"The difficult we can do immediately; the impossible

will take a little longer."

-Herman Haupt, Chief of U.S. Military Rail Roads in Virginia, to Abraham
Lincoln.

The Bhutto Assassination

MUSHARRAF: DEFECTIVE SUN ROOF

MANUFACTURER IDENTIFIED.

"Investigators with our Product Safety Bureau have

identified the factory that produced the defective

sun roof that killed Mrs. Bhutto as "Al Qaeda Sun

Sun Roof Manufacturing, Inc." and have closed

it indefinitely. I congratulate those involved in

so swiftly bringing this investigation to a

conclusion," said the Pakistani President.

The Bhutto Assassination

MUSHARRAF ANNOUNCES NATIONWIDE SUN

ROOF RECALL

"We must restore confidence in the safety of Pakistini

sun roofs," said the President.

The Bhutto Assassination

THE SUN ROOF?

The Bhutto Assassination, America, Pakistan, and The Clash

In the long-ago Cold War, America "tilted" toward

Pakistan in its continuous subcontinent feud with

India. Our countries have remained cordial ever

since. In the "war on terrorism" President Musharaff

was one of the most outspoken (if somewhat panicked)

in the world, certainly in the Islamic world, in

condemning the attacks. He pledged help to the

Bush administration, and has delivered some.


The old bromide that politics makes strange bed-

fellows applies here, of course. India is the world's

largest democracy; Pakistan has had far more coups

than free elections. India is a stable country;

Pakistan has gone through more leaders than

Lincoln went through generals. Finally of course,

Pakistan is Islamic and India is Hindu and our Clash

is with Islam.


Bedfellow Bush has snuggled up to bedfellow

Musharraf, to the detriment of both countries, and to

our side in the Clash. He has done all that he can to

protect Musharraf against surges of Islamist violence

and assassination attempts. On the bedfellows theory

that would seem to be a good thing, but it's not. The

Musharraf regime is about to fall, that will be one of

the results of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto

today, and in it's place will be...who knows in Pakistan,

but eventually, probably later rather than sooner, an

Islamist government. And this one will have the bomb.

That's a very bad thing. Pakistan developed and test-

launched its bomb under President Musharraf, and

with President Bush looking on, or looking the other

way.


The most vital threat that America faces in the Clash is

an Islamic bomb in the wrong hands. That is closer to

happening today than it was yesterday.


The bed-fellows approach has produced this result.

The U.S. never should have permitted Pakistan to

develop its atomic capability. This day was foreseeable.



In the Clash, instead of the bedfellows theory that

delays the inevitable, this page has proposed an

opposite theory, of encouraging the inevitable.

We have called it "constructive provocation" and,

applied in the context here, the U.S. would have, if

necessary, bombed the Pakistani nuclear facilities out

of existence. That would have brought down the

Musharraf regime. Constructive provocateurs would

say, better sooner than later, better by our action than

the improvised reaction that the bedfellows theory

produces, better that we fight the Clash at a time of

our choosing rather than the enemy's. Whatever one

thinks of theories, we should have prevented the

Pakistani nuclear capability by all means necessary.


Long before President Bush, America should have

gotten out of bed with Pakistan. Pakistan shares none

of America's values. The bedfellows approach shunts

that consideration aside--for defensible reasons--for

geopolitical expediency. But there's the rub. The

bedfellows theory is supposed to be temporary and,

given the "strange" relationships it produces, it is

critical that each relationship so produced be

constantly reevaluated.



It has been the long-standing view here* that Pakistan

has not been a net plus for America in the Clash.

Rather, we have consistently argued that Pakistan and

Saudi Arabia are our greatest enemies. Shortly after

9/11 The New York Times Magazine did a story on

President Musharraf's madrasahs, the Pakistani schools

that inculcate Pakistani children in Islamist hatred.

As does our other major "friend" in the Islamic world,

Saudi Arabia, the madrasahs were one way for President

Musharraf to buy off Islamist threats to him personally,

and to his regime. The result for America however is a

new generation in Pakistanis--and Saudis--who, when

they come of age, will act out their school lessons with

the violence and hate that they were taught.

Additionally, U.S. intelligence indicates that Osama

bin Laden is alive and well. In Pakistan. In that "lawless"

tribal area in the mountainous border region it shares

with Afghanistan. Reportedly, we had a bead on bin

Laden in that area of Pakistan at one point, but

Secretary Rumsfeld called off military action for fear

of destabilizing our "friend." Acting under a theory of

"constructive provocation," obviously the U.S. would

have gone in and gotten bin Laden.



President Musharraf's fiat does not extend over a large

geographic area of his country; he does not rule the

hearts and minds of a large segment of his people;

he hasn't been able to produce bin Laden; our

ability to capture bin Laden ourselves has been

thwarted by concern for our bedfellow; and he

is teaching his youngsters to make jihad on us.


Another old bromide comes to mind, with friends like this...




* Our Friends in Pakistan, May 29, 2002.

China's Great Wall of Silence: China's "Eichmann's Defense" Law

At his trial in Israel in 1961 Adolph Eichmann defended himself

as someone who "never did anything great or small,

without obtaining in advance express instructions from Adolf

Hitler or any of my superiors."



At her trial in China in 1981 Jiang Jing defended herself in the

same way, "I was Chairman Mao's dog. He told me who to bite

and I bit them."


Israel convicted Eichmann and China convicted Jiang but

Israel is a nation of laws and applies them indiscriminately;

China is a nation of orders which it issues at its whim.

"Following orders" is not a defense recognized in a society

ruled by laws; it is a defense in a society ruled by orders.



It is for this reason that those responsible for the murder of

Bian Zhongyun and of 3,000,000 others during the Cultural

Revolution go unpunished. When it wants to, as in the case of

the Gang of Four, China issues orders holding people

accountable. When it doesn't want to, it issues no such orders.


Wang Jinyao, Bian's husband, has found this out over the

years. Wang has tirelessly sought justice for his wife's murder.

Pausing here for a moment we note another distinction.

"Memorializing" and "justice" both are important, noble

concepts. There are two parties to a murder, the victim and the

murderer. Memorializing focuses exclusively on the victim:

when we lay wreaths on the graves of our loved ones we do so

regardless of whether they died by murder, accident, in

war, or by natural causes. Justice focuses on both victim and

murderer. When Wang Jinyao went to his country's authorities

it was not to memorialize Bian; he has done that in his

apartment since 1966. Wang sought justice, he wanted those

responsible for his wife's murder to be held accountable in

some way.


When Wang sought justice he was cited a Chinese "law" that

codified Adolph Eichmann's defense. Wang was told that since

Bian's murder had occurred in the midst of a "mass movement"

the requisite criminal intent could not be imputed to any

individual. Without criminal intent there is no crime. Without a

crime there is no criminal. Therefore, no one was responsible

for Bian's death. Such was the Chinese government's order.

Justice is not revenge, the two, like orders and laws and

memorializing and justice, are often conflated. Justice is the

product of the shared values of a society, those values are

embodied in its laws and a society's fairness, that is, its

legitimacy, depends on the enforcement of those laws, that is,

those values. Wang Jinyao received no justice from his country

for his wife's murder because, you see, his country has no

justice to give. This is Public Occurrences.

Poetry Lives, American Culture Lives

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/au07/poetry-goetsch.html

Credit, not for the first time, to Arts and Letters Daily at www.aldaily.com.

China's Great Wall of Silence: The Struggle for History. Photo #1 Again

We have to understand our fellow man and their

perspectives; we have to take into account their

reality.

Now, to you and me, and anyone else without

a brain lesion, these are photographs of dead people.

But Red Guards have more complex thought processes

than you and me. They were the elite of the Chinese

educational system, the "morning suns" of progressive

Maoist thought.

To them these are not necessarily dead people. In the

reality which the Red Guards inhabit these folks could

all be sleeping. Yeah, see, never thought about that, did

you? That's because you're not as, how to say, erudite

as them, as they are, excuse me. Those people in the

bottom left hand corner, who's to say they aren't in

sleeping bags instead of body bags. Pshaw, we dumb

people are always jumping to conclusions.

Or they're dead people--no deceased hominids, no post-

living bipeds--but where is the evidence that they were

murdered, Huh? Perhaps they all died of heart attacks,

or from some other pre-existing medical condition, as

Dr. Weili Ye claimed was the case with Bian Zhongyun

in Carma Hinton's tour de farce Morning Sun. Were

there autopsies conducted, another salient point raised

by Weili Ye, Medical Examiner? No?

The Red Guards smell a rat, a frame-up of historical

proportions, just like that perpetrated on their own

Song Binbin. They'll get to the bottom of this, just you

wait and see. All they have to do is focus their super-

brains onto this conundrum and they'll come up with

an explanation, they'll come up with an explanation

all right, an explanation that satisfies--them. I am

Benjamin Harris.

China's Great Wall of Silence: The Struggle for History. Photo #2

Here we see more of the results of the youthful

idealism of the Cultural Revolution celebrated by Carma

Hinton, Weili Ye, Liu Jin, and...Oh where to stop. So many

Red Guards, so little time.

China's Great Wall of Silence: The Struggle for History. Photo #1

Above are photographs of the corpses of human beings

murdered during the Cultural Revolution. As can be

seen they were splashed unabashedly across a full page

of a Chinese newspaper of the time. The newspaper

article in which they appear was sent by a person

living in the P.R.C. Similar such articles have been

published here previously (1). More will follow.

In a recent paper (2) Dr. Youqin Wang writes of the

dichotomy that exists between the Chinese

government's official history of the Cultural Revolu-

tion and the "real" history. The former ignores the

scholarly purpose of truth-seeking. It cites to other

official accounts, thus completing the circle, rather

than to original documents like that above or to first-

hand interviews. The official account is not really

history at all but a sanitized account whose purpose

is not factual accuracy but regime protection.

The Chinese government's purpose is aided by the faux

academic efforts of foreign apologists such as Americans

Carma Hinton (3) Weili Ye (4), and the openly Maoist website

http://www.wengewang.org/, by the French philosopher Alan

Badiou (5), and others. These "useful fools"--to use Lenin's

phrase-- perpetrate their ideology-disguised-as-history on

insouciant Western audiences.

The real history is being written by Dr. Wang whose

website http://www.chinese-memorial.org/ is dedicated

to the memory of the victims of the Cultural Revolution,

by Roderick McFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals (6), by

Jonathan Spence (7), Jung Chang (8), Hu Jie (9), and

Harry Wu (10), among others. Except for Hu Jie, all are

living in the West.

There is a desperate struggle for the past going on here.

The Chinese government is winning that struggle. It is very

big and very powerful. By contrast, "my voice is very weak"

is Dr.Wang's poignant description of her own brave efforts

and those of Hu Jie. For five years Dr. Wang's website has

been blocked by the Chinese government's censors. The

regime pulled Hu Jie's film from a showing at a film festival

at the last moment. Books by the scholars mentioned

above are, of course, banned also in the P.R.C.

It is not a given in human affairs that "the truth will out."

The Chinese government is winning, and there is

nothing impossible about its ultimate triumph. I

remember being struck by something that

Professor Macfarquhar wrote, that if there is to

be an historical accounting of the Cultural Revolu-

tion that it will only be done by the Chinese people.

On the YouTube site of Hu Jie's film Though I Am

Gone, a young person posted that he hadn't known

that there was such violence during the Cultural

Revolution. He has never seen the corpses in the

above photograph. There is now a generation of

Chinese coming of age in a more open China who

do not know what really happened during the

Cultural Revolution, during the far more

disastrous "Great Leap Forward" of the 1950's, or

for that matter during the entire history of the P.R.C.

At the beginning of the school day the morning after

Bian Zhongyun's murder, Liu Jin, one of the Red

Guard leaders of the school, made the official

announcement over the loudspeaker:

"Bian Zhongyun's dead. That's it. There is no reason

to talk about it."

That is the Chinese government's position on

history also. Obviously, that position has

grounding in the thinking of many individual

Chinese. Even today, the individual perpetrators

of Cultural Revolution violence go unnamed by

even those dedicated to historical truth. The

government will win the struggle for the past

unless enough Chinese people decide that that's

not "it," that there is a "reason" to talk about it.

-Benjamin Harris, J.D.

1. Public Occurrences. June 8, 2007.

2. Official History and Parallel History, Victims or No

Victims: The Antithesis in the Historical Writings of the

Cultural Revolution. China Perspectives October-November

2007.

3. Morning Sun (film), 2005.

4. The Death of Bian Zhongyun. Chinese Historical Review,

Fall 2006.

5. "The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution." Positions,

Winter, 2005. Duke University Press.

6. Mao's Last Revolution. Belknap Press of Harvard University

Press, 2006.

7. The Gate of Heavenly Peace (1981), The Search for Modern

China (1991), Mao Zedong (1999), et al.

8. Mao: The Unknown Story. Anchor Books, 2006.

9. Seeking the Soul of Lin Zhao, 2004, Though I am Gone,

2006. (films)

10. http://www.cicus.org/. Troublemaker: One Man's Crusade

Against China, co-authored with George Vecsey. NewsMax

Media, Inc. 2002.

Sports

We are all Pittsburghers



"To encourage knowledge of affairs at home and abroad; to cure the spirit of lying which prevails
amongst us; to record memorable providences."-Statement of purpose, Public Occurrences, September 25, 1690





The college football regular season in the U.S.A. ended last night. It has been the most unpredictable season in history. Seven different teams who were ranked #2 in the country have lost during the course of the season, five of them to completely un-ranked teams. Last night both the number-one and number-two teams
played their season-ending games. Had they won they would have played against each other after the new year for the national championship.

Both lost.

Missouri, the number-one team, lost to Oklahoma, a highly-ranked team in its own right. Number-two West
Virginia however lost to the University of Pittsburgh, an un-ranked team with a losing record, over whom
West Virginia was a twenty eight and one-half point favorite. To make the result even more surprising the
game was played on West Virginia's campus. "Home" teams in American college football have a decided
advantage. Most surprising is that Pittsburgh is West Virginia's most- despised rival, thus seeming to negate
the common concern that a superior team might overlook an inferior opponent. Finally, this was exactly the 100th game between the two schools.


None of this mattered. Pittsburgh won the game 13-9.


The game has been described in historic terms by American sports writers. To lose to one's bitterest rival, at home, in the final game of the season, when playing for a chance at a national championship, while being favored by twenty eight and one-half points is indeed historic.

At its best sports presents the human condition in the starkest of terms. West Virginia's coach sorrowfully described the game as a "nightmare." We have all had those. We are all West Virginians. But for Pittsburgh's fans, and for underdog fans everywhere, the result was a miraculous joy. We are all Pittsburghers.


We have not had occasion to document memorable providences in the five-plus years that we have been publishing this electronic continuation of Public Occurrences but Pittsburgh's victory was not just historic, it was providential, that is miraculous, and so, true to our ancient mission we hereby record it. This is Public Occurrences.