Quotes from Richard Bernstein

The whole point of the liberal revolution that gave rise to the 1960's was to free us from somebody else's dogma, but now the same people…are striving to impose on others a secularized religion…disguising it behind innocuous labels like 'diversity training' and 'respect for difference.

The year 1945 in this sense marked the origin of a rivalry between the United States and China's Communists that, like a recurring illness, has always reinstated itself, and has bedeviled the relations between the two sides even after periods of near-rhapsodic warmth and declarations of common interest, during which the suspicions and animosities of the past seem to have been put permanently to rest.

that the concept of a loyal opposition did not exist in China and that Chiang's system of balancing off a variety of competing opportunists would not survive the introduction of western democracy with its free-for-all popular participation, particularly when one of the competing forces would be a dynamic, proliferating, disciplined organization determined to destroy that system and seize power.

How was power to be shared in a country that in its three-thousand-year history had never once witnessed a peaceful struggle for power?

Shi Zhe wrote in his memoir, "and if you didn't confess you were tortured and stayed in prison. The more stories you made up the better you were treated.

Anyway, if he went anyplace, Mao said, he'd rather that it be to the United States where he was sure he'd have a great deal to learn.

When the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov visited Washington in 1942, he'd been invited to sleep at the White House. "I think," Roosevelt told Churchill in 1942 referring to Stalin, "that if I give him everything I can and ask him for nothing in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace." The American president clung to that illusion until his death in April 1945.

As we'll see, there was an irony in this. The government's claims were propagandistic exaggerations, which came to be widely disbelieved. But actually the government resisted far more than the Communists, who resisted very little and whose losses were a small fraction of those suffered by the KMT's forces.

Warned by some of his advisers that Stalin would devour whole countries after the war, Roosevelt's feeling was that "Stalin is not that kind of man.

It was a rare and therefore heartening event in a China that had become perhaps not inured to defeat but well acquainted with it, and with the human devastation that it brought with it.

Rectification Campaign, that Mao engineered in Yenan and that was designed both to indoctrinate the thousands who had flocked to Yenan and to eradicate his opponents inside the party. The long-range effect of this famous meeting was to reduce the magnificent art and culture of China, historically one of the greatest contributions to global culture ever made, to standardized, officially approved propaganda.

The Communists had mounted an attack and then used it in a propaganda campaign, utterly unhinged from the truth, whose purpose was to portray the United States as an imperialist enemy. This was to be the pattern for the next twenty-six years, during which tens of thousands of Chinese and American young men were killed in wars that needn't have taken place.

It was a repetition of the familiar Communist pattern of seizing upon some incident, justifiably or otherwise, and embroidering thereon without regard to truth and accuracy to form the basis for an almost hysterical campaign of vituperation," Marshall concluded wearily.

Mao assured Forman of the CCP's democratic aspirations and its admiration of western values. "We are not striving for the social and political Communism of Soviet Russia," he told him. "Rather, we prefer to think of what we are doing as something that Lincoln fought for in your Civil War: the liberation of slaves.

Later he understood Zhou to be "a man as brilliant and ruthless as any the Communist movement has thrown up in this century," but he "had a way of entrancing people, of offering affection, of inviting and seeming to share confidences. And I cannot deny that he won my affection completely.

In retaliation, Zhou ordered the Red Squad to assassinate Gu's entire family, some fifteen people, and this order was scrupulously carried out.

The next time American pilots bailed out into the hands of Communist troops was in Korea about five years later, and the reception this time was imprisonment and torture, which makes the level of wartime cooperation all the more amazing and the decline of the relationship into enmity all the more shocking and costly.

the goal was not simply to make the thought-control target admit his errors and flaws but to so thoroughly destroy his sense of autonomous individuality that he feels gratitude and love for the leader who restored him to the correct path—Chairman Mao.