RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hong-kong-crackdown-has-begun-11571180182

Hong Kong

The Chinese crackdown here is under way. Tanks haven’t rolled into Hong Kong à la Tiananmen Square in 1989. But Beijing is carrying out a subtler, though often still violent, effort to suppress dissent, hoping the world won’t notice. Ask Stanley Ho Wai-hong of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions.

The 35-year-old pro-democracy labor activist planned a community event Sept. 29 in Sai Kung, a fishing village in Hong Kong’s New Territories. But that afternoon, tens of thousands were rallying in the city against China’s human-rights abuses, so Mr. Ho canceled his event at the last minute. He was driving away when a stranger called him and asked him to come back so villagers could give him a gift. “It was a trap for murder,” he told me at the hospital earlier this month.

When he arrived back in Sai Kung, he says, three men ambushed him and bludgeoned him with metal rods. Mr. Ho fell to the ground and tried to cover his skull with his hands. It took only half a minute for bystanders to rescue him, but “30 seconds is a long time.” The attack left Mr. Ho with seven gashes in his head and five bruises on his back. His right thumb and three other fingers were broken, the left index finger so severely that he needed surgery.

Other pro-democracy figures have been the targets of criminal violence, including lawmakers Lam Cheuk-ting and Kwong Chun-yu; an unnamed reporter for the Apple Daily news paper; Davin Wong, a student activist who was acting president of the Hong Kong University Students’ Union; and Jimmy Sham, convenor of the Civil Human Rights Front, which organized several protests with a million or more participants in Hong Kong this summer. The home of Apple Daily publisher Jimmy Lai was firebombed in September, and posters hung up in the metro system recently advertised his personal phone number as well as those of his children. Plainclothes thugs have also beaten up protesters, most famously in Yuen Long district in July, where some 45 were injured. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/kim-jong-un-astride-a-pale-horse-urges-self-reliance-in-face-of-u-s-sanctions-11571209808?cx_testId=30&cx_testVariant=cx_1&cx_artPos=0#cxrecs_s

SEOUL—North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, riding a white horse, galloped to the top of the country’s tallest mountain and delivered a blunt message aimed at the U.S.: his people’s pain has “turned into their anger.”

Mr. Kim blamed his country’s hardships on “ceaseless sanctions” and pressure from U.S.-led forces hostile against the North, according to a Wednesday report in state media. The North Korean leader has been calling for the country to be more self reliant while sanctions batter the cash-strapped regime’s economy.

“We should neither want help from anyone nor lend an ear to any temptation,” Mr. Kim was quoted as saying. “We should choose the prosperity based on our own efforts.”

Mr. Kim’s comments suggest Pyongyang’s hardened stance on nuclear talks with Washington isn’t softening. Working-level negotiations broke off earlier this month in Sweden. The Kim regime has since threatened to end diplomacy unless Washington takes a substantial step toward Pyongyang’s position before the end of the year.

The State Department offered a different account of the Oct. 5 meeting held by Stephen Biegun, the U.S. special representative on North Korea, and the chief North Korean negotiator, Kim Myong Gil. The U.S. said it had brought “creative ideas” and hoped talks would pick back up within two weeks.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/10/an-afternoon-with-anne-marie-waters/

“The charge against the For Britain founder is that she is ‘a racist’. The evidence for this, according to those on the Left who seek to gag her, is a relentlessly articulated and witheringly explicit analysis of the harm Islam has done to every aspect of British life.”

I wanted the restaurant to be English in character but I discovered that in Spitalfield that meant spare and pricey and not oak and hearty so I settled on Dilchad, in Widegate Street. It was Bengali so there would be plenty of vegetarian (even if it, too, would be halal-certified) and when I went in at eleven o’clock to look over the wine list and book the table in the window corner, the young fellow in charge was polite and it looked safe and so I wandered back down Bishopsgate to St Botolph’s, the church where Keats had been baptised, the one the IRA had bombed in 1993, and sat in the pews and thought about what I would say to her and whether it would be awkward and, if it were, whether I could manage that kind of situation satisfactorily. She had, after all, been very generous in the way she had answered an unsolicited request from a retired Australian judge to meet her.

A wise woman buildeth up her own house.
—Proverbs 14:1

It was a Friday and Anne Marie had asked that we meet near Liverpool Street station. I had never been to that part of the East End but after arriving from Australia on the Wednesday it was already clear to me that since my last visit in 2011 London’s decline had been in free-fall and this part of it was no different. As I walked about that district and watched the sub-continental fellaheen shambling down the streets and through the monuments and relics of this most ancient ward of the capital, the expletive-laden chatter of young Threadneedle Street bankers managed to make itself heard over the din of the buses and the mini-cabs. I remembered that the City had been—it still was—the Remainers’ redoubt. I also remembered that London wasn’t all that Britain was.

But, still, this wasn’t good. Pubs were harder to find. I found out why. I talked to the owners who have kept theirs open and also to the odd brave patron. They had signs on the door and at the bar telling people not to proselytise their customers about drinking alcohol. The signs are not directed at the Salvation Army, let me tell you.

Back in Australia, I had thought that the chaos and indignity of Mrs May’s premiership might be enough for the British people to refuse to cop it sweet from their elites any longer. After such national humiliation, politics surely could not merely remain “downstream” from culture (as everybody says some deceased young media tycoon once said). Cultural imperatives would assert their former primacy in political life. They had to, I thought. If they didn’t, Britain would not survive. These things concern me deeply because I am British and because I love my country as much as I do the nation it founded on the other side of the earth.