Malignant unrestrained power | Lee Yee
The Hong Kong police issued a statement the night before yesterday quoting the Guangdong Provincial Public Security Department’s response to the arrest of the 12 Hongkongers. The short communication was full of loopholes. If these 12 people are still under investigation, how can the authorities be sure that they will be approved by the procuratorate for arrest later? One of the 12 people was the skipper, is he a member of the smuggling organization? If he is indeed part of a smuggling group, why was he escaping to Taiwan? Why was there no mention of the arrest of the skipper? What happened to the speedboat? Did the 12 people buy the boat hence it was confiscated?
It has been more than a month and they still could not spin a better story. The power has become so domineering to the point where they say what they want without regard for whether it is believable or not anymore.
Chinese state media reported that, at the recent Third Central Symposium on Xinjiang Work held in Beijing, Xi Jinping emphasized the need to “uphold efforts to sinicize religion, sinicize Islam and forge the collective consciousness of a common Chinese identity.” Following Xi’s “sinicization of Tibetan Buddhism,” this is another one of his latest sinicization campaigns with requirements explicitly put forward.
Both Tibetan Buddhism and Xinjiang Islam are religions based on beliefs in God or divine inspirations, while in other parts of China, most religious believers just pray to gods and buddhas for blessings. Very few people truly believe in gods, reincarnation, or life after death. If “One China” means China under the dictatorship of the atheist Communist Party, then the “sinicization of religion” denotes a false and bogus religion. A leader who can come up with the idea of sinicization of religion under atheism is enough to show that there is nothing believable about this regime, including the woven tale for the 12 arrested Hongkongers.
In the era of ancient China’s absolute monarchy, although there was no real religious belief, ancient Chinese emperors at least paid respect to ancestors and held ceremonies to worship heaven. Dictatorship began from as early as the Qin dynasty to the Han Dynasty during which Dong Zhongshu proposed the rule to respect the emperor. However, he also proposed to restrict the emperor and respect heaven; the emperor would be called the son of heaven, meaning the heavenly father was watching over. The occurrence of a catastrophic natural disaster would be the wrath of heaven; the emperor would often issue a rescript for penitence, and reflect and review to improve governance.
The atheistic CCP not only does not believe in gods but also disbelieves in heaven. Mao Zedong claimed to be a “monk holding an umbrella,” meaning that he was above the law and above heaven. He also said, “Battling with heaven is endless joy.” Therefore, under the guidance of the idea of “Humans will triumph over the sky,” the Great Leap Forward brought about a situation of “endless suffering” for the Chinese people.
However, the CCP regime before Mao the second at least would not, on the one hand, claim to believe in Marxism-Leninism, and on the other hand, bludgeon itself with such absurd theories as the “sinicization of religion.” Perhaps Mao 2.0 now possesses absolute power such that no one dares to tell the truth, resulting in comments of all illogical nonsense.
Recently, the Chinese education department was so preposterous that it blatantly falsified the Bible. The story of Jesus and the Adulteress from the New Testament was cited in textbooks but the ending of the story was distorted. In the original passage of the Bible, Jesus said to the adulteress, “I, too, do not condemn you; Go and sin no more!” The Chinese textbook, however, presents the story as: “When the crowd disappeared, Jesus stoned the sinner to death saying, ‘I too am a sinner. But if the law could only be executed by men without blemish, the law would be dead.’” Forcing words to justify the Chinese leaders into the mouth of Jesus.
Of course, anyone who enforces the law in any society will not be a flawless person, but in a normal society, at least the law enforcers know that they are either guilty, or that regardless of religion or even non-religion, they believe that “there is a deity watching over them.” In addition to believing that “a deity is watching,” law enforcers are also restrictive in their power by the separation of powers with mutual checks and balances, as well as the supervision of the Fourth Estate. Nearly 300 years ago, the French Enlightenment thinker Montesquieu said, “Every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go. Power is naturally expansive and has a tendency to turn malignant. As long as there are insufficient restraint and supervision, any power will give rise to corruption. To prevent this abuse, it is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power.”
The power we face and its extension in Hong Kong may be the most extreme power in human history. It has no restraints nor any checks and balances, and without the constraints of “heaven” from the dark ages of ancient China and the Western Middle Ages. Its “expansion and malignancy” can exceed all human imagination. Therefore, normal people can only completely and absolutely distrust this absolute power.
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preposterous meaning 在 Sam Tsang 曾思瀚 Facebook 的精選貼文
I blame Jacques Derrida.
I blame Derrida for President Trump and QAnon.
Let me explain myself. Derrida is one of the leading thinkers whose writings helped develop postmodernism. He is often considered the founder of deconstruction.
To simplify, deconstruction (and post-modernism) denies that there is an absolute signifier that allows for a connection between a sign and its referent. To put it in other terms, there is no truth out there to be found and language is insufficient to describe it.
But rather than despairing about this state of things (like the existentialists of the 60’s did-remember Sartre’s book Nausea), postmodern thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, and others relished the idea because meaning could not be imposed on them by others, but rather meaning could be constructed by themselves.
Now it is interesting that those in the lines of Derrida and Foucault often constructed meaning in a progressive direction, resisting forces that sought to impose authority structures on them. But critics of deconstruction warned that it would be equally possible to construct meaning in a different direction, say a misogynist or racist direction.
Some of my academic friends might remember that probably twenty years ago, a leading deconstructionist, Paul de Man (who was at Yale when I was doing my doctoral work), was outed as a Fascist in his youth, thus in the minds of many confirming the problem with this post-modern mindset.
So what does this have to do with our President or QAnon? Well, I think most reasonable people recognize that he constructs the facts in whatever direction pleases him. I think it was KellyAnn Conway who spoke of “alternative facts.” These alternative facts often have absolutely no evidence and even have abundant evidence against it, but that does not deter people from believing him. I suspect because they want to believe him.
As for QAnon, the same is abundantly true. Biden is a pedophile? Please. There is no evidence for this (and remember PizzaGate). And don’t post memes of Biden giving grandfatherly kisses to his friends’ children.
Well, then, why is it so many Christians support our first post-modern president and give QAnon the time of day? It’s actually mind-blowing because we Christians do think there is an absolute signifier out there (God). Yes, getting at the truth is difficult and everyone has their ideological lenses, but even so that does not mean we get to construct our reality in the way we want to against the evidence. We don’t have to lock ourselves into our ideological biases but we need to expose ourselves to other interpretations and then consider which is the true understanding. If you listen to CNN turn to Fox once in a while and vice versa. When it comes to evaluating our president, listen to what he says in his speeches and on twitter.
I worry that many evangelical Christians have been conditioned against evidence and the truth when it seems to butt up against how they prefer to view reality. We can see this for instance in say those who affirm that the cosmos is only a few thousand years old. The evidence is overwhelming against this conclusion. But many people wrongly think that the Bible teaches otherwise, so they need to ignore or make up explanations of the evidence that are preposterous or, and here we are back to the mindset that accepts Trump’s misconstruals of the evidence or the conspiracy theories of QAnon.
I am not saying that everyone who supports Trump over against Biden are guilty of this kind of post-modern thinking, but I worry that many are (particularly based on some of the responses I receive on Facebook). I can think of no good reason though why anyone who is a Christian would turn to a source like QAnon to support their views.
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