Your favorite politician/ government official

[Black_Rose]

Who is your favorite politician? In order to maintain the rules of the “social justice” forum (I do not know any other better forum to post this), the politicians cannot be contemporary but I want a more historical answer:

My favorite politician is not from the occidental, classical liberal tradition, but oriental. My favorite politician is Lin Zexu who, inspired by the Confucian teaching of moral virtue, attempted to stop British importation of opium in China:

Lin Zexu (simplified Chinese: 林则徐; traditional Chinese: 林則徐; pinyin: Lín Zéxú; Wade-Giles: Lin Tse-hsü; Foochow Romanized: Lìng Cáik-sṳ̀; Styled: Yuanfu (元撫); (30 August 1785 – 22 November 1850) was a Chinese scholar and official during the Qing dynasty.

A formidable bureaucrat known for his competence and high moral standards, Lin was sent to Guangdong as imperial commissioner by the Daoguang Emperor in late 1838 to halt the illegal importation of opium from the British.[4][5] He arrived in March 1839 and made a huge impact on the opium trade within a matter of months.[4] He arrested more than 1,700 Chinese opium dealers and confiscated over 70,000 opium pipes. He initially attempted to get foreign companies to forfeit their opium stores in exchange for tea, but this ultimately failed and Lin resorted to using force in the western merchants’ enclave. It took Lin a month and a half before the merchants gave up nearly 1.2 million kilograms (2.6 million pounds) of opium. 500 workers laboured for 22 days in order to destroy all of it, mixing the opium with lime and salt and throwing it into the ocean outside of Humen Town.

Lin also wrote an extraordinary “memorial” (摺奏), by way of an open letter published in Canton, to Queen Victoria of Britain in 1839 urging her to end the opium trade. The letter is filled with Confucian concepts of morality and spirituality. As a representative of the Imperial court, Lin adopts a position of superiority and his tone is condescending [4], despite the British clearly having the upper hand, military-wise, when the event is examined with hindsight. His primary line of argument is that China is providing Britain with valuable commodities such as tea, porcelain, spices and silk, while Britain sends only “poison” in return.[4] He accuses the “barbarians” (i.e. private merchants) of coveting profit and lacking morality. His memorial expressed a desire that Victoria would act “in accordance with decent feeling” and support his efforts.[7]

 

[tjm190]

Bismarck

 

[mpb74]

I don’t want to say anything improper but you really teed this one up. There is an old saying, gaining a lot of popularity these days. The only good politician is a dead one. They can no longer do any harm. Sorry too tempting.

 

[Black_Rose]

Bismarck

If you read my posts, you think that I would love Bismark despite being left-wing. I have a respect for his sense of German nationalism by reunifying Germany as a nation. Before, Germany was a constellation of sovereign principalities due to the Peace of Westphalia after the Thirty Years War. The Peace of Westphalia respected the sovereignty of the principalities formed after the Thirty Years War, giving them independence from the supranational Holy Roman Empire, but their sovereignty prevented national cohesion by decentralizing power.

I also loved how he initiated the modern welfare state.