Totalitarian Chinese Government Censors Fight Club … Viewers Outraged!

Maybe this will help CCP apologists clarify the difference between condemning Xi’s regime and having ill will toward more than a billion Chinese people wrongly suffering under their control.

Fight Club was an immensely popular cult classic film that succeeded specifically because it was counter-cultural. The Chinese totalitarians might not realize it yet, but this inept response to subversive art is evidence of the reason their regime must — eventually — be destined to lose.

What China is trying to do to Fight Club, what heavy-handed woke activists, and what a certain percentage of attempts at Christian film, music, or artwork have in common is an attempt to push propaganda, rather than tell a genuine story.

Most people have seen it, and there are dozens of lessons that could be taken from it.

But at least one of the reasons Fight Club, as a movie, ‘worked’ was because it took a cubicle jockey who was dissatisfied with his life, and it taught him to rage against the idols his culture had trained him to worship.

In a culture that expects so many of us to slot in and become an anxiety-driven consumeristic cog in the machine, sublimating our own desires and dreams so that we can work long hours helping someone else to achieve theirs, Fight Club took direct aim at the roles we are supposed to mindless accept.

It’s a film in which the male characters — notably the very ‘nobodies’ our culture disdains — begin discovering themselves, awakening to their actual un-pursued dreams (for example, the moment where Brad Pitt’s character holds a gun to the convenience store worker’s head, or when he lets go of the wheel of moving car) and they come together in a movement specifically tailored to overthrowing the system that had entrapped them.

It was about ‘feeling alive’, and even the fights themselves were as much about having the courage to take a beating as they were about taking a swing at anyone else. It was an invitation to return to a masculine world of risk and reward that had all been bred out of us.

Fight Club doesn’t offer much in the way of hope — it stops short of offering any new and better way to live — but it does present a clear message that, in some way, each of us has the power to get off the hamster wheel of living the life someone else has dictated to us.

Needless to say, that is NOT the kind of message the relative handful of people leading the CCP would want being pumped into the imaginations of a billion or so Chinese citizens.

So the CCP sanitized the ending of the film.

In the closing scenes of the original, Norton’s character The Narrator, kills off his imaginary alter ego Tyler Durden – played by Pitt – and then watches multiple buildings explode with Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), suggesting his character’s plan to bring down modern civilisation is underway.

In the censored version released in China, The Narrator still kills off Durden, but the exploding buildings scene is replaced with a written message on black screen: ‘The police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding.’

It then adds that Tyler – a figment of The Narrator’s imagination – was sent to a ‘lunatic asylum’ for psychological treatment and was later discharged. —DailyMail

That’s what can happen when you have the sort of complete control against ‘dangerous misinformation’ the State does not want their population hearing.

That’s right, the exact power of censorship the Democrats are now fighting for is the tool the Communist Chinese have been using to subvert and control their own population. Authoritarians love it. The film is distributed by Tencent.

Chinese tech company Tencent has deep ties with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Guangzhou-based Southern Metropolis Daily reported that Tencent has established 275 party branches within its offices. The company employs more than 60,000 people, out of which over 11,000 are party members. Tencent was founded in 1989 by five friends, led by Ma Huateng. Ma is known to be one of the richest men worldwide as Bloomberg reported his net worth to be around $55.5 billion.

Three members of the company’s Discipline Inspection Commission and 11 members of the Party Committee are all core executives. Plus, the company also has 724 part-time and 10 full-time party officials. — VisionTimes

Unfortunately for the CCP, many Chinese viewers already have a reference point for this movie that was made more than 20 years ago. They also know they’re being lied to. They don’t like it.

The shocking and seemingly unwanted change — one which both removed and added content that completely altered the plot of “Fight Club” — is becoming more and more common under the nation’s regime, the Guardian reported.

“Under president Xi Jinping, Chinese authorities have pushed to purge society of elements deemed unhealthy, including scenes within movies, television and video games,” the Guardian wrote, adding that “it was not clear if government censors ordered the alternative ending or if the original movie’s producers made the changes.”

…A Tiananmen Square joke was previously ordered out of a “Simpsons” episode and Marvel’s “Iron Man 3” had a Chinese doctor spliced in to save Tony Stark’s life in Chinese releases, Fortune reported.

Adding fuel (and concern) to the censorship fire, the Cyberspace Administration of China announced today that it will be running a “clean” web campaign that will create “civilized and healthy” browsing during the upcoming lunar new year, per the Guardian. —NewYorkPost

These are the people Hollywood, and Fortune 500 corporations have been working so hard to placate. But if they have to censor like this, they are afraid of the truth. And if they are afraid of the truth, they are building on a house of cards.

Unvarnished truth spoken in The Gulag Archipelago helped topple the Evil Empire (USSR).

And if China’s CCP thinks they can just whitewash stories to make themselves the hero, they really don’t understand how deeply the power of story — and art generally — resonates with the human spirit. You can try to limit art however you want, it will find some new form to express itself. Stories, music, film, dance, comedy, graffiti, cartoons, memes. Something will come along that authorities haven’t figured out how to suppress.

And by then? Then the jig is up.

If you like art, you’ll love this…

Psalms of War: Prayers That Literally Kick Ass is a collection, from the book of Psalms, regarding how David rolled in prayer. I bet you haven’t heard these read, prayed, or sung in church against our formidable enemies — and therein lies the Church’s problem. We’re not using the spiritual weapons God gave us to waylay the powers of darkness. It might be time to dust them off and offer ‘em up if you’re truly concerned about the state of Christ’s Church and of our nation.

Also included in this book, Psalms of War, are reproductions of the author’s original art from his Biblical Badass Series of oil paintings.

This is a great gift for the prayer warriors. Real. Raw. Relevant.