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Dec 16, 2022Liked by Peter Nayland Kust

I’ve been working on a piece along the lines of “what we can learn from China’s protests”. The short of it is, a lot. Imagine what people could’ve done 2 years ago, in a not-yet totalitarian country? This article sounds like all China did with their zero-covid policy was push themselves two years into the past. The sentiment among the propagandized citizenry is starkly reminiscent of the general public in the US in early 2020.

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In China, in Iran, and even in the US, protests are a reminder of one of the essential truths outlined in the Declaration of Independence--that people are disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.

What we are seeing in the Zero COVID protests in China and in the Mahsa Amini protests in Iran is that even people within totalitarian regimes can be pushed to the point where the evils are no longer sufferable, at which point they push back. Whenever the people refuse to back down even when faced with the lethal force of government coercion and suppression, by sheer mass of numbers they are powerful enough to topple any regime.

Ultimately, even autocrats govern at the consent of the governed.

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...all this without invoking the Emergencies Act or getting their bank accounts frozen...how did they do this...in CHINA, no less......

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