Rouge Forum Dispatch: Preserve the Vietnam Syndrome.
We Say Fight Back!
Anti-Racist Protests Continue in Ferguson, Madison Protesters gathered near the Ferguson, Missouri, police headquarters and chanted slogans like “the whole damn system is guilty as hell” in what appeared to be a peaceful demonstration one night after two police officers were shot.
Demonstrators briefly blocked a road during the protest on Thursday night. About 100 protesters and 20 police officers were visible, NBC affiliate KSDK reported. www.nbcnews.com/storyline/michael-brown-shooting/security-change-ferguson-after-2-police-officers-are-shot-n322491
Seniors Vote for Prom-unism They’re calling it “prom-munism.” Seniors at an Albuquerque school want their prom to have a Communism theme. Seniors at Cottonwood Classical Preparatory School near I-25 and Paseo del Norte voted online this week for the theme of their prom this year.
“They wanted prom-munism, so that’s what got voted for the most,” said senior Sarah Zachary.
She voted for “A Night in the Reef,” because the prom is expected to take place at the Albuquerque Aquarium on April 25.
“We have a lot of jokesters in our grade, so they wanted it to be funny and a lot of them are really intense with politics,” Zachary said.
However, students who asked to remain anonymous don’t believe Communism is a joking matter.
“I would hope Cottonwood would realize the seriousness of having a very powerful and destructive idea as the theme for a prom,” one student wrote.
Another said, “While the seniors meant no harm in their choice of theme, it is not appropriate.”
“Our students are in the International Baccalaureate program, so they are very academically focused,” said Sam Obenshain, executive director at Cottonwood. “One of the classes they enjoy the most is a world history class.”
Obenshain said, despite the vote, this is not a done deal. He said he plans to talk with the students about it next week.
“We want to make sure we honor the students’ voices but at the same time we use this as a learning experience for them,” Obenshain said.
At this point, he and many students aren’t even quite sure what “prom-munism” is supposed to look like. krqe.com/2015/03/05/seniors-vote-for-communism-themed-prom/
Sydney demonstration against the empire
UC Irvine Flag Ban Petition “We admire the courage of the resolution’s supporters amid this environment of political immaturity and threat, and support them unequivocally,” www.socjobrumors.com/topic/please-sign-this-in-support-of-uci-students
Support Grows for UC Irvine ant-nationalists more than a week after the vote, students and faculty at UC Irvine are beginning to raise their voice over the angry condemnation of the students who created a national stir with their vote. A petition signed by hundreds from universities statewide said the aggressive and sometimes shrill response to the resolution embodies the exact aspects of nationalism the six had hoped to eliminate — racism, xenophobia and intimidation. www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-0313-uci-flag-20150313-story.html
Detroit’s Buck Dinner, 2015 www.buckdinner.org/
Maduro May Come to the US to Challenge Obamagogue Ridiculing the U.S. qualification of Venezuela as a security threat, President Nicolas Maduro said on Thursday he may travel to Washington to challenge American counterpart Barack Obama.
“We demand, via all global diplomatic channels, that President Obama rectify and repeal the immoral decree declaring Venezuela a threat to the United States,” Maduro said.
In the worst flare-up between the ideological enemies since Maduro took power in 2013, Washington earlier this week declared a “national emergency” over “the unusual and extraordinary threat” from Venezuela and sanctioned seven officials over allegations of rights abuses and corruption.
The Maduro government has demanded evidence of how it threatens U.S. security. news.yahoo.com/venezuelas-maduro-says-may-u-challenge-obama-022600069.html
Families of Mexico’s 43 Missing Students in US Relatives of 43 students who disappeared last year in Guerrero, Mexico, are scheduled to visit Houston next week as part of a campaign to raise awareness about the case.
“The purpose of this visit is for the Mexican government to know that they (the families) are getting support from other countries,” said Pamela Martinez, spokeswoman of The People’s Assembly of Houston, an organization created in November following a Houston rally about the disappearance of the students.
Felipe de la Cruz Sandoval,a representative of the group of relatives, said in a written statement: “It’s important that both residents and government leaders from other countries know the injustices (occurring) in Mexico.”
In January, the Associated Press reported that the Mexican attorney general had said investigators were certain that the 43 students of Teaching School in Ayotzinapa missing since September were killed and incinerated after they were seized by police in southern Guerrero state. www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Families-of-the-43-missing-students-in-Mexico-6131056.php
The Little Red Schoolhouse
Fat Bonus for Detroit Emergency Manager Detroit Public Schools’ third emergency manager left the job with something his predecessors did not: a hefty bonus from the state, totaling $50,000.
The Michigan Department of Treasury gave Jack Martin the performance bonus in two payments — the first for $23,000 in 2013, and the second for $27,000, which went out around the time he stepped down in mid-January from his 18-month tenure. The total was the maximum amount outlined in his contract.
“While there were no particular benchmarks (for the bonus pay), Martin worked to stabilize enrollment, restored numerous programs at the elementary and middle school levels, redesigned career tech programs and sold or leased numerous unused or vacant properties which generated millions of dollars for the district,” Terry Stanton, spokesman for the Michigan Department of Treasury, wrote in an e-mail. www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2015/03/08/state-gives-dps-emergency-manager-bonuses/24612615/
Reactionary Eagle Forum easily joins Liberal-Nationalist Opt Out Movement Americans are waking up to how bad Common Core really is for education, but its nightmare does not go away quickly. Liberal education bureaucrats (“educrats”) are now trying to enforce Common Core through the courts, with one lawsuit already filed in Oklahoma, and another likely in Louisiana.
In both states the governors tried to get rid of Common Core, but parents are shocked that it may return by court order as unelected educrats claim they have more power than the state legislature and the governor combined. The Oklahoma legislature approved a law to repeal Common Core and the governor signed it, but now its state board of education has filed a lawsuit to bring it back www.eagleforum.org/publications/column/common-core-becomes-a-nightmare.html
Detroit’s Renaissance High May Lose the Music Program A premier Detroit high school that attracts students from all over the metro area is in jeopardy of losing one its signature programs.
Cuts to Detroit Public Schools are forcing schools districtwide to reduce staff. At Renaissance High School, that may mean the loss of its music program.
Jody Childress, president of Renaissance’s parent group, said school administrators informed her that district cuts will mean an end to the school’s fine arts curriculum and could result in teachers having as many as 43 students per classroom this fall.
Childress said she was told that the dance and band instructors retired
at the end of the last school year and will not be replaced.
“You’re taking away scholarship opportunities,” she told the Free Press Wednesday after the first day of new-student orientation at the high school on the city’s west side. “It’s terrible what they’re doing to these schools.”
Steve Wasko, spokesman for Detroit Public Schools, confirmed that cuts are happening at several schools around the district, including Renaissance, much of which is related to new class-size and enrollment numbers, from which state revenue is determined. He said he did not have specific information on Renaissance readily available Wednesday afternoon. archive.freep.com/article/20140821/NEWS01/308210056/Renaissance-High-School-teacher-cuts
LAUSD Distributes 609 Layoff Notices (add in all those sub cutbacks) The Los Angeles Unified School District Board, facing a nearly $160 million budget deficit, will consider authorizing layoff warning notices for 609 teachers, counselors and social workers at its board meeting Tuesday.
Included on the proposed list are more than 260 adult education teachers, 59 counselors, dozens of foreign-language teachers and 63 psychiatric social workers.
The board will also consider authorizing notices to “certificated administrators, confidential employees and supervisory employees,” along with “all certificated and classified contract management employees with expiring contracts.” losangeles.cbslocal.com/2015/03/09/facing-budget-deficit-lausd-to-consider-layoffs-for-609-employees/
Pearson Isn’t a Spy Agency, they’re just keeping track of property Bob Braun, an education blogger and former journalist, got ahold of a note from a school superintendent advising parents in the district that a student in NJ had tweeted outside of school hours about a PARCC test he had completed earlier when school was still in session.* (The exact contents of the tweet are unknown now.)
Pearson, a multinational corporation which monitors its brand on Twitter for reputation defense and intellectual property rights violations, saw the tweet and contacted the New Jersey Department of Education which then reached out to the superintendent of the school district where the child attends. Pearson labeled this a “Priority 1 alert” breach of the confidential nature of the test’s contents and the NJDOE instructed the superintendent to have the student remove his tweet and he complied.
The framing of this by Braun as “spying” has caused the hair of many education activists to catch on fire. HOWEVER.
Pearson is not “spying” on student tweets, it’s enlisting public school officials — the New Jersey Department of Education — to defend its intellectual property. The latter is worse and a bigger problem. thewire.k12newsnetwork.com/2015/03/14/pearson-is-not-spying-on-student-tweets-its-enlisting-public-school-officials-to-defend-its-intellectual-property/
The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the official US War on Vietnam,which began long before. The US still moves to destroy the “Vietnam Syndrome, that is, the truth about the imperialist war on Vietnam that the US lost. Below are resources:
above, one of the dozens of campus alternative presses depicting Richard Daley, Chicago, 1968
above, two of dozens of GI underground newspapers, featured in Sir, No Sir, youtube below
“THE MORALE, DISCIPLINE and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at anytime in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.
By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having _refused_ combat, murdering their officers and non commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous. Elsewhere than Vietnam, the situation is nearly as serious…
“To understand the military consequences of what is happening to the U.S. Armed Forces, Vietnam is a good place to start. It is in Vietnam that the rearguard of a 500,000 man army, in its day and in the observation of the writer the best army the United States ever put into the field, is numbly extricating itself from a nightmare war the Armed Forces feel they had foisted on them by bright civilians who are now back on campus writing books about the folly of it all.
“They have set up separate companies,” writes an American soldier from Cu Chi, quoted in the New York Times, “for men who refuse to go into the field. Is no big thing to refuse to go. If a man is ordered to go to such and such a place he no longer goes through the hassle of refusing; he just packs his shirt and goes to visit some buddies at another base camp. Operations have become incredibly ragtag. Many guys don’t even put on their uniforms any more… The American garrison on the larger bases are virtually disarmed. The lifers have taken our weapons from us and put them under lock and key…There have also been quite a few frag incidents in the battalion.”
Can all this really be typical or even truthful?
Unfortunately the answer is yes.
“Frag incidents” or just “fragging” is current soldier slang in Vietnam for the murder or attempted murder of strict, unpopular, or just aggressive officers and NCOs. With extreme reluctance (after a young West Pointer from Senator Mike Mansfield’s MontIn some cases, however, sexual freedom became license: sexual exploitation.ana was fragged in his sleep) th/spane Pentagon has now disclosed that fraggings in 1970(109) have more than doubled those of the previous year (96).
Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units.…” (Colonel Heinl) msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/Vietnam/heinl.html#
above, one of the better basic texts on the wars
www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQhwEGVVGS4
Vietnam, Year of the Pig, is one of the better films about the Vietnam Wars, as is Sir, No Sir, below
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nPJgeg6hpA
Below, Leslie Dwyer’s latest poster commemorating the wars on Vietnam
above available at www.design4peace.com/shine-a-light/vietnamfulldisclosure/#main
Pacific Northwest Collective Archive of Anti-War thought and action depts.washington.edu/antiwar/photosdocs.shtml
Below, Obamagogue Lies about the Vietnam Wars
A complete online unit on the Vietnam Wars www.richgibson.com/vietnam/
Klare: Obama’s Drive for More Imperialist War Of the many enduring lessons of the Vietnam War, none, perhaps, is more relevant today than avoiding what Yale historian Paul Kennedy termed “imperial overstretch”—or an excessive reliance on military force to protect a far-flung and often unruly web of alliances and commitments. For many who observed or fought in that war, America’s defeat was due less to the flawed strategies of US generals than to the overextension of American power in a place of questionable strategic significance and with minimal support at home. For a time, it appeared that US policy-makers were determined to avert more Vietnam-like fiascos; but now, as in the George W. Bush era, Washington seems headed toward another foolhardy increase in military activism abroad.
March marks the fiftieth anniversary of the entry of main-force US troops into Vietnam, making this a perfect moment to reflect on the war and its long-term consequences. In this issue, former Nation editor George Black examines one of those consequences: the ongoing legacy of unexploded ordnance and Agent Orange. The Pentagon, meanwhile, is promoting its own interpretation of Vietnam, via an interactive timeline. After criticism from many scholars, who said it distorted the war’s history and character, the Pentagon backed off on some aspects of its new history.
What is most striking in all this, however, is that many in Washington now seek to embrace the same misbegotten logic that produced the Vietnam debacle in the first place: a belief that America should confront hostile forces wherever they arise, primarily through military action.
As the Vietnam War was ending, US leaders sought to ensure that such myopia would not prevail again by adopting a series of measures—including the War Powers Resolution of 1973 and the establishment of an all-volunteer army—aimed at constraining the war-making ability of future presidents. By requiring the president to secure congressional approval for all future troop deployments, it was believed, the White House would engage in fewer ill-advised military engagements abroad; by eliminating the draft, the Pentagon presumably would be forced to pick and choose among overseas commitments, rather than embracing them all. (This was before the policy of multiple redeployments was adopted, which produced the mental and physical traumas experienced by so many US soldiers.) …
In response to all this pressure, accentuated by the media frenzy over public beheadings by ISIS, Obama is suppressing his noninterventionist instincts and moving toward a more assertive military posture. He has commenced an air war against ISIS and signaled a willingness to extend the US military mission in Afghanistan. The administration is also stepping up military aid to pro-Western rebels in Syria and considering the delivery of battlefield weapons to the Ukrainian military. Obama’s newly chosen secretary of defense, Ashton Carter, is vigorously campaigning to overcome Congressional restraints (known as sequestration) on higher military spending.
To cap all this off, Obama has asked Congress to approve a new authorization to use military force, or the new AUMF. This one is aimed at ISIS, and would give the president the power to use military force as “necessary and appropriate” to degrade and defeat that entity. Unlike the first two AUMFs, however, it sets certain limits on military action: a time limit of three years,
The Dubious Money? For the Good of the Good Ole Navy A Navy commander fighting bribery charges in the still-unfolding “Fat Leonard” scandal outlined his defense in court documents last week, saying the operational decisions he made were not the result of alleged bribes but were made for the good of the Navy. Michael Misiewicz is among numerous former and current Navy members and employees charged in the long-ranging bribery scheme, and is the one of the last to continue to contest the charges. Five have pleaded guilty for their roles in the quid-pro-quo scandal, as well as “Fat” Leonard Glenn Francis, the contractor at the center of the investigation, and one of Francis’ cousins.
Misiewicz, who managed operations on the Blue Ridge, flagship of the Seventh Fleet, is accused of diverting ships to numerous Southeast Asian ports owned by Francis’ company, Glenn Defense Marine Asia, in exchange for luxury hotel rooms, travel expenses and prostitutes. The company provides trash removal, security and water and other services to visiting ships.
Misiewicz was initially charged in September 2013 and was indicted in January on charges of bribery and conspiracy to commit bribery.
In a motion for discovery filed Friday in San Diego federal court, Misiewicz’s lawyers argue he “did not act ‘corruptly’.”
“Rather, consistent with his 28 years of dedicated, meritorious service, each and every official act by Commander Misiewicz was taken in his belief that it was in the best interest of the Navy,” the motion reads.www.utsandiego.com/news/2015/mar/13/misiewicz-defense-navy-bribery-fat-leonard/?xtor=-%5BNewsletter%20-%20Daily%20News%20%2810%29%2003/14/15%2007:00%20AM%5D–%5B%5D-%5BNTYyOTMyNjgxMTMS1%5D–
The US as AQ’s ATM In the spring of 2010, Afghan officials struck a deal to free an Afghan diplomat held hostage by Al Qaeda. But the price was steep — $5 million — and senior security officials were scrambling to come up with the money.
They first turned to a secret fund that the Central Intelligence Agency bankrolled with monthly cash deliveries to the presidential palace in Kabul, according to several Afghan officials involved in the episode. The Afghan government, they said, had already squirreled away about $1 million from that fund.Within weeks, that money and $4 million more provided from other countries was handed over to Al Qaeda, replenishing its coffers after a relentless C.I.A. campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan had decimated the militant network’s upper ranks.
“God blessed us with a good amount of money this month,” Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, the group’s general manager, wrote in a letter to Osama bin Laden in June 2010, noting that the cash would be used for weapons and other operational needs.
Bin Laden urged caution, fearing the Americans knew about the payment and had laced the cash with radiation or poison, or were tracking it. “There is a possibility — not a very strong one — that the Americans are aware of the money delivery,” he wrote back, “and that they accepted the arrangement of the payment on the basis that the money will be moving under air surveillance.”
The C.I.A.’s contribution to Qaeda’s bottom line, though, was no well-laid trap. It was just another in a long list of examples of how the United States, largely because of poor oversight and loose financial controls, has sometimes inadvertently financed the very militants it is fighting. While refusing to pay ransoms for Americans kidnapped by Al Qaeda, the Taliban or, more recently, the Islamic State, the United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars over the last decade at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, some of which has been siphoned off to enemy fighters.www.nytimes.com/2015/03/15/world/asia/cia-funds-found-their-way-into-al-qaeda-coffers.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor
inequality.org/income-inequality/
Bloomberg Surprise: US Economy Sucks Eggs It’s not only the just-released University of Michigan consumer confidence report and February retail sales on Thursday that surprised economists and investors with another dose of underwhelming news. Overall, U.S. economic data have been falling short of prognosticators’ expectations by the most in six years.
The Bloomberg ECO U.S. Surprise Index, which measures whether data beat or miss forecasts, fell to the lowest since 2009, when the nation was in the deepest recession since the Great Depression.
There’s been one notable exception to the gloom, and it’s a big one: payrolls. The economy added 295,000 jobs in February and 1.3 million over four months, a reflection of a healthier labor market in which the unemployment rate has fallen to the lowest in almost seven years.
Most everything else? Blah.
This month alone, personal income and spending, manufacturing as measured by the Institute for Supply Management, auto sales, factory orders, and retail sales have all come in a bit weak.
Citigroup keeps economic surprise indexes for the world, and its scoreboard shows the U.S. is most disappointing relative to consensus forecasts, with Latin America and Canada next, as of March 12. Emerging markets were supposed to be hurt by falling oil prices but are now delivering positive surprises. U.S. policymakers frequently talk about weakness in Europe and China, though both are exceeding expectations.
The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement
The Killed by Police Facebook Page and the Numbers Last week, we wrote about the fact that the U.S. government doesn’t track how many people are killed by the police. The FBI tracks “justifiable” police homicides, which it reports to be about 400 per year, but that tally is an undercount.
Given this vacuum, attention has recently turned to some excellent nongovernmental attempts to compile this data, including the Fatal Encounters database, the recently created Gun Violence Archive and a new database created by Deadspin.
But one recent effort stood out for its apparent comprehensiveness: The Killed By Police Facebook page, which aggregates links to news articles on police-related killings and keeps a running tally on the number of victims. The creator of the page does not seek to determine whether police killings are justifiable; each post “merely documents the occurrence of a death.” He told FiveThirtyEight that he was an instructor on nonviolent physical-intervention techniques and that he prefers to remain anonymous.
Killed by Police had listed more than 1,450 deaths caused by law-enforcement officers since its launch, on May 1, 2013, through Sunday. That works out to about three per day, or 1,100 a year. fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/another-much-higher-count-of-police-homicides/
Solidarity for Never
Charter Schools are Swell, after all—as long as they send $ to the Empire’s dues eaters A successful push by educators at the Alliance College-Ready Public Schools would hand an important victory to United Teachers Los Angeles as it struggles to reverse years of declining membership. The move could also pose a challenge to charters, which have been able to hire and fire staff without union rules — a key factor they believe helps provide the best instruction for students.
Nearly 70 teachers and counselors sent a letter Friday to the high-performing charter group, explaining their intention to partner with the teachers union. The letter asked for “a fair and neutral process” that would allow educators to organize without fear of retaliation. www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-charters-union-20150314-story.html
Spy versus Spy
Stuxnet Leaker Stuck in Israel/US/Iran Catch-ah-33? A sensitive leak investigation of a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has stalled amid concerns that a prosecution in federal court could force the government to confirm a joint U.S.-Israeli covert operation targeting Iran, according to current and former U.S. officials.
Federal investigators suspect that retired Marine Gen. James E. “Hoss” Cartwright leaked to a New York Times reporter details about a highly classified operation to hobble Iran’s nuclear enrichment capability through cyber-sabotage — an effort not acknowledged by Israel or the United States.
Prosecutors will have to overcome significant national security and diplomatic concerns if they want to move forward, including pitting the Obama administration against Israel if that ally were opposed to any information about the cyber-operation being revealed in court.
The United States could move forward with the case against Israel’s wishes, but such a move might further harm relations between two countries, which are already frayed because of a disagreement over how best to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
Administration officials also fear that any revelations could complicate the current negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.
“There are always legitimate national security reasons for not proceeding in one of these cases,” said John L. Martin, who handled many sensitive espionage investigations as a former Justice Department prosecutor.
The case captures the tension between national security concerns and the desire of prosecutors to hold high-ranking officials to account for leaking classified secrets. The Obama administration has been the most aggressive in U.S. history in pursuing those suspected of leaking classified information. www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/leak-investigation-stalls-amid-fears-of-confirming-joint-us-israel-operation/2015/03/10/2a348b1e-c36c-11e4-9ec2-b418f57a4a99_story.html?hpid=z1
NACLA has covered the US wars on Latin America for Decades
How the US Funds Dissent Against Latin American Governments “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”National Endowment for Democracy founding father, Allen Weinstein
The U.S. government and military have a long history of interfering in the affairs of numerous countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.
By the end of the 19th century, there had been at least 10 U.S. military interventions across the hemisphere including Argentina (1890), Chile (1891), Haiti (1891), Panama (1895), Cuba (1898), Puerto Rico (1898) and Nicaragua (1894, 1896, 1898 and 1899).
From this time onward, successive U.S. administrations applied different strategies and tactics for involvement in the region as a means to secure and protect its geopolitical and economic interests. However, only recently has there been wider acknowledgement about the role that U.S. funding to nongovernmental organizations — particularly via the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) — plays in furthering U.S. foreign policy.www.telesurtv.net/english/analysis/How-the-US-Funds-Dissent-against-Latin-American-Governments-20150312-0006.html
More on those wacky, drunken, whoring Secret Service Agents (with full auto weapons)Two Secret Service agents suspected of being under the influence while striking a White House security barricade drove through an active bomb investigation and directly beside the suspicious package, according to current and former government officials familiar with the incident.
These and other new details about the March 4 incident emerged Thursday from interviews and from police records obtained by The Washington Post.
The revelations spurred fresh questions Thursday from lawmakers about whether the newly appointed director of the Secret Service, Joseph P. Clancy, is capable of turning around the troubled agency.
Among lawmakers’ questions was whether Clancy, a 27-year Secret Service veteran appointed to his job last month after a string of embarrassing agency missteps, has been aggressive enough in his handling of last week’s incident. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/secret-service-agents-disrupted-bomb-investigation-at-white-house/2015/03/12/0eb74590-c8c4-11e4-aa1a-86135599fb0f_story.html?hpid=z1
The Magical Mystery Tour
www.youtube.com/watch?v=glIrOU5tYsQ
The Long March for this? Chinese social fascists want to rule reincarnation (choose me!)
Chinese Communist Party leaders are afraid that the Dalai Lama will not have an afterlife. Worried enough that this week, officials repeatedly warned that he must reincarnate, and on their terms.
Tensions over what will happen when the 14th Dalai Lama, who is 79, dies, and particularly over who decides who will succeed him as the most prominent leader in Tibetan Buddhism, have ignited at the annual gathering of China’s legislators in Beijing.
Officials have amplified their argument that the Communist government is the proper guardian of the Dalai Lama’s succession through an intricate process of reincarnation that has involved lamas, or senior monks, visiting a sacred lake and divining dreams.
Party functionaries were incensed by the exiled Dalai Lama’s recent speculation that he might end his spiritual lineage and not reincarnate. That would confound the Chinese government’s plans to engineer a succession that would produce a putative 15th Dalai Lama who accepts China’s presence and policies in Tibet. Their anger welled up on Wednesday, as it had a day earlier.
Zhu Weiqun, a Communist Party official who has long dealt with Tibetan issues, told reporters in Beijing on Wednesday that the Dalai Lama had, essentially, no say over whether he was reincarnated. That was ultimately for the Chinese government to decide, he said, according to a transcript of his comments on the website of People’s Daily, the party’s main newspaper.
“Decision-making power over the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, and over the end or survival of this lineage, resides in the central government of China,” said Mr. Zhu, formerly a deputy head of the United Front Department of the Communist Party, which oversees dealings with religious and other nonparty groups. www.nytimes.com/2015/03/12/world/asia/chinas-tensions-with-dalai-lama-spill-into-the-afterlife.html?_r=0
The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World
This is not a basketball fanatic. He is yelling, “Read Marx and Make Class War!”