Goodbye and good luck, Mr. Frank
“It’s 3 am here and I would love to get back to sleep a bit more today. But if you don’t mind, could you explain to us what brought about the dissolution of the former Soviet Union (SU) and why the how the Berlin Wall collapsed?” — that was what I requested Mr. Frank the last time when he was putting his audience into a complete silence following his “spreading fears” once again.
“What you said reminds me of one puzzle that Professor Yuval Noah Harari mentioned before. He thinks that the Former SU, the Russian Empire and largest communist state of the world, would have not collapsed if it wasn’t for Mr. Mikhail Gorbachev who had willingly given up his power. For the ones who have not heard of Dr. Harari, he is a contemporary philosopher in The Hebrew University of Jerusalem who published three books about humanity.” I further explained.
True, on Christmas eve of 1991, the world was shocked when Gorbachev announced his resignation. Following that came the dissolution of the Soviet Union on New Year’s day of 1992.
Like usual, Mr. Frank answered my question with complicated historical events that I tend to filter away from my brain and the only idea I could manage to retain is that Mr. Gorbachev had made sure that the power would stay within the communist party, which was not too far from the fact that Mr. Putin used to work for the KGB!
However, his answer was a bit too predeterministic to me.
“This is how the powers are operated in politics. They do whatever to make sure the power stays within.”
“Ever since 1949 since it took over the power from President Jiang Zhongzheng, the CCP has ruled the ppl swimmingly. They are skillful at executing and maintaining their powers. They know where the weapons are made and stored, they control the 20 million Army members, who are ready to fight for the country, and most importantly, they are not afraid of pointing the guns against their own ppl. We should never underestimate the stability and brutality of our great rulers.”
“It’s naive to believe that a bad economy would bring down the CCP, as the current economy is so much stronger than any other time since 1949. It’s naive to think that bad corruption within the party will bring down the CCP, as this has always been a terribly corrupted Party ever since its establishment. Those “anticorruption campaigns” are the merely lasting strategies that have been tried, tested, used, and perfected to clean out those who are not following the mission of Chairman Mao and Prime Minister Zhou, as evidenced by our loss of vice-chairmen Liu Shaoqi, Lin Biao, Zhu De, and Peng Dehuai…let alone the loss of countless intellectuals during the rectification movement in YanAn between 1941–1944, the anti-rightest in 1957, Great Culture Revolution nation-wide between 1966–1976…”
He went on and on, but the bottom line is that regardless how terrible the CCP were, it would not go down by bad economy, hunger, conflicts among ppl, or/and poor relationships with other countries.
In other words, “they (he meant the top leader of the CCP) will do whatever to keep their power without mercy!”
It’s not difficult to imagine that such bold statements frequently silence his audience. “So in this case, you meant that we, the powerless people, can only passively accept our fate to be ruled by those monsters?!” I asked. “Brother Frank, could you please explain to me, then, what is the difference between humans and animals?”
He laughed a little and was clearly not prepared for such a “stupid” question. But soon he regained his calm and answered the question with his usual confident tone. Except that his answer was so far away from what I was looking for, I hardly could focus on listening to it — he frequently takes ppl’s questions out of original context, relates them to some historical events, then comes up with “answers” from top-down with an eagle eye.
To tackle that, I sometimes stress that I am only seeking straightforward, simple, short, and direct answers. Yet I have been failing, each and every time when I try to bring him to down the earth.
A sneaky loach he is!
He is uncomfortable being under normal skin. He lives to tell impressive stories that are hard to verify as they are based solely on what he heard from unique sources that “cannot be disclosed”. I would have trusted him more if he had not claimed that those well-established democratic countries in the Western world were no different from the CCP’s authoritarian.
…
I have written above a few weeks ago when he deactivated his CH for the third time, which made me think that he would have left the CH for good, thus, the title of this post.
However, before I could finalize this post, he has shown up again, at the most inconvenient time for me, as I was in San Antonio, TX attending a 2-day party celebrating one of my best friends’ 45th birthday.
It was again very early morning, 4 am-ish on April 17th, 2021, which had been more than three weeks since he disappeared from my CH life. Boy, I have now only realized how much I had missed him when that familiar voice coming from my phone over a night table beside my ears.
(To be continued…)
