World

From “North Korea defector compares woke US ideology, education to regime tactics” (New York Post):

“They were in Manhattan, living in the freest country you can imagine, and they’re saying they’re oppressed? It doesn’t even compute,” Yeonmi Park told The Post of students at her alma mater, Columbia University. “I was sold for $200 as a sex slave in the 21st century under the same sky. And they say they’re oppressed because people can’t follow their pronouns they invent every day?”

The 29-year-old defected from North Korea as a young teen, only to be human-trafficked in China. In 2014, she became one of just 200 North Koreans to live in the United States — and, as of last year, is an American citizen.

Now, three years after she graduated from Columbia with a degree in human rights, Park is raising alarm bells about America’s cancel culture and woke ideology.

In her book “While Time Remains,” out February 14, Park writes how she made it all the way to the United States only to find some of the same encroachments on freedom that she thought she left behind in North Korea — from identity politics and victim mentality to elite hypocrisy.

[…]

In North Korea, Park said, the government divides citizens into 51 classes based on whether their blood is “tainted” because their ancestors were “oppressive” landowners.

“That’s how the regime divided people. What an individual does doesn’t matter. It’s all about your ancestors and the collective,” she explained.

Now, when she sees Americans indulging in race essentialism and identity politics, she said, it feels eerily familiar.

“They say white people are privileged and guilty and oppressors,” Park said. “This is the tactic the North Korean regime used to divide people. In America it’s the same idea of collective guilt. This is the ideology that drove North Korea to be what it is today — and we’re putting it into young American minds.”

[…]

“I really don’t think that we have that much time left,” she warned. “Already all our mainstream institutions have the same ideology that North Korea has: socialism, collectivism and equity. We are literally going through a cultural revolution in America. When we realize it, it might be too late.”

 

“Raisi’s Death Commission executed children as young as 15.”

U.S. Senators Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Chuck Grassley, Marsha Blackburn, Rick Scott, and Marco Rubio sent a letter to President Biden calling on him to deny entry visas to Iranian President-elect Ebrahim Raisi and other senior Iranian officials to attend the U.N. General Assembly in September 2022.

Below is the full text of the letter:

July 27, 2021

President Joseph R. Biden
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear President Biden,

We are writing to express our concern about the prospect of incoming Iranian President, Ebrahim Raisi, visiting the United States to attend the United Nations General Assembly.

Raisi’s record as a violator of human rights is long-standing and clear. In 1988, during his tenure as the deputy prosecutor of Tehran, Raisi served on a four-member Death Commission which oversaw the killing of over 5,000 prisoners, including women and children. The Death Commission conducted interviews that lasted only minutes to determine a prisoner’s loyalty to the Islamic Republic of Iran, then sentenced them to death without a lawyer, right to appeal, or fair trial. The executions, conducted by hanging or firing squad, often occurred on the same day as the Death Commission’s interrogations. After burying the dead in unmarked mass graves, Iranian officials refused to notify families for months and never shared with them the locations of their graves. Raisi’s Death Commission executed children as young as 15.

Ebrahim Raisi is proud of his record. In 2018, Raisi defended his role on the 1988 Death Commission, calling it “divine punishment” and “one of the proud achievements of the system.” In the thirty years since the commission, Raisi continued to subject the Iranian people to extrajudicial prosecution, torture, and execution. During the 2009 Green Revolution, when Iranians protested the rigged presidential election, Raisi served as Iran’s deputy chief justice. In this role, Raisi was directly involved in the regime’s prosecution and death sentences of peaceful protesters. Years after, when Raisi served as prosecutor general, he advocated for maintaining Iran’s house arrests on Green Revolution leaders.

Raisi also consistently supports inhumane punishment against the Iranian people. In 2010, Raisi celebrated the Iranian judiciary’s amputation of a prisoner’s hand for stealing as “a source of pride for us.” More recently, Ebrahim Raisi led Iran’s judiciary from 2019 to 2021. During his tenure, the judiciary regularly tortured its prisoners.

Recently, the United States designated Raisi for his role as head of Iran’s judiciary in facilitating the Supreme Leader of Iran’s tyrannical agenda, where he oversaw the state’s crackdown and murder of non-violent protesters. In 2019, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated Raisi, pursuant to Executive Order 13876, for his oversight over the executions of juveniles, torture, and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of Iranian prisoners, including amputations.

Ebrahim Raisi should remain sanctioned under U.S. law. If the United Nations General Assembly maintains its current plans to allow some in-person attendance, the White House should deny Raisi and other Iranian leaders visas to attend. Allowing Raisi to travel to the United States-to the same city where the Iranian regime just tried to kidnap a U.S. citizen-would legitimize his repression, undermine America’s moral leadership, and potentially endanger our national security, given the likely presence of intelligence agents in the Iranian traveling party.

There is strong precedent for denying an entry visa to a foreign leader. In 1988, the United States barred PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat from entering the United States to attend a meeting of the United Nations. In 2014, President Obama denied an entry visa to Iranian Ambassador Hamid Aboutalebi, who was involved in taking American diplomats hostage in 1979. In 2020, the United States declined to issue a visa for Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif. Ebrahim Raisi’s role in the Death Commissions, brutal crackdowns on Iranian protesters, and his association with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps should disqualify him from receiving a visa to the United States.

Thank you for considering this important matter. We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

/s/

 

Writes Agustina Vergara Cid on “Saudi Oil Isn’t Worth the Betrayal of American Values“:

…In an op-ed for the Washington Post, the president claimed that the goal of his visit was “to strengthen a strategic partnership going forward that’s based on mutual interests and responsibilities, while also holding true to fundamental American values.” But this is a fantasy: everything about the Saudi regime is hostile to fundamental American values.

Saudi Arabia is an absolute Islamic monarchy. The ultimate authority, even on judicial matters, is the king. Citizens have no rights or due process — the legal system is based on Sharia law, which empowers the state to control every aspect of people’s lives, including what they can think and say…. Just as there’s no freedom of speech, there is no freedom of thought: those who renounce Islam are subject to public decapitation. Dissent is punished by lashings, torture, wrongful imprisonment, kidnapping (see the case of Loujain al-Hathloul) and murder.

…Biden said that he is “not going to remain silent” when it comes to “a clear violation of human rights.” But what does that lack of silence mean if it has no implications for how he acts towards the perpetrators? Is empty finger wagging what Biden means by “holding true to fundamental American values”?

By the very act of sitting at the table with the Saudis, President Biden has whitewashed the regime’s despotic nature and crimes. He has empowered the regime by giving it a moral sanction.

Read the rest.

From “Ontario school board ‘regrets’ burning books in the name of reconciliation​ as part of educational program“:

An Ontario school board has said that they now “regret” a 2019 educational program that saw books burned and used as fertilizer in the spirit of “reconciliation” — a program that was, in part, led by the co-chair of the Indigenous peoples’ commission of the Liberal Party of Canada, …

[…]

Titles such as Tintin in America, which was withdrawn for its negative portrayal of Indigenous peoples, alongside biographies of various geographers and explorers were discarded, burned, and used as fertilizer to aid in growing a tree on school property.

The program has been ongoing since 2019, but only recently drew criticism.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said personally, that he would not burn books, but he has no right “to tell Indigenous people how they should feel or act to advance reconciliation.” The Canadian fascist has no problem locking up his fellow Canadians who refuse to get vaccinated.

It’s quite apropos that the cover of the book shows “Indigenous peoples'” seeking to burn Tintin while tied to a stake; in Trudeau’s Canada, they simply resort to burning his creator’s books. – MDC

“First broadcast 4 June 1989. Chinese troops opened fire on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on Saturday evening. The collection of students and labourers had been occupying the site for several weeks. Despite the outbreak of “unremitting gunfire”, the protesters refused to leave. The BBC’s Kate Adie reports from the scene.”

According to Levin, “Isolationists believe that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine doesn’t affect us. Nothing could be farther from the truth. As Putin storms Ukraine, history teaches us that appeasement of madmen like Putin only encourages more genocide. And as Mark illustrates, evil exists in more places than just in Russia. And America’s security starts overseas.”

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

Writes veteran Daniel Duffy on how “American Appeasement of Russia Led to War in Ukraine” in The American Thinker:

In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia.  Shortly after, President Obama announced a “reset” policy with Russia.  This was consistent with President Bush, who found Putin “straightforward and trustworthy.”  In 2014, Putin punished Ukraine for ousting its pro-Russian puppet president by annexing Crimea.  The West responded with tepid sanctions.  President Trump equated Putin’s killings of journalists and dissidents with the actions of the United States not once, but twice.  “There are a lot of killers,” Trump told Bill O’Reilly in a 2017 interview.  “You think our country’s so innocent?”  In 2015, he said, “I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe, so you know.”  He continued to describe Putin as a leader and someone whom he respects.

No, the United States isn’t perfect. But the lack of moral clarity when equating a country that has representational government, freedom of speech, real elections, a mostly free economy, and a separation of church and state with the monstrosity of a dictator like Putin emboldens the Kremlin and does real damage. Putting Putin on an equal footing affects the way we think of our relations with him.

If someone were your moral equal, why would you hesitate to become largely dependent on him for natural gas? To Trump’s credit, he did in fact warn Europe that this was not a good idea. But the point is that the lack of moral clarity dilutes our thinking.

[…] So what’s wrong with the precedents set by all these administrations? The common denominator is that they negate the nature of Russia. The West views these events — the invasion of Georgia here, attacking American troops there — as episodic. Westerners haven’t connected the dots.

Read the rest.

From “Hybrid Immunity Kept Omicron Deaths Low in Countries Where Millions Aren’t Fully Vaccinated” in the WSJ:

When the highly infectious Omicron variant reached Asia a few months ago, India and Indonesia had a major gap in their defenses: Two-thirds of their populations were yet to be fully vaccinated.

But the countries are emerging from their most recent Covid-19 waves with a fraction of the deaths they recorded during the onslaught of the earlier Delta variant. Their deaths per capita are even lower than more vaccinated places that have better healthcare systems such as South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong.

Historian Niall Ferguson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, speaking on Bari Weiss podcast on “Russia’s War on Ukraine: A Roundtable“:

In Russian literature, there is a great novel: Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.

Biden is the idiot.

The reason this happened is because the Biden administration slowed down deliveries of armaments to Ukraine, lifted the sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that was supposed to bypass Ukraine, signaled to Russia that the U.S. would not support Ukraine militarily, and therefore made it clear to Putin that he had an opportunity to take military action with only sanctions to fear.

The administration’s strategy was to threaten the worst sanctions—as if sanctions were going to deter Putin. Then they tried something even crazier, which was to say, “You’re going to invade, and we know the date”—as if that was somehow going to stop him from invading. And the worst thing they tried was to get the Chinese to dissuade him from invading, when the Chinese had given him the green light on the condition that he didn’t go until after the Beijing Olympics.

This has been a debacle that has allowed a massive war to break out, one that could have been prevented had there not been such clear signs of weakness.

(Joe Biden apologist, Francis Fukuyama, disagrees.)

Ferguson later adds:

The problem is that we created the possibility of Ukraine’s joining NATO and joining the European Union. But our actual attitude was like that New Yorker cartoon of the guy on the phone who says, “No, I can’t do Thursday. How about never?” We never seriously meant for them to join NATO or the EU. We didn’t supply nearly enough armaments for them to deter Russia from attacking. And as a consequence, we have a massive geopolitical crisis that could have been avoided. Telling people that you saw it coming is not an act of strategic genius. It’s an act of strategic feebleness.

The consequences of this are far-reaching indeed. First of all, in the administration’s anxiety to avoid even higher inflation, they’re desperately trying to resuscitate the Iran nuclear deal and get Iranian oil back onto the world market in the process, making all kinds of concessions that I think will come back to haunt them. Meanwhile, in China, Xi Jinping is watching this fiasco and saying to himself, “Well, if the most I have to fear is the threat of sanctions, then if I decide to take control of Taiwan, I’m in good shape.” And when Putin took out his little nuclear saber and rattled it, we were immediately deterred. The Europeans were so terrified that they immediately canceled the plan to make fighter jets available to the Ukrainians, which they had offered in the early days after the invasion.

Listen to the podcast.

***

As an aside:

Italy’s main University in Milan just banned teaching Fyodor Dostoevsky because he’s a Russian writer.

Dostoevsky was sent to a Siberian labour camp for reading banned books in Tsarist Russia.

We are reaching levels of hatred and stupidity that I thought were never possible.

— Alessandra (@alessabocchi) March 2, 2022

Michael Shellenberger on how green ideology empowered Putin and when it comes to understanding the relationship between energy independence and political-economic security Putin is “smart” and Europe and much of the West has been “dumb”:

How has Vladimir Putin—a man ruling a country with an economy smaller than that of Texas, with an average life expectancy 10 years lower than that of France—managed to launch an unprovoked full-scale assault on Ukraine?

[…]

Missing from that explanation, though, is a story about material reality and basic economics—two things that Putin seems to understand far better than his counterparts in the free world and especially in Europe. 

[…]

The reason Europe didn’t have a muscular deterrent threat to prevent Russian aggression—and in fact prevented the U.S. from getting allies to do more—is that it needs Putin’s oil and gas. 

[…]

For all his fawning over Putin, Donald Trump, back in 2018, defied diplomatic protocol to call out Germany publicly for its dependence on Moscow. “Germany, as far as I’m concerned, is captive to Russia because it’s getting so much of its energy from Russia,” Trump said. This prompted Germany’s then-chancellor, Angela Merkel, who had been widely praised in polite circles for being the last serious leader in the West, to say that her country “can make our own policies and make our own decisions.”

The result has been the worst global energy crisis since 1973, driving prices for electricity and gasoline higher around the world. It is a crisis, fundamentally, of inadequate supply. But the scarcity is entirely manufactured.

Read the rest…

Related:

From “Lawmakers fear Russian invasion could increase Chinese threat to Taiwan” (Washington Examiner):

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are sounding the alarm that Russia’s attack on Ukraine could increase the threat of China invading Taiwan, with some calling for the United States to ramp up its efforts to deter an incursion. These concerns spiked after China’s foreign ministry said on Wednesday that “Taiwan is not Ukraine,” arguing it has “always been an inalienable part of China” and refusing to call Russia’s actions an invasion.

[…]

House Foreign Affairs ranking member Micheal McCaul said he believes it is “only a matter of time” before China invades Taiwan, noting that at least nine Chinese military jets have already been seen crossing into the self-governed island’s airspace. “I think we all saw this unholy alliance coming together at the Beijing Olympics, where Putin and [Chinese] President Xi [Jinping] were hand-in-hand condemning NATO’s ‘aggression’ and calling for the West to stay out of the South China Sea and Taiwan,” the Texas Republican said in an interview.

“So these two events are interconnected and intertwined, and I think Putin has always wanted to do this, it was all about the right time. And I think Xi has always wanted to take Taiwan — it’s about basically going back to the glory of their empires.”

[…]

McCaul said that after speaking with military officials, he believes the U.S. needs to help provide Taiwan with the resources necessary for the island to prepare for an attack.

“Deterrence is always a key. I didn’t really see any deterrence with respect to Ukraine. In fact, waving the Nord Stream 2 sanctions [last May] was, in my judgment, a really bad mistake and emboldened Putin,” he said in an interview.

Recommended:

• The Mind of the Dictator
• Today’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
• Why is the Chinese Government Terrified of Tennis Player Peng Shuai?

Bill Maher says that Justin Trudeau’s rhetoric against those who oppose his viewpoints makes him sound like Hitler (though we think Trudeau looks more like Fidel Castro).

For those who wish to learn how Germany turned into Nazi Germany (and how to avoid it) see Leonard Peikoff’s The Cause of Hitler’s Germany, and The Ominous Parallels.

“The NBA, Hollywood and many big companies make ads saying “speak up on injustice.” Yet they’re happy to ignore atrocities committed by China, because they want the money.” – John Stossel

Comments Gren Reynolds in the NY Post:

So we’re finally seeing a genuine, bottom-up, working-class revolution. In Canada, and increasingly in the United States, truckers and others are refusing to follow government orders, telling the powerful that, in a popular lefty formulation, if there’s no justice, there’s no peace.

Naturally, the left hates it.

For more than a century, lefties have talked about such a revolt. But if you really paid attention, the actual role of the working class in their working-class revolution was not to call the shots — it was to do what it was told by the “intellectual vanguard” of the left.

A working-class revolution led by the working class is the left’s worst nightmare because the working class doesn’t want what the left wants. The working class wants jobs, a stable economy, safe streets, low inflation, schools that teach things and a conservative, non-adventurous foreign policy that won’t get a lot of working-class people killed. It’s not excited about gender fluidity, critical race theory, “modern monetary theory,” foreign adventures and defunding police. [“Truckers are starting a working-class revolution — and the left hates it“]