To John Derbyshire, Freedom is Irrelevant
What has gotten into John Derbyshire? He catches the vapors vis-a-vis China:
The sentiment that Nazism was the wave of the future was quite prevalent in the 30s, Communism in the 40s. The sentiment was quite mistaken.
It is hard to say that the Chinese people are "fine" with despotism given that they haven't been asked and that each manifestation of not being fine with it has been crushed by tanks and exile to the laogai camps for reeducation.
I am frankly surprised that Mr. Derbyshire, whose personal knowledge of China dwarfs my own, now buys into the notion that the Chinese people, perhaps unique amongst those on Earth, do not desire freedom from oppression.
Freedom is on the march, John---won't you fall into the ranks of those seeking it for those laboring under the yoke of tyranny?
Most likely the latter. My Chinese friends and relatives have been telling me for years that with rising prosperity and the demands of a confident middle class, China will morph into a rational, constitutional state any day now. Is there the faintest sign that this is happening? From all that I can see, the ChiComs really have got it worked out, and their despotism is stronger than ever. They learned all the right lessons from 1989, and there will be no massed popular demonstration in the streets of Beijing — not this year, nor the next, nor the next. An unelected and fundamentally lawless dictatorship rules China, and the Chinese people, by and large, are fine with it.
Why should they not be, if they have movies to watch, food in their bellies, gadgets to play with? Which they have, aplenty. If the phase of history we are entering is to be one of amoral, ahistorical hedonism, why should we suppose that constitutional government can manage that kind of world better than the soft despotism of modern China? After all, the most agreeable and hedonistic society anyone has ever been able to imagine, the one described in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, was not the least bit democratic. As in Huxley's utopia, bioengineering and pharmacology — both hot growth areas in Chinese science, with no Judeo-Christian ethical reservations or eagle-eyed tort lawyers to slow down research — can take care of the social problems. It is hard to push away the thought that what we are seeing over there is the future.
The sentiment that Nazism was the wave of the future was quite prevalent in the 30s, Communism in the 40s. The sentiment was quite mistaken.
It is hard to say that the Chinese people are "fine" with despotism given that they haven't been asked and that each manifestation of not being fine with it has been crushed by tanks and exile to the laogai camps for reeducation.
I am frankly surprised that Mr. Derbyshire, whose personal knowledge of China dwarfs my own, now buys into the notion that the Chinese people, perhaps unique amongst those on Earth, do not desire freedom from oppression.
Freedom is on the march, John---won't you fall into the ranks of those seeking it for those laboring under the yoke of tyranny?
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