The Fragility of Freedom in Our Day


I just finished reading a book (for the second time) by Madeleine Thien called Do Not Say We Have Nothing. It’s a novel about China as seen through the eyes of a Chinese immigrant, a young girl growing up in Canada during Chairman Mao’s brutal and deadly communist regime, a time when literally millions of Chinese people were killed, relocated, re-educated, humiliated – all in the name of social engineering with the goal of establishing a great, utopian society. It didn’t work then 30-40 years ago, and it isn’t working now.

Thien’s well written novel focuses on a community of highly talented and motivated musicans in China – an elite group – who were reduced either to working in factories, building radios, were tortured and killed at the hands of the Red Guard or exiled far from family and colleagues. Their talents were no longer appreciated; in fact, they were considered a threat.

China has done its best to suppress the knowledge of what took place in its recent history from its own people, including the Tianamen Square massacre, a task that is much more difficult in this age of the internet and instant information.

Hermina Dykxhoorn offers a glimpse of China under its current President for Life, Xi, open for business with the world, but still clinging tenaciously to its communist ideology, and making it difficult to live there for anyone with other ideas (p. 34).

Oppression of ideas and of people is nothing new. It is becoming more apparent in North America as well, as ideas that are not considered correct ones are shouted down in universities, a place where ideas and debating of those ideas are supposed to free-ranging. Consider the current furor over abortion.

Anyone not on board with the mantra that abortion is a woman’s right is vilified by the media and shut down at the highest levels of government, particularly in Canada. Ideas that are considered “wrong” today are now being censored without the need of government edict. In Canada, for example, the movie “Unplanned” is not being picked up by

Canadian movie theatres despite its strong showing in the United States. Why? Because it hurts the pro-abortion cause. Yet we are a long way from having to flee our homelands. Not so, in countries dominated by Muslim governments. Eastern Christians are particularly vulnerable. Bassam Madany, born in Lebanon and a long time radio minister with the Back to God Hour, continues to write about Islam and its influence in the East, and particularly how that is affecting Eastern Christians, as the Christian presence in a number of countries such as Iraq and Syria, dwindles. (See page 24.)

In America, where freedom still reigns based on Christian principles of freedom of opportunity, of speech, of conscience and religion, of peaceful assembly and of association, we cling to them recognising their fragility and rarity in this world.

John Van Dyk, Editor
Christian Renewal Magazine

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