Published on February 24, and either missed or overlooked by Legacy Media, China’s leader of the opposition-in-exile, Wei Jingsheng’s 魏京生 short treatise, ‘Why Praise the Tyrant?’, argued that silence and appeasement strengthen tyrannical despotism.
He isn’t new to the subject. Branded the father of Chinese democracy, Wei was imprisoned, then released in 1997, as part of a Clinton administration negotiation with then Chinese President Jiang Zemin.
Wei served a total of 18 years in prison for non-violent, pro-Democracy opposition to the Chinese Communist Party.
In his February piece, Wei asks, “Why are there so many people liking the tyrant?”
He then provides two reasons: “First, people become accustomed, numb, they don’t know to be afraid. Second, no one dares to talk about tyrants at home.”
Wei said, “people are brainwashed by propaganda, people believe [what they’re told] that tyranny is inevitable [e.g.: for their own good], or at least cannot be overthrown.”
In other words, people are conditioned to embrace the tyrant as an altruistic patron of the people, and tyranny as their benevolent benefactor.
Under a false sense of security, as alluded to by Wei, the populace falls asleep, “they accept tyranny as reality – since resistance is useless, just as well lie down and enjoy.”
For his example, Wei uses the Chinese middle class. They “belong to this lying down, and enjoy being part of the group, [which is rewarded] with material living conditions which they can lie down and enjoy.”
Wei argues that “some people have developed a Stockholm syndrome, who would defend tyrants with tears in their eyes. There is no shortage of this kind of people in the elite class in China, including the elites overseas.”
Condemning manipulative propaganda, and revisionism, he links back to a recent TV series’ portrayal of “Qin Shihuang, the founder of the Qin dynasty, the first emperor to unite China.”
Wei explains, ‘it is said the part of Qin Shihuang killing his two brothers was censored and deleted, which, for 2,000 years has been viewed by scholars as evidence of Qin Shihuang’s tyrannical character.’
This deletion, Wei said, highlights the fact that the “core purpose of the censor, is to praise the tyrant.”
If I’ve read Wei correctly, the CCP approved period drama, deceptively revised the history of Qin Shihuang in order to falsely align the Communist Chinese Party with the Qin Dynasty in the hearts, and minds of the Chinese people.
The article’s translation from Chinese into English isn’t particularly well done, but it’s good enough to get the gist.
Wei concludes, “tyrants have one thing in common, that is, they ignore basic rights and dignity of the people. For their great goals, they enslave the people, and sacrifice their power.”
This is done by ‘stripping the power away from the people and imposing severe penalties. In order to implement severe penalties to deter the people, one must ignore human dignity. This includes grooming villains, and cruel officials, corrupting social morality, and creating social unrest.’
China has come a long way financially because reforms embraced a market economy. For Wei, however, when ‘compared with Democratic systems that manage market economies, a Communist managed market economy is a backward system. It can’t adapt to economic development and technological progress, nor can it adapt to modern people’s pursuit of freedom and dignity.’
Wei then writes, “people in the West have now come to realise that continuing to infuse blood into authoritarian countries not only endangers their own interests but also endangers their own living conditions and values.”
Referring perhaps to the West’s widespread adoption of Communist Chinese C0V1D-19 authoritarianism, Wei said, ‘the Chinese model can no longer be maintained.’
To paraphrase Wei, this means that the tyrant model of cruel repression, which strengthens despotism to save shaky vested interests’ is a fool’s errand.
The “blood transfusion diplomacy” with the CCP is a toxin to Civil Liberties, and Classical Liberal, constitutional democracies.
Can we say this about Cancel Culture, and its alphabet mafia, where the real oppressors march, not with the oppressed, nor for the oppressed, but as the oppressed?
I think so.
As I firmly stated last year, the culture war isn’t between left vs. right, black vs. white, it’s between truth vs. falsehood.
In the context of the Church, if we fail to bring a confession of Jesus Christ up against the clear, and present false doctrines woven into the current platforms of allowable debate, we’ve failed, not only in our civic duty but as Christians.
At Caldron Pool, we aim to fight for truth over against falsehood by ministering through the vocation of speaking truth in love; informing, by being well informed.
A Christian who isn’t Missional, isn’t a Christian.
Wei is right. The “core purpose of the censor [propagandist and revisionist], is [indeed] to praise the tyrant.”
Silence, and appeasement, strengthen tyrannical despotism.
Engagement with the culture is an imperative; joyless defeatism dressed up as “losing graciously”, isn’t a Gospel centred stratagem for Christians in a post-Christian paradigm.
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