On June 5, 1851, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery serial, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, started its ten-month run in the National Era abolitionist newspaper.
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Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Will truth ever be bought-off or beaten-down enough to satisfy Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Butchers of Beijing?
The ‘Butchers’ nickname came 32 years ago today — from the clearing of Tiananmen Square by soldiers and tanks in the early morning hours of June 4th, and in opening fire on and murdering thousands of Chinese citizens outside the square.
Someone may object that Xi, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since 2012, can’t be blamed. He wasn’t in charge back in 1989.
Xi didn’t give the order for troops to kill the unarmed students and workers who filled Tiananmen Square for weeks with as many as a million people protesting for freedom and democracy. Nor did he have thousands more arrested and imprisoned after the massacre. In fact, Xi’s father “condemned the use of force against protesters during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests,” informs U.S. News.
But Xi cannot escape the taint of Tiananmen. Not only does Human Rights Watch charge that government repression under his unlimited rule is “at its worst level since the Tiananmen Square massacre,” Xi and today’s CCP are on a mission to memory-hole Tiananmen.
How?
By massacring any public memorial of the massacre.
While the truth about Tiananmen has always been verboten in China, freer folks in Hong Kong held massive memorials each year. “Last year’s vigil was banned for the first time because of the coronavirus,” Yahoo News explains, “but thousands defied police and rallied anyway.”
This year, however, the new national security law threatens five years in prison for attending an unauthorized rally. Chanting “Democracy for China!” could land a Hongkonger in prison for life.*
Thankfully, in America today we have the freedom to condemn the Chinazis.
And remember June 4.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* And it has already begun: “Hong Kong cracks down on Tiananmen commemorations, arrests vigil organiser.”
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Veuillot’s Law
When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.
Louis Veuillot, as quoted by Frank Herbert, Children of Dune (1976).
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Tankman, Thanks
June 4 marks the 1989 Chinese government crackdown on peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square, with tanks entering the square and soldiers, who opened fire on citizens outside the square, estimated to have killed thousands.
It also marks Tonga’s Emancipation [or Independence] Day, commemorating the abolition of serfdom in Tonga by King George Tupou in 1862, and the independence of Tonga from the British protectorate in 1970.
Did the recent pandemic begin as a leak from a lab in Wuhan, China?
Who knows?
But in these United States there suddenly appears serious — even bipartisan — interest in finding out.
I’ve been curious for some time, but why wasn’t more of the media interested from the beginning? Why were questions about the Wuhan Institute of Virology as well as the questioners often attacked?
“[T]he newspapers I read and the TV shows I watched had assured me on many occasions that the lab-leak theory wasn’t true,” Thomas Frank, the progressive historian and author, explains in The Guardian, “that it was a racist conspiracy theory, that only deluded Trumpists believed it, that it got infinite pants-on-fire ratings from the fact-checkers,” adding that he “always trusted the mainstream news media.”
Thank goodness Senator Rand Paul confronted Dr. Fauci, again, leading to Fauci acknowledging the need for further investigation into the Wuhan lab that performed research on bat coronaviruses, arguably including gain-of-function research, with indirect U.S. funding.
“Renewed focus on Wuhan lab scrambles the politics of the pandemic,” was one of several recent explanatory Washington Post articles.
Politics?
You don’t say!
“The shifting terrain highlights how much of the early debate on the virus’s origins was colored by America’s tribal politics,” the paper reported, “as Trump and his supporters insisted on China’s responsibility and many Democrats dismissed the idea out of hand . . .”
The Post should include itself when referring to Trump-blaming “Democrats.”
Another article The Post dangled before readers captures the moment — “Facebook: Posts saying virus man-made no longer banned.”
In addition to the media and social media failure on this lab-leak story, let’s not forget the “expert fail.” Mr. Frank fears that if Big Science is found to be the cause of the pandemic, it “could obliterate the faith of millions” in “the expert-worshiping values of modern liberalism.”
We should be so lucky.
What’s next: a release of Fauci’s emails?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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On June 3, 1959, Singapore adopted a constitution.
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Nassau Senior
If the worst government be better than anarchy, the advantages of the best must be incalculable.
Nassau William Senior, Esq., Political Economy (Third Edition: 1854), p. 76.
Firing politicians is what democracy’s all about.
But politicians don’t like being fired. Even when “You’re fired!” is a signature line. It definitely explains why incumbents tend to oppose term limits.
As shown in the long history of term limits in my home state, Arkansas.
In 1992, an all-volunteer petition drive placed the initiative on the ballot and a grassroots campaign beat the Good Ole Boy network and their $500,000 in paid media warnings of “outsiders.”
The victory sent shockwaves through the Arkansas political establishment; term limits received more YES votes than President-Elect Bill Clinton had garnered in his home state.
Arkansas pols have been at war with term limits ever since. The latest assault came in April, when legislators passed an “emergency” measure now known as Act 951.
The Act bans people found guilty of minor misdemeanors (trespassing, vandalism, any violation of drug laws) at any time in their lives — even many decades ago — from working as paid petitioners. The new law also limits the pool of petitioners to state residents, something not done for any other political job, or for those carrying Arkansas’s candidate petitions.*
That’s why Arkansas Term Limits, Liberty Initiative Fund, U.S. Term Limits, et al., filed a complaint in the federal Eastern District of Arkansas alleging constitutional rights violations under the legislature’s Act 951.
“I was never a supporter of term limits until this bunch got in office,” offered Arkansas Times editor Max Brantley in response to our lawsuit, “and gave themselves essentially unlimited terms and set about running roughshod over human rights.”
Cries of “You’re fired!” are coming soon. But first, to pry back petition rights in Arkansas, the catchphrase is, “You’re sued!”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* In recent years, similar residency requirements have been unanimously struck down in rulings of the 4th, 6th, 7th, 9th and 10th federal Circuit Courts of Appeal. Earlier this year, a federal judge enjoined enforcement of Maine’s similar law.
meter / JG
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Citizenship
On June 2, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act into law, granting citizenship to all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the United States.
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Nassau Senior
When we read of African and Asiatic tyrannies, where millions seem themselves to consider their own happiness as dust in the balance compared with the caprices of their despot, we are inclined to suppose the evils of misgovernment to be the worst to which man can be exposed. But they are trifles compared to those which are felt in the absence of government. The mass of the inhabitants of Egypt, Persia, and Burmah, or to go as low as perhaps it is possible, the subjects of the Kings of Dahomi and Ashantee, enjoy security, if we compare their situation with that of the ungoverned inhabitants of New Zealand. So strongly is this felt, that there is no tyranny which men will not eagerly embrace, if anarchy is to be the alternative. Almost all the differences between the different races of men, differences so great that we sometimes nearly forget that they all belong to the same species, may be traced to the degrees in which they enjoy the blessings of good government.
Nassau William Senior, Esq., Political Economy (Third Edition: 1854), p. 75–6.