HONG KONG’S BALLOTS CHALLENGE CHAIRMAN MAO’S GUN BARRELS:

The Hong Kong pro-democracy movement’s overwhelming Nov. 24 election victory demonstrates that the city’s brave citizens disdain Mao Zedong’s political ditties almost as much as they scorn the crooked Chinese Communist Party tyranny the mass-murdering former chairman created.

Mao, who fancied himself a poet and philosopher, declared that political power grows from the barrel of a gun. From the Soviet Kremlin to the University of California, Berkeley to Jane Fonda, the global left waved Mao’s Little Red Book, applauded his so-called “thoughts” and proclaimed radical Marxism to be humanity’s future.

Hong Kong’s 2019 protests and the recent district election results are actions –deeds, not words — that directly challenge Mao’s gun barrel maxim and lay claim to a future where political power expresses the will of free people.

My latest Creators Syndicate column.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Beijing Was Confident Its Hong Kong Allies Would Win. After the Election, It Went Silent.

The Chinese government seemed confident that its allies would prevail in the Hong Kong elections on Sunday.

For a week, commentators wrote brassy pieces saying the Hong Kong public would go to the polls to “end social chaos and violence,” a vote against what they saw as rogues and radicals. Editors at state-run news outlets prepared stories that predicted withering losses for the protest movement.

When it became clear early Monday that democracy advocates in the semiautonomous territory had won in a landslide, Beijing turned silent. The news media, for the most part, did not even report the election results. And Chinese officials directed their ire at a familiar foe: the United States.

The sudden pivot reflects the ruling Communist Party’s continuing struggle to understand one of its worst political crises in decades. At various moments in the months long protests in Hong Kong, Beijing has been caught off guard, forced to recalibrate its propaganda machine.

They don’t understand democracy, or how people used to democracy think. How could they?

UPDATE (FROM AUSTIN): Glenn’s addition is right in line with my column, which I wrote on Monday. The issues the essay explores will resonate for 30 years. 30 is a reasonable number — the Tiananmen Square massacre has resonated for 30 years, despite the Chicoms attempts to erase it from history. Sunday’s November 2019 ballot in Hong Kong was the first time Chinese citizens had a chance to cast a vote rejecting the Chinese Communist Party’s June 1989 thug decision to turn Tiananmen Square into a slaughter house. The Beijing Commies lost the 2019 ballot, big time. Why? My guess: Thugs tend to surround themselves with frightened yes men. My latest book, Cocktails from Hell, explores Red China’s numerous gambits, delusions and fragilities.

WADING ASHORE IN INDIA: The caption stresses that this exercise –Exercise Tiger TRIUMPH–is a training exercise in humanitarian assistance disaster relief operations. Yes, that’s right. U.S. Marines and Indian Army soldiers disembarking and wading ashore at Kakinada Beach, India– “a joint and combined Indian and U.S. force.” Well, this joint and combined India-U.S. force is well armed, because you never know what to expect when conducting humanitarian assistance. I’m certain that’s how the boys in Beijing will interpret this photo. Photo taken November 19, 2019.

STRATEGYTALK: Broken ships. Jim Dunnigan discusses why the U.S. Navy is having problems building new ship classes. If you learn something, please subscribe.

B-52 IN NORWEGIAN STRATOSPHERE: A USAF B-52 flies over Norway while training with the Royal Norwegian Air Force. Meanwhile, on the ground in Germany: Armored vehicles from the U.S. Army’s 1st Infantry Division perform a strategic convoy maneuver at the Hohenfels Training Area.

STRYKER POWER: A U.S. Army Stryker M1128 Mobile Gun System assigned to the 3rd Cavalry Regiment engages simulated enemy targets during a live fire exercise at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. Photo taken on Nov. 08, 2019.

HOME FRONT? IT’S A WAR ZONE:

The U.S. home front has become a war zone under persistent attack by adversaries who employ an array of weapons and execute operations exploiting stealth, ambush, naivete and, in many cases, utter stupidity.

I’ll use the terror threat to make a general point.

“War on the home front” brings to American minds violent terror attack — and after 9/11, it should.

However, international Islamic terrorists opened their war on U.S. soil in 1993 with a truck bomb attack on the World Trade Center that killed six and injured several hundred.

Osama bin Laden and his terror gang warned us. The planet was their battlefield and killing Americans on American soil a premier objective. Few bothered to pay attention. Naivete and stupidity exacted a terrible price.

I suggest you read the entire essay.

AMERICA’S HOME FRONT IS A COMPLEX WAR ZONE

GRADUATE FORMATION OVER SAN ANTONIO: A military pilot’s career has to start some place. In this photo pilots from the 8th Flying Training Squadron fly their T-6 Texans in formation during USAF Basic Military Training graduation at Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas, Nov. 8, 2019.

SOME EXTRAS: I had a computer problem during the PJMedia event in California so I didn’t post anything. Got it solved yesterday. This is a good shot of a Pave Hawk conducting a combat search and rescue demonstration. Ten days ago the U.S. Navy, the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, the Royal Australian Navy, and the Royal Canadian Navy conducted a large joint exercise in the Philippine Sea (Annual Exercise, aka ANNUALEX). Nice photo — think of it as visual diplomacy.

ABOVE THE BAP ANGAMOS: An MH-60R Sea Hawk helicopter conducts a hoist exercise with the Peruvian navy submarine BAP Angamos off the coast of San Clemente Island.

VENOM OVER FLOWING DESERT SAND: Saudi Arabia’s Empty Quarter? No,a USMC UH-1Y Venom helicopter on an exercise near Brawley, California. Marine Venoms do a lot of training over desert terrain. Here’s an April exercise near Yuma. Well, a lot of U.S. military training areas are in our deserts. As a wizened fellow (who knew his maps) once pontificated, “Bay, roughly a quarter of these United States is hard a** desert. For some reason the mainstream media doesn’t know that…wait, it’s flyover desert…never mind. Gimme a sec, dammit. I gotta kick Fort Irwin off my boots.” Fort Irwin? Here’s a USAF A-10 conducting an “austere” landing at Irwin. This photo shows you why Army and Marine tankers love A-10s. More Irwin: An Abrams with a counter-mine kit prepares to attack opposing forces and a dusty Bradley crew scans the desert. Last but not least, another Marine sand photo, this time beach sand, not desert. An LCAC with the USS Bataan Amphibious Ready Group comes ashore during a landing exercise.

HONG KONG IN HISTORY’S LENS:

Consider the past 10 days. On Nov. 8, security forces killed a student protestor. Another was wounded Nov. 11. On Nov. 12, Beijing sycophants claimed mobs had brought the city to “the brink of total collapse.”

Beijing blames the U.S. and Britain for the violence. But accusing adversaries of doing what communist sympathizers and agents are actually doing was a standard Cold War Soviet and Red Chinese tactic.

Stuart Heaver (reporting from Hong Kong for The Independent) thinks Beijing is already invading. “There may be no tanks,” Heaver wrote, but many locals believe “PLA troops are already here, disguised as Hong Kong riot police …” They intend “to impose Tiananmen by stealth and create a climate of fear.”

The suspect police “are often heard speaking in Putonghua dialect,” Heaver writes. Putonghua is Mandarin (Beijing) Chinese. Most Hong Kongers speak the Cantonese dialect. Eighty-five to 95 million Chinese living along the south China coast speak Cantonese or Hakka, a related “southern” dialect.

Which leads to a linguistic connection that disturbs Beijing’s mandarins (pun intended): Seventy percent of Taiwan’s 24 million people speak Hakka.

Read the entire column.

ADDITION, THANKS TO A COMMENTER: My sources on Taiwanese dialects all said Hokkien and Hakka. Hokkien failed to make it into the column– my error. I’ve emailed my Creators editor and asked her to include it.

ARMED HOG LEAVES VEGAS: Well, an A-10C Warthog takes off from Nellis Air Force Base (which is just outside of Las Vegas). But “armed Hog leaves Vegas” has more snap. “Armed Hog splits Vegas” is another option.

BUFFS HIGH OVER THE BARENTS SEA: Three USAF B-52Hs and five Royal Norwegian Air Force F-16s fly toward the Barents Sea in the Arctic. Why? A stab at an answer: Russia’s Kola peninsula is on the Barents Sea. Russia’s Northern Fleet is based on the Kola.

SOUTH KOREA EXPLORES HIGH PERFORMANCE NAVAL AIR: Will South Korea purchase stealthy Vertical Take-Off and Landing F-35Bs? The post doesn’t come out and say it, but the betting line is yes. South Korea intends to build at least one 30,000 ton warship that looks a lot like a Japanese DDH (destroyer helicopter carrier). A DDH, depending on configuration, can handle a dozen F-35Bs. A dozen supersonic, stealthy fighter bombers can be a potent, multi-mission force, a point I made in a column written in 2017. It’s common knowledge South Korean naval planners have urged their government to buy F-35Bs, and the post notes that. I’ll add this. The F35B can also be dispersed on land to “hide locations” that are not airfields. The British Harrier had this capability and the British touted it. The post doesn’t mention that tactic, but it is a capability that defense planners world-wide discuss, especially in countries that confront enemies who just might try to launch a surprise attack on key airfields. Here’s a photo from 2011 showing a test model F-35B turning to approach the U.S. Navy’s amphibious assault ship USS Wasp. This photo from 2019 shows an operational F-35B “thrust vectoring” as it takes off from the USS Essex.

A RETROSPECTIVE ON THE BERLIN WALL, 2009: I wrote this column ten years ago.

Here’s an excerpt:

Many in the West, including the U.S., believed that the communists had history on their side. The wry debate reply from the defeatist lefties favoring unilateral U.S. nuclear disarmament was “better Red than dead.” For decades — I repeat, decades — this crowd had a media pulpit from which its self-proclaimed intelligentsia preached the moral equivalency of the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and at times dropped the all pretense and fingered the U.S. as the “fascist state” and global oppressor.

In the language of the defeatist left, the U.S. was the jailer, the warmonger, the threat to world peace.

The Berlin Wall’s collapse exposed that Big Lie, as did the documented moral, political, economic and ecological wretchedness of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, we still hear echoes of this “blame America” cant lacing al-Qaida propaganda and the lectures of hard-left reactionaries like Bill Ayers. The great anti-American lies of the Cold War are recast as the great anti-American lies of the War on Terror.

Breaching the wall in 1989 was bloodless, but the Cold War certainly wasn’t. World War III did not break out along the intra-German border and produce a nuclear conflagration, but the Cold War’s battles on the periphery (e.g., Greece, Korea, Vietnam, El Salvador, Angola, Afghanistan) were expensive, fatiguing and deadly.

I think the essay has legs. But read the whole thing and decide.

RELATED: A column from May 2009 recalling May 1989’s propitious events, like Hungary’s decision to open the Austrian-Hungarian border. It also discusses the 1956 Hungarian Revolution’s military leader, General Bela Kiraly. Yes, there are some historical disagreements (some in print) regarding the demolition of the huge ammo dump and the Soviet reaction. However, he told me the version in the column on two different occasions.

ALSO RELATED: The Berlin Airlift Memorial. Nose art on a static C-54 transport.

HAWKS OVER SYRIA AND THE SEA: Two U.S. Army medical evacuation Blackhawk helicopters takeoff from an undisclosed location in Syria. Photo taken October 31. A day later, U.S. Navy sailors in the Gulf of Oman hook cargo to an MH-60R Sea Hawk. The sailors are assigned to the guided-missile destroyer USS Lassen. (The MH-60R is a navalized variant of the UH-60 Blackhawk.) The Blackhawk and its variants have spawned copycats — for example, the Chinese “Copyhawk.” For what it’s worth, here’s a photo I like — a Blackhawk landing in Balad, Iraq, taken in 2006. Last but not least, a Blackhawk extracts Special Forces operators from a mountain in Afghanistan.

THE WAGES OF IRANIAN OIL SMUGGLING:

Iran has proved resourceful in the past when it came to finding new ways to smuggle oil, but the Americans now have decades of experience dealing with Iranian ploys and it has become more difficult to come up with new ideas, given that so many of the most effective sanction evasion methods have been neutralized or made much more difficult and expensive to use.

A long, detailed post that is worth the read. The U.S. sanctions employ the military, diplomatic and economic elements of power. Washington is serving Tehran a well-mixed power cocktail from Hell, to coin a phrase.

REMEMBERING THE FORT HOOD TERROR ATTACK: Ten years ago this week.

Obama initially called the Fort Hood attack “tragic events” and “violence in the workplace.” Words matter. Obama insistently ignored evidence indicating that violent Islamic dogma spurred Hasan. It took Obama six years — till 2015, well after the 2012 election — to call the massacre a terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

Obama decided his political survival trumped the welfare of the soldiers he commanded.

Harsh? Deserved historical judgment. In 2011, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs called Fort Hood “the deadliest terrorist attack within the United States since September 11, 2001.”

In 2017, Hasan wrote that everyone opposing the Afghan Taliban’s establishment of “Sharia (God’s) Law” as supreme law and seeking to replace it with something “like a democracy that doesn’t rule by God’s law” were “the enemies of God” and worth killing.

The global war on terror isn’t over. Obama declared in 2009 that the war on terror had become a “contingency operation.” What a fraud. President Trump despises endless wars, but wars aren’t over until the enemy is defeated.

Worth remembering, especially on Veterans Day.

FLEET OF BONES: The 28th Bomb Wing at Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota, prepares its B-1B Lancers for the Bomber Task Force mission in the U.S. Central Command area of operations.

CHURNING WAKE: The aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford conducts high-speed turns in the Atlantic Ocean. Photo taken October 29. The Ford is conducting sea trials. The ship –first in its class of new carriers– has experienced a several problems with its advanced systems. Its EMALS (Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System) catapult issues have received the most media criticism. As the linked post notes, there are other problems as well.

THE FORT HOOD TERROR ATTACK AS BITTER HISTORY:

Former Army major and psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan made Fort Hood a domestic battlefield. He killed 13 people and wounded over 30 more before a policeman wounded him. Fourteen dead is arguably a more accurate toll, since the unborn child of a pregnant victim died when she died. This is a forensic fact.

What spurred Hasan’s treason? From the get-go, non-benighted humans identified Islamic jihadi ideology as the psycho-political insanity guiding his crime. Hasan had known contact with terrorist recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki. But the FBI did not investigate the warnings signaling Hasan’s Islamic conversion. An official who recommended the FBI investigate was told an interview was “politically sensitive.”

Really? Sensitive to whom?

Answer: the boss of the FBI, then-President Barack Obama.

Read the entire essay.

REMEMBERING THE FORT HOOD TERRORIST ATTACK: Ten years ago today.

Ten years ago on Thursday Nov. 5, 2009, a day that had dawned chilly but bright in Killeen, quickly turned bloody as a U.S. Army psychiatrist walked into an on-post resiliency center and began shooting.

On Nov. 5, 2009 Nidal Malik Hasan fatally shot 13 people and injured more than 30 others, before Fort Hood civilian police Sergeant Mark Todd shot him, ending the rampage. (File)

Nidal Malik Hasan fatally shot 13 people and injured more than 30 others, before Fort Hood civilian police Sergeant Mark Todd shot him, ending the rampage.

Of the 13 killed, 11 died at the scene and two others died later, after being taken to hospitals.

One of those killed was pregnant, yet her baby who also died, never has been individually counted on the list of victims.

The shooting still ranks as the worst mass shooting at a military installation in U.S. history.

Hasan shouted “Allahu Akbar” before he started killing his fellow soldiers. Barack Obama called Hasan’s crime work place violence.

In a column written in November 2009, I argued Hasan committed treason– and was a terrorist.

Hasan’s treason employed terrorist tactics. Sure, the lawyers can argue Hasan attacked soldiers, with civilians as incidental targets, and the assault occurred on a military post, but the tactics are those used by jihadis in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Indonesia and a score of other nations — the armed killer entering an open facility and massacring unarmed men and women.

Hasan received the death sentence for his crime and he remains on death row at Fort Leavenworth.

WRAITH PAINT SCHEME ON AN F-16: An aggressor squadron F-16 Fighting Falcon gets a new paint job in the paint barn at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. The “Wraith” design “replicates an adversary paint scheme.”

AERIAL SPRAY ATTACKING INVASIVE VEGETATION: An Air Force Reserve C-130 Hercules flies over the Utah Test and Training Range during an aerial spray operation.

TALONS OVER SAN ANTONIO: USAF T-38C Talons assigned to the 560th Flying Training Squadron, fly as part of a 4-ship formation. The planes are returning to Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph after conducting instructor pilot training over South Texas.