War is peace--slavery is freedom?

Don Feder has written a fabulous piece in the Washington Times recently illustrating the merits of the democracy of Taiwan. A letter to the editor from Chu Maoming, Press Counselor at the D.C. embassy of the so-called People’s Republic of China didn’t quite agree with Feder’s expose.

Excerpt: But Chu was on a roll. “The Chinese government has been consistently engaged in maintaining peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and achieving the peaceful reunification of China,” Chu declared. Of course it has -- in the same way that Japan consistently engaged in maintaining peace and stability in East Asia from 1937 to 1945.

Beijing’s peace-and-stability offensive has included 1) stationing 800 medium-range missiles on its coast near Taiwan 2) increasing military spending by double-digits for better than a decade 3) test-firing missiles toward Taiwan in 1996, to intimidate its people during their first direct presidential election 4) passing its infamous Anti-Succession Law in 2005, pledging to invade Taiwan whenever it believes the Taiwanese are taking unspecified steps toward “independence” and 5) periodically threatening nuclear war if the U.S. attempts to interfere with “reunification.”

War is peace. Slavery is freedom. And the Chinese communists need spokesmen whose pronouncements sound less like propaganda posters.

Two things must be understood at the outset: Firstly, Taiwan has a government; China does not. China has a regime -- a gang with guns that rules by brute force and with no one’s consent but its own.

Secondly, this is not about Taiwan’s “reunification” with China, but the incorporation of 23 million Taiwanese into the People’s Republic of China -- the aforesaid ruthless, vicious totalitarian state.

[...]Also last year, Li Xintao, formerly a worker at the Huamei Garment factory in Shandong province, went to prison for 5 years for “disturbing public order and government institutions.” His heinous offense consisted of trying to collect wages owed him by a bankrupt state company.

There are credible reports of organ harvesting, in Chinese prisons and labor camps. Victims include prisoners of conscience, among them members of the Falun Gong.

On July 29 of this year, police in a suburb of Hangzhou used electric stun batons to break up a demonstration by 3,000 Christians who were protesting the demolition of a house church (as all unauthorized churches are called).

On July 19, 2003, Deng Shiying died two days after her release from the Jilin Women’s Prison in Changchun City. Deng, who was serving a seven-year sentence for producing and distributing material describing human rights abuses committed against Falun Gong members, was beaten by other inmates at the direction of guards.

In China, the regime goes to extraordinary lengths to suppress any religious activity it can’t control. Catholic bishops loyal to Rome (as opposed to the puppet Patriotic Catholic Church), are routinely imprisoned.

The regime has a morbid fear of any organization which could conceivably challenge the party -- be it a church, labor movement, independent association of journalists or lawyers or even a meditation cult. The more popular the cause, the more brutal the repression.

That’s what China is today -- a huge, border-to-border detention facility for 1.2 billion inmates where human rights are non-existent and democracy is a distant dream. (more)

And there are many more reasons to stay out of the Olympics folks...

Mr. Feder is a former syndicated columnist for the Boston Herald and author of Who's Afraid of the Religious Right? (Regnery) and A Jewish Conservative Looks at Pagan America. He works as a freelance writer and media consultant and serves as the president of Jews Against Anti-Christian Defamation.