A way to escape the tyranny 145
… and not lose America?
There are two American nations owning the same country. One wants individual freedom and equality under the law; the other wants authoritarian gynocracy with a caste system graded by skin color. Each loathes and fears the other. Each wants to be free of the other. But territorial separation is not possible.
Is there a solution?
Selwyn Duke thinks there is. He writes about it at Canada Free Press:
With a stolen election, stolen culture, stolen courts and stolen dreams, many Americans are realizing that rule by the Left, absolutely corrupt even without absolute power, is unthinkable. Talk of secession, something continually entertained in various states throughout history, is again in the air. The problem is that for the most part, we’ve been supinely submissive in the face of burgeoning leftist tyranny. So it would help if there were something between secession and our current slouching toward servitude. And there is.
Too many conservatives are also waxing defeatist, saying “The republic is dead; our freedoms are gone.” And, yes, if we continue operating inside the box and being “conservative” — as in status-quo oriented — we can kiss our (remaining) liberties goodbye. But the Left isn’t constrained by any box, except what’s physically and politically possible; it doesn’t abide by rules, laws, social codes or conventions except when convenient. So why should we remain in any box … ?
Embracing Mao’s sentiment that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”, the Left trades in violence, violence done to political opponents and to our culture, history, heroes, Constitution and just liberties. Now having seized power in government’s executive and legislative branches via the violence of electoral theft, the Left aims to use that power to become autocratic. As to how we should respond, remember:
Only power negates power.
The Left has been able to steal a national election (and some down-ballot seats, no doubt) via massive vote fraud in, largely, a handful of big Democrat-run cities. Yet despite all the electoral theft, President Trump still won half the states, some by wide margins. It is these states where power should be exercised.The power I reference is what Thomas Jefferson called the “rightful remedy” for all federal usurpation of states’ domain: nullification. This is the process whereby authorities simply ignore federal dictates, whether handed down by Congress, a bureaucracy or the courts.
There’s nothing unprecedented about nullification. Leftists engage in it continually. For example, their localities often ignore federal drug or immigration laws, and more than a score of states nullified the REAL ID Act of 2005.
Only, leftists don’t call it “nullification” — they just do it. In contrast, conservatives busy themselves conserving the status quo even though it’s leftist-born and generally abide by even unconstitutional federal laws, mandates and court rulings because “this is the way things are done”.
This said, we have seen some pushback, with county sheriffs in recent times refusing to enforce irrational China virus restrictions and some opposition to anti-Second Amendment proposals. But this effort must become widespread and organized — “Nullification!” must become a rallying cry.
To this end, we need a nullification movement. When state officials, from governor to assemblymen and senators, run for office, the first and last question must be: Will you vow to nullify all unjust federal dictates? If they hem and haw at all, they must be immediately disqualified.
In addition, nullification-disposed states should make a compact with one another so that we can enjoy the strength numbers bring.
In reality, nullification … should have been pursued long ago; the federal government has, after all, been trampling states’ powers for at least the better part of a century, and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. … We now require a ton of cure.
The cure of nullification is the obvious next step for anyone serious about combating the burgeoning leftist tyranny. We’ve no other recourse. …
Reasoned argumentation only works with those who’ll yield to reason (the Left won’t).
Constitutional constraints only matter to those who respect laws and national contracts (the Left doesn’t).
Appealing to courts only bears fruit when judges have a sense of justice and duty and the guts to act rightly even when pariah status results (most don’t).
Making this more tragically comical still is that when we seek redress for federal tyranny, we expect relief from the federal government’s own judicial branch!
This didn’t help us with the 2020 election, which the Left got away with stealing. Moreover, it knows it can not only replicate the theft in the future but can expand it; thus have the Democrats introduced a bill taking mail-in voting nationwide. … The states can just pass on it. …
The Democrats can hobble border enforcement so that they can further destabilize our country and import more future voters — and Texas can secure its border itself. Let the left-wing, black-robed lawyers issue their contrary “opinions” as we know they will. My response would be a paraphrase of the paraphrase of Andrew Jackson: “The judges have made their decision. Now let them enforce it.”
In sum: The power of the federal government would be nullified by conservative populist states ignoring federal laws their own majorities don’t like and don’t vote for.
But the conservative populist states are the rule-of-law states. Would it not be a betrayal of their own principle to do it?
Not if the federal government has abandoned the rule of law and become a dictatorship. The Democrats now in power have amply demonstrated their contempt for any law that stands in their way. They have gotten away with conspiring against an elected president, perjury in court, cheating in an election, encouraging violent riots. They have lost the right to be obeyed.
So yes, defiance, or “nullification”, might be a solution. It is the practical sort of solution that evolves in response to the exigencies of conditions (like the constitutional republic of the United States), rather than the sort conceived by theorists and arbitrarily imposed (like socialism).
Then what might a Leftist federal government do about it? Would it use the US army to enforce its will?
We suspect that the gang in power in D.C. now would not hesitate to use the army. They are already doing so in the federal capital. And the Democratic Party’s radical female novices in Congress almost certainly would as soon as they’ve risen to some seniority. Or even before.
What then? Civil war?
*
Note added three days later: The North Dakota legislature, alarmed by Biden’s extravagant issue of executive orders and their effects, is considering exercising its right of nullification.
America goes 393
As the Catholic Church did in ages past, and Islam still does, the Left strives to bring every nation, and every last member of every nation, under its rule: a rule not of law but of lawyers, law-makers and law-breakers; bureaucrats, bankers, communication controllers, billionaires.
In America there are still tens of millions who refuse to comply, and they are being treated as heretics, infidels, and pariahs. If you are a Trump supporter, or in the least degree opposed to the Leftists who have seized the executive branch of government and now control both houses of the legislative branch, you are likely to be forced into conformity and unquestioning obedience. The means to be employed will be cutting you off from the services you need to live a normal life.
Through institutions of government and enormously powerful corporations, the heresies of patriotism, populism, anti-tribalism, individualism, and defiant defense of free speech, private property, arms bearing, and the teaching of reading writing reckoning and history to your children, will be punished.
You will be denied the services of banks, credit card companies, the internet, social media, insurance companies, the national health service, schools, universities. It will be very hard for you to find a job.
There will be degrees of deprivation. If you are a mild offender, you may be allowed some health care, for instance, and a low-paying job. If you are a grave offender – one who goes so far as to persist in speaking well of Donald Trump – you may face long imprisonment. An active attempt to reinstate him could be ruled a capital offense.
If you capitulate and submit, your life will not be easy. Your record will be held against you.
Even if you always supported the Left and voted the totalitarians into power, you will receive only the information that the rulers choose to allow you. You will have no way of knowing – unless by chance you personally witness a reported event – whether what you are being told is true or false.
Bruce Bawer writes at Front Page:
I’ve been ranting for years about the perfidy of the left. At times I’ve been accused of exaggerating. On rare occasions I feared – or hoped? – that perhaps I was exaggerating. In fact I can now see that these people are worse than I ever imagined. Worse than most of us ever imagined. …
Worse than even Donald Trump “with all his insight” imagined.
He went into office determined to clean up the swamp. He was tireless. But not tireless enough. No mere mortal could have been tireless enough. Trump had denounced the swamp in apocalyptic terms, but it proved to be even deeper and more extensive than he knew. It reached into the upper echelons of the intelligence community and the military, into cabinet departments and the judiciary.
Not only did the Democrats try to derail his campaign and then his presidency. Even people whom he appointed to White House jobs proved unreliable. Far from being too suspicious, he’d been too trusting. He’d appointed two-faced D.C. insiders. He’d trusted people who turned out to be snakes in the grass.
The news media, with very few exceptions, made it their task to thwart his progress and poison his name with a constant flow of disinformation. They said Trump had told people to drink bleach. They said he’d called neo-Nazis “good people”. They said many other outrageous things that they knew were outright lies. They relentlessly repeated the charge that he did nothing but lie, lie, lie, when in fact it was they, the media, who were constantly feeding us lies. …
When enemies of Trump, and of freedom, created violence and mayhem in cities around the country, they were whitewashed, protected, and even praised by the media, by Democratic politicians, and by police officials. In a debate with Trump, Biden said Antifa was an idea, not an organization. Congressman Jerrold Nadler called it a myth.
Meanwhile Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey gave BLM $3 million. While the leftist gangsters went unpunished, citizens who tried to protect their homes and businesses from destruction by them were arrested by the police and demonized in the media. If you tried to spread the truth about all this on social media, you were shut down by Silicon Valley bosses who said you were lying.
And then the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
Republican officials in the states affected by the steal sat on their hands. State legislatures, ditto. Even the justices he’d named to the Supreme Court refused to hear Texas v. Pennsylvania, absurdly maintaining that a state didn’t have standing to challenge the conduct of a presidential election in another state.
Trump’s supporters, ever civilized, waited patiently while every possible means of stopping the steal was dutifully exhausted. When it came down to the final vote certification in Congress, an army of [between 600,000 and 2,000,000!) MAGA folk gathered peacefully in Washington to show that they had Trump’s back.
Then a tiny percentage of them foolishly entered the Capitol building. And a tiny percentage of that tiny percentage – at least some of whom seem to have been Antifa goons – caused minor damage. Most of them appear to have milled harmlessly around the building, leaving paintings and statues untouched. The contrast with the conduct of Antifa and BLM insurgents during the previous year could hardly have been more striking. …
One of those people, an Air Force veteran named Ashli Babbitt, was shot dead by a Capitol Hill policeman. She didn’t do anything to provoke the shooter. It was impossible not to think of George Floyd, the career criminal who, on May 25 of last year, died while resisting arrest after committing a crime. Floyd was black; the arresting officer was white. In the ensuing months, Floyd’s death was used to justify rioting, arson, and vandalism by Antifa and BLM agitators, none of whom ended up being killed by a cop.
But nobody’s making a martyr out of Ashli Babbitt.
I’m not saying anybody should. I’m just saying that after four years of reportage that routinely demonized Trump, sugarcoated his opponents, and cruelly mocked his supporters, and after an election that was blatantly stolen yet described in the media as eminently fair, those supporters could hardly be expected not to explode – especially since they’d seen, during the previous few months, one leftist explosion after another rewarded with praise.
But they did not explode.
On January 6, Biden, oozing faux solemnity, addressed the ongoing situation on Capitol Hill. After months of referring to Antifa and BLM thugs as “protesters”, he called the non-violent people who’d entered the Capitol a “mob” of “domestic terrorists” who, in an action bordering on “sedition”, had made an “unprecedented assault…on the citadel of liberty….This is not dissent, it’s disorder”.
He wasn’t alone. In one voice, people who’d spent months cheering leftist violence expressed horror at the breach of the Capitol building and blamed it on Trump. Once the Capitol was secured, the planned challenges to the vote steal were scuttled and the election of Biden and Harris duly certified.
Whereupon the left – and not just the left – moved with the swiftness of lightning.
Accusing Trump of having incited the Capitol breach, [Speaker] Pelosi and [Senate minority leader] Schumer raised the possibility of using the 25th Amendment to deny him his last few days in office …
And she absurdly introduced a proposal to impeach him for a second time, though he had only a few days more as president. .
Republicans who were never strong Trump supporters to begin with were quick to profess outrage at Trump’s purported provocation. Cabinet members Elaine Choi and Betsy DeVos quit. The Wall Street Journal called on Trump to resign. Senator Pat Toomey gave a thumbs-up to impeachment. Forbes warned companies not to hire anybody with a Trump connection.
Both Twitter and Facebook deplatformed Trump, and when he shifted from his personal Twitter account to the POTUS account, Twitter silenced that one, too. Other enemies of the left were also kicked off social media – among them Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, and Steve Bannon. Facebook ejected the WalkAway movement, in the process deleting countless heartfelt posts by ordinary citizens explaining why they’d quit the Democratic Party. YouTube took down a video by Rudy Giuliani. Amazon, Google, and Apple removed Parler, a “free-speech” alternative to Twitter and Facebook, from their app stores. The CEO of Mozilla, developer of the Firefox browser, wrote an essay entitled “We Need More than Deplatforming.”
(Yet the social-media accounts of the Chinese Communist Party and Ayatollah Khamenei remained untouched.)
Pelosi tried to get the military to stop taking orders from the President. …
She urged the Chiefs of Staff to mutiny against their commander-in-chief! (They refused.)
The director of ABC News spoke of “cleansing” the Trump movement after January 20, whatever that might mean. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, who’d taken the lead in challenging the vote steal, to be expelled from the Senate. Simon & Schuster canceled Hawley’s contract for a book about cancel culture. Biden likened Cruz to Goebbels. …
There’s no intrinsic magic about America that protects it from becoming Mao’s China or Stalin’s Russia. Only utopians believe in the perfectibility of man. People are people. And some of the people who are now, or are about to be, in power in the United States would, if accorded enough power, do far more to those of us who falter in loyalty than merely take away our social-media accounts.
Indeed, as scary as the situation may be right now, one thing’s for certain: worse is on its way. The Democrats now control both houses of Congress and are about to be handed the executive branch. The totalitarian-minded elements in that party are on the ascent, backed up by Silicon Valley, the legacy media, and much of corporate America.
Bruce Bawer thinks that by “listing, arresting, and imprisoning ‘enemies of the state'” – as, he reminds us, was done in the terrible reign of Stalin, and under the brutal tyranny of Mao –
These people will overreach. Their lists will grow so long, their cancelations so widespread, that, as happened with the Reign of Terror, everyone who isn’t clinically insane will finally realize that things have gone too far and will, in one way or another, put an end to the madness.
He asks:
But how far will things have to go before that happens? How long will it take? And how many lives will be destroyed before it’s over? These, alas, are the all too sobering questions that have yet to be answered.
In the meantime, those of us who care about liberty will simply have to do our best to keep enduring the daily tsunami of evil ideology, fake news, and contempt for decent people, and to continue hoping that the true and good will yet prevail.
Much as we would like his optimism – such as it is, sorrowful and tentative – to hearten us, we are less sure that such a realization will come, or that “the true and good will yet prevail”.
What has happened seems to us to demonstrate that there is a tragic weakness in freedom and tolerance. They permit those who value neither to exploit them to gain the power to abolish them.
A new America made in China? 220
The powerful coterie that accused Donald Trump, first as a candidate for the presidency and then as president, of “colluding” with Vladimir Putin to do something-or-other in the interest of Russia and against the interest of the United States, knew perfectly well that the accusation was a lie since they themselves had invented it. They would have him exposed and punished as a traitor to the country he led, knowing full well that he was nothing of the sort but in fact a passionate American patriot.
Now their chosen president, Joe Biden, and his powerful supporters – billionaires, owners of vast international corporations, film makers, newspaper and television moguls, federal bureaucrats, career diplomats, primates of academia – are colluding with the Chinese Communist Party to do what it pays them to do in the interest of China and against the interest of the United States.
Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness about the “collusion” and the collusion:
“Collusion” destroyed what was left of respect for the Washington FBI, the CIA, and the liberal news media. …
“Collusion” … allowed befuddled Russian appeasers and naïfs to … recalibrate themselves as our new version of Cold War hawks. It was as if a supposedly geriatric and anemic Russia suddenly had transmogrified back into the huge and global-menacing Soviet Union …
But the chief motive for the “collusion” accusation was the destruction of Donald Trump; the driving force behind the hoax, sheer hatred of him – and of the tens of millions of Americans who trusted him to make their lives more prosperous and fulfilling. (Which he did.)
“Collusion” was, as the debased FBI agent Peter Strzok had texted, the “insurance policy” of the administrative state to keep the “smelly”, the “ugly folk”, and “dregs” where they belonged—far, far from power. …
“Collusion” took off because so many of those directly involved in its illegality—Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and Hillary Clinton—pushed the “collusion” lie in roles of respected senior “wise men and women” with “security clearances” who knew “what was really going on”. …
[The accusation of] “collusion” did hurt Donald Trump, the sum of all their hatreds. “Collusion” was behind the dishonest and embarrassing witch hunt of Robert Mueller’s 22-month $35 million investigation. It was the subtext of a fraudulent impeachment …
The “collusion” fraud tore the country apart. It destroyed the reputations of James Comey, Robert Mueller, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, network news, and what had been left of the little repute of Brennan, Clapper, McCabe, and Andrew Weissmann. …
The “collusion” effort, its proven dishonesty, and its complete failure to remove Donald Trump, did not lead to a hiatus. … No, the abject failure of “collusion’s” outlandish premises, and the impunity given those who destroyed so many lives and hurt the country, only whetted the appetite of the “Resistance”. The slow-motion coup aficionados promised to do better in the next round.
Remember, those who lied under oath, abused government power, broke the law, and unmasked and leaked classified information, to this day, have never been held to account. Nor have the journalists who spread these untruths and demonized any who refuted them.
And so with that exemption, the Left pressed on to impeachment and, eventually, remaking the very system of how we voted in 2020. …
And while the lying was going on –
There was a real, far more dangerous collusion that was burrowed deep within the U.S. administrative state, the Democratic Party, corporate boardrooms, Big Tech, professional sports and entertainment, and the media.
If, save for its rusting nuclear arsenal, Russia was shrinking, poor, and spent, not so was China. It was rich, huge, and ruthlessly hellbent on global hegemony—if not by bribery and corruption, then by naked commercial and military force.
[There was] a NATO along a much weaker Russia’s borders, [but] until Trump there was nothing much to protect Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan from China. …
Beijing, far better than Russia, understands how to unravel a new America, unhinged and obsessed with race, victimization, and “privilege”.
Hollywood has had a field day with casting big-screen, shaved-headed, Orthodox tattooed, Russian mafia killers and brutes as the evil enemies of all noble minority and feminist film heroes. Yet at the same time, progressive studio heads and producers were reassuring the 1.4 billion people in the Chinese market that they would cull darker-skinned minority American actors so as not to offend the innate racism of the Chinese movie-goer. No one said a word about the paradox.
[China can] put 1 million religious dissidents in a gulag archipelago, destroy the semi-independence of Hong Kong, threaten any of its dissident neighbors with commercial destruction, embark on the largest imperialist and colonialist project in two centuries throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe, obliterate the culture of Tibet, militarize, with man-made atolls, the South China Sea, systematize internal surveillance, nonchalantly practice institutional racism, and infect the planet with a novel virus—and receive almost no official criticism from the United Nations and the governments of the European Union and the United States …
[What do] Michael Bloomberg, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Representative Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), the elite universities of the United States, the family of Joe Biden, Lebron James, and Colin Kaepernick all have in common?
Easy. A presidential primary candidate [Bloomberg] assures us that China is not an authoritarian country as he pours billions into jump-starting Chinese companies.
The erstwhile head of the U.S. Senate’s intelligence committee [Dianne Feinstein] has had a Chinese spy as her chauffeur for 20 years and a spouse who has millions in joint-Chinese ventures.
A congressman on the House Intelligence Committee [Eric Swalwell] was deeply compromised by an attractive young Chinese spy—a fact kept silent for years.
The Department of Education complains that our best universities have failed, again for years, to report tens of millions of dollars in “gifts” from Chinese government-affiliated companies.
Hunter Biden and his familial clique received millions of dollars in Chinese investment monies for no reason other than the “big guy” Joe Biden was vice president.
Our sports icons simultaneously trashed American democracy while keeping mum about Chinese racist dictatorship, the source of their millions in endorsements and franchising.
Remember just those few examples and one realizes that something is gone haywire with those at the very heart of America’s power and cultural influence.
And the most depressing fact of all? Even if we had investigative reporters and crusading congressional representatives, or past administrations before 2016 interested in real collusion, then what could they really have done? …
How many Wall Street grandees, how many media moguls, how many ex-politicians and bureaucrats (now “consultants” and “analysts”), and how many retired esteemed generals would journalists have had to reexamine to adjudicate whether their public views and corporate policies were warped by Chinese profiteering?
One can lie about “collusion” with impunity. But to speak the truth about collusion is to be smeared as “xenophobic”, “racist”, and “nativist”.
China has piggybacked on the entire diversity/identity politics domestic cancel culture. …
Our elite simplistically conflates the Russian nationalist dictator and kleptocrat Vladimir Putin with the criminal past of the now-defunct Stalinist Soviet Union that killed 20 million of its own. Yet in creepy fashion, it still remains indifferent that Chinese President Xi Jinping, current General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and Chairman of the Chinese Central Military Commission, heads a government apparatus that is the direct and unbroken successor to Mao Zedong’s Communist killing machine that wiped out over 50 million of its own people. …
Given the present U.S. “collusion” hysteria of the anti-Trump Left, had a Russian city been the source of the origin and transmission of the virus, had SARS-CoV-2 been connected to research and experimentation within a Level-4 Russian virology lab, and had the Russians lied about these facts, and, either through laxity or deliberation, allowed the virus to infect the world, kill over 1.5 million, and destroy the global economy, then we would have been on the brink of war.
Once China has finished “unravelling” this “new America, unhinged and obsessed with race, victimization, and “privilege”, will it “build [it] back better” (as the slogan of the globalists runs) and make an entirely new America in its own image?
The quickest, smartest, simplest, most efficient way the Democrats, pressed as they are by their rising communist generation (represented in government by “the Squad”), could turn the United States of America into the United Socialist States of America (USSA), is to invite the Chinese to take over the running of the country. The ruling Chinese Communist Party wouldn’t need to send many of its agents here, as there are tens of thousands of them already in place.
A few top men would need to be flown over. (They would be men, not women, not transgenders. Their pronouns would be only he, him, his.)
It would be an unremarkable event when a smiling Chinese Communist fresh from Beijing enters the Oval Office, waits while a befuddled Joe Biden is gently removed from the chair at the president’s desk and escorted out into limbo, and quietly takes his place.
The UN must be destroyed 297
Is there any benefit whatsoever to be derived by the human race, or any portion of it large or small, from the iniquitous United Nations?
Our answer: none.
Lloyd Billingsley writes at Front Page:
[This month, October 2020] Cuba and the People’s Republic of China, both longstanding Communist dictatorships, gained election to the United Nations Human Rights Council. The move should come as no surprise because the UN tilted to Communist states from the start.
In the waning days of World War II, Stalin’s foreign minister Andrei Gromyko suggested … Alger Hiss as the first UN Secretary General …
He was appointed. So the first [“acting”] Secretary General of the UN was a Soviet spy working in the US State Department. …
The newfound UN did nothing to liberate eastern Europe from Soviet control. When Hungarians rebelled in 1956, the UN under Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld stood by as the Soviet Communists crushed the rebellion …
The UN had nothing to say against the brutal repression of the Hungarians by the USSR. But at the same time (October/November, 1956) roundly condemned Britain, France and Israel for attempting to stop President Nasser of Egypt from nationalizing the (British and French owned) Suez Canal. The UN sent an armed (but totally impotent) group to “supervise” the withdrawal of the three nations’ forces when they gave up their intervention under pressure from President Eisenhower.
The Soviet Union retained control of eastern Europe, and from 1972 to 1981 made gains in southeast Asia, Africa and Central America. The UN Secretary General at the time was Kurt Waldheim, … a former Nazi in a Sturmtruppen unit that executed thousands of Yugoslav partisans and civilians and deported thousands of Greek Jews to death camps from 1942 to 1944. None of that appears in Waldheim’s official UN biography.
… [In Cambodia the Communist] Khmer Rouge murdered nearly two million people, approximately one-fourth of the population, … executed thousands of babies by smashing their heads against a tree, and forced prisoners to dig their own graves before killing them with clubs to save bullets.
The UN looked on, unmoved. It saw nothing it didn’t like.
From 1974 to 1987 the head of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was Amabou-Mahtar M’Bow of Senegal, a Muslim … On M’Bow’s watch, UNESCO funded the PLO and violent Marxist movements around the world. UNESCO served as cover for a dozen of the 47 KGB spies expelled by France in 1983.
UNESCO promoted the “New World Information and Communication Order”, a Soviet-style effort to quash free speech and repress journalists. When the French L’Express described M’Bow as a “megalomaniac despot”, the UNESCO boss sued the publication. M’Bow’s excesses prompted U.S. President Ronald Reagan to pull the United States out of UNESCO in 1984.
Communist China has occupied Tibet since the 1950s and the UN looks the other way. Likewise, the United Nations did nothing about China’s Communist dictatorship under Mao Zedong, with an estimated 65 million victims by the worst mass murder of the 20th century, easily surpassing Stalin and Hitler. During the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, Mao bragged, “We have buried alive 46,000 scholars.”
This genocidal dictatorship now lands on the UN Human Rights Council, along with fellow Communist state Cuba and such reputable upholders of human rights as Bolivia, Venezuela, and Pakistan which sheltered Osama bin Laden.
The United States withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council in 2018 and President Trump stopped funding the World Health Organization, part of the UN and a PRC asset.
The United States is the biggest funder of the United Nations but remains its primary target, along with Israel. President Trump should continue his momentum by withdrawing the United States from the UN, now headed by former Portuguese prime minister Antonio Guterres, from 1992 to 1999 vice president of the Socialist International.
The UN has done no good and much harm. Paid for by the United States but always dominated by Communist and Islamic tyrannies, it is a profoundly evil institution which the Western world should never have tolerated.
THE UN MUST BE DESTROYED!
The Red Guards in America now 78
Paul Joseph Watson shows us the Red Guards at their work of humiliation, persecution, destruction and murder, in Mao’s China and Democrats’ America:
(Hat-tip to Jeanne Shockley)
Race war? 17
The Black Lives Matter movement wants a race war.
Conservative journalists, reporters, commentators are issuing dire warnings that the Black Lives Matter movement is Marxist – as its leaders state and emphasize that it is. So they say that what these revolutionaries want to impose on Americans instead of their present Constitutional Republic is a Marxist dictatorship like that of Stalin, Mao Zedong, Castro, Maduro, Pol Pot. It is a fearsome warning.
But in fact what Black Lives Matter want to impose on America is something even worse. Actually – if you can imagine it possible – much worse. When Hawk Newsome, the BLM leader in New York, says that he wants “black sovereignty”, he means it. He is a black racist. The BLM movement is a black racist movement. Its ideologues do not want black equality, they do not even want black supremacy, they want a BLACK ONLY America. To that end, they are happy to use the help of arrogant, unsuspecting white Marxists. And of whites generally, the millions of white citizens eager to demonstrate that they are not racists. (So eager that they were even prepared to elect a Communist to the presidency, twice, for no better reason than that he was black.) They are marching now in the city streets with banners supporting black racists, passionately shouting the slogans of black racism, baying – if they but knew it – for their own destruction.
The international Communist movement, instructed about 100 years ago by the Comintern (which took its instructions from the Politburo thugs who took theirs from Stalin), ordered that Karl Marx’s “class analysis’ was to be replaced by “race analysis”. And when the New Left arose violently in France and Germany in 1968, it insisted that the revolutionary force was no longer the proletariat (the urban working class) but the underdogs of the world, chiefly the black and brown races. All the members of the Comintern, and almost all the theoreticians of the New Left, were white, and it never occurred to them that if they incited the black and brown races to rise in revolt against “race oppression”, they were inviting them to rise against whites as such, and they themselves would be the race enemy.
All the foolish well-meaning white protestors and donors and propagandists will be discarded, very likely destroyed, as BLM gathers strength. Wealthy whites and big businesses mainly run by whites are giving millions of dollars to the insurgents to help them win, without realizing that they are funding a race war and they themselves are the targets of the fire. It is thanks to Hawk Newsome (“I just want black liberation and black sovereignty by any means necessary,” he says), and the accurate records of twentieth century history, that we know it. We want to cry aloud, ”Americans of all races, don’t let yourselves be forced into such a conflict! Refuse to let race matter.”
It can be pointed out that Blacks are a minority (13.4%) in America, and however much terrorists like (“burn it down”) Hawk Newsome may want it to be a BLACK ONLY country, they are unlikely to succeed in making it so. Unlikely, that is, by their own effort. But they have the help of the Democrats (roughly half the electorate), the news media, the entire education system especially the universities, the entertainment industry.
And time is on their side. The white race is dwindling. BLACK ONLY (or anyway non-white) America is a realistic possibility.
What sort of country will it be? Might it be free, prosperous, just, humane, tolerant, inventive? The signs, found in diatribes by black New York Times editors and writers such as Nikole Hannah-Jones and tweeting Sarah Jeong, and numerous works of vengeance and envy by black professors in the universities, do not encourage hope that it will be such a country, or strive to be. Will Africa, perhaps, supply its model? Rwanda, Somalia, the Congo, Uganda, Nigeria … ?
It seems all to probable that with the fading away of the white race, its almost accomplished ideal of a free, prosperous, just, humane, tolerant, inventive civilization will dissolve with it.
The UN must be destroyed 171
From its inception, the United Nations Organization has been the tool of America’s enemies: Communist regimes and their sympathizers, later joined by the Islamic states – tyrannies all.
Yet the Organization has been chiefly sustained by America! To this day the US gives it nearly a quarter – about 22% – of its funding. In this the US resembles a dhimmi paying a tax to his Muslim oppressors for the favor of being slapped.
The UN has done no good, but it never stops doing evil; and every one of its sub-agencies has done evil; often by letting it be done.
President Trump sees this and does not like it.
Lloyd Billingsley writes at Front Page:
President Trump is cutting off funding for the World Health Organization, headed by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus … the first director-general in the WHO’s 72-year history not to be a medical doctor but a favorite of China with a radical leftist past. This is not the first time a Communist regime installed their mouthpiece and deployed an international body for their own purposes.
The WHO is part of the United Nations, which dates from the waning days of World War II. Stalin’s foreign minister Andrei Gromyko suggested U.S. State Department official Alger Hiss, a Stalinist spy, as the first Secretary General, the first and only time a Soviet leader suggested an American for an international post. Hiss was duly appointed acting Secretary General, so the Communists got the man they wanted.
U.S. Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, who had been under the wing of Hiss and [possible Soviet agent] Harry Hopkins, delivered a speech to the opening UN conference in San Francisco in May-June of 1945. The speech had been written by Stalinist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, brought to the conference by Alger Hiss. Stettinius was so pleased with Trumbo’s speech that he requested an autographed picture of the screenwriter, but Stettinius later denied he ever knew Trumbo.
Stettinius became U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, first headed by Norwegian Trygve Lie. The newfound UN did nothing to liberate eastern Europe from Soviet control. When Hungarians rebelled in 1956 the UN, then under Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, stood by as the Soviet Communists crushed the rebellion, as they did the “Prague Spring” of 1968.
The Soviet Union retained control of eastern Europe and from 1972 to 1981, made gains in southeast Asia, Africa and Central America. UN Secretary General at the time was Kurt Waldheim … a former Nazi in a sturmtruppen unit that executed thousands of Yugoslav partisans and civilians and deported thousands of Greek Jews to death camps from 1942 to 1944. …
The Khmer Rouge [in power in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979] murdered nearly two million people, approximately one-fourth of the population. The Khmer Rouge murdered thousands of babies by smashing their heads against a tree and forced prisoners to dig their own graves before killing them with clubs to save bullets. The UN dithered until 1988 before condemning the Khmer Rouge and utterly failed to establish any kind of tribunal for genocide.
From 1974 to 1987 the head of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was Amabou-Mahtar M’Bow of Senegal, a Muslim … On M’Bow’s watch, UNESCO funded the PLO and violent Marxist movements around the world. UNESCO served as cover for a dozen of the 47 KGB spies expelled by France in 1983.
UNESCO promoted the “New World Information and Communication Order,” a Soviet-style offensive to quash free expression and repress journalists. When the French L’Express described M’Bow as a “megalomaniac despot,” the UNESCO boss sued the publication. All told, M’Bow’s excesses prompted U.S. President Ronald Reagan to pull the United States out of UNESCO in 1984.
The United Nations did nothing about the murderous repressions of China’s Communist government under the genocidal Mao Zedong, a contender with Stalin for worst mass murderer in history.
Communist China has occupied Tibet since the 1950s and the UN looks the other way.
The UN’s favorite targets are Israel and the United States, the UN’s largest funder.
The United States is also the largest funder of the World Health Organization, now headed by “Dr. Tedros”, the non-doctor who appointed Zimbabwe’s dictator Robert Mugabe as a WHO “goodwill ambassador”. So no surprise that Tedros serves as the dummy for Communist China’s ventriloquism.
President Trump has pulled the plug on US funding for the WHO, based on its failures during the current pandemic. The president should now turn his attention to the United Nations, a boon for Communist dictatorships, a bust for democratic nations, and like the WHO a bad deal for the United States.
The UN must be destroyed!
Tell them (reprise) 117
The United Socialist States of America?
Is it really possible that the United States of America will vote to become a socialist country? Is the Democratic Party now irredeemably a socialist party? If so, does it as such have a real chance of winning the House, the Senate and the Presidency?
Victor David Hanson writes at Townhall:
A recent Harris poll showed that about half of so-called millennials would like to live in a socialist country. …
But they have no idea what socialism is. Professor Hanson gives several reason why millennials are attracted to what they think it is, including this:
Schools and colleges have replaced the empirical study of economics, history and politics with race, class and gender indoctrination.
Few young activists … know the 20th century history of … Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, Soviet Union strongman Joseph Stalin and Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong [who] each killed millions of their own people.
Today’s students romanticize Che Guevara and Fidel Castro because they are clueless about their bloody careers. The Castro government for over a half-century was responsible for the murders of thousands of Cubans and Latin Americans in efforts to solidify Cuban “socialism” throughout Latin America.
When our schools and colleges do not teach unbiased economics and history, then millions of youth have no idea why the United States, Great Britain, Germany and Japan became wealthy and stable by embracing free-market capitalism and constitutional government. Few learn why naturally rich nations such as Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela — or entire regions such as Central America, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia — have traditionally lagged far behind due to years of destructive central planning, socialist economics and coerced communist government.
The handmaiden of failed socialist regimes has always been ignorance of the past and present. And that is never truer than among today’s American college-degreed (but otherwise economically and historically illiterate) youth.
What can be done to counter the propaganda of the Left which is winning so many with its false promises?
The offering is parceled so prettily: economic equality, guaranteed jobs, free health care, free education. But take off the wrapping, and the contents are poverty, dreariness, staleness, hopelessness at best, agony and violent death at worst.
Here is our answer, taken almost verbatim from the article titled Tell Them (under Pages in our margin), first posted in mid October 2016, shortly before the election that fortunately brought Donald Trump to the presidency:
Why do millions of Americans “think” that economic equality is morally desirable?
Why are tens of millions content to live on state support without attempting to improve their standard of living by their own efforts?
Why do millions of university students in America admire intellectuals who hate America, such as Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and make an icon out of the sadistic mass-murderer Che Guevara?
Why? Because they’ve been told to. They’ve been told that good people do and “think” these things. They want to be good. They believe what they’ve been taught.
The same answer applies to: Why Muslim women believe they must put up with being sexually mutilated and enslaved to men. Why multitudes the world over believe that there was a nation called Palestinians who were driven off their land by aggressive usurping Jews. Why Christians believe that a man who died long ago lives on as one part of a three-part god. Why Muslims and Christians imagine that when you are dead you are still alive in another place. Why Jews believe that their benign and omnipotent God has some unknowable but just purpose in having six million of them enslaved, starved, tortured and murdered by Nazis.
They believe these things because they were taught them. All this was drummed into them. They were raised to know that that is how it ought to be.
Few if any ideas are easy to spread. To get an idea accepted by large numbers of people takes patience, persistence, conviction, tireless energy on the part of those who want to spread it. The idea need not make good sense, be reasonable, come with proofs that it will work as its advocates say it will. It doesn’t even have to appeal strongly to the emotions. It just needs to become what “everybody” accepts.
If you want your idea to prevail over others, this is what it takes. First the conviction that it is right and everyone should know it. Next, a decision to spread it. Then energy, persistence, patience – and eventually force.
What made Christianity catch on? It wasn’t the life-style – poor, austere, hard, humble. Even the promise of eternal life was not a reliable recommendation as anyone’s eternity could as easily be endless agony as endless bliss (it was and is a 50-50 tossup). The theology was so hard to make sense of that the Church itself to this day has not settled it. And the morality it demanded was against human nature. So what made it succeed? Energy, persistence, patience, indoctrination, force.
See how long it took. From the time St Paul invented “Jesus Christ” to the time the emperor of Rome (Constantine) accepted the new god and the doctrines that had accreted to him, thus making it fashionable to be Christian (just a few decades before force was applied and it became compulsory), nearly three hundred years had passed. Three hundred years of persistent, patient, energetic proselytizing. Even then, it was not securely implanted in the minds of the subjects. One Emperor – Julian – came along and actually tried to reverse the trend by suppressing Christianity and re-instating paganism. He didn’t have enough time. He died in battle, his successors went back to favoring Christianity, and the Emperor Theodosius decreed that Christianity was to be the religion of the state. With him the final phase of force arrived.
Marxist Communism took less time to get a real grip on the minds of multitudes. Means of communications had speeded up considerably between the 4th and the 19th centuries, but still it took half a century (if one arbitrarily dates it from the first publication of Marx’s Das Kapital in 1867 to the success of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917). And still the same method had to be employed: energetic, patient, persistent proselytizing. Much repetition was required. The fever of enthusiasm had to be caught by two generations of intellectuals before the infection became a pandemic. Then came force.
The creed must become the norm. So pervasive must the doctrine be that anybody who does not subscribe to it wholeheartedly will appear egregious; an oddball, a rebel, a danger to everyone else and even to himself. The orthodoxy must be accepted without question as good, so anyone who opposes it is ipso facto a bad person.
By the late 20th century communications had become even faster, so the New Left, rising in 1968, could achieve the peaks of power in Europe in less than thirty years, and in America in forty years. It started as a weak revolutionary movement which brought nothing good with it to Western Europe and America, but much that was bad: recreational drugs, AIDS, and terrorism as self-expression. New Leftists complained that they had too much freedom, too much choice, that tolerance of their politics was repressive. And this irrational case was widely accepted, even while, on the other side of the iron curtain, a young man burnt himself to death to protest against the lack of freedom, choice, and tolerance.
The New Left movement was ignorant, blind, puerile, unreasonable, sadistic – yet it became, it has become, the prevailing belief-system of the greater part of the Western world, and at present in almost all “free” countries the standard ideology (or religion) of the state, no matter what political party is in power. How?
The plan was made. The plan was put into execution. Gramsci supplied the phrase for the overall strategy: “The Long March through the Institutions”. It wasn’t enough that the New Leftists should protest, should threaten and carry out violent attacks, should shout and write and display their slogans. They must take over the institutions of power, everyone of them: the smallest citizens’ groupings – such as library committees – were not too small. But none were too big. Town councils had to be infiltrated and eventually dominated; then newspapers, radio and TV channels; boards of education very importantly; the schools, the universities; the civil service; the law courts; a major political party; then the country’s legislative body, and eventually the pinnacles of power, prime ministerships, presidencies. Police forces and the military were formidable challenges. The tactic was first to discredit them and pressure them from outside by means of public opinion guided by the converted press; then to infiltrate them; finally bend them from within to conform to the doctrine and advance the cause.
Meanwhile books, films, articles, lessons, lectures, systems of reward, prizes must all promote the cause. It took decades, but it succeeded. Even in America now there have been at least two generations raised on New Left doctrine through schools, universities, books, films, the press, and TV.
How otherwise could the free Western world, whose policies and armies opposed the oppressing, enslaving Communist Eastern world, have been successfully converted to the very doctrine that oppressed, enslaved, tortured and mass murdered? It didn’t take reason. It didn’t take persuasion. The idea was no more innately and manifestly true and good than the idea of Christianity. But as in the case of spreading Christianity – that weird, obscure, muddled, sorrowful, other-worldly new religion – it took conviction, decision, planning, energy, persistence, repetition, on the part of its missionaries. And finally force.
Only Leftist doctrine – government control of the economy, government provision of welfare, confiscatory and punitive taxation – is politically correct now in America. Collectivist thinking is the norm. Good people vote left. (When, in 2008, a Californian woman came upon a stall set up on a main street to canvass votes for the Republican presidential candidate John McCain, she called the police, and was astonished to learn that to solicit public support for the anti-collectivist Republican Party was not illegal.) Again, as with Christianity, the allegiance to the doctrine has little or nothing to do with its ideas. Most adherents could not explain what the ideas are. But they know that good people find them good, that good people vote for them. And that is all they need to know. Who doesn’t want to think of himself as a good person?
But the question of how did this become the case has not been fully answered. There is another aspect to the story. In order for one doctrine to succeed, it is necessary for other, counter doctrines to fail.
And the success of Leftism now – would it have happened if the conservative Right had been paying attention? Remember that old saying that “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance”? Well, the Right was not being vigilant. It didn’t bother to argue against political correctness. It disregarded the cynical shenanigans going on in the United Nations as if it were nothing but a zoo housing many clamorous beasts who were safely confined and could in no way threaten American life, liberty or happiness. If it was made to feel now and then the bullying, deceitful, sly, sometimes violent tactics of the Left, it shrugged them off. Conservatives went on being civil and preferring honesty when the world’s mood had changed to favoring lies and abuse. They put their confidence in the fact that America had been founded as the political embodiment of the idea of personal freedom; had demonstrated to the world – forever, they believed – that freedom brought prosperity and might and stunning innovation. They assumed that the rightness of individual liberty, the capitalist system, and government by the people had been established forever. So strong and free a country could afford to be tolerant. Let some wild, immature, misguided persons preach despotism (Communism, Socialism, Progressivism, Greenism, whatever), the system was strong enough to be hospitable to alien ideas, and to allow dissent or even rebellion. Tested, it would prove itself inviolable. It could not only withstand opposition, it could absorb it and dissolve it. No special effort was required. American history was on the side of those who would defend freedom and the Constitution. The separation of powers would protect them. The free press would dilute propaganda. Open enquiry in the academies would ensure that all points of view were argued and the most rational, the most humane, would persuade serious scholars. But they were wrong.
In their complacency, conservatives did not even notice the Long March. They could not mark its stations of success. Even now there are deluded Republicans who have not absorbed the fact that most Americans like collectivism; that they don’t object to electoral fraud; that they accept a failing economy; that many would rather live on government handouts than become rich; that being rich has become a morally bad thing; that it’s okay for foreign powers to develop weapons that can kill vast numbers of Americans; that the press does not report what is happening in the world but only what it wants to happen; that courts of law are willing to prefer foreign law to the Constitution; that it doesn’t matter if American representatives abroad are attacked and murdered; that freedom has become a term worthy only of contempt; that American history is a trail of shame; that a cruel religion – Islam – is being allowed to seep through the body politic, and is protected and advanced by the government itself.
But now millions of conservatives are waking up and are asking, how did this happen? It happened because people patiently, energetically, persistently planned it and made it happen.
What can we do about it, they ask themselves and each other.
What they have to do about it is change the minds of the people. First they must be sure that they want the free republic the founders established; that they want to maintain free markets; that they don’t want a welfare state; that they do want to preserve national defenses; that they want indoctrination in the schools to stop; that they want to forbid the application of foreign law; that they do not want to go on funding an institution – the UN – that consistently works against their interests. Then they must decide that their political philosophy is right, uniquely right, and must be implemented at any and all costs. Then they must start teaching it. With energy, persistence, patience and fiery enthusiasm. It will take time. But that is the only way. Teach, preach, argue, use every method that works. Give up the idea that it’s better to be gentlemanly than to sink to using the methods of the opposition; that if you do as they do you will have betrayed the very values that you are fighting for. So let them win? No! They have made the fight low and dirty. Get down in the dirt and fight it.
How badly does the conservative right want to win and hold on to power in America? How important is it to them that they should?
If it is as important to you, Conservatives, as it needs to be, tell the voters, tell the children that the free market is the only means of creating general prosperity, and why. Tell them that central planning of an economy cannot work, and why. Tell them why competition is good for everyone, producers and consumers alike.
Tell them what profit is and why it is essential for ensuring abundance.
Tell them that only where people are free can there be discovery and innovation, improvement in everyone’s daily life, better technology, the advance of civilization. Explain why. Show them the proofs of history.
Tell them the truth about life in the Third World. Not politically correct sentimental drivel, but the actual awful facts about life in most other countries.
Tell them why impartial judgment is the only means to justice; why all sane adult citizens must be treated equally by the law; why people must be judged by their actions, not their intentions or feelings.
Tell them why government should be kept small and its powers limited. Tell them what the essential tasks of government are: protection of the nation, of the individual, of liberty, of the rule of law itself. And why governments should not be allowed more power and money than it needs to fulfill its few essential functions.
Shout down the shouters. Tell Muslims what is wrong with their creed and why American secularism is better. Don’t allow them to build a protective wall around themselves to shut out criticism of their absurd and savage beliefs.
Tolerate only the tolerant and tolerable.
It will take time. Start now. Tell them.
Nazism Communism Islam 25
August 23 of every year is Black Ribbon Day. It is the anniversary of the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, whereby Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin conspired to divide large parts of eastern Europe between their twin tyrannies.
It is a day when the victims of Russian Communism and German Nazism are commemorated together.
Beyond a certain point, it becomes difficult to distinguish degrees of tyranny and cruelty. National Socialism and International Socialism are equally evil totalitarian systems. Both have destroyed hundreds of millions of lives, wrecked them, wasted them, killed them. If the Nazi concentration camps weigh heavier than the Soviet gulags in the scales of judgment, the balance of evil is restored by the fact that the Soviet oppression lasted much longer then the Nazi persecutions: 70 years as against 12 years.
Rex Murphy writes (in part) at the National Post:
We have various darkling lodestars of modern inhumanity, the grimmest manifestation of the ferocity of evil … being the Hitlerian inferno. There is only a single qualification to be placed on that eruption: that it was unique, that it so completely fulfilled the concept of what is utterly and irredeemably detestable that … [it] is universally repellant. …
So can nothing be compared to Hitler’s Germany?
Yes. Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
Anything that is happening now?
We can, alas, compare North Korea. Does its starvations and repressions not elicit recall of China’s gruesome Maoist Cultural Revolution? Or the drear miseries and state sadism of Stalin — the king of famine and the gulags? Who cannot still weep for Cambodia’s days under Pol Pot’s communist Khmer Rouge — an interlude of torture, death and determined savagery that earns a place in the same theatre of depravity as North Korea.
There are more. The communist islets of Eastern Europe during the Cold War. East Germany itself with its Stasi, a whole country spying on itself. That fragment of a bankrupt ideology we know as Cuba under the Castros. Che Guevara, a sapling in the same huge dark wood.
Yet throughout the Western world, Communism gets a pass!
The salient difference between all of these and the Hitlerian nightmare is that the latter was a plague that choked on itself: while communism — all its horrors confirmed with every repetition or variant of the model — is epidemical.
Communism has powers of replication that defy its own history. Despite the world of tears that follow its every instalment, it inexplicably does not excite in parts of the world — that must know better — a repulsion equivalent to that which greets Nazism.
That is a shameful state of affairs. And there is another ideology comparable to both Nazism and Communism, which, like Communism, enjoys a good press in the free world: Islam.
Nazism, Communism, Islam. All three would rule the world. All three are doctrinally murderous. All three, when in power, torture people of all ages. All three designate certain classes of people as worthy only of being enslaved and killed.
All three are equally foul.
(Hat-tip to Cogito for the Rex Murphy article which gives a heart-rending picture of North Korea. Read it all here.)
PRC: the People’s Republic of California? 270
Reuters reports:
One in every three California residents supports the most populous U.S. state’s peaceful withdrawal from the union … The 32 percent support rate is sharply higher than the last time the poll asked Californians about secession, in 2014, when one-in-five or 20 percent favored it … The concept has even earned a catchy name – “Calexit”.
California is not likely to secede from the union. But if it did, what sort of country would it be?
Robert Laurie writes at Canada Free Press:
If the United States wants to be a successful powerhouse, we should follow the example set by one of the worst regimes on the face of the Earth. That’s the message from California Governor Jerry Brown, who seems to be enraptured with the way Chinese President Xi Jinping is getting things done:
I met with president Xi for almost an hour. This is a very determined man. He’s building roads and high-speed rail and not just in China, but all over the world. Washington can’t even build roads and bridges in our own country, much less spreading the American dream all around the world. If we’re going to be the great power we all want to be, we’re going to have to start rolling up our sleeves, raising some revenue and getting the job done.
Well, it sounds like Governor Moonbeam has a new hero. … And all he had to do was ignore the fact that Xi Jinping is the iron-fisted ruler of a fascist, one-party, communist state with a list of human rights abuses long enough to choke an elephant.
I mean, seriously, just how stupid must one be to make a claim like the one Jerry Brown is making? Is the Governor of California unaware that much of China’s economics-free approach to expansion is built on the backs of slave labor? Does he not know about the horrors of the “reform through labor” system that was created by Mao and still exists to this day?
In 2014, at the National Review, Josh Gelernter described the horrors:
China’s Communist dictators operate more than a thousand 1,000 slave-labor camps.
The camps are called “laogai,” a contraction of “láodòng gǎizào,” which means “reform through labor”. They were conceived under Mao; unlike Stalin’s gulags, they never closed — though the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] has tried to abolish the name “laogai.” In the Nineties, it re-designated the camps “prisons”. The conditions, though, don’t seem to have changed.
Our picture of life in the laogai is murky, but here’s what has been reported: The prisoners are given uniforms and shoes. They have to purchase their own socks, underwear, and jackets. There are no showers, no baths, and no beds. Prisoners sleep on the floor, in spaces less than a foot wide. They work 15-hour days, followed by two hours of evening indoctrination; at night they’re not allowed to move from their sleeping-spots till 5:30 rolls around, when they’re woken for another day of hard labor. Fleas, bedbugs, and parasites are ubiquitous. The prisoners starve on meager supplies of bread, gruel, and vegetable soup. Once every two weeks they get a meal of pork broth.
We do not doubt that the prisoners are very badly treated, but we doubt that that description is accurate. Grown men could not survive on such a diet, especially if they do hard physical labor for 15 hours a day. Bedbugs where there are no beds? Well, possibly. No washing? Hmmm.
The camps currently billet between 3 and 5 million convicts — real criminals along with thought criminals guilty of opposing Communism, promoting freedom, or practicing religion — though the process doesn’t wait on [judicial] conviction; Chinese law permits the police to hold anyone for four years before judicial proceedings. At any given time — according to the Laogai Research Foundation — 500,000 Chinese citizens are in “arbitrary detention”. If a prisoner does get a hearing, he enters a legal system controlled, capriciously, by the Communist Party.
The laogai camps are estimated to have held between 40 and 50 million prisoners since they opened in 1949. Which is about the population of South Korea. Between 15 and 20 million of those prisoners died or were killed. Which is two or three times the population of Hong Kong. Or to put it another way: Between 50 and 300 thousand people were murdered during Japan’s rape of Nanking. China’s Communist Party has inflicted between 50 and 400 Nanking massacres on the country it dominates. According to an article published in Human Events by a man named Michael Chapman, a large proportion of Chinese exports originate in the camps — a quarter of China’s tea, tens of thousands of tons of grain.
Prisoners mine asbestos and other toxic chemicals with no protective gear, work with batteries and battery acid with no protection for their hands, tan hides while standing naked in vats filled three feet deep with chemicals used for the softening of animal skins, and work in improperly run mining facilities where explosions and other accidents are a common occurrence.
They stand naked in vats filled with chemicals used for softening animal skins? And their own skins are not dissolved?
And that work finds its way into American and European stores. A quick Internet search will yield photos of notes slipped into Chinese products on sale everywhere from Kmart to Saks. Notes begging for help, signed by Chinese slaves. One that turned up in Northern Ireland says, “We work 15 hours every day and eat food that wouldn’t even be fed to pigs and dogs.” It was written in Chinese. One that turned up in Oregon was written in English. “People who work here have to work 15 hours a day without Saturday, Sunday break and any holidays. Otherwise, they will suffer torturement.” …
The writer of that note identifies himself as a worker in the Masanjia labor camp. Former Masanjia inmates have been interviewed by the New York Times. …
The New York Times? Prepared to give a Communist regime adverse publicity? A flying pig moment!
… They described “frequent beating, days of sleep deprivation, and prisoners chained up in painful positions for weeks on end.” One told the Times, “Sometime the guards would drag me around by my hair or apply electric batons to my skin for so long the smell of burning flesh would fill the room.” …
Chained up in painful positions for weeks on end? Living flesh subjected to burning for long periods? Again, hmmm. Human beings are frail. Especially if they’re starving. How likely is it that even strong healthy men could survive such treatment? The article says that many don’t. But it also suggests that some do, at least long enough to write notes and slip them into exported goods.
And remember: The camps’ prisoners are just the formal slaves. In a more general sense, all of China’s one and a third billion people are slaves …
That we know to be true.
Even if this description is full of exaggeration or outright falsehoods, it is true that Communist China is a vile country governed by a cruel regime. Communism is never anything but cruel. It cannot ever be anything but cruel. And if this description deters California from emulating it under the leadership of Jerry Brown, may it be widely read in his state.