Squeaky clean Olsen sisters

At first it sounds like another great American success story:

Thirteen-year-old twins Lamb and Lynx Gaede have one album out, another on the way, a music video, and lots of fans.

They may remind you another famous pair of singers, the Olsen Twins, and the girls say they like that.

But this success story has an odd twist.

But unlike the Olsens, who built a media empire on their fun-loving, squeaky-clean image, Lamb and Lynx are cultivating a much darker personna. They are white nationalists and use their talents to preach a message of hate.

Known as “Prussian Blue” — a nod to their German heritage and bright blue eyes — the girls from Bakersfield, Calif., have been performing songs about white nationalism before all-white crowds since they were nine.

“We’re proud of being white, we want to keep being white,” said Lynx. “We want our people to stay white … we don’t want to just be, you know, a big muddle. We just want to preserve our race.”

Lynx and Lamb have been nurtured on racist beliefs since birth by their mother April. “They need to have the background to understand why certain things are happening,” said April, a stay-at-home mom who no longer lives with the twins’ father. “I’m going to give them, give them my opinion just like any, any parent would.”

April home-schools the girls, teaching them her own unique perspective on everything from current to historical events. In addition, April’s father surrounds the family with symbols of his beliefs — specifically the Nazi swastika. It appears on his belt buckle, on the side of his pick-up truck and he’s even registered it as his cattle brand with the Bureau of Livestock Identification.

“Because it’s provocative,” explains April of the cattle brand, “to him he thinks it’s important as a symbol of freedom of speech that he can use it as his cattle brand.”

Is this sicker than all hell or what? Yeah, give the hateful freaks the freedom to sing their songs, but thank God we all have the freedom to tell them that they do not represent America, and that racism and Nazi symbols are repellent, even if you package them as good old-fashioned American entertainment. Sickening.

Will anyone be there on November 5-6? I know it’s all in Chinese, but I was hoping to show up to meet some of my fellow pundits. If anyone wants to meet up, let me know; I should arrive in town on November 3 and will work out of my Shanghai office for two days.

The unlinkable Thomas Friedman writes about podcasting in China.

Chinese Finding Their Voice – New York TimesOctober 21, 2005
Op-Ed Columnist
Chinese Finding Their Voice
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Shanghai

And you thought the Cultural Revolution was over. Sorry, it’s just beginning, only China’s new Cultural Revolution will be driven this time from the bottom up – by podcasters with Apple’s little white iPods or competing players, not from the top down by Maoists with Little Red Books.

Yes, I know, I am a little ahead of myself. Very few Chinese have ever even seen an iPod, so the podcasting that does exist here is

(more…)

For the last 56 years, China has been a literary wasteland – utterly devoid of the freedom of expression necessary for literature to flourish. For great Chinese writers one must look to the first half of the 20th century. Ba Jin, the first author to write full-length popular novels in vernacular Chinese rather than the traditional and elitist classical script, died this week in Shanghai, aged 101 years. He was the sole survivor from this first generation of radical mass-market writers.

He was often compared to Charles Dickens as his earlier novels exposed the evils of traditional Chinese feudal society. Traditionally in China, the population looked to writers for guidance, hope and new ideas. His most famous work was the semi-autobiographical trilogy Family (1937), Spring (1938) and Autumn (1940). The books follow the trials and tribulations of the young members of a large family who struggle to break away from their old-fashioned parents, only to encounter stubborn opposition and tragedy. The works are now compulsory reading for all Chinese junior school students.

Real name, Li Feigan, he was born into a family of officials in Sichuan Province in 1904. He adopted the pen-name Ba Jin because the two characters are part of the Chinese names of the famous early Russian anarchists Bakunin and Kropotkin. As well as revolutionary Russian writers, his other literary inspirations came from the intellectuals who led China’s “New Culture” movement in the early 1920s. During that period he joined the nationwide calls for democracy and national modernization among China’s students and intellectuals.

Ba Jin initially welcomed Mao’s New China with its lofty ideals and promises of peace and national re-construction. He even kept faith during the anti-rightist/class enemy purges of the 1950s, the restrictions on freedom of expression and all the mind-numbing political exhortations. However, the Cu1tural Rev0lution finally caused him to lose faith in both Mao and communism. He and his wife, as well as many of his fellow writers were imprisoned and tortured during this period by teenage Red Guards blinded by ideology and the cult of Mao. His wife died in 1973 after being denied medical treatment.

He was quietly rehabilitated in 1977, and four years later was made chairman of the Chinese Writers’ Association. However, he never fully recovered from the horrors of the 60s and 70s. In 1985, he called for an end to all restrictions on writers in China and advised that the country should build a museum to properly remember the victims of the Cu1tural Rev0lution – ‘lest later generations should ever forget.’

He received his final wish, his words are engraved in stone at the entrance to China’s only such museum in the mountains near Shantou in Guangdong province.

After two days of deadline work, I’m finally getting around to this – the much-anticipated NY Times review of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s biography, Mao: The Unknown Story. The review is a must-read because it’s fair and balanced and illuminating.

I still haven’t read Mao, but the review confirms my own initial thoughts (which still might be wrong; won’t know until I read it for myself): that the book does indeed offer reams of evidence that Mao was the true scum of the earth, worse than the Great Dictator, worse than Stalin or Chiang Kai Shek or Pol Pot, worse tham anybody. But the authors also hurt themselves by over-generalizing and making blanket assertions that they fail to back up with evidence.

In their new book, “Mao: The Unknown Story,” Jung Chang and Jon Halliday make an impassioned case for Mao as the most monstrous tyrant ever. They argue that he was responsible for “well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other 20th-century leader,” and they argue that “he was more extreme than Hitler or Stalin” in that he envisioned a brain-dead, “completely arid society, devoid of civilization, deprived of representation of human feelings, inhabited by a herd with no sensibility, which would automatically obey his orders.”

Ms. Chang, the author of “Wild Swans,” a best-selling memoir that chronicled her family’s sufferings under Mao, and her husband, Mr. Halliday, a British historian, drew upon newly available material from secret Chinese and Soviet archives for this volume, and they interviewed hundreds of people, including intimates, colleagues and victims of Mao. Their hefty if tendentious and one-dimensional book contains a plethora of valuable new information that helps flesh out the record of devastation left by this heinous tyrant.

The book demonstrates just how brutal and conniving Mao was in his rise to power, maps out the key role he played in fomenting the Korean War and reveals the huge degree to which he was dependent on Stalin both in coming to power and in trying to turn China into a nuclear superpower. The authors write that “close to 38 million people died of starvation and overwork” during the Great Leap Forward and an accompanying famine. This, they contend, was a result not of economic mismanagement but of cold political calculus. They argue, further, that Mao launched his deadly Cultural Revolution as a means of purging those officials (like his No. 2, Liu Shao-chi) who had dared to question his catastrophic Great Leap Forward policies.

Unfortunately, I really don’t want to read a one-dimensional account of Mao’s life (or anyone’s life). To me, a good biography has to offer an historiographical account, making the reader feel he or she is there in that time, in that place, learning not just about the life of the “hero,” but about the psychological and historical factors that shaped him. Now, this book may contain all of these aspects, but from what I’ve read so far, I’m skeptical. I already know Mao was the quintessential dick.

One of the problems with this volume is that Ms. Chang and Mr. Halliday offer little insight into Mao’s behavior. There are few clues to childhood or adolescent ordeals (aside from having a father he disliked) that might have shaped his pathological psyche, no assessment of philosophers (like Nietzsche or Machiavelli, say) who might have influenced his philosophy, no analysis of the dictator’s mature writings that might shed light on his politics or values.

The authors also provide scant historical context for Mao’s ascendance. They do not put their subject in perspective with the imperial tradition in China, nor do they examine the social and economic circumstances that helped make the country susceptible to his rise and malign rule. To make matters worse, they occasionally make gross generalizations that cannot be proved: for instance, they write that during the Cultural Revolution, when students were exhorted to assail their teachers, “there was not one school in the whole of China where atrocities did not occur.”

Such questionable assertions undermine the authors’ purpose and are thoroughly gratuitous: Mao’s crimes against humanity, documented in this volume and elsewhere, are so heinous and so gargantuan that they hardly need to be hyped.

Again, I’ll reserve final judgement, but have to admit I’m approaching it with a big grain of salt.

The Financial Times takes a look today at the unintentionally hilarious book-length “white paper” Beijing is spreading around as proof of its successful implementation of democracy rich with those Chinese characteristics we all know and love.

The 74-page government policy paper entitled “The Building of Political Democracy” seeks to justify autocratic Communist party rule in much the same way that Asian dictators have defended their regimes since the 1950s.

Genuine democratic demands are portrayed as “anarchic”, in contrast to the party’s paternalistic guidance of the people towards prosperity and harmony. Echoing the “Asian values” popular with authoritarians in the 1990s, the paper says “China’s socialist political democracy has vivid Chinese characteristics”. It shamelessly defines democratic government as the Communist party ruling on behalf of citizens with a view to perfecting “the people’s democratic dictatorship”.

So what else is new? This is the kind of shit one hears with alarming and headache-inducing frequency on CCTV-9. I just want to know, does anyone — anyone at all? — believe a word of it? (Like, does anyone believe North Korea is literally the democratic people’s republic of Korea? Words often mean so very, very little.)

In fact, the paper is unlikely to convince anyone who lives in a free country. In Hong Kong, an autonomous Chinese territory enjoying free speech and a promise of eventual universal suffrage, there is a groundswell of opposition to similarly specious official arguments about the need for harmony rather than democratic elections.

A more likely reason for publication is that the paper is for domestic Chinese consumption. It consolidates justifications for Communist party rule in a single document and may provide comfort to embattled cadres trying to explain themselves to cynical peasants, factory workers and middle-class homeowners. After allowing tightly controlled elections at the local level, Communist leaders are alarmed to find that villagers want to exercise their rights to oust unpopular and corrupt officials.

The Chinese Communist party, in short, is on the defensive. Although it will use any means of repression to avert a repeat of the pro-democracy demonstrations of 1989, it is clearly struggling to formulate a philosophy to justify its political pre-eminence.

Try as they might, Chinese policymakers cannot get around the unambiguous meaning of the word democracy; in Chinese, as in the English word derived from the Greek, it simply means the people are in charge. Everyone knows this is not the case in China. The party’s arguments are weak but at least it is continuing down the path from Maoism to pragmatic Asian authoritarianism and beginning to recognise that democracy is a subject worthy of debate.

That’s certainly a step forward, but China still has a ways to go even before it reaches the goalpost of “Asian authoritarianism.” Singapore it’s not; not even Malaysia. Meanwhile, stunts like this banal 74-page diatribe certainly won’t garner much praise for its publishers, and can only help perpetuate the impression of their being ham-fisted, bumbling propagandists desperately seeking respect from a doubting public.

It could just be a hoax. But it wouldn’t surprise me if it turned out to be true.

Police are investigating an offer of babies for sale on the website of the Chinese operation of the e-Bay online auction company.

The advertisement offered baby boys for £2,000 and girls for £900. They supposedly came from Henan, China’s most populous, poor and socially troubled province. Delivery was promised within 100 days.

“Our aim is to send good news to the thousands of couples around the country who are unable to have children,” it said, according to the Shanghai Morning Post, which was alerted by a reader.

The advertisement was posted on Sunday on Eachnet, a firm started by two Chinese graduates and bought by eBay in 2003. It was “browsed” 50 times, but attracted only one inquiry and no sales, according to the company.

Do they ship it to the winning bidder via FedEx?

[Thanks to Keir for the tip.]

How sublime and inspiring to see high-ranking Republicans and decorated officers now stepping forward to reveal just how dreadfully incompetent, secretive and dangerous our government has become under Bush. From no less a figure than Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to former SOS Colin Powell:

Decisions that send men and women to die, decisions that have the potential to send men and women to die, decisions that confront situations like natural disasters and cause needless death or cause people to suffer misery that they shouldn’t have to suffer, domestic and international decisions, should not be made in a secret way.

That’s a very, very provocative statement, I think….But fundamental decisions about foreign policy should not be made in secret. Let me tell you the…practical reasons why it’s true.

….When you cut the bureaucracy out of your decisions and then foist your decisions on us out of the blue on that bureaucracy, you can’t expect that bureaucracy to carry your decision out very well and, furthermore, if you’re not prepared to stop the feuding elements in that bureaucracy, as they carry out your decision, you’re courting disaster.

….What I saw was a cabal between the Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.

This is one of those “read the whole thing” articles. Read it, but don’t expect to come away with even a nano-droplet of faith in the people running our government and our military. Depressing, sickening. And you can’t blame this one on those damned libruhls.

So sayeth commenters in the latest open thread. Pity.

In a move widely reported in China at the moment as ‘hurting the feelings of the Chinese people’, US-based Google have removed previous references to Taiwan as a province of China:

Chinese media reports said “Google.com, world’s largest Internet search engine, deleted the words ‘Taiwan, a province of the People’s Republic of China’ on a map of Taiwan linked to its maps search engine maps.google.com. This has drawn rage from Chinese officials and the people.”

Google made the changes “under pressure of extremists in Taiwan’s pan-Green camp (a pro-independence alliance between the ruling Democratic Progressive Party and the hard-line Taiwan Solidarity Union party),” Xinhua reported.

This must be a bit of a blow as China is used to foreign Internet companies kowtowing and strictly towing the official party line. Google China boss Li Kaifu will be hoping that the incident will quickly blow over. However, the media have already warned that the government ‘has many options at its disposal’ to punish Google such as increased bureaucratic red tape, fines and even orders to close down business in China. Such tactics have been used before. China’s notorious Internet users are already talking of boycotting Google in retaliation.