Brutal Video Smuggled out of China Shows Why We Can’t Let It Win

If the fervor on the American left is any guide, the horrifying lessons of history in Europe aren’t enough to turn young millennials away ...

If the fervor on the American left is any guide, the horrifying lessons of history in Europe aren’t enough to turn young millennials away from socialism.

The daily stories of deprivation and depravity from Venezuela haven’t swayed young progressives either.

But an undercover video smuggled out of the socialist giant of China might at least make American liberals take another look at how brutal a world not protected by the United States Constitution really can be.

According to WNYW, the video was shot by a previously successful Chinese businessman who became a government prisoner because of his support for the Falun Gong movement, a quasi-religious movement the Communist government of China despised and feared.

The businessman, Ming Yu, shot the video while imprisoned in 2008 – when the whole world was applauding Beijing for a stunningly successful Summer Olympics games.

Away from the cameras of the world, though, the Chinese prison system was in full operation.

According to WNYW, Yu’s video evidence of Chinese torture is part of a new documentary called “Finding Courage,” the story of an exiled Chinese family’s attempts to retrieve the body of a woman named Wang Kefei, who was a courageous follower of Falun Gong and ended up dying for it in a Chinese prison.

Check out the WNYW report here.

The Falun Gong is a spiritualist movement that stresses moral teachings, meditation and breathing exercises to improve physical and mental health.

The movement has its critics in the West, whose descriptions make it sound like a kind of Chinese Scientology, but it’s largely ignored — like most such movements until they win a major celebrity convert or become the basis for a new diet plan. (In fact, the movement has numerous supporters in San Francisco and other U.S. cities with large Chinese populations.)

But the kind of existence Americans — especially millennials — take for granted requires a level of freedom that communists such as those in charge in Beijing can’t tolerate.

And videos like the ones Yu smuggled out are a reminder of what happens when a government has the power to control what its citizens think.

Under a totalitarian system – the kind of system socialism has a long, sorry record of producing – any individual separation from the state is intolerable to the state’s rulers. 

The Chinese Communist government has been known for its brutality for decades, of course.

In June of 1989, the regime’s People’s Liberation Army used tanks and machine guns against unarmed demonstrators in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to crush weeks of popular protests.

The official death count is a likely ludicrously low 241, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. By way of comparison, a report in the U.K. Independent in 2017 put the tally at 10,000.

China is a country that doesn’t respect the lives or rights of its citizens.

And it just happens to be the country that is also the United States’ biggest challenger as a world power today.

It’s also the same country that former Vice President Joe Biden, in his infinite wisdom, claims is not a threat to the United States at all. That’s the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

American millennials pining for the kind of socialism their country defeated in World War II and in the Cold War should take a long, hard look at video evidence of the system’s barbarity.

Socialism has written a long and bloody story on the globe – from the gulags of Joseph Stalin in the past to Nicolas Maduro fighting for his dictatorship in Venezuela in the present.

It doesn’t end well. It never ends well.

But the West apparently needs constant reminders. Yu’s videos might be the reminders we need today.