by Colin Hyde

There’s this piece by James W. Pfister in the Daily Telegram titled, “James W. Pfister: Same mistake: Vietnam and Taiwan,” in which he effectively calls for the US to abandon our friend, Taiwan. You guessed it; Mr. Pfister is a pretty big guy. He holds a doctorate in political science, and is a retired professor after 46 years in the Political Science Department at Eastern Michigan University. Someone needs to tell this gentleman that people who absolutely can’t live together, ought to be allowed to go their merry way.

In his article, Dr. Pfister explains about the US folly in Vietnam. He said the US interfered in a situation there, between North and South Vietnam, giving protection to the weaker entity. But history was the determining force, the two Vietnams having been one, so the US fought to prevent the inevitable.

In the case of Taiwan, that island was a part of China. Then the Japanese invaded China and took control of it. Then the Japanese got kicked out. After a long civil war in China, the communists defeated the capitalists, and the capitalists, who were led by Chiang Kai-shek, fled to Taiwan.

Going back a little, Pfister says the “Chinese government accepted the Japanese surrender in Taiwan on Oct. 25, 1945.” Re: China demanding ownership of Taiwan, Pfister wrote: “The Chinese Communist Party referred to the 1943 Cairo Declaration that declared Taiwan be returned to China, according to Frank S. T. Hsiao and Lawrence R. Sullivan, ‘The Chinese Communist Party and the Status of Taiwan,’ 1979. Taiwan was considered to be a PRC province in the PRC constitution.”

Pfister said the US “prevented unification by putting the 7th Fleet into the Taiwan Strait during the Korean War and by entering into a defensive treaty in 1955 with Chiang Kai-shek regarding Taiwan.”

Pfister said that “as with South Vietnam, we are defending the weaker entity which in history was unified with the dominant entity. In both cases we have intervened to prevent the natural outcome of reunification. We should…mind our own business, instead of spending lives and money in another losing cause.”

I would point out to the gentleman that what I got from his piece is that it was under the leadership of the capitalists that Taiwan was reunited with mainland China, in 1943. Chiang Kai-shek was the leader of China until 1949. It seems unconscionable that the communists would deny the capitalists their little piece of earth. What, they wanted Chiang and his people to disappear into the sea?

In time, at its own pace, Taiwan would very likely get closer to Big China. But any reunification should be because Taiwan wants it.

Understanding the Jews, and Nazi hatred

While reading about Ms. Whoopi Goldberg being excoriated for a relatively benign comment about race and the Jews, and her journey to acceptance that it was a race thing in Germany, I came across this not-to-be-ignored 1919 piece from the pen of Adolf Hitler. He said the Jews are a race, “not a religious belief”, that the group is about preserving their “race and character much more rigorously than many of the peoples among whom he lives”. Hitler said that “living among us is a non-German, alien race, unwilling and unable to sacrifice its racial distinctiveness, renounce its feelings, way of thinking and aspirations” despite “having exactly all the political rights that we have.” He went on to say the Jews were concerned only with “material things”, that everything about them was to satisfy their “lust for money and power.”

That Hitler statement, there are lessons in it that we must not ignore. Capitalism is a serious animal. A news story this week said that Mr. Elon Musk had lost $200 billion, more money than any single person had lost before. Wow, a single man lost BZ $400 billion, the equivalent of one hundred years’ worth of our country’s production! That’s what capitalism does. The Jews are the world’s foremost capitalists. Understand that that tribe doesn’t give the highest ratings to Jesus. Their Book, the Torah, doesn’t include the New Testament. Moses is da man for the Jews.

The media came hard at Ms. Goldberg. I’ll say I think the media was very unfair with her. The Jews lash out, sometimes unfairly, because they were hurt badly.

JP O’Malley, in the piece, “How Hitler used Jews’ failed WWI-era idealism to feed the world’s worst genocide”, said that almost 100,000 German Jews served the country’s war cause in WWI, but after the defeat, myths started circulating that the Jews “were war profiteering at home”, and there were stories that they avoided “military responsibilities at the front lines.”

In his piece, O’Malley cites the book, A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War, by Tim Grady, a British historian. Grady says the wartime experience of Jews was almost similar to that of other Germans, but “the instability and chaos that resulted from some prominent Jews’ legacies were eventually exploited by the National Socialists as the party made its bid for power.” Grady says that for the Germans, Hitler’s Nazis “are the party that will avenge Germany’s defeat, and part of their legacy of WWI involves targeting Jews.”

So, what we had there in Germany was serious hatred of the Jews. I’ve asked myself why the smart Germans didn’t devise a sophisticated tax system to separate the Jews from their wealth, instead of sinking to vicious murder. Yes, if the Jews had amassed so much wealth, why didn’t they tax them more? Why didn’t the smart Germans design programs to improve wealth distribution?

But we mustn’t forget that the problem was a lot deeper than money, and separatism. Remember that the 1930s, the coming of the Nazis, wasn’t really that far removed from the 1914-1918 war. The International Encyclopedia says “a summary of World War I casualties, compiled by the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service, lists 1,773,700 German war dead, 4,216,058 wounded, 1,152,800 prisoners, for a total of 7,142,558 casualties, an amazing 54.6 percent of the 13,000,000 soldiers Germany mobilized for the war.” You can bet that many “Aryan” Germans were still smarting over that war. Blame and revenge are tools to ease pain. There was some crazy hatred of the Jews whipped up there.

I’ve never seen a movie that didn’t paint the Jews as a people that were completely innocent of wrongdoing. I’ve seen a number of movies about the Nazis and the horror, the Holocaust they wrought in Germany. They say the winner gets the spoils. The Nazis lost. The Jews won, though after suffering terribly. My, after reviewing the notes, I can’t find any saving grace for the losers. Their hate consumed them.

How come the smart Germans resorted to such atrocities? I point blank stop at the violence the “Aryan” people in Germany visited upon the Jewish population. But I should understand hate. Some of my ancestors didn’t mind committing genocide, decimating the population of some other of my ancestors. And I should understand ignorance. Some of my ancestors thought some of my other ancestors were less than human beings.

There’s a lesson for us. When we think of Nazi hatred of the Jews because of their tremendous financial success, we have to think of our own reality here, with a few very successful tribes, and tribes that are struggling. One of the groups doing well is the Mennonites. Do you think they would become a target for our pain? Do you know that at this time there are members of that group who feel they aren’t doing enough to help Belizeans who are living on the margins?

Young people don’t tolerate poverty very well. If Plan Belize fails and we continue to languish in poverty, what then? Will our deprived masses look less favorably upon the haves? You know that’s natural, very human. Brother Patrick Rogers said that when poverty increases to 70%, all civility goes to hell. Ah, people can behave like sophisticated animals when they’re all propped up, when things are going great. But all can fall down; we are all reduced to our beast status, when hunger is in our bellies.