The Chinese people have always been slaves.
The courageous life of Liu Xiaobo proves the evildoers can kill the body but never the man.
What gave him indomitable will in the face of totalitarian power? Love.
Let us hope and pray some of the slaves noticed that a real man is always free, even when shackled and beaten.
From The Old Gray Whore that employs more Maoists than you might think:
Liu Xiaobo's Dying Words for His Wife
As Liu Xiaobo, China’s most famous political prisoner, lay dying under police guard, he struggled to finish what was probably his last written work. It was not a political statement, but a sometimes playful, sometimes darkly cryptic, tribute to his wife, Liu Xia, an artist and poet who endured house arrest while he served an 11-year prison sentence.
“Love as intense as ice, love as remote as blackness,” reads one of the handwritten notes Mr. Liu wrote in a hospital in the northeastern city of Shenyang before he died of liver cancer on Thursday. “My praise is perhaps an unforgivable poison,” he wrote in the brief and sometimes fragmentary tribute to his wife and her art.
Mr. Liu’s notes were for the preface of an unpublished collection of his wife’s photographs provisionally titled “Accompanying Liu Xiaobo.” His notes and the photo collection were shared by a Chinese editor who was a friend of the couple and who had helped compile the book. The editor said Mr. Liu made contact late last month and that people close to Mr. Liu later passed on pictures of his notes from the hospital. The editor asked to remain anonymous, citing fear of repercussions.
Mr. Liu will remain best known as an obdurate dissident who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 while in prison. He was sentenced in 2009, the year after he helped issue a petition calling for democratic change that led to his arrest.
But his last known writing shows how Mr. Liu, whose fame began in the 1980s when he was a quarrelsome literary academic, remained an artistic soul who drew inspiration from Ms. Liu and feared for her future. She has lived under constant police watch since Mr. Liu received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Remember, kiddies, the pen is mightier than the GULAG.
Her black-and-white photographs include many images of dolls with pained expressions in nightmarish settings. Some of the images have been exhibited before. One shows a doll locked in a birdcage, holding a flickering candle. Another shows a doll whose arms and legs are tied with strips of cloth.
In one poem dedicated to Mr. Liu, which was shared by the editor, Ms. Liu wrote:
I know sooner or later the day will come
When you’ll leave me
And walk alone down the road of darkness.
Many other people have voiced concern for Ms. Liu since the government revealed that Mr. Liu had advanced liver cancer late last month, a point at which a cure was nearly impossible.
Friends and supporters said they feared that Chinese security forces could force Ms. Liu back into house arrest, although she has not been accused of any crime.
In the insane materialistic worldview of left-fascism, reality is a crime.
Ms. Liu has found her isolation hard to take. In a rare interview in 2012, when reporters with The Associated Press managed to evade guards outside her apartment in Beijing, she said, “Kafka could not have written anything more absurd.”
Now Ms. Liu won’t have even the consolation of visiting her husband once a month and hoping for his release.
“That’s what we’re worried about. Now he’s gone, we’re all worried that Liu Xia will face serious difficulties and struggle to cope,” said Wu Yangwei, a writer who uses the pen name Ye Du and was a friend of the couple.
“If she stays in China, the house arrest and surveillance won’t let up for several years at least,” Mr. Wu said. “She needs to go somewhere free so that she can preserve her health, otherwise the consequences could be unthinkable.”
“There’s an incredible sense of urgency about how best to help her,” said Sophie Richardson, the China director of Human Rights Watch. “Every single government I’ve talked to in the last week has been very focused on how to try to help her. We are sick with worry about the prospect of her just going right back into house arrest.”
At a briefing on Friday, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, Geng Shuang, bristled at the international criticism that followed Mr. Liu’s death and brushed aside repeated questions about whether Ms. Liu would be allowed to leave the country. He said, as Beijing officials often do, that such matters were part of China’s internal affairs.
So says the mouthpiece of the murderous, blood-soaked ghouls.
“His words and deeds go against the principles and purposes of the peace prize,” Mr. Geng said.
But Mr. Liu’s handwritten preface also reflected his passion for art, literature and ideas, a side of him that became obscured in the focus on his political activism and his Nobel Prize.
“Appreciation has become my destiny in life, perhaps it’s the instinct of a polar bear enjoying hibernation in the vast snows,” he wrote in the tribute to his wife and her art.
Mr. Liu shot to official notoriety in 1989, when he sided with the student protesters who occupied Tiananmen Square to demand political liberalization. He was arrested days after the armed crackdown of June 3-4, when he and three friends helped avoid bloodshed on the square itself by negotiating with soldiers to let protesters leave peacefully. He served 21 months in detention.
But before that turning point, Mr. Liu was already known as a combative and original literary thinker. His dying comments on his wife’s work show how that artistic background stayed with him, and underline the bond formed with Ms. Liu through poems they wrote for each other.
“Liu Xia’s photographs and Liu Xiaobo’s poems struggle with shared demons,” Perry Link, a professor of Chinese at the University of California, Riverside, wrote in his introduction for the unpublished selection of Ms. Liu’s work, which he agreed to share. “The two artists look, feel and worry side by side.”
Mr. Liu and Ms. Liu met in the 1980s, when they belonged to a broad circle of writers, artists and academics embracing the new freedom and ideas opened up by economic reform and a measure of political relaxation. Ms. Liu abandoned a job in the financial bureaucracy to write poetry and make art. Mr. Liu completed a doctorate in literature but bridled at convention and censorship.
Later, after their first marriages had broken up and Mr. Liu emerged from prison, they became close. They married in 1996 while he was serving a sentence in a labor camp for his political advocacy.
“I lived as a convict’s wife. During this period of intense loneliness and desperation I began taking black-and-white photographs,” Ms. Liu wrote in a dedication at the front of the book. “I am so grateful to my family for their inexhaustible love during the difficult times.”
More from The Whore:
Liu Xiaobo, the renegade Chinese intellectual who kept vigil at Tiananmen Square in 1989 to protect protesters from encroaching soldiers, promoted a pro-democracy charter that brought him a lengthy prison sentence and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while locked away, died under guard in a hospital on Thursday. He was 61.
The Bureau of Justice in Shenyang, the city in northeastern China where Mr. Liu was being treated for liver cancer, announced his death on its website.
The Chinese government revealed he had cancer in late June, only after the illness was virtually beyond treatment. Officially, Mr. Liu gained medical parole. But even as he faced death, he was kept silenced in the First Hospital of China Medical University, still a captive of the authoritarian controls that he had fought for decades.
He was the first Nobel Peace Prize laureate to die in state custody since Carl von Ossietzky, the German pacifist and foe of Nazism who won the prize in 1935 and died under guard in 1938 after years of maltreatment.
Read and learn, kiddies. Left or Right makes no difference in the real world. Those are just words. But fascism is real.
“After multiple treatments, Liu Xiaobo’s condition continued to deteriorate,” the Shenyang Bureau of Justice said in a statement. “On July 10, he entered a state of rescue and intensive care, and on July 13, he died due to multiple organ failure after attempts to save him failed.”
Allow me to translate that into non-totalitarian for you:
"We finally killed that dirty little insect. Too bad he made so much noise while alive...we could have simply shot him in the head and buried him in a forest if nobody knew his name."
The police in China have kept Mr. Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, under house arrest and smothering surveillance, preventing her from speaking out about Mr. Liu’s belated treatment for cancer.
“Can’t operate, can’t do radiotherapy, can’t do chemotherapy,” Ms. Liu said in a brief video message to a friend when her husband’s fatal condition was announced. The message quickly spread online.
Mr. Liu’s illness elicited a deluge of sympathy from officials, friends, Chinese rights activists and international groups, who saw him as a fearless advocate of peaceful democratic change.
“The reaction to his illness shows how much he was respected,” said Cui Weiping, a former professor of literature in Beijing who knew Mr. Liu and now lives in Los Angeles. “People from all walks of life — friends, strangers, young people — have been outraged to hear that someone with terminal cancer was kept locked up till he died.”
Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, said on Thursday, “The human rights movement in China and across the world has lost a principled champion who devoted his life to defending and promoting human rights, peacefully and consistently, and who was jailed for standing up for his beliefs.”
Blah-blah-blah from an ineffective pansy who licks the boots of murderers all day long.
Terry E. Branstad, the United States ambassador to China, said in an emailed statement, “China has lost a deeply principled role model who deserved our respect and adulation, not the prison sentences to which he was subjected.”
He added, “We call on China to release all prisoners of conscience and to respect the fundamental freedoms of all.”
Ditto.
Mr. Liu was arrested most recently in 2008, after he helped initiate Charter 08, a bold petition calling for democracy, the rule of law and an end to censorship.
A year later, a court in Beijing tried and convicted Mr. Liu on a charge of inciting subversion. The petition and essays he wrote in which he upbraided and mocked the Chinese government were cited in the verdict. Mr. Liu responded to his trial with a warning about China’s future.
“Hatred can rot a person’s wisdom and conscience,” he said in a statement he prepared for the trial. “An enemy mentality will poison the spirit of a nation and inflame brutal life and death struggles, destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and hinder a country’s advance toward freedom and democracy.”
By the time of the trial, Mr. Liu was already China’s best-known dissident, and his fame grew even more when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 while imprisoned in northeast China.
After his death was announced, Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chairwoman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said the Chinese government “bears a heavy responsibility for his premature death.”
“Liu Xiaobo will remain a powerful symbol for all who fight for freedom, democracy and a better world,” Ms. Reiss-Andersen said by email. “He was truly a prisoner of conscience, and he paid the highest possible price for his relentless struggle.”
Mr. Liu could not collect the Nobel Prize himself, and he was represented at the ceremony by an empty chair. His statement for his trial, which he was not allowed to read out, served in his absence as his Nobel lecture.
“Xiaobo was wedded both psychically and physically to China and its fate,” Geremie R. Barmé, an Australian Sinologist and a close friend of Mr. Liu’s, wrote in a tribute before Mr. Liu’s death. “In the end, his words and deeds may have garnered him a Nobel Prize, yet in an authoritarian system, one that since 1989 has oscillated merely between the poles of the cruel and the pitiless, they sealed his fate.”
Confrontation and detention were nothing new to Mr. Liu.
He was born on Dec. 28, 1955, in Jilin Province, in northeast China. The son of a professor who remained loyal to the Communist Party, Mr. Liu made a vocation out of obdurate opposition to authoritarianism.
"Authoritarianism"? Are you fucking kidding me? That one word choice is exactly why nobody with a conscience takes The Old Gray Whore seriously and hasn't for decades. Talk about licking the blood of innocents off the boots of their killers!
“He was a dissident even among dissidents,” Yu Jie, a friend and biographer, said. Mr. Yu now lives in the United States.
He added, “Liu Xiaobo was willing to criticize himself and reflect on his actions in a way that even many activists in the democracy movement can’t.”
Mr. Yu recalled the first time Mr. Liu spoke to him over the phone, in about 1999. “He said, ‘I’ve read your book, and there’s a lot I disagree with,’ ” Mr. Yu said. “He criticized me for about half an hour.”
Mr. Liu started out as a notoriously abrasive literary critic in Beijing in the 1980s. He was called a “dark horse” who bridled at intellectual conformity, even in the name of reform. But he was increasingly drawn into political questions as Deng Xiaoping, the Communist leader, resisted matching economic liberalization with political transformation.
In 1989, he was a visiting scholar at Columbia University when students in Beijing occupied Tiananmen Square to demand democratic changes and an end to party corruption. He returned to Beijing to support the protests. He later described that time as a turning point, one that ended his academic career and set him irrevocably into a life of political opposition.
Mr. Liu’s sympathy for the students was not unreserved; he eventually urged them to leave Tiananmen Square and return to their campuses. As signs grew that the Communist Party leadership would use force to end the protests, Mr. Liu and three friends, including the singer Hou Dejian, held a hunger strike on the square to show solidarity with the students, even as they advised them to leave.
“If we don’t join the students in the square and face the same kind of danger, then we don’t have any right to speak,” Mr. Hou quoted Mr. Liu as saying.
When the army moved in, hundreds of protesters died in the gunfire and the chaos on roads leading to Tiananmen Square. But without Mr. Liu and his friends, the bloodshed might have been worse. On the night of June 3, they stayed in the square with thousands of students as tanks, armored vehicles and soldiers closed in.
A man, a hero, a true patriot, a man of learning...Liu Xiaobo was a real mensch.
Mr. Liu and his friends negotiated with the troops to create a safe passage for the remaining protesters to leave the square, and he coaxed the students to flee without a final showdown.
“If he hadn’t been on the scene, I’m sure people would have died on the square. That was his pacifism in action,” said Liu Suli, a friend of Mr. Liu’s who stayed with him and others on Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3. “Xiaobo had a kind of heroism complex that never left him.”
Mr. Liu was arrested days after the crackdown and spent 21 months in detention for supporting the protests. He lost his university lecturing job, his books were banned and the Communist Party labeled him a “black hand” who had helped foment turmoil. His later support for American government policies, including the invasion of Iraq, also brought scorn.
But he was unbowed. In 1996, he was sent to a labor camp for three years after demanding clemency for those still in prison for joining the demonstrations.
Mr. Liu did not instigate Charter 08. But after he joined activists who were preparing to release it, he worked to make its demands acceptable to as many people as possible, tramping from door to door in Beijing to recruit prominent signers.
The petition at first drew 303 signers, including many prominent Chinese writers, academics, lawyers and former officials who were recruited by Mr. Liu. By May 2009, the number of signers had grown to over 8,600, including supporters living overseas.
“He was able to span people inside and outside the system,” said his friend Ms. Cui, who also signed the charter. “He also linked together opposition movements from different generations. I don’t think anyone other than Liu Xiaobo could have done that.”
Mr. Liu and most other participants dismissed the risk that they could be severely punished. But his wife feared that the government would retaliate harshly. In the statement that Mr. Liu wrote for his trial, he thanked Ms. Liu for her “selfless love.”
“Even if I am crushed into powder, I will embrace you with ashes,” he wrote. “Dearest, with your love, I will calmly face the impending trial, with no regrets for my choices, and will look forward with hope to tomorrow.”
The Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo, in His Own Words JULY 13, 2017
In Liu Xiaobo’s Last Days, Supporters Fight China for His Legacy JULY 11, 2017
TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.
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