American who idolised Bruce Lee and trained at Shaolin writing star's biography

He grew up wanting to be Bruce Lee, and later became a Shaolin disciple; now Matthew Polly is in Hong Kong to write story of kung fu star's life

By Shirley Zhao
http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1218619/american-who-idolised-bruce-lee-and-trained-shaolin-writing-stars
April 20, 2013


Martial arts expert Matthew Polly in front of a statue of Bruce Lee in Tsim Sha Tsui. Polly, who dropped out of Princeton to become a Shaolin apprentice, is writing the late star's biography. Photo: Edward Wong

Matthew Polly knows about being an introvert and an extrovert. When it's suggested he must be an extrovert, he doesn't deny it but confesses he used to be a skinny, nerdy boy, always too shy and geeky to communicate. Back then, he found it was always the suave and outgoing people who tended to lead or become popular among girls in the US, and he wanted to be one of them.

He believed going to China, to the Shaolin Temple to learn kung fu, would make him different. He went. It did.

"I'm getting better at it [being an extrovert] now," said the 41-year-old American author.

He certainly looks a natural now, always keeping a keen smile, hearty laughs, cracking jokes from time to time and, every so often, giving you a friendly pat on the shoulder or gentle touch on the arm. Even though he stands 1.92 metres tall, he doesn't look intimidating. He is a friend, a pal, and he makes sure you are impressed through showing off his tongue-curling Beijing Putonghua during conversations.

After American Shaolin, a US bestseller on his two-year kung fu training in Shaolin, and Tapped Out, on his ultimate fighting experience in mixed martial arts (MMA), Polly has come to Hong Kong for his third book project, a biography of Bruce Lee.

"No one's written a biography [of Bruce Lee] in the last 20 years," he said. "He's such a huge star. It seemed a shame that no one had written a very good biography about him."

Polly says most books in English about Lee only cover his life in the US, so he came, four decades after the death of Lee, trying to find out what he was really like through interviewing people in Hong Kong who actually knew him and his family.

Among those he has interviewed are movie mogul Raymond Chow Man-wai, Robert Chua Wah-peng, who created the popular television show Enjoy Yourself Tonight, martial arts master Ip Man's son Ip Chun and Betty Ting Pei, Lee's mistress, who was with him when he died in her apartment.

The interview with Ting lasted seven hours, Polly said, during which she showed him her kung fu moves and did Buddhist chanting.

"That has to be the most unique interview I've ever been in," he said. "I think it's one of the very first times she's ever told to Western journalists about her relationship with Bruce. For many years Betty Ting was blamed for Bruce's death, so I think it's good that she's finally decided to open up and tell her side of the story."

Polly's first encounter with Bruce Lee is a typical story. A scrawny 13-year-old who was always bullied suddenly discovered this exotic Hong Kong movie, Enter the Dragon, where a small, lean Asian man beat a whole bunch of people taller and stronger than him. The boy was fascinated and started learning kung fu two years later. He wanted to be Bruce Lee.

The boy, Polly, later entered the Ivy League, majoring in religion and East Asian studies at Princeton University, focusing on Buddhist and Taoist philosophies. He was charmed by the philosopher Zhuangzi's sense of humour and irony and imagined one day, through meditation, he could achieve enlightenment.

Then, after three years of study, he found the perfect answer to his pursuit of martial arts and spirituality - Shaolin Temple, which offered both. In Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee played a Shaolin monk, so there was a definite plus side to it.

"I thought I could become a badass," he said. "And become an enlightened Buddhist, a master. It made perfect sense to me but everyone else thought I was crazy."

That was in 1992, when China was a mystery to many in the West. Polly's mother cried over his decision to leave university for Shaolin, and his father wouldn't talk to him for six months after he bought his plane ticket.

He left anyway, with a backpack and a sleeping bag, expecting to camp outside a quiet, peaceful Buddhist monastery in the middle of Henan province for days or even months until the monks let him in.

Instead, he wound up in a tourist attraction with souvenir stores and restaurants. A young monk led him to a martial arts school next to the temple, Shaolin Wushu Centre, where the school party chief agreed to let him be a Shaolin student for US$1,300 per month. He later discovered the chief overcharged him by almost US$800.

Polly, the first American Shaolin disciple, stayed in the school for two years, training with the Shaolin monks for seven hours a day and six days a week. There was no TV nor any other entertainment, and no one talked to him for the first two months, because the school leaders told them not to, fearing he might spread "impure thoughts".

Two sympathetic monks did break the order and talk to him, and they became close friends. But the big change didn't come until nine months into the training, when a kung fu master from the city of Tianjin requested a challenge match at a banquet thrown by a French photojournalist for Shaolin in the school's restaurant. Polly offered to take the challenge. The monks agreed. He won.

"That was the moment when I became sort of an official member of Shaolin Temple," he said. "And instead of Bao Mosi [his Chinese name], they started to call me laobao ['old Bao', an affectionate nickname]."

In 1995, seeing many monks emigrating overseas, Polly realised he had spent too much money being a foreign disciple in Shaolin and he wanted to finish university and get a job. He went back to the US, but his parents were not impressed by his kung fu achievements. "I don't know what we did wrong," his father said to him when seeing him practising his "iron forearm" against a tree, "but whatever we did wrong, I'm sorry".

His was an achievement-oriented family. He went to Princeton, later Oxford and became a Rhodes Scholar. His sister went to Yale. "At first [my parents] thought I'd fallen off the path of success by going over there," he said. "I think it was after I wrote the book and it became a national bestseller and a Hollywood option that they were like okay."

His two years in Henan being the only foreigner among all the monks and disciples also made him tougher, more confident and outgoing. "For me, whenever any problems come up, I'll think 'well, it can't be worse than Shaolin'," he laughed. "No matter how scared I am now, I can't be any more scared than I was at Shaolin. I think that's the great advantage of chiku [eat bitterness]. If you eat bitterness, then you'll know what sweetness is."

Having stayed in Hong Kong for more than two weeks, Polly will return in July, when the Heritage Museum has an exhibition about Bruce Lee and Betty Ting Pei may be doing a television show on the 40th anniversary of his death. He also hopes to interview more people who knew Lee, such as singer-songwriter Sam Hui Koon-kit and his wife Rebu, as well as Jackie Chan.

Polly says Hong Kong people have been talking more about Bruce Lee recently. He suspects this is related to the huge success of the three films in the recent Ip Manseries about Lee's martial arts mentor.

"There's an old saying that a prophet has no honour in his hometown," he said. "Now people are remembering that it really was Bruce Lee who put Hong Kong on the map. He was the one who brought Hong Kong and Hollywood together. Without Bruce there wouldn't have been a Jackie Chan or Jet Li. I'm glad he's getting the attention I think he deserves it because, for a while, I think people thought he wasn't cool any more."

The Making of the President, Heartland Edition

Salena Zito and Brad Todd profile the Rust Belt voters who elected Donald Trump.

By Fred Siegel

https://www.city-journal.org/html/making-president-heartland-edition-15947.html

June 1, 2018

The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics, by Salena Zito and Brad Todd, Crown Forum, New York, 320 pp., $28

During the 2016 presidential campaign, amid the pontifications of a national press both certain about its disdain for Donald Trump and confused by his appeal, came a flash of insight. Salena Zito of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review explained that the press “takes [Trump] literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” With her ear for how Midwest people speak, Zito, along with her coauthor Brad Todd, expands on this understanding in The Great Revolt.

The authors commissioned an extensive survey for the book and also took a road trip “into the lives of Rust Belt voters.” They spoke with lifelong Democrats who had voted for Barack Obama in 2012 but switched parties in 2016.  “On the back roads and side streets of places like Erie, Pa., and Kenosha, Wis.” emerged voters who never seemed to figure in the networks’ reporting. They were “blue-collar optimists, evangelical pragmatists and suburban vacillators who turned the dials just enough to shock the body politic”—part of a white electorate that, notes analyst Lloyd Green, had seen the loss of more than 700,000 jobs between November 2007 and late 2016.  

Despite Trump’s narrow margin of victory—just 77,000 votes—in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, Zito and Todd see the 2016 election as representing a tectonic shift in America’s electoral plates. “Far from a fluke, the 2016 election was a product of Obama’s globalist conceits that produced defective trade deals, open borders and an aggressive secularism.” Trump’s victory was his triumph, not the Republican Party’s.  Neither the two-time Obama voters who switched to Trump nor the habitual nonvoters who came out to the polls in 2016 saw much to rally around in the GOP. Their ties are to Trump, a finding with implications for the upcoming midterms.

“Eighty-nine percent of Trump voters represented in the Great Revolt Survey agree with the statement ‘Republicans and Democrats in Washington are both guilty of leading the country down the wrong path,’” Zito and Todd write. An Iowa voter insisted that the “only person that is able to turn me against Trump is Trump.” Similarly, in economically hard-hit Ashtabula, Ohio, east of Cleveland, a voter said: “So to ask me what would extricate me from Trump would be like asking me to remove me from myself, from my family, and from my community.” The most important issues for voters in the authors’ survey were “restoring manufacturing jobs, protecting Medicare and social security and appointing conservatives to the Supreme Court to protect religious liberty being threatened by assertive Hilary Clinton Progressives.” One interviewee said that NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, “is no longer an acronym—it’s a noun, and a profanity.”

One cliché that critics got right about Trump’s swing voters is that they came largely from the small-town and rural Midwest. “Trump only carried three of the nation’s 44 ‘mega-counties,’ places with more than one million in population, and only 41 of the country’s 129 ‘extra-large’ counties with more than 400,000 but less than one million,” the authors observe. But in places like Ashtabula County, where Democrats have won for 30 years, Trump beat Clinton by 19 percentage points.

Zito and Todd show a keen understanding of voter sentiment and do not condescend to their subjects. White working-class swing voters have generally been characterized as resentful, ignorant, and often racist, but Zito and Todd describe thoughtful men and women who made a deliberate and sometimes fraught decision to support Trump. Upper-middle-class Joe Steil of Keokuk, Iowa, whom the authors dub a “Rotary Reliable,” interacted with middle- and lower-middle class citizens through his involvement in local civic organizations like the Rotary Club and the YMCA. Steil and many other residents of small and midsize communities are more likely to vote “with their neighbors and not their economic or educational class,” the authors conclude. 

With the Democratic Party doubling down on its hyper-progressive, identity-politics-driven agenda, it will have a hard time recapturing the voters it lost in 2016. “A liberalism that seeks to spread cosmopolitan relativism to the masses,” Zito and Todd write, “by force if necessary, instead of spreading economic equality, was destined to leave a decisive slice of the American electorate in search of a new home.” The Great Revolt does an excellent job of limning the concerns of this crucial and much-maligned segment of the American electorate.

Fred Siegel is a City Journal contributing editor and the author of The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class. 

Sirhan Sirhan, Forgotten Terrorist

He assassinated Robert F. Kennedy 50 years ago this week. Young Americans might not even know his name.

By Warren Kozak

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/sirhan-sirhan-forgotten-terrorist-assassination-of-robert-kennedy/

June 5, 2018

Sirhan Sirhan, is taken from the Hotel Ambassador early June 5, 1968 after he shot Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

What was the first act of Arab terrorism committed inside the United States?

If you were thinking of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which killed six people and wounded 1,000, you’d be off by almost a quarter-century. It actually occurred 50 years ago this week, when Sirhan Bishara Sirhan assassinated Senator Robert F. Kennedy — an act that subverted the American electoral process and altered the history of the United States.

Kennedy had just won the California presidential primary on the night of June 5, 1968, when he thanked a huge crowd of enthusiastic supporters at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and made his way out through the kitchen. Waiting for him there was Sirhan, 24 years old, holding a .22 caliber revolver. Sirhan, a Palestinian Arab, shot the presidential candidate three times — twice in the back and once behind his ear. It was the last shot that proved fatal. Kennedy died 26 hours later at the young age of 42. Five other people in the crowd were wounded but survived.

Because the assassination came just over four years after his brother President John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, and just two months after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in Memphis, the nation focused on gun violence and hatred of the Kennedy family in its aftermath. Many blamed right-wing racists, since the Kennedys had supported the civil-rights movement. I was in school back then, and I remember the most common phrase: “They killed another Kennedy.” The “they” was generic. It wasn’t an individual; it referred to a supposed violent streak that ran through American culture and mythology all the way back to our frontier days.

But a single individual killed Kennedy for very specific reasons. Sirhan was obsessed with both Israel and Jews. He was born in British Mandatory Palestine in 1944 and emigrated to the United States in 1956, attending school in Los Angeles. Yet even though the California economy of the 1950s and 1960s was one of the strongest in the world, Sirhan never took advantage of what surrounded him: He worked as a stable boy and never became a U.S. citizen.

The shooting took place on the one-year anniversary of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War. This was no coincidence. When Kennedy was 22 years old, he traveled to Palestine, writing articles for the Boston Post about his admiration for the country’s Jewish inhabitants. As a senator from New York, Kennedy continued his strong support of Israel. Shortly before the assassination, in a televised debate with his chief Democratic rival, Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy, Kennedy said he supported the sale of fighter jets to Israel.

Indeed, Kennedy was a consistent and staunch supporter of Israel — which infuriated Sirhan. In a 1989 interview with David Frost, Sirhan said: “My only connection with Robert Kennedy was his sole support of Israel and his deliberate attempt to send those 50 bombers to Israel to obviously do harm to the Palestinians.”

Sirhan was convicted of the murder of Kennedy in 1969 and sentenced to death. Three years later, when the California supreme court invalidated all pending death sentences issued before 1972, the conviction was commuted to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole. (Charles Manson was another beneficiary of this ruling.)

Sirhan’s 15th and most recent parole hearing took place in 2016. He was, once again, denied. In a previous hearing in 2006, Tip Kindel, a spokesperson for the board of parole hearings, said Sirhan was “very hostile.” “He hates Americans,” Kindel said. “He continues to pose a risk for public safety.”

It is unclear whether Kennedy could have taken the nomination from Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who entered the race after the incumbent president, Lyndon Johnson, withdrew. Humphrey never ran in any of the primaries, which were fought between Kennedy and McCarthy. Considering the chaos that occurred at the Democratic convention in Chicago the following August, and the strong influence that the Kennedy family still had within the Democratic party, people have debated whether Bobby Kennedy might have won the nomination and gone on to defeat Republican Richard Nixon in November.

But, of course, it’s only conjecture. We will never know. Sirhan Sirhan, who resides in Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego and is now 74 years old, decided that on his own for the American voter.

Americans under 50 might not even know his name.

WARREN KOZAK — Warren Kozak is the author of LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay.

WOLVES IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING

The joys of taqiyya.

Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270348/wolves-sheeps-clothing-bruce-bawer

June 5, 2018

Abdirizak Waberi (photo: TT)

Muslim politicians in the Western world come in two general varieties: those rare ones who are candid about their desire to transform the West in accordance with the dictates of their faith, and those, far greater in number, who prefer to disguise that ambition. The first category includes people like Abdirizak Waberi, a Swedish MP turned Islamic school principal who has actually admitted he believes in “banning music and dancing, prohibiting boys and girls from socializing, and allowing men to beat their four wives with sticks when they became disobedient,” and Brussels city councilman Redouane Ahrouch, who openly advocates for sharia government and recently called for a separation of the sexes on that city's public transport.

In the second category are Rotterdam mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb, who while striving to pose as a progressive allows his mask to slip now and then (recently, he told an interviewer that “every Muslim is a bit of a salafist”), and London mayor Sadiq Khan, another faux liberal who has, in fact, ordered police to put less emphasis on monitoring potential terrorists and more emphasis on harassing Islam critics. And let's not forget Minnesota's (and the DNC's) own Keith Ellison, who poses as a standard-issue Democrat but belonged for a decade to the Nation of Islam, speaks at CAIR events, and has ties to several pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic groups.

Also belonging to the latter category is Somali-born Bashe Musse, a Norwegian Labor Party politician who has been a member of the Oslo City Council since 2011. During the last couple of weeks he's been making headlines because of a Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) report on “dumping.” What's dumping? Like honor killing and female genital mutilation, it's a common practice in Europe's Muslims communities. Instead of sending their kids to regular neighborhood schools, many Muslim parents in Europe send their children off to madrasses – Koran schools – in the countries from which they, the parents, emigrated. The children stay in these schools for years at a time, memorizing the Islamic holy book while their agemates back in Europe learn math, science, and literature.

“Dumping” is eyebrow-raising for more than one reason. Many of these kids' parents were allowed into Europe in the first place because they professed to be refugees from oppression in their homelands. The fact that they're shipping their kids off to schools in those same countries gives the lie to those claims. The parents also often maintain that they're proud to be French, Swedish, or whatever, and that they're striving to assimilate into their adopted nations. But the whole point of sending these kids to madrasses in the Muslim world is to shield them from what the parents consider the baleful influence of Western civilization.

Last year, NRK produced, as noted, a report on Somali madrasses in which children from Norway have been enrolled. Many viewers considered the revelations eye-popping. In fact it was old news. In a 2004 study, Out of Sight, Out of Mind, Norway's Human Rights Service (HRS) documented, in extraordinary and devastating detail, the grim reality of daily life in these institutions, where the conditions are almost always primitive and where the atmosphere is less that of a First World school than of a Third World prison. NRK's report, which contained interviews with children living in Norway who had attended the Somali madrasses, confirmed HRS's findings: at those “schools,” the children had been tied up, whipped, beaten, and subjected to other sorts of brutal treatment that would ordinarily be considered torture.

Bashe Musse (Rolf Ohman)

Which brings us to Bashe Musse, who in addition to being an Oslo city councilman is also the official chief spokesperson for Norway's Somali community, the largest non-Western immigrant group in the country. After NRK's report aired last year, he claimed to be shocked by its contents. But on May 29 of this year, NRK reported that in an interview aired on Somali TV, Musse had dismissed the children's testimony about the madrasses and regretted that such lies, as he called them, had been “sold to the Norwegian people” by the Norwegian media, which he characterized as “one-sided.”

When confronted by NRK with a transcript of his comments to Somali TV, Musse insisted that the person who had translated his words from Somali into Norwegian had fouled up, entirely misrepresenting his views. NRK thereupon engaged the services of another translator, whose product was essentially identical to that of the first translator. It then presented the transcript to various government officials. Frode Jacobsen, head of the Oslo Labor Party, said he was “surprised and shocked” by Musse's “double communication,” which he described as “very unfortunate.” Norway's Minister of Integration, Jan Tore Sanner, also expressed concern, but did not call for any action against Musse. The Progress Party's immigration spokesman, Jon Helgheim, went quite a bit further, scorning Musse as “a wolf in sheep's clothing” and urging that the Labour Party discipline him in some way. But as far as I have been able to determine, no one in a position of power has demanded Musse's resignation or removal from the City Council.

Lying to infidels, of course, has a name in Arabic – taqiyya – and it is one of the chief weapons of Islam in its eternal conflict with non-believers. Among its more celebrated practitioners is “Euro-Islam” proponent, Oxford professor, accused serial rapist, and current jailbird Tariq Ramadan, who is known to routinely say one thing to Western audiences in French or English and another to Muslim audiences n Arabic. Indeed, Caroline Fourest's book about him is entitled Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan. To employ taqiyya, as Musse appears to have done, is to demonstrate definitively that one is not on the side of the West but that one is a double agent – a partisan, a person whose true loyalty lies, shall we say, elsewhere.

Within a few hours of being caught dead to rights on NRK as a practitioner of doublespeak, Musse made anannouncement. Did he resign? Of course not. He declared that NRK had represented him to the Norwegian public as a liar and, what's more, had painted an unflattering picture of Somalia.  Accordingly, he had contacted a lawyer, Arild Humlen, to ascertain what legal rights he had in the matter. 

What makes this story important, needless to say, is that Musse is not an outlier. Far from it. Increasingly, all over the West, Muslims hold elected positions, some of them at a very high level. It is considered to be racist, or at the very least to be in terribly bad taste, to question whether they can be loyal at once to their totalizing, all-encompassing religion and to their officially secular country and its (still) mostly non-Muslim inhabitants. Once those poiticians are caught engaging in taqiyya, of course, there is no further reason for doubt on this score.

Bruce Bawer is the author of “While Europe Slept,” “Surrender,” and "The Victims' Revolution." His novel "The Alhambra" has just been published.

Richard Pipes: ‘I Have Been Spared Not to Waste My Life’

By Jay Nordlinger

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/remembering-richard-pipes-great-scholar-extraordinary-man/

June 4, 2018

Editor’s Note: The below is an expanded version of a piece that appears in the current National Review.

Richard Pipes on Firing Line with William F. Buckley. (Firing Line via YouTube) 

Richard Pipes was a great scholar and an important public figure. In this appreciation of mine, however, I will write mainly personally — Pipes was a big deal to me (as to the world at large, to be sure).

He was born in Poland — Jewish — in 1923. You could see the year of his birth in his e-mail address: “rpipes23.” He was 16 when the Nazis came. Much later, he wrote, “I noticed with surprise that the soldiers were not the blond supermen of Nazi propaganda: many were short and swarthy and quite unheroic in appearance.”

On October 6, a month and a week after the invasion, Hitler took a victory lap in Warsaw. Pipes saw him from his window, up on the fourth floor. “He rode in an open Mercedes, standing up in the familiar pose, giving the Nazi salute. I thought how easy it would be to assassinate him.”

He and his parents were able to flee. Many relatives, not to mention schoolmates and friends, were not. They were murdered.

Newly in America, Pipes went to Muskingum College, in Ohio. Then he went into the Army — which had him learn Russian, at Cornell. At Harvard, he earned his Ph.D. And he would teach at Harvard for the duration of his career.

What he was, was a leading historian of Russia, the Soviet Union, and Communism. Why? Why this field? In large part, because he felt the need to deal with political evil — but the European experience under Nazism was a little too close to home. So he studied the other side of the same, totalitarian coin. Not until he was almost 80, when he wrote his memoirs, did he speak personally about what happened to his family and his community after September 1, 1939.

He had an important public assignment in the mid-1970s. He was chosen to lead “Team B,” whose charge was to challenge the CIA’s assumptions about the Soviet Union (which were wrong). A bit later, in the early 1980s, he served on the National Security Council staff for President Reagan.

One story from those Reagan years? In 1982, Brezhnev, the Soviet premier, died. It fell to Pipes to go to the Soviet embassy in Washington to pay the respects of the U.S. government. Confronted with the condolence book, he felt in a bind: to sign or not to sign? Thinking fast, he decided to sign — but illegibly.

To hell with Brezhnev, to hell with the Soviet Union, to hell with Communism.

I first saw him in 1987, when he appeared at a forum with Yuri Orlov, the great physicist and dissident who had just come out of the Soviet Union. Pipes told some truths about the Soviet Union and Communism that the student audience was not pleased to hear. The next day, I slipped a note under his office door. It was a fan letter, really. He wrote me back, via the Post Office (in those pre–e-mail days).

Later, when I became a journalist, I contacted him every chance I got. I told him I would seize any excuse, and he didn’t mind. Indeed, the opposite.

I asked him about things big and small. Here is something small: Customarily, do you capitalize “Communist” and “Communism”? Yes, said Pipes.

Something a little larger: Lenin once described Kerensky as “stupid.” (Alexander Kerensky was the Russian prime minister before Lenin’s takeover.) Did he have a point? “Kerensky,” replied Pipes, “was ‘stupid’ in Lenin’s eyes because he did not know how to hold on to the one thing that mattered to Lenin, namely power. I met Kerensky many times and found him gentle, perhaps too much so for a politician, but certainly intelligent.”

Okay, what about this notion of a “right side of history” (a phrase about which I was writing an essay)? Pipes replied, in part,

I went into the Internet to ask for “right side of history” and was astonished at how many responses I got! It is apparently a standard code phrase. Of course, it means whatever the user wishes it to mean. If you think democracy is the wave of the future, then favoring democracy is to be on the “right side of history.” If, on the contrary, you perceive the future of mankind to be Communist or socialist, then everything that contributes to the spread of Communism or socialism qualifies as “historical.” The concept is not necessarily Marxist, although, of course, Marxists do espouse it.

I must have asked whether “right side of history” was inherently Marxist, or Marxist-flavored. Anyway, Pipes continued,

The whole notion is nonsensical. History is a mental construct: it does not exist as reality. Hence you cannot be on its “right side.” You can only be on the “right side” of historians.

Okay, back to Lenin for a moment: What was his attitude toward children? “I do not think he was especially interested in them or fond of them,” said Pipes. “Indeed, according to Alexander Yakovlev, the brain behind Gorbachev’s reforms whose biography I am completing, he sent children to concentration camps.”

Well, then — that’s not liking children at all.

From Richard Pipes I got a fund of stories. This is one of the most striking, I think: One day, he was in a Soviet town somewhere, riding a city bus. A woman, noticing a foreigner, started to extol the glories of her town and of her country generally. Surely there was no better country anywhere in the world. She was speaking loudly, for all to hear. Later, before she got off the bus, she sneaked up to Pipes and said, “Please, tell me the truth: We live like dogs, don’t we?”

Some years ago, I was writing a piece about the influence of the Chinese government on China studies in the West — and the influence of Arab governments on Middle East studies. Naturally, I talked with Daniel Pipes, the Middle East scholar, and one of Dick and Irene’s sons. (For Daniel’s extraordinary appreciation of his father, go here.) I also talked to Dick about Russia or Soviet studies.

There was never much money in Sovietology, he told me. But Sovietologists wanted to go to the Soviet Union, as one could well understand. And that meant that you had better not be too critical of the Kremlin.

One day, Pipes was testifying before Scoop Jackson’s committee in the Senate about SALT (the arms-control treaty). Pipes was taking a hard and realistic line; another Ivy League Sovietologist was taking a soft and unrealistic one. As they were leaving, the other guy said to Pipes, “I really agree with you, but if I talked as you do, I wouldn’t be able to go to the Soviet Union. They wouldn’t give me a visa.”

As a class, the Sovietologists got the Soviet Union very, very wrong. (And many resented Pipes for getting it right.) They just glided on, with hardly a backward glance. Many of them “have fallen in line behind Putin,” Pipes told me, back in 2008. They were traveling to Moscow to attend conferences hosted by him.

Speaking of Putin: I asked Pipes to locate him — to sum him up, to get to the heart of him — in a 2014 podcast. “Very much a Soviet man,” said Pipes. “He is at heart a Communist, and a Russian imperialist. . . . What he worries about, and what every Russian ruler worries about, is to appear weak.” Putin had annexed Crimea. Hitler had done the same with the Sudetenland in 1938, said Pipes.

Toward the end of his career, Pipes wrote a book called “Property and Freedom.” He believed that you could not have one without the other. Property rights were the barrier to government power. To his amusement, a Chinese state publishing house put out a translation of his book, but with a different title. The word “freedom” evidently could not be stomached. The book was published as “A Discussion of Property.”

At every stage of his career, Pipes attracted controversy. Why? In explanation, he once quoted Samuel Butler, who wrote in a letter, “I never write on any subject unless I believe the opinion of those who have the ear of the public to be mistaken, and this involves, as a necessary consequence, that every book I write runs counter to the men who are in possession of the field; hence I am always in hot water."

Let me tell you something about writing: I was once editing a piece by Pipes and suggested to him a different tense in a certain passage. He said, with some disgust, “I long ago gave up on English tenses. They are confusing and inconsistent.” Ain’t it the truth. I think of Pipes every time I am stuck on a tense, which is often. In fact, it happened as I was writing this appreciation, several paragraphs ago.

In February of this year, I went to Harvard, to interview another great nonagenarian scholar, Dante Della Terza (a Dante specialist, as befits his first name). I called Dick, but did not get him. I never heard back from him, which I thought was curious. It transpired that he was ill, and he passed away on May 17.

Listen to him: “The main effect of the Holocaust on my psyche was to make me delight in every day of life that has been granted to me, for I was saved from certain death.” Pipes wrote those words in his memoirs, Vixi (Latin for “I have lived”), published in 2003. He went on, “I felt and feel to this day that I have been spared not to waste my life on self-­indulgence or self-aggrandizement but to spread a moral message by showing, using examples from history, how evil ideas lead to evil consequences.”

What’s more, “I admit to having little patience with the psychological problems of free people, especially if they involve a ‘search for identity’ or some other form of self-seeking.”

As 1999 turned into 2000, National Review published a millennial issue, consisting of big-think pieces, including an essay by Pipes. He cited a book by Henri Frankfort,Kingship and the Gods (on ancient Near Eastern religion and society). He had the g in “gods” down — in the lower case — but, as it was in the title, I, of course, as editor, put it up. He insisted on its being put back down. “I am a Jew,” he said, “and there is one God, and I will not have the plural word capitalized.” I pleaded, “I am as monotheistic as anyone, but this is a matter of style, and to have the word up doesn’t imply any idolatry: It’s just a word in a title, like ‘table’ or ‘chair.’” No, no, said Pipes, it could not be up, title or not.

So, that’s how the book was referred to in the magazine: Kingship and the gods. It was wrong but, at the same time, right — and totally, wonderfully Richard Pipes.

He gave his memoirs the subtitle “Memoirs of a Non-Belonger.” He and Irene — his tall beauty of a wife — had a home in the British Virgin Islands, where they were classified as neither “residents” nor “visitors” but “non-belongers.” Pipes said he had gone through life feeling like a non-belonger.

Well, wherever he belongs, I’d like to belong there too.

Italy: "The Party is Over" for Illegal Migrants

by Soeren Kern
June 4, 2018 at 5:30 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12448/italy-illegal-migrants

Leader of the League party and Italian Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini, walks through the crowd on the occasion of celebrations for Italy’s Republic Day, in Rome Saturday, June 2, 2018. (Claudio Peri/ANSA via AP/MANILA BULLETIN)

Italy's new interior minister, Matteo Salvini, has vowed to cut aid money for migrants and to deport those who illegally are in the country.

"Open doors in Italy for the right people and a one-way ticket out for those who come here to make trouble and think that we will provide for them," Salvini said in the Lombardy region, home to a quarter of the total foreign population in Italy. "One of our top priorities will be deportation."

Salvini, leader of the nationalist League (Lega) party, formed a new coalition government with the populist Five Star Movement (M5S) on June 1. The government's program, outlined in a 39-page action plan, promises to crack down on illegal immigration and to deport up to 500,000 undocumented migrants.

"The party is over for illegal immigrants," Salvini said at a June 2 rally in Vicenza. "They will have to pack their bags, in a polite and calm manner, but they will have to go. Refugees escaping from war are welcome, but all others must leave."

On June 3, Salvini visited Sicily, one of the main landing points in Europe for migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea from North Africa. He said:

"Enough of Sicily being the refugee camp of Europe. I will not stand by and do nothing while there are landings after landings of migrants. We need deportation centres. 

"There are not enough homes or jobs for Italians, let alone for half the African continent. We need to use common sense."

Salvini also accused Tunisian authorities of deliberately sending criminals to Italy:

"Tunisia is a free and democratic country that is not exporting gentlemen but often willingly exports convicts. I will speak to my Tunisian counterpart, it does not seem to me that there are wars, pestilence or famine in Tunisia."

Italy is the main European gateway for migrants arriving by sea: 119,369 arrived by sea in 2017 and 181,436 in 2016, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). An estimated 700,000 migrants have arrived in Italy during the past five years.

Italy has been the main point of entry to Europe since the EU-Turkey migrant deal, signed in March 2016, shut off the route from Turkey to Greece, at one time the preferred point of entry to Europe for migrants from Asia and the Middle East.

In February 2017, Italy signed a migrant deal with Libya to intercept boats and return migrants to Libya. The deal, in which Italy committed to equipping and financing the Libyan coast guard, resulted in a 75% decrease in arrivals during the summer of 2017. Since the beginning of 2018, however, more than 13,000 migrants have arrived in Italy from Libya. Those numbers are expected to increase during the summer as the weather improves.

Meanwhile, Italy deported only 6,514 migrants in 2017, and 5,817 in 2016. The new government has pledged to speed up deportations by converting migrant reception centers into deportation centers. Deportations, however, are expensive and complex.

According to Italian law, for example, at least two agents must escort each deportee in an elaborate operation. The newspaper La Repubblica described a recent deportation operation of 29 Tunisians, who were escorted on an aircraft chartered from Bulgaria by 74 government agents, including doctors, nurses, armed police and unarmed plainclothes officers, at a total cost of €115,000 ($135,000), or €3,965 per deportee.

At this rate, the new government's pledge to deport 500,000 migrants would cost Italian taxpayers nearly €2 billion ($2.3 billion).

The previous government allotted around five billion euros to pay for expenses related to the migrant crisis in 2018: 20% is for rescues at sea; 15% for health care, and 65% for migrant reception centres, which currently host around 200,000 people.

The new government has said that it wants to divert some of the funds allotted for the reception centers to pay for deportations. In addition to the financial costs, Italy faces legal hurdles that make mass deportations nearly impossible.

Article 10, Paragraph 2 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights states:

"No one may be removed, expelled or extradited to a State where there is a serious risk that he or she would be subjected to the death penalty, torture or other inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."

This law effectively prevents Italy and other EU members from deporting migrants to most countries in the Muslim world.

The new government has also pledged to negotiate more bilateral deportation agreements. Italy currently has deportation agreements with only five countries: Egypt, Gambia, Nigeria, Sudan and Tunisia. Migrants cannot be deported without approval from the states of origin.

Salvini has also said that Italy will reject proposed changes to the Dublin Regulation, a law that requires people seeking refuge within the EU to do so in the first European country they reach. The Dublin Regulation will be the focus of a meeting between the interior ministers of the 28 EU members states in Luxembourg on June 4.

Italy's geographic location means that it has borne disproportionate responsibility for illegal immigration from Africa and the Middle East, but Salvini said that other EU member states are resisting changes that would require them to share the burden: "They want to weigh down the Mediterranean countries, such as Italy, Cyprus, Malta and Spain, giving us thousands of more migrants for a period ten years."

EU law currently requires member states to be financially responsible for migrants arriving in their countries for a period of ten years. Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, want that responsibility to be reduced to eight years, but Italy, Cyprus, Greece, Malta and Spain want to lessen it to a maximum of two years.

Meanwhile, pro-EU, pro-mass migration and pro-multiculturalism media outlets have gone into attack mode in an effort to undermine the new Italian government.
The German newsmagazine Der Spiegel published a cover which featured a fork of spaghetti with one piece dangling as a noose: "Italy is destroying itself — and dragging down Europe with it." It wrote, in apocalyptic terms:

"The EU must adopt a united stance on Donald Trump, whose misguided policies threaten both Europe's security and prosperity. Trump is forcing Europe into a trade war and, worse yet, he threatens to scrap the postwar international order that enabled the Europeans to find their place in the world — through trade and the structures of the World Trade Organization and the security it found in the form of NATO. 

"But how can the EU wage a trade war if Italy threatens to spiral into chaos? At a time when the EU could be proving itself as an alternative to Trump's unilateralism...Europe may instead be facing months, if not years, of squabbling over a possible bailout for Italy.... If this country teeters, it will shake the entire architecture of the European Union. 

"The Italy crisis is a convergence of the two greatest challenges facing the EU: the economic threat to the eurozone and the erosion of shared values and norms. If the populists now govern in Italy, the country could steer itself on a course of constant confrontation with Brussels — by for example, expressing its solidarity on key issues with right-wing populists in France, Austria or Finland or with the EU-critical governments in Hungary and Poland. 

"Or it could take the side of half or full-on autocrats like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and undermine European unity in the process. Some potential issues where it could do so include the Iran agreement, the trade tariffs imposed by Trump, the extension of sanctions against Russia, climate policy or even the European approach to China. 

"The revival of nationalism in Europe, particularly in Italy, is bad news for the Continent. If the EU ever had one great, overarching goal, then it was to counter national self-interest with the vision of a transnational community of values. What will hold Europe together if that foundation is shaken?"

The New York Times wrote:

"The xenophobic League and the out-with-the-old-order Five Star Movement — bring together bigotry and incompetence to an unusual degree. They are a miserable bunch borne aloft on the global anti-liberal tide."

And again:

"Matteo Salvini — the leader of the League and the incoming deputy prime minister and interior minister — is vowing a crackdown on migration and the expulsion of up to 500,000 migrants already in Italy.
"That could force Brussels to start an Article 7 process against Italy for breaking the fundamental commitments to the rule of law. 

"And the new Italian leaders have already expressed their desire to improve relations and trade with Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin. 

"That may mean that the European Union is unable to renew economic sanctions against Russia stemming from its behavior abroad, including its annexation of Crimea, violation of the Minsk accords in eastern Ukraine and the assassination attempt on a former Russian spy and his daughter in Britain, which the Kremlin continues to deny.

Enter George Soros, a billionaire Hungarian-American committed to mass migration in Europe, who blamed Russia for interfering in the Italian election:

"I am very concerned about the proximity of the new coalition government to Russia. They said that they are in favor of the cancellation of sanctions against Russia.... There is a close relationship between Matteo Salvini and Vladimir Putin. I do not know if Putin actually finances his party, but Italian public opinion has the right to know if Salvini is on Putin's pay check."

After the new Italian government was formed, Soros called for more open borders:

"Until recently, the majority of migrants could move to the countries of northern Europe, their true destination. Then both France and Austria closed the borders and the migrants found themselves stuck in Italy.... This was the main reason why the League did so well in the last election. 

"The EU must change the existing regulations and pay a large part of what is needed to integrate and support the migrants that are stuck in Italy in such an out-of-proportion proportion."

Salvini replied:

"We have never received a lira, a euro or a ruble from Russia. I think Putin is one of the best statesmen around and I am ashamed of the fact that Italy has invited an unscrupulous speculator like Mr. Soros to speak here."

Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute.

• Follow Soeren Kern on Twitter and Facebook