Peking Propaganda

No.94: February 11, 2022

Dear Friends,

I’m vaguely aware that the 2022 Winter Olympics are ongoing in Beijing—or, maybe I should say Peking. Did you know that it was Peking until…1979, and then it changed because the Commies just commanded us to change it? Me neither.

Hang on a sec.

Okay, I’m back. I’ve now consulted management and the official style guide of The Square Inch now says it's “Peking.”

I haven’t watched a single second of the Olympics, but I don’t begrudge anyone who wants to cheer on our athletes—they should be supported. But I’m rather down on China at the moment, and have little interest in lending my eyeballs to their propaganda campaign. They know how to put on a glitzy charade for the cameras, that’s for sure. But from behind the scenes are leaks of nightmare stories from athletes about their living conditions and the apparently pathetic and horrible food supplied at the Olympic Village.

And outside the Olympic Village? Up to a million Chinese Uyghyrs are in concentration camps, and I bet they’d crawl over broken glass to eat the food in the Olympic Village. And I’d also like to remind you it isn’t just the Uyghyrs and concentration camps. Pastor Wang Yi of Early Rain Covenant Church is still in prison, after a brutal crackdown on his church. According to Chinese authorities, Pastor Wang’s preaching that Jesus Christ is King of kings and Lord of lords, and that all earthly powers—including the Chinese Communist Party—are accountable to him, is “inciting subversion to state power.”

They are right about that. Preaching Christos Kurios (Christ is Lord) is subversive of all tyrannical regimes. They ought to have repented, but instead they are piling up their iniquities to heaven. And, as atheists, they think nothing of adding a little genocide to the mix. They are mistaken.

So that’s why I’m rather down on China. More and more I’m finding myself very choosy about things I order on Amazon. I am under no illusions that completely boycotting China is workable (and I don’t think sin is a substance passed along a supply chain and that we’re morally culpable for buying an iPhone that might’ve involved child labor), but if I’ve got a choice between a less expensive something manufactured in China and a more expensive thing manufactured elsewhere, my impulse has always been to click on the cheaper option. No longer. It’s one little thing I can personally do to stick it to the regime.

This is the same regime, mind you, that engaged in the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, which I remember well, but apparently if you ask a Chinese national they’ll ask, “what massacre?” That’s because if you are in China and click that link I just posted, you won’t find that article. If you Google “Tianenmen Square Massacre” you will find nothing but articles about Tiananmen Square, the actual place in Peking (sorry! Official Style Guide), and nothing about a massacre that took place when the army killed an unknown number (but probably thousands) of Chinese students. And that brings me to an institution I’m down on even more than China:

Google. They agree to throttle and censor their search engine for Chinese users, actually collaborating with Big Brother. This is a company whose official employee code of conduct once included, “Don’t be evil.” And while I’m at it, I’m down on Facebook, which does similar funny business. And I’m down on the NBA, an institution so sycophantic to the thugs in Peking that they once escorted my friend Eric Teetsel from a basketball game because he held a sign that said, “Google ‘Uyghyers.’” True story. The NBA is an institution so addicted to Chinese cash they’ll gladly cover up atrocities for the bosses.

And then there’s the obsequious coverage of China from our news outlets. There are exceptions, thankfully, but from what I hear NBC is being very, very careful not to say anything critical of their Chinese hosts.

And then there’s the spectacle of the Speaker of the United States of America’s House of Representatives, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), telling American athletes to keep their mouths shut and not say anything that might irritate the Chinese Communist Party. This is for their own safety, of course. Wouldn’t want to get carried out of the Olympic Village in the middle of the night to some dark hole in the ground somewhere.

You know what I miss? I miss moral clarity. I miss the time when my safety as an American citizen was guaranteed and backed by the full force of the United States of America, and that a communist regime wouldn’t dream of touching an American athlete or American citizen of any kind (or at least they’d think long and hard). Those were the days. But those were also the days, not coincidentally, when the American President called a certain communist country an “evil empire,” or a trio of nations an “axis of evil.” Now the U.S. government tells us to be nice to the tyrants and don’t upset them. And if you do, you’re pretty much on your own because your citizenship is meaningless. I mean, they’ve been pretty clear that they’ll even leave you in the hands of the Taliban.

Let’s bring back moral clarity. The Chinese regime is engaged in genocide, tyranny, oppression, control, and censorship. It is totalitarian, knowing no distinction between public and private, no limits on state jurisdiction and power. It is a tyranny that is no friend of liberty. We’re not friends, and we need to say so. More importantly, we need to believe so. And then we need to act like it is so. Enough of this servile sycophancy.

You can probably tell I’m a little fired up about this. That’s because this week I read Yeonmi Park’s 2016 memoir, In Order To Live. It isn’t often you read the memoirs of a 21-year-old woman, I admit. But then, it isn’t often a 21-year-old woman like Yeonmi Park lives long enough to tell the tale of those 21 years.

She was born and raised in North Korea under the rule of the Kims. You could not make up the tale she tells of what life is really like in the Hermit Kingdom. Communism is evil and the Kims are evil—not that she or her mother could ever even form that thought in their heads, so deeply brainwashed were they. But they did know they were going to die. So they escaped to China, and… well, no spoilers. It is a brutal, awful story of degradation. They do end up making it to South Korea and real freedom, but I’ll let you follow the various twists and turns.

I have read a lot of these kinds of books, of survivors and defectors and escapees, but they’ve always been tales of the (for me) distant past: the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, East Berlin, and so forth. This one hit me much, much harder.

In the winter of 2002 I was huddled in my warm row house in Philadelphia. We’d just welcomed our first daughter into the world. I was enjoying seminary studies and working as a security guard. At the same time, on the other side of the world, Yeonmi was an eight-year-old living with her sister in a house with no electricity or running water. Their mom left them to go to Pyongyang to try to bribe someone to get her husband out of jail—he’d been arrested for smuggling. Left with a small bag of rice, an eight and ten-year-old fended for themselves in the freezing dark. Mom didn’t return for a month.

There’s something sobering about reading the dates on these stories and reflecting on what you were doing at the time. I was no doubt hoisting a pint in an Aberdeen pub at the same time Yeonmi and her mom scrambled in the middle of the night down a riverbank, terrified, to reach the Chinese shore. And what happened after that was arguably worse than living in North Korea.

This is really happening. These aren’t old stories. They are contemporary accounts. Uyghyrs really are in concentrations camps. North Koreans really are regularly murdered by their Dear Leader for slight infractions upon his royal dignity.

I know, I know. But Joe Rogan had a guest who said something wrong about COVID. We’ve definitely got more important things to worry about.

Miscellany

• You can order Yeonmi Park’s book here.

• I had a great time on the Full Proof Theology podcast with Chase Davis, pastor of the Well Church in Boulder, Colorado. We talked for over an hour about Herman Bavinck, public theology, and lots of other rabbit trails. You can watch it here:

• I suspect this might be my last mention of COVID-19. The pandemic is now endemic; it is just taking our politicians and administrators a long time to come to terms with the fact that most of their leverage has vanished. Suddenly, Democrat governors are realizing that if they keep insisting on masking kids, they’re going to get thrown out of their offices. (This also explains The Atlantic—the heretofore terrified folks at The Atlantic!—publishing an article entitled, “Open Everything.”) And, really, how long can the American people watch things like playoff football games or the Super Bowl, see with their own eyes 70,000 people shouting and screaming, shoulder-to-shoulder, not a mask to be seen, and then not feel a tad irritated at needing to wear a mask from the front door of the restaurant to the table?

  It is time to just revolt. I recently walked through three airports not wearing my mask, daring someone to scold me (they didn’t; but, sure, come get me now, Feds). And I was kind of dismayed that I was practically the only one. I just wasn’t going to wear it as long I was walking past food courts with people eating, drinking, laughing, coughing, sneezing, and so forth. I see no reason whatsoever to keep up this charade. If you want to double-mask and put plexiglass in front of your face for some reason, knock yourself out. But I see no reason anyone else should be forced to do it with you.

  Anyway, let’s take a closer look at this chart:

It seems to me there are a few conclusions to be drawn, and they are fairly irrefutable:

1. That bold blue line is the “hazard rate” for people who get COVID for the first time without vaccination. That’s a measure of the likelihood you’ll need hospitalization or medical intervention. Pretty clear that if you’re unvaccinated and you get COVID for the first time, you’re at a substantially higher risk. The good news is that there are less and less of these people around—that’s good news depending on how you look at it. There’s less because most people survived their encounter with COVID; but we shouldn’t forget that a great many people didn’t. (That’s why I find many Facebook comments and memes mocking the virus and vaccines highly distasteful.)

2. If you’re vaccinated and you get COVID for the first time, your risk goes way down—that’s the dotted blue line. So, yeah, the vaccinations work to mitigate hospitalizations.

3. Now, look at that flat line on the bottom. No, look again: there are two flat lines on the bottom. They are, respectively, people who are unvaccinated but have already had COVID, and vaccinated people who have already had COVID. The chart illustrates that natural immunity from having contracted and overcome COVID has the exact same hazard rate as someone who gets a vaccine after having had the virus. So the idea that we would mandate vaccines for people who have had the virus is utterly indefensible. That seems like something pretty close to what we call a “fact.”

4. But there’s more. Compare the light blue dotted line at the very bottom with the dark blue dotted line above it. Conclusion? Natural immunity is better than the vaccine. Note: I’m not suggesting you forego the vaccine because of this fact—that would put you in bold blue line territory (higher risk). I am suggesting that if you’ve had COVID, there’s pretty much zero reason for you to get the vaccine. That’s what this CDC chart looks like to me, and I can’t square it with the political rhetoric being pushed about vaccine mandates.

   It’s over. Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!