Further to my recent post about Walmart’s alleged conversion to localism, it might be timely to remind ourselves of the unsavoury regime that allows Walmart to undercut its competitors. Walmart’s relationship with China is well documented but the latter’s gross and grotesque persecution of Christianity is all too often glossed over by corporate giants like Walmart, and by the Federal Government and the news media.

A graphic reminder of China’s secular fundamentalist dictatorship was offered by the recent death of the 86-year-old Catholic Bishop Leo Yao Liang of Xiwansi. Bishop Yao had spent three decades in detention, longer than the prison sentence imposed on Nelson Mandela, for the “crime” of being defiantly loyal to the Pope. The Chinese government banned Catholics from outside Bishop Yao’s local county from attending the funeral and banned all references to him as “bishop”. In spite of government threats, many Catholics defied the ban and braved the snow to attend his funeral.

The funeral was not mentioned by the mainstream western media, nor had the media mounted a campaign for the bishop’s release from detention, even though his only “crime” was to be loyal to the papacy. The sickening hypocrisy of the press in demanding human rights for everyone except Christians is plain for all to see, as is the equally sickening hypocrisy of successive American governments in their continued support for China’s anti-Christian totalitarianism. And as for global capitalism, it’s very happy to share a bed with the reds as long as it means that it can continue to maximise its profits on the sweat of cheap, semi-slave labour.

The only voice of sanctity and sanity amid the maelstrom of instability caused by self-serving globalism comes from the Catholic Church in its social teaching, and especially in the words of the present Holy Father in his recent encyclical and his ongoing calls for the freedom that comes with an embrace of subsidiarity.    

And as for Obama’s verbiage about “human rights”, and the media’s calls for “the freedom of the indvidual”, and Walmart’s cant about localism, it’s all so much hypocrisy as long as they continue to support the extremist secular fundamentalism of China.