File under 'unclear on the concept.' Or more directly, the New York Times has disgraced itself yet again.

The Times in this instance has yielded its precious column inches to one Regina Ip, a Hong Kong functionary who defends China's treaty-busting crackdown on the enclave, something millions of Hong Kongers oppose. But never mind them. She's got the New York Times to serve as her megaphone. In an op-ed for the Times, she writes:

To some, the new national security law is especially chilling because it seems simultaneously vague and very severe. But many laws are vague, constructively so. And this one only seems severe precisely because it fills longstanding loopholes — about subversion, secession, local terrorism, collusion with external forces. One person’s “severe” is someone else’s intended effect.

Oh.

So us schmoes thinking the Chicom crackdown and repression of the former island of freedom on the South China Sea is 'severe' were merely missing the point. See, if Beijing intends it, then all us workers ants here should be all in for 'severe.' It sounds like something out of Mao.

It's totalitarian garbage, actually, published by the paper of Walter Duranty.

Here's what the freedom-loving Hong Kong locals think of Ip, no translation necessary:

Now she's got space in the New York Times for her nasty op-eds, defending China's thugcraft in Hong Kong, which by the way, is a violation of its 1997 treaty with Britain.

As National Review's Jimmy Quinn notes:

It’s a PR coup for the dictatorship that’s snuffed out the remaining elements of democratic governance in the city. The only reasonable argument for publishing it would have been to expose the CCP’s aims — but these are already widely known.

It's also grotesquely self-abasing, an unfit act for a paper in a country that supposedly prizes its First Amendment freedoms. The ChiComs in fact have brutalized the New York Times' reporters in just this year alone, beating them up, yanking their visas, kicking them out. Just recently a New York Times reporter trying to cover COVID in the people's hellhole found herself beat up and detained for a day or two by ChiCom regime goons.

But all we see from the Times is kowtowing. Back in March, a New York Times columnist, Li Yuan, wrote that China's expulsions of the Times reporters showed Beijing's 'confidence' in their own message, which is about as masochistic and Orwellian an interpretation as any coming from the Times, when the reaction should be simple outrage. Seems the ChiComs now have not only kicked out the Times' reporters, they've commandeered the Times's op-ed page, too. In the military, that's called hot pursuit. But at the same time, if they were all that confident, why would they still need the Times to use to get their message out? What they're confident in is not their message but their ability to control the Times.

There's all kinds of creepy stuff happening to reporters over there - a recent local reporter who was disappeared and detained for two months came back singing the regime's praises. The ChiComs are totalitarians, remember, they have a yin and yang relationship with use of force and use of lies to reinforce each other, and they can make you say black is white. Freedom of thinking and freedom of speech is not their thing. Force of violence is what they are about.

Which is what makes every last thing this nomenklatura says a total lie. Publishing any of this dreck from these people is disgusting for that alone. You don't run op-eds by Hitler or Mussolini, you don't need to turn your pages over to the ChiCom propagandists either, it's common sense. These people don't 'think' What they do is propagandize in the name of strengthening their own power, and the Times is a convenient vehicle for them. This is not about ideas.

The Times itself may argue that all sorts of points of view should be represented in its op-ed pages. 

There's just one problem with that: They effectively fired their op-ed page editor for running the point of view of Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican conservative not too long ago, forcing him to resign. So only leftists get to express different points of view? Somehow that's not quite the freedom of speech they think it is. 

More likely, they got muscled, agreeing to publish this crap in exchange for a promise not to beat up or jail some reporter, or worse still, some kind of stock deal from the upper reaches. They probably gave something to get something, and it wasn't pretty. And if it's so, they sold their integrity.

Image credit: Alfredoko, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0