Who Lost China? What The Bible Shows

 

 

 Dino Might?   

 

Anti-evolutionists are feeling pretty good about themselves, so confident they’ve got the godless on the run that their analogy generation skills are shot.

From the crypto-creationist Discovery Institute’s evolutionnews.org  [clever name to propagandize the unwary evolution-curious!] comes a metaphor for the ages: “Creation scientists” are Mao Tse Tung, and Beijing is theirs!

“After 1949 when China went Communist, American anti-Communists in their anguish turned on fellow Americans, seeking to pin the blame somewhere and prompting the famous “Who Lost China?” debate. Evolutionists lately have been following this same path, bewailing the public’s continued discontent with Darwinism and support for academic-freedom legislation, and looking for someone to blame, even if that someone is on the Darwinists’ own side.”

 Proof for this headscratcher comes of course from The Atlantic, where Robert Wright knows who to blame: pushy atheists!
In simpler times only Wright recalls, godless and god-smacked respected one another, we all liked Ike, and god apparently wasn’t shoved into the Pledge of Allegiance or onto our coins.
Then, trouble.
Other than dates and such, right on the money!
 Dawkins’ god squad warnings appeared in 2006, seven years after the Discovery Institute’s “The Wedge” appeared, laying out their strategy for stealth creationism, itself a cleaned up version of the god-struck’s historic strategy.
When called on facts and chronology Wright doubled down on absolving creationists and climate denialists:
 First off, demand creates its own supply?  Second, why is Wright pretending this is about hurt feelings rather than power and ideology?  Creationism and climate denial can have roots in religious beleaf, but its whole mobilization infestructure is paid for by somebody. Given their Libertarian pretensions I suspect the Koch brothers may be godless Randians, but they are happy to use the armies of the lord as carbon war cannon fodder.
The Discovery Institute’s analogy does work somewhat about Wright , but on the McCarthy period’s opposite side.  Wright is today’s version of a beloved political type, the liberal or ex-socialist claiming that others on the left created McCarthyism by their insufficient anti-communism.
From Arthur Schlesinger’s eager distinction drawing:
                                                                                           ” Liberals who complain when [HUAC Chairman] Parnell Thomas fails to distinguish between liberals and Communists should remember that too often they have failed to make that distinction themselves.”

To ex-Trotskyite Irving Kristol’s  judgement that

                                  “.. there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalis they feel they know no such thing.”

Lets certify that Communisim was feared, but McCarthy was looking for means of doing in domestic enemies.  The fall of Beijing was to cause the fall of Washington.

Later day former leftist Ronald Radosh still swoons for Kristol’s Lattimore stylings.

Its unclear if Radosh read the report, which is a mishmash of testimony excerpts and theories often proving the opposite of what it claims.*  Radosh even boasts about  Kristol’s outing Lattimore as an opponent of Japanese imperialism in China:
…without pausing to consider the Soviet’s then ally, or the consequences of  backing Japan: Chiang Kai-Shek’s demise fifteen years early.

*After detailing an instance where Lattimore did the opposite of what a communist had asked him to do in editing, the Committee said he was still a bad person, and never mind: “From the communist point of view, a given book or article may be to their interest, even designedly to their interest, though in quantity 95 percent of it is neutral or non communist” [page 95]

So no defense then!

 

Self-Discredited McCarthy Witness Pawn In Internet Battle!

 

 

Mr. Matusow Meets The Market 

Harvey Matusow was a crucial witness in the McCarran Committee persecution of Owen Lattimore, reinforcing the tattered testimony of Louis Budenz.

Matusow’s dead, but in the long tail/netherworld of the Internet he apparently has value. Somehow his confessional False Witness finds a market, if you pay the author and publisher nothing.

Budenz’s claims of a seamless web between Lattimore’s writings and the Communist line had suffered from actual reading of what Lattimore wrote, and  of what the Budenz edited Daily Worker said about Lattimore.

Matusow providentially appeared to tie Lattimore to the Reds.  After first inventing Communist subversion of the Boy Scouts, Matusow built from his experience running a Communist book store to claim he sold Lattimore’s Solution In Asia, and that it represented the party line.

 Saluting Solution – see the title on the blackboard partly obscured by bow-tie daddy.

Later Matusow admitted he’d invented this story   and many others as he climbed to the heights of the former party-member-tells-all business.

Matusow recanting has done nothing to deter right-wing cranks replicating his old lies.

Somehow this long lost witness lives on in the Internet, with the text of his tell-all “False Witness” available in a vast array of formats. You can buy a musty old copy for $3.97,  and free online reading and downloads are available at the Hathi Trust Digital Library and archive.org.  After that it gets more complicated. Two outfits sell text files of the book to read or download, and one will even print you a copy of the text, allowing you to simulate the Internet experience of no index and weird scanning generated typos:

“ a feeling of guilt— of how or when could this ever stop. However, I soon got down to rock bottom, a 29 point which made it easy for me to justify my reporting on my former friends.”

Goodreads.com is the physical book seller, and also markets ads against online texts and any reader generated commentary, so start  scribbling for the greater glory.

Onread.com is a bit murkier.  They have malware spreading accusations in their past, although Norton and McAfee find them currently clean.

Others aren’t so sure:

Russian terms of service. Protected by a Chinese domain that is registered from FranceBoth . “Book” downloads that come with an .exe extension that install and direct you to another website. I may be just a tiny bit jaded, but somehow I think this might not be entirely legitimate…

Pied Pipers of the Politburo Produced President’s Paramour!

 

How Owen Lattimore Got Obama Laid, & Policy Made 

 

 

Slate’s David Weigel surveyed how wingnuts and their Politico enablers folded David Maraniss’s exciting Obama college girlfriend revelations into their rich fantasy life, finding “A frantic search for something else to be conspiracy-minded about.”

I say they’re missing the shadows in plain sight.

 

Maraniss tracked down Obama’s girlfriend of his New York years, Genivive Cook, who shared with him, and the nation, her contemporary notes on the affair.  He mentions Cook’s stepfather Phillip Jessup, with a glancing mention of Jessup’s father, the Philip Jessup.  That Jessup was a major Joseph McCarthy target, paired with Truman Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Owen Lattimore as Chiang Kai-shek’s banana peels, the “Pied Pipers of the Politburo“.

High on their own fumes heroes managed to link Bill Clinton with Lattimore by inventing connections and ignoring actual facts, and here is an Obama link with the boys who lost China!

Dreams Of Her [Step] Grandfather  

China’s Stories Past: Ji Chaozhu Remembers.

Tales Of [Comparatively] Ancient China  

Inspired by the current American tour of incipient Chinese leader Xi Jinping, the  New York Times looks back to the start of the current era in US/China relations,  Nixon and Kissinger’s 70s visits with  Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai.

Ji Chaozhu was there for most of these events, a lead translator for the Chinese side and later diplomat.

Ji was brought up in New York during the 40s, and his family’s doings in America figured in the Owen Lattimore story.  Ji’s father edited a Chinese language newspaper in New York, and one McCarthy charge against Lattimore was defending the senior Ji against Communist allegations [He was, but that’s for another day].

Older brother Ji Chaoding was a Columbia economics PhD who worked for Chiang Kai Shek’s government in New York and Chungking in the forties, and joined China’s delegation to the founding conference of the World Bank/International Monetary Fund.  One perjury charge growing out of Lattimore’s McCarran Committee testimony was about whether Lattimore knew or should have known Ji Chaoding was a Communist.

Ji was, and by several accounts headed  the American Communist Party’s China Bureau which smuggled funds and supplies to China. While employed by Chiang Kai Shek.

Ji Chaozhu’s memoir isn’t exactly hard hitting, mostly being a chronicle of meetings and translation, sometimes for the Greats.

The best part is his discription of his father’s  role in the film “30 Seconds Over Tokyo,” playing a kindly Chinese doctor patching up crash-landed veterans of the Doolittle Raid.  The film was written by future Hollywood Ten-er Dalton Trumbo, and presents China’s anti-Japanese resistance as an incredibly bourgeois affair, with resistance leaders in suits and ties.  Plucky resistance children bring tears and throat lumps to the downed fliers with a Chinese version of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Chi Senior Rolls Up His Sleeves To Repair Van Johnson  

 

Arthur Schlesinger, Air Tight

Svetlana Alliluyeva  

Ever cutting-edge, shed of it’s Boston shackles, The Atlantic responded to the death of Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva by going to the vaults, resurrecting a review by Arthur Schlesinger.

He was a fan, and using his historian glasses hunted up proof of Alliluyeva’s version of her mother’s death.

“There is independent testimony (Alexander Orlov, Alexander Barmine, Victor Serge, Victor Kravchenko) that Nadya was appalled by the violence, repression, and famine which came in the wake of the forced collectivization of the countryside. “

Of the four, Barmine is the only one playing a roll in the Lattimore case, but lets look at these guys.

Orlov spent the years of collectivization, Alliluyeva’s death and Stalin’s murder of most of the party leadership working abroad for Soviet intelligence in Berlin, the US, Vienna, London, and Copenhagen. He ended as intelligence chief in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, where while apparently brooding over Alliluyeva’s suicide four years previously turned grief into strength hunting down Spanish Trotskyists and shipping Spain’s gold reserves to Moscow.  He didn’t break with the Soviets until 1938, and didn’t surface his tales of the Kremlin until the US anti-communist market appeared in the fifties.

Barmine claimed to have known Stalin’s brother-in-law, who filled him on all the dope. Who knows, but Barmine’s constant discovery of new memories was on display in his Lattimore testimony, where, years after writing his post-Soviet memoir and debriefing the FBI, he suddenly recalled a fancy Soviet intelligence boss as mentor, and Lattimore’s participation in a preposterous Soviet scheme to smuggle arms into China.  To a province they already occupied.

Serge spent the late twenties and the thirties hounded as a dissident, in the Gulag and then in exile, and is fairly reliable on other matters. He claimed his information came from Kremlin gossipers he knew before his last imprisonment.

Kravchenko was a minor official who defected in the mid 40s while in New York for a wartime Soviet purchasing commission.

That these four told similar tales, years later and often with the benefit of each others books, tells us that they can read and write.

Schlesinger is the “Even The New Republic” of the Lattimore case, the liberal fig-leaf held up by a certain stratum of Lattimore-Was-Guilty-Of-Something-ists as showing that even one of their guys hated him.


Before They Were Stars: Harvey Matusow In The Minor Leagues

“Why, oh why, oh why oh, did he ever leave Ohio?”

Dateline: Dayton Ohio, February 25, 1952

The Ohio House Un-American Activities Committee probes the Red Menace.

In the chair is Harvey Matusow, a young ex-Communist looking to get big in the burgeoning field of Anti-Communism, and hoping Ohio’s laboratory of democracy will loose him upon the world as a made man:

“Q. In addition to the folk singing, did they also use square dancing?”

Was there no aspect of America’s faux folk past safe from Communist marauders?

Fortunately yes, as the Committee’s Chief Counsel rushed to assure:

“You are not saying, and you are not testifying, or want to give the impression that there is anything subversive or un-American about folk singing or square dancing?

A. That is correct.”

The Committee is interested in Yellow Springs’ Antioch College, a Pink festering sore on Ohio’s ass since the days of the Abolitionists.   Harvey was gunning for the big leagues, and Red subversion of innocent youth was to be his ticket out of there.  Shortly after this out of town production he came to Washington, started lying about Owen Lattimore, and left Ohio behind.

Matusow ran through a greatist hits of folk Commie Classics during his testimony, mangling lyrics as he went.

One of the better songs he namechecked: Banks Of Marble

Case Closure: Owen Lattimore Innocent All Over Again

Past Time: Lattimore Re-enactors

A Re-enactment of Lattimore case highlights was staged back in May by the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit, and their video is now up online.

Several veterans of the case participated, including former Judge Luther Youngdahl clerk Berl Bernhard and two lawyers with connections to Lattimore’s defenders at Arnold Fortas & Porter, Patricia Wald and Bud Vieth.  The prosecution was played by Miguel Estrada, famously  blocked by Democrats from a federal Appeals Court seat, who demonstrated the menacing skills they were so afraid of.

Pediaphiles: Because Where You Get Your Bad History Matters!

Dim Bulbs Seek Truth, Results Uncertain

Everyone enjoys a hearty laugh at the expense of the online research-challenged.  That was the stunning outcome, when one “Miss Kitty” meandered into a discussion of Owen Lattimore, armed only with what she thinks she recalls from Conservapedia and Wikipedia.

Here’s the fast facts, insofar as Kit remembers:

While reading “Blacklisted by History,” I looked up a commie named Owen Lattimore (he’s the second one from the left, standing next to Mao Say Dung), who, while touring a Soviet death and concentration camp, callously brushed off the pleas of a desperate female prisoner to help her. He was well protected by the verifiably corrupt (by verifiably, I mean there were FBI tape recordings of tapped phone conversations discovered decades later to prove it), Truman Justice Department. There is a huge difference in the way Wikipedia portrays him and the way Conservapedia portrays him, with the writers at Conservapedia using Owen Lattimore’s own writings and other eye-witness accounts of the man’s actions to incriminate him. So the next time you want to look something up, check Conservapedia and you’ll see a big difference. Of course, the chorus of the voices on the right will say they are biased.


I think the voices in Miss Kitty’s head are a chorus of voices on the left, and she’s channeling details of the Amerasia case not Lattimore’s, but we must hurry along.

The photo referred to actually has Lattimore standing next to Peoples Liberation Army Commander Chu Te.

Lattimore was photographed with Mao, but it looks more like this:

Cause they all look alike?

Miss Kitty’s strenuous truth-seeking doesn’t extend to actually linking to either Conservapedia or Wikipedia‘s Lattimore entries, perhaps because they might dim the lustre of her story.

They each, in their own way, are more aligned with Miss Kitty then the truth.

Conservapedia refers to claims by the now dead Marvin Liebman of a conversation with former Gulag prisoner Elinor Lipper, who mentions the Henry Wallace Siberia visit in her memoir.  

In Liebman’s version, Lipper told him Wallace’s sinister translator [Lattimore] steered the Vice President away from a woman prisoner screaming her innocence.

Several problems.

1. Lipper’s original book had no mention of Lattimore, references to him being added for the American edition after McCarthy surfaced his name.  And none refer to the incident Liebman claimed to have heard. Lipper presented all her stories as second hand.

2. By all accounts, the Wallace party saw a Potemkin village, with KGB guards pretending to by miners for the day. Lipper even claims watchtowers were removed for the occasion. Why would the Soviets spoil the show with actual prisoners?

3. Lattimore spoke some Russian, but he wasn’t Wallace’s translator for the Soviet portion of the trip.  He was along for later Mongol and Chinese conversations.

Conservapedia recalls the glory days of bipartisanship with a reference to a Lattimore slam “After the fall of China to the Communists in 1949, [by] then-Senator John F. Kennedy.”    But Kennedy wasn’t elected to the Senate until 1952, and he got in this early attack on Lattimore before the fall of Chiang, in early 1949.  But other than that, right on the money.

Conservapedia goes all in for the reference notes, referencing the maximum program anti-Lattimore pamphlet, “Communism at Pearl Harbor,” in which Lattimore basically caused World War II.

Conservapedia claims “When Lattimore resigned as editor of Pacific Affairs, he was succeeded by Michael Greenberg, a Communist Party member. Lattimore then became a member of the editorial board of the notorious Amerasia magazine.”  Lattimore resigned board membership at Amerasia before leaving Pacific Affairs.

Kitty’s far too hard on Wikipedia, which smuggles in it’s own nut-ball references on Lattimore.

Wikipedia repeats unchallenged the tales of Alexander Barmin, who years after writing his post-Soviet memoir and talking to the FBI, suddenly recalled Lattimore’s participation in a preposterous Soviet scheme to smuggle arms into China.  To a province they already occupied.

Wikipedia goes on about the FBI’s early and lengthy interest in Lattimore, without being too fussy about what those interests were.

On page 101 in part two of Lattimore’s FBI file, we learn that among other things they  tracked Mrs. Lattimore’s activities under their monitoring of “Foreign Inspired Agitation Among American Negroes.” The Bureau was concerned about the “Baltimore Committee for Home-Front Democracy,” which it reported “recommended equal opportunity to shop at any Baltimore store without discrimination because of race or color.”

Owen The Future: Looking Up Lattimore In Shanghai

May Not & May Never Have Been His Office

A China excursion including a Lattimore relative prompted participants to try and track down where Lattimore lived during his brief period in Shanghai.

Lattimore was employed in the city by the British firm of Arnhold Brothers & Co., before wanderlust sent him North to Tientsin.

Great Nephew Greg Lattimore Andrews and friends despaired of finding Lattimore’s house, moved on to looking for his office, and may or may not have found it.

But a fine time had by all.


When Judges Kill [Cases] – Looking Back At Lattimore

The Court In Unhappier Days

Washington’s Federal Courthouse was the scene of some of the final acts in the Lattimore drama, where twice the presiding judge in the case threw out the government’s principal charges, gutting the case.

On May 12th the court will revisit Lattimore, with the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit and the Litigation Section of the District of Columbia Bar staging a re-enactment of parts of the case, and an overview of its significance.  Several participants played small rolls in Lattimore back in the day:

Patricia M. Wald, former Chief Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit who was with Lattimore’s Arnold, Fortas &  Porter defense team,

G. Duane (Bud) Vieth, still with Arnold & Porter, the firm’s successor,

Berl Bernhard, former clerk for Judge Luther Youngdahl, who sank the government’s case.

Also participating will be conservative legal legend Miguel Estrada, whose DC Appeals Court nomination by George W. Bush was filibustered by Senate Democrats.  Despite his nomination’s failure, the Estrada is still in the fight, writing a stirring defense of the 2009 coup in his Honduran homeland.

I’m gonna guess he plays the prosecution.