Lenin Came By Train

Canada simply allowed tyrants in and then bred them:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he’s offered provinces $14 billion as part of a “safe restart” plan notably to help them buy more personal protective equipment and offer up to 10 sick days to workers. But some provinces are already saying no deal. ...

“The reality is we have a $23 billion problem in Ontario. And $14 billion for all of Canada, won’t solve the problem. $14 billion for all of Canada just won’t cut it,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford told reporters.

Ford also said that he is not interested in Ottawa’s proposal for provinces to offer 10 paid sick days to workers without benefits, adding that most premiers except British Columbia’s seemed opposed to it as well.

“I wasn’t getting any requests for this. This seems to be something that originated out west and the prime minister is kind of taking a hold of it,” New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs confirmed during a separate press conference.

It's rather like the Canada Summer Jobs program - agree or else.




The coronavirus lockdown and all that it entails - the grocery store lines, shortages, fines, no governmental oversight, the snitching - is a taste of what is to come:

“My wife is from Venezuela. She has been telling me for years when you walk into a store in Venezuela there is nothing in the store,” D’Souza recalled. “When I was a kid in India, my family had a card with our names in it — a ration card. We were allowed to buy so much rice and so much sugar and so much cooking oil. To get a phone in India there was a 7-year wait.”

“This is a hard concept for an American to grasp,” he said. Even in the Great Depression, Americans didn’t have it this bad.

Yet the empty shelves in grocery stores and the government’s attacks on civil liberties should make Americans wary of socialism.

“Suddenly on a temporary basis, you get a small foretaste of what socialism would be on a permanent basis,” D’Souza warned. “They don’t just want to take your money they want to control your life and make you a worm.”

Are you suggesting that the popular press lied?:

Here’s what Trump said:

“Equal justice under the law must mean that every American receives equal treatment in every encounter with law enforcement regardless of race, color, gender, or creed. They have to receive fair treatment from law enforcement. They have to receive it. We all saw what happened last week. We can’t let that happen.

“Hopefully, George is looking down right now and saying, ‘This is a great thing that’s happening for our country.’ It’s a great day for him. It’s a great day for everybody. This is a great day for everybody. This is a great, great day in terms of equality. It’s really what our Constitution requires and it’s what our country is all about.”

Clearly, Trump’s reference to Floyd was in the context of Americans agreeing everyone must be treated equally by police, not optimistic U.S. job numbers.

Despite their obvious blunder about what Trump said, which quickly went global and erupted on social media, few media organizations have corrected it.

Why do these distortions and lies sound so familiar?

Oh, yes:

Amazingly, even as Cambodia disintegrated, the Khmer Rouge benefitted from unsolicited apologetics from intellectuals at the West’s august universities. Just as Mao, Stalin, and Hitler enjoyed disproportionate popularity among academics and university students, Pol Pot and his promise of a communist utopia in South East Asia elicited sharp defences from many radical Western academics. In what is now known by some historians as the ‘The Standard Total Academic View,’ these professors downplayed reports of atrocities perpetrated in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and printed vicious attacks against anyone who disagreed.

Reports of cities being emptied by the regime’s forced marches, for instance, were explained away as a necessary policy to prevent starvation in the country. “What was portrayed as a destructive, backward-looking policy motivated by doctrinaire hatred was actually a rationally conceived strategy for dealing with the urgent problems that faced postwar Cambodia,” wrote Gareth Porter and George Hilderbrand in their 1977 book Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution. “Cambodia is only the latest victim of the enforcement of an ideology that demands that social revolutions be portrayed as negatively as possible, rather than as responses to real human needs which the existing social and economic structure was incapable of meeting.” The authors didn’t have the direct data on food levels in Cambodia required to make this claim. Nor were they able to assess conditions on the ground, since the regime had expelled all Western observers under a policy even more strict than that adopted by North Korea today.

(Sidebar: that's like saying the breakdown of the traditional family and fatherlessness could be chief contributors to the crime and hopelessness one often sees in some parts of the US. But that would just be nutty ...)

As refugees who managed to escape the Khmer Rouge began spilling over the border into Thailand, their harrowing testimonies of horrific hardship, forced labour, starvation, and mass killings were dismissed by the West’s radical intelligentsia. In a manner reminiscent of the patronising social scientist, one academic wrote, “What the urban dwellers consider ‘hard’ labor may not be punishment or community service beyond human endurance … Such associations take what is happening in Cambodia out of its historical and cultural context.”



After interviewing Cambodian refugees, the French priest François Ponchaud said, “How many of those who say they are unreservedly in support of the Khmer revolution would consent to endure one hundredth part of the present sufferings of the Cambodian people?” In his 1977 book Cambodge Année Zéro (translated into English a year later as Cambodia: Year Zero), Ponchaud argued that refugee testimonies spoke to the gravity of the crisis enveloping Cambodia. John Barron and Anthony Paul reached a similar conclusion in their 1977 book Murder Of A Gentle Land: “We believe that the documentation conclusively shows that cataclysmic events have occurred in Cambodia and that their occurrence is not subject to rational dispute. We hope that upon learning of these events, people in all parts of the world will act to halt the ongoing annihilation of the Cambodian people…”

The academic Left in the West found Ponchaud’s book uncomfortable, and detested the conclusions in Murder Of A Gentle Land. Noam Chomsky, arguably the most formidable icon of the Left’s intelligentsia, called the book a “third rate propaganda tract.” Refugee testimonies were not be dismissed, Chomsky argued, but nor were they to be trusted. “Refugees,” he wrote, “are frightened and defenceless, at the mercy of alien forces. They naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocutors wish to hear.”

Did Mr. Chomsky mean real refugees or people who sneak into Canada and claim that they are refugees?

It doesn't matter, I suppose. According to him, we don't have to take them seriously.