In the 1930s, when Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist Workers Party was becoming more influential, intellectuals and political elites in Britain relied on people like Neville Chamberlain to set policy for the country. The idea was that if the European democracies were nice to Hitler, he would see the error of his ways and reform. Mainly, the European democracies were afraid of Hitler and didn't want war. Others, like Winston Churchill, were staunch, hard-line opponents of Hitler. Churchill favored a confrontational approach, reasoning that a dictator only understands force. In Britain, Churchill was pilloried as a right-wing nutcase and a warmonger.
Of course we all know what happened. At the Munich Agreement on September 30, 1938, Hitler gained the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia. The area had 3 million German speaking people. Hitler claimed that they wanted to become part of Germany. Germany, France, Italy, and Britain met. Hitler promised he would not take any more territory. Most of Europe celebrated the agreement, because it prevented the war threatened by Hitler. Hitler announced that this was his last territorial claim in Europe, and the choice seemed to be between war and appeasement. When Neville Chamberlain came home he was celebrated by Britain’s political elites. But when the Nazi bombs started falling on London who did Britain turn to? The hard-ass wingnut Winston Churchill.
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica’s article titled “Munich Agreement,”
Today, the Munich Agreement is widely regarded as a failed act of appeasement, and the term has become ‘a byword for the futility of appeasing expansionist totalitarian states.’"
Keep that phrase in mind, “the futility of appeasing expansionist totalitarian states.”
Hitler was feared because his centrally planned economy was seen as superior, and because of his ability to mobilize people and resources without bothering with little things like human rights and freedoms.
Let’s fast forward to 1980. The Cold War with the Soviet Union is in full swing. A conservative former actor by the name of Ronald Reagan is elected president. He is widely condemned for his hard-line attitude toward the communist state. He is told that the Soviets have a superior, centrally planned economy that will inevitably surpass the United States because of its ability to mobilize people and resources (without worrying about little things like freedom and human rights). He is told that the Soviet Union is the rising power and the US is the declining power. He is told that if we are nice to the Soviets they will reform.
Just as the British elites during the 1930s regarded Churchill as a wingnut, so too Reagan is regarded as a buffoon, a lightweight, and a warmonger. Reagan asks his economic advisors to do an analysis of the superior Soviet economy. He is told that it is about half the size of General Motors. Reagan decides to continue his hardline policy and defeat the Soviets. The same year he leaves office (1989) the Berlin Wall falls. The Soviet Union crumbles. In 1991, Boris Yeltsin signs a declaration banning the communist party and outlawing communism forever in Russia.
Fast forward to 2020. The former host of a really bad TV show by the name of Donald Trump – probably the most despised president in U.S. history – initiates a hardline policy toward the Communist Party of China, the last remaining bastion of communism on the planet. TRUMP pillories the CCP for their concentration camps which contain a million Uyghurs, a Muslim minority. These CCP concentration camps also imprison Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual movement, Tibetan Buddhists (remember Tibet? The great nation the CCP occupied in the early 1950s?), dissident Catholics and other Christians, and political dissidents. TRUMP says that the CCP has turned China into a slave labor camp, and calls out Tim Cook of Apple for placing nets around his buildings so workers can’t jump off and commit suicide. He criticizes the CCP for breaking trade agreements, conducting massive espionage, and for its massive theft of intellectual property.
TRUMP is pilloried by the media and the corporate and Wall Street elites who are in bed with the communists and who are making lots of money off the backs of the hard-working Chinese people. TRUMP is called a racist and a xenophobe for stopping international flights out of Wuhan to New York during the pandemic, an action that probably saved tens of thousands of lives.
TRUMP, like his predecessors, is told by the corporate/Wall Street and political elites that the Chinese Communist Party is managing a superior economy, a centrally planned economy that must inevitably surpass the US. He is told that China under the CCP is the rising power and that the US is the declining power. He is told that China under the CCP will inevitably surpass the United States because of its ability to mobilize people and resources (without worrying about little things like freedom and human rights).He is told (as has every president been told since the 1990s) that if we keep being nice to the CCP they will reform and become a valuable and law-abiding partner in the global economy.
There’s only one thing wrong with this idea: it doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked since the National Socialist Workers Party (the Nazi Party) came into existence in 1920. The world’s manufacturing supply chains are centered in China, where the Chinese people are worked to death. That’s great for the balance sheets of corporations and Wall Street hedge fund managers, but not so great for the Chinese people, and the people of every other country under the tyranny of the CCP’s Belt and Road initiative. Where did ten million U.S. manufacturing jobs go? To China and its slave labor factories.
Despite this, the elites drag out this tired old argument decade after decade, trying to fool the people over and over again. Like Churchill and Reagan, TRUMP aint buying it. TRUMP is on a mission to take down the CCP and free the Chinese people, and the world, from totalitarian communism once and for all.
Communism is another word for fascism and tyranny. The CCP is an old, sad, dark remnant of the 20th century, a century of war and brutality. A century I grew up in and lived through, and never want to see again. The CCP operates under a tired, failed philosophy of old white guys like Marx and Lenin. It cannot survive without gulags, concentration camps, suppression, and ubiquitous surveillance, all aided and supported by American Big Tech companies who are making billions off the backs of the Chinese people.
Do you want to know what the riots in our streets are all about? Certainly not about poor George Floyd and what happened to him. Chairman Mao told us what it is about in his euphemistically titled “Little Red Book,” a collection of his writings:
A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained, and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence, by which one class overthrows another.”
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/download/red-book.pdf, The Little Red Book, p. 5.
And this:
The seizure of power by armed force, the settlement of the issue by war, is the central task and the highest form of revolution. This Marxist-Leninist principle of revolution holds good universally, for China and for all other countries."
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/download/red-book.pdf, The Little Red Book, p. 24
Why all the Mao quotes? Because General Secretary Xi Jinping is a Maoist. The CCP is the center of darkness on the planet at the beginning of the 21st century, aided and abetted by our own economic, technological, and political elites of BOTH parties. It's sad. The tools being used are information and economic warfare, but it is warfare nonetheless.
I have had to reluctantly conclude that TRUMP is holding the line against these fascists.
Who knows, maybe TRUMP is fooling us, and is just a Tool of the Oligarchy (if so he’s doing a good job of pissing them off). But I do know one thing: he’s not a Neville Chamberlain. He’s not an appeaser. He’s willing to stand up to tyranny and those who support it.