Re: Lock and Load (fwd)

["Bruce Balden" <balden@mail.bc.rogers.wave.ca>]

>It shows that a Communist rifle doesn't allow us the freedom to lock and
load.
>
Having travelled in China extensively, I can tell you that there is not a
great deal of "Communism", the way Marx, Lenin, Stalin, or even Mao might
have imagined it.

Historians of WWI will recall that US domestic politics included a faction
that maintained that the two oceans were a natural protection against
overseas aggressors and so involvement in the European war seemed pointless.
Such people were called "isolationists", even though they were simply
maintaining that the US simply **was** isolated.


Anyway, China has had the Himalayas and huge deserts and the Pacific to
protect it and was the same way.  When technology changed that, all sorts of
foreigners moved in.  By the time the twentieth century arrived, Chinese
were sick of foreign influence, and successive governments, Imperial (Qing
dynasty), Guomentang (National People's Party = KMT), CPC (Communist Party
of China),  tried to kick everybody out.  Mao's communism was, among other
things, better organized, and at least kicked the Japanese, and later the
Russians, out, making them great heros to the Chinese people for this alone.
But now, after the Great Leap Forward, and other adventures, Chinese people
including those within the Communist Party, have little more patience for
socialism.

State Owned Enterprises (SOEs), the core of communism, are being
systematically privatized, with a final result expected to resemble modern
Britain c. 1975 (before Thatcher), and they are engaging in extensive joint
ventures with foreign firms.

China can't drop the word "Communist" easily for political reasons, but
"socialism with capitalist characteristics" is not readily distinguishable
from Tony Blair's species of moderate European socialism.

Similarly, the U.S. cannot admit directly that most of the Cold War military
spending was essentially a form of disguised Keynsian economics, and that
Grumman and friends were essentially state-subsidized if not state-owned ent
erprises.  Eisenhower figured out but few others did.