Ronald E. Yates's Blog, page 76

Tiananmen Square Diary

With most Americans today focused on the U.S.-China trade war as well as U.S. tariffs that will make Chinese goods more expensive, few may recall what happened in Beijing 30 years ago.

I won’t be one of them.

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 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.

China is NOT our friend.

Any government that can murder its own children so indiscriminately and so ruthlessly as it did 30 years ago, cannot be trusted to act rationally or benevolently toward us or any other nation.

The China of 2019 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 30 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 at least 800 demonstrators (the Chinese Red Cross puts the number closer to 3,000 with 12,000 wounded) in what the world has come to know as the “Tiananmen Square Massacre.”




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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.

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 HERE 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

A Legendary Journalist is Gone

Two years ago Clare Hollingworth, one of the toughest, most determined, and inexhaustible war correspondents who ever lived passed away in her Hong Kong home. I posted on her passing at the time, but because she was such a unique and iconic journalist, I feel compelled to post my story again. Here it is.

Clare was 105 years old when she passed, so it shouldn’t have come as a shock. But having known the unconquerable and doughty Clare, I just assumed she would live forever.

I first met Clare Hollingworth in 1985 during my second posting in Tokyo as the Chicago Tribune’s Chief Asia Correspondent and Tokyo Bureau Chief. I was introduced to Clare by London Times correspondent Peter Hazelhurst.

[image error] Clare Hollingworth around 1985

Along with a few dozen other hacks, we were in the bar of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan. We chatted a few minutes and then Peter mentioned that Clare’s first story was perhaps the biggest scoop of the Twentieth Century: namely, the beginning of World War II.

You can read about that in the Associated Press obituary I have appended below.

After our meeting in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, I saw Clare several more times as we covered stories throughout Asia. During occasional stopovers in Hong Kong, I would see Clare at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondent’s Club.

One of my quirkiest memories of Clare was in 1989 during the bloody Tiananmen Square uprising and massacre. I was in the square interviewing some student leaders who were camped out there when I noticed Clare walking alone nearby in her de rigueur tan safari suit.

Clare was barely five-feet tall and nearly 80 years old, and I watched her walk over to a lamp post and shinny part-way up to get a better view of the packed square.

That was Clare’s indomitable spirit in spades.

Read more about Clare Hollingworth’s amazing career below.

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HONG KONG (AP) – As German tanks encircled the Polish town of Katowice, rookie British newspaper reporter Clare Hollingworth picked up the phone and dialed the British Embassy. An official there didn’t believe what she told him, so she dangled the phone out the window so he could hear the ominous rumbling for himself.

“Listen!” she implored. “Can’t you hear it?”

Hollingworth was 27, and just a week into her job with the Daily Telegraph of London. She had the scoop of a lifetime: World War II had just begun.

[image error] Clare Hollingworth in 1939

She hung up and called the Telegraph’s Warsaw correspondent, who dictated to London her story about the Nazi invasion of southern Poland in late August 1939.

As the Nazis moved in, Hollingworth scrambled to get out of Poland, sometimes sleeping in cars, and eventually made her way to Romania. Hollingworth, who died at the age of was 105, would go on to write many more chapters in a decades-long career as a foreign correspondent.

She had scored another big exclusive just days before the invasion when she had borrowed a British consulate official’s car to drive into German-occupied territory, which was off-limits to all but diplomatic vehicles.

Hollingworth saw tanks, armored cars, and artillery massing.

Burlap screens beside the road, “constructed to hide the military vehicles, blew in the wind; thus, I saw the battle deployment,” she recounted in her autobiography.

“I guessed that the German Command was preparing to strike to the north of Katowice and its fortified lines and this, in fact, was exactly how they launched their invasion in the south.”

Returning to Poland, she filed her story, but her name was not on the byline – a common practice for newspapers in those days.

A determined journalist who defied gender barriers and narrowly escaped death several times on the job, Hollingworth spent much of her life on the front lines of major conflicts– including in the Middle East, North Africa, and Vietnam, for British newspapers. She spent the last three decades in Hong Kong after being one of the few Western journalists stationed in China in the 1970s.

She won major British journalism awards including a “What The Papers Say” lifetime achievement award and was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. Former British Prime Minister Ted Heath and former Hong Kong Gov. Chris Patten were fans of Hollingworth, while various British generals wrote about her fondly.

Hollingworth was born Oct. 10, 1911, to a middle-class family in the village of Knighton in Leicestershire, England. Her father ran a boot factory founded by her grandfather. She took brief courses in Croatian at Zagreb University, international relations in Switzerland and Slavonic studies in London. She worked as a secretary and then at a British newspaper’s refugee charity in Poland while writing occasional articles about the looming war in Europe. Friends influenced her decision to focus on journalism rather than politics.

The Daily Telegraph’s editor gave her a job as a stringer and sent her to Poland, partly because of her work with refugees in that country, according to her great-nephew Patrick Garrett.

During her five months with the charity, Hollingworth played an important role in helping an estimated 3,000 refugees trying to escape the Nazis flee to Britain by arranging visas for them, a little known fact that Garrett unearthed in research for his 2016 biography of his great-aunt, “Of Fortunes and War.”

Though she carved out a career in what was then a male-dominated field, Garrett said she looked back on her achievements matter-of-factly.

“She would never regard herself as a feminist,” said Garrett. Hollingworth hated when women were given special treatment because it made women a “hassle,” which made it harder for other female journalists trying to cover wars, Garrett said.

[image error] Clare Hollingworth on the right covering Vietnam

“She thought that everyone should be treated the same. She hated it when women wasted time on makeup or getting their hair done,” Garrett said.

After the Polish invasion, Hollingworth covered the Romanian revolution and hostilities in North Africa. When Allied forces captured Tripoli in 1943, British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery ordered her back to Cairo because he didn’t want women around. So she instead got herself accredited with U.S. forces in Algeria.

Later she reported on the fall of the Balkan states to communism, and on Cold War espionage, including the case of Kim Philby, a British journalist and Soviet double agent. Hollingworth wrote for many publications in her career, including the Economist, the Manchester Guardian, and the Daily Express.

Hollingworth was close to danger for decades. In 1946, she was standing 300 yards (meters) from the King David Hotel in Jerusalem when it was destroyed by a bomb planted by militant Zionists that killed nearly 100 people.

While covering the Algerian war for independence in 1962, Hollingworth defied members of a French far-right group who rounded up foreign journalists and threatened some of them with execution.

“I was extremely annoyed at this treatment, and I told their commander in French, ‘Go away at once, Monsieur or I will have to hit you over the head with my shoe, which is all I have.'”

The commander pushed her aside, grabbed another British journalist, and dragged him out the front door of their hotel. Hollingworth led the other reporters outside in pursuit of their colleague, who was thrown to the ground. The gunmen released the safety catches on their guns, and the reporters dived for cover, but they drove off without shooting.

Covering the Vietnam War, Hollingworth flew aboard U.S. military aircraft on supply runs and bombing missions.

Hollingworth became the Telegraph’s first resident China correspondent when the paper sent her to Beijing – then known as Peking – in 1973, a year after President Richard Nixon’s landmark visit that eventually led to formal ties between Washington and Beijing.

She moved to Hong Kong in 1981. She had intended to stay temporarily as she wrote a book about Mao Zedong, but decided to wait to watch the negotiations over Britain’s return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 and never left.

Hollingworth wrote articles for the International Herald Tribune and Asian Wall Street Journal well into her old age. She was known for visiting the Foreign Correspondent’s Club every day, where her domestic helpers read newspapers to her because of her failing eyesight and where friends and admirers helped her celebrate her 105th birthday with a cake.

[NOTE: COME BACK TOMORROW WHEN I WILL BE POSTING MY FIRST PERSON RETROSPECTIVE ON THE 30TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE TIANANMEN SQUARE MASSACRE IN BEIJING–A STORY BOTH CLARE & I COVERED.]

A First Person Retrospective on the Tiananmen Square Massacre 30 Years Ago

Please join me Tuesday June 4 for my first person account of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing 30 years ago.

That night in the square thousands of demonstrators were beaten and gunned down by Chinese troops in one of the most egregious acts by a government against its citizens I have ever witnessed.

I hope you will take a look.

Writer’s Block: Some Advice & Antidotes

Anybody who writes, whether amateur or professional, at one time or another, will suffer from the dreaded condition known as WRITER’S BLOCK. It is an unavoidable component of the writing life.

Many writers have devised distinctive remedies for this constipation of the brain. They range from running as far away as possible their computers (or typewriter, if you still use one of those) to altering their schedules, so they write at a different time.  

My remedy has always been to plow ahead through the impenetrable miasma and continue writing even if what emerges from my shattered brain is gibberish. I have found that even among the horse apples I produce there is occasionally a gem or two. But most of all the effort to keep moving, as it were, allows me to avoid total catatonia.

That approach may be because I spent most of my writing life as a journalist and editors simply don’t believe in writer’s block. They believe in deadlines, and they are anal about reporters meeting them. Excuses about a lost muse or a lack of creative juices won’t cut it—at least not in any of the newsrooms I ever toiled in.  If my brute force remedy fails to break the curse of writer’s block, then my next antidote is to read. I always have several books in various stages of scrutiny, and I have found that reading unblocks whatever is producing my cerebral constipation.

Many writers suffering from writer’s block say they take their minds completely off of writing and replace it with something else. They may travel and experience the real world and thereby escape their exhausted imaginations. They may binge watch a bunch of movies, have dinner with friends or family and listen to what others are doing, thinking, and feeling. Or they may do something they have been putting off doing, such as some household chore or project. Changing habits or routines can often get the creative juices flowing again.

  Norman Mailer

I have often wondered what other writers have done when confronted by this infernal condition. So I did a little research and here is what some successful writers have done to deal with writer’s block.

“Over the years, I’ve found one rule. It is the only one I give on those occasions when I talk about writing. A simple rule. If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow; you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material. You are, in effect, contracting to pick up such valuables at a given time. Count on me, you are saying to a few forces below: I will be there to write.” — Norman Mailer in The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing.

“If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to ­music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don’t just stick there scowling at the problem. But don’t make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people’s words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient.” — Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall &  Bring Up The Bodies

   Hilary Mantel

“The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day … you will never be stuck. Always stop while you are going good and don’t think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it, consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.” — Ernest Hemingway

“I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer’s block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don’t. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.” — Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

I will end with this bit of advice from British author Philip Pullman.

“Writer’s block…a lot of howling nonsense would be avoided if, in every sentence containing the word WRITER, that word was taken out and the word PLUMBER substituted; and the result examined for the sense it makes. Do plumbers get plumber’s block? What would you think of a plumber who used that as an excuse not to do any work that day?

               Philip Pullman

“The fact is that writing is hard work, and sometimes you don’t want to do it, and you can’t think of what to write next, and you’re fed up with the whole damn business. Do you think plumbers don’t feel like that about their work from time to time? Of course, there will be days when the stuff is not flowing freely.  What you do then is MAKE IT UP. I like the reply of the composer Shostakovich to a student who complained that he couldn’t find a theme for his second movement. “Never mind the theme! Just write the movement!” he said.  

“Writer’s block is a condition that affects amateurs and people who aren’t serious about writing. So is the opposite, namely inspiration, which amateurs are also very fond of. Putting it another way: a professional writer is someone who writes just as well when they’re not inspired as when they are.” — Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials

I think Philip Pullman has nailed it.

The Rules of Writing: There Are None!

For writers and those who are struggling to be writers, there is no shortage of rules, guidelines, tenets, and imperatives all calculated to turn you into a bestselling author.

They are often daunting and overwhelming and in some cases a bit terrifying.

But mostly, they are unnecessary.

Yes, I said it. Rules of writing are gratuitous, redundant, and pointless.

“What is he saying?” You might be asking yourself. “Has he gone off his mental reservation? Did somebody steal his rudder? Is he weak north of his ears?”

I have been writing, in one form or another, for most of my life. I learned the techniques and skills of writing by toiling for almost 30 years in the relentless and stressful world of journalism.

I was in some pretty good company. Ernest Hemingway began his writing career as a journalist—in fact, we both began our journalistic careers at the Kansas City Star.

Other successful authors who started as newspaper hacks include Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Charles Dickens, Evelyn Waugh, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, Jack London, Annie Proulx, Stephen Crane, John Steinbeck, James Agee, Lillian Ross, and Mark Twain.

For 13 years I taught journalism and writing at the University of Illinois after leaving the world of professional journalism. During that time, I managed to condense my thoughts on writing into a structure suitable for the classroom.

So allow me to share my views on what writing is. What I am about to say here are not stringent rules or rigorous imperatives.

Don’t forget. There are no rules. Look at my comments as suggestions or musings, but not as edicts or diktats. [image error]Writing is both an art and a craft. To be a good writer, you must first master the tools of the craft. What are those? They are vocabulary, grammar, research, style, plot, pacing, and story.

Words are your essential tools. They are your implements in the same way hammers, saws, bubble levels, squares, screwdrivers, and tape measures are the tools a carpenter must possess.

Then comes grammar. Just as carpenters must learn to respect and skillfully master their tools, so too must writers learn to skillfully manipulate words and respect the language.

If you don’t respect the language, you will never succeed as a writer.

You must also give yourself time to learn the art and craft of writing. You don’t learn how to be a writer by sitting alone in a room and squeezing your brain for inspiration the way you wring water from a sponge.

One of the first steps to becoming a good writer is by reading. Read, read, and read. As I used to tell my students, “If you want to write well, read well.”

Learn from the best; imitate (and I don’t mean to plagiarize). Listen to the words! Words speak to us from the written page, IF we let them IF we allow our eyes to open our inner ears.

Gifted writing can’t be taught. It must be learned.

And we learn from doing it; from experience. That’s how we gain confidence.

Let me repeat that because it is SO VERY IMPORTANT. To be a good writer, you must be confident in your ability to use the tools of the craft: vocabulary, grammar, research, style, plot, pacing, and story.

A confident writer is typically a good writer. We gain confidence by being successful in our work–no matter what work we do. We also learn from failure. Why was a book rejected 40 times? Why isn’t it selling on Amazon or Goodreads or Barnes and Noble? There must be a reason. Find out what it is and learn from it. Then go back to work and make the book better.

Once you master the Craft of Writing, the fundamentals, the mechanics, the “donkey” work, then you are ready to move on to the Art of Writing.

I don’t know if those who do not write for a living understand just how difficult writing is. Many believe that writers work from inspiration and that the words simply leap onto the blank page (or into the motherboard and central processing unit of a computer).

Ernest Hemingway once said: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

[image error]    Ernest Hemingway

What’s a typewriter? You might ask. That’s a topic for another post when I discuss ancient writing implements.

But I digress. In fact, while inspiration is a beautiful thing, it is not what makes a good writer or book. Writing requires significant research, whether fiction or non-fiction. It requires a facility for organization and a keen sense of plot, pacing, and story.

I don’t believe writers are “born.”

They evolve over time as a result of significant experience in the craft.

Not all writers are brooding, intractable alcoholics or unbearable misanthropes who feel their creations contain irrevocable and definitive truths that most of humanity is too obtuse to comprehend.

In fact, most successful writers are excellent storytellers, and they like nothing more than to have their stories read by as many people as possible–even if those stories don’t always possess immutable truths.

And storytelling is not limited to fiction. Storytelling in non-fiction or journalism is just as important.

When I was young, I used to write lots of short stories. Were they any good? No. But for a person who wants to be a writer they were my way of practicing. Sort of like practicing the piano or the flute or some other instrument. The more you practice, the better and more accomplished you become.

Somerset Maugham, the author of such classics as The Razor’s Edge, The Moon and Sixpence, and Of Human Bondage, had this to say about writing:

“If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.”

And that leads me to Ann Rice’s Non-Advice to Writers. Ann Rice is a best-selling American author of gothic fiction, including books such as The Vampire Chronicles, Feast of All Saints, Servant of the Bones, Exit to Eden, and Belinda.

[image error]     Ann Rice

Here is what she says about giving advice to writers:

“On giving writers advice, offering “rules.” I’m asked a lot about this, and people bring great lists of rules for writers to the page all the time. What do I think? I can’t say it loud enough. There are NO RULES for all writers! And never let anyone tell you that there are. Writers are individuals; we each do it in our own way.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you’re not a “real” writer because you don’t follow their rules! I can’t tell you how much harm was done to me early in life by others judging me in that way. I was told in college I wasn’t a “real” writer because I composed on a typewriter; I was condemned later on in damn near apocalyptic terms for “not writing every day.”

“Real writers” are those who become “real writers.” That’s all there is to it. And again, we each do it in our own way. For me, stubbornness has been as important as any talent I might possess. I ultimately ignored the people who condemned me, ridiculed me and sought to discourage me. I laughed or cried over it in secret; and went right on writing what I wanted to write, the way I wanted to write it.

I knew of no other way to become the writer of my dreams. If you want to be a writer, go for it. Critics are a dime a dozen, and people who would love to see you fail are everywhere. Just keep on going; keep doing what works for you. Keep believing in yourself.” 

Ann Rice has said it well. You must believe in yourself and your work because if you don’t, who will?

In Defense of (Gasp!) White Men

A couple of years ago MTV released a controversial video in which a cluster of of smug and self-righteous twenty-somethings looked into the camera and told viewers that white guys should “try to recognize that America was never great for anyone who wasn’t a white guy.”

Social media was quick to condemn the video as “racist” and “pathetic.”

For a good reason.

It was racist, and it was pathetic.

The video essentially asserted that white males were at fault for every bad thing that has ever happened in America.

A 20-something blasts white men on MTV

Really? So the United States has always been an unexceptional land without liberty and opportunity for all? I see.

Perhaps that explains why millions of people have for more than two centuries flocked to our shores from every continent on the planet–and still do! I guess they are eager to come to a disgusting country where angry white men oppress them. Makes sense to me.

MTV’s video (which by the way, was quickly taken down) implied that white men are guilty of what? Of being white and being male, of course.

If that’s not bigoted and racist, then I don’t know what is.

Because the video targeted white men, MTV and its lineup of inane nonwhite actors and one “token white guy” thought it was perfectly okay to smear an entire class of human beings as racist, clueless and privileged.

And Democrats and their left-wing masters wonder why they lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump.

The premise of the video is this: If you are a male and if you were born white, then that is a sin against humanity. How dare you be born white AND male! One of those sins is enough. But committing both sins burdens you with “white guilt” and brands you as a legitimate target for hateful rhetoric from every ethnic, racial, and sexual minority on the planet.

Nothing has changed since that disgusting video hit the airwaves. Speeches by Muslim Democrat congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib not only continue their anti-Semitic diatribes against Jews and the Jewish state of Israel, they often contain references to America’s “whiteness” as though it were some infectious disease.

The Founding Fathers: Deplorable White Guys

Here’s a news flash for Omar, Tlaib and other mindless bigots: Unlike many of our nation’s frightened, safe-space-seeking cupcakes and snowflakes, I don’t have ANY white guilt. None at all. Not a smidgen. Never did. Never will.

Why should I?

I wasn’t with Columbus in the 1490s when he subjugated Native Americans. I wasn’t a slave-owner when slavery was legal in the 18th and 19th centuries. I didn’t attack Mexico in 1846 and appropriate much of what is now the Southwest United States from that country. I had nothing to do with creating the exclusion laws that barred Chinese from entry to America. Nope, I wasn’t around for any of those events.

All I have done to warrant such loathing from Muslim bigots like Omar and Tlaib is work hard in school and my chosen profession, serve four years of active duty in the U. S. Army and try to live my life as much as possible by the tenets of the Golden Rule.

So why do these fatuous boobs want to yoke me with White Guilt?

Perhaps it’s because, like a lot of like-minded Americans, I don’t believe in white guilt, but I do think that All Lives Matter—not just black lives.

As Tomi Lahren, of the Blaze, said in response to that MTV video:

“Apparently white males are no longer allowed to say ‘All Lives Matter’ or ‘Blue Lives Matter’ because a group of snowflakes on MTV say so. When we say ‘All Lives Matter,’ we include black lives in that. And by the way, the All Lives Matter movement has yet to burn down a CVS, call for the murder of police, or block an interstate.”

MTV News may have the lowest intelligence quotient of our mindless culture-shaping entertainment media, but its position is hardly distinctive.

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Lena Dunham, the radical feminist creator, and star of the HBO series “Girls,” recently posted a video gleefully predicting the “extinction of white men.”

I wonder if she included her biological father in that cheery death wish. Or perhaps she emerged fatherless from an alien pod.

Maybe it’s her well-known obsessive-compulsive disorder speaking, but when she and other bovine hypocrites haughtily harangue “white guys” for imaginary crimes, such as being born white and male, it apparently has never occurred to them that just as being a white man does not impart any moral superiority, neither does being female, black, brown, yellow, red, gay, or lesbian.

If that notion makes me a depraved and debauched white man, then so be it. I am not ashamed of my gender or my race, and I am sure as hell not saddled with white guilt.

Are you?

Journalism is Dead—Long Live the Media!

Today, I am running a column about journalism written by historian Victor David Hanson. You will find his complete bio at the end of the post.

For the past few years, I have struggled to understand, if not accept, what has happened to the practice of journalism in America. It has devolved into something that I no longer recognize.

When I began my professional journalism career at the Chicago Tribune in the early 1970s, the concepts of fairness, balance, and objectivity were required components in the newsroom. If I inserted my opinion in a story or if it was perceived as biased, I heard it from any number of Tribune editors. “Yates, you can’t say this,” they would bark.” Where’s the attribution? I don’t care what YOU think, just report the damn story.”

Sadly, that kind of editorial oversight seems to be missing from newsrooms today. Reporters, like CNN’s Jim Acosta or April Ryan of the American Urban Radio Networks, prefer to create news with their antics at press conferences rather than report it. Neither would have lasted a day in the old Chicago Tribune newsroom.

Hanson examines the decline of journalism and offers some thoughts on why it is happening. Here is Hanson’s column. Give it a read. It contains a lot of wisdom.

By Richard David Hanson

There still exists a physical media in the sense of airing current events. But it is not journalism as we once understood the disinterested reporting of the news. Journalism is now dead. The media lives on.

Reporters
today believe that their coverage serves higher agendas of social justice,
identity politics, “equality,” and diversity. To the degree a news account is
expanded or ignored, praised or blasted, depends on its supposed utility to the
effort to fundamentally transform the country into something unlike its
founding.

At
the recent third president-less White House Correspondents’ Dinner,
passive-aggressive journalists whined that they were victims, standing on the
barricades against the all-powerful, all-evil—and all absent—Donald
Trump. If the attempt was to return professionalism to the evening and
eschew the pathological celebrity obsessions of the past, the result was only
more confirmation of the self-referential and narcissistic culture of the
Washington press corps.

Why
should we believe reporters suddenly worried about ethics, free inquiry, and
speech?

No journalist who pontificates now about the supposedly First
Amendment-violating Trump ever mentions that Barack Obama had Fox News’s James
Rosen (and his relatives) monitored, that he surveilled the communications
records of Associated Press reporters, or that he spoke with the press far less
often than did Trump, and often fixated on Fox News.

Journalists
themselves had no problem with colleagues colluding with the Clinton campaign
as evidenced in the Wikileaks Podesta trove. There was never much introspection
about why the elite press and media corps—loudly progressive and feminist—was
decimated by #MeToo Movement allegations of long-standing sexual harassment and
assault.

Were there serious worries voiced over journalistic ethics when CNN’s Donna Brazile leaked primary debate questions to the 2016 Clinton campaign? Did journalists speak out when journalist Candy Crowley abandoned her moderator role and turned into an Obama partisan in the 2012 second presidential debate? Were reporters at all worried when the Shorenstein Center cited 90 percent negative media coverage of the Trump campaign and presidency? Did they object much when Twitter and Facebook exiled conservative voices that they found inconvenient?

[image error]

Are
journalists concerned when campuses shout down visiting lecturers or pass
speech codes to restrict free expression? Was the strange Obama-era state
surveillance of fellow journalist Sharyl Attkisson of any importance to the
journalistic brotherhood? Did they fret that the Obama-era FBI likely inserted
informants into a political campaign, or deliberately deceived a FISA court to
spy on an American citizen?

Have
journalists signed any of their accustomed collective outrage letters over the New
York Times’ Nazi-like anti-Semitic cartoons, and its pathetic
sort of, sort of not initial apologies?

Concerning
the three great psychodramas of the last two years—the Kavanaugh hearings, the
Covington kids fiasco, and the Jussie Smollett fantasy—the media for too long
trafficked in the lies of the discredited and predicated their coverage on
ideology: feminists, Native Americans, and African-Americans as noble victims;
their white male oppressors not so much, regardless of the actual facts of the
case.

During
the Duke lacrosse team mess, the University of Virginia fraternity hoax, and
the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin drama the public first began to sense the
old implicit media bias had become something new—an outright distortion of
evidence to serve a higher cause. We are now at the point that the news
consumer has little expectation that journalists will report the facts, but
assumes that they will massage, distort, and misrepresent narratives for
purposes of supposed social utility.

The
media does not just mislead in what it reports; it also chooses not to report
news it finds antithetical to its social justice mission. Voters never learned
about what Barack Obama actually had said at a dinner honoring Rashid Khalidi
because journalists suppressed his speech, in the same fashion the public never
knew that then-Senator Obama had posed for a photo-op with Louis Farrakhan, a
picture also never released until after Obama had left office. In a new
condemnatory account of media misbehavior, Unfreedom of the Press,
Mark Levin inter alia devotes a discussion to what we
might call the “un-news,” the long history of deliberate suppression of
important stories that do not advance the media’s ideological objectives that
transcend simply reporting the facts of important daily events.

We might call their modus operandi “critical journalistic theory” that postulates there are few disinterested facts, only interpretations constructed by white male elites. So, to get at a different “truth,” journalists must deconstruct the story by changing or omitting bothersome facts to transmit the “true” essence of an event.

[image error]

Recently,
the media was faced with an existential decision over whether to own up to its
peddling myths about Russian collusion or to double down on them. So they
perpetuated the farce by bragging on their own contributions to it, and by
extension sought to ensure their tarnished reputations by further tarnishing
them.

There
was never any
evidence to support the collusion hoax. Despite denials, the yarn arose mostly
from Hillary Clinton’s (illegal) hiring of British subject Christopher Steele
(albeit through the intermediaries of the DNC, Perkins-Coie, and Fusion GPS) to
smear her election opponent. After all, presidential candidates are not
supposed to hire foreign nationals to work with other foreign nationals to
conduct espionage to undermine an opponent’s campaign—and then illegally hide
the nature of such a “campaign expense” through three firewalls.

After
her defeat, “collusion” morphed into a progressive and media generated mechanism
at first to account for the inexplicable Clinton defeat, then to abort the
unpalatable Trump transition and presidency, and finally as a desperate
preemptive effort to thwart investigation of high crimes of Obama-era officials. And the
collusion myth caused the nation a great deal of harm until even the onetime progressive heartthrob Robert
Mueller’s “dream team” found no evidence for it whatsoever.

In
response, did the media in introspective fashion, reexamine why they had
peddled collusion through leaks, groupthink, and self-righteous sermons about
their own wounded fawn egos? Hardly. No sooner had Mueller found no collusion
and no case for prosecuting “obstruction” of such a non-crime than the media
first declared itself correct and righteous for peddling the Russian conspiracy
theory, and, second, moved immediately to “tax returns,” in essence learning nothing and forgetting nothing.

Lately,
a tiny few progressive journalists have tried to warn their colleagues that the
collusion farce and other frauds have all but ruined what was left of the
reputation of American journalism. The leftist anti-Trump Nation has
just published Aaron Maté’s exhaustive
account of the falsities, smears, and sheer ridiculousness of
the media obsession with collusion.

Rolling Stone’s Matt
Taibbi, another progressive anti-Trumper, had earlier done the same. And a few journalists,
despite being deeply embedded within the Democratic-media nexus, have voiced
warnings on other fronts.

CNN’s Jake Tapper finally had to remind his television audience that, contra the Joe Biden rollout campaign video and the progressive gospel, Donald Trump did not excuse white nationalists and Klansmen during the 2017 Charlottesville violence.

[image error]
Covington kids slandered and libeled by groupthink Media

Recent
polls of likely voters, of all Americans, and even of the Washington press
corps itself, show an overwhelming consensus the media is both biased in
general and in particular against the Trump presidency.

“Fake
news” is not just a Trump talking point or obsession. It is a factual account
of what journalism has become—so often an arm of the progressive movement and
an incestuous and inbred group of New York and Washington coastal elite
mediocrities, or what former Obama official Ben Rhodes cynically wrote off as
an “echo chamber” of greenhorn know-nothings.

CNN’s
White House correspondent Jim Acosta can delude himself into thinking the media
got it right on collusion fantasies, but his own act as a disruptive and
shallow performance artist has discredited him as a serious journalist.
 His own network has all but ruined its reputation and lost much of its
former audience by reporting outright falsities, and employing entertainment
and news hosts in a wide variety of shows who descended into gross
buffoonery—from Kathy Griffin’s decapitation video to Anderson Cooper’s on-air
Trump defecation metaphor to Reza Aslan’s “piece of s—t” commentary to the late Anthony Bourdain’s quip about poisoning
Trump.

Do
we still remember the CNN news team in December 2014 doing an on-air “hands-up”
charade in honor of the Ferguson shooting victim Michael Brown? Note that even
Eric Holder’s Justice Department found that Michael Brown never so attempted to
surrender to police. CNN never apologized for its news team trafficking in
false news that only inflamed passions at a time of increased national
tensions.

CNN
reporters like Gloria Borger, Chris Cuomo, Eric Lichtblau, Manu Raju, Brian
Rokus, Jake Tapper, Jeff Zeleny, and teams such as Jim Sciutto, Carl Bernstein,
and Marshall Cohen as well as Thomas Frank, and Lex Harris all have peddled
false rumors and gossip passed off as fact.

CNN
“analyst” James Clapper, himself an admitted liar who has deliberately misled
Congress while under oath, for months claimed that Trump was a virtual Putin
asset. He never recanted. Finally, he and others have ended up attacking the
idea that members of the Obama intelligence team “spied” on the Trump campaign,
in effect defending himself on air by ridiculing charges against people like
himself.  None of these journalists wondered why they seemed to have
repeated the same errors in the same fashion with the same denials of culpability.

What
destroyed the present generation of journalism was not just that they live in
coastal corridors of progressive groupthink. It was not just because they
almost all graduated from liberal journalism programs that still regurgitate
ossified Watergate psychodramas of investigative reporters as comic book
heroes. Nor is the cause of their decline even their own hair-trigger and
social media snark or the pushback from Donald J. Trump.

Instead,
over the last 20 years, marquee journalists saw themselves as wannabe
celebrities who were to make news, not to report it, to massage stories in such
a fashion to serve their social justice agendas, and to virtue signal their
superior morality, as many revolved in and out of government.

What
have they become instead? People with enormous self-regard, but with little
experience with the public whom they were supposed to serve.

They
espouse opinions on nearly everything while knowing almost nothing. They
believe Washington and New York are the centers of the universe, while the
universe is making both more irrelevant. As their ethics dissipated, their
vocabularies shrank. Their poor communication skills grew ever poorer, and they
displayed little knowledge of the history and culture of the people they
reported on. Most could give an in-depth lecture on Botox, but are ignorant
about the U.S. Constitution or basic facts of American history.

The
people finally are tiring of their bias, their incompetence and their
arrogance—and are finally beginning to ignore most of what they say and write.

Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc.

Photo Credit:  Getty Images

About the Author: Victor Davis Hanson

[image error]Victor David Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is an American military historian, columnist, former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He was a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, and is currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of  The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict was Fought and Won  (Basic Books).

News from the 2019 Chanticleer Writers Conference

Along with a few hundred other authors, I attended the 2019 Chanticleer International Book Awards Conference which took place April 26-28 at the luxurious Hotel Bellwether in Bellingham, Washington.

[image error]Hotel Bellwether

As with some 275 other authors from around the world, I was a semi-finalist in one of 16 divisions from which a secret panel of Chanticleer judges selects first place and grand prize winners, as well as the biggest award: The Best Book of the Year.

Winners are announced from sealed envelopes during a
suspense-filled evening banquet. Sort of like the Oscars, only at Chanticleer
you get a meal with the anxiety.

As a former journalist, I have attended my share of rubber
chicken dinners. Unless I myself was speaking, I attended these as an observer.
This time, however, I was up for an award.

Spoiler alert! When I arrived at the conference as one of 18 semi-finalists for a First Place Award in the Goethe Historical Fiction category, I was just happy to have made it that far. The process Chanticleer uses to evaluate books is involved and rigorous. Those who apply for an award in one of the 16 divisions must first escape the “Slush Pile” where several hundred books are assessed, appraised, and ultimately jettisoned.

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Books that survive the Slush Pile, are added to a “Long List” along with dozens of other books where they are further evaluated by a secret jury of professional editors and authors. During that process more books are eliminated and those that survive are included on a “Short List” where they undergo even more scrutiny. At the last stage before the awards banquet, the best books are moved from the “Short List” into the “Semi-Finalist” category. And that’s where I was when the banquet began April 27.

[image error]Kathryn “Kiffer Brown

The night was kicked off by Kathryn “Kiffer” Brown, President and Founder, and Sharon E. Anderson, Chief Review Editor of the Chanticleer organization.

[image error]Sharon E. Anderson



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Within minutes the First Place Category winners were named in each of the 16 divisions—usually between six and eight out of semi-finalist lists that ranged from as few as 11 to as many as 30. When my name was called as one of the First Place Winners in the Goethe Historical Fiction category I was feeling pretty happy. I trotted up to the podium and got my blue ribbon. At that point, I considered the evening a huge success.

But Chanticleer wasn’t done with me. New sealed envelopes
arrived and the Grand Prize winners in each of the 16 categories were
announced. I looked over the list of other First Place winners in the Goethe
Historical Fiction category. Stiff competition. These were all excellent books
or they wouldn’t have been awarded First Place status.

[image error]

            I recall taking a drink of my Widmer Hefeweizen beer as the Goethe envelope was torn open: “The winner of the Grand Prize in the Goethe Historical Fiction Division is The Lost Years of Billy Battles, Book three in the Finding Billy Battles trilogy by Ronald E. Yates.”

[image error]

“What,” I gasped. “Are you kidding me?” And up I careened
toward the podium where Kiffer Brown presented me with a much larger blue and
white ribbon and a hug. I hadn’t been so stoked since I won my first Edward
Scott Beck Award for international reporting along with a Pulitzer nomination.

Back at my table I placed the ribbon in front of me and thought to myself. “Now we can leave. Such an honor.”

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“But wait,” as
those television commercials say, “that’s
not all!”

“Now for the highlight of the evening,” Kiffer Brown said. “The Overall Best Book of 2018.” Before the envelope was ripped open I found myself looking around the ballroom at the other tables and the expectant faces of authors seated at them.

“I wonder who will get
that award.” I thought to myself.

Then came the announcement: “The winner of the Overall Best
Book of 2018 is Ronald E. Yates, author of The Lost Years of Billy Battles.”

At first it didn’t register with me. Then, I recall saying
something brilliant and inspired like: “What? OMG!”

And up I stumbled once again to the podium where Kiffer gave me an even bigger blue and white ribbon and another robust hug.

[image error]Overall Best Book of 2918 Ribbon

As fellow author, Mary Adler, who writes award winning
mystery novels set during World War II, said recently: “You must have been
chuffed!”

Chuffed I was and dazed as well. Never in my wildest dreams
did I ever think I would leave Bellingham with such a haul of awards and prizes.

In addition to a $1000 prize, I received a 24-month license from Hindenburg Systems for Audiobook Creator software and Journalist Pro software for Podcasters. I also received one year of free distribution of my books through PublishDrive, an eBook publishing platform and distribution network designed to get an author’s titles into hundreds of bookstores and 240,000 digital libraries in 70+ countries around the world.

[image error]Grand Prize Winners (I’m in the back holding the big ribbon)

Chuffed? You bet! Of course, the greatest thing about a
writers’ conference and awards banquet—in addition to possibly picking up an
award—is the opportunity to talk to other authors and to attend sessions and
workshops on a variety of topics critical to the writing life.

At this year’s conference, there were plenty of opportunities to do that. Of particular note was the presence Keynote Speaker J.D. Barker, the international best-selling author of THE FOURTH MONKEY and FORSAKEN.

[image error]Author J.D. Barker

As a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award and winner of the
New Apple Medalist Award, his work has been compared to Stephen King, Dean Koontz,
and Thomas Harris. His third novel, THE FIFTH TO DIE, was released in June
2018. The Stoker family was so impressed with his novel, Forsaken, that they reached to him to co-author
a prequel to DRACULA, which was written by Bram Stoker in 1897. Barker’s novels
have been translated into numerous languages and optioned for both film and
television.

The Chanticleer conference is notable because it intermixes the
work of both traditionally published and indie authors.  

At this year’s conference there were sessions on a wide
variety of topics:

MAKING THE LEAP FROM INDIE TO TRADITIONAL
PUBLISHINGCROSSING GENRE & WHY YOU SHOULD DO IT!AUDIOBOOK CREATION WorkshopJOURNALIST PRO Workshop
(for podcasters)Revision
& Editing: Secrets of The Dark ArtsWriting
Fiction so Readers Land Amid Your Story and Don’t Want to Leave. Ever.METADATA TIPS AND TRICKS THAT HELP YOU SELL MOREFrom Page
to Stage – Public Speaking and Podcasting Become an
Ethical Literary Thief: Robbing from Life for Your Fiction/ Stealing Fiction
Techniques for your MemoirA
DIALOGUE ABOUT DIALOGUECLUES
THAT CAPTIVATE YOUR MYSTERY AUDIENCESCULPT
UNFORGETTABLE CHARACTERSMaking
Social Media, Smart MediaGETTING
MEDIA ATTENTION as a SMALL PRESS or INDIE AUTHORMEDIA
OUTREACH: CHECKLIST & TIMETABLEHOW TO
OVERCOME WRITERS BLOCK with MEDITATIONHow to
Create a Book Trailer on a BudgetHow to
Write Online Content that People Will Actually Read

The biggest problem was finding
time to attend all of the sessions, which of course is impossible unless you
are able to clone yourself.

No doubt planning for the 2020
Chanticleer Conference and Book Awards Banquet has already begun. That means I
need to get busy and finish my next book which is not in the historical fiction
genre, but likely to fall into the Global Thriller or Contemporary Literary
categories.

The working title of that effort
is: Asia
Hands: A Tale of Foreign Correspondents & Other Miscreants in the Orient.
Is it based on my own life as a foreign correspondent? You will have to read it
to find out.

Stay tuned!

About

The Insanity of Reparations

Recently Steve Baldwin, author, former California Assemblyman, and former
Executive Director of the Council for National Policy, and I co-authored a piece on the idea of paying reparations to millions of African-American descendants of American slaves. The story appeared in the Western Journal. Here it is, reprinted.

By Steven Baldwin and Ronald E. Yates

The latest rage of the left is “reparations,” which is the name given to an issue that has become a litmus test for 2020 Democratic presidential candidates. Three weeks ago, most of the major 2020 candidates showed up at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and groveled before a group of professional social justice warriors and assorted race baiters.

Without missing a beat, every candidate in attendance signed on to the idea of supporting Congresswoman’s Sheila Jackson Lee’s bill which will “study” the idea of giving money to African-Americans as atonement for the practice of slavery over 150 years ago.

But the word “reparations” is being used improperly by Sharpton and the left. Google’s online dictionary defines the term as “the making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged.” That definition clearly refers to parties in the present tense, meaning actual persons who are wronged would receive money from actual persons who wronged them.

But the reparations movement wants people who have committed no injustice or crime to pay people who had no crime or injustice committed against them.

A more accurate description of what the left is proposing would be “bribery,” since that’s exactly what is occurring. We are witnessing presidential candidates promise money to radical black activists in exchange for supporting their candidacies. Nothing more.

Indeed, Trump’s rising support among blacks probably has something to do with why this issue has suddenly burst onto the leftist political scene. The left is hoping this issue will prevent any further hemorrhaging of the black vote.

Nevertheless, this issue bears scrutiny. When it comes to reparations — especially reparations for those claiming to be descendants of slaves — the issue is fraught with complications, not the least of which is who today should qualify for a reparation payment.

How will that be determined? Will there be pervasive DNA testing? And who will be tested? Are there accurate records available that will allow recipients to unequivocally trace their lineage back to enslaved ancestors? How will those records be vetted? Or will it just be enough that an individual is black or looks black and is therefore entitled to reparations based on his or her presumed race? And how black must one be? Do you need to be 100 percent black? Or does 50 percent, or 25 percent, or 10 percent qualify?

Indeed, there are millions of African-Americans living today with zero connection to slavery because their ancestors immigrated here post-Civil War. Should they benefit from reparations? What about blacks who owned slaves?

[image error]

The first legal slave owner in American history was a black tobacco farmer named Anthony Johnson who owned a 250-acre tobacco farm in Virginia. While Johnson was not the first slave owner in American history, he was, according to historian R. Halliburton Jr., among the first to have his lifetime ownership of a slave legally sanctioned by a court. In 1654, a civil court found that Johnson, in fact, owned five indentured servants for life, an outcome historian Halliburton calls “one of the first known legal sanctions of slavery — other than as a punishment for crime.”

In fact, the 1830 U.S. Census shows there were 319,599 free blacks in the United States that year and 3,775 of them owned a total of 12,760 slaves! Thirty years later, the 1860 census shows that the largest black slave owner in South Carolina was William Ellison, a wealthy plantation owner and cotton gin manufacturer. He owned 63 black slaves, making him the largest of the 171 black slaveholders in South Carolina.

Indeed, Halliburton has found that free black slaveholders could be found at one time or another “in each of the thirteen original states and later in every state that countenanced slavery.”

Surely, the descendants of these slave-holding blacks should not benefit from reparations, right?

Then there’s the dicey issue of Native Americans who owned slaves. After all, Elizabeth Warren is advocating reparations for Native Americans — but what if they owned slaves? Fear not; some did.

RELATED: Bob Ehrlich: There’s Still Hope for Race Relations in America

According to historian Tiya Miles, the number of slaves held by Cherokees was about 600 at the start of the 19th century and grew to about 1,500 at the time of government-mandated westward removal in 1838-1839 — otherwise known as the “Trail of Tears.” Miles writes, “Slavery inched its way slowly into Cherokee life…. and when a white man moved into a Native location, usually to work as a trader or as an Indian agent, he would own black slaves. If such a person also had a child with a native woman, as was not uncommon, the half-European, half-Native child would inherit the enslaved people (and their children) under white law, as well as the right to use tribal lands under tribal law.” It was a combination that put Cherokee slaveholders in a position to expand their wealth, eventually operating large farms and plantations.

In addition, Miles writes that as the 19th century began, Creeks, Choctaws and Chickasaws held some 3,500 slaves.

But what about other groups that suffered the loss of various rights throughout American history? There were Irish slaves.

Authors Don Jordan and Michael Walsh in “White Cargo,” have investigated the Irish slave trade and determined that between “1600 unto 1699, there were many more Irish sold as slaves than African. There are records of Irish slaves well into the 18th century .. Irish slaves were less expensive than Africans, and treated with more cruelty.” Should we set up a fund to pay all Irish-Americans?

What about women? They were not allowed to vote until 1920 so they were deprived of this basic right for the first 100 years of America.

Chinese laborers were forced to build many of the first railroads in conditions that were slave-like. Should their relatives receive reparations?

Poor whites in Appalachia suffered all kinds of discrimination; should we pay their descendants?

What about all the Italian-American, German-American, and Japanese-Americans who were placed into internment camps during WWII?

Should all these groups receive funds?

Actually, Japanese-Americans did indeed receive reparations when in 1988 President Reagan authorized the payments of $20,000 to each Japanese still living who had been interned in camps during WWII. The U.S. government eventually paid over $1.6 billion in reparations to 82,219 Japanese-Americans.

[image error]Japanese-American internees during WW II

But this is very different from today’s reparations proposals. These reparations were paid to genuine Japanese-Americans who experienced life in the camps and who lost both their freedom and property as a result. To compare this to paying reparations to descendants of enslaved black Americans from 156 years ago is nonsensical, given the complications we have already detailed.

Then there’s the issue of who should pay? All Americans? If all Americans end up paying reparations via a federal budget expenditure, then won’t we be forcing the black descendants of slaves to pay for the sin of slavery through the taxes they pay? If the left tries to limit those who must pay to whites, a host of other problems arise, aside from such a proposal likely being ruled unconstitutional. Which whites would pay? If one’s forebears were active in the abolition movement, would they have to pay? What about the descendants of whites who died in the Civil War fighting the Confederacy?

Should the descendants of white slaves pay reparations? Authors Jordan and Walsh in “White Cargo,” discovered that 300,000 whites were shipped to America as slaves. Most were urchins swept up from London’s streets and shipped to America to work on tobacco farms. The authors write, “The first slaves imported into the American colonies were 100 white children in 1619, four months before the arrival of the first shipment of black slaves.”

Indeed, most whites of that era did not own slaves. Slavery was mostly engaged in by the wealthy plantation class and some factory owners. Without doing an in-depth genealogical study, it is likely the majority of non-blacks alive today in America can be traced to those who took no part in slavery or who immigrated to America after the Civil War.

What about those of mixed race? Unless the proponents are advocating the government spend billions in genealogical researching tracking down the living descendants of slave owners, there is no logical way to hold responsible for slavery anyone alive today.

Moreover, the reparations ideology assumes America did nothing to stop slavery or address how blacks were treated in the years since the end of slavery. Do the deaths of 364,5111 Union soldiers who gave their lives in the Civil War not count? What about all the civil rights acts supported and passed by the GOP in the 1960s? Let’s not forget such legislation was opposed by almost all Democrats at the time.

Indeed, the KKK was a Democratic Party creation as were Jim Crow laws and the segregation movement in general.

The Republican Party was founded to oppose slavery; the Democratic Party was founded to defend slavery. It would be easier and perhaps more accurate to assess all Democrats a reparations fee for their history of support for slavery and subsequently blocking the passage of civil rights laws. If the GOP wanted to use this issue to educate Americans about the true history of the Democratic Party, they should amend the reparations bill to do just that.

And then kill the bill.

We also should be concerned about the precedent this silly idea would create.

If the government actually starts paying reparations to descendants of people who may or may not have been enslaved, other groups will soon line up at the trough. It will never end.

William A. Jacobson of Cornell Law School sums up the argument perfectly: “If you can’t answer the question of why a Vietnamese boat person has to pay reparations for the conduct of white plantation owners more than a century earlier, then you can’t make the argument. If you can’t answer the question of why two successful black doctors living in a fashionable suburb should get reparations paid for by the white children of Appalachia, then you can’t make the argument.”

Reparations ideology is an insult to individual accountability and to the Western notion of justice. Rather, it is a system based upon the concept of identity politics whereby Americans are broken into groups and pitted against one another.

Indeed, it is ironic that the left is pushing reparations at a time when leftist demagogues sermonize about racial healing. But rather than heal, the reparations issue will likely increase racial division.

Forcing all Americans to pay for something that affected no one alive today is neither just nor moral. The reparations movement is just another scam by race hustlers who see billions, if not trillions of dollars, flowing into some giant reparations fund that they can manipulate and control in perpetuity.

But that won’t dissuade the author of the reparations bill from using this bill to divide Americans; After all, Jackson Lee is one of the most race-obsessed members of Congress. She once stated that Republicans invented some diseases to “kill black people,” and that the names given to hurricanes by meteorologists are racist.

During a hearing involving NASA, she asked, “Will the Mars rover be able to show the flag the astronauts planted before?” When others corrected her publicly, her staff denounced them as “racists.” She also refers to herself as a “freed slave” and claims the Tea Party is a KKK group.

In other words, she’s obsessed with racial hatred — and therefore the perfect person to author a reparations bill.

Steve Baldwin is the former California Assemblyman where he served as the Minority Whip and as Chairman of the Education Committee. He also served as Executive Director of the Council for National Policy. He is the author of the book, From Crayons to Condoms, the Ugly Truth About America’s Public Schools. 

‘Survival itself is no small achievement’

Keyes Beech, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1951 for his Korean War battlefield coverage, was based in Hong Kong when he wrote the essay below for The Chicago Daily News centennial edition in 1976.  A renowned correspondent for The Chicago Daily News Foreign Service until it was closed in 1977, Beech died at age 76 in 1990.

Keyes Beech was a wonderful role model for any newly-minted foreign correspondent, which is what I was in 1974 when I was sent to Tokyo as the Chicago Tribune’s Far East Correspondent. We crossed paths often in places like Bangkok, Saigon, Taipei, Manila, and Hong Kong, where Keyes lived for many years. Like me, he was in Saigon on April 29, 1975, when the city fell to Communist North Vietnamese troops; and like me, it was not an even that he was proud of. 

And even though he worked for a competing newspaper I never really saw him as a competitor–just a fellow foreign correspondent doing the best he could to keep his readers informed. Keyes was not a great raconteur. In fact, he was a pretty quiet guy who let his writing do his talking. And his writing was exemplary and had a lot to say.

I recall after the Chicago Daily News folded Keyes had just moved to San Diego. I was based in Los Angeles with my office in the Los Angeles Times building. One day a friend from the L.A. Times came to my office and told me the Times had just hired Beech. He would be going back to Asia–specifically, Bangkok.

When I asked Keyes about it he told me: “I was hanging up a picture when the phone rang and the Times offered me the job. I think I wavered about 30 seconds and then said yes.”  He stayed in Bangkok until 1983, when he finally decided he had had enough.

Even though I was based in Los Angeles, my “beat” was all of Asia and Latin America–which meant I was traveling about 60 percent of the time. One week I might be in Singapore or Hong Kong and the next I could be in Mexico or Chile.

“Ridiculous,” Keyes told me one day when we were having lunch in Bangkok. “What the hell are the editors at the Tribune thinking?”

I didn’t have an answer. But in his essay below Keyes said what a lot of foreign correspondents think about when they look back on their careers of covering war and mayhem.

When asked what we have to show for years of slogging through jungles, racing for planes, running for cover, eating putrid food, and sleeping in fleapit hotels, many of us will answer as Keyes did in this 1977 essay.  

[image error] Keyes Beech

‘Survival itself is no small achievement’

By Keyes Beech

HONG KONG — I went to the Far East for The Daily News for a year’s tour of duty.

That was nearly 30 years ago. And I’m still out here.

It has, with a few exceptions, been a happy relationship. I still hold a grudge against the bookkeepers for refusing to pay $25 for a pair of glasses I broke on a Chinese Nationalist ship while dodging a piano that had gone berserk in turbulent seas in the Formosa Strait in 1958.

On a loftier plane, I can still work myself into a towering rage at my editors’ refusal to allow me to go into Communist China in 1957 when Peking had granted me a visa. I finally got back in — 18 years later.

I’ve always said that if I ever lost my capacity for indignation, I would get out of this business. The difference is that today I am more selective in what I get angry about. Which means, I suppose, that I am older, sadder and, I hope, wiser.

I didn’t really mean to stay in Asia so long, but things kept happening and I kept staying on because I wanted to be where the action was.

Of course, there were all those wars. I’m sensitive about covering so many wars: Some of my friends have suggested that I’m a warmonger. I should like to point out that I didn’t start those wars. I merely reported them. On my 25th anniversary in Asia, I was having dinner with a friend in Bangkok. He asked me, only half jokingly, what I had to show for all those years.

“Well,” I said defiantly, “I survived.”

That in itself is no small achievement for anyone who has spent nearly 30 years of his life in this part of the world, racing for airplanes, jumping out of helicopters, dodging bullets now and then, sometimes wondering if your next step was going to come down on a land mine.

When I stop to think about it, more of my friends are dead than alive. And a shocking number of them died violent deaths in Korea and Vietnam. Yet during all those years, I have never been seriously ill. And the only injury I suffered during the better part of a decade in Vietnam was breaking a heel bone while hanging a curtain in my house in Saigon.

I wonder who’s living there now?

A staggering amount of history has been written since I arrived in Tokyo in May 1947. I was not long out of the Marine Corps as a combat correspondent and a rather cocky reporter who was soon to be humbled by how much he did not know and how much he would never know about the “mysterious Orient.”

I watched people starve in Shanghai and Peking as the Communist armies tightened their grip on the cities and the weary Nationalists disintegrated under the weight of their own corruption and incompetence.

I escaped from Seoul by the skin of my teeth in 1950 as the North Koreans rolled in. I watched the Japanese rebound from defeat to become the world’s third greatest economic power. I watched the newly independent countries of Southeast Asia grope for a form of government that would suit their needs.

In the process, I learned two things that should have been obvious to begin with. One was that there is no Asia, only Asians. “What do I have in common with an Indonesian?” a Japanese cabinet minister said coolly.

The answer was nothing, except that they both belong to the human race.

The other thing I learned was that democracy is at best a fragile export when transplanted to Asian soil. The only democracy left in Asia today is Japan, which alone among Asian nations had the machinery to make it work.

Over the years, I have seen the American stature in Asia steadily diminish. We emerged from World War II bright and shiny and noble — or so it seemed to many Americans and a great many Asians.

But time and attrition have damaged that image beyond repair. The myth of American omnipotence was shattered in the rice paddies of Vietnam.

Perhaps it was inevitable. Perhaps it was even healthy. But for one who remembers those heady days when Americans thought they could do anything, it takes a little getting used to.

One of the proudest moments of my life was the day in 1960 when hundreds of thousands of South Koreans cheered the American flag as the corrupt, tyrannical Syngman Rhee regime came to an end.

The saddest and most shameful day was April 29, 1975, when I left the American embassy roof in Saigon by helicopter as thousands of frightened Vietnamese clawed at the embassy gates. It was not a nice way to go.