"The first victory we can claim is that our hearts are free of hatred. Hence we say to those who persecute us and who try to dominate us: ‘You are my brother. I do not hate you, but you are not going to dominate me by fear. I do not wish to impose my truth, nor do I wish you to impose yours on me. We are going to seek the truth together’. THIS IS THE LIBERATION WHICH WE ARE PROCLAIMING."
Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas (2002)
Authorities recognized one death in these protests. Diubis Laurencio Tejeda was a 36-year-old singer who was shot in the back by the National Revolutionary Police (PNR) in Havana on July 12. There are others, but they have not been officially recognized.
Christian Díaz,
age 24, disappeared after joining the protests. Relatives on July 12
reported him missing to the PNR in Cárdenas. Police told his father that
Christian was jailed in Matanzas. On Aug. 5, officials informed his
family he’d drowned in the sea and was buried in a mass grave. His
family is convinced he was beaten to death.
How the Chinese Communist Party prioritized power, punishing whistleblowers such as Dr. Li Wenliang, and plunged the world into a pandemic.
Dr. Li Wenliang warned about Covid-19
Today remembering Dr. Li Wenliang,
the hero who warned about the initial COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan,
China. He was grabbed by secret police in the middle of the night and
threatened with prosecution for making "untrue statements."
He died two years ago today on February 7, 2020. The police state had silenced him and COVID-19 took his life, but the whistleblower is not forgotten despite the efforts of Beijing to erase him.
On March 15, 2020 this blog warned about Communist regimes, such as the ones operating in China and Cuba, to engage in the "denial of objective reality, truth and an ability to systematically lie
to achieve is sometimes effective in taking over a country and imposing
a totalitarian dictatorship, but is a disaster when dealing with
infectious diseases, and an outbreak such as the coronavirus."
Dr. Li Wenliang warned about intitial COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan
Others
in China, who questioned the Chinese Communist dictatorship's response
to COVID-19 went missing. A high profile case was Chinese tycoon Ren Zhiqiang who "wrote in a scathing essay that China’s leader, Xi Jinping, was a
power-hungry 'clown.' He said the ruling Communist Party’s strict limits
on free speech had exacerbated the coronavirus epidemic," reported Javier C. Hernández in The New York Timeson March 14, 2020.
Mr. Zhiqiang went missing at the time, and reappeared in September 2020 when he was found "guilty of corruption, bribery and embezzlement of public funds" in a Beijing court fined $620,000 and sentenced to 18 years in prison.
The
message to the Chinese populace is clear: criticize the Chinese
Communist leadership at your own peril. Transparency and the free
exchange of ideas and data are non-existent in such an environment.
This
is not good in the midst of a pandemic.
Rewarding this behavior that has led to the loss of millions of lives with a Winter Olympics is an outrage. This is part of the reason why I am boycotting the Winter Olympics in Beijing this year, and encourage others to do so.
14 years later, and the world has suffered over 5.6 million deaths due to COVID-19, and the Chinese Communist dictatorship of Xi Jinping bears responsibility. The Chinese government did not reveal for weeks what it knew about COVID-19, allowing it to spread into a worldwide pandemic. The Frontline Documentary "China's COVID Secrets" is required viewing to understand what happened.
#NoBeijing2022 has listed some of the other outrages committed by the ruling Chinese Communist Party in Beijing. "The Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics is set to happen amid one of the world’s worst crackdowns against freedom, democracy, and human rights."
At least TWO million Uyghur,
Kazakh, and Uzbek Muslims are detained in “re-education camps”
undergoing systematic torture, rape, and political re-education.
80% of Tibetan children – as young as 4 – are forced away from their parents and housed in China’s colonial boardingschools, cut off from their families they face intense political indoctrination.
In Hong Kong, the Chinese government has implemented a draconian National Security Bill that effectively criminalises protest and curtails any remaining human rights.
Protests by Southern Mongolians, whose rights, language and culture being eradicated, are put down with force
Detention & disappearance of countless Chinese lawyers, feminists & activists
Intimidation and geopolitical bullying of Taiwan and aggression and expansion across borders – in the South China Sea and India-Tibet border – present a clear threat to regional and global security.
A second Frontline Documentary from April 2020, "China Undercover" examined the systematic crackdown on Chinese Muslims.
Despite this the International Olympic Committee
(IOC) chose China once again to host the Olympics in 2022 in
the midst of the historic crimes of the Chinese Communist Party dictatorship.
As was the case in the lead up to the 2008 Olympics
friends of a free China need to increase scrutiny on the Chinese regime and boycott these Olympics. The consequences of the IOC legitimizing such a regime cannot be overstated. If you are in the Washington DC area on Thursday, February 3rd at 12 noon please join the #NoBeijing2022 Rally at Union Square 3rd Street SW.
On August 1, 1936, Hitler opened the XIth Olympiad. Musical fanfares
directed by the famous composer Richard Strauss announced the dictator's
arrival to the largely German crowd. Hundreds of athletes in opening
day regalia marched into the stadium, team by team in alphabetical
order. Inaugurating a new Olympic ritual, a lone runner arrived bearing a
torch carried by relay from the site of the ancient Games in Olympia, Greece.
[...] Concerted propaganda
efforts continued well after the Olympics with the international
release in 1938 of "Olympia," the controversial documentary directed by
German film maker and Nazi sympathizer Leni Riefenstahl.
She was commissioned by the Nazi regime to produce this film about the
1936 Summer Games. Germany emerged victorious from the XIth Olympiad.
German athletes
captured the most medals, and German hospitality and organization won
the praises of visitors. Most newspaper accounts echoed the New York Times report
that the Games put Germans "back in the fold of nations," and even made
them "more human again." Some even found reason to hope that this
peaceable interlude would endure.
The 1936 Olympics whitewashed the brutality of the Nazi regime in
Germany and led to acceptance of Hitler's criminal regime. The 2008
Olympics whitewashed the brutality of the Communist regime in China
further legitimizing that criminal regime.
In 2022, returning the Olympics to China and making this decision in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the destruction of Hong Kong's democracy, threats against Taiwan, and the Uyghur genocide creates a historic moral hazard.
This is why I will not watch the Olympics, and encourage others to join me in this boycott, instead I will stand with Hong Kong, and Taiwan, share documentaries and films that reveal the facts of the genocidal regime in Beijing, and calls to nonviolent protests against the Chinese Communist dictatorship, and their enablers.
Below is a documentary about the 2019-2020 protests in Hong Kong titled "Do Not Split." Please share it with others.
"We are ruthless and ask no quarter from you. When our turn comes we shall not disguise our terrorism." - Karl Marx, Marx-Engels Gesamt-Ausgabe, vol. vi pp 503-5 (The final issue of Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 18 May 1849)
“In politics you cannot follow nonviolence. You cannot follow
honesty. Every moment you have to give a lie. Every moment you have
to take a bullet in hand and kill someone.” - Gopal Godse, co-conspirator in Gandhi's assassination, Time Magazine, February 2000.
"Terrorism and deception are weapons not of the strong but of the weak." - Mohandas K. Gandhi
Seventy four years ago Mohandas Gandhi was shot three times in the chest
and killed by Hindu nationalist Gopal Godseat 5:17pm. Godse was part of a team of assassins that had tried 10 days earlier to bomb and kill Gandhi.
Body of Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi lies in state at Birla House in New Delhi.
Gandhi despite his successful struggle for independence and the establishment of the largest democracy on the
planet was felled, after repeated assassination attempts they gunned him down
as he went to worship. They murdered the independence leader because they did not
believe that India could survive with Gandhi promoting Satyagraha and a Muslim state next door.
Gopal Godse, a co-conspirator and brother of the assassinNathuram Godse, argued as late as February 2000 in a Time magazine interview that:
“In politics you cannot follow nonviolence. You cannot follow
honesty. Every moment you have to give a lie. Every moment you have
to take a bullet in hand and kill someone.”
Communists view nationalists as a threat to their revolutionary project, and nationalists often have a critical view of Marxism-Leninism, but they both agreed in their hostility to Mohandas Gandhi.
The
nationalists were open and transparent about their evil intent, but the
communists had more guile, and their reasons for rejecting him more
complex.
Although
Gandhi regarded the union and independence of the Indian peoples as
his goal, his reactionary-Utopian social theory and the reformist
methods of struggle connected with it caused his activity to fail in
facilitating overthrow of the colonial yoke [...] The social essence of
the Gandhi doctrine and its fundamentally reactionary role in the
history of India's national liberation
movement has hardly been treated in Marxist literature. Yet this
doctrine still retards the development of class awareness among the
Indian masses.
What was this social essence of Gandhian
thought that so troubled the Marxist Leninists in the Soviet Union?
First, the reformist methods of struggle referred to in the above quote
was nonviolent resistance and secondly his social theory rejected class
struggle as another manifestation of destructive violence. On September 11, 1906 a new word came into existence that would give a better understanding of Gandhi's social theory and method of struggle which he described as:
'Satyagraha.'
Truth (Satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and
therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian
movement 'Satyagraha,' that is to say, the Force which is born of
Truth and Love or non-violence, and gave up the use of the phrase
'passive resistance,' in connection with it, so much so that even in
English writing we often avoided it and used instead the word
'Satyagraha' itself or some other equivalent English phrase.
The
Marxist-Leninists embrace revolutionary violence and a movement led by
a small vanguard of intellectuals and professional revolutionaries that carry out the changes "necessary" by whatever means necessary and
reject nonviolence as naive. They follow the doctrine of Vladimir Lenin as
presented in his 1902 revolutionary tract "What is to be done."
Over a century has passed since both sets of ideas have been set out and applied around the world. An analysis done by Maria J. Stephen and Erica Chenoweth
systematically explores the strategic effectiveness of both violent and
nonviolent campaigns using data on 323 campaigns carried out between
1900 and 2006.[1] Their findings demonstrate that major non-violent
campaigns were successful 53% of the time versus only 26% for major
violent campaigns and terrorist campaigns had a dismal 7% success rate.
Today,
India with all its flaws is the world's largest democracy with a
growing economy that presents new competitive challenges to the
developed world and Communism has amassed a body count of 100
million dead and counting. It would appear that Gandhi's criticisms of
the communists were prescient:
"The
socialists and communists say, they can do nothing to bring about
economic equality today. They will just carry on propaganda in its favor
and to that end they believe in generating and accentuating hatred.
They say, when they get control over the State, they will enforce
equality. Under my plan the State will be there to carry out the will of
the people, not to dictate to them or force them to do its will." - Mohandas Gandhi
"It
is my firm conviction that if the State suppressed capitalism by
violence, it will be caught in the coils of violence itself, and will
fail to develop non-violence at any time. The State represents violence
in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as
the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to
which it owes its very existence." - Mohandas Gandhi
It is Satyagraha that is relevant today
in 2022 and offers an alternative to the conflagrations suffered in the
20th century and the wars that plague the world now. Gandhi's
Satyagraha is a call to principled non-violence but even pragmatists and
realists looking over the historical record cannot fail to be
influenced by the fact that non-violent civic resistance works and offers a better chance of a better life for more people.
"Whoever
destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the
whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture
to have saved the whole world." - Mishnah (1135-1204)
Harold Cepero Escalante (1980 - 2012)
Harold Cepero Escalante was born in Ciego de Avila on January 29, 1980 and was murdered by the Cuban dictatorship together with Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas in Bayamo, Granma on July 22, 2012. Harold was a member of the Christian Liberation Movement and a youth leader. Harold understood that those who engaged in repression were also not free stating "[t]hose who removeand crushfreedomare the realslaves."
Today
would have been his 42nd birthday, but due to the actions of the Castro regime's
secret police his life was ended ten years ago at the age of 32.
MT @mclcubaoficial Eliecer Porto, Christian Liberation Movement in Palma Soriano, remembers Harold Cepero on his birthday, January 29, 1980. Harold Cepero was murdered along with Oswaldo Payá by the Cuban communist regime on July 22, 2012 https://t.co/WmJT7KB1HT
Clare Short, a former Labor member of parliament addressing the topic of forgiveness and justice raises two important points that underline reconciliation within an ongoing injustice and repression:
"Is anger about
injustice one of the forces that drives historical progress and
important social reform? Is
there an important difference between the bitterness,hatred and quest
for vengeance that
can be so damaging to those who have been hurt or wronged, and the anger
that thirsts
after justice?" ... "I also agree that the quest for vengeance is also
wrong because it so often inflicts harm on people who share an identity
with the original perpetrator but have no guilt,and it means the evil of
the original harm is
recreated in the actions of the person who has been wronged. But all
this said, there is
such a thing as just anger and those who are subject to continuing
oppression can get
strength from that anger in order to join with others to liberate
themselves. And so I wish to
conclude by celebrating forgiveness and reconciliation but also by reminding us that
reconciliation can not be the answer when there is a continuing wrong or continuing
oppression."
"Because what I do not forgiveis that theyear has started with thesamerepression thatended last year. What I cannot forgiveis that inmy country,those who govern, do notrecognize the need to changetodemocracyand allowthe people to decidein free andpluralistic elections. I can not and do not want to forgive that right now, at this instant, there are political prisoners inCubaandthatthe existing lawsguarantee their imprisonment or perhaps the firing squad for others. I do notforgivethat young people arelivingwithout life projects, whilea group in powerlive asbillionaires.Nor do Iforgivethe complicity of manyinterests thatseek capitalnowinCubawithout wanting to find outtodaywhat is happeningthere. I do notforgiveout ofhate. No, no but becauseforgiving a present and a future ofinjustice andtotalitarianismfor yourcountry, is notmercybutcomplicity with the evil of others."
Tony Díaz Sánchez understood, and continues to understand the dangers of speaking truth to power in Cuba, and paid the price of long years in prison, and forced exile to do it.
Harold also understood the dangers of advocating for freedom in Cuba under the Castro dictatorship. In 2012, shortly before his death he
explained the cost of resistance:
"Christians and non-Christians who
have the courage and the freedom to consider the peaceful political
option for their lives, know they are exposing themselves to slightly
less than absolute solitude, to work exclusion, to persecution, to
prison or death."
This courageous young man is remembered and the demand for justice continues. The petition
demanding an international investigation into the circumstances of
Harold and Oswaldo's killing on July 22, 2012 has crossed 16,500 signatures.
Defending memory by pursuing truth
and maintaining the call for justice is an ever present opportunity for
the other to repent and embrace justice and actual forgiveness. The
antithesis of this is "forgiving and forgetting" while injustices are
ongoing and new ones being compounded not only harms the victims but
also condemns the perpetrator to continue committing evil acts and is
described as a "false reconciliation."
In the spirit of defending truth and memory, this video of a 2002 interview with Harold Cepero provided by the Christian Liberation Movement on their Youtube channel is being shared.
Posts
