RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/will-peru-get-on-the-marxist-path-11619986216?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Peruvians will vote in a runoff presidential election on June 6, and if the polls are correct, Marxist candidate Pedro Castillo will win. An upset by his rival, center-right candidate Keiko Fujimori, is not impossible, but she is definitely the underdog.

Ms. Fujimori trails Mr. Castillo by 10 percentage points in a Datum poll released Thursday night. Importantly, some 22% of those surveyed say they are either undecided or will cast a blank vote because they don’t support either candidate. Voting is mandatory in Peru.

Until Saturday Ms. Fujimori had been confined to campaigning in Lima because she is the subject of a criminal investigation. That prohibition on travel has been lifted and she now has six weeks—an eternity in Peruvian politics—to make up for lost time.

Mr. Castillo’s thinking is frighteningly similar to that of the late Hugo Chávez, who ruled Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013. Chavismo strangled Venezuela’s democratic institutions, sent human capital fleeing, destroyed the economy, and generated widespread poverty. The military dictatorship is now headed by Nicolás Maduro with important intelligence backing from Havana.

Venezuela was once one of the most advanced countries in the region. Today Venezuelans live primitively, often without running water, electricity or basic medical supplies.

https://www.westernjournal.com/french-generals-top-officers-warn-political-elites-military-intervention-divisive-critical-race-theory-breaks-society/

“The generals’ letter closed with the words of the late Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier, famous in his own time for his pastoral resistance to the German occupation of Belgium during WWI. “When prudence is everywhere, courage is nowhere.” Indeed, it is time for the West to regain its courage.”

A massive group of former and current French military personnel signed an open letter this week warning of the imminent danger posed by so-called anti-racist ideology, and urging French President Emmanuel Macron to work quickly to prevent a civil war.

The letter, published in French magazine Valeurs Actuelles, was signed by 20 former French generals, 100 officers and over 1,000 other military personnel.

It accused the French government of kowtowing to destructive ideologies such as anti-racism and Islamism, which it said were being leveraged for the purposes of sowing unrest in French communities and risking a descent into full-blown civil war.

The signatories expressed grave concern with the government’s push to deconstruct and decolonize its own history in an attempt to placate a growing Islamism that has wracked the nation with violence and argued that radical Islam is being used to subject neighborhoods to dogmatic rules that go against the French Constitution, creating an unconstitutional parallel Islamic state.

“Perils are mounting, violence is increasing day by day,” the letter warned. “Who would have predicted ten years ago that a teacher would one day be beheaded when he left school?”

The sentence was a reference to the murder and beheading of Samuel Paty, a middle school teacher, in a Parisian suburb last year.

Paty had been teaching a course on free speech and showed his class the cartoon of Muhammad that Islamic terrorists claimed justified the Charlie Hebdo shooting. He was soon after ambushed, murdered and decapitated by a Muslim refugee. Seven more people were charged with facilitating the murder, including a local imam, a parent of one of his students and two students who attended the school.

Notably, the letter explicitly linked the growing threat of an Islamic insurgency in France with the everyday terror of violent socialist and anti-racist riots that have frequently piggybacked off of the chaos of the Yellow Vest protest movement.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17301/erdogan-reform-collapse

“We don’t see ourselves elsewhere but in Europe,” Erdoğan said on November 21. “We envisage building our future together with Europe.”

According to Turkish news site Gazete Duvar, a total of 128,872 people have been indicted in the past six years for insulting Erdoğan. Of those, 27,824 had to stand trial and 9,556 were convicted.

Apparently, Erdoğan wants a democratic system without opposition.

But who cares about the Constitution in a country where the governing bloc is proposing to close down even the Constitutional Court, in addition to banning opposition parties? All these autocratic measures occurred in the less than half-year since Erdoğan pledged democratic reforms.

A few years ago, then Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu had vehemently refuted claims that Turkey was a second-class democracy. He was right. Turkey has since remained a third-class democracy.

His critics often joke that when President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pledges democratic reforms, one should run away immediately. His latest charm offensive in November, aimed at repairing Turkey’s badly-strained ties with the West and Western institutions, has proven that the joke still holds value.

“We don’t see ourselves elsewhere but in Europe,” Erdoğan said on November 21. “We envisage building our future together with Europe.” Two days later, Defense Minister Hulusi Akar described NATO as the “cornerstone of our defense and security policy” and said that Turkey was looking forward to cooperating with the incoming administration under Joe Biden in the United States. Erdoğan also promised a bold package of democratic reforms.

Less than five months later, Italy’s Prime Minister Mario Draghi had to call Erdoğan a “dictator.” That was not because an experienced European politician wanted to insult a Muslim head of state.

According to Turkish news site Gazete Duvar, a total of 128,872 people have been indicted in the past six years for insulting Erdoğan. Of those, 27,824 had to stand trial and 9,556 were convicted. By comparison, only 11 Turks had been convicted for insulting Ahmet Necdet Sezer, president between 2000 and 2007.

After Erdoğan’s latest reform pledge, on March 21, Turkish authorities arrested a pro-Kurdish opposition MP who had refused to leave parliament for several days after his seat was revoked. Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu “was brought out by force while he was in pyjamas and slippers” by “nearly 100 police officers,” the leftist Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) said in a statement.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/macrons-folly-bruce-bawer/

Last October I reported here that French president Emmanuel Macron had just “delivered what, on the face of it, seemed to be a remarkable speech on Islam.” Having previously been wishy-washy on the topic, he now promised a new program “intended to defend French laïcité, or official secularism, from ‘Islamist separatism,’” which he explicitly characterized as an existential threat to the Republic. Acknowledging that “one reason why ‘Islamist separatism’ had been allowed to fester was the ‘cowardice’ of French authorities,” Macron proclaimed that a new day had dawned.

In public services, in cultural and athletic associations, in schools and universities, and in other sectors of society, Islamic indoctrination would be officially, firmly, and comprehensively resisted, and Islam itself modernized into an “Islam of the Enlightenment.” My comment at the time was that a great deal of Macron’s scheme, on close examination, “starts to look not like a program for the secularizing of Islam but, rather, like a blueprint for propping up public laïcité while actively promoting private Islamic observance – a blueprint born, one imagines, of pie-in-the-sky hopes that, when the Muslims take over, they won’t replace the Napoleonic Code with sharia law.” In any event, given the decades of French government inaction on the Islam issue, it was hard to take Macron’s vows any more seriously than a boeuf bourguignon prepared with a Beaujolais. 

Two weeks after Macron’s speech, a Muslim named Abdoullakh Abouyezidovitch Anzorov beheaded a history teacher named Samuel Paty, who’d shown his students some cartoons of Muhammed as part of a lesson on freedom of expression. The French took to the streets in outrage (which soon subsided). The government expelled a couple of hundred immigrants who’d been identified as potential terrorists (leaving heaven knows how many hundreds of thousands of others). A mosque was closed (and has since been reopened). Macron praised Paty while also making the usual nice, empty noises about Islam, but admitted that he hadn’t done enough about the problem so far and again promised action. Again I was dubious. “What guarantee is there,” I wrote, “that Macron will keep his eye on the ball after the furor over Paty’s murder dies down – let alone that he will take action that is sweeping enough to make a real difference in this long-term civilizational war?”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/no-escape-from-hong-kong-11619650575?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Mark another step in Hong Kong’s descent: On Wednesday the Legislative Council made it easier for the government to block Hong Kongers from leaving.

The new legislation gives authorities the power to prevent Hong Kong residents and foreigners from boarding any plane or vessel docked in the city. All that’s required to block a departure is an administrative order, not a court order. The text suggests broad extraterritorial reach. Watch if the implementing rules let authorities demand that a foreign plane or boat that has departed Hong Kong must return or make a detour so an arrest can be made.

The law means that millions of Hong Kongers who participated in the pro-democracy protests have reason to fear they’ll be trapped. The language is also ambiguous enough to worry foreigners working in the city. All of this expands the ambit of exit control beyond last year’s national-security law that lets authorities block the departure of anyone charged with secession, subversion, terrorism or “collusion” with vaguely defined foreign forces.

Beijing is installing the door locks now to avoid the embarrassment of a Hong Kong exodus. After the Communist Party violated the Sino-British Joint Declaration with its abridgement of autonomy, the United Kingdom offered a path to citizenship for Hong Kongers who hold British National (Overseas), or BN(O), passports, as well as their family members.

The British government said on March 19 that it had received some 27,000 applications from Hong Kongers seeking to resettle in the U.K., and the Home Office anticipates “between 123,000 and 153,700 BN(O) status holders and their dependents coming in the first year and between 258,000 and 322,400 over five years.” Bloomberg estimated this month that emigrating Hong Kongers may sell as much as $19.3 billion in property this year.

This brain drain is a tragedy for Hong Kong. But it’s no surprise that the same people who were willing to fight for their freedom in 2019 are now willing to flee for it as Communist control tightens. The U.S. should follow Britain’s lead and welcome Hong Kong’s refugees.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17283/china-antarctica

Rare earth materials are necessary components in the building of such various equipment as combat aircraft, weapons systems, wind turbines and electric vehicles, among other things. They are available in different geographic locations, but are difficult to process. Last year, China produced 90% of the world’s rare earth materials.

“In 1984, during China’s first Antarctic expedition, armed PLA Navy (PLAN) personnel helped set up China’s first Antarctic station—a fact that was not properly acknowledged in China’s report to the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research at the time… In recent years, PLA personnel have repeatedly participated in China’s Antarctic program without their presence being noted in China’s annual report under the Antarctic Treaty….” — Anne Marie Brady, report for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 2017.

China is reportedly deceiving international audiences about its intentions in Antarctica. “China adopts one message on Antarctic issues for foreign audiences and another for domestic audiences”. — Anne Marie Brady, report for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 2017.

“In 30 years, the Antarctic Treaty becomes modifiable, and the fate of a continent could hang in the balance.” — Professor Klaus Dodds, Royal Holloway University of London, July 12, 2018.

Both Russia and China are fighting to have prohibitions on resource extraction in the Antarctic relaxed. “A significant number of Chinese experts believe, contrary to international law, that the Madrid Protocol expires in 2048, along with the accompanying ban on mining in the Antarctic”. — Alexander B. Gray, National Interest, March 20, 2021.

It is probably not too far-fetched to assume that what lies behind the CCP’s concern for “environmental protection in Antarctica” will turn out to be desire for environmental exploitation.

Hardly a spot remains on the planet — and off — that China does not consider up for grabs, and that includes the North and South poles.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17316/china-totalitarian-controls

In the Haidilao Hot Pot restaurant in… Vancouver, more than 60 surveillance cameras watch 30 tables and send feeds to China. The cameras, manager Ryan Pan explains, are there to “people track” and are “part of the social credit system in China.”

In 2014, China’s State Council issued guidelines for the establishment of a national “social credit system” by 2020, with the feeds from about 626 million surveillance cameras and smartphone scanners and with data from a multitude of sources … For example, criticizing Chinese ruler Xi Jinping would result in the lowering of an individual’s score. There are consequences for low-scored individuals.

Why did Beijing select Ryan Pan’s restaurant for such intensive collection of information? For starters, it is near to the home rented by Huawei Technologies for staff attending to Meng Wanzhou, the firm’s chief financial officer. Meng is in the middle of a multi-year struggle to avoid extradition to the U.S. for alleged bank fraud relating to sanctions evasion, and she is allowed to stay in one of her homes. Beijing, therefore, wants to know what people around her are saying and doing.

In addition to posing a crucial national security risk, the secretive transmission of video to China is a violation of British Columbia law, specifically, the province’s Personal Information Protection Act.

Beijing will, at some point, be able to assign a social credit score to just about everyone on the planet…. it is just a matter of time before they succeed.

China’s Communist Party wants to know everything that happens everywhere on the planet. So far, the Western democracies do not seem to be putting up much of a fight.

China is surreptitiously collecting, for use in its domestic social credit system, video from a popular eatery in Canada.

In the Haidilao Hot Pot restaurant in the Kitsilano district of Vancouver, more than 60 surveillance cameras watch 30 tables and send feeds to China. The cameras, manager Ryan Pan explained to Scott McGregor and Ina Mitchell, are there to “people track” and are “part of the social credit system in China.”

This restaurant is corporate-owned, one of two Haidilao locations in that port city in British Columbia. There are more than 935 of the chain’s restaurants worldwide with over 36 million VIP members. The business started in China’s Sichuan province.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17315/biden-armenian-genocide

US President Joe Biden, to his credit, has become the first sitting president formally to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide since it occurred more than century ago.

More recently, there appears underway an attempted genocide by the Communist Chinese of the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. More than a million are being held in 1,300 concentration camps. Although the Chinese State insists on calling them “re-education camps,” reports are that they come complete with forced labor, torture, surveillance, forced sterilization and rape.

Companies supporting the supply chains of these crimes against humanity apparently include “at least 82 well-known global brands in the technology, clothing and automotive sectors, including Apple, BMW, Gap, Huawei, Nike, Samsung, Sony and Volkswagen.”

Adding to that, Communist China’s deliberate deception about the human-to-human transmissibility of the Wuhan virus has so far killed more than 3,000,000 people on the planet, it would seem imperative to move the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics to a country that really does espouse the ideals that the Olympic committee professes: ” …the educational value of good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.” Yes, it is short notice, but doubtless there are many deserving countries that would be happy to scramble. At the very least, the world should not “reward” Communist China by enriching it to commit further aggression.

What several international organizations, however, have referred to as a genocide of Christians at the hands of Muslims is currently taking place in Nigeria — as well as in Mozambique, South Sudan, and other sub-Saharan nations — and in dire need of being acknowledged so that efforts at rectifying the situation can begin.

As commendable as it is for Biden to have recognized the Armenian Genocide, turning his attention to those who are currently experiencing hate and genocide would be far more practical — it would save lives — than acknowledging history.

To his credit, U.S. President Joe Biden has become the first sitting president formally to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide since it occurred more than century ago. On Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, April 24, 2021, the American president issued a statement opening with the following words:

“Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring. Beginning on April 24, 1915, with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople by Ottoman authorities, one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17308/beijing-winter-olympics-boycott

“We’re dealing with a government of intolerance, dictatorial, brooks no dissent, arrests people at a drop of a hat. I think there’s a very strong case to be made that China should not be rewarded for its astonishingly bad behavior.” — British MP Sir Ian Duncan Smith, Co-chair, Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China.

“We therefore call on governments to boycott the Beijing 2022 Games — anything less will be seen as an endorsement of the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian rule and blatant disregard for civil and human rights.” — A coalition of more than 180 human rights groups, in a letter to the International Olympic Committee.

“The IOC’s failure to publicly confront Beijing’s serious human rights violations makes a mockery of its own commitments and claims that the Olympics are a ‘force for good.'” — Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch.

“We must boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in China. It would be a terrible loss for our athletes, but that must be weighed against the genocide occurring in China and the prospect that empowering China will lead to even greater horrors down the road.” — Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley.

“To be clear, I do not support a boycott. Boycotting these games will only hurt athletes who have spent their lives training to represent their country on the international stage. Instead, it should be the position of all democratic nations that the IOC can and should move the 2022 Games to a nation that respects human rights.” — U.S. Senator Rick Scott, in a letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

“This is not about ‘opposing views’ between countries. There is no room for a middle ground. Either you make yourself an accomplice by closing your eyes, or you stand up for the values ​​that are close to your heart — such as freedom and democracy.” — Glacier Kwong, a human rights activist from Hong Kong who is currently residing in Germany.

A growing number of Western lawmakers and human rights groups are calling for a boycott of the next Winter Olympics, set to take place in Beijing in February 2022.

The calls for a boycott have come in response to burgeoning evidence of human rights abuses against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, a remote autonomous region in northwestern China. Human rights experts say that at least one million Muslims are being detained in hundreds of internment camps, where they are subject to torture, mass rapes, forced labor and sterilizations.