Socialism — that is the State substituting itself for individual liberty and growing to be the most terrible of tyrants.
Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin (September 12, 1848), published as the epigraph to Yves Guyot, The Tyranny of Socialism (1894).
On March 21, 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led 3,200 people on the start of the third and finally successful civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
Nearly two decades earlier, the Twenty-second Amendment (Amendment XXII) of the United States Constitution, passed Congress. The date was March 21, 1947. The amendment, ratified on February 27, 1951, set a term limit for election and overall time of service to the office of President of the United States. This was an obvious reaction to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s more than three terms in office.
The first section of the amendment reads as follows:
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President, when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
Perhaps it is impossible for a person who does no good to do no harm.
On March 20, 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published.
Wikipedia — the free online, once freely editable encyclopedia — started out upholding a principle about “neutrality.”
According to Wikipedia, this means that Wikipedia content “must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV) . . . representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic.”
NPOV isn’t the same as objectivity, which is about getting at the truth by honest observation and logic, not primarily by balancing viewpoints about what’s true. But if good objective work by “reliable sources” has been done about a subject, Wikipedia’s neutrality standard requires that both the sludge and the good work be included.
Somebody new to the subject has a fighting chance to be steered in the right direction.
NPOV still guides many Wikipedia articles where it is not really necessary, articles about elms and carburetors. The standard is now often ignored, however, in articles about controversial subjects. Like politics. Or socialism.
As I write, Wikipedia’s article on socialism mentions the kill list of “suspected high-ranking Communists” drawn up by Indonesia’s Suharto but not the many millions slaughtered under the commie-socialist regimes of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, et al. Critiques of socialism are barely touched on. No NPOV here.
Such agitprop is guarded by non-neutral left-wing Wikipedia editors. Britannica is one alternative. Conservapedia was launched in 2006 as “a conservative, family-friendly Wiki encyclopedia,” and appears to be going strong. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, harshly critical of Wikipedia’s centralized propagandistic turn, is developing an alternative called Encylosphere.
It’s even mentioned in Wikipedia.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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On March 19, 1649, England’s House of Commons passed an act abolishing the House of Lords, declaring it “useless and dangerous to the people of England.”
This was during Oliver Cromwell’s rule as Lord Protector, after the execution of Charles I. The House of Lords did not again meet until the Convention Parliament of 1660, under the Restoration of the monarchy.
Just seven years ago today — March 18, 2014 — Taiwanese students began a 23-day occupation of the country’s legislature, in what became known as the Sunflower Student Movement. They were protesting the rushed and opaque passage of a Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement with China.
Trade deals usually aren’t so explosive, but China is a neighbor 58 times larger than Taiwan’s 24-million population and one that regularly threatens military invasion. Furthermore, the agreement was negotiated in secret and initially passed by the Legislative Yuan in 30 seconds.
Obviously without debate.
Opponents of the deal argued it would allow China to effectively “purchase” Taiwan, and to economically leverage and then strangle Taiwan’s vibrant democracy, which like Hong Kong’s aspirations constitutes a terrible affront to the anti-democratic Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ruling over more than a billion silenced, disenfranchised Chinese.
The students’ concerns for transparency and safeguards connected with the Taiwanese public, which put enormous pressure on the government.
Ultimately, the spring Sunflower Movement in Taiwan helped influence the autumn Umbrella Movement protests in Hong Kong as well as energizing the 2016 win for Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party and far less Beijing-friendly President Tsai Ing-wen (who won a second term last year).
In these last seven years, the world has come a long way in recognizing the threat posed by totalitarian China. For that I give those students in Taipei a lot of credit. Their standing up kept Taiwan free — and helped us all begin to stand up to the Chinazis (as Hong Kongers call the CCP).
The other aftermath? Le Monde’s report on students finally leaving the Yuan, noted it was “not without having thoroughly cleaned the building.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Dear Mother, please don’t worry . . .
Today is the day
That I protect you for a change.
From “Island’s Sunrise,” an alternative rock anthem of the Sunflower Student Movement.
March 18 marks the 7th anniversary of the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement, wherein students occupied the Taiwanese legislature to block a trade agreement between Taiwan and China, which the public came to believe gave too much economic leverage to China, a power that regularly threatens to invade the free and democratic island nation.
The event awakened a deep concern about China’s dangerous encroachment as well as further impressing a “Taiwanese identity.” The protest also is believed to have influenced the 2014 Umbrella movement in Hong Kong as well as leading to electoral victories in Taiwan for the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party in 2016 and again in 2020, This website salutes the Sunflower Student Movement and hopes this date may be long remembered as the day the modern world first stood up and said “No” to totalitarian China.
On March 18, 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a bill enabling Hawaii to become the 50th state in the Union. The official day of statehood was set for (and became) August 21 of that year.
The statehood signing occurred exactly 85 years after The Kingdom of Hawaii formalized its treaty with the U. S. establishing exclusive trading rights.
Comedian Sarah Silverman, who has famously lent no small part of her cachet to the progressive cause, supporting Senator Bernie Sanders in both of his Democratic presidential runs, is now ditching the Democratic Party.
Her complaint isn’t that the party stiffed her candidate twice, first when the Democratic National Committee stabbed Bernie in the back for Hillary and next when it orchestrated ingenious maneuvers to gain the nomination (and then the presidency) for the tepid (and tepidly supported) Joe Biden.
I have argued before that Democrat insiders’ treatment of Sanders was deeply anti-democratic. But no, Ms. Silverman directs her ire against “the absolutist-ness of the party,” as she put it the other day on Instagram. “It’s so . . . elitist. You know, for something called ‘progressive,’ it allows for zero progress.”* Telling, perhaps, that Ms. Silverman emphasizes “progressive” and not “democratic,” as if it were named “The Progressive Party.”
Silverman specifically called attention not only to progressives’ unwillingness to compromise, but also to the it-takes-two-to-tango divide: “You know, Republicans might hear an idea that they would totally agree with, but, if it comes from AOC then they hate it.” She admitted that the same thing applied to her.
No wonder, then, that she does not “want to be associated with any party anymore,” complaining about “too much baggage.”
But she’s objecting to her fellow progressives’ anti-free speech agenda, too, characterizing it as “righteousness porn.”
Silverman, who has a special named Jesus Is Magic and is famous for her rape jokes, has herself felt the sting of cancel culture and would be a natural proponent of principled free speech.
But that is not a progressive cause, it is a very old-fashioned liberal one.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* An f-bomb has been elided in the quotation from Ms. Silverman.
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