In Praise of Chumps

When a red Ferrari recently crashed in Beijing, the rumor mills exploded with reports that the driver was none other than Bo Guagua, son of the Communist Party chief of Chonquing and graduate of Harrow and Oxford. Such is life among the vanguard of the Proletariat: in a Ferrari one day, on the run the next. Bo’s dad, Bo Xilai, has just been cashiered by the Politburo, and Bo’s mother is under arrest. But it was good while it lasted:

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The Proletarian Life

Bo Guagua had been making social media headlines in China as he squired around Chen Xiaodan, the daughter of “Chen Yuan, the governor of the China Development Bank and one of China’s most influential bankers”:

Chen, now studying at Harvard for an MBA, is the granddaughter of Chen Yun, one of China’s top leaders until his death in 1995 and one of the “eight immortals” of the Communist leadership of the 1980s and 90s …

Her background thus makes her one of the most eligible women in the country. Together with 17-year-old Jasmin Li — the granddaughter of Jia Qinglin, a member of the all-powerful nine-member Politburo Standing Committee — they are better known among Europe’s elite as China’s “red princesses” for their high-profile appearances at blue-blooded Paris balls.

Chen has featured in photographs of debutante balls such as the Crillon Ball in Paris which have appeared on Twitter and Facebook as well as the usual Chinese social networking sites. In 2006, Chen was considered the most attractive young woman at the ball attended by beauties such as 20-year-old Princess Costanza of Italy and other European royals.

Wearing her Oscar de la Renta dresses, her stylish looks have been an inspiration to many young people in the new China, yet as news about these red princesses who mingle with the European and American glitterati is kept out of the state-run Chinese press, little is actually known in China about them.

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The thing about communism, at least to the uninitiated, is that it appears to be identical in all respects to a hereditary aristocracy. If one didn’t know better, it would seem that the more communist a country, such as North Korea, the more it resembles a monarchy. In China, the children of the Politburo members are actually called princesses and princes, and they gad about in a style that makes the current European royalty look like a bunch of low-rent grifters.

How admirable then, that intellectuals like Cornel West, Van Jones, and Bill Ayers can go around and seriously sell socialism and Marxism in the name of “equality” and “egalitarianism”. You know, because they are one with the Common Man. Surely their superior educations must provide a true insight into the nature of Marxist societies, because to the uninitiated the whole thing looks like a scam to trick people into waging “revolution” in which a few odd million will be horribly killed to create a worker’s paradise and green society. All the resulting outcomes we actually examine reveal only societies ruled by an aristocracy no different from — nay, more lavish than — the Court of the Sun King at Versailles. Versailles didn’t even have indoor plumbing.

But at least it had trees and bushes in the garden. North Korea doesn’t. North Korea’s forests have been burned down by the happy peasants to cook their gruel and to keep from dying of cold in winter. Defectors heading south know they’ve reached the capitalist Republic of Korea because they can see trees again. And as for the environment in China: well, why do you think the red princes and princesses go to Paris to dance the night away?

Future generations may wonder how it was possible for sophisticated Western intellectuals to actually devote their lives to bringing about communism as if it were anything more than a swindle. Consider Walter Kendall Myers, a distinguished State Department intelligence analyst, who together with his wife Gwendolyn spied on America for years on behalf of Fidel Castro. They were not paid money. In fact, their only known reward was being congratulated by Fidel himself:

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Myers, an Ivy League-educated Europe specialist who made his home in Northwest Washington’s diplomat-friendly precincts, began working for the State Department as a contract instructor in 1977. He joined full time in 1985 and become a senior analyst with a top-secret clearance in the department’s sensitive bureau of intelligence and research.

“We did not act out of anger toward the United States or from any thought of anti-Americanism,” Walter Myers said in a 10-minute statement in seeking leniency for his wife. “We did not intend to hurt any individual American. Our only objective was to help the Cuban people defend their revolution. We only hoped to forestall conflict” between the countries.

They acted, as always, from what they believed to be idealism. Never did they entertain the notion that they might have been led on by stupidity. Gross, manifest, and terminal imbecility. They betrayed their country, and not in order to advance the cause of “peace” or “prosperity” for the “poor and downtrodden”. In reality, they sold out their country so that slimy tyrants in foreign countries could live the life of kings, and they did not even have the wit to notice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xItolrDvoVg


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