CHINA NOW FASCIST?

Chinese Communist Party boss Jiang Zemin is laying enormous emphasis at the moment on making China more capitalist. What he says is in fact quite startling for an alleged Communist. �Any road to wealth� seems to be his message. See here or here. There are still a lot of legacies of Communism in China but anything that impedes China�s material progress seems set to go in the foreseeable future.

This heavy focus on national wealth, progress, power and prestige would seem to make it fair to say that post-Mao China has passed out of the hands of Communists and into the hands of Fascists. The first Fascist of modern times (Mussolini) started out as a Marxist too. And both Mussolini and Hitler showed how popular (and in many ways successful) a Leftist tyranny that is also nationalist can be.

I do not believe, however, that this development should worry us. Why? For two reasons:

1). Most people have now forgotten it (if they ever knew it), but of the three Southern European Fascist states in existence at the outset of WWII, one stayed neutral (Spain), one went over to Hitler�s side only at the last minute (Italy) and one co-operated with the Allies to a degree (Portugal). So Fascism is quite clearly not INHERENTLY threatening to the Western democracies.

2). All former Fascist states are now democracies. If Fascism has always been a stage on the road to a firmly democratic system, we have no reason to believe that China will be different.

Besides, as Peikoff points out at length, we are all now to a degree Fascists. Even the United States now has a massive system of government intervention in almost all spheres of life -- from business to welfare -- that has been built up gradually by decades of �progressive� legislation. And a pride in America�s greatness is widespread everywhere in America except among hard-core Leftists. All it needs is for US Leftists to learn Mussolini�s lesson and become patriotic and the USA would be a classical Fascist State in everything except its system of government. Mussolini would really then have the last laugh. But libertarians like me would not be laughing.

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CHINA�S CHILDREN

China hand has just put up two new posts about life around him in modern China that show how much the social and economic system can influence behaviour. He shows that China�s tyrannical �one child� policy has turned the normally placid children of China into spoilt monsters and he shows how the advanced capitalism of Hong Kong produces much more motivated and hard-working people than their fellow Cantonese in nearby China itself.

For those who are unaware of it, China is as diverse as Europe and people from the different areas of China speak quite different languages and see great differences between their various groups -- just as a Swede would see himself as being different from an Italian.

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AN ANGLOSPHERIC UNION?

Jim Bennett, author of The Anglosphere Primer, has an interesting suggestion here. He looks forward to the continued prospering of the USA under the now reinforced Bush administration and also notes that the EU continues to wallow in economic stagnation under its huge load of bureaucracy. Given that the USA has recently shown considerable keenness for Free Trade agreements (agreements with Mexico and Canada now being in place and one with Australia under negotiation), Jim thinks that the USA should now try to �lure away� from the EU both Britain and Ireland. An economic union between North America and the British Isles would indeed make much more sense culturaly and institutionally than the present arrangements and would certainly be of greater economic benefit to the UK than the EU now is. And I am sure that most Brits would greet the idea with a huge sigh of relief.

Orrin Judd has a related idea:

�Now is the perfect time for the U.S. to end-run Europe and add Israel, Turkey, India, and Taiwan to NAFTA and to forge a new political/economic/military alliance of democratic states. These five countries already have interknit security ties; together (and hopefully adding places like Britain, Australia, Eritrea, Morocco, etc.) we would form a belt of democratic, capitalist, pluralist states that would serve notice to both the Islamicists and the Communists that they are badly outgunned and outclassed.�

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CRICKET

As expected, the Australians demolished the England team again yesterday: This time doing it in my home-town of Brisbane. With the possible exception of Burma, England must be the world�s least competent sporting nation. And yet most of the sports that the world plays -- Soccer, Tennis, Golf, Rugby, Cricket -- were invented in Britain. Last time I checked, even boxing was done under Queensberry (British) rules in most places. What a paradox! I wonder how we explain that? Could it all be something to do with the British tradition of fair play?

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STRINE

John Weidner liked my inadvertent use of Australian slang in one of my posts yesterday.

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SADDAM-LOVERS

A clever article by Christopher Hitchens in Slate about Leftist betrayal of their own alleged principles when it comes to Iraq.

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FAKE REFUGEES

Read this and know one reason why the Australian government locks up many of those who come here as �refugees�

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