appreciate the frustration behind this message. I do not support BLM. I do not support the Democrat grievance agenda and the Party’s uncontested capture of our department. I do not support the Party co-opting my race, as Biden recently did in his disturbing interview, claiming that voting Democrat and being black are isomorphic.

I condemn the manner of George Floyd’s death and join you in calling for greater police accountability and police reform. However, I will not pretend that George Floyd was anything other than a violent misogynist, a brutal man who met a predictably brutal end.

 

Abolish the Police? God Save us from the Tyranny of Imbeciles!

Protestors across the country are calling for America’s police departments to be defunded and even abolished.

Are they serious? Yes, apparently they are.

Let’s just imagine the consequences of such an extreme and irrational move. The most vulnerable communities in our cities would find themselves without police protection.

That doesn’t seem very prudent to me.

Federal statistics show that America has more than 33,000 gangs with more than 1.4 million members. Imagine how delighted violent gangs like MS-13 would be if police stopped protecting America’s cities.

There is extensive data-driven research that proves that cutting budgets for the police while simultaneously demonizing their image causes a rise in crime rates.

That fact has been thoroughly analyzed and described, among others, by Heather Mac Donald in her book The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe. 

Look what happened In Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 following the killing of Michael Brown by police. First came the protests, the riots, and the looting. Then came the so-called “Ferguson Effect” in which police officers in high crime areas stood down and cut back on proactive policing out of fear for their safety or of being falsely accused of racism. That, in turn, led to an upsurge in crime.

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Of course, in the foolish cry to abolish the police, the notion of crime is totally ignored, as if fighting crime should no longer be a function of police departments.

Then what should those weak and powerless police officers who remain on the job be doing if they aren’t apprehending murderers, thieves, burglars, rapists, child molesters, car thieves, etc.?

Should they be tip-toeing through the tulips singing “Kumbayah” while vulnerable citizens cower in their homes?

That seems to be what some of these protesters are saying when they talk about replacing policing and crime-fighting with benign and ill-defined “social programs.”

Social programs? Leftists who call for defunding the police either do not understand the probable consequences of doing that, or they are deliberately worsening the state of affairs by attacking one of the core institutions of civilized society.

Of course, those on the far left who subscribe to anarchy apparently want chaos and lawlessness. Their fatuous idea is to destroy America in order to save it.

Think about this my rash and imprudent friends: If you don’t particularly like the house in which you live and you decide to burn it down, you won’t get a palace in its place. All you’ll get is ashes. And by defunding the police, you won’t get safety, you’ll get more crime.

In a recent article for the American Thinker, Lloyd Marcus, who calls himself a “black, unhyphenated American,” wrote the following:

“One police officer wrongfully killed a black man, which all of America condemned. The officer is being prosecuted. And yet, Democrats and fake news media flooded the airwaves with their lie that blacks are being murdered daily by police. Data confirming that police are the greatest protectors of blacks are ignored. Cops are far more likely to be killed by a black person rather than the other way around.

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“Democrats and fake news media absurdly say every white American is responsible for the daily persecution of blacks. White Democrat politicians are outrageously physically kneeling in worship to Black Lives Matter, begging forgiveness for being born white. Antifa thugs are demanding that other whites do the same.

“It blows my mind that public schools, beginning in kindergarten, are allowed to teach white students that they are born racist. It is no wonder that many Black Lives Matter anarchists are guilt-infected white youths.”

Lloyd Marcus makes a lot of sense to me.

Too bad the obtuse left-wing androids who have rampaged through the nation’s streets for the past couple of weeks aren’t paying attention.

Regrettably, when emotions run white-hot and protesters and naïve politicians behave like mindless sheep, the wolves lick their chops and dream of moveable feasts.

Abolish the police? You may as well abolish government.

God save us from the tyranny of imbeciles!

 

 

 

Finding Billy Battles Lost & Found Blog Tour

Please join the 4WillsPublishing Finding Billy Battles Lost and Found Virtual Blog Tour beginning today, June 8, and running through June 17.

Along the way I will discuss such topics as The Rules of Writing (there are none), The Awful English Language, Thoughts about the Art and Craft of Writing, Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, Writing for Nonreaders in the Post-Print Era, Dealing with the Dreaded Rejection Letter, and others.

Here is a link to the tour:  https://wp.me/P43s9i-Kzb

During the tour, you will also learn about the award-winning Finding Billy Battles Trilogy and a remarkable man who for decades lives an improbable and staggering life of adventure, peril, transgression, and redemption. Then Billy mysteriously disappears. For several decades his family has no idea where he is or what he is doing.

Finally, with his life coming to an end, Billy resurfaces in an old soldiers’ home in Leavenworth, Kansas. It is there when he is 98 that he meets his 12-year-old great-grandson and bequeaths his journals and his other property to him — though he is not to receive them until he is much older.

Years later, the great-grandson finally reads the journals and fashions a three-volume trilogy that tells of his great-grandfather’s audacious life in the old west, as well as his journeys to the Far East of the 1890s—including French Indochina and The Philippines—and finally, in the early 20th century, to Europe and Mexico where his adventures and predicaments continue.

One thing readers can be sure of, wherever Billy Battles goes trouble is not far behind.

 

 

 

The Myth of Systemic Police Racism

I spent 30 years working as a journalist, first for the Kansas City Times and then with the Chicago Tribune. I dealt in facts, not rumor, hearsay, or opinion. I dropped my membership in the Democrat party because I didn’t want to be influenced by any political organization. To this date, I have remained an Independent, preferring not to tie myself to one party or ideology.

For most of my 27-year career with the Tribune, I was a foreign correspondent covering Asia and Latin America. Once again, I tried to report accurately and fairly without inserting my opinion in my stories. When I did offer my opinion, it was in the Tribune’s Perspective section, usually on a Sunday and then it was clearly labeled “opinion.”

In the past two weeks, we have seen a lot of allegations hurled at the nation’s police departments by protestors and the media. Police departments from coast to coast have been accused and summarily found guilty in the court of public opinion and in the media with fomenting an atmosphere of systemic police bias and racism against black Americans.

The facts say otherwise. Today, I am reposting a recent column  by journalist, attorney, political commentator, and author Heather Mac Donald that presents those facts. Her most recent book, “The War on Cops,” analyzes the numbers and facts and puts them into perspective.

The Myth of Systemic Police Racism

BY: Heather Mac Donald

George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis has revived the Obama-era narrative that law enforcement is endemically racist. On Friday, Barack Obama tweeted that for millions of black Americans, being treated differently by the criminal justice system on account of race is “tragically, painfully, maddeningly ‘normal.’ ” Mr. Obama called on the police and the public to create a “new normal,” in which bigotry no longer “infects our institutions and our hearts.”

Joe Biden released a video the same day in which he asserted that all African-Americans fear for their safety from “bad police” and black children must be instructed to tolerate police abuse just so they can “make it home.” That echoed a claim Mr. Obama made after the ambush murder of five Dallas officers in July 2016. During their memorial service, the president said African-American parents were right to fear that their children may be killed by police officers whenever they go outside.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz denounced the “stain . . . of fundamental, institutional racism” on law enforcement during a Friday press conference. He claimed blacks were right to dismiss promises of police reform as empty verbiage.

[image error] Heather Mac Donald

This charge of systemic police bias was wrong during the Obama years and remains so today. However sickening the video of Floyd’s arrest, it isn’t representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians. A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.

In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects.

In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.

The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.

On Memorial Day weekend in Chicago alone, 10 African-Americans were killed in drive-by shootings. Such routine violence has continued—a 72-year-old Chicago man shot in the face on May 29 by a gunman who fired about a dozen shots into a residence; two 19-year-old women on the South Side shot to death as they sat in a parked car a few hours earlier; a 16-year-old boy fatally stabbed with his own knife that same day. This past weekend, 80 Chicagoans were shot in drive-by shootings, 21 fatally, the victims overwhelmingly black. Police shootings are not the reason that blacks die of homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined; criminal violence is.

The latest in a series of studies undercutting the claim of systemic police bias was published in August 2019 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers found that the more frequent officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that a member of that group will be fatally shot by a police officer. There is “no significant evidence of an anti-black disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by police,” they concluded.

A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. Research by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. also found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings. Any evidence to the contrary fails to take into account crime rates and civilian behavior before and during interactions with police.

The false narrative of systemic police bias resulted in targeted killings of officers during the Obama presidency. The pattern may be repeating itself. Officers are being assaulted and shot at while they try to arrest gun suspects or respond to the growing riots. Police precincts and courthouses have been destroyed with impunity, which will encourage more civilization-destroying violence. If the Ferguson effect of officers backing off law enforcement in minority neighborhoods is reborn as the Minneapolis effect, the thousands of law-abiding African-Americans who depend on the police for basic safety will once again be the victims.

The Minneapolis officers who arrested George Floyd must be held accountable for their excessive use of force and callous indifference to his distress. Police training needs to double down on de-escalation tactics. But Floyd’s death should not undermine the legitimacy of American law enforcement, without which we will continue on a path toward chaos.

Heather Mac Donald is a journalist, attorney, and fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of “The War on Cops,”

 

 

China Isn’t Letting a Pandemic Go to Waste

Today, ForeignCorrespondent is reposting a commentary by Victor Davis Hanson, historian, columnist, and professor. In this post, he demonstrates how China is taking advantage of the global pandemic to further undermine democracy in Hong Kong, bully its Asian neighbors, and thumb its nose at the United States. No more nice-guy façade.

By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis last week when a police officer used brutally excessive force to arrest him. It was the latest in a string of high-profile cases nationwide in which citizens, most of them African Americans, died from reckless police force. Once again, protests over police brutality turned violent and rioting ensued.

The U.S. is torn apart over the national mass quarantine. Liberal blue states accused red opened-up states of recklessly endangering national health by allowing their populations to go back to work before the virus has left.

Red states countered that blue states were hypocritical in wanting federal money to subsidize their locked-down residents while expecting other states to generate needed federal revenue. They also contended that there was no longer scientific evidence to justify the lockdown.

The nationwide protests and rioting have inadvertently adjudicated the issue: States cannot jail the law-abiding barber who wears a mask at work but allow the arsonist without a mask to roam the streets, burning with impunity.

There is mounting evidence that an array of federal officials had plotted to disrupt Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and his presidential transition, leaving Trump supporters furious.

[image error] Victor Davis Hanson

Meanwhile, likely Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is sequestered in his basement. He often appears confused. Yet Biden seems content that the more people do not see or hear him, the more they like the idea of him as president. Indeed, the more inert Biden has become, the higher his poll numbers have risen against Trump and his tweeting.

As the U.S. protested and bickered, China attempted to strangle what was left of Hong Kong’s enfeebled democracy. China’s theory seemed to be that if it’s going to be blamed for the spreading virus due to its deceit anyway, it might as well not let such a pandemic go to waste.

The Chinese strategy in reaction to disclosures that it hid vital data about the virus and exposed the world to contagion while it quarantined its own cities has devolved from “So what?” to the current “What exactly are you going to do about it?”

China also decided to ramp up its perennial border confrontations with India, as its forces encroached on Indian soil in the Himalayas.

What better way to show the world that a defiant China is dangerous than to agitate the world’s largest democracy?

Beijing warned European nations that if their independent media continued to condemn China, there could be commercial retaliation. A few European journalists still exposed Chinese deceit, even as shaken EU leaders backtracked and tried to contextualize Chinese misbehavior.

Japan and South Korea worried that China might move on Taiwan. They knew that if China did, only the United States — convulsed by quarantines, riots, and a contentious presidential race —could stand up to Beijing.

For years, China has bullied and waged a virtual commercial war against Asian democracies such as Japan, South Korea, India, and Australia. It has subverted almost all international trading norms.

The Chinese government assumed that Western elites would get rich by being complicit in China’s cheating and would thus help sell out their own countries. They were mostly right on both counts.

As China Westernized its economy, it conned gullible Western officials that eventually it would become a useful member of the family of nations.

In truth, China strategically hoarded cash from its asymmetrical trade surpluses. It planted its functionaries throughout transnational organizations and subverted them. It beefed up its military and planted island bases in international waters. It compromised strategically important nations by investing in their infrastructure through its neocolonial and imperialist multitrillion-dollar Belt and Road initiative.

China may have been forced by the global epidemic to give up its nice-guy façade. But it has insidiously pivoted from global friend to its new role as overt global villain. If the world had been anxious over the intentions of a suspiciously nice China, it will become downright terrified of an overtly hostile China.

In other words, China is not wasting the disaster of the Wuhan outbreak. It once gained a lot by faking friendliness, but now it seems to think it has no choice but to gain even more by being authentically belligerent.

As part of the about-face, China no longer flatters the West in passive-aggressive fashion but rather shows its disdain for a weak Europe and an increasingly divided U.S.

China’s real message to a fence-sitting world?

While America tears itself apart with endless internal quarreling and media psychodramas, while Europe appeases its enemies, and while the rest of Asia stays mute, waiting to see who wins, China is now on the move — without apologies.

Victor Davis Hanson is an American military historian, columnist, former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. As a National Review Institute fellow, he has been a commentator on modern warfare and contemporary politics for National Review and other media outlets. He is currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. 

 

Tiananmen Square: A Massacre that Foretold China’s COVID-19 Treachery

As we continue our battle against COVID-19, which began in Wuhan, China in the fall of 2019, we are learning that the Chinese Communist Party purposely misled the world about the deadly virus—hiding the fact that it is transmitted from human to human.

Most insidious, however, is the fact that the CCP then permitted the virus to spread worldwide when it allowed hundreds of thousands of people to leave Wuhan and seed the virus worldwide. To date, 189 countries are battling outbreaks of the Wuhan coronavirus and the death toll in the United States alone stands at almost 100,000.

I am not surprised by the treacherous and callous behavior of the Chinese Communist Party. I have personally seen the ruthless CCP in action.

I was in Beijing on June 4, 1989, when the Chinese government sent its army into Tiananmen Square to crush thousands of students, workers, and political opponents of the ruling Communist oligarchy.

What happened that night 31 years ago remains incomprehensible to me. Tanks and armored personnel carriers roared into the square mowing down pro-democracy demonstrators. Battle-hardened troops brought in from the tense border with Vietnam, opened fire on unarmed students in what can only be called a massacre.

Today, some American politicians like to say that China is our friend—an affable but tough competitor in the global marketplace.

I beg to differ. China is NOT our friend!

Any government that can murder its own children so indiscriminately and so ruthlessly as it did 31 years ago, cannot be trusted to act rationally or benevolently toward us or any other nation. We are seeing that behavior playing out with the COVID-19 virus when the CCP purposely misled the world beginning in November 2019 about the severity of the deadly virus attacking Wuhan.

Why? The CCP reasoned that it should not suffer the scourge of the COVID-19 virus alone. If China’s economy was going to crash, then the rest of the world should crash also. That is exactly what has happened.

The China of 2020 remains a nation of iron-handed one-party rule replete with human rights violations and corruption. This is a nation fixed on global economic and political domination. I have no doubt that if hundreds of thousands of students and protestors were to occupy Tiananmen Square again today, the result would be the same as it was on that summer night 31 years ago.

The post that follows contains my recollections of that gruesome night in 1989—one that is indelibly etched into my memory. It’s a little longer than most of my posts, but that bloody night in Tiananmen Square was also one of the longest I ever spent. I hope you will read on.

At the end of my post you can click on the link to an interview I did with National Public Radio for the 25th anniversary of the massacre. Feel free to comment.

Tiananmen Square Diary

             China was the world’s biggest story in the summer of 1989 when several hundred thousand students, labor leaders, and other dissidents occupied the five million square foot concrete piazza known as Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing. For seven weeks as the world watched, some 500,000 “pro-democracy” demonstrators descended on Beijing’s most sacred site to protest corruption, human rights violations, and one-party rule.

The protest would ultimately end in the early morning hours of June 4 with the deaths of thousands of demonstrators in what the world has come to know as the “Tiananmen Square Massacre.” The Chinese Red Cross puts the number at 3,000 with 12,000 wounded, But a recently declassified cable from then British Ambassador Sir Alan Donald just 24 hours after the massacre, said at least 10,000 people were killed in and around the square and perhaps as many as 20,000 were wounded or injured.




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Demonstrators in Tiananmen Before the Massacre

Today all evidence of that bloody night has been obliterated. Tiananmen Square is scrubbed and shimmering as it awaits the hundreds of thousands of summer visitors who will wander past the colossal portrait of Mao Zedong that hangs above the Forbidden City’s Gate of Heavenly Peace on the north end of the plaza and through the mausoleum that displays his waxy remains on the south end.

Despite the scourge of the COVID-19 virus, China today is relatively sanguine and confident. Profits, not protests are the driving force among most Chinese. However, that was not the case in 1989 when Tiananmen Square was turned into a squalid, fetid tent city of protestors.

For many young Chinese, the tragedy that unfolded in Tiananmen Square 30 years ago is ancient history—an event that has been glossed over, covered up and generally purged from the national consciousness by a nation eager to put forth its most dazzling and alluring face for tourists and the international business community.

But on June 3, 1989, as I walked through what is generally regarded as the planet’s largest city square, the world was just a few hours from seeing China at its most ruthless and ugliest.

The square that day was a hot, grubby place, strewn with refuse, canvass tents, and other makeshift dwellings. Under the towering “Heroes of the Nation” obelisk demonstrators cooked rice and soup while others linked arms and sang a spirited rendition of the “Internationale,” the world socialist anthem. Thousands of others dozed under flimsy lean-tos or blasted music from boom boxes.

Near the middle of the square, the 30-foot tall “Goddess of Democracy,” a pasty white statue constructed by art students and made of styrofoam and paper-mâché, stared defiantly at Mao’s giant portrait—almost mocking the founder of modern-day China. A truck swept by periodically spraying billowing clouds of insecticide and disinfectant over everything and everybody in its path.






Goddess of Democracy Statue




Hawkers guiding pushcarts containing ice cream, soft drinks, rice cakes, candy, and film encircled the students doing a brisk business. Even if the students in the square had not been able to topple China’s ruling hierarchy, at least there were profits to be made.

One enterprising entrepreneur raked in several hundred yuan within a few minutes after he began renting stepping stools for the hundreds of amateur photographers and tourists who arrived to have their pictures taken next to students or standing at the base of the “Goddess of Democracy” statue. Tiananmen, I wrote at the time, had evolved into a “Disneyland of Dissent.”

By June 3 the number of students occupying the square had dwindled to about 20,000 as thousands had already packed up and headed back to their provinces. But some students I talked with that afternoon were not ready to leave, and a few shared an intense sense of foreboding.

One of those was Chai Ling. Chai, who had been elected “chief commander” by the dissidents, was the only woman among the seven student leaders of the pro-democracy protests. As we sat cross-legged on the hot pavement, she talked about the protests and just what the students had accomplished during their 7-week-long occupation of Tiananmen.



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Chai Ling in Tiananmen Speaking to Students 1989 




“There will be a price to pay for all of this,” the 23-year-old child psychology graduate warned, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Some people will have to die for democracy, but it will be worth it.”

Chai, the object of a year-long nationwide search by the Chinese government after the violence in the square, would eventually escape China to Hong Kong sealed for five days and nights in a wooden crate deep in the hold of a rickety ship. She managed to elude capture in China by adopting a series of disguises, by learning local Chinese dialects and by working variously as a rice farmer, laborer, and maid. Eventually, she would come to the United States, be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and graduate from the Harvard Business School.

Barely eight hours after my conversation with Chai her warning would become a reality. Late in the evening of June 3 and during the early morning hours of June 4 the lethargy of weary demonstrators and the cacophony of boom box music would be replaced by shrieks of terror, gunfire and the guttural roar of tank and armored personnel carrier engines as the People’s Liberation Army rolled into the square, crushing tents and firing indiscriminately at protesters and anybody else who got in their way.

A couple of hours before the violence erupted a few of us foreign correspondents had enjoyed a quiet meal together in the venerable Beijing Hotel on Chang’an Avenue a few blocks from the square.

While dining we discussed the events of the night before when several thousand young unarmed military recruits were sent marching toward the students in Tiananmen Square. Before they got very far, an estimated 100,000 Chinese civilians poured from their homes near the square and confronted the soldiers—berating them for even thinking of entering Tiananmen to clear it of the thousands of students who had occupied it since late April.

This rather benign event was nothing more than a probe to determine what kind of resistance armed troops might face when they stormed the square. For several weeks some 200,000 Chinese troops—most from provinces far away from Beijing—had been massing on the outskirts of the city.

As Beijing entered its 15th day of martial law, it was also obvious that the government was still unable to enforce that decree. The government did admonish members of the foreign media to “observe regulations on news coverage” as they relate to martial law.

“Foreign journalists must not talk with student protesters, and any news coverage of any kind in Beijing must receive prior approval,” said a statement by Ding Weijun, spokesman for the city.

The statement also warned the hundreds of foreign reporters still in Beijing against inviting Chinese citizens to their offices, homes or hotels to conduct “interviews regarding prohibited activities.” Several foreign reporters had been expelled from the country for violating those rules.

Many of us ignored those edicts and talked to anybody who wanted to speak anywhere that was deemed away from the prying eyes and ears of government authorities. I also ignored the curfew, often riding my red and white Sprick bicycle down dark streets from my hotel to the Tribune’s offices that were located in a foreign housing compound a half-mile away. I got to know most of the Chinese police who were supposed to enforce the curfew. They would smile and wave as I peddled past.



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Aboard my Sprick Bicycle




The morning of June 3, once again ignoring marital law rules, I took the Tribune car and my nervous Chinese driver, and we drove outside of the square and into several neighborhoods where streets leading toward Tiananmen had been shut down by angry civilians intent on keeping the Chinese Army from reaching the students. Dozens of intersections were blocked with buses, trucks, and makeshift barricades. Neighborhood leaders proudly showed me their arsenal of weapons—rows of gasoline-filled bottles complete with cloth wicks, piles of rocks and bricks, shovels, rakes, picks and other garden tools.

“We will protect the students,” a man named Liang Hong, told me.

“But how?” I asked. “The army has tanks, machine guns, and armored personnel carriers. They will kill you.”

“Then we will die,” he replied. Several dozen others quickly echoed his words. “Yes, we will all die. These are our children in the square. We must help them even if it means death.”

Several days after the attack on the square when the authorities allowed people to travel once again in the city, I drove back to this same neighborhood. True to their word, I was told that Liang Hong and several of his neighbors had died or were wounded attempting to keep the army from entering the square.

After dinner in the Beijing Hotel, I decided to take one more stroll through the square. As I rode into the square on the bicycle I had purchased after my arrival in Beijing from Tokyo two weeks before, I could see that many of the students were obviously spooked—not only by the unarmed incursion of the night before but by the intelligence pouring in from the neighborhoods surrounding the square that the army was on the move.

“I think something will happen tonight,” one of them told me. “I am very afraid.”

I stopped at the foot of the Goddess of Democracy. The statue was illuminated by a couple of small spotlights as it looked toward the Forbidden City and Mao’s portrait. On the edge of the square, I bought a bottle of Coca-Cola then pushed my bicycle toward the four-story KFC restaurant on the south end of the square. It was about 8:30 p.m. and the restaurant (the largest KFC store in the world) was almost empty.

I then rode the 2 miles down Jianguomenwei Avenue to the Jianguo Hotel where I was staying. I needed to file a story on the day’s events—specifically my conversation with Chai Ling and the other students that afternoon. I finished writing my story around 10 p.m. and decided, despite the curfew, to ride my bicycle back to the square for one more look around. I parked my bike on Xuanwumen Dong Avenue near the hulking Museum of History and Revolution on the east side of the square and began walking toward the “Heroes of the Nation” obelisk which had become the headquarters for the students.

I hadn’t gotten very far when the sound of gunfire erupted. The firing seemed everywhere, amplified by the massive buildings that surrounded the square. I ran toward my bicycle, not wanting to be trapped in the square should tanks roll in. Moments later I ran into BBC correspondent Kate Adie who was walking toward the square with her camera crew.

“What’s going on,” she asked.

“Looks like the army is making a move tonight,” I answered. I explained that I hadn’t seen any troops or tanks in the square at that point, but I did see muzzle flashes from the roof of the Great Hall of the People on the west side of the square. A day before several hundred troops had massed behind the Great Hall and I assumed they had been positioned on the roof.

I rode my bicycle north toward Chang’an Avenue and hadn’t gotten very far when I noticed a line of Armored Personnel Carriers moving toward the square flanked by hundreds of soldiers with fixed bayonets. Seconds later the dark sky was interlaced by red and yellow tracer fire, and I could hear bullets ricocheting off of concrete. I turned my bike around and raced back toward the south end of the square. Like a lot of my fellow correspondents, I never thought the government would use deadly force against the students.

As the firing intensified thousands of more residents poured out of their houses and formed human blockades where streets entered the square. They quickly became targets for the machine gun and small arms fire. As the casualties mounted, the crowds became increasingly belligerent. They armed themselves with bricks, bottles, iron rods and wooden clubs and attacked some of the military contingents, including tanks.

An infuriated mob grabbed one soldier and set him afire after dousing him with gasoline. They then hung his still smoldering body from a pedestrian overpass. It was one of the many examples of instant justice meted out that night. The crowd accused the soldier of having shot an old woman to death.

I watched the wounded and the dead being carted from the square and the area surrounding it on the flatbeds of three-wheeled vehicles. The stinging stench of tear gas hovered over the embattled city and burned my eyes.



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Carting the Wounded out of the Square




“Tell the world!” the crowds screamed at me and other foreign journalists they saw. “Tell the United States! Tell the truth! We are students! We are common people-unarmed, and they are killing us!”

Around 2 a.m. at the height of the armed assault, a maverick tank careened down Jianguomenwai Avenue in an attempt to crack open the way for troop convoys unable to pass through the milling crowds.

With its turret closed, the tank was bombarded with stones and bottles as it sped down the avenue. Young cyclists headed it off, then slowed to bring it to a halt. But the tank raced on, the cyclists deftly avoiding its clattering treads by mere inches.

On the Jianguomenwai bridge over the city’s main ring road, where a 25-truck convoy had been marooned for hours by a mass of angry civilians clambering all over it, a tank raced through the crowd. It sideswiped one of the army trucks, and a young soldier who was clinging to its side was flung off and killed instantly.

The worst fighting of the night occurred around the Minzu Hotel, west of the square, where grim-faced troops opened fire with tracer rounds on milling crowds blocking their access to the square. Bullets ripped into the crowd and scores of people were wounded. The dead and wounded were thrown on the side of the road among a pile of abandoned bicycles as the troops moved on to take the square.



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Dead and Wounded Amid Abandoned Bicycles




One tank ran into the back of another that had stalled on Chang’an Avenue. As they hurriedly bounced apart, the machine guns on their turrets began to train on an approaching crowd of about 10,000. The machine guns erupted, sending tracers above the heads of the crowd. Men and women scurried for cover, many crawling into the piles of dead and wounded along the side of the road.

In my haste to return to the square, I had forgotten to bring my camera. Even though it was night, the square was illuminated by street lamps and the sky above it was lit almost continuously with tracers and bright flares. I decided not to ride my bicycle to avoid becoming a larger target. At the same time, I didn’t want to lose the only form of transportation I had, so I pushed it wherever I went, sometimes crouching behind it. Finally, I found a small tree and padlocked it to the trunk.

For most of the night, I found myself caught between trying to cover the tragedy unfolding in and around the square and watching my back. I didn’t want to be caught in the sites of some trigger happy soldier.

At one point several hundred troops successfully occupied a corner of the square and I watched as a crowd of some 3,000 howling unarmed students surged toward them on foot and by bicycle, intent on breaking through their line with their bare hands. A few in front of the main body rammed their bikes into the troops and were quickly beaten to the ground by soldiers using the butts of their rifles or clubs.




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Dead Demonstrators Piled in a Hospital Hallway

“Fascists! Murderers!” the crowd chanted.

As the main body of the crowd got within 50 yards of the first line of troops, an army commander blew a whistle, and the soldiers turned and fired volleys of automatic rifle fire. Screams of pain followed.

The protesters threw themselves and their bikes on the pavement of the Avenue of Eternal Peace. Dragging their bikes behind them, they crawled to safety, pursued by rifle fire and the throaty war cries of the soldiers.

When the firing momentarily stopped, the crowd regrouped and slowly crept back toward the square. Then the volleys rang out again, more intense this time. Two lines of soldiers began to chase the mob, alternately firing tear gas and bullets. I watched several people stagger and fall to the ground.

The acrid smell of tear gas triggered a paroxysm of coughing in the crowd. People ripped off shirt sleeves and used them as handkerchiefs over their mouths. The bodies of three women were laid out on the pavement of a side street to await transport. A crowd gathered around them, waving fists and cursing the government.

“How many people did you kill?” they shouted at steel-helmeted soldiers who stood stonily with AK-47 assault rifles cradled across their chests.

The fighting continued throughout the night as exhausted students and other dissidents engaged in hit and run battles with soldiers, tanks, and APC’s. Some students, many of them wounded, scrambled aboard abandoned buses seeking refuge and aid. I watched soldiers pull them out and beat them with heavy clubs.



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Students Confront APC’s in the Square




Several of the students, bleeding from head wounds, ran toward where I had taken cover behind a low stone wall. One of the students, a girl of maybe 16, had been shot through the shoulder and was bleeding profusely. She was falling in and out of consciousness and looked to be in shock. I looked behind me to see if there was some way to get her assistance.

In the distance, I saw a man waving at me from a doorway of a brick wall. He was motioning me to bring the girl and other wounded students to him, all the while carefully watching for soldiers. I pulled her up and with the help of another reporter, dashed with her and several other wounded students to the gate. The man quickly wrapped a blanket around the girl and took her inside the compound with the other students.

“Thank you,” he said. “I am a doctor. I will take care of them.”

I jogged back to the low wall where I had been kneeling before. I recall thinking that if I were wounded at least, I now knew where I could go for help. For the next few hours, I moved from one location to another, trying to find a spot where I could see what was happening while making sure I had an escape route should I come under fire.

The square was finally cleared at dawn when four personnel carriers raced across it, flattening not only the tents of the demonstrators but the “Goddess of Liberty” statue. I looked at my watch. It was about 5:30 and dawn was breaking over the city.

Ten minutes later a negotiated settlement allowed the hard-core remnants of the democracy movement—some 5,000 students and their supporters—to leave by the southeastern corner of the square. As they left singing the Internationale, troops ritually beat them with wooden clubs and metal rods.

 The army had been ordered to clear the Square by 6 a.m, and it had done so but at a terrible cost.

As daylight broke over the Avenue of Eternal Peace dazed knots of Chinese, many of them weeping and all of them angry at their government, stood at intersections, reliving the events of a few hours before when tracer bullets and flares turned the black Beijing sky into a deadly torrent of crimson.

Along the roadside leading into the square lay several wounded students, some perhaps already dead.

“They murdered the people. . . . They just shot the people down like dogs, with no warning,” said a man whose shirt was soaked with blood. “I carried a woman to an ambulance, but I think she was dead.”

“Please,” he said, “you must tell the world what has happened here. We need your protection from our government.”

Perhaps the defining moment of the massacre came a bit later that morning when a student jumped in front of a column of tanks on Chang’an Avenue and refused to move. This student, as yet still unidentified, shouted at the tank commander: “Get out of my city. … You’re not wanted here.” Each time the tank would attempt to maneuver around the student, he would jump in front of it. The column of tanks turned off their motors and then several other students ran out and pulled the student to safety. To this day nobody is sure who the student was or what happened to him. Most Chinese still refer to him as the “tank man.”



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The Still Unidentified “Tank Man” Confronting Tanks




I walked back to where I had left my bicycle and rode to the Jianguo Hotel. As I peddled along mostly deserted streets, I tried to make sense out of what I had seen. With the students already dispersing from the square or planning to, the attack by the army was unnecessarily brutal.

There was little doubt that what I had witnessed was an assault designed to punish the demonstrators for embarrassing China’s leadership—Premiere Li Peng and Deng Xiaoping, the ailing leader of China’s Communist Party.

China’s hard-line rulers, clearly in control after the bloodbath, issued a statement that morning that said:

“Thugs frenziedly attacked People’s Liberation Army troops, seizing weapons, erecting barricades and beating soldiers and officers in an attempt to overthrow the government of the People’s Republic of China and socialism.”

China’s leaders have not forgotten the pro-democracy demonstrations of 1989. Unnerved by turbulence among Tibetans and always nervous about the possibility of human rights protests in the heart of the capital, China barred live television coverage from Tiananmen Square during the 2008 Beijing Olympics—just as it had in 1989. It will probably do the same on the 30th anniversary of the slaughter.

However, it remains to be seen whether or not such a ban will exorcise the ghosts of June 4, 1989, that still hang over Tiananmen Square. There is little doubt that time has not healed the deep wounds inflicted on China’s people that terrible night 30 years ago.

CLICK BELOW FOR MY INTERVIEW WITH NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO ON THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE MASSACRE. (Note: there are two links that will take you to the NPR site. The top link on the NPR site is a shorter edited interview and the bottom link is an extended interview.

https://will.illinois.edu/player/audio/tiananmen-square-diary

My Retrospective on the Tiananmen Square Massacre Tomorrow

Please join ForeignCorrespondent tomorrow, June 4, for my personal retrospective on the Tiananmen Square massacre–a horrendous event that I covered on that date in 1989. 

In light of the Chinese Communist Party’s repressive behavior toward Hong Kong and its responsibility and culpability in allowing the COVID-19 virus to spread from Wuhan and infect the rest of the world, what happened in Beijing’s Tiananmen 31 years ago shouldn’t surprise anyone. 

[image error] Covering Tiananmen Square 1989

The Death of Freedom in Hong Kong

My introduction to Hong Kong was via the 1960 film, The World of Suzy Wong, starring William Holden and Nancy Kwan.

The movie was based on the 1957 novel of the same name by British author Richard Mason—a classic East meets West story in which a British artist falls in love with his Chinese model, who also happens to be a prostitute.

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From the moment I watched that movie, which was shot entirely in the old British Crown Colony, I knew someday I would visit Hong Kong.

I finally did that in 1974 when I was posted to Tokyo, Japan as the Chicago Tribune’s Far Eastern Correspondent. On my way to Vietnam to cover the final throes of that war, I managed to stopover in Hong Kong for a couple of days.

I wasn’t disappointed.

Hong Kong in the 1970s still retained its old colonial flavor and in 1974 it still had 23 years before the British would hand the place back to China. Hong Kong was an eclectic place bursting with all of the mysteries and inscrutability of the orient that an impressionable and newly minted correspondent from Kansas could want.

For two days I did everything possible to absorb Hong Kong into every fiber of my being. I wandered the bustling streets of Kowloon; visited the venerable Peninsula Hotel and its storied lobby; rode the Star Ferry between Tsim Sha Tsui and Hong Kong Island’s Wanchai district (where the fictional Suzy Wong plied her trade); took the mile-long funicular “Peak Tram” up to Victoria Peak; and took the 40-minute taxi-ride to Stanley Market on the far south side of Hong Kong island.

[image error] Stanley Market

But most of all, I just wandered the streets of Kowloon and Hong Kong Island taking in the eclectic and myriad scents of Hong Kong—the Cantonese, Hunan, and Szechuan food; the mysterious spices; the exotic fragrances.

Even though the Cross Harbor Tunnel under Victoria Harbor opened in 1972, as far as I was concerned the only way to travel between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon was on the Star Ferry. The 12 green and white ferries have been making the 8-minute trip between Tsim-Sha Tsui and Central Hong Kong Island since 1898, and the fare of HK $2.70 (about 34 U.S. cents) for the upper deck and HK $2.20 (about 28 cents) for the lower deck hasn’t changed in years.

[image error] The Star Ferry

During my almost two decades of working in Asia, I returned to Hong Kong many times. It was always one of my favorite destinations. So perhaps a little history lesson is in order for those of you unfamiliar with Hong Kong’s connection to Great Britain and how it was once separated politically, if not physically, from the Chinese mainland.

To understand that you need to go back to the so-called “Opium Wars” between Great Britain and China (1839–1860). After those bloody military and tense trade battles, China was forced to cede Hong Kong Island and a part of Kowloon to Great Britain in perpetuity.

In 1898, Britain negotiated a major land expansion of the Hong Kong colony and signed a 99-year lease with China. That lease ended in 1997, at which time Britain returned Hong Kong to China as a “Special Administrative Region” (SAR) called the “Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China” (HKSAR).

That’s where we stood until just last week when China reneged on the 1997 legal agreement assuring Hong Kong would maintain its democracy, capitalism, and autonomy under a “one country, two systems” framework.

In 1997, under the doctrine of “one country, two systems,” China allowed the former colony to continue to govern itself and maintain many independent systems for a period of 50 years. That doctrine was guaranteed by something called the “Basic Law,” which also established English as one of Hong Kong’s official languages.

Article 2, of the Basic Law, that both the mainland China and Hong Kong agreed to, says: “The National People’s Congress authorizes the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to exercise a high degree of autonomy and enjoy executive, legislative and independent judicial power, including that of final adjudication, in accordance with the provisions of this Law.”

Under that agreement Hong Kong’s economy has transitioned to a mainly service economy with manufacturing shifting to the mainland. It also developed what is considered the freest economy in the world. With a GDP of $362.9 billion in 2018 it is currently the world’s 35th largest.

As of May 22, all that changed. China’s government announced that it will allow mainland state-security agencies to operate officially in Hong Kong which effectively allows Beijing to impose national-security laws on Hong Kong. That means it will be able to repress and arrest political opponents at will, pursuant to the same Communist Chinese mandate that exists on the mainland. To show it means business, pro-democracy protest leaders have been arrested—a move that has gone largely unreported.

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In short, the world is watching the death of freedom in Hong Kong, and with it, the death of any semblance of opposition.

So far, most of the Western world has said nothing and done nothing, with the exception of President Trump. He has repeatedly and publicly condemned China’s seizure and obliteration of the 1997 agreement that guaranteed Hong Kong’s political freedoms as well as an economy characterized by low taxes, free trade, and minimal government interference.

Last week Trump declared that because of Beijing’s action, Hong Kong is no longer sufficiently autonomous from China and as a result, he revoked the former colony’s “special status.” That revocation means targeted sanctions, tariffs, and trade restrictions can be imposed which will radically alter the fate of a city that has served for decades as China’s economic gateway to the world.

When I consider what is about to happen to Hong Kong, I am glad I had the opportunity to spend time in the place during its prime when it was still a British Crown Colony.

The Hong Kong I once knew is fast disappearing and soon will be indistinguishable from the repressive nation ruled with an iron-hand by the Chinese Communist Party.

When that happens, one more bright light of freedom and liberty will be extinguished on our planet.

(Note: Please join ForeignCorrespondent this Thursday, June 4, for my retrospective on the Tiananmen Square massacre–a horrendous event that I covered on that date in 1989. It may give you a taste of what could happen to Hong Kong if its people refuse to buckle under to Beijing’s iron-fisted rule)