Other People’s Thoughts is a section in the Journal of the China Heritage site. It is inspired by a compilation of quotations put together by Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans), one of our Ancestors, during his reading life.
Pierre remarked that the resulting modest volume of quotations was ‘idiosyncratically compiled for the amusement of idle readers’ (see Simon Leys, Other People’s Thoughts, 2007). Our aim is similar: to amuse our readers (idle or otherwise); as is our modus operandi: to build up an idiosyncratic compilation, one that reflects the interests of The Wairarapa Academy for New Sinology and its coterie.
In collecting this material, and by adding to it over time, we accord also with a Chinese literary practice in which quotations — sometimes called yǔlù 語錄, literally ‘recorded sayings’ — have a particular history, and a powerful resonance.
The most famous collection of recorded sayings is The Analects 論語, compiled by disciples of Confucius. Then there is the timeless 5000-words of Laozi’s The Tao and the Power 道德經, as well as the Chan/Zen 禪宗 tradition of what in English are known by the Japanese term kōan 公案, dating from the Tang dynasty. Modern imitations range from the political bon mots of Mao Zedong to excerpts from the prolix prose of Xi Jinping’s tireless speech writers, and published snippets from arm-chair philosophers and motivational speakers.
Other People’s Thoughts also finds inspiration in the ‘poetry talks’ 詩話, ‘casual jottings’ 筆記 and ‘marginalia’ 眉批 of China’s literary tradition.
— Geremie R. Barmé,
Editor, China Heritage
31 July 2024
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Other People’s Thoughts I-XLVI:
- Other People’s Thoughts, China Heritage
Other People’s Thoughts, XLVII
Human types supposedly extinct for centuries, the dancing dervish, the robber chieftain, the Grand Inquisitor, have suddenly reappeared, not as inmates of lunatic asylums, but as the masters of the world. … Man’s history reduces itself to the rise and fall of material civilizations, one Tower of Babel after another. In that case we can be pretty certain what is ahead of us. Wars and yet more wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions, Hitlers and super-Hitlers — and so downwards into abysses which are horrible to contemplate.
— George Orwell, ‘Notes on the Way’, Time and Tide, 6 April 1940
Gore Vidal on the Death of William F. Buckley Jr.
‘I thought hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins forever those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred.’
The Opium of the People
Marx’s famous saying that ‘religion is the opium of the people’ is habitually wrenched out of its context and given a meaning subtly but appreciably different from the one he gave it. Marx did not say, at any rate in that place, that religion is merely a dope handed out from above; he said that it is something the people create for themselves to supply a need that he recognized to be a real one. ‘Religion is the sigh of the soul in a soulless world. Religion is the opium of the people.’ What is he saying except that man does not live by bread alone, that hatred is not enough, that a world worth living in cannot be founded on ‘realism’ and machine-guns? If he had foreseen how great his intellectual influence would be, perhaps he would have said it more often and more loudly.
— George Orwell, ‘Notes on the Way’, Time and Tide, 6 April 1940
Eternal by Comparison
The hell of communism, like every other hell, was smothering in the worst sense of the term. But literature transformed that into a life force, a force which helped you survive and hold your head up and win out over dictatorship.
In a country of that kind, the first thing for a writer is the most important one, the most substantial one, it is: do not take the regime seriously. You are a writer, you are going to have a much richer life than they have, you are in some sense or another eternal by comparison with those kinds of people, and in the last analysis you don’t need to bother about them very much.
— Ismail Kadare, d. 1 July 2024
A Tragic Relation with Freedom
For a writer, personal freedom is not so important. It is not individual freedom that guarantees the greatness of literature, otherwise writers in democratic countries would be superior to all others. Some of the greatest writers wrote under dictatorship – Shakespeare, Cervantes. The great universal literature has always had a tragic relation with freedom. The Greeks renounced absolute freedom and imposed order on chaotic mythology, like a tyrant. In the west, the problem is not freedom. There are other servitudes – lack of talent, thousands of mediocre books published every year.
I have created a body of literary work during the time of two diametrically opposed political systems: a tyranny that lasted for 35 years (1955-1990), and 20 years of liberty. In both cases, the thing that could destroy literature is the same: self-censorship.
— Ismail Kadare
Overcoming the Impossible
‘I am so grateful for literature, because it gives me the chance to overcome the impossible.’
Dictatorships, Kadare argues, breed untruth, selfishness, distrust, fear and irrationality. In the state of our world today, this alone renders Kadare essential reading.
An ancient shadow permeates his work
— Alberto Manguel on the genius of Ismail Kadare, 1 July 2024
Day One
Well, folks, it finally happened. The deep state managed to throw me into the bowels of the beast. Today is the darkest day in American history, engineered by the Clinton-Biden Global Crime Family, the Soros upload into OpenAI, the Bavarian Illuminati, the Aspen Institute and its lizard alien overlords, the Bush-Obama-Hapsburg family, the Fugger Bank, and the liberal shills at the New York Times.
— ‘Steve Bannon’s Prison Diary’, parody on Rick Wilson’s Substack, 3 July 2024
Election Eve
Sunak tried to explain why not getting planes to Rwanda counted as a success. Everyone’s eyes glazed over. Rish! is so yesterday’s man. “I have a plan,” he sobbed. Except he hasn’t. He’s never had a plan other than to be prime minister. That’s part of the problem. No real convictions. Just an absurdly inflated idea of his own brilliance and a tick on the CV before heading off to California. Hopefully he will be happier there.
— John Crace, Rishi sinks into TV sofa as Boris gloats and Mel goes rogue, The Guardian, 3 July 2024
The Fourth of July
What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned but never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.
— Judge Learned Hand, The Spirit of Liberty, 1944
Portillo Moments in the UK, 4 July 2024 Fourth
What a profound delight it has been to see them claim their scalps. Jacob Rees-Mogg, this festering spider-web of a man, oozing entitlement, nativism and cynicism. Now he’s gone. Penny Mordaunt, a vacuum in human form. Gone. Grant Shapps, a man with such little personality he doesn’t even have a set identity. Gone. Gillian Keegan, Lucy Frazer, Simon Hart. All gone.
Each and every one of them felt like a Portillo moment. Mogg especially. I let out an involuntary roar when he was defeated that actually took me by surprise. It was a cry of relief and triumph after years of having to watch this dreadful little man, and those like him, continue to poison our political life.
But the real Portillo moment came later. It was Liz Truss. The instigator of Tory misfortune closed the curtain on their time in power. It was utterly fitting.
She emerged blinking onto the stage at her count, after her opponents stood on stage awkwardly, wondering if she would ever come. Almost certainly she was hiding backstage, afraid to face the music. And then the result came in. It was historic. The biggest ever Tory to Labour swing in a constituency. The former prime minister had lost her seat. This paragon of uselessness and ideological mania finally met her electoral punishment. And afterwards, if you looked closely, you could see the anger in her robotic eyes. It was a beautiful sight, the likes of which we’ll never forget.
— Ian Dunt, Election 2024: A new day has broken in the most beautiful of all possible worlds, 5 July 2024
Starmer’s Victory to Lose
Labour’s victory has given the United Kingdom a chance to save itself by remaking itself. It has sprung from a very deep pool of disenchantment with the way things work in the country—and the multiple ways in which they patently do not. If Starmer grasps the truth that his triumph is a function of the United Kingdom’s brokenness, he will have the courage to begin to fix it. If not, it will remain dangerously unfixed. And it may indeed become unfixable. The party that has dominated it for 200 years has imploded. It would be foolish to imagine that the same thing could not happen to the country.
— Fintan O’Toole, Can Starmer Save Britain?, Foreign Affairs, 5 June 2024
讀書三餘
冬者，歲之餘；
夜者，日之餘；
陰雨者，時之餘也。
From Hulk Hogan’s Mouth to …
“Let Trumpmania run wild, brother!” he exclaimed. “Let Trumpmania rule again! Let Trumpmania make America great again!”
— Hulk Hogan addresses the 2024 Republican National Convention, 18 July 2024
The Saddest Race: British Politicians and the GOP
Nothing says “our empire ended several decades ago” like the scramble to get in on the end of theirs.
— Marina Hyde, The Guardian, 19 July 2024
Shot to the Head
I fear we’ve now crossed some threshold where the choreographed image or manufactured narrative becomes the only reality we have left. Look how the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, which HAPPENED ONLY TWO WEEKS AGO, so speedily transformed from real-time tragedy into iconography. No sooner had Mr. Trump ducked for cover when some indefinable Trumpy-sense clicked on, calculating with acute precision how best to turn the moment of survival into a sequence of living memes, first by asking for his shoes, perhaps so he could be seen to exit at full height, and then raising a fist to the clouds, mouthing, “Fight, fight, fight.” Someone died in that mindless violence, but what does it say about the supremacy of the defining visual that Mr. Trump commemorated the moment at his party’s convention by caressing the victim’s uniform live onstage?
— Armando Iannucci, I Created ‘Veep.’ The Real-Life Version Isn’t So Funny., 26 July 2024
Xi Jinping, always on the road
So far the most powerful tool in the tool box to check the power of the party appears to be the inspection team enforcing stricter party regulations.
This means such inspections would have to continue, as there are no other check-and-balance tools.
The success of the campaign has so far been measured by the number of corrupt officials snared every year. But, in the long term, shouldn’t success be measured by how rare corruption is?
— Josephine Ma, China’s third plenum and the 3 major challenges facing ‘Xi the reformer’, South China Morning Post, 16 July 2024
Next Time
‘Don’t miss Trump next time.’
— Kyle Gass (formerly of Tenacious D), Sydney, 16 July 2024
A Party Plenum and a Republican Convention
Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts. The keyword here is BLACKWHITE. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to BELIEVE that black is white, and more, to KNOW that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary.”
― George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four
Sign of the Beast
The Trump cult has now overtly merged with evangelical Christianity. He is their pussy-grabbing saint, their Cyrus on Epstein’s party list, their avenging angel, chosen by God to purge the sins of the woke libs with fire and sword.
— Rick Wilson, 29 July 2024
當下中國四類人
先知者，悲憤遠去；
後知者，無聲吶喊；
無知者，歲月靜好；
愚知者，一片狂歡。
— 章立凡轉
Stele for Shedding Tears 墮淚碑
After Yang Hu died, the people of Xiangyang erected a stele on the mountain to commemorate the man. Whoever gazed at the stele would always shed tears, and so Yang Hu’s appointed successor, Du Yu (222–284), named it the “stele for shedding tears”. Du Yu himself, who “loved to make a posthumous name,” made two steles on which he carved his accomplishments; then he sank one into the river beneath Mount Wan and set the other atop Mount Xian, saying, “How do we know that in the future the river will not turn into a hill and the hill into a valley?” 預好為後世名，常言高岸為谷，深谷為陵，刻石為二碑，紀其勳績，一沈萬山之下，一立峴山之上，曰：焉知此後不為陵谷乎。(《晉書》列傳第四 羊祜 杜預，杜預 16)
— Xiaofei Tian, Tao Yuanming and Manuscript Culture: The Record of a Dusty Table, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2005, p.54
Never Forget
Never forget, the press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy; the professors are the enemy. Professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it.
— Richard Nixon, as reformulated by J.D. Vance in 2017 and again on 17 July 2024
J.D. Vance’s Pulp Fiction Upcycled
J.D. Vance was named Trump’s running mate, which means people are talking about his stupid fucking book again, in which a venture capitalist from suburban Ohio who spent a couple of summers in Kentucky praises himself for pulling himself up by his bootstraps and blames the continued poverty of his ‘fellow’ hillbillies on their poor choices.
Instead, read literally anything else. Read Appalachian Reckoning which responds to J.D. Vance’s stupid fucking book. Read Demon Copperhead. Read Another Appalachia. Dump a can of alphabet soup onto the floor and read whatever comes out of that. I guarantee it will be better than J.D. Vance’s stupid fucking book.
— Caleb Miller, I Grew Up in Appalachia Too. J.D. Vance Is a Hillbilly Phony, Daily Beast, 19 July 2024
Fifty fifty
‘Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.’
— George Carlin
Volk und Führer
In Hitler and the Germans, the political philosopher Eric Vogelin dismisses the idea that Hitler — gifted in oratory and political opportunism but poorly educated and vulgar — mesmerized and seduced the German people. The Germans, he writes, supported Hitler and the “grotesque, marginal figures” surrounding him because he embodied the pathologies of a diseased society, one beset by economic collapse and hopelessness. Voegelin defines stupidity as a “loss of reality.” The loss of reality means a “stupid” person cannot “rightly orient his action in the world, in which he lives.” The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society’s zeitgeist.
— Chris Hedges, My Thoughts on Biden Dropping Out, 22 July 2024
Good News and Bad News
告訴大伙一個好消息和一個壞消息。
好消息是以後不會有壞消息了。
壞消息是以後只有好消息了。—馬冀遠記者
Necropolitics
Trump’s candidacy is a mortality play. He wants to die in the White House. Whatever else he might say, or whatever else his followers might believe, this is the essential reality. Old-guy dictatorship involves funeral planning. When Trump says that he admires a Putin or a Xi, what he means is “that man will die in office and not in jail.”
… The necropolitics is no one’s fault but that of the people concerned. Republicans did not have to nominate an aged coup-plotting felon. The broligarchs did not have to install their candidate to succeed a deceased Trump. And Vance did not have to join Trump’s ticket.
— Timothy Snyder, Veep Stakes, 24 July 2024
Poem for an Ersatz Axis
帝京城郭盡凋殘，作秀申遺枉自歡。
舊址拆修無永定[1]，新樓復建豈天安？[2]
國門基上殭屍臣[3]，陵墓碑前旗幟單。
造夢誰知了夢處，煤山老樹久孤寒。
注1：永定門1957年根據蘇聯磚家意見拆除，2003年重建。
注2：天安門於1970年秘密拆除後重建。
注3：原皇城正南門先後稱大明門、大清門，民國改稱中華門。1959年拆除。1976年建毛澤東陵墓，壓在國門原址上。
章立凡，七律 無題，2024年7月29日
[Note: The Beijing historian Zhang Lifan composed this poem in response to the news that the 46th session of the World Heritage Committee in New Delhi, India, had announced that the Beijing Central Axis — “A Building Ensemble Exhibiting the Ideal Order of the Chinese Capital” — had been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, becoming China’s 59th World Heritage Site.]