Free Republic

Human Rights: Flexing economic and military muscle, China is asserting an intimidating presence. But a bespectacled literary critic now languishing in a squalid prison has shamed the Middle Kingdom. Thanks to the Nobel Committee in Oslo, which on Friday awarded him its annual Peace Prize, the world takes note of Liu Xiaobo, 54, and his insistent demand for freedom. He wins his prize while still imprisoned in China, a nation which through the global economic crisis has been trumpeting a toxic model of authoritarian capitalism. That dubious model now stands exposed. Within hours of the announcement, China's Foreign Ministry branded...

Obama has surrounded himself with Maoists, like terrorist couple Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. The Czars he has named include Maoist-leaning Van Jones, and his White House Communications Director Anita Dunn has publicly expressed admiration for Mao Tse Tung. At least three of Obama’s campaigners, Carl Davidson, Bill Fletcher and Mike Klonsky, are big Mao fans. So if Obama is surrounding himself with Maoists, how is that affecting policy? Or rather, if Obama is enough of an admirer of Mao to have named these people in the first place, can we expect to see some evidence of this in his...

I thought this would be worth discussing. An American couple discover the sandbags in their door which was made in China are made up of a cut up American flag. This shows how China wants to cut up America's economy by refusing to devalue their yuan.

And the winner is... Mao Zedong, founder of the People's Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday.Speaking at The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival, Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian, said he found that during the time that Mao was enforcing the Great Leap Forward in 1958, in an effort to catch up with the economy of the Western world, he was responsible for overseeing "one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known".Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history...

Mao Zedong is the greatest mass murderer in history, having coordinated the death of 45 million Chinese peasants from 1958 to 1962, the Independent reports. Historian Frank Dikötter is the first to examine a block of Communist Party archives made available four year ago, and found—despite official whitewashing—that the acts of violence of the Communist authorities during the Great Leap Forward were carefully recorded. "It ranks alongside the gulags and the Holocaust as one of the three greatest events of the 20th century," he says. The Great Leap was a push to catch up to the economies of the West,...

A State Council think-tank in China has warned Washington that the US will come off worst in a trade war if it imposes sanctions against Beijing over the two nations' currency spat. Ding Yifan, a policy guru at the Development Research Centre, said China could respond by selling holdings of US debt, estimated at over $1.5 trillion (£963bn). This would trigger a rise in US interest rates. His comments at a forum in Beijing follow a string of remarks by Chinese officials questioning US credit-worthiness and the reliability of the dollar. China's authorities seem split over how to respond to...

In 1936 Mao Tse-Tung, then a cave-dwelling revolutionary, told Edgar Snow his life story. Snow recorded Mao's self-serving autobiography in Red Star Over China, which for decades made the American's name as the leading reporter in China. Back in China twenty-four years later, Snow was pestered by news agencies enquiring about mass starvation. The Snow of the 1930s had gone into the field to see for himself a prolonged drought in the north-west, where people were rumoured to be selling their children. But this time he relied on his access to top officials such as Premier Zhou Enlai, and foreigners...

Our beloved president has expressed bewilderment at recent polls showing large numbers of Americans doubt his commitment to Christianity. Because we hate to see our president even a wee bit flummoxed, let's help him out. Do most Christians you know choose to decorate their Christmas tree with smiling images of Chairman Mao, who murdered at least 50 million of his countrymen, as well as signed photos of transvestite Hedda Lettuce? Well, that's the very special holiday magic the Obamas decided to hang on their tree for their first White House Christmas, courtesy of famed Barney's designer Simon Doonan. Maybe we're...

Our beloved president has expressed bewilderment at recent polls showing large numbers of Americans doubt his commitment to Christianity. Because we hate to see our president even a wee bit flummoxed, let's help him out. Do most Christians you know choose to decorate their Christmas tree with smiling images of Chairman Mao, who murdered at least 50 million of his countrymen, as well as signed photos of transvestite Hedda Lettuce? Well, that's the very special holiday magic the Obamas decided to hang on their tree for their first White House Christmas, courtesy of famed Barney's designer Simon Doonan. Maybe we're...

Muslims making a spectacle of desecrating the American flag.

Does Obama’s anti-democratic ideology result from his dysfunctional childhood? An intriguing book, Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism, by Paul Vitz, argues this type background is a common precursor to the classic tyrant’s personality. This suggests Barack’s beef with America might result from his own deficient past. Does it matter the source of our politician’s mental makeup? Of course it does. After all, we expect leaders to make policy based on empirical knowledge, not just knee-jerk reaction to past trauma. For example, would Americans be pleased if the president outlawed taxis because his pooch was run over by...

Olavo de Carvalho had a column published yesterday in Brazilian newspaper which included a discussion of how communists continue to use illicit drugs as a weapon. He agrees with Prof. Denis Rosenfield's conclusion that revolution and drug trafficking are like Siamese twins, linked always and forever. The 'Opium War' waged by Mao against several Chinese provinces, for example, was the first recorded case in history when an organized political power deliberately addicted the population of their own country, to undermine it, explore it and master it. de Carvalho recommends a 1999 book by Joseph D. Douglass (Red Cocaine: drugging the...

Howard Zinn, the prominent “progressive” historian who died early this year, has been “outed” as both a communist and a liar. Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media writes: The prominent “progressive” historian Howard Zinn, whose books are force-fed to young people on many college campuses, was not only a member of the Moscow-controlled and Soviet-funded Communist Party USA (CPUSA) but lied about it, according to an FBI file released on Friday. The file, consisting of three sections totaling 423 pages, was made available on the FBI’s website and released in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from...

Yankee Utopians in a Chinese CenturyFor those who can yet recall the backyard blast furnaces of Mao's China in the 1950s and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to re-instill peasant values in the 1970s, the news was jarring. In 2011, said the Financial Times, China will surpass the United States as first manufacturing power, a title America has held since surpassing Great Britain around 1890. Each year, China passes a new milestone. Last year, China surpassed Germany as the greatest exporting nation. This year, China surpasses Japan as the world's second-largest economy. This year, China became the first auto manufacturer...

China has become the top sales market for General Motors, the iconic American automaker owned by U.S. taxpayers. Through the first six months of the year GM and its Chinese joint venture partners have sold 1.21 million vehicles in China, the company announced Friday. Its U.S. sales, announced Thursday, came in at 1.08 million...

I can't begin to explain how hard I laughed watching this kid. What is he, some unemployed weirdo making videos in his mommy's basement? Take into consideration he admires one of the worst mass-murderers of the 20th century. Let's watch and have a laugh.

Given President Obama's glaring domestic policy missteps, it is understandable that the public has largely been blinded to his foreign policy failings. In fact, these may have been even more damaging to America's future. He fought to reinstate Honduras's pro-Chávez president while stalling Colombia's favored-trade status. He castigated Israel at the United Nations but was silent about Hamas having launched 7,000 rockets from the Gaza Strip. His policy of "engagement" with rogue nations has been met with North Korean nuclear tests, missile launches and the sinking of a South Korean naval vessel, while Iran has accelerated its nuclear program, funded...

So it looks like the classic 1984 war film Red Dawn, starring Patrick Swayzee and Charlie Sheen, is being remade. This time, though, the Chinese will be the invaders. If you haven’t seen the original, you should definitely check it out. Red Dawn was listed as #15 on National Review Online’s list of the Best Conservative Movies.

Detail by painful detail, the CIA is coming to grips with one of the most devastating episodes in its history, a botched cloak-and-dagger flight into China that stole two decades of freedom from a pair of fresh-faced American operatives and cost the lives of their two pilots. In opening up about the 1952 debacle, the CIA is finding ways to use it as a teaching tool. Mistakes of the past can serve as cautionary tales for today's spies and paramilitary officers taking on al-Qaida and other terrorist targets. At the center of the story are two eager CIA paramilitary officers...

Americans have a taste for absurd humor. Whether if it is from a gross-out movie by Judd Apatow, or a British import such as Monty Python's Flying Circus, we have a keen sense that we can find laughs in impossibly ridiculous situations. So, it is in that spirit that I present to you the most absurd absurdity of 2010: The Year of the Absurd. In a meeting with Chinese government goons, Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner tried to put America and China on the same moral plane. So far, so good. Yes, the premise is absurd, so laughs are...