Chinese are fond of compressing a social, political, or economic issue into a set of bullet points designated by the number of them. One of the most famous was “The Three Rounds,” encapsulating Chinese material dreams as they began emerging from the horror of Mao Tse Tung. You were wealthy in post-Mao China if you possessed a watch, a bicycle, and a sewing machine -- the three “rounds.” That was a quarter-century ago. Comparing the dream of having The Three Rounds to China’s economy today gives you an idea of how amazingly far China has traveled in that period. China has been speeding along a highway of wealth creation that has few parallels in history - yet now it looks like it is going to drive right off a cliff.What is transforming the Chinese economy from a dream to a nightmare are The Three No’s: No Water, No Wives, and No Banks.

Playwright and socialism-advocate George Bernard Shaw famously declared a century ago that “We’re all socialists now” - meaning that socialist ideas had so permeated English society they were advocated however disguised even by their opponents. The current hysteria over the “abuse” of Iraqi prisoners is evidence that American society has become so infected with envy-appeasing liberalism that “We’re all liberals now.”

Cortez and his Spanish soldiers who conquered the Aztecs are known to history as “Conquistadors.” That label of “Conquerors” was applied to them by their contemporaries -- but it originated a generation earlier. It was first used to describe the Spaniards who liberated their own country from Islam. Arab invaders had swept across Spain in the early 700s, and it took centuries for the Spanish to kick them out. Cortez was not yet 10 years old when they were finally ejected from their last stronghold in Grenada in 1492. When Cortez first looked upon the pyramid temples of the Aztec gods, he called them mezquitas -- mosques. Cortez saw himself as a liberator -- just as his fathers had liberated Spain from the Islamic yoke, so he would liberate “New Spain” from the Aztec yoke. Yet he had little idea of how deep were the political-religious parallels between the Arabs and the Aztecs. The parallels go beyond the death worship of Aztec warriors and Arab suicide-bombers. One of the latter responsible for the train bombings in Madrid declared in a letter: “You (Christians) love life -- we (Moslems) love death.” Compare this Aztec poem: There is nothing like death in war Nothing like the flowery death So precious to the gods who give us life Far off I see it! My heart yearns for it! The deeper parallel is this: both the Arabs and the Aztecs invented a Religion of Jihad as a rationale to justify their imperialist empires.