I was reading recently in a newsletter from The Council for Foreign Relations that in recent months, troubling details have emerged about a sprawling network of secretive political re-education camps in China’s northwest. Former internees describe vast facilities that can hold 6,000 people and are heavily secured with barbed wire, surveillance systems, and armed police. Those interned are subject to intense indoctrination procedures that force them to proclaim “faith” in the Chinese Communist Party while denigrating large parts of their own religion and culture.
Now, initially was taken aback because like most I thought that China had moved to a more free and open society and left the more draconian bits of state enforced ideology behind.
It all seems so alien to us living as we do in a free, open and democratic society.
Or so we’d like to imagine.
When I look around at the daily news and the twisted and distorted wacky hall of mirrors, and sideshow alley, freak show that much of Western society and culture has become with everyone demanding respect for their most obscure, confected human right, not to be offended and taking offence and finding discrimination where it just doesn’t exist, perhaps Australia should seek Chinese expertise in establishing a few reverse, re-education camps in Australia because it seems to me that we actually have similar to the Chinese when it comes to re-education and the policing of thought, speech and action.
With the very essence and purpose of re-education being to enforce pc, state approved thought and speech to make the citizenry buckle under and to ensure strict adherence and compliance with, the approved guidelines and state approved orthodoxy, Australia already has its own version of, metaphorical, re-education camps with the application of the psychological ‘barbed wire’, bullying and groupthink of the various commissions, committees and tribunals like the federal, Human Rights and Race discrimination Commission and 18c.
Examples are right there in plain sight with the likes of the Human Rights Commission and such exponents of the dispensation of these rights as the former head Gillian “Sadly you can still say what you like around the kitchen table at home,’’ Triggs and the soon to be former Race Discrimination Commissioner Timmy “the touter in chief” Soutphomassane.
(Think, the QUT students and the unsigned indigenous computer lab. That case took years. Then there was the case of cartoonist the late Bill Leak.
In these examples it’s all about re-education, intimidation and sending a message so others won’t go there. The mental anguish and putting your life and career on hold while sending you broke is part of process to make you straighten up and fly right.
The process at these various Star Chambers is punishment.
Then there was the case, in that goes back to December 2017, of the barber in Sydney who was put through the mental anguish of 8 months of “law-fare” after he was asked by a woman to cut her daughters hair.
When he explained honestly that he wasn’t qualified to cut women’s hair because he was only trained as a men’s barber and pointed the mother to a female hairdresser across the road, she claimed his refusal was a egregious breach of the sex discrimination act.
And with that she stormed off to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission quicker than you can say “see you in court” squealing about discrimination and her human rights.
Either way the barber couldn’t win, if he had cut the hair and botched the job because he wasn’t qualified the mother, given what we now know of the type of person she is, would have dragged him off to court anyway demanding compensation for a bad haircut.
And there’s a further point to be made. Because the daughter is under 18 we can’t know the mothers name because to identify and deservedly shame and humiliate the mother would identify the daughter. So not only is the twisted and damaged mother gaming the system to make a sick point, she is using her daughter as a human shield knowing that her anonymity will be protected.
While there are real and serious cases of human rights abuses going on, the HRC chooses to waste time and money and accept this case and legitimise this woman’s trivial complaint about human rights and her imagined pain, suffering and mental anguish over the inconvenience of her 8 year olds haircut.
Meanwhile the real victim, in this, the innocent party, who has been discriminated against and who has many sleepless nights while his life has been put on hold, the barber, has been put through the wringer of grievance politics and lawfare.
Think about it. On the spectrum of human rights abuses one 8 year olds inconvenienced mother over a haircut is now equal to another 8 year olds female genital mutilation or forced marriage.
And the HRC thinks such a whinge has merit.
It’s easy to say “you can’t make this stuff up” but George Orwell did in 1984 but his fiction has turned out to be extremely prescient fact.
Now, in Australia, we don’t call them re-education centres as such but that’s exactly what they are. It’s all about the barbed wire of thought control and speech control complete with the thought police of the Human Rights Commission waiting to pounce.
And it’s about to get a whole lot worse because with the distinct possibility of a Labor government in the next 12 months there is the intention to extend the remit of section 18c of the federal race discrimination act to include people claiming they have been offended or insulted because of their religion. We are talking about the establishment of a blasphemy law in Australia or more specifically ‘Sharia law by stealth’ in order to prevent people from talking about, discussing, criticising scrutinising or in any way ‘offending’ Islam.
Don’t say you weren’t warned.
The purpose of QANGOS like these interfering, busy body bureaucracies, their entire raison d’être is the criminalising of unapproved, thought and speech and to intimidate and force individuals to buckle, comply and change their behaviour for fear of penalty and of course the only way to do that is to re-educate, just like the Chinese to change the thinking of the miscreant citizens.
And as we have seen in the last 18 months with the Bill Leak affair, the race discrimination commissioner was actually touting for business.
If they can’t source any complaints the HRC confects them by legitimising and embellishing the trivial and giving them standing in cases like haircut lady to simply justify their existence.