Hard-earned lessons about Communism from Sidney Rittenberg, the first American member of the CCP who lived in China from 1944-1979 and was imprisoned in solitary confinement for 16 years
I take issue with the “Which Dictator . . ‘ chart, in that it appears to puts all of the blame for the killings on the shoulders of individuals, and ignores the cultures and ideologies that produced these individuals, which were, in turn, a product and reflection, of our common human nature.
You know what they say, if you can't be a great inspiration you can at least be a horrible warning.
I think we are beginning to appreciate that widespread affluence must be monitored and policed. A great many of our problems are invented because we now have so few real ones.
I do wonder if the malaise of the west can be solved at all. We now produce many more like Rittenberg, and I suspect only exceptional hardship and direct exposure to much more backward societies will cure them. Many women could be cured of feminism with a one week all expenses paid trip to Pakistan, burka included in the price of course. Learning just how exceptional we are in our horrible imperial Anglo-Saxon world might be helpful to future Rittenbergs.
Nonsense. Huge parts of the world mistreat women. The Anglosphere doesn't. Yet our feminists are quite happy to both ignore their mistreatment elsewhere and the importation to our countries of people who continue to view women as lesser beings.
I am not alone in noticing this obvious misalignment which throws their stated aims into question. If they really cared about women and girls their targets would not be European societies in Europe or North America.
no kidding. torture of women in Iran no problem. not one "feminist " is over there complaining.. burquas are the real sign of "masculine toxicity".. how about the number of fistulas on forced circumcision of females all over Africa no problem.. where are the women her fighting this. honor killings ( even here in the USA), even sati is no entirely gone. and here is a great article https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-54528868..no women here are happy to support Hamas. I wish they could actually be forced to be in purda so they would know what it is really like to be suppressed
It is luxury beliefs and all of them aimed at white men. That is their real focus, which is insane. The one demographic who helped them. Just one more aspect of the fall of the west. A process that will severely harm women.
04/28/24: Wikipedia's profile of Sidney did not disappoint! Completely ignores his conversion from pro-Chinese Communism to anti- after returning to the United States.
What a revelation; I had never heard of Sidney Rittenberg and his incredible story. So many echoes of our current situation and cast of villains. Our own Madame Jiang, the odious Hillary C., embodies (pardon the expression) the point that the Maoists were not about truth or building a just society but destroying their opponents. You can see that in the venom that drips from their media mouthpieces and the speakers at their hate rallies. And as Mao said, the revolution will never end. That is our future, endless struggle, violence and recrimination while an entitled class loots whatever it can get control over, unless we restore our rule of law-based republic. Your effort in illuminating the stakes is much appreciated Yuri.
It is fascinating to see. I often wonder what motivates them. Most people are very decent. And yet these people seem completely broken. They seem to have a knack for creating personality cults others cannot seem to see through.
Just like the useful idiots of the past, today’s leftists still don’t get that leftism is utopian and does not value individuals; sooner or later this revolution will turn on them just like it turned on Sidney and all the other loyal minions. What is purged more than anything is the individual; humans are just meat for the machine in the end.
Amazing, heartbreaking but really not surprising that even imprisonment didn't shake this man's misguided faith. Western leftists wouldn't listen to Emma Goldman telling them the truth about the Soviet regime in the 1920s. They wanted so desperately to believe. My parents had an older friend of Sidney's generation, a classic 1940s style socialist who was devastated by the fall of the Soviet Union. Only when she saw mobs of Russians gleefully tearing down statues of Lenin on TV did she finally say, "Were we wrong?"
The problem with revolutionaries of whatever stripe is that they don’t understand that we are broken, prone to sin, bloody minded, and power goes right to our heads.
Not to mention our tendency to scapegoat.
The only culture where things get gradually better materially for people is the West, coming out of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome.
It is the tragic vision they reject. They imagine the fiction in their head is something others cannot imagine. So when we push back they just assume we are backward.
Unfortunately they are always there. Especially at our bastions of so called critical thinking: colleges and universities. Just walk onto almost any campus to catch a view. Humans are always craving for a religious experience and the left understands that very well. DEI, climate, gender etc. are the new order religions.
university social "science" departments are a great place to look. The inhabitants have already been preselected for paying huge sums to read ridiculous theories that add zero value to society and aren't marketable in anyway other than through government coercion. These are the idiots that will support communism.
What a fool….but glad he survived to tell his story. Fact is, God was gracious to him to allow him and his family to survive. Did he return the favor by repenting of his vain life?
That 15,000,000 number is suspect. The Congo had a population about that size in the late 1800s. I find it hard believe that a number of people equivalent to the entire population of the land was killed in the space 1-2 generations. If that were the case then the Congo would have been depopulated.
St. Paul writes to Timothy in the New Testament that "the love of money is the root of all evil." In our blinkered time, the average person takes this to mean either a). stay poor and don't get rich, or b) anyone richer than you is automatically "evil." But the reality is that the love of money leads to inevitably falling for Communist propaganda and then not seeing that such a deception is indeed evil. Everytime I read about these Communists, they're either supported by guilty wealthy people, or they are the generational scions of wealthy people. Even in our current era, the Ivy League Useful Idiots who a protesting for Hamas aren't going to state schools. For the life of me, this is some Biblical level judgment of human sin nature.
I don't remember the author or publication, sadly, but a Hillsdale College grad (I remember that part) wrote a piece a few years or so ago, in which he said that the problem many have is their inability to receive gifts gratefully and gracefully, as from the Lord, so they feel guilty, since they're undeserved gifts (such as being born into a wealthy family; but of course all our gifts are undeserved, since all we deserve is Hell and damnation). They try to make up for their guilt by rejecting the gifts and arguing against the system that they think resulted in them.
Couldn’t help but notice the phrase “Hope and Change” in your first excerpted paragraph.
That slogan always comes with a pretty propaganda poster and mass suffering.
Obama's slogan-- his machine repeated this all the time.
I take issue with the “Which Dictator . . ‘ chart, in that it appears to puts all of the blame for the killings on the shoulders of individuals, and ignores the cultures and ideologies that produced these individuals, which were, in turn, a product and reflection, of our common human nature.
You know what they say, if you can't be a great inspiration you can at least be a horrible warning.
I think we are beginning to appreciate that widespread affluence must be monitored and policed. A great many of our problems are invented because we now have so few real ones.
I do wonder if the malaise of the west can be solved at all. We now produce many more like Rittenberg, and I suspect only exceptional hardship and direct exposure to much more backward societies will cure them. Many women could be cured of feminism with a one week all expenses paid trip to Pakistan, burka included in the price of course. Learning just how exceptional we are in our horrible imperial Anglo-Saxon world might be helpful to future Rittenbergs.
On the contrary, a week in a burka might make anyone a feminist (a real one, that is) -- including yourself!
Nonsense. Huge parts of the world mistreat women. The Anglosphere doesn't. Yet our feminists are quite happy to both ignore their mistreatment elsewhere and the importation to our countries of people who continue to view women as lesser beings.
I am not alone in noticing this obvious misalignment which throws their stated aims into question. If they really cared about women and girls their targets would not be European societies in Europe or North America.
no kidding. torture of women in Iran no problem. not one "feminist " is over there complaining.. burquas are the real sign of "masculine toxicity".. how about the number of fistulas on forced circumcision of females all over Africa no problem.. where are the women her fighting this. honor killings ( even here in the USA), even sati is no entirely gone. and here is a great article https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-54528868..no women here are happy to support Hamas. I wish they could actually be forced to be in purda so they would know what it is really like to be suppressed
It is luxury beliefs and all of them aimed at white men. That is their real focus, which is insane. The one demographic who helped them. Just one more aspect of the fall of the west. A process that will severely harm women.
04/28/24: Wikipedia's profile of Sidney did not disappoint! Completely ignores his conversion from pro-Chinese Communism to anti- after returning to the United States.
What-a-surprise, not.
And here, the CCP shows how perfect the female army is, it's a bit weird:
https://youtu.be/xXcPd9afTCQ?si=dGFUnw1W1ZbsT94X
Those white f**k me boots. Noice
Produced by Goldie Hawn, I suppose.
What a revelation; I had never heard of Sidney Rittenberg and his incredible story. So many echoes of our current situation and cast of villains. Our own Madame Jiang, the odious Hillary C., embodies (pardon the expression) the point that the Maoists were not about truth or building a just society but destroying their opponents. You can see that in the venom that drips from their media mouthpieces and the speakers at their hate rallies. And as Mao said, the revolution will never end. That is our future, endless struggle, violence and recrimination while an entitled class loots whatever it can get control over, unless we restore our rule of law-based republic. Your effort in illuminating the stakes is much appreciated Yuri.
It is fascinating to see. I often wonder what motivates them. Most people are very decent. And yet these people seem completely broken. They seem to have a knack for creating personality cults others cannot seem to see through.
it is called sociopathy. and runs rampant in politics
He played stupid games, he won stupid prizes. Sidney Rittenberg was a great fool and ungrateful.
Just like the useful idiots of the past, today’s leftists still don’t get that leftism is utopian and does not value individuals; sooner or later this revolution will turn on them just like it turned on Sidney and all the other loyal minions. What is purged more than anything is the individual; humans are just meat for the machine in the end.
Amazing, heartbreaking but really not surprising that even imprisonment didn't shake this man's misguided faith. Western leftists wouldn't listen to Emma Goldman telling them the truth about the Soviet regime in the 1920s. They wanted so desperately to believe. My parents had an older friend of Sidney's generation, a classic 1940s style socialist who was devastated by the fall of the Soviet Union. Only when she saw mobs of Russians gleefully tearing down statues of Lenin on TV did she finally say, "Were we wrong?"
I'm sure after years of thinking about it, she concluded "no, we weren't wrong...it will work better next time!"
She was just an old woman who couldn't bear to think that everything she had always believed was false.
The problem with revolutionaries of whatever stripe is that they don’t understand that we are broken, prone to sin, bloody minded, and power goes right to our heads.
Not to mention our tendency to scapegoat.
The only culture where things get gradually better materially for people is the West, coming out of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome.
And that’s going down the tubes right now.
Without the true God, we are lost.
It is the tragic vision they reject. They imagine the fiction in their head is something others cannot imagine. So when we push back they just assume we are backward.
It's not us who are broken toys, it's the revolutionaries. Radicals punish the world and normal people to soothe their own deformed minds.
Disagree. We are all broken. Some of us know it. Revolutionaries don’t.
I love the “Are We the Baddies” clip! I share that whenever it’s relevant.
Such a bitter, important, cautionary tale. Where will the left find such idiots?
Unfortunately they are always there. Especially at our bastions of so called critical thinking: colleges and universities. Just walk onto almost any campus to catch a view. Humans are always craving for a religious experience and the left understands that very well. DEI, climate, gender etc. are the new order religions.
university social "science" departments are a great place to look. The inhabitants have already been preselected for paying huge sums to read ridiculous theories that add zero value to society and aren't marketable in anyway other than through government coercion. These are the idiots that will support communism.
We're already nearly surrounded by them!
Interesting piece, but it will go right over the heads of present supposed revolutionaries.
What a fool….but glad he survived to tell his story. Fact is, God was gracious to him to allow him and his family to survive. Did he return the favor by repenting of his vain life?
Had no idea that Leopold killed 15,000,000.
That 15,000,000 number is suspect. The Congo had a population about that size in the late 1800s. I find it hard believe that a number of people equivalent to the entire population of the land was killed in the space 1-2 generations. If that were the case then the Congo would have been depopulated.
St. Paul writes to Timothy in the New Testament that "the love of money is the root of all evil." In our blinkered time, the average person takes this to mean either a). stay poor and don't get rich, or b) anyone richer than you is automatically "evil." But the reality is that the love of money leads to inevitably falling for Communist propaganda and then not seeing that such a deception is indeed evil. Everytime I read about these Communists, they're either supported by guilty wealthy people, or they are the generational scions of wealthy people. Even in our current era, the Ivy League Useful Idiots who a protesting for Hamas aren't going to state schools. For the life of me, this is some Biblical level judgment of human sin nature.
I don't remember the author or publication, sadly, but a Hillsdale College grad (I remember that part) wrote a piece a few years or so ago, in which he said that the problem many have is their inability to receive gifts gratefully and gracefully, as from the Lord, so they feel guilty, since they're undeserved gifts (such as being born into a wealthy family; but of course all our gifts are undeserved, since all we deserve is Hell and damnation). They try to make up for their guilt by rejecting the gifts and arguing against the system that they think resulted in them.
I knew this story, but not the level of detail presented here. Wow! Excellent.
Great piece thank you.