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| The Cynic |
Cynicism, my friend the Cynic tells me, has been given a bad
rap.
The cynic, throughout history a moral activist, questions
everyone and everything because he mistrusts everyone and everything –
initially.
His intellectual allegiance may be bought, but the price is
high, and he will, ultimately, refuse to serve any unprincipled party. Antisthenes,
a student of Socrates who founded the Greek Cynic School, was no respecter of
persons. Historically, it is possible to trace a direct line from Greek Cynicism
to Roman Stoicism to the early Desert Fathers of the Christian church, all highly moral, ascetic and mistrustful of the kind of leisure and loose ethics that great wealth brings in its train.
Since cynics regard virtue rather than knowledge, though the
two are not unconnected, as the road to human felicity, you must convince the
cynic you are right and upright, and he is a tough customer.
At a time during which – just to keep the discussion focused
on politics – clever politicians, usually incumbents, are able to fool “some of
the people all of the time,” Abe Lincoln’s verbiage, the cynic, whose
bipartisan distaste for patent nonsense cuts across party lines, becomes the
indispensable man.
The cynic used to be found everywhere. In politics, in
academia, in religion, in journalism, he was ubiquitous -- and honored. Both Mark Twain and Henry Mencken were
cynics, that is, people who turned their faces against what they took to be the
reigning false, smelly little orthodoxies of their day.
Otto von Bismarck, who more or less created modern Germany,
was a cynic. Notice the drops of cynicism issuing from his lips when he says,
“What we learn from History is that no one learns from History,” or “Never
believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied,” or “The
Americans are a very lucky people. They're bordered to the north and south by
weak neighbors, and to the east and west by fish.”
To Bismarck, who pretty much launched realpolitik on its
bumptious course through the 20th century, China was no more, and no
less, than a market to be exploited.
Today, things have changed, of course. Modernity, and the
airplane, has reduced the oceans to puddles. China, with the assistance of
multi-national companies, has become a Pacific nation hegemon. Since Mao, a
communist purist and mass murderer plodding along in the Marxist hobnailed
boots of Joseph Stalin, another mass murderer and domestic terrorist, China has
managed to soften the hard edges of communism by embracing state fascism, a
successful ploy only because of the West’s suicidal stupidity.
And Chinese fascists are much more adept at business and
nation building than are fat-cat hedge fund managers in the West; indeed, in
Germany, the home of Bismarck’s realpolitik, which also has a surfeit of
anti-nationalist, citizens-of-the-world hedge fund managers.
What is fascism, Benito Mussolini, was asked? Said
Mussolini, an alchemist who changed his own state socialism into fascism:
Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing above the state, a
definition that fits China to a T.
In Britain and other parts of Europe, some politicians are
becoming less credulous and more cynical. The credulous, dangerously optimistic
West gave to China the mercantile muscle it is now flexing in the Pacific Rim.
China’s totalitarian nationalism might easily be marked “Made in the USA.” Of
course, all the Western nations, eager to tap into China’s massive consumer
population, followed suit.
Great Britain, though, appears to be having “second
thoughts,” according to a New York Times piece, reprinted here: Britain
Rethinks Letting China Enter Its Nuclear Power Industry.
After the communist military in China had for decades
successfully stolen proprietary data from an obliging and apparently
defenseless West; after a virus causing a worldwide pandemic had escaped from a
gain-of- function lab in Wuhan China run by Chinese military “doctors”; after
China had used the monopoly it had secured in rare earth mining to intimidate
and extort concession from various Pacific Rim countries; after China, flexing
its consumer muscle, had persuaded large Western tech companies -- Walt Disney companies as well -- to self-censor
data that might have caused social and economic eruptions in China’s fascist run state; after
Chinese Muslims had been herded into Stalinist re-education camps, the women
in the camps to be raped by soldiers; after China had sent to communist
countries in South America sufficient resources to prevent a citizen led
overthrow of failed socialist regimes in Cuba and Venezuela; after all this and
more – Great Britain and other core Western states have suddenly been rousted
from their Rip Van Winkle slumber.
We can expect, the Cynic says, they soon will disunite
around the proposition: China should not be permitted to build, finance and own
European nuclear energy producing facilities.
Both businesses and politicians have money commitments in fascist China, among them U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal and his wife Cynthia.
The
Free Beacon, not a Connecticut outlet, reported early in July, “The
Blumenthals have an investment of between $100,000 and $250,000 in U.S.
Shanghai LLC, according to the senator’s annual financial disclosures. U.S.
Shanghai LLC is a subsidiary of Malkin Properties, a company owned by
Blumenthal’s brother-in-law, Scott Malkin. The company partnered in 2014 with
the state-owned Shanghai Shendi Group to build Shanghai Village, a
592,000-square-foot luxury shopping resort next to Shanghai Disneyland. The
Blumenthals are also invested in U.S. Suzhou LLC, another Malkin-owned shopping
center near Shanghai.”
Contacted by the media outlet, “A spokeswoman for Blumenthal said the senator was unaware that he and his wife are invested in the venture until contacted for comment by the Washington Free Beacon.”
Yes indeed, wealthy Congressmen like Blumenthal, whose net
worth is estimated at $70 million, do tend to lose track of their pennies. But
Blumenthal will not be the first or the last credulous millionaire who
thinks his
own tongue is not being purchased by fascist regimes when his close
relatives invest in China. Among millionaire politicians – unprincipled, unlike
cynics -- everything is relative.
Cynics may expect, my Cynic tells me, that an unprincipled
resistance to the Chinese fascist-communist state will fall apart within weeks,
if not hours.
Proof, he says, is in the journalistic pudding. The story
appeared on a back page in an ever-dwindling Hartford paper recently bought
out by a major hedge fund company, and none of the all-Democrat members of
Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation made a fuss over the well hidden
story.
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