Tag: genocide

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ideological culture international affairs

Accounting for Taste

China, polls, polling, genocide

“In an open-​ended question allowing Americans to name which country they see as the greatest threat to the U.S., 50% name China, almost three times the share who name Russia (17%),” Pew Research reported last week.

Of course, some argue, as does Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs, that this “overwrought fear of China and Russia is sold to a Western public through manipulation of the facts.”

Has our government and media somehow hoodwinked us into not liking Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party? I sorta think we finally convinced them to start paying attention to the Chinazi threat — but whatever.

In perusing the polling at Pew’s website, I came across a recent survey of Asian Americans entitled, “Most Asian Americans View Their Ancestral Homelands Favorably, Except Chinese Americans.”

Strange that China would be the only unpopular outlier … unless you know modern Chinese history.

Still, these Asian Americans who responded to the poll might also have fallen victim to “Western propaganda.” What do people outside of the U.S. think?

“The nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that a median of 67% of those surveyed [in 24 countries] have an unfavorable opinion of China, while only 28% have a favorable view of the country. At least 50% of respondents in 17 countries gave China negative marks,” U.S. News & World Report detailed about the international poll, “with shares eclipsing 80% in Australia, Japan, Sweden and the United States. Majorities in only three countries — Kenya, Mexico and Nigeria — gave the country positive ratings.”

Apparently, genocidal totalitarianism isn’t very popular on this planet. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom international affairs

Truth, Compassion & Forbearance

China, Falun Gong, genocide

The Chinese Communist Party’s genocidal ways did not begin with the mass Uyghur incarcerations. Twenty-​four years ago the CCP kicked off “its brutal campaign to eradicate Falun Gong in China,” writes John A. Deller in The Epoch Times.

“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.

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general freedom ideological culture international affairs media and media people

Changing the Chinazi Channel

China, Uyghurs, Olympics

“Is there a more beautiful phrase,” Jim Geraghty asks his readers at National Review, “than ‘cataclysmic loss of audience’?”

Geraghty shares Dan Wetzel’s term for the good news that viewership of NBC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics in Beijing hit “a record low for the Opening Ceremony.” 

“Through the first four nights of competition,” reports the Associated Press, “NBC is on track for the lowest-​rated Winter Games in history.”

What’s going on? Americans are voting with their eyeballs! And TV remotes.

An Axios-Momentive poll shows why: “Seven in 10 survey respondents disapprove of allowing China to host these Olympics.”

“The host country, China,” explains Yahoo columnist Dan Wetzel, “is a serious problem.”

Wetzel called China’s use of a Uyghur athlete to light the Olympic torch “a propaganda prop to cover up a campaign of slavery, torture, forced abortions and internment in reeducation camps.” 

“Some Americans want U.S. corporations to take a stand as well,” informs FightThirtyEight, the polling website. “When asked whether they think ‘companies should withdraw their advertisements for the February 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics in response to human rights violations by the Chinese government,’ 54 percent of U.S. adults said probably or definitely yes.…”

One sponsor, Coca-​Cola, “has dialed back its marketing efforts outside of China.” The Atlanta Journal-​Constitution notes that “soda aisles in grocery stores are bereft of Olympics-​themed displays” and “the main page of Coke’s U.S. consumer website made no mention of the Games.”

“Congratulations to the athletes,” offers a Boston​.com reader, “but the pomp and circumstance can’t hide what’s really happening there.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom international affairs media and media people meme

Olympic Sponsors

China, Olympics, genocide games

More on the Chinese government’s crimes against humanity:

All the Tyranny in China — Common Sense
Thriving Totalitarianism — Common Sense
Disney’s Memory Hole — Common Sense
Strait Democracy — Common Sense
The Sound of Sino-​Silence? — Common Sense
Pandemics — and Something Far Worse — Common Sense
The Most Deadly Disease — Common Sense
Friends & Enemies — Common Sense
‘One Child Nation’ Exposes the Tragic Consequences of Chinese Population Control -— Reason TV
Totalitarianized — Common Sense

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general freedom international affairs media and media people

“Nobody” Cares

“Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, okay,” Chamath Palihapitiya stated emphatically on the All-​In Podcast. “I’m telling you a very hard, ugly truth.”

Concern that the totalitarian Chinese regime has locked more than a million Muslim Uyghurs in concentration camps is “a luxury belief,” according to Mr. Palihapitiya, the Sri Lankan-​born Canadian and American billionaire venture capitalist, once a senior Facebook executive and now partial owner of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors.

As the Olympics Games open today in Beijing, the validity of his assertion remains to be seen. 

“The 2022 Winter Olympics will be remembered as the Genocide Games,” argues Teng Biao, the former Chinese human rights activist, now teaching law at the University of Chicago. “The CCP’s purpose is to exactly turn the sports arena into a stage for political legitimacy and a tool to whitewash all those atrocities.”

In addition to the genocide “against my Uyghur brothers and sisters,” basketball star Enes Kanter Freedom points out the Chinazis are “erasing Tibetan identity and culture, attacking freedoms in Hong Kong and threatening democratic Taiwan.

“The world needs to wake up,” he warns, “and realize that the Chinese Communist Party is not our friend.”

And not a good sport, either.

“It’s hard to understand why anyone feels it’s even possible to celebrate international friendship and ‘Olympic values’ in Beijing this year,” the Uyghur Human Rights Project’s Omer Kanat told The Washington Post. Kanat charged “Olympic corporate sponsors” with “sportwashing genocide.”

“Do you ignore the ongoing genocide,” he asks, “or do you take a stand?”

Throughout these Beijing Olympics, I hope athletes and others — from news networks to you and me on social media — will care enough to take a stand by speaking up. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability general freedom international affairs

The Real Thing

Uyghurs, China, Coke, Olympics
Categories
international affairs

Feckless Endangerment

China, Olympics, genocide, boycott

The Biden administration sure knows how to look feckless when it comes to standing up to China.

The administration has decided that the best way to protest Chinazi aggression against Hong Kong democracy and freedom — and against the lives and freedom of millions of Uyghurs — is to announce a “diplomatic” boycott of the Beijing-​sponsored Olympic games, scheduled to be held in February.

U.S. participation would continue as before: athletes will perform, sports fans will attend, and corporations will make money.

What will be missing?

Government officials.

Viewers around the world won’t notice any difference, of course. They don’t tune in to watch muckety-​mucks photo-​bombing the medal ceremonies.

Even Jimmy Carter, loath to be outdone in the fecklessness department, knew that the way for the U.S. to boycott the 1980 Moscow-​hosted Olympics in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was to actually boycott the Olympics.

Columnist Cathal Kelly notes that the “diplomatic” boycott is “worse than meaningless.”

The administration’s language games amount to nothing less than “a more impressive sounding way of saying you are eliminating Olympic junkets,” Kelly writes. “Now all the sad, second-​rate pols from North Dakota and Maine won’t get flown private to Beijing so they can take a bunch of ego shots with Auston Matthews.”

With the Winter Olympics mere months away, we can’t expect the U.S. government to improve its policy in time.

But that still leaves many other parties who can act, including governments of other countries, U.S. sports teams, and individual U.S. athletes.

Withdraw, and say why.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment general freedom media and media people moral hazard too much government

Governments Gone Wilding

South Africa, land, expropriation, reform, genocide, refuges, media, racism

I was late to the story, and had a hard time finding information on the anti-​white violence in South Africa — farm families raped, pillaged, slaughtered, beheaded.

And I wasn’t at all aware of the “land reform” that South Africa’s Congress is voting on, the explicit aim of which is to expropriate white farmers without compensation.

Every day, I read through The Washington Post but noticed no articles there. Or elsewhere — until a fleeting Facebook post sent me to Lauren Southern’s video documentary, “Farmlands.”

The Wall Street Journal did cover the farm expropriation story — on its editorial pages. “No country ever became rich through its government’s seizure of private property (exhibit A: the Soviet Union), but politicians in South Africa want to give it another go.” 

Zimbabwe on repeat.

Worse yet, it is being argued for on racial grounds, and some of its proponents are notoriously … genocidal?

Quartz takes a different approach, in an article charmingly titled “South Africa’s much needed land debate is being turned into an international racist rant.” The Leftwing publication appears to be gearing up to defend mass theft as “land reform,” heedless of its long, violent, destructive history. 

Meanwhile, Ms. Southern, the “gonzo journalist” who detailed the ongoing race-​based murder spree in South Africa* that Quartz failed to mention, found herself detained in Calais, France, prevented from entering Britain. Why? In part for “being racist.”

Southern had once engaged in a stunt pitching the provocation that “Allah is a gay god” — to seek reactions from people after a major news source produced an article claiming Jesus was gay.

Islam is a religion, not a race, of course, but it’s racial collectivism that still unhinges minds.

To what extent? Socialist expropriation, at least.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* “According to the best available statistics,” the BBC relates, “farm murders are at their highest level since 2010-​11.”

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crime and punishment

Justice Delayed in Cambodia

It’s not a satisfying verdict. And no punishment can ever balance the scales for the many lives that the Khmer Rouge destroyed.

This August the two most senior surviving regime leaders, responsible for slaughtering an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians from 1975 to 1979 in the name of restructuring society along collectivist agrarian lines, were sentenced to life imprisonment. They are 88-​year-​old Nuon Chea and 83-​year-​old Khieu Samphan.

The pair are the first Khmer Rouge leaders convicted under proceedings sponsored by the Cambodian government and the United Nations. The only previous verdict was handed down in 2010 against a lower-​rung if still pretty vicious official, Kaing Guek Eav, then 67, sentenced to 19 years. As a prison commandant, he had overseen the torturing and killing of more than 14,000 people.

“I am not satisfied!” said 79-​year-​old Chum Mey back then. He had testified about being tortured by the regime. “We are victims two times, once in the Khmer Rouge time and now once again.” Others expressed similar dismay.

As for the notorious Pol Pot, he had died in 1998 after briefly suffering a house arrest as penalty for just one of his many murders.

One hopes that the proceedings, tainted by politics and other vitiating factors, will be improved even at this late date. But as near-​futile as the trials must seem to many survivors, I have to believe that even partial justice, however meager and belated, is better than no justice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.