At Volokh:

When the Taliban demolished statues of the Buddha, many people all over the world, including many non-Buddhists, denounced the destruction as an act of barbarism. The government of China has announced plans to perpetrate a similar atrocity.

In Tianjiajing, Henan province (east-central China)is a century-old sanctuary of the Virgin Mary. The sanctuary was nearly destroyed by the Japanese, and later by the Red Guards, but since 1979, citizens have been rebuilding it.

The sanctuary features a statue of Mary in her role as "Our Lady of Mount Carmel." On July 16, the worldwide Mount Carmel feast day, as many as fifty thousand pilgrims visit the sanctuary. Yet as reported in AsiaNews.it, the provincial government has recently forbidden visits to the shrine, and declared that the police and military will prevent the July 16 pilgrimages. Moreover, the government has declared that the entire shrine will be dynamited. Nor will local Catholics be allowed to save the Mary statue, or other sacred artwork on the site, by removing them before the explosions go off.

I'm not Catholic, and not a big fan of religious statues in general, but... well, I think you can judge for yourself what this says about the Chinese government.

In other news, it seems Britain is blowing up Churchill -- metaphorically, anyway -- by having him removed from the national educational curriculum.

The radical overhaul of the school curriculum for 11- to 14-year-olds is designed to bring secondary education up to date and allow teachers more flexibility in the subjects they teach, the Government said....

A spokesman for the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority said the new curriculum, to be taught from September 2008, does not prescribe to teachers what they must include.

The argument is implausible: if we don't want to tell teachers what to teach, why not drop the required curriculum altogether? Instead, it still requires teaching about figures such as Wilberforce and, strangely, Douglas Adams, and subjects such as the history of the EU, global warming, and the dangers of GM foods and other "contemporary issues" -- which students will be, I presume, better able to judge when unencumbered by too much knowledge about the past.

In history, this means that a requirement to teach about Churchill, Hitler and Stalin has been replaced by “the causes and consequences of various conflicts, including the two world wars, the Holocaust and other genocides”. [1]

Causes and consequences of "conflicts"? <sarcasm>Well, at least they're not wandering into subjective territory.</sarcasm> While the events which led to World War II are mysterious and controversial, the "root causes" are agreed upon by all: bad foreign policy by the US and UK and the rise of the Religious Right in America.

(Me, I think you first have to learn the raw material of the past, and then, and only then, can we start looking for repeating patterns and "root causes.")

And, speaking of being unencumbered by too much knowledge of the past, over at Newsbusters, a recollection of the BBC's former censoring of Churchill:

The Churchill biographies note mostly in passing that the BBC systematically barred Churchill from discussing his defense and foreign policy views during the 1930's; Sir John Reith was head of the BBC at the time. Manchester states that "Reith saw to it that [Churchill] was seldom heard over the BBC..." Reith wrote of Churchill in Reith's monumentally voluminous diaries, "I absolutely hate him."

In 1938 Churchill was scheduled to appear on the BBC for a half-hour talk -- on the Mediterranean. When the Czech crisis erupted, Manchester reports, Churchill asked that the program be cancelled. On the Saturday before Parliament's debate on the Munich Agreement, Churchill agreed nevertheless to meet with (future Communist spy) Guy Burgess of the BBC. Churchill complained to Burgess, according to Burgess's recollection, that "he had been very badly treated in the matter of political broadcasts and that he was always muzzled by the BBC."

Why did Reith detest Churchill? In Reith's eyes, Churchill was of course a warmonger, and Reith, not coincidentally, held Hitler in the highest regard. How little times have changed.

And, moving from the big dictators to the petty, Ace of Spades has a horror story about a woman and child ejected from a flight. My theory of "root causes"? I'm guessing the stewardess in question doesn't have a non-relativistic basis for determining her self-worth, so she must derive it from her surrounding circumstances and position: she has power over others, etc. If so, the woman and child, and sympathetic passengers, were a challenge to her own internal self-image, which had to win. So the woman and child were therefore ejected.

And why settle for one petty dictator when you can have a whole mess of them? Jonah Goldberg (of the right) quotes Matthew Yglesia (of the left) admitting the following (emph added) -- that the push for "gay marriage" (etc.) is not merely about, say, the desire of people to honor each other as they see fit:

Similarly, the gay rights movement does indeed want gay couples to be unmolested in their private conduct. But their demands go far beyond that. They want to regulate who you may employ, who you may rent a house to, etc., etc., etc. — not merely a state that refrains from discriminating, but a state that takes the lead in fighting discrimination.

To me, this is all to the good. And if Cato Institute employees want to endorse it, that's all to the good as well. But it's not libertarianism.

Goldberg's response:

What's refreshing about this is that Yglesias is honestly and correctly admitting that liberals have no problem imposing their morality on others via a powerful and intrusive state. I wish that most liberals were as honest.

Indeed. Neither of us are libertarian, so let's not pretend otherwise.