The Tiananmen Square massacre’s 35th anniversary reveals a CCP more emboldened than ever, with 10,000+ deaths in 1989 now framed as a "political vaccine" against dissent. Western engagement—from Jean Chrétien’s trade deals to John Cena’s Taiwan apology—ignored Uyghur atrocities and coronavirus cover-ups, while China secured WHO control (Dr. Tedros) and 95% of global medicine supply chains. The 2022 Olympics will cement its normalization, exposing the West’s strategic naivety as it prioritizes short-termism over accountability, leaving Trump’s potential return as the last line against tyranny. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello my rebels, it's June 4th, which is the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
I think things are worse in China than they were back then politically.
I think things are worse globally in terms of diplomacy and China's place in the world.
I'll take you through the evolution of that.
You know, China had the Olympics in 2008.
You know, they're going to have them again next year.
I think that's a symbol of where they are.
They're on the ascent.
I'll take you through it.
Before I do that, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
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Okay, here's today's show.
Tonight, it's the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and China is worse than ever.
It's June 4th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say is government go walking house is because it's my bloody right to do so.
On this day in 1989, Chinese tanks and soldiers under the direct command of the communist dictatorship attacked thousands of pro-democracy students who had gathered in Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing.
Tiananmen means heavenly peaceful gate, but of course it was just another communist slaughterhouse that day.
Tiananmen Square Echoes00:15:29
According to the British embassy, at least 10,000 people were murdered that day.
This man was the symbol that day for many, at least to the West, a brave young man literally standing in front of a column of tanks and staring them down.
What an inspiration.
Except, of course, it didn't work.
Maybe it worked for a moment to be caught on tape, but the thing about passive resistance that Gandhi used to such powerful effect against the British Empire in India is that it only works against an enemy whose values you're appealing to, an enemy that's pretty gentle.
So in the case of the British Empire, values like fair play, the rule of law, limited government, civil society, nonpartisan police and the military, and of course a free media to document it all, that's the only way Gandhi could have won.
Hitler or Stalin would have just shot anyone trying Gandhi's tactics, and no one would have even seen it.
No media would have covered it.
If they did, they'd be shot too.
So that young man in Tiananmen Square surely died.
It was a brave moment, but just a moment.
And after some huffing and puffing, well, the world moved on.
After all, China was opening up its economy, and there was plenty, well, plenty of people who wanted to make a buck or two billion, including Canada's own Jean-Cret Chen.
He was prime minister from 1993 to 2003.
He loved China.
He led Teen Canada trade missions to China.
His family are huge investors in China.
His son-in-law is a senior executive of Power Corporation, a massive Chinese company.
Weeks after he finished being prime minister, he went to work for China in China.
I've done with Zhang Kre Chen.
That was the way.
Just too much money.
And by the time the 2008 Olympics rolled around, China was ready to once and for all whitewash itself.
I mean, wasn't it proof that it was fully welcome in the family of nations?
There were boycotts of the Nazi Olympics in Berlin in 1936.
They were boycotts of the Soviet Olympics in Moscow in 1980, but everyone was there for China's debut, weren't they?
Chen and what?
Well, China learned a thing or two.
I mean, ask John Cena, the wrestler and actor who dared to say Taiwan was a country.
Oh my God, listen to this blubbering apology.
I have a lot of information, so I have a lot of information, but I have one mistake, I need to say that now it is very important that I love China and China, and I am very sorry for my mistakes, sorry, sorry, I am very sorry.
That's pure fear.
Fear of losing big endorsement deals and big money and big box office hits in China.
The biggest NBA basketball stars smear America as a racist jail every day, but boy, they bend the knee to China.
Even as China sets up concentration camp-style compounds for their Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang province, there's no doubt about that.
It's not just a rumor or a myth.
It's ethnic cleansing of Muslims on a massive scale, but no one cares.
The opposite.
Disney filmed part of the big movie Mulan literally in Xinjiang province, near those concentration camps, work camps.
And they actually gave a thank you to the Xinjiang secret police in their movie credits.
Nike and Coca-Cola, very woke companies, they actually lobbied against a U.S. bill that would address the Uyghur genocide and crackdown on doing commerce in Xinjiang.
Nike and Coca-Cola just love money too much.
You didn't believe their ads, did you?
That's where we are today.
And literally today, on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square, look at this.
In English, from one of China's propaganda websites, this one's called Global Times, published on Twitter, which is banned in China, by the way.
Here's a tweet from Global Times.
Chianmin Square embodies Chinese people's confidence in China's politics.
The Chinese public's understanding of June 4th incident has fundamentally changed.
We laugh at those posturing commemorative activities orchestrated by outside forces.
They're laughing.
They just said they're laughing.
Now they've always laughed, but just in private until recently.
In public, maybe they were ashamed or at least pretended to be, but now they know they don't have to pretend.
If they can get John Cena to blubber like that, and Nike, the brand of Black Lives Matter, the brand of Colin Kaepernick, if they can get the take-a-knee guy to support Xinjiang, to lobby for genocide commerce, why not laugh?
In fact, if you click on the link in that tweet, they're positively proud of it.
Channeling Square embodies Chinese people's confidence, pride.
Let me read an excerpt.
If the incident 32 years ago, I love that, the incident, they won't even say what it is, if the incident 32 years ago has any positive effect, that is, it has inoculated the Chinese people with a political vaccine, helping us acquire immunity from being seriously misled.
China underwent a color revolution but wasn't brought down by it.
The leadership of the Communist Party of China has saved the fate of the nation at a critical juncture.
Imagine rubbing it in with that metaphor, the vaccine virus metaphor.
They know they can.
I mean, who's going to complain?
John Cena, LeBron James?
Here's the editor of Global Times, that Communist Party mouthpiece that we were just reading from.
Here's what he has to say.
He says, the conclusion on June 4th incidents will never be reversed in Chinese history because its political outcome played a role in shaping socialist path with Chinese characteristics, which has led China to success.
The longer the time, the more resolutely the incident will be rejected, the incident.
So to be clear, they're not ashamed anymore, if they ever were.
They're proud of it.
In fact, they believe that in time, the incident will be seen really as a bunch of terrorists trying to take down China because they intend to keep saying that.
And I bet they'll get plenty of Westerners to repeat that for them for free.
I mean, like Peter Harter, a senior Trudeau appointee, ran Trudeau's transition team, now a Trudeau senator.
Let me read this tweet from Steve Chase of the Globe.
Senator Peter Harter, an ex-civil servant who later ran the Canada-China Business Council, told senators Thursday it's self-righteous to pass a motion urging a boycott of the Beijing Olympics over repression of Uyghurs, given Canada's cultural genocide of residential schools.
Got it.
He literally stood up in Canada's Senate and said it's self-righteous to criticize China.
We are the genociders, not them.
He said that.
Did China write his speech?
In fact, China's pushing forward, pushing on Channelment Square.
That's a terrorist incident, don't you know?
To laugh that anyone would support them, don't you know?
And they're pushing back on the virus origin story, too.
Look at this.
Just in, China accuses the U.S. and Japan of running a secret biological warfare development program.
Look.
Yeah, they really said that.
So who will push back against this?
Not Senator Harter.
Trump's side of the picture now.
Joe Biden's son worked for China, did billions of dollars of business in China.
So he's compromised.
So who's going to push back against China?
There's a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime.
Yeah, no, not him.
Stay with us for more.
Welcome back.
Well, I remember a year ago comparing how China's dictatorship responded to the coronavirus to how the Soviet dictatorship responded to Chernobyl.
I had just seen the HBO miniseries called Chernobyl.
And by the way, if you haven't seen it, you absolutely must.
I resisted it.
I thought, well, I know the story.
I don't want to be bored by a documentary.
It was absolutely gripping.
It was riveting.
And even though I knew how the story ended, to have it recreated and to see how the first instinct of the Communist Party was to deceive and to not lose faith, I thought it was a powerful analogy, except for one thing.
Chernobyl mainly hurt people in the Soviet Union, in Ukraine itself and Belarus, but in the Soviet Union, its deadly radioactivity did much less harm outside the Soviet Union.
I think that's the opposite of China's coronavirus.
But a new essay in an online magazine called American Greatness, amgreatness.com, is called The Chinese Coronavirus is This Generation's Tiananmen Test, as in Tiananmen Square.
And I have to agree, that's actually the better analogy than the Chernobyl one.
And joining us now via Skype is the author of this essay, our old friend Ben Weingarten, who joins us now via Skype.
Ben, very, very thoughtful piece, as always.
And it comes on the anniversary.
Well, today is the anniversary of Tiananmen Square.
Of course, you wrote this a little bit earlier, but the points remain.
Make your case for how this is analogous to the Tiananmen Square moment in 1989.
Yeah, and let me just preface by saying, you know, we're talking today on the anniversary of the apex of the Tiananmen Square massacre, ultimately.
And this piece that I wrote is actually from a year ago, but it could just as easily have been published today.
I'm sorry to say, unfortunately.
And really what the argument of this piece is that unlike Chernobyl, to your point, in this case, we're all victims.
And it's the same thing relative to the Tiananmen Square massacre.
There, it was a distant, far away, brutal purge of dissenters by the Chinese Communist Party.
The shot was caught, of course, by purported reformer and liberalizer Deng Xiaoping.
So even under the most moderate so-called communist leader, we saw its true face when it actually had to grapple with college students simply demanding their most basic natural rights.
That should have taught us everything we needed to know about the nature of the Chinese Communist Party and its willingness to be as brutal and deceptive as every other Communist Party, if not more so than any other Communist Party in the history of mankind.
And what I said was that we failed the Tiananmen test the first time around in that Tiananmen did not even serve as a speed bump really to China's ambitions to become a dominant economic, military, and technological power.
On the contrary, we engaged in this project to integrate effectively the Chinese Communist Party into every aspect of the Western world.
And it used that to its huge advantage.
All of the benefits of engaging with the West accrued to communist China.
And yes, we got cheap products and, you know, purportedly access to massive open markets to ourselves.
It hasn't exactly played out that way.
But at the consequence of our national interest, and I would argue our national soul, quite frankly.
And you can broaden that to the entire West, not just America for that matter, as you well know.
And so the long-winded point that I'm getting to is that this time around, we were all victims of Chinese Communist Party tyranny, brutality, lies, and deception, callousness, not caring about, and in fact, probably in some ways using to its advantage the knowledge in the West that they were willing to deal effectively to help foist on the world this pandemic, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands, if not millions of deaths.
So our test this time is how do we respond when we are directly impacted by Chinese communist tyranny and the Chinese Communist Party has the blood of the West on its hands.
It's sapped our treasure.
We've sacrificed our liberties as a consequence of it.
And so it is of the utmost importance.
It might be the most important thing in geopolitics for us to hold the Chinese Communist Party absolutely to account.
And the fact that we're talking now over a year since that piece came out, and only now the lab leak theory is even being entertained by the establishment, I think, speaks volumes about the failure of our so-called ruling class to pass this Tiananmen test.
Yeah, you know, I want to emphasize that you did write this last year, and I'm sorry I didn't actually quite, I was reading it because it feels like it was written today, but I noticed that you were a very early analyst to get this right.
Let me read what I think is the key paragraph in your essay.
China's Coronavirus Strategy00:07:13
Again, it's called The Chinese Coronavirus Is This Generation's Tiananmen Test.
And here you spell out what that test is in a paragraph.
The test is as follows.
With the Chinese Communist Party inflicting incalculable losses in blood and treasure through its unique role in spreading the coronavirus and its related menacing behavior, will we demand reparations or will we let the regime off scot-free?
Emboldening it and encouraging it to act with impunity and still more reckless abandon in its quest for hegemony going forward.
We failed this test in 1989.
Well, you know, I was thinking about how the 2008 Olympics in Beijing was their ultimate proof to the world, the outside world, and proof to their own citizens that everything was forgiven from Tiananmen Square.
They could say with great justification: look, the entire world is coming here to pay homage, to pay homage to us.
They're bending their knee.
They're saluting our anthem.
This is proof that we were right to crush them 19 years ago because look at the normalization.
Well, can you believe it?
Beijing is getting the Olympics again next year, the Winter Olympics, and it serves the exact same purpose to tell the world and domestic Chinese citizens, hey, we're the boss.
Who else has had two Olympic Games in 14 years?
Nobody but China.
I think it's incredible how it's not even a speed, like Channel Square, not even a speed, but at least Channel Square, you had some squawking about it in some quarters of the West, as opposed to now, when if you even dispute the origins of the virus and suggest maybe we should ask China a few more questions, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter will silence you.
It's incredible.
It's happening all over again, Ben.
The U.S. individuals inside the U.S. government, national security, intelligence, foreign policy establishment will suppress dissenting views with respect to the Chinese coronavirus.
The WHO will get rewarded with re-entry by the United States when it's a China-controlled entity that helped participate in the cover-up of the origins and then the spread of the coronavirus as well.
It's really an exceptional point that you make, an analogy to draw.
And I remember in 2008, there were these triumphalist symbols of Marxism of the Chinese Communist Party.
And I watched it and I'm just disgusted in real time, fuming as I'm watching that as a college student, thinking this is a regime with the blood of tens of millions of people on its hands.
And here it is.
And how many people in the West even comprehend of the propaganda effort that this is, that we're witnessing?
Like you said, fast forward to today, and we have John Sena groveling because he dared to have the gall to say that Taiwan was a country.
And look at what China's done this time.
I mean, move beyond Tiananmen Square now.
It, of course, has operates Uyghur gulags.
It has swallowed Hong Kong whole.
It crushes Christians and Falun Gong and the Tibetans and the Mongolians run down the list.
It threatens to subsume Taiwan, which is a living representation of what China could be, were its people to be free of the clutches of the Chinese Communist Party.
And then, of course, it has our blood on its hands and it threatens to expand its sphere of influence everywhere and ultimately be a hegemonic world power.
So to your point, they are laughing at the fact that they can literally get away with murder, including the murder of us, and be able to then host the Olympic Games as if they're a legitimate member of the family of nations.
It's absolutely sickening.
And in good conscience, no representative of any Western country should give the privilege and the honor to the Chinese Communist Party to host those games.
You know, Hillel Neuer of UN Watch pointed out that no country controls more United Nations agencies than China.
Chinese nationals run four key agencies, and of course they installed Tedros, Dr. Tedros, the Ethiopian boss of the World Health Organization.
So they effectively control five.
During the Cold War, I don't think the Soviet Union ever had that kind of sway over global diplomacy.
I mean, I could be wrong on that, but I don't think they ever did.
But the thing is, that's the only forum they were relevant.
There wasn't an enormous amount of commerce between the Soviet Union and the West.
There was some, but it was limited.
I think that's one of the reasons why Chernobyl didn't morally destroy the West as much as the coronavirus did, is because the Soviet Union was so cut off economically, scientifically, in terms of media.
This really was a problem in their own house.
It was one of the reasons the Soviet Union fell because they bore 90%, 99% of the economic burden of fixing it.
With coronavirus, China is so ingrained.
I mean, you note in your piece that so many supply chains in the West are rooted in China, including about 95% of our medicines, by the way.
You can't buy medicine at a pharmacy that's not made in China.
I mean, good luck finding.
I mean, just basic medicines, complex medicines, it's all made in China.
The linkages, it's almost impossible to untangle that mess.
Yeah, it's a great point.
If you look around whatever room you're in to viewers, can you imagine any product that you have sitting around your office or your living room or the like that doesn't have components made in China in it or raw materials coming from there or the like?
It's almost impossible, like you said.
And that, I would argue, is the brilliance of the Chinese Communist Party's strategy in contrast with that of the Soviet Union, which is that unlike the Soviet Union, which was intransigent and had to fight against the Western imperialists, China said, no, let's not resist.
Let's open ourselves up to the West.
Let them capitalize us.
Let them shower us with all the benefits of its labors in terms of technology and the financial markets and the trade architecture and all the and entree to all of the Western-led institutions.
And then let's take advantage of all of these benefits to the maximum extent possible.
It was a brilliant, brilliant strategy executed to perfection.
And as a consequence, we're stuck in a bear hug today, which is that, you know, and it's sort of represented in physical form by the supply chains that lead to these products around us.
How do we get ourselves out of this inextricably intertwined relationship?
And it would have been significantly easier in 1989, of course, before this massive trade and diplomatic relations and the like took place and manifested itself.
Now, unfortunately, we face a far richer, far stronger, far more powerful, far more brazen Chinese Communist Party that is no longer biting its time in the words of Deng.
Strategic Decadence00:04:14
You know, I think sometimes of rivals or enemies or opponents or competitors to the West.
I think of Iran and I think of China, and both of them have been engaged in diplomacy and military strategy for literally thousands of years for millennia.
And I think that there's a snobbery, there's a self-delusion, there's an ethnocentricity in the West that says we're much more sophisticated than the Persian Empire or the Chinese Empire because we've got, you know, Instagram influencers and we have woke this and vegetarian that, and we're just the absolute height of fashion.
And I mean, I think of John Kerry and I think of his obsession with climate change.
And I think of how the U.S. military is now, you know, emphasizing its wokeness.
And we think that that's signs of sophistication and that we're going to run circles around Iran or China.
I think they're beating us at things that we think we're better at.
I think they're more strategic than us.
I think they're more skillful at diplomacy than us.
I think they think more long-term than us.
I think they're more disciplined than us.
I think that they look at a buffoon like Joe Biden and his son or John Kerry or Anthony Blinken and say, these guys, their arrogance, let them think they're in control.
They're not.
I don't know.
I just think that they're absolutely cleaning our clock in the West.
Yeah.
And the thing that's most depressing about it is that we're doing it to ourselves.
If the West mustered all of its energy, talent, creativity for all of the warts on our societies today, I still firmly believe we can triumph over anyone, no matter what adversary.
But we are hanging ourselves right now.
And then you add to that the fact that, to your point, these are strategically oriented nations, regimes that are much longer term oriented than we are, that are willing to deal with substantially more sacrifice than we are, and also that understand us better than we understand them.
So they're able to take advantage of our avarice, our self-interest, our short-term thinking.
And then you add onto it the signs of decay and decadence and lack of moral clarity or really even belief that we ought to survive in any traditional sense as Western civilization that's inherent in this wokeness that we see.
And you have a sick Western world right now.
And of course, our adversaries are going to take advantage of that.
And I think that's one of the reasons they don't even need to really directly attack us or engage in any sort of traditional conventional warfare at this point because we're doing it to ourselves.
And they can watch and build up and bide their time.
And almost organically, they're positioning themselves to be dominant.
You know, it's incredible.
I mean, I was saying earlier in the show today, they're not even pretending on Channel 1 Square.
I mean, the Global Times, one of the English language propaganda arms of the Chinese dictatorship, they literally say they're laughing at criticisms of Channel Square.
So I don't even think they would have been that brazen about that in the past, but they don't need to be their best defenders because they've got the John Cena's of Hollywood, they've got the NBA and the LeBron James, they've got so many businessmen willing to go woke to get into that lucrative market.
So they think.
I just think that they are, I hate to say it, I think they're winning.
I think had Donald Trump been re-elected, that might not be the case, but I think they're roaring back.
To me, the ultimate image of that was New Year's Eve.
In Times Square, the iconic apple falling, sorry, you know, the clock, rather, the countdown didn't happen.
There was no one on the street other than Bill de Blasio dancing with his wife by themselves, just that cringe image.
Wuhan vs. Times Square00:02:42
Whereas in Wuhan, no masks, huge parties, huge fireworks.
Wuhan, China had the New York City New Year's celebration, and New York was a ghost town.
To me, that's the symbol of where we are.
Last word to you, Ben.
Yeah, it's a sorry but very apt image to part ways on.
And what I just say is, doesn't it tell you everything you need to know about the Western world that our ruling class, and this goes beyond the U.S., but really internationally with respect to most of the West, and China were all on the same page in terms of wanting to do everything they could to see Donald Trump fall?
I think that tells you everything you need to know about ultimately where the side of our where what side our ruling class is on and the fact that it was Donald Trump that stood as the greatest bulwark against these tyrannical forces.
Yeah.
We've been talking with Ben Weingarten.
His article from last year in The American Greatness is called The China Coronavirus Is This Generation's Channel Test.
Thanks, Ben.
Great to see you.
Thanks for having me.
All right.
Cheers.
Stay with us.
more happy.
Hey, welcome back.
Your feedback.
Calvin writes: let's fool everyone and elect an independent.
Yeah, I just don't think it's going to work that way.
You know how premiers and prime ministers are chosen in the parliamentary system.
It's whoever gets the most MPs or MLAs to support them, typically the party leader who wins a majority.
So it just won't work to have an independent unless you mean an independentist, someone who wants to separate from Canada.
And there's starting to be rumblings like that in Alberta.
Ina writes, do the Conservatives have a death wish?
Doug Ford at least does not behave as badly as Jason Kenney, although he no longer leads us.
We're now led by unelected health specialists.
I don't know if Doug Ford behaves as badly as Jason Kenney.
I suspect that Doug Ford doesn't follow any rules.
In fact, we sort of have evidence that he doesn't.
It's just that I don't think he's quite as ostentatious.
That sky palace is so it's the greatest lightning rod for wasteful, luxurious living politicians in Alberta to go to that patio of all places and break the lockdown rules you're enforcing and others at the same time.
The layers of arrogance there, there's just so many.
I'm sure Doug Ford has a layer or two at any one time, but to do that, men need things on top of each other and the photo.
Greatest Lightning Rod00:00:26
And then defending it by saying, oh, you know, it was only a $35 bottle of whiskey.
wasn't luxurious.
I just don't know.
I mean, I don't think they realize the trouble they're in.
I think they're going to lose the next election.
That's our show for today.
That's our week that was.
We'll have videos over the weekend, of course.
We'll see you on Monday.
Until then, on behalf of all of us here of Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.