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Though conservative in expressing her emotions, she loved Father, but in that era the word “love” was never associated with personal feelings, for love could be extended only to the state, the party, and its leader.
He needed a new way, one that would comprehensively mobilize the masses from the ground up. The “Cultural Revolution” was his solution. The world could not be put to order without first being thrown into chaos.
Facing a nonviolent opposition, a totalitarian regime will not retreat a single step; instead it will always display its essential nature, retaliating with brute force, whatever the cost in human lives and human liberty.
Violence, so deeply rooted in American life that you could never escape it, reflected the profound flaws built into the country’s social fabric.
In its business deals with China, the West always avoids issues of freedom of speech and citizens’ rights—one of the most glaring moral failures of our time. The West has an obligation to reaffirm human rights, for otherwise its conduct is tantamount to a neocolonialist exploitation of developing nations.
Sadly, the freedom that Westerners so enjoy loses its meaning if the West does not fight for freedom elsewhere.
Without the sound of human voices, without warmth and color in our lives, without attentive glances, Earth is just an insensate rock suspended in space.
