Considering the abundance of free material on the Internet, I rarely pay for things here. One big exception is David (aka Orcinus) Neiwert’s magnificent 87-page analysis of what fascism is, what its telltale signs are as it emerges, and how it is taking on a vibrant new life in America today, thanks to propagandists like Rush Limbaugh.

You can download the entire essay, Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: An Exegesis, as a PDF file from Neiwert’s blog for free, although Dave is requesting a $5 donation to allow him to devote more of his time to his writing. I gave $10, and I hope you consider doing the same.

In a space cluttered with bloggers trying to get themselves heard, the voice of Orcinus stands out as unique. Instead of tossing out links or offering quips on this story or that, Orcinus focuses like a laser on one of the most disturbing aspects of American politics today, i.e., the subtle and insidious shift of fascism from a marginalized phenomenon to something ever more mainstream and acceptable. His insights into how Rush and his clones are fanning the flames that fuel this trend are priceless. And it’s great reading, too.

I know I tend to gush whenever I talk about Orcinus, but that’s for a good reason: it’s one of the very best blogs out there, and the only one that is carefully monitoring the freeper movement and its quiet but steady spread under the current US government. So get your free copy, and consider making a small donation for a very important cause.

I’ll never forget an incident from the mid-80s, when I was walking through the Columbia University campus with my late friend Roy, then working on his MBA at Columbia. We walked past a student wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt and a Madam Mao button.

When Roy saw this, he told me to hold on, walked over to the fellow and shouted loudly (paraphrased): “What the fuck is wrong with you? Why would you walk around wearing a button honoring the lady who was most responsible for the Cultural Revolution? Do you have any idea how many people were tortured or killed because of her? Have you ever heard of the Gang of Four and what they did to China? Do you have a brain? Did you think before you put that button on or are you just trying to show how cool you are? Well you’re not cool, you’re an asshole.”

Roy was never one to hide how he felt, but it was certainly unusual for him to lose his temper and burst out like that. The frightened student didn’t say a word, but slinkered away as fast as he could (Roy was 6’5″).

I was surprised at Roy’s reaction because at the time I didn’t know as much as he did about the Cultural Revolution. Now I understand. Back then, China was of little interest to me; all I knew was that Mao & Co. had sent a lot of professors to the countryside and attempted to destroy all vestiges of Western culture. I had no idea how vast its scope was, how many iterations it took and how it sought to wipe out not just Western- influenced culture but all culture, aside form the culture of Mao. I didn’t really know who Madam Mao was.

I’ve caught up with history over the past few years, and being confined recently to a hospital bed for five days followed by a week at home gave me time to learn even more. I decided to immerse myself in books about China, with strong focus on the Cultural Revolution. I read three books in all.

I mentioned earlier that I read Grass Soup, the poignant diary of a “rightist” sent off to work in labor camps for his bourgeois beliefs. It puts you right there in the camp with all its inanities, funny, sad and outrageous.

Then I went on to the epic Wild Swans, which chronicles the lives of three women, the grandmother, her daughter and her granddaughter, the author of the book. The most impressive part of the book is its first two hundred pages focusing on the grandmother, a concubine to one of China’s last great warlords. In harrowing detail author Jung Chang describes what Chinese women had to undergo to have their feet bound. I didn’t realize that the pain was so enormous for the woman’s entire life, nor did I realize just how lowly a woman’s lot in China was, that she existed strictly for ornamental purpose and to please the whims, however brutal, first of her husband and then of her sons.

It was in these pages that I felt transported; I could feel the grandmother’s agony as she hobbled on her tiny feet and succumbed to the cruelties of her masters (her father, her “owner” the warlord and his wife), I felt I was in her house, watching her life disintegrate. Jung paints a magical picture, a huge fresco of life in China in the early 20th Century, and unfortunately the rest of the book never quite reaches such a high level.

The tale of Jung’s mother is what interested me most, as it brought to life the maddening irrationality of the Great Leap Forward, the famine of 1960 and the Cultural Revolution. It is actually a case study of one man (Mao) going insane, and insisting that the world’s largest population follow him in his insanity, resulting in the brain-death of an entire nation. The description of life during these years is superb if completely surreal.

Fascinating, but never quite so evocative as the earlier part of the book. There is also an annoying tendency on the part of the writer to paint nearly everyone else — all the side characters — as greedy, vindictive, selfish, even hateful toward Jung’s grandmother and mother (and, to a lesser extent toward herself). The three stars emerge as pearls among the swine, and this black and white contrast is so constant that one can only wonder how authentic it really is. One other comment, on the books stylistics: As the book moves from scene to scene, Jung has the habit of describing, in minute detail, the types of flowers and leaves that are present in an obvious but awkward attempt to create ambiance. I finally started to laugh out loud, waiting for the next description of the bamboo leaves wafting in the afternoon breeze. Not a big deal, but it did detract from what is for the most part an excellent read.

It was the third book that most captured my heart, and I am glad I read it last. I came upon Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress when my former employer in Beijing mailed it to me as a farewell present after I moved to Singapore. It describes the life of two young men sent to a remote re-education camp, and how their discovery of a suitcase full of classical Western books changes their lives, and the life of the object of their love — the book’s heroine, the little Chinese seamstress. From the first page, I was enchanted; there is something so simple, so sweet and so touching about the story, its characters and its tone, I couldn’t put it down. Just like Grass Soup and Wild Swans, it drove home the insanity of the Cultural Revolution, but its wonderful story and evocative characters bring it to another level of poignancy. If you haven’t read it, go buy it now.

Reading these books answered many of my questions about China during the 1960s and 70s, and raised several new ones. I admit, I didn’t realize just what a monster Mao was until now; I had a good idea, but I didn’t know it was quite this bad. After reading these books, one can only wonder why huge portraits and tall statues of Mao loom everywhere you look in China. Mao’s crimes are on such a grandiose scale, are so audacious and psychotic as to literally defy belief. The great mystery is why he retains his aura of greatness, why he is still revered to the point of hero worship. I don’t know, maybe it’s because we all need a leader to look up to. But when you read these books you really get a feel for just how intensely Mao was worshipped, to the point that one of the world’s great cultures surrendered its critical faculties and allowed this madman, this self-obsessed megalomaniac, take them down a path that would lead to a catastrophe so immense it is still recovering now, a quarter of a century later.

Eric Alterman offers the quote of the day:

It is almost too ironic to point out, for instance, that when the administration (in the form of Rice, Tenet, Cheney, and Powell) attempts to pooh-pooh the Niger lie by saying it was “technically correct” — they did not have sexual relations with that country — or was just one small piece of a larger case, that virtually every aspect of their case was a lie. The WMD threat was a lie. The al-Qaida connection was a lie. The promise of democracy and human rights was a lie. And as today’s front page Washington Post story (see above) indicates, they got stuck with the stupid Niger tale because everything they had been saying about nukes was a lie, too. “But a review of speeches and reports, plus interviews with present and former administration officials and intelligence analysts, suggests that between Oct. 7, when President Bush made a speech laying out the case for military action against Hussein, and Jan. 28, when he gave his State of the Union address, almost all the other evidence had either been undercut or disproved by U.N. inspectors in Iraq.” (And this to say nothing of the apparently clueless Bush who somehow forgot that it was he who ended the inspections regime, not Saddam.)

Be sure to check out that WaPo story Alterman cites. No wonder Bush wants to “move on.”

[Via Eschaton]

That’s what Mark Kleiman says it will be if the story told by Calpundit turns out to be true. And he (Kleiman) thinks that it probably is.

This is a complex and headache-inspiring story that I won’t attempt to retell here, and Kleiman wonders aloud why there’s been complete media silence about it. Calpundit says, “This just gets uglier and uglier, and I hope the mainstream press — having finally smelled blood — will follow this up. ”

It appears I can publish again after five days. I’ll try to make up for the silence over the next 24 hours.

There’s a long and detailed article titled The China Sickness in the July/August edition of Commentary (not my favorite magazine).

Written by Arthur Waldron, a China specialist trained at Harvard, the piece starts with a description of a story we all know too well, how the CCP (mis)handled the SARS epidemic, and notes that many Western media were duped into believing the brief period of openness signaled an opportunity for meaningful reform.

This is a metaphor for the article’s theme: Despite the obvious signs that it is a very sick country, the West dons rose-tinted spectacles whenever it looks at China, cheerfully overlooking its horrendous problems, financial, political and social.

Unfortunately, the article can’t be linked, and I can’t quote too much, lest I be hauled off for copyright infringement. But I’ll offer a few excerpts.

Waldron makes astute observations on how the West has fallen for the “China economic miracle” fallacy:

Even today, if you throw a brick on Wall Street you will probably hit someone in a banker’s suit who genuinely believes that China has been growing at a record pace and will continue to do so — indeed, that it is likely to become the motor for Asian and even world development. Over the past twenty years, such people, and their counterparts in Hong Kong and Taiwan, have poured roughly $450 billion in direct investment into China.

What return they will get on this investment remains to be seen, however. Money is made in China by shipping components there to be processed for re-export. With its immense pool of skilled labor, no nonsense about workers’ rights or unions, and a police force willing to crack heads, coastal China is an ideal “platform” for foreign business. Nevertheless, China’s world trade, which today stands at a little over $250 billion per year, is only a little greater as a percentage of world trade than what it was in the 1920’s (though of course much bigger in absolute terms than it was in 1960). Fully half of that figure, moreover, is accounted for by businesses in which foreigners have ownership. While, for Chinese workers, jobs in such processing industries are undoubtedly better than urban unemployment or rural poverty, the sector lacks what economists call backward and forward linkages. The rising tide lifts only the coast…[P]rivate enterprise is everywhere discouraged, and the state sector, which operates largely at a loss and is shrinking in its share of the economy, continues to grow in absolute size in a way that threatens everything else.

He also takes aim at a familiar target, the country’s state-owned enterprises, forced to borrow more and more from the nation’s banks as prices deflate, consumers put off their spending and the SOEs fail to sell their wares:

Failure to sell means that state enterprises lose money; to avoid bankruptcy, the state forces its banks to make irrecoverable loans to its enterprises, which are thus enabled to produce even more things that no one wants to buy. The result, long noted by some specialists, is that China’s banks are in fact insolvent while the state sector continues to waste the precious capital the banks pour into it.

Also examned is the tendency of the Chinese, based on centuries of hardship and tradition, to save and not spend income; the staggering dilemma of China’s vast peasant population, the blatant falsification of economic/production statistics, etc., etc., etc. Nothing really new here in and of itself, but altogether it paints a grim portrait indeed. And Waldron takes a hard look at China’s weird policies re. our friends in North Korea:

Today China provides the food and energy that keep the same loathsome North Korean regime alive. More critically, and more paradoxically, China has long been Pyongyang’s major military ally, and has contributed materially to its nuclear program. Even now, the Chinese seem not to grasp that this program poses a far greater long-term peril to them than it does even to South Korea, not to mention Japan or the United States. Why China would do so much to build up a possible enemy on its own border is again difficult to explain; one can only invoke some sort of feral anti-Western reflex, carried over from the days when, as Mao imagined, the East wind was prevailing over the West wind.

One last quote and I’ll call it a night:

As foreign dangers loom, the fragile bargain that has kept the domestic scene relatively quiet since the massacre of 1989 is beginning to break down. The bargain between regime and people was essentially, “you let us rule and we will make you rich,” and for 25 years China enjoyed a good economic run. But as we have seen, the rosy aggregate figures barely disguise the rot beneath: deflation, banking insolvency, increasing government debt, misallocation of resources, not to mention the lack of a legal system or a legitimate government, pervasive corruption of the rulers, and demoralization of the populace.

If you’re interested in this topic, you’re most likely familiar with Josh Marshall. In any case, be sure to read his brilliant analysis of the utterly absurd scenario that has climaxed with the CIA director’s self-immolation.

I notice the term “Yellowcakegate” has been used over here. (This is another invaluable site for balanced, intelligent, sane liberal logic and analysis, Atrios is a lot of fun and I read him daily, but he is more infotainment, while Kleiman is a true intellectual.) So I probably won’t win any prizes.

I still don’t think it’ll be a big enough story in terms of rocking American politics. Yes, it is big news — but most Americans simply won’t care, as it was one of many reasons Bush gave for the invasion, and no matter how deceptive and unethical it was, they can ultimately dismiss it as bad judgment or a mistake, and then apologize for it. It’s been done before.

[For a far more scathing but not unintelligent analysis, check out the latest posts at this site, which is actually better than its unfortunate name.]

Looking at virtually all of Josh Marshall’s columns of the past several days, it would appear that Cakegate (did I invent that or is it already being used in the US?) is the hottest story in town and could be with us for a long time.

I really think there is a lesson here about how GWB operates and thinks, the duplicity and the weaselishness with which he tries to wiggles out of the whole he’s dug for himself. I’m not saying the story is unimportant. Unfortunately, I really can’t imagine this issue taking America by storm. It may delight some bloggers and intellectuals and anyone who wants to see Bush besmirched, but I still don’t see any crime other than lying about one item on a very long list of items (reasons to invade Iraq). It just underscores what we already know about Bush & Co.

This is my perspective from many thousands of miles away. Is America outraged by this, or is it just grist for the boggers’ mill? Watergate had actual crimes involved, a vast web of lawbreaking and deception. Is Cakegate perceived in the US to be on that level? Can it escalate to that? It’s sure getting a lot of coverage on the BBC (surprise, surprise) but, again, I can’t tell how shaken up the American public is about it. My guess is, not much, but I could be wrong….

I am still not 100 percent recovered, so I can’t post much. Maybe over the weekend. I went out a couple of days ago thinking I was all better, and within about ten minutes found I was short of breath and headached and I staggered back to my apartment, where I’ve been hiding out ever since. I am still on a regimen of about 20 various pills a day, so if I posted anything goofy over the past week, that’s my excuse.

Mark Kleiman, who supported the invasion of Iraq, today tries to put the costs of the operation in perspective, and his conclusions are depressing:

The Pentagon says the occupation of Iraq is going to cost about $50 billion per year, indefinitely. That’s not counting reconstruction costs. Keeping Afghanistan safe for its warlords is now costing about $10 billion per year. Can you imagine how much safer a world we’d have today if we’d been willing to spend half that much on rebuilding the fragments of the Soviet Empire in the years just after 1989? Or how much a tenth of that, well spent, could do for human and economic development in Africa? Or how big a horselaugh you would get if you proposed spending anything like those sums on an activity that didn’t also include killing people?

Everything about Iraq right now looks like a quagmire: the US is bleeding, in terms of both money and soldiers, the Iraqi public appears to have lost its enthusiasm of just a few weeks ago and the president is bogged down in scandals of his own making, the yellowcake uranium story dominating the news. Here in Asia it is hard to tell how people in the US feel right now. If what I’m hearing in the media is any indication, it looks like the whole thing is about to blow up in Bush’s face. Watching him squirm on CNN over the uranium scandal, it struck me just how shallow, and just how arrogant he really is, placing himself above the truth and above scrutiny in the wake of a duplicity that make Clinton look like an altar boy. The smugness he displayed was truly revolting. If it continues like this, he just may dig his own grave and give the Democrats a crack at winning, something that seemed literally inconceivable just eight weeks ago.