This will not end well!
Marxist/Communist/Socialist
All posts tagged Marxist/Communist/Socialist
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- Hikvision began as an entity of China, and its largest shareholder remains the state-owned China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), a defense-industrial firm
- Hikvision receives generous support from China’s Communist leaders, allowing the company to offer low prices and expand abroad rapidly, outpacing much of its competition
- Hikvision cameras are used to surveil prisoners in “re-education” camps in China’s Xinjiang region, raising significant human rights concerns
- In the U.S., federal agencies were ordered by Congress to remove Hikvision cameras by August 2019 due to national security concerns
- Concerns have been raised that the Hikvision devices may have features, such as microphones, that can be turned on remotely, allowing them to relay information back to China’https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2022/07/05/china-hikvision-cameras.aspx?ui=5a05e186fc85b30f55c28204f849862c04192d97b134e516f76782809875c086&sd=20211124&cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art2HL&cid=20220705_HL2&mid=DM1199435&rid=1539231601
‘North Korea’s (DPRK) nuclear missile program remains a major headache for the United States, and much of the wider world.
Its development would not have been possible, however, without Pyongyang’s access to Soviet technology, specifically nuclear-capable hardware that remained in Ukraine after the collapse of the USSR. This article delves into the unlikely story of the part Ukraine played in making North Korea a major threat to America and its Asian allies.
The US, South Korea and Japan share a lot of common goals, one of them being the complete de-nuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. US President Joe Biden has once again made this point clear at the 2022 NATO summit in Madrid. Meanwhile, Washington’s allies in Asia have recently found a new reason for concern – on June 14, South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin announced that North Korea had completed preparations for a new nuclear test.
Prior to that, in March 2022, Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un effectively ended his country’s self-imposed 2018 moratorium on testing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) capable of reaching US soil. Now, both Seoul and Washington are anxiously awaiting news about new test launches.
How does a country which is effectively cut off from the rest of the world even achieve this level of technology? You might be surprised, but we must go to Ukraine for answers.’https://on.rt.com/bypy
Which is more capitalistic; Communist Vietnam or Australia? Go to Bunnings and see where MOST of the items come from! Most are from a communist nation such as China or perhaps Vietnam. Well, perhaps Wong will learn something about capitalism from them on this visit. Sad state in which we in the “free” world find ourselves in today!
‘If you refused to buy into the official narrative about the COVID shots, you likely found yourself on the receiving end of hateful attacks and rejection. Some of those zealots may now realize they were wrong, but few want to talk about it. How are you choosing to move forward?
Fomenting hatred is a tool of tyrants, and over the past two years, political leaders, agency heads, academics, medical professionals and media personalities alike have publicly encouraged hatred and violence and wished painful death upon anyone who didn’t want to be part of the medical experiment that is the COVID jabs.
In an eloquent Medium post, journalist Susan Dunham summarizes the lessons (hopefully) learned from hating and attacking the unvaccinated:1
“The mandates have let up, and both sides stumble back into something that looks like the old normal — except that there is a fresh and present injury done to the people we tried to break. And no one wants to talk about it.
Only weeks ago, it was the admitted goal of our own leaders to make life unlivable for the unvaccinated. And as a deputized collective, we force-multiplied that pain, taking the fight into our families, friendships, and workplaces. Today, we face the hard truth that none of it was justified — and, in doing that, uncover a precious lesson.
It was a quick slide from righteousness to cruelty, and however much we might blame our leaders for the push, we’re accountable for stepping into the trap despite better judgement.
We knew that waning immunity put vast numbers of the fully vaccinated on par with the shrinking minority of unvaccinated, yet we marked them for special persecution. We said they hadn’t ‘done the right thing’ by turning their bodies over to state care — even though we knew that principled opposition to such a thing is priceless in any circumstance …
And so it was by the willful ignorance of science, civics, and politics that we squeezed the unvaccinated to the degree that we did … [W]e cannot hold our heads high, as if believing we had logic, love, or truth on our side while we viciously wished death upon the unvaccinated. The best we can do is sit in the awareness of our rabid inhumanity for having cast so many aside …
[B]etting against them has been a scathing embarrassment for many of us who’ve now learned that the mandates only had the power we gave them. It was not through quiet compliance that we avoided endless domination by pharmaceutical companies and medical checkpoints at every doorway.
It was thanks to the people we tried to tear down … We took the bait by hating them, but their perseverance bought us the time to see we were wrong. It seems right now like the mandates will return, but this time there’s hope that more of us will see them for what they are: a rising authoritarianism that has no concern for our wellbeing.”
Forgive and Forget?
Dunham addresses the situation from the point of those who fell for the hypnotic command to despise anyone — friends and family included — who refused to buy the official narrative about the COVID shots. Most of you, however, have likely been on the receiving end of those attacks.
How are you choosing to address it? What have you learned? I suspect many of you are indeed willing to forgive, but few will ever forget those betrayals. But as noted by Dunham, no one really wants to talk about what was done.
Everyone’s just going along as if it never happened. As if our leaders didn’t actually call for our deaths. As if our president didn’t warn us his patience with us was “wearing thin”2 — a threat that implied bad things would happen once patience ran dry. As if news anchors like Don Lemon didn’t actually say we deserved to starve and shouldn’t be allowed to enter a grocery store.3,4 But they did say those things, and family and friends did reject us as a result.
Ignorance Still Remains
Remarkably, even now, with everything we know for sure about the jabs, the war against the unvaccinated continues in many areas, and while compassion is slowly making a comeback, ignorance of the basics still abounds. As noted in a January 21, 2022, MSN article:5
“There seems to be a war on the unvaccinated individuals because of the recent spike in COVID-19 cases due to the more transmissible Omicron variant … Starting last year, the Austrian government imposed restrictions solely on the country’s unvaccinated population, as many people wondered why those who got vaccinated should also face the same restrictions as those who opted against it …
I am all for encouraging people to get vaccinated; I had my jabs and my booster immediately when they became available in my community … But I wonder: Just how necessary is this war on the unvaccinated?
What if a person decided to opt-out against the vaccine because they had preexisting medical conditions, simply feared for their life, or lacked the knowledge about it because the government was too busy forcing and scaring people instead of genuinely informing them?”
Sadly, the author of that MSN piece seems convinced that if only the reluctant were to be given the science, the data, they would understand why the shots are so necessary, when the reality is that the science and the data have been the basis for our refusal from the start. Until or unless the experimental jab pushers acknowledge reality, we will never be able to see eye to eye.
The MSN author also believes that lack of financial incentive is behind some of the vaccine hesitancy:6
“If a person is given the choice between going to work or to the vaccination center, they would simply choose the option where there is money. That is just the reality. If they can go to the vaccination center and can still be promised to get their day’s pay, why wouldn’t they want to get vaccinated, right?”
This naiveté ignores the reality that countless individuals have sacrificed their careers by refusing the jab. For most of us, it was never about a lack of financial incentives. It was about the very real dangers the jabs pose — dangers that “the powers that be” have yet to fully acknowledge.https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-war-against-the-unvaxxed-will-not-be-forgotten_4514945.html?est=m1CgfWwnSrjNs8%2F6t4qInq93NqyP2KINi48R%2BD%2FM0R0DC70xH9yFrNlf%2FHQopAoywg%3D%3D
‘For most of my life, I had no idea what the call is. I was born into an atheistic family in the Soviet Union. Literacy was compulsory in the country for the sake of making people receptive to communist propaganda (even by now Ukraine, according to the UNESCO rating, is the most literate country in the world alongside North Korea). We loved to read and we were reading a lot.
I was reading everything interesting I get, including some “spiritual” stuff like Bhagavad Gita or Tao Te Ching. That was prohibited, and we considered it so cool to read what is prohibited. For the same reason, I even read the Gospel once (I can not recall now which one, but believe it was Luke). A grandmother of my friend kept a copy in Proto-Slavonic (Old Bulgarian), and I had to learn the language to read it! I enjoyed the story very much, though it sounded pretty sad. The good guy was killed by the authorities without any guilt or particular reason. Well, this is life! In our country, 20 million were slaughtered by the regime in the same manner.
The weird issues of the Gospel story, – like sin, redemption, resurrection, etc., – did not make any sense to me and I just skipped them. This is just a novel; it should not be absolutely consistent. Soviet propaganda was making all of us logically and morally challenged, accustomed to contradictions and inconsistencies. After all, taking the courses of Marxism-Leninism Philosophy, History of the Communist Party and Scientific Atheism was compulsory at the university, and we were quite comfortable with all that inconsistent mythology. We were trained not to ask uncomfortable questions.
I graduated as a research physicist, specializing in laser optics, and completed advanced studies in geophysics. By the age of 30 I was a Senior Researcher, had been published in scientific journals, had patented inventions in geophysics and laser optics, and was ready to defend Ph.D. theses. I knew everything a Soviet scientist should know about the Bible: most of it is just a collection of fairytales for the babushkas (illiterate elderly ladies). There are so many good and useful books around – why should I waste my time reading that one?
But God has a sense of humor, hasn’t He? He made me read the Bible by sending me almost to the North Pole alone with nothing to read but the Bible (a Norwegian pastor gave me a copy on the way). Having not much to do after the research equipment was installed and worked automatically, I decided it will not hurt to read some fairytales, and started from the very beginning. However, the account I found in its first pages sounded much more reliable than the atheistic cosmology I faced before – about nothing that exploded to well-organized something operated by sophisticated laws we try to intelligently learn now).
The biblical story of the origins sounded much more reasonable than any other explanation. Eventually, I found that everything I know from my personal experience and my science fits with this book. This was the only “spiritual” book that told the truth about “earthly things” which I experienced and could put to the test. So, if looking for a reliable source of information on matters I cannot test, on “heavenly things” — this was it. And if I accept a part of it on the basis of the facts, I have to accept the rest of it by faith.
But it went even farther. In the context of the Genesis first chapters, everything I learned before from the Gospel about Jesus started gradually making sense to me. From Genesis and the rest of the Old Testament I found out why the Gospel is so important, and why Christ had to come and sacrifice His life. So through science, I came to the Bible, and through the Bible, I came to Christ, and have committed my life to Him eventually.
The question disturbed me nevertheless: how did I manage to live till the age of 30 knowing a lot about the world and even knowing some about Jesus, but still not knowing Jesus personally? Why my friends and colleagues, having access to the same information, did not see this amazing truth either? The answer became obvious: there was no room for the Good News in our worldview. The story of Jesus was good enough for us but was not the Good News per se. As Paul puts it, the proclamation of Christ crucified is foolishness to Gentiles (1 Corinthians 1:23). We were gentiles. The system of atheistic propaganda and education shaped our worldview with the immunity to the message of salvation. Nobody is interested in salvation without understanding the danger to the parish. The bad news is what turns the message into the good news. As gentiles, we did not know the bad news of the fall, and that is why we were deaf to the Good News of the redemption.
I still did not know what the call is, and neither I was aware of the concepts like ‘ministry’, ‘evangelism’, ‘apologetics’, or something. I just found wonderful truths that bring real sense to my life, and I wanted other people to see this truth as well. I started to share it and was surprised how little people care about the truth actually. The university administration was not happy with what I was doing at all, and I had to hold underground meetings with students, professors, and colleagues at first, and either give up on doing this or give up on my Ph.D. pursuit eventually. I can not say I was a strong bold believer who made that decision easily. It was a great challenge for me. But the treasure I found was greater than academic success anyway, and I have decided to continue sharing the truth.
I did not know any devoted Christians who could guide and instruct me back then. And love for reading helped me again. I was reading and studying everything I can find about the Bible to know more about it. Somehow I got some books by College Press published in Russian through Literature and Teaching Ministry, and they were extremely helpful in shaping my vision and understanding of the ministry.
I came to the conclusion that in a post-soviet society where people had been indoctrinated in atheism and worshipped science for several generations, the way I came to Christ could be a very effective way to win others for Him. They should hear the bad news by learning the truth about the Bible, about creation and the Creator, about the fall, and about moral absolutes. With this in mind, I have left the research activity and started the apologetics ministry that got the name Christian Center for Science and Apologetics later on (https://scienceandapologetics.com/en/). It exists for introducing the Truth to skeptics; strengthening the saints in their confidence in the Truth, and equipping God’s people to proclaim God’s Word effectively.
We started it with my wife Olga in 100 square feet room that was our bedroom, office, print shop, and warehouse at the same time. Printed materials were the key tool from the very beginning of the ministry. Because people in post-soviet culture preferred to avoid direct discussions, giving them something to read was the most effective way of outreach. The first materials were the tracts and brochures manufactured by the noisy dot matrix printer under our bed. Like with a baby in the room we were half-sleeping, half listening. But with the baby, you wake up when hearing a noise. With the printer, we had to wake up when it got silent. This meant the paper is jammed and should be fixed. Very soon however the Lord arranged our partnership with LATM and we start publishing in a much more efficient way.
Books led me to the Book, the Bible. Books helped me to grow in faith. Books became the key tool to spread the message to others. Internet and media have expanded our outreach enormously as well afterward. Most of the recourses we published were translations. But whenever we could not find a foreign book on a specific issue the ministry and national church needed, we had to write it ourselves.
Life with Christ is full of joy, blessings, and surprises. God’s vision is always greater than our one and His plans are more amazing than anything we ever can imagine. Following His guidance, our small family ministry accomplished a lot in many various areas of outreach we would never even dare to start ourselves. It grew up into an informal movement across 8 time zones in 12 post-communist countries. Our online resources are requested from about 100 countries of the world. We published more than 200 books, and some of them were reprinted more than once. Looking back it is hard to believe that all this happened to us.
God is always faithful in His calling when you obey it, even not having no idea what the call is. «Now unto him, that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, Unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen» (KJV Ephesians 3:20,21).’https://scienceandapologetics.com/en/testimony/
