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Hong Kong’s political prisoners versus our own political prisoners — 29 Comments

1. The concept of “hate speech” (like that of “hate crimes”) is, of course, both illegitimate and unconstitutional, being invariably wielded as a weapon against anyone disliked by the regnant “progressive” elite, i.e. the kakistocracy now presiding over the ruins of our republic. What is beyond dispute is that the members of our corrupt ruling class admire the illiberal system of the CCP while disdaining traditional Americans as being “on the wrong side of history” and as destined only for the Trotskyite dust-bin of history. Could Kissinger and Nixon have imagined what their visit to China in 1972 would have led to over the next two generations? On a related note, how many Republicans in Congress have spoken out against the treatment of our own political prisoners?

2. At least the ChiComs are somewhat honest about it. At least in Hong Kong, everybody knows what’s actually going on there.

   So arguably, the treatment of the democrat party’s political prisoners is far worse. Those prisoners are literally being tortured as we speak. Far worse than waterboarding. Far worse than terrorists were ever treated in Guantanamo. Prisoners have been beaten within an inch of their life and denied medical treament. Starved. Denied simple hygiene. Denied the practice of their religion. Kept in unhygenic conditions. Denied bail. Denied consultation with lawyers and private communication with a lawyer.

   The democrat party is effectively at war with America’s Constitution and with those who support it and thus they are committing war crimes against those political prisoner’s.

   But there is a silver lining to our dark cloud. The activist left, its political arm the democrat party, its propaganda arm the mass media and its indoctrination arm the ‘educational’ system are revealing beyond dispute their sedition and treason.

3. This is not an original thought; many have expressed it for some time. The ideology on the Left is now a religion. Just as throughout history, zealots from every religion justified persecution of unbelievers, or even believers who were lacking in sufficient fervor, these zealots feel virtuous. Whatever means necessary.

   There is a common thread. That is a feeling of sublime superiority. With true religions zealots it is a moral elevation. With big government fanatics it seems to be an intellectual pretense that convinces them that they must shepherd the masses. So virtuous.

   That does not even address those who simply use the rhetoric of ideology as cover to attack political opponents, or for other forms of personal benefit.

4. See what’s happening in Alberts and BC, where ten (10) churches have recently been burned down, and where Protestant ministers are being handcuffed and taken to jail for the crime of having too many parishioners attend church that Sunday. The cops have not been too nice about the arrests, either.
   Refer to http://www.rebelnews.com, a Canadian site, for info.

5. As GB says above, it’s pretty simple today here in Honkers. As with Singapore (a de facto One Party State… extra points for noticing that at the very core it’s a multi-family oligarchy) and China Proper there are very clear lines you cannot cross.

   Stay on the safe side and you have freedoms Americans and Westerners don’t have — e.g. true Freedom of Association (i.e. you can exclude whosoever you like) and freedom of speech to say anything you like about sexual deviancy, broader GloboHomo Poz, etc. There are far fewer words or actions which can get you canceled here. And what you say or do today is less likely to get you unpersoned 10 years hence than in the West.

   Cross those lines and all bets are off. In extreme cases you might be disappeared, but 99.9% of the time you’re going to end up as a Public Example of What Not to Do.

   Ask the average Singaporean or Chinese how they feel about their Governments and their quality of life and you’ll generally get a positive response. And that’s not because they’re afraid of being black bagged. It’s hard for Westerners to grasp, but these people look around at their clean subways, public transport unpolluted by screaming urinating defecating schizophrenics and mystery meats from places they don’t know or care about, look up at their shiny skyscrapers, etc.. and feel a sense of contentment. More… MUCH more… they feel a sense of belonging… and not being despised legacy populations in their own countries. Imagine *that*! Luxury!

   So, in the case of classical Asian Techno-totalitarianism, it pretty much works. You want to get involved in politics you go join the UniParty and follow the UniParty Line and it helps if you have the right family background. Actually much the same in America too… Just that in Asia the Government doesn’t lie about Cherry Trees and Gettysburg Sacred Text Holy Light Shone Down and Your Vote Counts to you because it has more respect for your intelligence and will treat you as an adult provided you accept reality and don’t act like a child.

   The thing with HK is that the lines only got drawn in bright highlighter last June with the nasty new National Security Law. Before that, the Great Betrayal (British knew damn well that the Joint Declaration promises China made weren’t worth a bucket of warm spit and that they would and could do nothing to hold China to them) took about 15 years to really begin to bite in Hong Kong… i.e. the Frog was slowly boiled for about that long before local people began to really notice just how much they were being had and how hard they were being shafted.

   Worst than that they noticed that they were being shafted by their own home-grown tycoons and Fat Cat Quisling Civil Service. Which is somehow more galling than having it done by obvious foreigners. Again.. sound familiar?

   In the US case this happened as an inevitable result of societal decay and corruption. Per Sir John Glubb average survival of empires is ~250 years. In HK happened because of manifest impossibility of transitioning one type of system into another without creating a total pig’s breakfast.

   Hong Kongers are angry because they were sold one bill of goods and got something else. Also they are being literally swamped and replaced by culturally very different mainland immigrants whose numbers and type they have control over. Massive cause of social discontent here. You never read about *that* in discussions of the 2019 Protests because GloboHomo Media doesn’t want *that* as a talking point in the West. Immigration is Always Good, eh Comrade?

   Much of this should sound vaguely familiar to Americans. In the past few years everyone who is not an idiot has noticed that they are being served up a shit sandwich and being told to praise it as being caviar and blinis. It’s not just the totalitarian aspect… it’s the *insult* of being told to be grateful while you’re being shafted that really gets people angry.

   The Mainland Chinese (including the actual Rulers at the top) have a deep and abiding fear of a re-run of the Madness of the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward. They rightly see GloboHomo Poz / Culture of Perpetual Kvetching Critique as being Dangerous — hence the term ‘Baizuo’ = White Left for Social Justice Warriors. To them, a lot of the foreign and foreign-educated local supporters of HK Protesters looked exactly like Baizuo — because that’s exactly what they were.

   I feel sorry for HKers being picked up under repressive retroactive laws for things they did 2 or 5 years ago. The ones who published a book this year knew exactly what they were getting into and made a conscious decision to make martyrs or public spectacles of themselves. I’m not sure it’s so productive and I’m not sure Havel or Solzhenitsyn would have thought their gesture worthwhile. Live Not By Lies is one thing. Jump onto the Pyre is another.

   A Hong Konger can look at Shenzhen and see where he is going to end up. It’s not the Big Rock Candy Mountain, but it’s not too bad provided you don’t try to sell drugs, or the Epoch Times, or start your own political party. It’s neither all upside or all downside. 20 years from now he’ll be looking at the moon and his country (whether he likes his country that much or not) will have a base there. But an American… well there’s the thing. You could in theory go much higher.. and you’ve shown it before… but how low will you have to go first to get to there and through what techno totalitarian horrors and civil/racial war rivers of blood? (Chinese have been through *theirs*) That’s the rub.

6. @j e:

   While Western Ruling Classes may admire CCP Techno-totalitarianism, let me assure you that the admiration is not mutual.

   Chinese Ruling Elite behind their polite smiles think that Western Ruling Elites are stupid, gormless idiots who flip flop around whilst selling off the farm and the seed corn. Also today’s CCP has nothing but contempt for and a well-justified historical fear of Social Justice Warrior Virtual Spiraling (see Baizuo) and again think we are idiots for allowing it.

   Pretty much everyone at the Top in China today experienced family suffering and tragedy as children during the Cultural Revolution (SJWism Mark 1) and will never let anything remotely like it happen again so long as they draw breath. Their parents saw countless millions starve during the Great Leap Forward and warned them about Science and Technology becoming too politicised…. that’s just an aside.. but Ironic, no? 🙂

   They’re not just Ideological Robots with limited grasp of base level zero reality. That’s Harvard and Yale and Stanford and the Grey Lady and both poxed Houses.

7. Can Do!, quite a bit about Hong Kong and how that tyranny is working out, but with the usual excuses for the CCP. Not any mention of the demographic crunch that may get in the way of the grand glorious plans the CCP has for that moon base, dreams of “Total Recal.”

   But you couldn’t stray from a facile slap at the USA, could you: “… Cherry Trees and Gettysburg Sacred Text Holy Light Shone Down …” as if readers don’t know that the George Washington Cherry Tree story is for children, or that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were actual people, not your twisted caricatures. That’s what makes you contemptable IMO.

   And of course, you know what the CCP thinks. Hubris.

8. Om Dude:

   I don’t post for you.

   I’m just keeping my eye on Nemesis. Too old and battered for Hubris.

   Every culture has blind spots. Westerners have this huge blind spot about Liberal Democracy and another one about the power of Sacred Texts (Constitutions, Important Speeches, Straussian Scribblings, etc.) — Some Westerners believe that their Sacred Texts are Immutable and some believe that these texts were written to be debated and reinterpreted. Run this bunch of nested dialectics long enough and you end up with GloboHomo TechnoPoz Tyranny and your grand daughter on OnlyFans.

   East Asian TechnoTyranny Starts from more pragmatic notions of the nature of man and the need to keep him on a longish but firm leash… And your grand daughter can sight read Chopin and do pretty good calligraphy as well. Also she doesn’t hate you. And her parents are not divorced.

   Short of a massive and bloody social transformation, there are very few 20 year old Whites alive in the West today who will ever be able to say “My Grand Daughter”. Think on that.

9. Can Do! goes full Hubristic and Prophetic. A two for one who is all seeing.

   And they invented gunpowder, and the magnetic compass, and the East China Sea is all theirs, and all your bases ……

10. Zaphod,

    Useful insights into the Asian collectivist mindset.

    “But an American… well there’s the thing. You could in theory go much higher.. and you’ve shown it before… but how low will you have to go first to get to there…”

    I agree that the West’s potential is superior to the East’s because of individual liberties. Individual Genius, from which all breakthroughs arise, finds more fertile ground in the West.

    I disagree as to “Cherry Trees and Gettysburg Sacred Text Holy Light Shone Down and Your Vote Counts”. Not that the governing establishment doesn’t betray and lie about those ideals but because those ideals as a societal basis are, by far the most superior principles upon which to base a society yet conceived.

    Our past and current failures to live up to those ideals are a reflection of humanity’s “feet of clay”. Not of those ideals having inherent flaws.

    Asian ‘collectivist principles’ haven’t the transformative power to resist external totalitarian conquest. As China, North Korea and Vietnam have demonstrated.

    WWII demonstrated that a West, still dedicated in the aggregate to those principles, could defeat the external imposition of tyranny.

    The West’s vulnerabilty to totalitarian conquest is the result of internal betrayal. Ala Lincoln’s “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

    om,

    You might consider that your contempt for Zaphod is preventing you from separating the wheat from the chaff.

11. “WWII demonstrated that a West, still dedicated in the aggregate to those principles, could defeat the external imposition of tyranny.”

    That was 70 years ago. And before half of the population being killed off by foreigners would have meant liberation and restoration of at least a potentially human future, for the other half.

    Of course, the flip side of that is that the wasting of fly-over country and emptying it of a population which the progressives find uncongenial and insufficiently tractable, emotional, and community minded, would – so they believe – provide space for the importation of a grateful replacement population just chomping at the bit to serve and enable the progressives’ march into a transhuman future of endless ease, constant and uninterrupted affirmation, and, most of all, polymorphous perverse bliss.

12. @GB:

    “I disagree as to “Cherry Trees and Gettysburg Sacred Text Holy Light Shone Down and Your Vote Counts”. Not that the governing establishment doesn’t betray and lie about those ideals but because those ideals as a societal basis are, by far the most superior principles upon which to base a society yet conceived.”

    What use are these Ideals if they gave you at best 150 years of great prosperity and 75 years of Empire and then now a choice between some growing totalitarian horror with bonus extinction of legacy population under demographic tidal wave and fratricide? Nobility of Ideals is wonderful for a generation or three or four. I remain unconvinced that they result in lower overall butcher’s bill. Talking about American Foundational Ideals is like the old ‘True Communism has never been implemented’ argument. It’s all very nice. But here we are. And we got here from There and those Ideals did nothing to preserve you from your fate and indeed had no way to stop themselves being used and abused to accelerate your slide towards this fate.

    China absorbed Mongol and Manchu conquerors and made them into More Chinese than the Chinese. See the Kangxi and Qianlong Emperors. Really go look them up and see and learn. China has absorbed the nasty rootless cosmopolitan universalist horror that is Communism and has come out the other end after much terrible suffering.. and guess what? All that happened in the end is that the Emperor wears black on formal occasions instead of yellow.

    What is this ‘Resistance’ you speak of?

    Western Thought and most definitely politics and the commanding heights of economies have been fundamentally transformed by people largely outside the Western Tradition until Moses Mendelssohn, Heine, and friends popped up and joined the party. Sure there was a bit of ‘Resistance’.. but both Hitler and Madison both ended up in the Losers Bin. I’m guessing at least Madison didn’t end up in Hell. (BTW: Hitler in Hell by brilliant Israeli Historian Martin van Creveld is a good entertaining read)

    Nobody every conquered the Vietnamese. You didn’t. Deng Xiaoping got his nose bloodied by them shortly after they’d shown you the door. Conversely their near neighbours the Thais have submitted to and bedded every conqueror came along and written convincing histories of their great victories against same conquerors and will remain recognisably Thai until the end of time. But your people will not be American in 100 years if things don’t change hugely stat. TL;DR: Something.Is.Wrong.With.Western.Liberalism.

    Group-oriented, strongly family-oriented societies endure and work. Atomised Individualistic Societies where everybody is fungible (but think they are a Rugged Individualist Outdoorsman in their Walter Mitty reveries) fail on a long enough timeline.

    A good strong culture absorbs, digests, and very occasionally vomits or defecates invasive peoples or ideas. No society every survived Demographic Swamping. Not the Romans and not the West. Remember there were far more Chinese Chinese than Mongols or Manchus.

    This is not to say that the West must be doomed. Temperamentally I am individualist and a square peg. You’d never have guessed. But it’s a long road and a lot of people are going to suffer and/or die before the old idols are torn down and re-gilded with some modification of their backstories.

13. Geoffrey Britain:

    Go to it, Can Do! has given you a few sections (square miles) of wheat and chaff to sort out. Will you bother?

    You notice that Can Do! is very tepid in his criticism of the current CCP tyrants. Stockholm syndrome?

14. j e: “…how many Republicans in Congress have spoken out against the treatment of our own political prisoners?”

    Maybe Rep. Matt Gaetz? But crickets rule their roost.

15. @TJ:

    Their Owners and Masters have no interest in your political prisoners.

    They’re far louder about dumping on Ben & Jerry’s this week.

16. Last month read all 3 of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, nothing the government is doing is new, it can get worse as well and advise everyone to read some of it to see where it could go.

17. om,

    Whatever the degree of wheat (ie. truth) may be present is worth the effort to separate from the chaff. It’s not difficult to give credit where credit is due while also rejecting false premises.

18. well we go back to the fact that there has been a multiyear campaign of agitation and intimidation, at least going back to 2010, when the Occupy cells irrupted, they faded for a time, and the Dream Defenders, the precursors to so called blm, took up the torch, that was sanford, ferguson, baltimore and other localities, this expanded to nyc, ala the black liberation army of the 70s, which was the armed wing of the panthers, it all was seeded by the kellogg foundation, with susan rosenberg on the board, there was a campaign to drive any dissident voice off campuses, the snowflake brigade, then they ginned up ‘charlottesville’ the 1979 klan/communist showdown, half farce, half tragedy, then we ramp up to j 20, their tet offensive on dc, coordinated by agents of creamer and co, the conman behind obamacare’s blue print,

19. ah yes, then there was the alexandria ambush, where a sanders supporter,who had his head filled with tripe from maddow, sought to kill 18 members of the freedom caucus, including my future governor, (he had consulted (colluded) with senators duckworth and durbin before hand), until a month or so, the bureau labeled it as a ‘suicide by cop’ even though it was nothing of a kind,

20. Damn, 2.5 minutes in it stopped letting me correct the faulty boldening…

    What the hell now it wiped out my entire long response to Zaphod!

21. all the smoke from the burning strawmen, can get in the way, vietnam was conquered by a marxist in ho chi minh, (his real name escapes me right now)
    how many did he kill in the red river, of course, the kennedy administration was really helpful in disposing of his lead adversary, diem, who we know from victory forsaken, was much more successful then we thought,the deep state is murky, to my kin the san roman brothers, dulles and mueller’s future inlaws, barnes and cabell, offered support, and then ‘disposed’ of them on giron beach, where they subsequently faced a variation on what the j6 seekers are facing,

22. Geoffrey Britain:

    neo, Art Deco, and a few others point out that the wheat to chaff ratio is sometimes pretty small, but there are occasional ponies found under the piles. I don’t complain when a rare pony emerges from the massive piles.

    Glad to hear you have a post coming about the chaff.

23. om,

    I composed a long reply to Zaphod, addressing his comment point by point. I posted it, it showed it but with a large portion emboldened as I’d missed a closing mark. I re-edited it and saved it but it still showed part improperly emboldened. I reopened it made corrections and saved it. Instead of showing my corrections, it vanished. I still had over 2 minutes left to make corrections when it vanished. Too long to try to redo. A bit frustrating.

24. Geoffrey:

    That would have made the Good Humor Man quite unhappy!

    Some others write their comments in a separate word processing program and then paste them into the comment box IIRC. And others know the HTML commands for fancy formatting. Not me; holding a train of thought together long enough for a few sentences while using the comment box is my the best I can do most days. Even then the comment edit timer often gets the best of me.

25. @GB:

    Commiserations. It’s happened to me before. I’ve gotten into the habit of doing ctrl-a ctrl-c to select and copy all text in the comment window before I hit the post button. Then if anything goes wrong, I just re-paste.

    Since you were in editing mode you may have accidentally hit the far right delete button instead of the far left save button — I’ve done that before in the heat of the moment whilst merrily Confounding Om.

26. You confound yourself Can DO!

    Control z “ctrl-z” restores content that is accidently deleted.

    So much chaff, so little time, chappie.

27. @om:

    Not if he’s gone done clicked save or delete and contents of the textbox have disappeared into the ether and failed to appear in the blog — then text won’t be in clipboard for him to restore with ctrl-z. Read his description of the problem again.

    Or would you like me to spell it out in vi or emacs?

28. Coup by vote fraud + persecution of patriots = lots of treason to clean up when Trump is reinstated.

29. Can Do! crtl-z works for short term only, as is you work for the CCP.

    “Not if he’s gone done ….” is this more flyover prole speak, chappie? Which part of the USA do these “flyover proles” actually live in? Don’t forget to drop some of the aint’s, y’alls, skookums, uffdah!, and, well we flyover proles may not cotton to received English.

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