Tag: Mao

Kindle Consumption: 2023

 

A handful of books were my companions each evening this year as I dozed off, or was wakeful, or inexplicably alert in the wee hours. Some off these I’ll recommend wholeheartedly, while others are not worth your time. 

Menagerie Manor, by Gerald Durrell- Some of us are acquainted with Durrell through his accounts of an idyllic boyhood on the Greek island of Corfu. Durrell continues his obsession with animals in this volume, a collection of stories from Durrell’s years building and maintaining a zoo. The quality of the writing is an echo of My Family and Other Animals; however, in some of the stories, Durrell is inspired again, and I was at times happily transported in his telling of how he acquired and maintained his zoo creatures. Durrell is known for helping to revolutionize the purposes and operations of zoos, yet sometimes I found myself wondering whether a few of his animals would have been more content left alone in the wild. In some ways, perhaps, he never stopped being that ten-year-old kid fighting the odds to maintain his vast collection of specimens. 

Marching Maoist Morons

 

I was scrolling through the Instapundit site the other day when this item grabbed my attention: “Biden is trying to enshrine ‘equity’ more deeply as a national policy.” 

So I clicked on the link and wound up at the Newneo site, where I found the article of the same name, with contents just as terrible as the title indicated.

[Member Post]

 

Biden-linked Totalitarian CCP continues campaign against Jimmy Lai and free speech. After a judge released Jimmy Lai on bail pending a February court date prior to Christmas, a very public campaign of intimidation against the judge saw Jimmy back in custody for the new year. Notice the reverence in Hong Kong for social distancing among […]

⚠️ This is a members-only post on Ricochet's Member Feed. Want to read it? Join Ricochet's community of conservatives and be part of the conversation.

Join Ricochet for free.

We are joined by Dr. Jung Chang, author of the best-selling books Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China; Mao: The Unknown Story; and Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China. Dr. Chang discusses Wild Swans, a sweeping narrative about three generations of her family across 20th-century China, and the importance of transmitting firsthand historical knowledge of life under Mao Zedong. She also describes her definitive biography of Mao – which, like Wild Swans, remains banned in China – documenting the carnage under his reign, including the peacetime deaths of an estimated 70 million people. She explores Mao’s cult of personality, changing perceptions of his character and legacy, and Maoism’s resurgence in China today. Dr. Chang then delves into the topic of her newest book, Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China, a group biography of the powerful Soong sisters, including Madame Chiang. She concludes with a reading from her memoir, Wild Swans.

Stories of the Week: A new report covered by Time magazine reveals a shocking lack of Holocaust knowledge among Millennials and Gen-Z Americans surveyed across 50 states – troubling evidence of the dangers of woefully inadequate history instruction. CBS News reports that more Black families, when given the option, are likely to choose remote learning, for a variety of reasons having to do with mistrust of the system and safety concerns.

Green New Deal: Serious as a Mass Famine

 

Keep yucking it up. Talk about Alexandria Occasional Cortex. Hey, it could never happen here right? Not so fast, slick, your laughter is actually based in ignorance or forgetfulness. Stalin engineered a terror famine, the Holodomor, and Mao killed off up to 60 million inconvenient people with his Great Leap Forward. Today, Venezuelans are eating rats. Now are you focused?

Holodomor memorial monument in Kyiv, UkraineAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s socialist scheme reveals, in its own words, the red origins and aims of the Green movement. Instead of greedy capitalists oppressing wage slaves, evil polluters are killing everyone. those at the top of the intersectional virtue pyramid hit hardest.

Dennis Prager on the Self-Righteously Suicidal West and False Morality

 

For this week’s Big Ideas with Ben Weingarten podcast, I had nationally syndicated radio host, columnist, author of numerous books, teacher, film producer and co-founder of PragerU, Dennis Prager, on the podcast to discuss among other things:

  • How Dennis Prager ended up a conservative as an Ivy League-educated Jewish intellectual from Brooklyn, New York — contrary to so many of his peers
  • How perceptions of human nature divide Left and Right
  • Whether government has filled the void of religion for the increasingly secular and progressive American coasts
  • How the good intentions that underlie Leftist policy prescriptions lead to horrendous outcomes — and emotion versus reason on the Left and Right
  • The false morality underlying European immigration policy with respect to the Muslim world, and Prager’s criticism of Jewish support of mass immigration consisting disproportionately of Jew-haters
  • The self-righteous suicidalism of the West
  • The Leftist bias of social media platforms and PragerU’s legal battle with YouTube/Google

You can find the episode on iTunes, everywhere else podcasts are found, download the episode directly here or read the transcript here.

[Member Post]

 

In Gil Reich’s thread “Cheer Up! The Bright Side of the Middle East” (a welcome dose of optimism), he repeats a popular claim about Russia’s diminished role in world affairs since the end of the Cold War.  Russia and China support the Iran – Assad axis. But today’s Russia and China have neither the power nor […]

⚠️ This is a members-only post on Ricochet's Member Feed. Want to read it? Join Ricochet's community of conservatives and be part of the conversation.

Join Ricochet for free.