On July 25, 1861, the U.S. Congress passed the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution, stating that the war with the seceded states of the Confederacy was being fought to preserve the Union, not to end slavery.
“Falun Gong (also called Falun Dafa) was introduced to the public in China by Mr. Li Hongzhi in May 1992,” explains Mr. Deller. “It is a spiritual practice in the Buddhist tradition based on the principles of truth, compassion, and forbearance. . . . By 1998, over 70 million people across China had found improved health and morality through Falun Gong.”
In the West, we may not immediately see how dangerous (to tyrants) a religio-philosophical movement like Falun Gong could be.
Isn’t it innocuous? When D. T. Suzuki introduced Zen Buddhism to the U.S. in the last century, most Americans . . . yawned.
But the Chinazis did not yawn. They banned Falun Gong on July 20, 1999. And began arresting and imprisoning and torturing and executing its practitioners.
While Deller insists that Falun Gong was not perceived by most of its practitioners to be intrinsically anti-communist, over the course of the antagonism it has dawned on the persecuted that “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is indeed at odds with “truth, compassion, and forbearance.”
What really bothers the CCP? Ideas.
Of independence . . . forbearance.
Of truth . . . not propaganda.
Of compassion . . . the idea that maybe prisoners shouldn’t be killed to facilitate lucrative organ transplants.
The 24-year-old genocide is a memecide, the attempted final solution to these paramount ideas.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder.ai and DALL-E2
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting a passage in the Bhagavad-Gita, in the documentary The Decision to Drop the Bomb (1965), characterizing his thoughts upon the successful detonation of the first atomic bomb. Christopher Nolan’s drama Oppenheimer (2023) is in first-release theatrical competition with the fantasy-comedy Barbie (2023) this month.
On July 24, 1487, citizens in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, went on strike against a ban on foreign beer.
On the same day of 1823’s calendar, slavery was abolished in Chile.
July 24 serves as Pioneer Day in Utah and as Simón Bolívar Day in Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela.
On this day in 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court told President Richard Nixon that he lacked constitutional authority to withhold the infamous “Nixon Tapes” from Congress.
The very idea may make you quiver, but Paul Jacob eases you into the idea.
WHATEVER YOU DO, TELL THE TRUTH.
Presidential candidate Stephen Grover Cleveland’s telegram response to a query as to what the Democratic Party should say about reports that he fathered a child out of wedlock. The issue was scandalous, but he won office and his first term in the presidency of the United States started in 1885.
On this day in 1903, the Ford Motor Company sold its first car. Less than 30 years later, Aldous Huxley satirized Ford’s assembly line procedures in his novel Brave New World. Arguably, both the assembly line and the satire advanced freedom.
Don’t tase me, bro, and don’t whack me with that stick. Yes, and without much apology, a few kind words for . . .
The remnants of slavery and colonialism are ubiquitous. Slavery has been systemically embedded in the deep structure of world history, etched into the human experience since the dawn of civilization.
David Martin Jones & M. L. R. Smith, The Strategy of Maoism in the West: Rage and the Radical Left (2022), p. 1.
On July 22, 1937, the U.S. Senate voted down Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s court packing scheme.