You’ve nothing to fear.

I worry a little that, in this politically charged environment particularly, when someone urges you to ‘be your authentic self’ she means ‘come out here where I can get you’.

Addendum, April 11, 2021 as follows:

Gilbert King, “The Silence that Preceded China’s Great Leap into Famine“, Smithsonianmag.com, Sept. 12, 2012.

Excerpts: “Mao’s speech may be best known for marking the beginning of the Hundred Flowers Movement—a brief campaign that ended in the betrayal of the principle on which it was based and the people he had invited to take part….writers and intellectuals were wary and skeptical of what would be called the Hundred Flowers Movement….Mao began to sense that the movement was spiraling out of control, and in July, he quashed it. The “fragrant flowers,” he announced, must be distinguished from the “poisonous weeds”; criticism would no longer be tolerated. In the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957, critics and detractors were rounded up by the hundreds of thousands and shipped off for execution or re-education through labor. The Hundred Flowers Movement, Mao would later say, had “enticed the snakes out of their lairs.” [bolding mine]

(Note the ‘like’ for this post was added before the addendum. Cat might like my graphic but might not endorse my addendum. I don’t want to misrepresent her view.)

Categories: Pam-Toons

Tags: authentic, belief, conversation, danger, discourse, disingenuous, dissimulate, expression, free, honest, Maranos, moriscos, safe, self, speech, truthful, U-boat, witch hunt