RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/reality-of-swedens-migration-problem/

Readers may recall a kerfuffle in February 2017, which now seems like the long, distant past. It revolved around President Trump riffing on the question of migration in front of a rally of his supporters:

You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this. Sweden. They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible.

As it happens, nothing had particularly happened the night before in Sweden itself. Rather, the president appeared to be referring to a segment he had seen on Fox News the previous evening, in which a journalist reported on the social and criminal problems that Sweden had been having as a result of the unchecked migration that peaked in 2015.

But such is the tenor of the times that the dominant response to the President’s statement was to ridicule it, especially by highlighting what a nirvana Sweden allegedly is. In other words, much of the political and media class in America and around the world decided to take part in covering up the problems which sudden non-European migration had brought to Sweden. In their desire to lampoon Trump they ended up colluding in a falsehood.

Just how false can once again be seen from the most recent work from Paulina Neuding, one of the most indispensable journalists not just in Europe but anywhere else. In recent years Neuding has, among other things, been keeping a tally of “explosions” in Sweden. Not metaphorical ones, but actual ones. So strangely self-censoring is the Swedish press that when explosives are used (including grenade attacks, among other hitherto un-Swedish activities) they are either ignored or reported merely as “explosions.”  Some of these do turn out to be accidents, but a great many do not, and the unwillingness of most of the media (local and international) to look into these events is one of those things that I predict historians will look back at and just whistle.

https://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/the-sky-high-stakes-in-hong-kong/

In Hong Kong’s huge protest over a proposed law that would allow extradition from the territory to mainland China, there is far more at stake than “confidence” in the integrity of Hong Kong’s legal system, or the health of Hong Kong’s economy — important though those both are. The real showdown going on in Hong Kong has long been between despotism and democracy, between tyranny and the Free World. And whether we, the free people of America, and our allies, choose to think of it this way or not, the reality is that the showdown now taking place in Hong Kong will shape our future as well.

For two reasons, the people of Hong Kong — in their efforts to stop this ruinous extradition law — deserve the strongest support we can muster. One reason is quite simply that it is the right thing to do, though in international politics that is often a backseat priority. The other reason– perhaps more compelling to those inclined to think of Hong Kong as a faraway foreign place and none of our business — is that it is a high-risk precedent for the Free World to abandon its own. It invites aggression by the likes of China (and Russia, Iran, North Korea, etc.) against us and our allies. Which is what it will boil down to, if the U.S., the U.K. and other democratic powers do not find some way to buttress the demands of Hong Kong’s demonstrators. It is vital that Washington persuade Beijing and its satrap in Hong Kong, Chief Executive Carrie Lam, that it would be wise to scrap this proposed law, and moronic –or at least astoundingly expensive — to push it through.

Please, make no mistake. Officially Hong Kong these days may be a “Special Autonomous Region” of the “People’s Republic” of China, destined under treaty to fall entirely under Beijing’s jackboot in 2047. But in spirit, in character, in history, in the inheritance of British rule of law, and for another full 28 years according to China’s promise of “One Country, Two Systems,” Hong Kong is one of our own, still part of the Free World. If we do not stand up for its people, China’s rulers will all too likely read that abandonment as one more sign of Western weakness, one more invitation to commit the next act of aggression.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/06/12/president-xis-strongman-tactics-have-severely-backfired-hong/

Hong Kong’s reunification with the mainland looks increasingly problematic

This week’s scenes from Hong Kong are eerily reminiscent of another battle for Chinese democracy, one that took place just 30 years ago in Beijing. While it’s true that the clashes between Hong Kong’s protesters and the Hong Kong police have been nowhere as violent as that dished out by the People’s Liberation Army that warm June evening in 1989, the use of tear gas and rubber bullets against the crowds are a troubling sign.

From one perspective, this is just a battle between the Hong Kong government and its people over an extradition law, which might make it possible for people in the city to be extradited to the mainland. 

Seen from another perspective, however, it’s a single battle in the war between closed, authoritarian states and open, democratic ones – a conflict between those who believe that a single party should be the arbiter of law, of social taste, of economic life, of education, and even, of thought – and those who believe that it is down to the individual to decide on much of this, and that dignity and happiness lay in the latter – not the former.

As one Hong Kong-watcher wrote this week, “It’s not easy to turn a million prosperous people into political dissidents. But that’s what China might have pulled off in Hong Kong.” Given the fact that Hong Kong’s approval rates for Chinese rule in 1998 were as high as 60 per cent, it is astonishing to think how Beijing has mismanaged the former British colony.

On the 20th anniversary of the handover, just two years ago, less than 3.1 per cent of Hong Kong youth identified as Chinese, while a University of Hong Kong poll found that less than 40 per cent of the city’s residents were satisfied with Chinese rule. It is astonishing, and tragic.