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Dan's avatar

Walking the NYC streets with my early teenage (pre Obama) son we we approached by a Democrat solicitor to register us with the party. Right then to the solicitors astonishment I told my son: “Don’t listen to him. These are bad people”.

This nightmare has to run its course. Good family values is a hopeful start.

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Dr. Dre's avatar

Great history lesson today. Much appreciated. Now a little history of my own. In the mid-70s we lived near Boston MA. I was a young housewife and new mother, but took the opportunity to volunteer as a docent at a famous nearby museum. The source of its collections was in good part the items that the Age of Sail in post-Revolutionary American clipper ship captains brought home with them from their lengthy trading voyages to the Far East: Chinese Export porcelain, silk fabrics, and other luxury goods. What the Americans brought to trade at Canton were rough goods, like furs and a plant that grew wild in the New England woods -- ginseng.

Yankee traders were confined to the port cities and had to deal with the Chinese 'boss' of the place. One famous entrepot was Houqua and his portrait graces many a Yankee dining room in fond remembrance of the 'good old days'. Yes, the Americans were involved in this trade, but it was the British trading companies that monopolized opium, carried by them from India to China. There were Americans who got involved in this disagreeable practice, like the Delanos and the Russells, but the Brits were the main dealers. Indian exports also included cotton goods, like calico. This was just before the cotton gin was invented in the US and cotton became King in the US South.

My other historic tidbit re the Chinese Century of Humiliation is that my mother (b. 1902) and some of her relatives escaped the Russian Revolution shortly after it happened in the late 'teens (c. 1918-20). They were fortunate to find a way out by rail through Eastern Siberia and into China. Her family was prominent, doctors and military officers. As with many other so-called White Russians they ended up in cities like Harbin in Manchuria, Tientsin and Peking. There were established "European Sectors" in those places, whether the Chinese liked it or not, and life was quite pleasant, schools were good, recreation available. Lots of native Chinese servants to serve as "Ammas" (child care Nannies) and Boys to do heavy work. Once there was a great commotion in the kitchen and the Cook was yelling at Boy; turns out Boy was discovered to be hosting a tapeworm and summarily fired! Another time, my grandmother ("Babushka") was riding in a rickshaw and saw another such vehicle, where the British officer passenger was beating the rickshaw operator with some sort of club. My grandmother screamed at him to stop (she spoke four languages, English being one), saying "Stop that, you British dog!" My mother was in the rickshaw with her and told me the story many years' later.

Babushka died in April 1953, outliving by a few weeks, Joseph Stalin, the man responsible for arresting her beloved husband and sending him to certain death in a Siberian prison camp in the late 1920s, along with millions of others. Our family learned that my grandfather had been "rehabilitated" by the Soviet authorities in 1954. Prior to the Revolution he had received several awards from the Czarist govt for his veterinary work, studying cattle plagues like anthrax and insuring the sanitation of the Army's meat supply during WWI. He also received a kind of knighthood from the Mongolian government thanking him for his assistance to the Buryat peoples, nomads who rely for their sustenance on their animals.

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