Socialism! The devil you say?

“Red Scare” poster of the Joe McCarthy era.

We have finally discovered something President Trump fears. “Here in the United States, we are alarmed by the new calls to adopt socialism in our country,” he said last week in his State of the Union address.

And his audience of Senators and House representatives booed.

“We are born free and we will stay free,” the President said. “Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.” (more…)

Youth versus Bullets

Tank Man, 19-year-old Wang Weilin faces Chines tanks on Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Wikipedia.

It’s an image that endures. It’s not old enough for us to call it historical yet. It only goes back about 30 years. But the frames of video taken by an amateur videographer show a man in a white shirt, dark pants, facing a column of military tanks. It was June 4, 1989. It was the final day of the student-organized, non-violence demonstration at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, just before China’s People’s Liberation Army gunned down hundreds of civilians for protesting government corruption and lack of free speech.

“Tank Man,” they called him. But the Sunday Express newspaper in Britain later claimed the man was Wang Weilin, a 19-year-old student, who’d joined the weeks-long protest, despite the threat of annihilation. (more…)