Plane Violence is like Gun Violence. We need Plane Control Now.

Hillary Clinton read her own emails for an hour at an art exhibition in Venice where all 60,000 pages are on display.

"They are just so boring," she reportedly said during the visit. https://t.co/SdN1ZTbndO

— HuffPost (@HuffPost) September 11, 2019

Here’s an article I wrote for UPI on the evening of September 11, 2001 (due to the surfeit of events, it was actually published a few days later):

Bush had called for laxer airport security
by Steve Sailer
UPI, September 11, 2001

LOS ANGELES, Sep. 11 — Ironically, in an attempt to appeal to the growing number of Arab-American and Muslim voters, exactly eleven months ago George W. Bush called for weakening airport security procedures aimed at deterring hijackers.

On Oct. 11, 2000, during the second presidential debate, the Republican candidate attacked two anti-terrorist policies that had long irritated Arab citizens of the U.S.

At present [i.e., the evening of 9/11], of course, there is no definite evidence that Arabs or Muslims were involved in today’s terrorist assaults. Many incorrectly assumed after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that Middle Easterners were involved. Nor is there direct evidence that Bush’s attack on airline safety procedures made the four simultaneous hijackings easier to pull off.

Bush said during the nationally televised debate, “Arab-Americans are racially profiled in what’s called secret evidence. People are stopped, and we got to do something about that.” Then-Governor Bush went on, “My friend, Sen. Spence Abraham [the Arab-American Republic Senator from Michigan], is pushing a law to make sure that, you know, Arab-Americans are treated with respect. So racial profiling isn’t just an issue at the local police forces. It’s an issue throughout our society. And as we become a diverse society, we’re going to have to deal with it more and more.”

Bush’s plug for Senator Abraham was intended to help Abraham in close re-election battle, which he ultimately lost. (Abraham is now the Bush Administration’s Secretary of Energy.) More important personally to Bush was the swing state of Michigan’s 18 electoral votes, which Al Gore eventually won narrowly. Arab-Americans, centered in Dearborn and Flint, make up about four percent of the population of Michigan, the most of any state.

In the debate, Bush conflated two separate policies that Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans felt discriminate against them: the heightened suspicions faced by Middle Eastern-looking travelers at airport security checkpoints and the government’s use of “secret evidence” in immigration hearings of suspected terrorists. Yet, despite Bush’s confusion, Arab-Americans appreciated his gesture. Four days after the debate, the Arab-American Political Action Committee endorsed Bush.

The day after Bush’s remarks, 17 American sailors died in a terrorist attack in the Arab nation of Yemen. The bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, however, did not stop Vice President Al Gore from echoing Bush’s calls to end these two anti-terrorist techniques in a meeting with Arab-American leaders on October 14, 2000.

According to a spokesperson for a leading Arab-American organization, people of Arab descent are stopped and searched at airports more often than many other ethnic groups. Some refer to this as Flying While Arab or Flying While Muslim. These terms are intended as plays on the popular phrase “Driving While Black,” which is widely used to criticize police departments for stopping more black than white motorists.

This year, both Bush and his Attorney General John Ashcroft have called for an end to racial profiling.

The Federal Aviation Administration provides airline and airport personnel with the Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening system to help them identify suspicious travelers. It relies on a secret profile of the characteristics of typical hijackers and terrorists.

Bush’s Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta has said that “the security procedures are not based on the race, ethnicity, religion or gender of passengers” Yet, the system is widely believed to use other information – such as whether the traveler is going to or coming from the Middle East – that tends to “disparately impact” Arab and Muslims.

None of the ethnic rights groups, however, has offered any data to dispute the widespread assumption that in the three decades since the Palestine Liberation Organization invented skyjacking, a disproportionate number of hijackers and plane bombers have had Middle Eastern ties.

Nonetheless, the Bush Administration publicly agrees with the civil rights organizations that even a nonracial airport profiling system that had merely a disparate impact on Arabs and Muslims would be objectionable. Secretary Mineta said, “We also want to assure that in practice, the system does not disproportionately select members of any particular minority group.” Of course, if Arabs and Muslims are disproportionately more likely to hijack airliners, and the profiling system does not end up disproportionately targeting them, then system wouldn’t work very well at preventing hijackings.

To ensure that no disparate impact is occurring, the Bush Administration carried out in June a three-week study, first planned by the Clinton Administration, of whether or not profiling at the Detroit airport disparately impacts Arabs.

The results of the study have not been released. Nor is it known whether the secret profiles have been relaxed – they are kept secret in order to keep hijackers guessing.

However, on June 6th Attorney General Ashcroft told Congress, “We want the right training, we want the right kind of discipline, we want the right kind of detection measures and the right kind of remediation measures, because racial profiling doesn’t belong in the federal government’s operational arsenal.”

Besides airport profiling, Arab-American activists long demanded the repeal of the “secret evidence” section of the 1996 Anti-Terrorism Act. To prevent terrorist gangs from murdering U.S. government secret informants, this law allows the government to provide evidence from unidentified moles in the immigration hearings of foreigners suspected of terrorist links. The government has deported or detained a number of Arabs hoping to immigrate to the U.S. due to testimony by witnesses they were never allowed to confront.

Although Abraham’s bill repealing the use of secret evidence died in 2000, during his confirmation hearing, Ashcroft endorsed the ban on secret evidence. He told Congress in June that the Bush Administration has not used secret evidence.

As the practice has come under increasing attack, the number of Arab immigrants detained on secret evidence has dropped sharply. Hussein Ibish of the American Arab Anti-discrimination Committee told UPI in June, “Two years ago there were 25 in prison,” he said. “Now we’re down to only one.”

Also of interest, as I blogged in 2006:

It was not until 2005 that Michael Tuohey surfaced. He was the veteran U.S. Air ticket agent in Portland, ME who checked in Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 19 9/11 terrorists, and a companion on the first leg of their trip that ended in the World Trade Center. Tuohey was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey:

Michael Tuohey was going to work like he had for 37 years, but little did he know that this day would change his life forever. On September 11, 2001, Tuohey, a ticket agent for U.S. Airways, checked in terrorist Mohammed Atta for a flight that started a chain of events that would change history.

Tuohey was working the U.S. Airways first-class check-in desk when two men, Atta and his companion Abdul Azziz-Alomari, approached his counter. From all outward appearances, the men seemed to be normal businessmen, but Tuohey felt something was wrong.

“I got an instant chill when I looked at [Atta]. I got this grip in my stomach and then, of course, I gave myself a political correct slap…I thought, ‘My God, Michael, these are just a couple of Arab businessmen.’”

Tuohey also told David Hench of the Portland Press Herald:

Then his eyes locked on Atta.

“It just sent chills through you. You see his picture in the paper (now). You see more life in that picture than there is in flesh and blood,” Tuohey said.

Then Tuohey went through an internal debate that still haunts him.

“I said to myself, ‘If this guy doesn’t look like an Arab terrorist, then nothing does.’ Then I gave myself a mental slap, because in this day and age, it’s not nice to say things like this,” he said. “You’ve checked in hundreds of Arabs and Hindus and Sikhs, and you’ve never done that. I felt kind of embarrassed.”

It wasn’t just Atta’s demeanor that caught Tuohey’s attention.

“When I looked at their tickets, they had first-class, one-way tickets – $2,500 tickets. Very unusual,” he said. “I guess they’re not coming back. Maybe this is the end of their trip.”

When I was a kid in 1970, the word “Controversial” was a term of praise, as illustrated by this ad for Robert Altman’s movie Brewster McCloud:

“CONTROVERSIAL … YES!!”

In 2019, however, “controversial” means “not respectable, probably should be deplatformed.”

From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:

No Continent for Young Men
by Steve Sailer

September 11, 2019

The death last Friday of Robert Mugabe, the big man of Zimbabwe from 1980 to 2017, is a reminder of the paradox that Africa, the most youthful continent, tends to be ruled by the old.

When Mugabe was finally overthrown two years ago at age 93, he was 75 years older than the median Zimbabwean, who is 18.

Grotesque as he was, Mugabe was not an anomaly: Broadly speaking, sub-Saharan Africa tends toward gerontocratic cultures in which men are deemed to deserve to accumulate power, money, and wives by outliving their rivals.

It’s no continent for young men. …

Increasingly, the young men of Africa are leaving for Europe and North America.

And, as professor Stephen Smith of Duke’s African Studies department notes in his important book The Scramble for Europe: Young Africa on Its Way to the Old Continent, now available in English after causing a sensation in France, there are vastly more who will depart for the First World in the future as the African masses modernize enough to contemplate immigrating.

Read the whole thing there.

From the New York Times Magazine, an article about how colleges are biased in favor of lazy white boys and discriminate against amazing hard-working black and Latino Women of Color. That’s why Silicon Valley is full of indolent white boys making huge amounts of money in easy jobs like starting their own businesses, while amazing black women and Puerto Rican men have to take on life’s greatest challenges, such as being a college admissions staffer or writing op-eds about how society should pay more attention to their hair.

What College Admissions Offices Really Want

Elite schools say they’re looking for academic excellence and diversity.
But their thirst for tuition revenue means that wealth trumps all.

By PAUL TOUGH SEPT. 9, 2019

In the fall of 2014, Angel Pérez was hired to oversee enrollment at Trinity College, a small liberal-arts school that occupies a picturesque 100-acre hillside campus overlooking Hartford.

Trinity, with its famous squash team, is often thought of as the preppiest college in the Northeast, what Washington and Lee is to the Southeast.

It’s not exactly representative.

By the way, the 2019 Trinity men’s squash team was a real Rainbow Coalition of the Global Rich:

Trinity College men’s squash junior Kush Kumar (Dhampur, India) was named to the College Squash Association (CSA) All-American First Team and classmate Thoboki Mohohlo (Johannesburg, South Africa) earned CSA All-American Second Team honors to add to the Bantams’ post-season accolades. Kumar, senior tri-captain Tom De Mulder (Ghent, Belgium) and sophomore Ziad Sakr (Tanta, Egypt) were also named to the 2019 All-New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC) All-Conference First Team, while senior Nku Patrick (San Fernando, Trinidad) earned All-NESCAC Second Team honors.

Back to Paul Tough’s article in the NYT:

… Pérez grew up in very different circumstances, born in Puerto Rico in 1976 to a teenage mother and a father who delivered milk door to door. …

A guidance counselor persuaded him to apply to Skidmore College, a selective private institution in upstate New York that Pérez had never heard of. He took the SAT just once, and he scored poorly. But miraculously, someone in Skidmore’s admissions office decided to ignore his lousy test score in favor of his excellent grades and admit him with full financial aid. It was a decision that changed Pérez’s life.

Pérez got his first job in admissions straight out of college, motivated by the opportunity to do for young people what that admissions officer did for him: spot hidden potential in students with unconventional academic records and transform young lives. He rose through the profession, working first at Skidmore and then at the Claremont Colleges in Southern California …

The story of Angel Perez, who did poorly on the SAT but was let into Skidmore anyway and then became a Skidmore admissions officer looking for more Mini-Mes just like himself to admit to Skidmore reminds me of Richard Armour’s definition: “The Admissions Office is in charge of admitting the college’s mistakes.”

Often, these mistakes, not being able to get jobs in the outside world, wind up working for the Admissions Office.

It’s all the Great Cycle of Life, college admissions-style.

“I remember when I got the call about this job,” Pérez told me the first time we met, on a cold winter day in 2017. We were in his window-lined office in Trinity’s admissions building, which looked out over the college’s snow-covered athletic fields. “I was sitting in lovely Claremont, California, and my response was, Why would I move to Hartford, Connecticut?”

There should be an app to add the subsequent unvocalized thoughts of New York Times interview subjects, like in Peep Show: “Why would I move to Hartford, Connecticut?” exclaimed Pérez. “Hartford is full of Puerto Ricans!”

“But then I started having conversations with the president, and I was so inspired by her vision of taking an institution that has been historically white, wealthy and privileged and really bringing it into the modern day and age.”

There shall be No Refuge! The fact that Trinity is famous as a Last Redoubt of old time WASPiness is exactly why it must be assimilated into The Diversity.

Then the article talks about Caroline Hoxby’s studies of under-recruited smart high school students:

Hoxby’s papers gave new momentum to the national effort to make selective colleges more socioeconomically diverse. In news releases, wealthy colleges trumpeted their efforts to recruit and admit more low-income and black and Latino students.

Actually, what Hoxby found was that the biggest reservoir of smart high school students that elite colleges were overlooking were white boys in Red States.

Paul Tough goes on to point out that the subjective standardized tests are discriminating against amazing Women of Color who are aceing their GPAs but they just don’t test well. That’s because these girls are Rebels. In contrast, because Society is so biased in favor of white boys, they tend to get lower GPAs from their teachers even as they do better on the SAT and ACT test. That’s because they are Conformists, right?

Or something. I mean, Science proves that white males are bad. We all know that, right?

Among the roughly two million students who take the SAT each year, about two-thirds, according to the College Board’s categorization, receive scores that are “nondiscrepant,” or in line with their high school grades.

For those students, the SAT doesn’t really affect their college prospects at all — their test scores send the same signal to college-admissions offices that their high school grades do. The students for whom test scores make a difference in admissions are the two groups who have “discrepant” scores — meaning either that their SAT score is much higher than their high school grades would predict (let’s call them the inflated-SAT group)

Or instead of “inflated-SAT group,” you could call them “smart.”

or their SAT score is much lower than their high school grades would predict (let’s call them the deflated-SAT group).

Or you could call them the “inflated-GPA group.”

Those two categories each make up about a sixth of each cohort of high school seniors.

In 2010 three College Board researchers analyzed data from more than 150,000 students who took the SAT, and they found that the demographics of the two “discrepant” groups differed substantially. The students with the inflated SAT scores were more likely to be white or Asian

By the way this is the only time the word “Asian” is used in this long article. In contrast, “white” is used 9 times. Of course, Asians are wholly irrelevant to the question of who gets into elite colleges, right?

than the students in the deflated-SAT group, and they were much more likely to be male. Their families were also much better off. Compared with the students with the deflated SAT scores, the inflated-SAT students were more than twice as likely to have parents who earned more than $100,000 a year and more than twice as likely to have parents with graduate degrees.

Because of course we know that intelligence isn’t hereditary, the fact that kids who do better on the SAT than they do on their grades tend to have smart parents are obviously just working incredibly hard at their SAT prep class even though they are lazy at everything else, right?

These were the students — the only students — who were getting an advantage in admissions from the SAT. …

By contrast, according to the College Board’s demographic analysis, students in the deflated-SAT group, the ones whose SAT scores were significantly lower than their high school grades would have predicted, were twice as likely to be black as students in the inflated-SAT group, nearly twice as likely to be female and almost three times as likely to be Hispanic. They were three times as likely as students in the inflated-SAT group to have parents who earned less than $30,000 a year, and they were almost three times as likely to have parents who hadn’t attended college. They were the students — the only students — whose college chances suffered when admissions offices considered the SAT in addition to high school grades.

The significance of the College Board’s discrepant-score research comes into clearer focus when you consider data from a second College Board study, the National SAT Validity Study, which every year or two analyzes the records of students who take the SAT and then enroll in college. The 2018 validity study (which used data from 2013, before the SAT was redesigned) showed that working- and middle-class high school students, students whose parents earned between $40,000 and $80,000, had an average grade-point average in high school of 3.63. Wealthy students, whose parents earned more than $200,000, had an average high school G.P.A. of 3.66, almost exactly the same as the working-class ones.

But students in the $40,000-to-$80,000 family-income cohort had average SAT scores of 1,624 (out of 2,400, as the SAT was scored before the redesign), while students in the over-$200,000 cohort had average scores of 1,793. That’s a 169-point advantage for the well-off ones. High school grades, considered alone, made for a fairly level playing field for students from different economic backgrounds. But SAT scores tilted that playing field in favor of the rich.

It’s almost as if higher income parents work to get their kids into more rigorous high schools with tougher grading standards.

25 years ago I was negotiating a 9 figure deal with an executive at Oracle who showed me his Oracle ID card which had #5 on it: he was the giant database software company’s fifth-ever employee. He said that he had tried college for a couple of weeks, “but it was just the same as high school,” so he called up Larry Ellison, for whom he’d been doing some coding as a high school kid, and got hired by Larry’s little start-up Oracle. And that was the end of his educational career.

I’m sure he had a really high SAT score and not such a high HS GPA score, so Paul Tough could explain to him that his fortune in Oracle stock options were rightly the possession of amazing Women of Color with high HS GPAs.

Anyway, I was going to sum up by saying this article shows how easy it is to figure out how the world works if you know ahead of time who are the Good People and who are the Bad People. But on second thought, that’s backward: this article is ingenious at pandering to its readers’ dumbest prejudices as it wields Occam’s Butterknife.

What’s actually easier mentally, what requires juggling fewer balls conceptually, what needs the least number of epicycles, is the simplest and most accurate explanation.

Recently Bret Stephens in the New York Times melted down over a little joke on Twitter about bed bugs. Meanwhile, in the Washington Post, Max Boot wonders if all his hard work will go for nought:

But I do sometimes wonder what I am actually accomplishing. Much of my journalism for the past four years has been devoted to critiquing President Trump and opposing the spread of Trumpism. But no matter how many columns or sound bites I produce, he remains in office, acting (as Sharpiegate shows) more erratically than ever. Sure, he’s not terribly popular — but he could still be reelected. I am left to ask if all my work has made any difference.

Will no one rid me of this turbulent President? Look, it wasn’t this hard to start the Iraq War, so why is it so much more work to get my way this time? How many more columns am I going to have to write before the Joint Chiefs of Staff get the hint and have an accidental drone strike on the White House putting green?

Aren’t we Americans lucky to have a Pundit Class of such rock solid emotional stability and such charmingly self-deprecating senses of humor?

Since the 1970s, the U.S. has had a National Transportation Safety Board to inquire into the causes of jetliner crashers and the like and issue recommendations. We should also have a National Immigration Safety Board to investigate how we came to let in losers like, say, this Iraqi who sabotaged a jetliner to get some extra overtime pay:

American Airlines mechanic accused of sabotaging plane over labor dispute

By DAVID KOENIG and CURT ANDERSON
Saturday, September 7, 2019 2:24PM

MIAMI — An American Airlines mechanic is accused of sabotaging a plane because he was upset over stalled labor contract negotiations, according to court documents.

He was also fired from another airline several years ago and briefly had his mechanic’s license suspended, the documents show.

Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani appeared in federal court in Miami on Friday on a charge of willfully damaging or disabling a plane. Federal investigators said he admitted to tampering with a part that provides vital flight information to pilots.

The pilots aborted the July 17 flight before takeoff in Miami.

Alani, 60, was arrested Thursday. He had worked for American since 1988 but was suspended after his arrest.

Court records from a lawsuit in California indicate that for some years, Alani worked both for American and Alaska Airlines until Alaska fired him in 2008 after several errors, including failing to verify that repairs were working and installing the wrong battery on a plane. The Federal Aviation Administration suspended his mechanic’s certificate for 30 days, according to court documents.

Alani, who was born in Iraq and became a U.S. citizen in 1992, sued Alaska Airlines for discrimination based on national origin. A judge dismissed the lawsuit for lack of evidence.

… Nothing in the criminal complaint against Alani suggests any link to terrorism, and prosecutors did not indicate that any such charges are pending. …

Alani said he tampered with the plane “to cause a delay or have the flight canceled in anticipation of obtaining overtime work,” Ruiz wrote. …

When mechanics examined the plane, they found a piece of foam glued inside a navigation system part called an air data module. Video from an American Airlines surveillance camera captured a person who drove up to the plane, got out and spent seven minutes working around the compartment under the cockpit that contains the navigation system, according to the affidavit.

The person was later identified by co-workers as Alani, in part by his distinctive limp, the affidavit said.

In the Washington Post opinion section, an eloquent articulation of the conventional wisdom that Resistance Is Futile, that In The Long Run We Are All Dead so why even try defending your turf?

Britain is no stranger to barriers. Today, almost all of them lie in ruins.

Visiting Roman walls amid the chaos of the Brexit debate.

By Erica X Eisen
Erica X Eisen is a freelance writer now based in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

Writers these days never live anywhere, they are always “based” somewhere. Unlike hitmen, however, they are always “based in” some place, never “based out of” anywhere. Ice Pick Willie is based out of Philly, while Erica X Eisen is based in Bishek.

I must say, though, that Ms. Eisen being “based in” Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan is a new one.

September 5

… Eclipsed by its southern twin — Hadrian’s Wall, which has the luck of being both better preserved and named for an emperor of greater renown — the Antonine Wall was built during the reign of Antoninus Pius beginning in 142 A.D. to fend off the Caledonian tribes: the Damnonii, the Venicones and the Taexali (whom the Roman legions never succeeded in subduing and whose collective name, by all accounts, means “the hard-footed ones,” a testament to their endurance and resolve).

Of course, Roman wall-building was a complete failure. What did the Romans know about holding territory?

Time has not been kind to these fortifications, built of turf and wood mounded up over a stone base. …

My visit to the wall coincided with the slow yet seemingly inexorable grinding of the gears of Brexit, which amounts to nothing so much as the construction of a great wall.

… To many supporters of the wall that Johnson and his allies wish to build, the people it would keep out are barbarians at the gates, foreigners of unfamiliar custom and religion who amount to an existential threat to the state. At such times as these we would do well to remember the lesson that a visit to ancient walls teaches us: their folly. …

Britain is no stranger to boundaries. From Roman fortifications to medieval civic defenses, it is crisscrossed by layer upon layer of borders that have been erased, abandoned, forgotten as years and empires have moved on. Visiting these structures — typically worn down to knobbles of stray masonry — it is impossible to view them as anything but sad. On a long enough time scale, every defense becomes permeable, every hold can be breached, so that it becomes difficult to understand what borders the walls were consecrating in the first place. …

… The stones of Hadrian’s Wall, for instance, would over the centuries find their way into cowsheds, country churches, grain mills and manor houses. Humans have no greater reverence for delimitations that have lost their meaning than do the elements, merely more expedient means of disposing of them. These partially dismantled structures are testaments to the artificiality of national divisions,

For example, when, a mere 1900 years after Hadrian’s Wall, the United Kingdom’s parliament granted the Scots a chance to vote for independence in 2014, only 45% of them voted to secede. So there!

but also to the perspective that a remove of several centuries grants. At a time when the fires of nationalism are being stoked as a powerful force of separation, we would do well to remember the many boundaries that once seemed natural and absolute to their makers but that have since faded in relevance and crumbled into dust.

So that’s why the history of England, with its natural defenses of sea:

This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,

is so much more tragic than that of, say, Belarus, which has had the good fortune to have no natural defenses.

Seriously, earlier this year in “Barriers Against Barbarism,” I reviewed historian David Frye’s eye-opening history of 4,000 years of barrier-building, from the Fertile Crescent to the Malibu Colony, Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick.

Throughout Walls, Frye tries to explain the psychology of this bizarre anti-wall belief system.

One famous people that chose to live without walls were the Spartans, who felt that physical security made men decadent. “They opted for a forced, artificial barbarism over high culture.” Frye repeatedly observes that a lack of walls means a lack of diversity within society. In Sparta, as in most barbarian tribes beyond the walls, virtually each male citizen must have no profession other than war.

In contrast, the Athenians built long walls to protect their access to their port, behind which their men diverged into a dazzling variety of jobs, such as philosopher, playwright, sculptor, architect, and historian. As Frye repeatedly documents, walls mean economic diversity and cultural progress. In contrast, a lack of secure borders means merely the war of all against all. …

“One path, beginning with walls, had led to writing, architecture, astronomy, and math. The other, open and unwalled, led only to militarism.”

From Camelot:

Shall two knights never tilt for me
And let their blood be spilt for me?
Oh where are the simple joys of maidenhood?

Shall I not be on a pedestal
Worshipped and competed for?
Not be carried off, or better still
Cause a little war?

Where are the simple joys of maidenhood?
Are these sweet, gentle pleasures gone for good?
Shall a feud not begin for me?
Shall kith not kill their kin for me?
Oh, where are the trivial joys
Harmless, convivial joys
Where are the simple joys of maidenhood?

A New York Times obituary seems to be intended as a metaphor of current relevance to trends on American campuses that bear an unsettling resemblance to the Chinese Cultural Revolution:

Nie Yuanzi, Whose Poster Fanned the Cultural Revolution, Dies at 98

By Chris Buckley
Sept. 3, 2019

When Nie Yuanzi put up a vitriolic wall poster one day in 1966, she plunged into the political maelstrom of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. For the rest of her life, Ms. Nie wrestled with the fame, and the infamy, that her act of rebellion would bring.

As this obit goes on to point out, it wasn’t exactly an act of rebellion, but more of a Calling Out of Top Dog Mao Tse-tung’s enemy, the head of Peking U., for Cancelation.

The poster brazenly denounced the Communist Party secretary of Peking University, where Ms. Nie worked, as well as two other Beijing officials. After Mao praised the poster, Ms. Nie vaulted to the front of the militant Red Guard student movement, which Mao was stoking to attack his foes. …

Ms. Nie died on Wednesday at 98. Her son Yu Xiaodong said the cause was respiratory failure. …

The Chinese news media has remained silent about her death, a sign of how sensitive the traumas of the Cultural Revolution remain. …

Ms. Nie was not a typical Red Guard. When Mao began the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Ms. Nie was a midlevel Communist Party functionary at Peking University. At 45, she was more than two decades older than the high school and university students who formed the bulk of the Red Guards.

Ms. Nie was born on April 5, 1921, in rural Henan Province in central China, the youngest of seven children. Her father belonged to a long family line of well-off landowners and doctors, but many of his children embraced revolutionary politics. …

After the Communist Party came to power in 1949, Ms. Nie climbed the political apparatus in northeast China. Her big chance came in 1960, when she was transferred to prestigious Peking University.

… Despite her limited education, she was among the party loyalists sent to watch over the university, regarded as a seedbed of unorthodox ideas. In 1963 she was promoted to Communist Party secretary of the philosophy department, which was turning out teachers and theorists trained in Marxist-Maoist doctrine.

So it sounds like she was a professional Communist Party minder paid to oversee and snitch on professors.

When Mao called for a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Ms. Nie did not question his accusations that dangerous “revisionists” and “capitalist roaders” had infiltrated the party and were trying to derail his revolution.

“I thought that I had to obey Chairman Mao,” she wrote in her memoirs, “In the Vortex of the Cultural Revolution,” published in Hong Kong. “This was personally launched and led by Chairman Mao; of course I had to respond positively.”

Ms. Nie said that she and six other party activists associated with the philosophy department had come up with the idea of a big-character poster laying out their frustrations with the university leader, Lu Ping, but that they had had no plans to ignite a political firestorm.

Some historians, however, have said that Ms. Nie was no innocent — that she was indeed part of a scheme to undermine party leaders by lighting that fuse at Peking University.

“She was attuned to the political struggles in the high ranks,” said Ye Yonglie, a popular historian who was a student at Peking University from 1957 to 1963. …

A few days later, Kang Sheng, a powerful security official, reported to Mao about the poster. Mao immediately grasped it as kindling for his Cultural Revolution. He ordered that the poster be reprinted and circulated. He later praised it as the “first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster in the country.”

Ms. Nie leapt to political stardom.

A lot of Youth Rebellions turn out to be less spontaneous than they might seem, but instead are driven by 45-year-old bureaucrats responding to power struggles at the Top, with ambitious students then responding to which way the winds seem to be blowing among the grown-ups.

Our colleges these days employ enormous numbers of 45-year-old bureaucrats, for example in the ever-growing Diversity departments. Not surprisingly, they tend to instigate students who someday want to be 45-year-old bureaucrats in the Diversity department.