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Freedom is being thrown away in the West while being fought for in Communist China.

The contrast could not be greater: while sheepish and servile crowds are well on the road to serfdom, happily voting in dictators in Victoria, in China, the crowds are bravely protesting tyranny, even at the cost of their own lives! One group prefers servitude, slavery and submission while the other demands freedom. I know which group I stand with.

While Victorian Premier Dan Andrews is not yet fully on par with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, the similarities are too obvious to ignore. Both have been utterly callous and dismissive of basic goods like freedom and human rights. Both have ruled over the harshest and longest lockdowns in the world. Both have a deep contempt for religion, especially Christianity. Both are power-hungry thugs who want to be dictators for life.

During the same weekend when Victorians decided they prefer tyranny over liberty, corruption over integrity, and dystopian nightmares over an efficient and productive society, large crowds in China were moving in the exact opposite direction.

The immediate cause of their anger and willingness to lose their lives while taking to the streets was idiotic Covid restriction that prevented a fire from being put out in an apartment building. Not since the Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989 have we seen such large-scale protests like this. And we all know of the brutal and bloody suppression of that freedom movement.

People Power

One media report on the recent protests begins like this:

Protests spread to cities and college campuses around China on Saturday night, reflecting rising public anger at the country’s draconian Covid controls, with some in a crowd in Shanghai directing their fury at the Communist Party and its top leader, Xi Jinping.

The wider demonstrations followed an outpouring of online anger and a street protest that erupted Friday in Urumqi, the regional capital of Xinjiang in western China, where at least 10 people died and nine others were injured in an apartment fire on Thursday. Many Chinese people say they suspect Covid restrictions prevented those victims from escaping their homes, a claim the government has rejected.

The tragedy has fanned broader calls to ease China’s harsh regimen of Covid tests, urban lockdowns and limits on movement nearly three years into the pandemic. For much of that time, many accepted such controls as a price for avoiding the widespread illness and deaths that the United States, India and other countries endured. But public patience has eroded this year as other nations, bolstered by vaccines, moved back to something like normal, even as infections continued. And after years of enforcing the strict “zero Covid” rules, many local officials appear worn down.

The widening discontent may test Mr. Xi’s efforts to hold those rules in place. “The demonstrations across the country have been like the spark that lit a prairie fire,” James Yu, a resident of Shanghai, said in an interview, adopting a Chinese phrase used to describe the spread of Mao Zedong’s Communist revolution. “I feel like everyone can make their voice loud and clear. It feels powerful.”

The biggest protest on Saturday appeared to be in Shanghai, where hundreds of people, mostly in their twenties, gathered at an intersection of Urumqi Road, named after the city in Xinjiang, to grieve the dead with candles and signs. Many there and elsewhere held sheets of blank white paper over their heads or faces in mournful defiance; white is a funeral color in China.

The main thing being chanted by the protesters is this: “We want freedom.” But sadly in Victoria, the main thing being chanted seems to be, “We want more tyranny. We want more statist control. We want more corruption. We want more unaccountable government. We want to bow down and worship Chairman Dan.”

Religious Persecution

I see two diametrically opposed movements happening here. And take another area: religious freedom. It of course has been smashed in Communist China, and it is being smashed in Victoria. Here, any parent or pastor or priest who simply discusses with or prays for someone unhappy with their sexual attraction can be thrown in prison for ten years!

I have long documented the misotheistic and Christophobic reign of Dictator Dan. He is doing his best to emulate his mentor in China as he stamps out faith and freedom. Indeed, all the grubby deals Dan is happy to do with the Chinese Communist Party tell us all we need to know about Andrews.

As to the religious situation in China, it is certainly bad news as well. One recent article said this about the current state of play:

Mug shots, taken from Chinese police files, show some of the millions of Uyghurs who have been held in at least 1200 Chinese concentration camps. Their crimes? They may have relatives in other countries, or they made the mistake of applying for a passport. They may have had more than three children. They might be seen as too religious, or they have been declared “untrustworthy.” This has been happening for years in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang, and the world has done almost nothing to stop it.

Tursunay Ziyawundun, a Uyghur, was imprisoned by the Chinese for visiting her family in nearby Kazakhstan. She told us, “Our cell was four square meters, and there were more than 20 people. And there was only one bucket to be used as a toilet. At night, they would take out some people, especially some young girls for interrogation. And we could hear their screaming. Some of the girls would bleed very badly. One woman had bite marks all over her body. And sometimes they would die because of the bleeding.”

Tursunay was gang-raped by prison guards and tortured with electric shocks to her genitals. Other prisoners face forced sterilization, slave labor, and brainwashing. Prisoners are regularly killed so their organs can be harvested.

“Everyone, literally every single prisoner, was subject to an organ examination. And after the examination, some people were put on a bus and taken somewhere else,” Tursunay said. Those outside the camps live in an Orwellian world of constant surveillance. Every home has a QR code at the entrance, so police know who is inside, and an app on required for phones records everything people do.

Chinese police use an app that tells them everything about the person they are questioning, from their blood type to how much electricity they use. The app asks the officer if the person’s reaction to being questioned was “normal” or “abnormal,” and if the person “requires further investigation.”

The article continues:

China is using every tool at its disposal in its war on faith. All faiths. Anything that might compete with the communist state. Beijing is also imprisoning huge numbers of Falun Gong members, a Buddhist sect, and house church Christians.

Former President Trump’s Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, Sam Brownback said, “Christians are arrested. Pastors are put in jail. Whole congregations are forced to go underground. The Uyghurs, even if you’re not in the concentration camp, you’ve got a camera for every other person. You’ve got a police station or kind of way station every 50 yards in the major cities. People are tracked constantly. They’ve taken genetic sampling of everybody. They’ve got facial recognition systems, and if you are an observant Muslim, you’re targeted, and your family is targeted as well.”

While things may not be that bad in Victoria — yet — they could easily head that way. Dan’s war on Christianity knows no limits, and one simply has to ask about his 580-million-dollar quarantine facility which he recently had built, but was closed eight months after it opened. This will likely come in real handy if any uppity, freedom-loving Victorians continue to resist his reign of terror. Just sayin’.

And we can speak about the hideous social credit system in China which keeps tabs on everyone, rewarding the compliant while punishing the dissidents. Andrews of course is fully in favour of such things, as are so many other leaders in the West right now. A digital identity system, a cashless society, and similar agenda items are all part of the Great Reset’s plans for your life and mine.

Of course, many of us have been sounding the alarm about all this for years now. We have not just warned about ugly and diabolical tyrannies that we find in places like Communist China, but we have warned about how the West is quickly following suit. And leading the way is Victoria.

As stated, can there be any greater contrast? Victorians with a clear case of Stockholm Syndrome and Battered Woman Syndrome are pleased as punch to vote back in their thuggish leader, while liberty-loving Chinese protesters are facing certain arrest, imprisonment, torture and death to get rid of theirs as they stand up for freedom.

Will it soon be the case that freedom-loving Victorians will start moving to China in the near future? Stranger things have happened.

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Originally published at CultureWatch.