If China can inject its dark ideology into the world’s most powerful democracy, it is difficult to believe that it has not compromised India’s own political, academic and media ecosystems. – Abhijit Majumder
Last week, the cat lapped up milk. Also, CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury sang the eulogy of his ideological masters, the Communist Party of China (CPC), in a letter.
Both would have been equally unsurprising had Yechury’s luxuriant praise not come on the back of a devastating pandemic originating from China (from most accounts, from its biological weapons labs in Wuhan). Besides, China has been engaged in a series of violent conflicts from Doklam to Galwan to Pangong Tso with Yechury’s own nation, India.
Brazening out all these inconvenient realities, Yechury wrote, “Progressive people look forward to the People’s Republic of China under CPC’s leadership pursuing a peaceful foreign policy, consolidating good neighbourly relations, contributing to peace and stability in South Asia and the world.”
He topped it by claiming that China’s economic recovery after Covid was a “lesson for the world”.
Coming from the head of India’s largest Communist party, it is predictable but still distasteful, given the current context.
But here is the more problematic bit: a very small yet vocal section of young Indians are getting drawn to the far-Left. Certain urban Indian campuses like JNU and Jadavpur University have always been Leftist strongholds. But three recent developments have fed the trend.
First, sustained propaganda by the Left and so-called “liberal” intelligentsia against Narendra Modi has subliminally convinced many urban, English-educated youngsters that the “vernac” onslaught of nationalism and Hindutva will wreck their neat world of “coolness”.
Second, live television and social media in the United States, which these young stars follow more than their own local content, made ousting President Donald Trump a civilisational mission, that too by far-Left, violent means. These channels and videos openly celebrated anarchy on the streets, smashing of statues, burning of cars and mass robbing of shops.
Many departmental stores owned by black Americans were burned and looted in the name of black victimisation.
But the third trend of Wokeness perhaps captures most eloquently the organised intellectual thuggery of the Left. Every idea whom a small group of frustrated, attention-seeking, violently intolerant individuals hiding behind LGBTQIA and other marginalised identities deem offensive is cancelled. Every person who puts forth or backs that idea is cancelled, his or her career damaged or destroyed. It is like an intellectually blinkered lynch-mob moving from one book to the next treatise with chainsaws or sledgehammers, spoiling for a kill.
Gullible youngsters are never encouraged to question the motives of the far-Left. They are told that the Leftist ideology is one of compassion, dissent and resistance, standing for the poor and the underdog. They are made to believe that Communism best anchors their anger and angst, insecurities and creativity.
Alas, generations have quickly been disabused.
Here are a few basic questions young men and women should ask themselves and their ideologues, and do some research on their own before plunging headlong into a blinding certitude:
- If Communism is pro-poor, why do Communist nations not trust the poor to vote?
- If Communism cares for the underdog, why have the poor voted it out across the democratic world, including India?
- If Communism is pro-minorities, why does a Communist nation like China kill Uighur Muslims, ban beards and Muslim names, send millions to detention camps?
- Why do most mass killers of modern history—from Stalin and Lenin to Mao, from Kim to Ceaușescu, from Pol Pot to Milošević—come from the Left? Even Hitler’s Nazi party started out as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party or Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterparte. While mercilessly killing or expelling thousands, Idi Amin furiously nationalised institutions, spurned Britain and moved to the arms of the Communist Soviet Union.
- Why doesn’t Communism give people their basic right to practice religion when they are in power, but allies with Islamist regimes like Pakistan internationally?
- If Communism is the best economic solution, why are most Communist or socialist countries poor? Why did China have to open its economy and indulge in the most capitalistic practices around the world to become an economic superpower?
These are not comfortable questions. Certainly not for millions of youngsters who have been culturally brainwashed to wear Che Guevara T-shirts and caps believing him to be this hotly idealistic revolutionary.
Alvaro Vargas Llosa, the author of The Che Guevara Myth and the Future of Liberty, captures a very different, sinister Che in one of his pieces for The New Republic: “In April, 1967, speaking from experience, Guevara summed up his homicidal idea of justice in his ‘Message to the Tricontinental’: ‘Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective and cold-blooded killing machine.'”
Llosa writes: “In January, 1957, as his diary from the Sierra Maestra indicates, Guevara shot Eutimio Guerra because he suspected him of passing on information: ‘I ended the problem with a .32 calibre pistol, in the right side of his brain. … His belongings were now mine.”
Basically, Che enjoyed killing. He carried out many of the executions personally.
A 2004 movie that gave further rocket fuel to the Guevara legend is The Motorcycle Diaries. It is based on Che’s travel diary, Notas de Viaje.
The film projects Che as the darling, budding revolutionary. It cleverly blacks out the deeply racist bits from his book.
“The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing, have seen their territory invaded by the Portuguese. … The black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meagre wage on frivolity or drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving.”
As for the Wokes who wear Che T-shirts at the Pride March, here is the news. Guevara was involved in the creation of the first labour camp in the Guanahacabibes peninsula in 1960, where thousands of homosexuals were later imprisoned.
Che’s friend and boss Fidel Castro, another Communist icon who kept Cuba in gruelling, romanticised poverty, viewed queers as deviants.
“We have never believed that a homosexual can personify the conditions and requirements of conduct that allow us to consider him a true revolutionary,” he said. “A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant Communist should be.”
Some jokingly call Communism the fourth Abrahamic religion. In its ideological rigidity, lust for solutions based on violence, bigotry toward the “non-believer”, it often surpasses the worst medieval instincts of the other three. But it has probably the world’s best advertising and machinery at its disposal, and the young are its prime target audience.
That is the chilling bit. – FirstPost, 11 July 2021
2 – ‘Communism is cool’ is a lie made in China, sold in the US, and shipped to gullible Indian youngsters
The Indian education system inculcates among our young a touching tradition of accepting hand-me-downs. Whether it is the elder sibling’s books and clothes or western notions of “cool”, the young receive second-hand stuff unquestioningly. Okay, maybe the old books and clothes a little grudgingly sometimes.
This is why our alarms should have gone off when in 2015 a Gallup poll found that nearly 70 percent of American millennials, suckled on the teats of a free-market economy and great democratic freedom, said they would be happy to vote for a socialist presidential candidate.
Then in 2020, a poll conducted before the presidential election by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that barely half of the millennials were fine with socialism. Besides, 36 percent of millennials and 25 percent Gen Z-ers had a favourable view of Communism.
These are generations born after tens of millions were killed by Lenin’s de-Cossackisation and famines, Stalin’s stone-cold gulags, Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”, Castro and Guevara’s execution camps, Pol Pot’s killing fields of Cambodia, Kim Jong’s Juche tyranny in North Korea, Ceausescu’s Timisoara killings, or Bengal’s Marichjhapi massacre. For these western youngsters, Communism suddenly became “cool”. How could their urban, English-speaking Indian counterparts not follow?
Elders in the West were bewildered. But they still failed to see the big picture staring at them: China was no longer satisfied being the new, rising economic and military superpower. It wanted more. It sought cultural dominance too, and a collapse of faith in democracies.
Unnoticed by most, using the very democratic foundations of free speech, China infiltrated US campuses and newsrooms. It then slowly started working on the minds of newer generations, feeding them with lies, window-dressing the most murderous ideologies to make them look desirable to youngsters, propping up opinion-makers in colleges, newspapers and channels who were on its payroll.
“Reuters establishes a new round of internal vetting on stories about human rights in China after its English and Chinese websites are blocked. Radio stations in 15 US cities broadcast content provided by Chinese state-run media. Tech giant Apple removes The New York Times’ mobile-phone applications from its download store in China with little explanation. And several rounds of crippling cyberattacks hit the New York-based servers of New Tang Dynasty Television and The Epoch Times newspaper’s websites,” reads Freedom House’s senior research analyst Sarah Cook’s 2017 testimony before the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission titled, “Chinese government influence on US media landscape”.
She exposed how the Communist Party of China (CCP) was pumping in money to advertise Xinhua at Times Square, or selling China Daily in major US cities. It is also seeping in state media content in the US mainstream media by its policy of “borrowing the boat to reach the sea”.
“Chinese diplomats and other officials have gone to great lengths to develop ‘friendly’ relations with private media owners and reporters, encouraging them to produce their own content that promotes key narratives favoured by Beijing. Media owners whose reporting portrays Beijing positively are frequently rewarded with advertising, lucrative contracts for non-media enterprises, joint ventures, and even political appointments,” wrote Cook. “Chinese state media have also purchased small financial stakes in overseas media to solidify such a relationship.”
This frightening penetration of a totalitarian state into the minds of welcoming democracies does not stop at manipulating the media. China sows its dark seeds in the nurseries of knowledge too: West’s campuses.
The China-funded Confucius Institutes are a clutch of educational bodies to teach Chinese language, culture, and history mainly in foreign lands. But its real intent is much less noble.
In 2018, Politico reported: “A 2011 speech by a standing member of the Politburo in Beijing laid out the case: ‘The Confucius Institute is an appealing brand for expanding our culture abroad,’ Li Changchun said. ‘It has made an important contribution toward improving our soft power. The ‘Confucius’ brand has a natural attractiveness. Using the excuse of teaching Chinese language, everything looks reasonable and logical.'”
Li was right. Confucius Institutes have come up at more than 500 college campuses worldwide, with more than 100 of them in the US—including at The George Washington University, the University of Michigan and the University of Iowa.
“Overseen by a branch of the Chinese Ministry of Education known colloquially as Hanban, the institutes are part of a broader propaganda initiative that the Chinese government is pumping an estimated $10 billion into annually, and they have only been bolstered by growing interest in China among American college students,” the Politico report said.
If China can creep its way into injecting its dark ideology into the world’s most powerful democracy, it is difficult to believe that it has not compromised India’s own political, academic and media ecosystems.
Prominent politicians like Rahul Gandhi have repeatedly spoken China’s language, praised it, met with Chinese officials in the heat of Doklam or Galwan hostilities with their own nation, India. The Congress is yet to divulge the contents of a 2008 Memorandum of Understanding it signed with the CCP when its UPA government was in power.
Prominent news organisations have carried China’s official advertorials at the peak of a national conflict. Many campuses have been hotbeds of Maoist activity. Freshly minted “Wokes” are out to cancel everybody and every idea they disagree with, including their own parents.
It all fits into China’s “unrestricted warfare”. Engineer disaffection towards democracy so that the young undermine the very freedoms they have grown up on. Kill family values while keeping the same values intact in China. Push societies towards anarchy while making the young feel that they are changing the world.
And finally, to make Communism look tempting, like China-made products that break and shatter your peace when you start using them. – Firstpost, 17 July 2021
3 – Five myths about Communism and socialism that Millennials and Gen Z are being fed
While young MBAs worldwide racked their brains over how to sell to Millennials and Gen Z, two grey-headed men in their seventies did it effortlessly. Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn were not selling some cool gizmo or game, but two most widely discredited credos of the last century: Communism and socialism.
These gents were helped by a silent, insidious ally that had spread its tentacles across campuses and newsrooms in the West: The Communist Party of China (CCP).
In part 2 (above) of this three-part series on Communism and youngsters, I dwelt on surreptitious Chinese funding of western media and academia, and cunning packaging of its toxic ideology among the young.
And the young in the US and the UK were just ripe for the brainwash.
This American generation is the most highly decorated one in history, with the most degrees and share of graduates. But successive economic slowdowns, the 2008 financial crisis triggered by extreme corporate greed and systemic dishonesty, and looming unemployment also make it the most insecure and angry.
They have seen the most depraved white-collar criminals get away without punishment. They have seen falling wages, rising student debt. In the UK, they have helplessly seen tuition fees soar despite protests, but jobs dry up.
It is for them that Sanders and Corbyn dusted out an old trick from their bags: showing them the Marxist chimera of equal wealth distribution. They prodded this generation to demand endless sucking on state benefits, without a clue where the money will come from in a polity that punishes big business.
Sanders, Corbyn, and their ideological masters China have successfully planted five myths about socialism and Communism in the minds of the impressionable.
First Myth: Communism changes an unjust world
It does. For worse. What can be more unjust than people—underdogs like workers and farm labourers that Communism claims to champion—not being allowed to vote? From Cuba to Venezuela to the former Soviet Union, Communist regimes have kept the people poor and created a rich over-class. When Romania’s Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu fell, for instance, billion-dollar deposits were found in his wife’s overseas accounts along with meat scales made of gold and other such startling luxuries from their home. North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is believed to be worth between $5-7 billion, money tucked away under false names in countries like Austria, Switzerland, Russia, and Liechtenstein.
Second Myth: Socialism works great in Nordic nations
Yes, only if you don’t know the difference between socialism and a welfare state. Nordic socialism is a well-manicured myth.
Nordic countries have free market systems; not socialist government-controlled economies. Their high taxes lead to lavish social benefits. The Nordic nations were capitalist economic successes well before they built welfare states.
Their governments do not interfere in business. None of these countries have a minimum wage, for instance.
Third Myth: Communism loves minorities, queers
The Soviet Union employed the harshest measures to curb Islamist extremism, including putting criminal responsibility on the accused’s families as well.
Modern China has put more than one million Uighur Muslims in detention camps where they are taught that Islam is a mental illness. It has outlawed 30 Islamic names, long beards, Ramzan fasts. Han Chinese men stay with families and often sleep with wives of incarcerated Uighur men.
Communist icon Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s loathing of homosexuals is well-documented. I mentioned it in the first part (see above) of this series.
Fourth Myth: Communism treats its dissenters well
Mao Tse Tung, Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, Pol Pot, and other Leftist autocrats have killed several millions of their own people who did not take kindly to their ideas and ideology. Artificial famines were inflicted, ruthless firing squads were deployed, dissenters were killed in freezing gulags and sun-washed crop fields.
Stalin’s killers hunted down a towering intellectual like Leon Trotksy and gored him to death with an ice axe while he was in exile in Mexico City. He had merely suggested certain democratic reforms to Stalin’s iron-clad Marxism.
Fifth Myth: Communism is a non-violent ideology
Given the number of mass murderers like Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot that Leftism has produced, this one is a dark joke. But today’s “wokes” buy it unquestioningly.
One needs to just peek into the one or two states that Communists ruled back home in India. Political murders are rampant in Kerala and Bengal. During Bengal’s red days, a spate of state-backed massacres like Marichjhapi, Ananda Margi, and Nandigram happened. At Sainbari in 1970, the Communist cadre butchered two Congress activists and reportedly forced their mother to eat rice with her sons’ blood. Such is the Leftist compassion and politics of love.
Marketers of this ideology are invisibly at work in our media and academia. They are masterful at their craft. Their main prey is the young. Their aim is to destabilise and topple democracies through righteous-looking anarchy.
Are we speaking enough with our young? Are we telling them the truth about the Left in this information war? If we cherish our democracy and freedom, that time is now. – Firstpost, 23 July 2021
Filed under: china, india, USA | Tagged: CCP, communism, CPI(M), ideological warfare, maoism, marxism |
BHARATA BHARATI 