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Connecticut Down, Part 3

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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