Tag Archives: Totalitarianism

News

How does the communist government in China treat its citizens?

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Mary found this moving article in the Wall Street Journal that talks about what the state police can do to private citizens today in China.

Excerpt:

On Dec. 23, the United Nations International Convention for the Protection of All Persons From Forced Disappearance came into force. China has declined to accede to this convention. My experience that same day is just one of many examples of how the authorities continue to falsely imprison Chinese citizens.

That evening, I was in the Xizhimen area of Beijing chatting with my colleagues Piao Xiang, Xu Zhiyong and Zhang Yongpan. Ms. Piao had been disappeared after she and I went to Dandong on Oct. 7 to argue the court case of Leng Guoquan, a man framed by the police for drug trafficking; she had only been released on Dec. 20. Her abductors had been officers from the state security squad of the Public Security Bureau. I asked her to narrate the entire process of her disappearance in detail.

Later, I suggested to Mr. Zhang, “Let’s go and see Fan Yafeng’s mom.” The day before, we had contacted fellow human rights lawyer Fan Yafeng and found out that he was under strict house arrest. But he had said that his mother was going to be alone at home in the evening and so I thought we should go see her.

Because I used to go there frequently I remembered clearly where she lived. As Mr. Zhang and I entered the block of flats and started walking up the staircase, I had a feeling that someone was following us. Observing that we went to the third floor, a young security guard asked us whom we were visiting. We said, “We’re seeing a friend.” Immediately, he called out for someone else to come up.

We knocked on the door and were greeted by Mr. Fan’s mother. But as we entered the flat, the security guard came with us, and a person in plainclothes stormed in just behind him. The man in plainclothes demanded to check our IDs in a very coarse manner. I asked him in a loud voice, “What sort of people are you? How can you enter a private residence without permission?”

The plainclothes man said, “I am a police officer. We want to check your ID cards.” “You’re a police officer? I want to see your police ID.” “If I am telling you I’m a police officer, then that’s what I am. What are you doing here?” “Is that your business? How can you prove you’re a police officer if you don’t show your police ID card?”

The situation was escalating. I ducked my head and used my phone to send out a message on Twitter, and Mr. Zhang made a phone call to a friend. It was then about half past eight. The plainclothes guy made a phone call asking for reinforcement. Later I learned that at that moment our own reinforcements were mobilizing.

Two police officers showed up. One of them showed us his police ID. I asked Mr. Zhang to note down his police ID number and name, Shi Ligang, and pass it on to our Twitter friends. Then they wanted to check our IDs. I said, “According to Article 15 of the National Identity Card Law you have no right to check them in the present situation.”

He said, “We are conducting an investigation in accordance with the People’s Police Law.” I said, “You can only question people who are suspected of having broken a law. We’ve just come to a friend’s home for a visit, so you have no right to question us.”

We quarreled for some time, and that state security squad officer in plainclothes kept making phone calls asking for more people to come over. The situation was getting worse, so I sent another Twitter message.

I talked to Mr. Fan’s mother and the older state security squad officer told her not to speak to me. I got angry. “You’re not even disclosing your identity, do you think you can enter other people’s flat as you please and order the flat-owner about—not to mention that that’s illegal, it lacks every human feeling!”

“You should think more clearly. Don’t talk so much about the law with me. Do you know where we are? We are on Communist Party territory!”

The whole thing is a must-read, and it gets much, much worse. It will open your eyes to the dangers of the big government – and specifically atheistic big government. I find it ironic that Americans living in the freest country in the world would put on shirts that celebrate communism.

In case anyone wants to read a good book on where communism comes from and where it leads, I recommend “The Road to Serfdom” by F.A. Hayek, a Nobel-prize-winning economist. I have read the book four times, myself. The one-line-summary is this: if you let government control the free market such that it regulates businesses and workers, profits and earnings, you will lose every single freedom you have, including the precious freedom of religious liberty. If I had to point to one book that helped me to make the connection between economics and Christianity, this was the book. The book was recommended to me by Jay Richards himself, along with many books by Tom Sowell.

News

Canadian parents jailed and fined for spanking child

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Political Map of Canada

Story from Life Site News. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

The parents of a 14-year-old girl were sentenced each to 10 days in jail plus a $500 fine on December 9 for using a belt to spank their daughter. They had been found guilty of assault in June of this year, but sentencing was put off until a later date.

The jail time was remitted due to the five days the couple spent locked up after being arrested, according to Quebec Media Inc.

Lawrence Zachow, 60, and his wife Aida Calagui-Zachow, 54, were originally charged with assault with a weapon for the Jan. 15, 2008 spanking. However, Judge Michael Stevens-Guille found them guilty of the lesser offense of assault, saying he understood the parents were disciplining the girl according to their religious beliefs, and not just reacting in anger.

“Whatever one’s belief in higher authority, if you live in Canada you are subject to the laws of Canada as interpreted by the courts, in this case the Supreme Court of Canada,” Stevens-Guille said in the ruling. “Spare the rod and spoil the child is not the byword of the discipline of children in this country in 2010,” he added.

According to QMI, the court was told that the spanking was the result of a confrontation between the parents and the daughter, in ninth grade at the time, over the girl’s admission that she was having sex with her boyfriend. She refused her parents’ request to break off the relationship.

Following the spanking, which the girl told the court did not hurt, she reported her parents to a school official who called the police.

[…]In 2004, the Supreme Court of Canada banned spanking of children under 2 and over 12 and criminalized it at any age with an implement such as the common wooden spoon.

I do not agree  with spanking a 14-year old. My point in posting this is to show how social engineers in Canada’s most liberal province do not really believe that parents are the authority over their own children. And I think they are especially annoyed by the idea that fathers should be able to push their morality on children because of their authority as provider and moral leader. What incentives does this create for fathers who want their daughters to not act immorally? Does being overridden by the state make men more likely to marry? Does it make men more likely to want to have children? What man takes on a marriage and children when he can be overruled and regulated by the feminist state at any time? Why bother to have children at all, if the state decides what vision of morality the children will be raised with?

Don’t forget the previous story of the daughter who took her father to court for grounding her – and won! She was sending naked pictures of herself on her father’s computer. Is that what fathers can look forward to? And with government approval, no less? Why should a man sign up for that? What is the point? Why bother? Why not just stay single, stop working so hard, and enjoy the freely available sex that is available as the number of fatherless women increases as feminism dominates society more and completely destroys the institution of marriage?

Women think men want to marry as much as they do and for the same reasons, but it’s false. Men marry for respect, and to be recognized as essential, and as the moral and spiritual leader of the home. ALL THESE THINGS are taken away by the feminist state’s regulation of the family. Men today get no respect, no special role as provider, and no authority as leader. They have been replaced and marginalized from their traditional roles, by design. There is really no reason for men to MARRY any more, and no reason for them to take on the burden of parenting. There is nothing in it for men. Women don’t value men, and women vote for social policies that discriminate against men and marginalize them for their traditional roles – substituting government social programs and welfare for husbands and fathers. Imagine – courts overruling the judgment of parents about a 14-year old having sex! Unbelievable! What man wants this? NONE.

This is a question that women today never ask: What is the value proposition for men to marry and raise children?

And there even more to it than that. Presumably, these parents worked for 30 years each paying 40% of their income to the government. That would involve scholarships for these judges and lawyers to got the school. And funding for the courts and the prisons. And funding for public schools to teach their daughter sex education. And funding for public school teachers to call the police on them. Police that are funded by their taxpayer dollars. They literally paid the state to incarcerate them for the crime of disciplining (in an excessive way, granted) their own daughter, who had been indoctrinated by the state’s sex education programs to think that pre-marital sex was normal.

There is something deeply, deeply disturbing about paying for your own execution. And it brings to mind that old sick pre-occupation of the secular left to avoid being judged morally at all costs – the same sickness that causes them to reject the objective moral law. In fact, they would probably find everything that I am saying to be quite odd. Morality? What is morality? These people don’t understand what morality even is. The purpose of life, on their view, is to be happy in whatever way feels right to you. And anyone who tries to form your character to any end should be arrested and put in jail.

Previous story on Sweden fining and jailing parents for spanking their child.

News

MUST-READ: Sweden jails father of child who was seized for being home-schooled

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Teacher Union Protesting Parental Rights
Teacher Union Demanding Bigger Government

From an Alliance Defense Fund press release.

Excerpt:

After seizing a child from his parents and holding him in custody with virtually no visitation for 1 1/2 years because he was home-schooled, the Swedish government has now jailed the boy’s father for taking his son home from a supervised visitation when he wasn’t supposed to last week. Social services officials also told the 9-year-old boy’s mother that if she doesn’t stop crying at the limited visitations, which last for one hour every five to six weeks, they will further reduce the frequency of visits with her son.

After Swedish courts upheld the government’s right to seize Domenic Johansson, son of Christer and Annie Johansson, attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund and the Home School Legal Defense Association filed an application with the European Court of Human Rights asking it to hear the case, Johansson v. Sweden. Swedish authorities will not permit the family to be represented within the country by an ADF-allied attorney and have instead required them to accept a government-appointed public defender.

“The government shouldn’t abduct and imprison children simply because it doesn’t like homeschooling. That’s exactly what happened here,” said ADF Legal Counsel Roger Kiska, who is based in Europe. “Despite the ill-advised decision on the part of Mr. Johansson, the only menace here is a government drunk with its own power.  This sad circumstance is what happens when an over-powerful government pushes a parent to the point of desperation, so social services should not pretend to be surprised.”

“The parents complied with everything expected of them, and yet the government has continued to keep their son under lock and key,” Kiska added. “Americans beware: This is coming to your doorstep if you are not vigilant about your government.”

Swedish authorities forcibly removed Domenic from his parents in June 2009 from a plane they had boarded to move to Annie’s home country of India.  The officials did not have a warrant nor did they charge the Johanssons with any crime.  The officials seized the child because they believe home schooling is an inappropriate way to raise a child and insist the government should raise Domenic instead, even though home-schooling was legal in Sweden at the time he was taken into custody.

The Democrat party, and all secular leftist parties, are opposed to the idea of parents raising their own children because it offends their sense of “equality”. The left desires equality of outcomes for all citizens regardless of how they act. And that means that all children should receive state care and instruction during daylight hourse, virtually from the time they are born until the time when they become employed (hopefully by the government). The left is especially terrified of homeschooling, because in that arrangement, the parents, (and especially the father), are able to teach the child to have the beliefs that the parents prefer. The left is allied with teacher unions who have educated themselves to the point where they believe that parents are not their partners in educating children, but instead are enemies.

Homeschooling versus fascism

A common thread in fascist regimes is the effort to separate children from parents at a young age, so that adult teachers can impose the state’s values on the children when they are least able to resist them. That is why, accoring to the Guardian, the National Socialist party abolished homeschooling in fascist Germany in 1938. (A review of Goldberg’s book by Canadian author Denyse O’Leary is here). My favorite quote from Goldberg’s book is about the role of government-run schools in a fascist state:

Hence a phalanx of progressive reformers saw the home as the front line in the war to transform men into compliant social organs. Often the answer was to get the children out of the home as soon as possible. An archipelago of agencies, commissions, and bureaus sprang up overnight to take the place of the anti-organic, contra-evolutionary influences of the family. The home could no longer be seen as an island, separate and sovereign from the rest of society. John Dewey helped create kindergartens in American for precisely this purpose — to help shape the apples before they fell from the tree — while at the other end of the educational process stood reformers like Wilson, who summarized the progressive attitude perfectly when, as president of Princeton, he told an audience, “Our problem is not merely to help the students to adjust themselves to world life … [but] to make them as unlike their fathers as possible.”

The United States is also heading in this direction. In Democrat-run California, Human Events reported that homeschooling was effectively banned by an activist court. Christian apologist Dinesh D’Souza recently explained why the left is so intent on keeping control of the schools here. He notes that secular people do not form families and do not have children, because it is too much of a constraint on their autonomy. Instead, D’Souza writes, secularists simply seize control of the children of religious parents, and pass their values on to the children in the mandatory government-run schools.

Christians and the secular left

Some people, even some Christians, vote for Democrats because they don’t want to have to pay for the things they want by working themselves, but would prefer to pay for the the things they want by having their harder-working neighbors pay for the things they want. Parents who vote for leftists are really just delivering their children into the hands of an ever growing secular humanist educational bureaucracy that will have no respect – no respect – for the traditional family. And this is even worse for Christians, because the traditional family is the nursery for Christian beliefs. When a child has to please his peers and his public school indoctrinators more than his parents, Christianity is finished.

This is something that the church is largely ignorant of, and indifferent to, because they are more focused on providing feelings of happiness to their customers. The church does this by neglecting the truthfulness of Christianity as a knowledge tradition and emphasizing Christianity as an amusing musical show. Apologetics is replaced by entertainment.

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