Canada's House of Commons delivered an uncontested rebuke to Xi Jinping's Chinese Communist Party by declaring that the Chinese state is committing a genocide of Muslim minorities in Xinjiang province. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet abstained from voting.

In heavily surveilled Xinjiang, over one million Chinese citizens belonging to ethnic, religious, and linguistic minorities — most of whom are Muslim Uyghurs — have been interned in so-called "re-education camps." Scores of reports allege that the camps are hotbeds for ideological brainwashing, slave labor, torture, rape, and attempts to curb minorities' birth-rates — including forced sterilizations and abortions.

"When the Nazis were exterminating Jews, the world did not believe until [it saw] the liberated camps," said Kayum Masimov, a former teacher in Xinjiang, in a news conference hosted by Canada's Conservative Party. "Today the Chinese Communist Party are holding Uyghurs in concentration camps and killing them. Yesterday’s Jews are today’s Uyghurs."

China's embassy to Canada fired back, decrying what it deemed an "anti-China farce" and — in a novel variation on the Soviet quip "and you are lynching negroes" — urging that Canada "reflect deeply on the tragic history of its indigenous people." (A recent government-mandated inquiry found that Canada did, indeed, commit genocide against Indigenous peoples.)

According to Uyghur-Canadian activist Mehmet Tohti, Canada's declaration amounts to the first official recognition of the Uyghurs' genocide by a legislative body. (The U.S. State Department issued a similar declaration earlier this year.)

But official statements are one thing —stopping atrocities is another. Boycott every company, and every brand, complicit in Xinjiang's forced-labor camps. Heckle your representatives until they acknowledge that slavery and genocide have no place in today's world. Press them to take diplomatic or economic action against the genocidal tyrants in the CCP — freeze assets, sanction, whatever it takes.

It's time for BDS to come to Beijing.

#XiXiXi

Arturo Di Modica — best known as the sculptor of "Charging Bull," New York City's 3½-ton, 16-foot-long bronze bovine — has died. He was 80.

His world-famous monument to economic optimism has remained "perpetually poised to charge through the Financial District" since 1989, two years after Black Monday saw the violent crash of stock markets worldwide. And though widely treated as a symbol of capitalist recklessness — as in our notorious bull-and-ballerina poster for Occupy Wall Street — the piece's origins are more mischievous than one might assume.

Originally deposited in front of the New York Stock Exchange as a "gift" to his adoptive homeland, the massive statue — hand-made and self-financed by the once-poor, Sicilian-born artist — was swiftly removed: Di Modica didn't have permission to put it there. Charged a fine of $500, the sculptor afterwards agreed to have it moved to its current location, where it has stayed in suspended animation ever since.

As it turns out, Di Modica's bullish feeling regarding American capitalism was not only premature but misguided. Only 20-odd years after Black Monday — the sorry day that allegedly inspired Charging Bull's creation — the world economy was thrown once more into a crippling financial crisis. And some dozen years after that, stock markets crashed again in the midst of the recession brought on during the COVID-19 pandemic. One begins to wonder whether this sort of thing isn't to be expected of a precarious system built to benefit the few on the backs of the many.

Though Di Modica has left us, his most famous artwork lives on — a brazen idol to be honored and worshiped amid the modern world's financial Babylon. Mammon couldn't be more pleased.

"Respected citizens, the current event is illegal. We are doing everything to ensure your safety," said a police officer, lying through his teeth over a loudspeaker last weekend in Moscow — capital of an ever-more authoritarian Russia. Riot police had been sent to suppress a protest of forty thousand in Pushkin Square. Across the country, in more than 100 cities, over 3,000 demonstrators were arrested. Violence was not uncommon.

The protests — the largest in the country since 2012 — were sparked by the arrest of President Vladimir Putin's longtime bugbear, Alexei Navalny.

Apprehended immediately upon landing in Moscow after five months spent in Germany, where he recovered from a botched assassination attempt (almost certainly carried out by the Kremlin), Navalny now faces as much as three-and-a-half years' imprisonment in a penal colony. He is charged with violating the parole-terms of a previous, likely politically-motivated conviction of embezzlement handed down in 2014, which the European Court of Human Rights deemed patently unfair.

But Navalny isn't staying quiet, not even from prison. Last week, his team (some of whom were also arrested) published a sprawling investigation into Putin's wealth, which they contend was acquired by corrupt means.

"Putin is no longer afraid of western sanctions, critical statements and the demands of European and American politicians for further isolation," writes Zhanna Nemtsova, daughter of Putin critic and opposition politician Boris Nemtsov. In her eyes, last weekend's protests ought to have made Putin sweat. "For him the stakes are too high — he knows that Navalny is capable of overthrowing his regime."

Navalny seems undaunted, even as he faces time behind bars. And he hopes that his supporters will remain so, too — calling for further protests this Sunday. "You won't manage to frighten dozens of millions of people who were robbed by those in power," he announced during an appeal hearing in Moscow. "We won't allow a bunch of villains to impose their rules on our country."

Activists around the globe, citizens, multitudes: with Navalny's example in mind, be courageous in standing up to every form of injustice, every instance of oppression, wherever it lurks. We — the Third Force — have the power to do what governments fear!