Current Affairs

Many people born in the new era may not understand that just a few decades ago, our country would still divide people into “left” and “right” people. The “left and right” mentioned here is a political indicator, which is widely used to divide everyone’s political tendency. During the French Revolution, the National Assembly included royal nobles, religious figures, emerging capitalists and urban craftsmen. The former sits on the right side of the parliament hall and supports the monarchy and the Catholic Church; while the latter sits on the left side of the hall and supports the republic and opposes the dictatorship of the church. From then on, in politics, those who advocated maintaining the current system and opposed radical reforms or revolutions were called “rightists”; while those who advocated breaking the current system and supporting radical reforms or even revolutions were called “leftists”. ...

#The causes and consequences of the Floyd incident On May 25, 2020, in Minnesota, the United States, an African American named George Floyd was negligently killed by a local white police officer during his arrest. This incident became the trigger for a nationwide riot, with large and small protests breaking out in various states across the United States. These protests have developed from initially peaceful demonstrations to violent incidents of smashing, looting, and burning. There have been vicious incidents in various places where shops were smashed and looted by thugs. ...

On March 7, 2020, the Changjiang Daily published an article titled “Carry Out Gratitude Education Across the City and Build Strong Positive Energy.” It disclosed instructions from Wang Zhonglin, then Party secretary of Wuhan, at a video meeting of the city’s Covid prevention and control headquarters. He called for “gratitude education” among citizens, Party members, and cadres, centered on “listening to the Party, following the Party, and building strong positive energy.” ...

At the end of December 2019, Google released its word of the year as usual: “Hero.” This may have had something to do with the many superhero movies released that year. But in an age full of chaos and anxiety, calling for heroes does become one of people’s choices. After all, history is only an abbreviated record of past events, and it easily creates the illusion of a heroic view of history. The more a nation likes to “take history as a mirror,” the more likely it is to look eagerly for the arrival of a hero when facing a historical crisis it cannot handle. Napoleon for France and Hitler for Germany are examples, though the legacies they left were completely different. The former left the great French Civil Code and spread the spirit of French freedom and democracy across Europe; the latter left war, massacre, and a Germany reduced to ruins. Yet both were personally lifted onto the heroic throne by their own people. ...

In recent years, as Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd has become popular among readers, Chinese-language society has seen a wave of stigmatizing “the masses.” People seem to have found, in Le Bon’s arguments that lack logical continuity and empirical support, a justification for “controlling” public opinion. Following the method of looking for evidence after deciding on a conclusion, a series of “crimes” by mass opinion have been made public. Thus the claim that “public opinion eats people” has itself been accepted by “public opinion,” producing a strange scene of self-disarmament. ...