The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada (Part 4)

(Continued from Part 3, previous blog post)

In its history, the renowned Knox College founded in 1844-45 by the Presbyterian Church in Canada once had a prominent leading role in the free-church and anti-slavery movements in Canada.

A main founder of Knox College was Rev. Dr. Robert Burns, a Scottish Presbyterian minister and one of the leaders of the 1843 Free Church movement in Scotland (the “Great Disruption”), who was invited to Toronto in 1844 to start the Free Church movement in Canada, became minister of Knox Presbyterian Church in Toronto and led the founding of Knox College. ¹¹⁸

The first Principal of Knox College – a position begun in the 1850s – was Rev. Dr. Michael Willis, a colleague of Burns and also from Scotland, who when became the principal was already the founding president of the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada. ¹¹⁹ The anti-slavery history in Canada at the time was mainly known for the “Underground Railroad” – a network of anti-slavery Americans and Canadians who smuggled black slaves from the American South to freedom and settlement in Canada. ¹²⁰

As much as being a part of the anti-slavery history, though, Knox College of Toronto is not related to (and should not be confused with) Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Located at a town that was the centre of anti-slavery activity in the state of Illinois and a “Freedom Station” on the Underground Railroad, this liberal-arts Knox College had been founded seven years earlier in 1837 by a group of anti-slavery advocates led by Presbyterian minister George Washington Gale, starting out as a bible-training college with an odd name, Knox Manual Labour College, for the reason that students worked on the farm to support their educations; this Knox College’s establishment had the approval of Abraham Lincoln among other state legislators, and subsequently it was the ‘historic’ site of the fifth Lincoln-Douglas debate – one of a series of political debates in 1858 between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas – for election to the U.S. Senate; Lincoln lost the election but the debates propelled him to national fame and in two years’ time election to the U.S. presidency, defeating Douglas this time. ¹²¹ Abraham Lincoln also received a honorary degree from this Knox College – his first and the college’s first honorary doctorate. ¹²²

Even now, Knox College in Illinois continues its tradition of being part of the politics for change and progress, proudly making it known to Americans: the college observes that when John Podesta, former Bill Clinton Whitehouse chief of staff and leader of the transition team for newly elected President Barack Obama – the first African-American President in U.S. history – appeared on the TV program The Colbert Report (on January 29, 2009, which happened to be a special day for me, and when I posted my first blog article, “Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”), Obama, Podesta and the show’s host Stephen Colbert all had received Knox College honorary degrees. ¹²³

But even so, back in early 1863 when Abraham Lincoln was succeeding in his historical achievement leading Americans to abolish slavery – although he had not decidedly won the Civil War – the Canadian contributions to the cause, especially those by Rev. Robert Burns and Rev. Michael Willis of Knox College in Toronto, were singled out by George Brown – a fellow Scot and founder of The Globe and Mail newspaper – for congratulation for a mission accomplished: ^{124, 125}

“… Now we have an anti-slavery president of the United States. Now we have an anti-slavery government at Washington. Now we have an anti-slavery congress at Washington. Already slavery has been abolished in the District of Columbia. At last a genuine treaty for the suppression of the slave trade has been signed at Washington with the government of Great Britain, and for the first time in her history the penalty of death has been enforced in the republic for the crime of man-stealing. Then, the black republics of Hayti and Liberia have been recognized by the United States as inde­pendent powers; and, even more important still, the vast territories of the United States have been prohibited by law from entering the republic except as free states. And the climax was reached a month ago when Abraham Lincoln, as President of the United States, proclaimed that from that moment every slave in the rebel states was absolutely free, and that the republic was prepared to pay for the freedom of all the slaves in the loyal states. The freely elected government and legislature of the United States have proclaimed that not with their consent shall one slave remain within the republic.

Was I not right, then, when I said that we ought to rejoice together to-night? I congratulate you, Mr. Chairman (Rev. Dr. Willis), on the issue of your forty years’ contest here and on the other side of the Atlantic on behalf of the American slave. I congratulate the venerable mover of the first resolution (Rev. Dr. Burns), who for even a longer period has been the unflinching friend of freedom. I congratulate the tried friends of emancipation around me on the platform, and the no less zealous friends of the cause throughout the hall, whose well-remembered faces have been ever present when a word of sympathy was to be uttered for the down-trodden and oppressed. …”

Of special interest here is that George Brown who made the above-quoted speech in 1863 soon after the proclamation of emancipation by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, had also (with his father Peter Brown and with Robert Burns) founded the Presbyterian Record magazine; this fact is mentioned in the September 2005 article quoted in detail earlier (“A united effort crowns righteousness”) about Stevie Cameron and her Out-of-the-Cold program as well as about Chinese Presbyterians; in addition, George Brown as a politician later became one of the founding fathers of Canada (Fathers of the Confederation). ¹²⁶

The late Rev. Edward Ling’s son Winston Ling, vice president of finance and administration at Tyndale University College & Seminary since 1995 – as earlier mentioned – whose wife Stephanie has been a governing board member of Knox College in Toronto as well as a board member of the Scott Mission for the needy, had for many years been the executive vice president of finance at (the former) Crownx Inc., holding company of the Crown Life Insurance Company, the Extendicare Health Care group, and the Crowntek Group, working under then president Michael Burns and chairman David Hennigar from the owners: Toronto’s Burns family of Burns Fry Ltd. fame (today part of Bank of Montreal Nesbitt Burns), and the Jodrey family of Nova Scotia. ¹²⁷ I found the Burns and Burns (i.e., the financial Burns family and Rev. Robert Burns) associations in the Winston-Stephanie Ling couple quite interesting and even intriguing, and once asked Winston if the Burns family were related to Rev. Robert Burns; but the answer was: not that he knew of, Michael Burns was Anglican – in fact a recent Chancellor of (the Anglican) Renison University College at the University of Waterloo. ^{128, 129}

My question to Winston is pertinent here even if not everyone in Rev. Edward Ling’s large family is necessarily familiar with a historical Burns connection: my great-great-grandfather, namely Rev. Edward Ling’s medical-doctor-and-Presbyterian-minister grandfather (as discussed earlier in the context of a Toronto Star article about Rev. Ling, and in my January 29, 2009 blog article, “Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”), who had been born in or around 1849, the year the first Protestant church in his home region of China was founded in his humble village by Swiss Basel missionary Rev. Rudolf Lechler, in around 1860-61 became a Christian when he was a young pupil tutored by Rev. William Burns at the school of that church and was baptized by Rev. Burns ¹³⁰ – that was 100 years before the cornerstone for the first Chinese church building in Toronto, with a school-style architecture, was laid under the leadership of businessman and church elder Edward Ling in 1960, who then went to Taiwan in 1961 to study to become a pastor. ¹³¹

The Rev. William Burns in China in 1861 was the person Canadians had known as Rev. Robert Burns’s young nephew, William Chalmers Burns, who in 1844 had accompanied Robert Burns to visit Canada, where Robert Burns stayed to lead the free-church movement and found Knox College. They and William Chalmers Burns’s fellow young preacher Robert Murray M’Cheyne were enthusiastic members of the Scottish Free Church movement led by Thomas Chalmers, and when visiting Canada the young W. C. Burns was already internationally known as the remarkably incredible revival preacher of Kilsyth, having drawn crowds as large as 10,000 to his spiritual-revival sermons in 1839. ¹³²

William Chalmers Burns was born in 1815 in the same year the Swiss Basel Mission was founded in Basel, Switzerland, which as a Lutheran foreign mission subsequently had strong influence over British foreign missionary work – particularly that of the Anglican Church – for the next several decades. ¹³³ In 1847, Burns became the first official foreign missionary sent abroad by the Presbyterian Church of England Foreign Missions, going to China in the same year as the two first Basel missionaries to China, Theodore Hamberg and Rudolf Lechler. ¹³⁴ In 1860-61, Rev. William Burns was invited to the Ling family’s home village in the Shantou (Swatow) region of Guangdong province to visit the first Protestant church of the region founded by Rev. Lechler in 1849, which had been left with only 13 disciples on their own in 1852 when Rev. Lechler was expelled by the regional government and returned to Hong Kong. ¹³⁵ Rev. Burns preached and taught school in the same house where Rev. Lechler had done so, and revived and took under his spiritual wing this local church. ¹³⁶

Rev. William Burns died several years later in 1868 at the age of 53, up in the unfamiliar Northeast of China (i.e., Manchuria, homeland of the imperial Qing-dynasty ethnic people), exhausted, nearly alone amongst a small group of Chinese worshipers but still full of the spirit that had set him apart. ¹³⁷

In or around 1896, the second medical hospital to be founded by the English Presbyterian Mission in the southern coastal Shantou region of China was named the William Burns Memorial Hospital in his honour; by this time, the young-pupil Ling baptized by Rev. Burns had long ago completed studies under Doctor William Gauld at the first hospital of the Mission founded by Gauld, practiced as a medical doctor in this hospital for decades and was about to become a Presbyterian preacher, while a fellow doctor Lin (Ling and Lin were actually the same family name, in a village where the majority were of this family name and distantly related) – son of the person who had invited Rev. Burns to revive the village church left there by Rev. Lechler – would become the principal of this second hospital; in recent decades the site has been the campus of a regional school of public health. ^{138, 139}

Prior to his life journey in China, William Chalmers Burns was in Canada from 1844 to 1846, preaching in churches in different part of the country. In the Woodstock area of Ontario (Oxford County) Rev. Burns baptized a baby born in 1844 – the year he arrived in Canada – by the name of George Leslie Mackay. ¹⁴⁰ Little Mackay grew up with W. C. Burns as his idol, studied at Knox College in Toronto and at other Presbyterian institutions, became the first foreign missionary sent abroad by the Presbyterian Church in Canada (and became a medical doctor), following the example of his idol to China and following his idol’s footsteps to do missionary work in the Shantou (Swatow) region; but after arrival Mackay decided to sail across the sea to take a look first at the island of Taiwan, and once he saw the Tamsui town in Taiwan he knew instantly Taiwan would be his home, where today a large Mackay Memorial Hospital (in the capital city Taipei with branches including in Tamsui Township) stand in testimonial of his contributions to his adopted homeland – even if the hospital originally was not named for him but after a Captain Mackay of Detroit whose wife donated money for his clinic on the condition that the hospital be named that way. ¹⁴¹

Rev. Dr. Mackay died at the age of 57 in 1901 in Taiwan, after a fruitful and fulfilled life, whose achievements beside the medical hospital included founding around 60 churches with thousands of coverts, founding the Oxford College – forerunner of Taiwan Theological College and Seminary where  in the 1960s Rev. Edward Ling studied to become a preacher – and serving as the elected Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada in 1895; the Canadian missionary assisting him in his later years and then succeeding him was one Rev. William Gauld (apparently unrelated to the British Dr. William Gauld in the 1860s in Shantou across the sea). ^{142, 143}

Burns, Mackay, Mackay & (not closely or necessarily related) Mackay, William Gauld & (unrelated) William Gauld, Burns & (unrelated) Burns, what interesting ‘inspirations’ around!

The town of Tamsui in Taiwan which Mackay felt in love with at first sight and chose as home was by the Chinese name 淡水, meaning ‘freshwater’; it had been an important seaport on international trade routes, with prior Spanish and Dutch colonization and missionary work dating back to the San Domingo Fort and church in 1629, and has been referred to as “Venice of Taiwan”. ¹⁴⁴ In contrast, the village housing the first Protestant church in the mainland region of Shantou across the sea – a region Mackay had gone to as inspired by W. C. Burns – was a small fishing village named Yanzao (Yam-tsau), or 鹽灶, meaning ‘salt pan’, where Rev. Lechler had stayed only three years before he was expelled in 1852; in fact, even the port city of Shantou not long before that point had been a fishing village in the same county. ¹⁴⁵

An English missionary book published not long after Rev. William Burns’s visit to the Yam-tsau church in 1861, told of the story of local children flocking to him and singing his Christian hymns during the Chinese New Year, at the same time when a clan-feud with a neighbouring village were engaging two hundred militia men in the defense of this village (and obviously most of the attention); and to travel to that village the missionaries had to contend with robbers on the road. ¹⁴⁶

A moving tale indeed. Even today the Yanzao village is known in China for a unique type of annual ritual – held on the twenty-first and twenty-second days of the Chinese new year – in which an idol of Chinese god is paraded in palanquin under heavy protection and the large crowd fight to drag him down to the ground, something – just like any other ritual of idolatry type – most local Christians do not take part in and the older Christians do not go anywhere near. ¹⁴⁷

The purpose, or morale, of the preceding, long-winded family history digression in this blog article about Brian Mulroney, the Airbus Affair and Stevie Cameron, is the illustration that in the proud history of Canadian Presbyterians there was a long period from 1843-44 to the end of the 19^th century when, inspired by Scottish Presbyterians, the Church was split into two, the Established Church and the Free Church, with the former then overseen by and beholden to the government and the landownership, while the latter independent and democratic in its religious affairs, governing, and finance: ¹⁴⁸ in this historical division, the St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Toronto where Stevie Cameron has been an elder and founded the Out-of-the-Cold program, was the centre of the Established Church in Canada, from which the Free Church led by Rev. James Harris, broke off, founded Knox Presbyterian Church as its new centre, ¹⁴⁹ brought over Rev. Robert Burns and Rev. Michael Willis (among others) from the Scottish Free Church, founded Knox College, and became active also in anti-slavery activity.

The Chinese Presbyterians in Toronto have been associated with the Free Church tradition, and with the heritage of William Chalmers Burns from Scotland and in China. They have also been associated with the early heritage of Swiss Basel missionaries in China, who made efforts to separate missionary work from the state of being tainted by unscrupulousness under German missionary Karl Gutzlaff – who had taken part in the opium trade himself and in the Opium War as a British colonial official – and to expose some of the problems in Gutzlaff’s organization Chinese Christian Union. ¹⁵⁰

It was a moving history, even if it wasn’t quite that of Knox (Manual Labor) College in Illinois with its association with Abraham Lincoln; and this history provides a new level of context to certain criticism of Stevie Cameron related to her Presbyterian background, “inbred puritanism of the old Ottawa establishment”. However such if true of Ms. Cameron was not what many Canadian Presbyterians have been; besides, one should note that Ms. Cameron’s personal choice (who grew up in Belleville outside of Toronto, studied at UBC in Vancouver and worked for the federal government in Ottawa before becoming a journalist in Toronto ¹⁵¹) did lead to the opening of the once-privileged St. Andrew’s door to even the homeless, and that as a journalist-author her pursue to expose corruptions associated with Brian Mulroney has been relentless, albeit – with the Gutzlaff controversy in mind – not as hard-hitting or as all-encompassing as the work of academic-author Chalmers Johnson on recent American history – which has been noted in an earlier part of this blog article.

The legacy of Brian Mulroney, in his known propensity to associate with persons of corrupt or unsavoury repute and in the yet-unclear depth of his political problems of ethics and conduct relating to business interests close to or lobbying his government, may in the end be compared to some of the more notorious in the recent history of the western, Judeo-Christian, democratic world. Yet, as have been previously shown, neither the RCMP nor the Liberal government of Jean Chretien during its 10-year tenure from 1993 to 2003 really went after Mr. Mulroney: in public they were merely reacting to, and maintaining a continuing interest in, issues in the Airbus Affair as brought forward by members of a left-leaning Canadian media – particularly by Stevie Cameron and the CBC’s The Fifth Estate – and supported by those in the federal government system opposed to Mr. Mulroney’s rightwing agendas.

The conclusion would again appear to be that not only there was no political vendetta against Mulroney on the part of the RCMP or the Liberal government, which he has alleged, but that the long-running saga was mostly a media circus despite that – as previously shown – very serious and nagging questions still exist as to the nature of the Airbus Affair, the depth of corruption and Mr. Mulroney’s real role in them.

However I am not ready to conclude such but would next illustrate that the Chretien government and the RCMP did likely have their own agendas in seeing the criminal investigation against Mulroney be launched and be ongoing for an extended period of time (from 1995 to 2003), and that although neither wanted to get to the bottom of the Airbus Affair both had an interest to see it hound Mr. Mulroney through to the end of the Chretien political era.

In November 1997 in his first media interview after winning a legal settlement with the federal government over the libel issue, Mr. Mulroney alleged that there had been pressure from Liberal justice minister Allan Rock to prosecute him since 1993: ¹⁵²

"Allan Rock arrives (in Ottawa) in 1993. The first thing he does as minister of justice is to write to the RCMP, conveying gossip about me personally to the commissioner of the RCMP requesting an investigation. Out comes (Stevie) Cameron’s book (On The Take), Herb Gray, the solicitor general, gives a copy of it to the commissioner of the RCMP, asking that he look into it. These are clear signals by a new government to a national police force, and the signals say, it’s all right for open season on Mulroney”.

And Mulroney further stated the Liberal government must have been behind the RCMP in branding him a criminal in a letter to the Swiss authorities:

"If anyone believes that this could take place without the knowledge of the minister of justice or the knowledge of the solicitor general or the knowledge and approval of the commissioner of the RCMP or the knowledge of the PMO [i.e., Prime Minister’s Office] anybody who believes that, I wish them well in Disney World".

While the Chretien government at the time denied any involvement in the RCMP investigation, I would give Mr. Mulroney the benefit of the doubt on his points quoted above. My analysis of press archives has suggested to me that such were likely the case, however that it was not obvious vendetta against Mulroney but a part of the incoming Liberal government’s law-and-order agendas during 1993-1995 to include a criminal investigation of Mulroney’s role in the Airbus Affair, and that the Liberal brand of law-and-order may at least partially explain the criminally accusatory language in the September 29, 1995 letter to the Swiss authorities.

First, one notes that when Jean Chretien stepped down as prime minister in December 2003, he had completed a decade-long reign in which he won three back-to-back majorities – among the most Canadian prime ministers have done in history – in elections in 1993, 1997 and 2000, ¹⁵³ and that big anniversaries and personal milestones in politics were important for the high-achieving Chretien, who in August 2002 when announcing his plan to step down after his was challenged by long-time leadership rival Paul Martin, set a time of February 2004 – well past the ten-year mark in power – for retirement. ¹⁵⁴

On the date of the 10-year anniversary of his election to power, Saturday, October 26, 2003, Chretien celebrated by visiting the sacred Sikh Golden Temple in India on a day that happened to be Diwali – India’s equivalent of Christmas, basking in happiness among over 100,000 revellers and accompanied by natural resources minister Herb Dhaliwal, one of several Sikh Canadian Liberal MPs, while in Ottawa in the House of Commons a motion put forward by the Bloc Quebecois was to be voted on that Tuesday to force Chretien to step down as soon as Paul Martin became the Liberal leader in November; but Mr. Chretien was still planning to attend the Commonwealth summit in Nigeria in December, and he survived the motion, notifying new leader Paul Martin on November 18 that he would leave office on December 12 after returning from Africa – an unusually long time for a new Liberal leader to wait (for anything more than 10 days). ¹⁵⁵

The British Commonwealth summit turned out to be important as during that early-December event Zimbabwe under leader Robert Mugabe withdrew from the Commonwealth due to continued opposition from western democratic nations against ending suspension of its membership – in place after Mugabe was accused of rigging election in 2002. ¹⁵⁶ A Canada-EU summit after that, originally scheduled for December 17 in Ottawa (which would be right after Chretien’s resignation), was mysteriously cancelled by then EU president, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who also refused to meet with Chretien sooner in Europe, so Chretien paid a farewell visit to France with his large family accompanying him, and then as his last official foreign-relations function he received Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in Ottawa on December 11. ¹⁵⁷

Now, taking notice of Mr. Chretien’s liking of anniversary dates and milestones, one recognizes that on April 22, 2003 when the RCMP announced termination of the Airbus Affair criminal investigation, the day happened to be the 10-year anniversary of the Liberal Party’s unveiling of its law-and-order platform for the 1993 election, an election that would turn out to be historic as the Tories under Mulroney’s successor Kim Campbell would be reduced to only two seats and without official-party status – the worst federal electoral defeat in Canadian history. ¹⁵⁸

 

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Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late (Part 2)

(Continued from Part 1, previous blog post)

Such caricatures of Chicago not only date back to the days of Clarence Darrow or the days of Al Capone as the media would gladly recall, ⁶³ but had their academic versions, and in the field of mathematics, as well. The 1998 book “A Beautiful Mind” by The New York Times correspondent Sylvia Nasar about the mysterious but often sad life stories of the mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr., told of the tremendous interest on the part of the University of Chicago’s mathematics department including the mathematician Shiing-shen Chern, a patriarch figure in mathematics, ⁶⁴ toward an up-and-coming, flamboyant but abrasive John Nash in 1958-1959, who at the time was on the faculty of MIT but was fancying himself as the “the prince of peace”, the leader of a great movement for world peace, and “the left foot of God”; ⁶⁵ when Prof. Adrian Albert of the University of Chicago made an offer of a “prestigious chair” to John Nash, Nash responded that he had to decline because he was “scheduled to become Emperor of Antarctica”. ⁶⁶ Such undiplomatic response and related uttering prompted then MIT president Julius Stratton to call John Nash “a very sick man”. ⁶⁷ Nash, however, confidently told others that he was receiving encrypted, important political “messages” communicating to him through The New York Times. ⁶⁸

So in early 1959 the very promising mathematician John Nash chose not to go to Chicago, staying at MIT in Boston and talking out loud about forming a world peace movement, but soon (on or around April 8, 1959), he was involuntarily sent to McLean Hospital, committed and diagnosed as suffering from ‘paranoid schizophrenia’. ⁶⁹ This sad story has been dramatized somewhat differently in the Ron Howard movie adaptation of “A Beautiful mind”, with Nash portrayed by actor Russell Crowe, in which Nash was fancying himself as having been invited to work for a shadowy, secretive agency that was probably part of the Pentagon, analyzing data related to national security. ⁷⁰ In the real-world story according to Sylvia Nasar’s book, Nash’s claim was that he received messages through The New York Times, and although years before his world-peace ideas Nash had done some consulting work for the military and political think-tank the RAND Corporation, his association with RAND ended at the height of the McCarthy era in 1954 when he was napped by the police for engaging in homosexual activity. ⁷¹

John Nash nevertheless did not really believe that he had a mental illness. Looking back at his life in his 1994 Nobel Prize autobiography, Nash blamed it on the “characteristic of my orientation”, stating that “rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person’s concept of his relation to the cosmos”, and referring to the “madness” of Zarathustra and his millions of “naïve followers” as a case in point. ⁷²

But was John Nash a threat to the society in any violent sense during his “madness” – which would have been what mattered most to others – to justify confining a genius like him to the psychiatric ward? During his ‘self-styled’ world peace campaign in 1958-1959 he wrote many letters to family, colleagues and friends, and to the FBI, foreign ambassadors, the pope, and the United Nations, some of which presumably to do with his thought of (or allegation of) involvement in a “conspiracy” among military leaders to take over the world, ⁷³ but he did not actually lay a hand on even his wife, Alicia Larde, during those difficult times, and his family’s primary concern was that he might be treated like a “common criminal” if he was not taken as “insane”; the technical reason for his psychiatric committal was safety for Nash’s wife, but Alicia Larde also felt that by doing so she betrayed Nash’s determination to pursue his goals. ^{74, 75}

There, however, may have existed real concerns about John Nash among part of the authorities, though the author on the John Nash life story did not make an explicit connection in her book: all of John Nash’s ramblings of world peace and talks of military conspiracy were except an old incident that could have been of concern to the security-minded: when he was only a teenager in his hometown of Bluefield, West Virginia, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor when the older Americans had gone off to fight in the Second World War, Nash and his teenage friends Donald Reynolds and Herman Kirchner were fooling around with homemade pipe-bomb experiments in Kirchner’s basement, before Kirchner died in an accidental explosion in 1944. ⁷⁶

Now there could indeed be something there in 1959, meaning that the talented young mathematician might have in fact been capable of figuring out some crucial politics ahead of time – his credibility bolstered by his prior background of doing research at RAND. One can look at it this way: in January 1959 Fidel Castro’s revolution was winning in Cuba, an island just a stone’s throw across the water from the United States, and North Vietnamese communists were also adopting a path of “armed struggle” to unify with the South against the backdrop of increasing U.S. military assistance to South Vietnam; ^{77, 78} it was not like signs of warning did not exist for the turbulent decade ahead, ⁷⁹ and ten years later by 1969 when the Vietnam War was in full force and the St. Stephen’s Day-born American leftist William Ayers was founding the militant-resistance organization Weather Underground to engage in a series of high-profile, violent bombings in the United States for radical causes, ⁸⁰ John Nash’s thoughts by then could have been viewed as a borderline, nonviolent precursor to these later actions of Ayers and his associates; but by then Nash’s expressions had already been concluded as thoughts of “madness” by some (but not all) psychiatrists, and by the authorities. ⁸¹

What else would be a better explanation than the above – beside Nash’s own brash behavior and his habit of convoluted language – that a mathematician of original thinking and prolific production ⁸² who has now been recognized as having made fundamental contributions to the mathematical economic theory, and who has been called “the greatest numerologist the world has ever seen” (i.e., someone better than anyone else at the use of numbers in astrology and other human affairs) by the Princeton mathematician William Browder, ⁸³ was “mentally ill” when it came to his thinking about politics? Recognizing credibility in Nash’s political thoughts is like accepting his mathematical brilliance without automatically overriding any legitimate medical issue there might have been.

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Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late (Part 1)

It was eleven years before the New Millennium, in February 1989 only several months with my Mathematics Ph.D. degree out of the University of California, Berkeley, when the notion “Mathematics for the New Century” circulating in the mathematics community made a strong impression on me. ¹ A larger public-relations campaign was soon launched by then President George H. W. Bush and the U.S. state governors, spearheaded by a few including Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas, for what would become the first National Education Summit held in September 1989 in Charlottesville, Virginia, where it was declared that, among other objectives, U.S. high school students would be leading the world in mathematics and science by the year 2000. ² Subsequent efforts would lead to the Goals 2000 project later signed into law in 1994 as a centerpiece of President Bill Clinton’s education reform. ³

In 1989 I was a computer science faculty member at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, as an educator and researcher generally interested in good news for education and particularly impressed by declaration of lofty goals and projects to achieve them. Education, however, was often trumped by other more ominous or more urgent matters, such as the Gulf War in 1991; or at least that was what I would presume. But press archives indicate that on January 17, 1991, the day of the launch of Operation Desert Storm, or what Iraqi president Saddam Hussein called “Mother of all Battles”, ⁴ President Bush, Sr. actually met with his education advisory panel to hear about creating national standards for student performance, though he made no commitments on their proposal at the time according to panel member and former U.S. secretary of labor William Brock. ⁵

Having grown up a peaceful child and done Ph.D. study under someone who happened to have a past background of vigorous opposition to the Vietnam War, I tended to look into things via more idealistic, less bombastic lenses, and my presumption could sometimes be quite naïve. The peaceful and beautiful British Columbia where I had moved to in 1988 was not all reclusive when it came to U.S. politics: the city of Nelson, B.C. was well-known as a haven for many of the Vietnam-era “draft dodgers”, ⁶ and U.S. ambassador to Iraq April Catherine Glaspie, who was in the news over the controversy of exactly what the U.S. government told Saddam Hussein in July 1990 just days before his launching invasion of Kuwait, was originally from Vancouver. ⁷

By the time Bill Clinton became U.S. president and right away came to Vancouver for his first major international summit, the first Clinton-Yeltsin summit in April 1993, pitching different themes from the previous Bush administration’s, including the re-emergence of Richard Nixon as an elder statesman on U.S. foreign policy, ⁸ I was already out of the academia and bogged down in some politics of my focus, and was viewing the pomp and circumstance of the glitzy visit by the rare, distinguished guests to a place I had not long before been exiled from – part of the summit was held at the University of British Columbia – as a sort of ‘swan song’ by the departing Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, hardly noticing that at the time President Clinton was also transmitting his message to the U.S. Congress to legislate for Goals 2000, Educate America Act. ⁹

President Clinton loves Vancouver, British Columbia, obviously.

When the new century, or rather the New Millennium as it was referred to by then, finally drew close the views on progress towards it were by no means universal. Some in fact were quite critical about perceived lack of progress in education despite the efforts: at the eve of the New Millennium, then The New York Times columnist Richard Rothstein described the movement toward “Goals 2000” as a failure’s shutout victory over the United States. ¹⁰

Just before the New Millennium began I was joining the Silicon Valley in California (after another stint as an educator at the University of Hawaii, in Honolulu), arriving at the high-tech world among the dot-com and venture-capitalism rushes, which I wasn’t really part of. The ominous notion someone like me read and heard daily about the New Millennium at the time was not failure of education, but fears for Y2K (also called the ‘millennium bug’), and the tremendous amount of government and corporate efforts being made (and of course money being spent) to prevent disasters from materializing out of tiny numerical ‘legacies’ of computer programs. It was reported that one man in Ontario, Canada, had been preparing for the potential doomsday scenario for 20 years, burying 42 school buses deep underground as a home for himself. ¹¹

Fortunately, when the New Year of 2000 finally came nothing of a catastrophic type happened, though among the worldwide euphoria of New Millennium celebrations one wondered if there might not be a few vampires arriving for the occasion and taking away with them some tormented souls. The U.S. government later reported only a number of small technical glitches at the moment of the arrival of the millennium, such as: on the Naval Observatory web page the date read “19100”, the alarm systems at the John F. Kennedy Federal Building in Boston malfunctioned, a federal facility security access system in Nebraska was stuck in the open position, a Federal Aviation Administration system stopped processing some notices to airmen, an automatic backup system at the Cleveland Air Route Traffic Control Center failed to activate, a fire alarm system at a Financial Management Service office in Kansas was falsely activated, also in Kansas a lock failed at a Food and Drug Administration leased facility, and a Chicago-area bank stopped electronic transfers of Medicare payments to healthcare providers; in the end only oddly behaving malfunctions like the above, without any obvious disaster, yet all the while in Guam the processing of federal food-stamp benefits was being carried out manually because the systems there were not Y2K-compliant. ¹²

At the Eve of New Year 2000, I myself was in a hotel in Hong Kong, having arrived in Hong Kong the morning of December 31, 1999, but prevented by unexpected shortage of bus seats from being able to get to Guangzhou (Canton) in mainland China, only 108 miles north, to be with my parents to welcome the new age at midnight. While lights were glittering in Hong Kong, it wasn’t so much in the hotel I was staying but there was a good-spirited celebration for the New Year countdown. I wondered at the time what it might be like at the moment of the New Year across the Chinese mainland border: the city directly across from Hong Kong was Shenzhen, the special economic zone where Chinese market-oriented economic reforms first began in 1979-80 which have transformed the country from reliance on Communist ideology to functioning as one of the main engines of the modern world economy; one of Shenzhen’s most thriving industries has been – you may not believe it – book printing for the rest of the world. ¹³

When the New Millennium began, I and others didn’t know that in a couple of years, in 2002, a young American man by the name of Mark Ndesandjo, originally from Kenya, would move to Shenzhen and make his life there as a businessman and piano performer, and that – something many people today still don’t know – this young man is half brother of 2008 U.S. President Elect Barack Obama. ¹⁴ Honestly, at the night of the New Year’s Eve on December 31, 1999, I found it more interesting that the hotel owner’s daughter emceeing the countdown celebration in the hotel lobby looked like a certain student girl I had come across frequently on UC Berkeley campus during the 1980s.

Now with nine years, nearly a decade, or almost one-tenth of one-tenth of the New Millennium, gone, I am finally posting my first weblog (i.e., online diary), on a day that is special to me not only in a small annual sense but in a big way. I feel like I am finally leaving the gallows (behind), but still with chains in tow. Not the worst manner in which to transit into a new era, perhaps.

So where have I been in the nine years, to think of myself as entering the New Millennium only now?

(Read Full Article with Footnotes in Feng Gao’s Space) . . .

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