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January 13, 2019 (The Catholic Thing) China is a large, strange, complex, contradictory thing, even before you get to the large, strange, complex, contradictory, and murderous form of Communism that has come to dominate its various peoples. No one understands it very well. But those closest with a real say the Hong Kong protesters who know what submission to Beijing means, andTaiwanese voters who roundly resisted mainland pressurein elections this weekend are united in believing that China is simply not to be trusted.

Its worth trying to think through why the Vatican seems to have a different view.

Living in Washington, Ive met any number of sincere and dedicated public figures, as well as many scamps, scalawags, con men, and outright liars. But the few encounters Ive had with Chinese officials set the gold standard for shameless lying particularly about religious persecution.

Evensecular journalists with little love for religionroutinely report these days on Chinas increasing outrages against believers. Their reports tend to focus on religious groups Western secularists favor the 1 million Uighur Muslims in China, for example, who are now beingbrainwashed in re-education camps.

Journalists are much less interested in Chinas 100 million Christians (Protestants and Catholics). Or how religious bodies are being brutally sinicized, even forced incredibly to re-write their scriptures to bring them in line with Communist ideology.

Last week, a Congressional committee on China issueda blistering report, which began: Observers have described religious persecution in China over the last year to be of an intensity not seen since the Cultural Revolution. It documented how not only foreign religions (i.e., Christianity and Islam) are being squeezed, but even traditional faiths like Buddhism and Hinduism are under a full-court press against religion now.

Just the next day, Pope Francis gavehis annual address to diplomats, and did not utter a word about Chinese persecution. Indeed, his 2019 address to the diplomats claimed that the Vaticans Provisional Agreement with China is the result of a lengthy and thoughtful institutional dialogue that led to the determination of certain stable elements of cooperation between the Apostolic See and the civil authorities. [Authors Correction: An earlier version of this column mistakenly attributed this quotation to the 2020 address. RR]

How is such stone-blindness possible?

Theres an answer perhaps inAHidden Life, Terrence Malicks moving new film about the martyrdom of Franz Jgersttter, an Austrian Catholic whose conscience would not allow him to swear allegiance to Hitler. Ive had an interest in him since I wrote my bookThe Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century.

Amea culpa: He was one of my very favorites among many modern heroic and holy figures, almost totally ignored by historians. But I had to write about him as a historian myself, with only the broad outline of his personal struggles as he thought about how his wife and children would have to cope without him. How his friends and fellow villagers regarded him as a traitor (they, of course, felt guilty that they had compromised with evil and took it out on him and his family). How, as the Nazis never tired of telling him, his death would change nothing; no one would ever know about it; his stubbornness would only bring suffering to those he loved.

Some have criticized the slow, lengthy treatment of these matters in the film. But how else to convey what its really like to live under relentless persecution, day after day, and deal with tortures and doubts to a degree that would drive most of us mad?

But even that was not the worst. Franzs pastor and bishop (Joseph Fliesser of Linz) nervously suggested he be obedient to public authorities, as St. Paul counseled (Rom. 13). These men were not monsters, or Nazi shills. They did not intend to destroy the Church, but thought that by passively going along they were actually saving as much of the Church as could be saved, in terrible circumstances. There was also personal cowardice, of course, mixed in with the other motives. They were wrong, massively wrong, as anyone can see today.

Something similar is going on in China right now. The Vatican, by its accord with an evil government, has essentially told Chinese Catholics that they are wrong to remain independent of a regime they see quite clearly is murderous and hell-bent on forcing the Church to be re-defined along lines that will make it harmless to government interests.

Reliable sources say that the same instruments of manipulation officials used so effectively in imposing the one-child policy are now carrying out the sinicization of religious bodies.

So where are the bold Catholic voices protesting the intimidation and taming of the Church? We have Hong Kongs retired Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, who just issued a heartfeltletter to all the Catholic Cardinals, which ends on a personal note to each of them, Your Eminence,can we passively witness the murder of the Church in China by those who should protect and defend her from her enemies? Begging on my knees, your brother. . .

Theres been silence about this letter to say nothing of the horrors it describes at the highest levels in the Vatican, i.e., Cardinal Parolin, the Secretary of State, who worked out the Provisional Agreement with China, and Pope Francis himself.

Weve heard from Parolin that we must be patient and keep up hope, but the facts on the ground are beyond dispute: the Church has been had. The belief that dialogue which like diplomacy has become something of an idol in certain internationalist circles is possible with certain forms of evil will someday be seen, as is clear already to many of us, as a foolish experiment that many Chinese and not only Chinese Catholics will pay for with their liberties and lives.

And it wont stop there because other malefactors around the world are watching. If you have to suffer and perhaps die anyway, better to do so like Franz Jgersttter as he told his captors, as a free man, although he was imprisoned than to accept a false peace, which is, sooner or later, only the peace of the graveyard.

Published with permission from The Catholic Thing.

More here:
Vatican doesnt understand that communist China will never compromise - Lifesite

Just over an hour prior to Tuesdays latest 2020 Democratic presidential debate, longtime Democrat and former Clinton official James Carville appeared on MSNBCs Hardball to unspool his latest takes of lunacy.

This time, he insisted that Trumpism is the greatest threat this country has faced since the fall of communism and Republicans cannot ever be trusted to save the United States.

Carville declined to make the case for Bennet, but instead attacked Trump by claiming that, instead of radical Islamic terror thats killed thousands of Americans in the last three decades, its Trump and Trumpism thats the greatest threat this country has faced since the fall of communism and the only way to deal with it is defeat it resoundingly.

He added that it will not only need to be defeated at the polls, but decimated in the same way that itd look like Clemson looked last night against his LSU Tigers.

Later and in closing out their discussion, Matthews screeched with the utmost faux concern for the Republican Party (click expand):

MATTHEWS: What happened to the Republican Party? The opposition party

CARVILLE: They dont exist.

MATTHEWS: from your thinking, the party that wasn't evil, it wasn't stupid. Now, I mean, I noticed in the whole day of defending Trump, not a single Republican member of the House, and they're all some of them smart, not one of them said one good thing about Donald Trump personally. Nobody nobody spoke for his character. Nobody said he's a good, honest, guy. I mean, it was immaculate, immaculate. Not a single positive comment. And yet, they bow to him like he's the emperor of Siam. They bow to him without ever respecting him personally. How do you explain?

Similarly falsely claiming to have an interest in the future of a vibrant GOP, Carville stated that the Republican Party that you and I knew does not exist because [t]here's only Trump and Trumpism.

He added that, when it comes to stopping Trump, [i]t is up to the Democrats to eradicate this scourge and save the United States since [t]heres no Republican going to come up and save us.

Matthews then complimented Carville without missing a beat that he [s]peaks integrity and true partisanship.

Okay, sure, Chris.

To see the relevant transcript from MSNBCs Hardball on January 14, click expand.

MSNBCs HardballJanuary 14, 20207:50 p.m. Eastern

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Michael Bennet here you are, the pro, Im building you up and you come into this race in mid-January now and youre picking a candidate now? Why? This late? Why this one?

JAMES CARVILLE: Because I think I think that Trump and Trumpism is the greatest threat this country has faced since the fall of communism and the only way to deal with it is defeat it resoundingly. If Michael Bennet is the Democratic nominee, you're going to get 55 percent of the popular vote and youre going to pick up 55 senate seats. It will be the end of Trumpism. Trumpism doesn't have to just be defeated at the polls. It has got to be decimated. It's got to look like a beaten arm. It's got to look like Clemson looked last night. Beat and ready to quit and Michael Bennet is the best choice among any Democrat to accomplish that.

(....)

7:54 p.m. Eastern

MATTHEWS: What happened to the Republican Party? The opposition party

CARVILLE: They dont exist.

MATTHEWS: from your thinking, the party that wasn't evil, it wasn't stupid. Now, I mean, I noticed in the whole day of defending Trump, not a single Republican member of the House, and they're all some of them smart, not one of them said one good thing about Donald Trump personally. Nobody nobody spoke for his character. Nobody said he's a good, honest, guy. I mean, it was immaculate, immaculate. Not a single positive comment. And yet, they bow to him like he's the emperor of Siam. They bow to him without ever respecting him personally. How do you explain?

CARVILLE: Right. Look, the Republican Party that you and I knew does not exist. There's only Trump and Trumpism. The Republicans are going to do nothing about it. It is up to the Democrats. It is up to the Democrats to eradicate this scourge, and the way to do that is by massive and humiliating election defeat. Theres no Republican going to come up and save us. Thats not going to happen. Everybody keeps waiting. Well, you know, pretty soon, maybe Rob Portman will say something. They're not going to say something. They're scared to death.

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

CARVILLE: And the Democrats have to save the United States. That's it. There's no other choice. The Republicans are not going to do it for you.

MATTHEWS: Okay. Spoken like a great partisan, sir. Thank you, James Carville.

CARVILLE: Geaux Tigers.

MATTHEWS: Speaks with integrity and true partisanship.

Go here to see the original:
Carville Rages on MSNBC: 'Trumpism Is the Greatest Threat' to America Since Communism - NewsBusters

On the occasion of the International Conference on Libya that is taking place in Berlin and the discussion about Greece's non-participation in it, the Press Bureau of the CC of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) issued a statement which was published on 902 portal.

The statement of the KKE reads the following:

"The International Conference for Libya in Berlin, the only purpose of which is the determination of this country's future based on the interests of the imperialists who first destroyed and dismembered it, is not a process that benefits that Libyan people and the other peoples of the region.

It is indicative that the participants in the Conference are NATO-affiliated and other forces which are responsible for the imperialist intervention in Libya, the bombing and dissolution of the country and which today compete and negotiate for the control of the energy resources. These forces are either on the side of the government of Tripoli, either with General Haftar or are bargaining with both at the same time.

The imperialist peace they are discussing about cannot solve for the people's benefit the problems that have been created.

As for the discussion and the controversy regarding Greece's participation or not in the Conference, it reveals the following:

First, the bumptious and unfouded assertion by the New Democracy (ND) government and its predecessor of SYRIZA about the alleged international isolation of Turkey, while Turkey plays an essential role in the developments within the context of the US-NATO plans, which tolerated the signing of her unacceptable maritime agreement with the Sarraj government.

Secondly, the deep agreement of all the other parties that claim Greece's participation in this International Conference, with the imperialist plans in the region, since this is exclusively the Conference's subject.

This further involvement of Greece, which is a commonplace for all the other political forces, serves only the participation of sections of the Greek capital in the sharing of the plunder and does not offer any benefit for the peace and security of the people, as well as to Greece's sovereign rights."

Excerpt from:
KKE: The Berlin Conference on Libya is not a process for the benefit of the Libyan people - In Defense of Communism

WHAT DOES China want from the world? Some things are obvious: natural resources, foreign markets and nifty stuff, from high-end computer chips to top-notch airliners, that China cannot yet make. Then there is Chinas ambition, at once reasonable and terrifying, to become so strong that no other power will thwart its core demands. China has less obvious wishes, too. A surprisingly pressing one is a demand for foreign powers to recognise the legitimacy of its Communist Party. Though it may baffle outsiders, when Chinese grandees meet foreign visitors the question of legitimacy comes up, time and again. The words vary, but their meaning is something like: will America and the self-righteously democratic West ever accept that the party provides the best and most fitting government for China, with a mandate strengthened by the countrys rising global stature, economic growth and domestic stability? Chinese diplomats voice the same grievance whenever they hear international criticism. China, they protest, is being singled out for suspicion because it has a different political system, led by a communist party.

If this seems an obscure fight to pick, history teaches the world to beware. A well-connected Chinese scholar who lives and teaches in Europe, Xiang Lanxin, has written a book ascribing centuries of East-West tensions, including several crises in relations, to Westerners who condescendingly dismiss Chinas rulers, whether imperial or communist, as oriental despots. He says they have failed to grasp how Chinese leaders must earn their right to rule through deeds and accomplishments, at the risk of overthrow if they are truly tyrannical. Mr Xiang is no apologist for todays party leaders. Though an avowed Chinese patriot, he is scathing about the corruption enabled by one-party rule. He believes that modern-day income inequalities make a nonsense of claims by party bosses to be reviving traditional, Confucian ethics. In a vivid passage, he compares Beijings political scene to the last days of the Russian tsars, with charlatans and sycophants running amuck. Still, his book, The Quest for Legitimacy in Chinese Politics, A New Interpretation, is an invaluable guide to the feelings of hurt and injustice that consume those same ruling classes now.

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A political scientist and historian at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Mr Xiang devotes many pages to a crisis three centuries ago. Then the consensus view of China changed among European elites, just as dramatically as it is changing now in Washington and other Western capitals. The cause was an arcane theological dispute known as the Chinese rites controversy. To simplify, this was an argument about whether Chinese converts could be good Christians if they continued to pay solemn respects to their ancestors and to Confucius, a sage particularly revered by scholars and officials. Mr Xiang praises Jesuit missionaries who travelled to China in the 16th and 17th centuries, painstakingly learning Chinese and studying Confucian classics in a spirit of cultural accommodation.

Those Jesuit scientist-adventurers reported to Rome that China was a brilliant civilisation whose traditions of ancestor worship and Confucian ethics were not pagan religious rites, but customs compatible with Christian monotheism. With disastrous results for those envoys, hawks back in Europe disagreed. Mr Xiang draws explicit parallels between religious hardliners back in Europe who attacked those Jesuits for being overly tolerant of Chinese traditions, and modern-day critics who chide China for falling short of values that the West calls universal. In 1692 the Kangxi emperor was so impressed by his Jesuit guests that he issued an edict of toleration, blessing the presence of Christian Europeans in his empire. But within half a century Christianity had been banned and most missionaries expelled. The rupture was provoked by papal rulings that ancestor worship and Confucian rites were pagan idolatry. It was an unanswerable charge: the crime of Confucius-revering Chinese converts was to be un-Christian, as defined by the church in Rome. Mr Xiang argues that those taxing China with being undemocratic are using a similar trick: defining legitimacy in a way that makes it unattainable by rulers who are not Western-style democrats.

That does not make Mr Xiang or grumbling Communist Party officials correct, though. They urge the world to judge Chinas rulers by their achievements, not their political system. But that is exactly what most foreign governments do, to a fault. Even in the immediate aftermath of the murderous suppression of pro-democracy protests in 1989, Americas then-president, George H.W. Bush, secretly wrote to assure Chinas leader, Deng Xiaoping, that his aim was to preserve close ties, adding: I am respectful of the differences in our two societies and in our two systems. If Western leaders were really unable to abide communists, America and its allies would not be investing in and even helping to arm Vietnam, as a strategic partner in Asia.

Today, it is true, hawks in Washington charge previous American governments with wishing away Chinas authoritarianism and resistance to change. To quote the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo: We accommodated and encouraged Chinas rise for decades, even when that rise was at the expense of American values, Western democracy, security and good common sense. But his boss, President Donald Trump, does not deem Chinas rulers illegitimate. He says he does not blame them for taking advantage of Americas past stupidity and calls President Xi Jinping an incredible guy.

Chinese demands for respect are in part a ploy, a passive-aggressive bid to browbeat foreign critics into silence. But to meet officials in Beijing is to hear a regime talking itself into a funk about how America and its allies cannot bear to let a system like theirs succeed. That is mostly bogus. The problem is Chinas actions, not the fact that it has a politburo. But the risks of a rupture are real.

Follow this link:
Communism is not what worries the world about Chinas Communist Party - The Economist

This week marks 30 years since Romania ousted communist dictator Nicolae Ceauescu in a revolution that ended decades of communist rule in the country.

The dictator and his wife were killed by a firing squad on December 25, 1989, after days of a bloody national uprising.

A 2006 presidential commission report by anti-communist political scientist Vladimir Tismneanu called the former system "inhuman".

"The Communist regime in Romania, a totalitarian system from its establishment until its collapse, was one based on the constant violation of human rights, on the supremacy of a hostile ideology to open society, on the monopoly of power exercised by a small group of individuals, on repression, intimidation and corruption," the report concluded.

The same month, President Traian Bsescu condemned Romania's communist regime, in a symbolic separation of the state from its past.

But how much has Romania separated from its past? And what is the legacy of Romania's communist regime? Euronews spoke with experts to find out.

"The communist legacy in the broader term is still there and is definitely going to be there for a while," said George Jiglu, a political scientist at Babe-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

"In the entire region, we have issues that are visible when it comes for instance to relations between citizens and the state and how citizens perceive the state."

This is shown in opinion polls, Jiglu said, which consistently show that citizens have little trust in government.

A May 2019 Romanian survey found that 76.4% of Romanians think the country is heading in the wrong direction.

Romanians have low trust in government institutions: just 8.9% have confidence in political parties and just 9.8% have confidence in Parliament. The most trusted internal institutions, the INSCOP survey found, were the army and the church.

It's concerning that "the two key pillars of any representative democracy which are the parties and parliament have such low levels of trust", Jiglu said, though this is not limited to Romania.

It's this distrust, he added, that "actually fuels populism".

Policy analyst Sorin Ionita from Expert Forum in Bucharest agrees but pointed out that Romanians also have more trust in EU institutions.

"People in ex-communist countries appear consistently in surveys as more cynical and least trustful in their national institutions (with the exception of the army and the church)," Ionita said.

"By contrast, they show more trust in EU institutions," he said which can be attributed to an "aspiration" for good governance.

Romania also has a high rate of emigration Romanians moving abroad compared to other countries.

A recent OECD report found that 17% of the population moved abroad in 2015 and 2016. Romania had a higher emigration rate than Mexico, China and India.

This migration is due to a legacy "political culture" in which the state still does not recognise that it "provides a service" to the people, Jiglu said.

There is a lasting legacy from the previous regime, Ionita says, but it's not "communism" as one might think.

"There are legacies of the real regime of Nicolae Ceauescu, a typical Balkan combination of nationalism, primitive socialism and territorial family clans, in which everything was negotiable, informal arrangements prevailed and no official institution or planning process worked properly," said Ionita.

But in terms of the current government, no one is going to nationalise property.

Rather under successive social democratic governments, the country has rolled back anti-corruption measures. Ionita says the Social Democratic Party (PSD) is not communist, but rather conservative, closer to populists.

But Romania's government recently switched hands after a vote of no confidence in October toppled the existing social democratic government.

The change came following anti-government protests in 2018 and the imprisonment of former party leader Liviu Dragnea who went to jail in May over corruption charges.

The re-elected liberal president Klaus Iohannis has promised to tackle corruption in the country and has a new prime minister from the same party.

Iohannis has also spoken out about holding people accountable for the communist regime as well as understanding what happened in the revolution - which remains a concern in the country.

"The expectation is to have people accountable for what happened during the revolution," said Jiglu, but that will not change the legacy which he says extends to the education sector and the healthcare system in subtle ways.

Only long term changes will shift the political culture of society, he added.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments below.

Read more from the original source:
Thirty years on, what is the legacy of communism in Romania? - Euronews