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Red China Turns U.S.

Human Rights
Molehills Into Mountains

by

Dr. Frederick Meekins


Fellow Of Worldview Studies
Issachar Institute For The Study Of Apologetics & Policy

The United States and China discussed human rights at a


round of high-level talks. One might be surprised that the
meeting did not so much focus on the egregious atrocities
that have gone on under this Communist tyranny from the
time of its founding to this very day. Rather, Obama
administration officials allowed America to be berated on
issues such as homelessness and the new Arizona
immigration law.

Before America as a nation takes this criticism seriously,


perhaps we should consider what the law entails and how
this compares with what goes on in Red China.

The Arizona law will permit police to ascertain an


individual's identity and thus legality after initial contact.
Essentially, this isn’t anything that isn’t already authorized
by law and is perhaps an even better guarantor of individual
liberty and dignity than what is already permitted.

In a number of decisions, the Supreme Court ruled that


police could compel an individual to identify themselves
even when it had not been established that the law had even
been violated or that there was probable cause indicating
such. Interestingly, there were no riotous mobs in the streets
when it was thought these kinds of identity checks were only
going to be aimed at actual Americans.

Even if scores of those with no legal standing in the United


States are removed from the streets of Arizona as a result of
the new law, they will still fair considerably better than those
taken into custody in dictatorships. In Iran, several
American coed tourists straying over the Islamic Republic’s
border with Iraq were sentenced to lengthy prison terms.

And unlike illegals here, those there are not fawned over
with lavish government handouts with their bureaucratic
benefactors hoping the outsiders will recast the entire society
in a foreign image.

It could be properly argued that the American students


deserved some kind of punishment for violating another
country’s sovereign borders. What likely cannot be argued
against is that the accommodations they languished in made
Camp Gitmo look like a swanky New York City hotel.
Guards there are not going out of their way to provide
American delicacies or to treat our holy books and founding
documents with a nauseating degree of deference.

In China, one house church pastor sentenced to prison was


allowed to languish and suffer without access to his diabetic
medicine. And it could be argued that he can be considered
one of the lucky ones. It has been claimed that organs are
regularly harvested from dissident Tibetans and Christians.

If Red China had the illegal alien problem plaguing the


United States, do you honestly believe authorities there
would do little than look over the papers of these
transnational vagrants, whisper sweet nothings in their ears,
and release them on their recognizance which many have
very little of to begin with given their connections to the drug
trade, human smuggling, and assorted gangs. And given the
propensity of a certain atrocity to occur throughout Chinese
history (be it during the Great Cultural Revolution or in
rumors a few years back regarding what was being done to
fetuses), if a wife in China told her husband that they would
be having a little Mexican later that evening that wouldn't
mean he should expect to have a taco or burrito for dinner.

Many infringements upon human rights stem from an


improper understanding of the relationship between social
institutions such as government and the individual. In
America, the extremes of these have been minimized in part
due to the assumption that the individual possesses worth of
his own created in the image of God. The individual is not
owned by the state.

As an officially atheistic socialist country, the Chinese


Communist Party and state see themselves as the highest
authority with these determining that it is not so much the
individual that counts but rather the group as a whole. After
all, if we are simply nothing more than animated primordial
ooze as the Darwinian insists and upon which Marxist-
Leninism rests, it is kind of hard to get worked up over one
person when there are over a billion more walking around
easily capable of taking the place of a defective cog in the
machine of state.

Since in the Communist system you are less an individual,


the more the system provides of those things deemed to be
necessities by the overseers (under whom fewer things end
up being defined as necessities than in a free market
economy) in such command societies such commodities
extended only so that the goals mapped out for you by the
COMMUNITY might be achieved. In a constitutional
republican system, it is believed that the individual is best
suited to determine for themselves which needs and desires
should take priority for oneself and one's family. Granted,
the system is not perfect, but it is far preferable and more in
line with what God intended for humanity.

Thus, that is no doubt why China would rank homelessness


as a human rights violation while not batting an eye at
putting a bullet in the back of the head of a House Church
pastor so that his kidneys might remain undamaged for organ
harvesting. In America, those who love liberty must first
inquire as to why the individual is homeless before
formulating an appropriate policy response.

Though it is not politically correct to mention it these days


and even if they represent only a fraction of those without a
domicile, frankly there are those that simply refuse to do that
which is necessary to maintain a residence or they engage in
behaviors that cause their homes to be lost. Of those that
went into vapors when Glenn Beck critiqued the subject, tell
me where is the social justice to take from those working
and scrimping in order to hoe their own path to give it to
those living irresponsibly and demanding a standard of living
far above a subsistence level with a few basic comforts that
they are not willing to exert the labor necessary to acquire?

One might feel sorry for the children of such deadbeats and
somehow provide enough for the children to get by without
hardly a single bread crumb going to such pathetic excuses
for parents. It is preferable that such outreach come from
the private sector free to point out the deficiencies of
individual character and the blunt steps necessary to correct
the situation. Often in these times where we must constantly
walk around on eggshells for fear of offending some self-
enlightened leftist do-gooder with a law degree or a bullhorn
and definitely too much time on their hands, government is
unable to articulate those steps necessary for complete
restoration.

And while we are at it, perhaps something needs to be said


about and to these women that fall for scumbag men. If you
find the boozing and carousing attractive when you are
young only to have it morph into not knowing how you are
going to feed the five kids because he's blowing the milk
money on beer and backhanded you across the face because
you dared ask where he was the night before, other than for
tossing his rear in jail, don't expect much pity and especially
don't expect some behaved guy you wouldn't give the time of
day to 15 years ago to take you in as if he has some
obligation to provide for another man's progeny.

One of contemporary liberalism's most glaring intellectual


deficiencies is that it assumes that the remainder of the
world, when you come down to it, lives no differently than
the people of the United States. Before we pull out the
sackcloth and ashes to belittle ourselves embarrassingly on
the world stage, let’s at least make sure we don’t waste the
effort on autocrats, thieves, cutthroats, and homicidal mass
murderers.

by Frederick Meekins

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