ALL RISE: OBAMA & THE FALL OF COMMUNISM

ALL RISE 

The 16th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party 

OBAMA & THE FALL OF COMMUNISM
THE FALL? WAS WHEN EXACTLY? 

Today, in Washington, D.C., President Barack Obama made a rather strange statement for someone who is supposed to be so bright, and who is in charge of the national security apparatus of the U.S. 

Here is the wind-up: "Fidelity to our values is the reason why the United States of America grew from a small string of colonies under the writ of an empire to the strongest nation in the world." 

Okay. Then: Enemy soldiers… strong alliances …  

Then, "It's the reason why we've been able to overpower the iron fist of fascism and outlast the iron curtain of communism, and enlist free nations and free peoples everywhere in the common cause and common effort of liberty." 

"…outlast the iron curtain of communism.…" 

Oh, yes? The People's Republic of China, ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, has fallen? (and the regimes in Cuba, and North Korea, and Vietnam…?) 

Twenty-five years ago, President Ronald Reagan came back from his first trip to what he had been pleased to call "Red China" and spoke of the "so-called Communist China." This in 1984. 

In the fall of 2007, at the time of the most recent Chinese Communist Party Congress, I showed an American in Beijing a copy of the photograph above, taken at the previous Congress, the 16th (November 2002). He looked at the giant hammer and sickle and said, Oh, Russia. 

Whatever one may think of what has happened since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Communists have not ruled there since December 1991, while in China they go on and on.  So far.