RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/in-iran-a-new-generation-is-prepared-to-fight-the-mullahs/

The uproar, the girls and women ripping off and setting fire to their hijabs, the rage in the streets of 90 Iranian cities, show no signs of abating. The young people now leading these protests are different from the previous generation; they have lost that feeling of fear. They know that they have nothing more to lose by fighting against the only government they have ever known — the oppressive regime run by religious fanatics in Tehran. A report on the latest protests can be found here: “A barrier of fear has been broken in Iran. The regime may be at a point of no return,” by Jomana Karadsheh and Tamara Qiblawi, CNN, October 5, 2022:

A woman dressed in black raises a framed portrait of her son, Siavash Mahmoudi, in the air as she paces the sidewalk in Iran’s capital, Tehran. “I am not scared of anyone. They told me to be silent. I will not be,” the woman seen in a viral social media video yells, her voice fraught with emotion.

“I will carry my son’s picture everywhere. They killed him.”

Mahmoudi’s mother is among many Iranians who claim the regime tried to silence them as they mourned loved ones slain in ongoing nationwide demonstrations.

But Iran’s protesters, and their supporters, are defiant. For weeks [and now in its fourth week], a nationwide protest movement has relentlessly gathered momentum and appears to have blunted the government’s decades-old intimidation tactics. Slogans against the clerical leadership echo throughout the city. Videos of schoolgirls waving their headscarves in the air as they sing protest songs in classrooms have gone viral, as have images of protesters fighting back against members of the formidable paramilitary group Basij.

These are scenes previously believed to be unthinkable in Iran, where the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei rules with an iron fist. But experts say that these protests transcend Iran’s many social and ethnic divisions, breaking a decades-old barrier of fear and posing an unprecedented threat to the regime.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-thoughts-of-chairman-xi-nationalism-aggression-china-ccp-communist-power-mao-war-taiwan-south-korea-11665955319?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The most important election in the world this year is no election at all. It’s a coronation. When China’s Communist Party anoints President Xi Jinping for a third five-year term this week, it will confirm China’s combination of aggressive nationalism and Communist ideology that is the single biggest threat to world freedom. It all but guarantees an era of confrontation between China and the U.S.

We say this with regret, and not only because war with China would be a catastrophe. When China embarked on its reform project under Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s, there was reason to hope that the Middle Kingdom might eventually leave behind its murderous Communist past. For a time, into the 2000s, that still seemed possible as reforms continued and Chinese living standards increased.

The bet, which was worth taking for the sake of a better world, was that China would follow the path of other East Asian nations that evolved into democracies as the middle-class grew. But China’s Communist Party has never relinquished its grip on power as the authoritarians of Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia and the Philippines did.

In his book “The Hundred-Year Marathon,” Michael Pillsbury makes a powerful case that Chinese war hawks have been biding their time all along until China was strong enough to challenge U.S. power. But there were enough differences in elite opinion in China to think that even the Party wasn’t monolithic in its views. Mr. Xi’s consolidation of power has ended that debate, as he has become the most powerful and committed Communist leader since Mao Zedong.

In a decade Mr. Xi has crushed all dissent, imposed a vast censorship regime, and created an intrusive surveillance regime beyond anything the East German Stasi imagined. He has erased the autonomy for 50 years that China had promised Hong Kong and made Xinjiang province a prison camp for the Uyghurs.