By DEXTER DUGGAN
In a world that has gone from bulky computers to miniaturized devices with far more capabilities in three decades, how little has changed in some other ways that could have improved freedom and communication.
In 1989, the totalitarian Chinese Communist government crushed young pro-democracy demonstrators right in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square with a bloodletting. Thirty years later, in 2019, continued economic reforms have made China a different place, but still under a powerful dictatorship.
Young pro-democracy protesters went so far as to shut down Hong Kong’s busy international airport temporarily in August 2019, and once again the Communist-led military awaited orders for action on a wider front.
Hong Kong is less under Beijing’s direct control than the Chinese mainland, but 2019’s demonstrations were sparked in part by a bill to allow China to extradite Hong Kongers.
The Federalist commentary site in the U.S. posted an article by John Daniel Davidson on August 14 noting remarks that the Hong Kong unrest “hearkens back (to) America’s rebellion against Great Britain, when in the Declaration of Independence the Founders decried the king and Parliament ‘for transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses’.”
The website of The Week magazine on August 13 was among sites posting videos of the Asian demonstrators waving the flag of the United States and singing its national anthem.
They weren’t asking for or demanding permission to emigrate massively to the U.S., but were showing respect for the Stars-and-Stripes ideals that they want to install to improve their native land and their lives.
Back in 1989 the Beijing demonstrators had constructed their own sort of Statue of Liberty, which went by different names including the Goddess of Democracy and the Goddess of Liberty. They put papier-maché over a high metal form. The death-dealing Communist troops destroyed it.
Lack of important progress over 30 years also can be noted in the lands below the U.S.’s southern border. Powerful Communist troops usually haven’t been these nations’ jailers — with such exceptions as Venezuela and Cuba — but the maladies of socialist thinking that throttle freedom and progress have made their enervating mark.
It seems all too familiar that rather than look to Hong Kongers for an example of trying to take control of their fate and future, the southern border-jumpers only redouble their efforts to break U.S. immigration law and make themselves dependents of its welfare system.
Rather than, say, waving the U.S. flag in Mexico City as a symbol of what they aspire to attain in their native land, they slip into the U.S. then wave the Mexican flag to show where their sympathies truly lie.
Protesting ICE at a Colorado detention facility in mid-July, open-borders radicals pulled down a U.S. flag and dragged it along the ground, cheering as they put a Mexican flag up on the pole instead. They also defaced a “Blue Lives Matter” flag honoring law enforcement, spray-painting it to say “Abolish ICE.”
The Denver Post reported that some of the agitators tried to burn the U.S. flag.
The Seattle Times on July 13 reported a violent incident outside the ICE detention center in Tacoma, where a protester died of gunshot wounds after arriving with a rifle and incendiary devices and tossed lit objects around, causing a car fire.
On August 14 news agencies reported that shots were fired into ICE offices in San Antonio, with an FBI special agent being quoted that “had the bullets gone two inches in another direction, we could be here today talking about the murder of a federal official.”
We’re told of the poverty and violence illegal immigrants are fleeing, but we were told the same decades ago — and tens of millions of illegal immigrants ago — people whose passivity back home is used as an excuse for their showing every kind of energy and enterprise to break U.S. law.
Maybe caching some savings would put them on the road to modest success at home while pushing for political reform, but putting $8,000 in the hands of a northbound people-smuggler is the lawless road they choose instead.
Decade after decade, news stories where I write this in Arizona, and around the nation, show that crime and corruption gushing over the U.S. international line haven’t been stopped, nor will they be stopped, by half-measures and evasive talk — or obeisance to left-wing unbelievable dogma.
Thumb through a few stories here on my desk.
The Catholic national weekly Our Sunday Visitor, 1980 — 39 years ago: “Federal crackdown targets employers of illegal aliens”;
Arizona’s largest daily, The Arizona Republic, 1987 — 32 years ago: “Arizona Guard sent to border for drug fight”;
The Arizona Republic, 1987: “Padre risks life to defy ‘narcos,’ Drug traffic ruining Mexican ‘Eden’”;
The Washington Times, 2004: “Impact of illegals hits Arizona to the tune of $1.3 billion a year”;
Arizona Republic, 2005: After this open-borders newspaper editorially lamented deaths in the desert of people trying to get into the U.S., a reader’s letter to the editor said blame also belongs to “the corrupt and cynical Mexican government” which allows “a country rich in natural resources…to wallow in poverty, violence, and corruption”;
Arizona Republic, 2006: “Life of long hours, low pay in Mexico heightens lure of opportunity in U.S.”;
Tucson’s Arizona Daily Star, 2007: “Border troubles draw reporters to Arizona from across the globe”;
Arizona Republic, 2007: “Mexico’s gangs take over U.S. meth trade”;
The Long Island newspaper Newsday, 2007, an opinion column by James Pinkerton: “(George W.) Bush wimps out as gangs cross our border”;
Associated Press, 2007: “Pope: Migrants should heed host nation values”;
Arizona Republic, 2007: “Pro-immigration lobbies paying big money, but success elusive.”
One might observe that if gaining success has been “elusive” for the shadowy porous-borders network, one can only wonder what real success would resemble.
After the recent El Paso and Dayton mass murders, leftists once again tried to dictate a vanity vocabulary of what accurate words people aren’t allowed to say, like “invasion.” But leftists usually consider reality an affront to their sensibilities and insist that it be shelved.
Sorry, no sale.
If an analogy could be drawn with riding the bus in the U.S., decades continue to go by while people avoiding the fare box try to cling to metal seams on the exterior, repeatedly falling into the roadway and being rushed to tax-paid emergency care, rather than addressing the issue less perilously. Powerful Democrat politicians beckoning them to a free ride say paying the fare is only for racists.
The free ride actually exacts a continuing high toll — even on the lawbreakers, whose consciences are poisoned.
The Wanderer asked conservative political consultant Constantin Querard about the contrast between Hong Kongers waving the U.S. flag and singing the National Anthem over ideals they share, and people in the U.S. waving their own foreign flags while profaning this nation’s.
“People without freedom crave freedom, while too many who do have it are spoiled by it,” Querard said.
“We’re seeing people in Hong Kong who can feel their freedom being taken away reacting in powerful ways while in the U.S. we have leftists who are free and seem to place no real value on it.
“Most know almost nothing of the ideology they espouse or its effects on the rest of the world that has already given in to the temptations of socialism, only to watch it destroy everything it touches,” Querard said.
“So in Hong Kong they are flying the U.S. flag while the leftists here are burning it,” he said. “In Hong Kong they wish they had the Second Amendment so they could protect themselves if and when the Communist troops arrive to strip them of their freedoms, while the leftists here want to strip our rights away and disarm us so that we can be powerless to defend our freedoms.
“It is remarkable to watch both groups at the same time,” Querard said.
At least as remarkable as seeing Hong Kongers inspired by U.S. ideals trying to push back Communism, even while illegal aliens hustled into the U.S. prefer a Democratic Party hustling to debilitate our lives and future.
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