It is probably no coincidence that tales of so-called Chinese social credit were born and flourish in the West. They correspond exactly to our experience of large bureaucratic apparatuses. It is not the “don’t make trouble and we’ll leave you alone” mentality that is typical of dictatorships and authoritarian regimes.
The mentality that prevails in the West is a combination of the master’s view of the serf and the customer relationship. From this comes the need to constantly care, to educate, to provide more and more services, whether one wants it or not. To cover all aspects of his life, his privacy, his behaviour and his thinking and feeling. To feed him more and more products. According to what products are in stock, not according to what he needs. “Exploit the customer’s potential” – they say in corporate management parlance.
Equipped with this experience, we then attribute to Chinese civilisation something we ourselves know intimately. In fact, we can no longer even imagine how else it could be. In fact, we can no longer even imagine that other civilizations can simply ignore individuals – in good and bad ways.
About civilizational flattery
How is it possible that we have taken it so completely for granted that the West is the whole world? How could we have thought that the whole world had adopted European civilization and European thought? How could it have escaped so many people that other regions are developing differently, according to other civilizational logics, and are heading somewhere else entirely? How is it possible that Europeans were so blind?
Of course, many have read Huntington. And many were moved by our contacts with Islam, where we saw a rapid return to the early Middle Ages. But we still didn’t fully realize it.
I realized it again when I picked up Francis Fukuyama again after a while (not The End of History, but his later work on neoconservatism). He really believes (sincerely, apparently) that America is loved the world over. That not only are the elites attached to American money (which of course is extorted from the poorer people in those countries) pro-American, but that entire societies yearn for the American model. Actually, it’s easy. Everyone you talk to flatters Americans. If you don’t, you put him in the “communist” or “fundamentalist” column. And you don’t trust the polls.
These people will also never accept that Islam could be a civilizational rival trying to destroy us. For the same reason. They are in contact exclusively with the layer of Muslim societies that will tell them everything they want to hear (even if they tacitly support Islamization).
On the communist legacy
The legacy of the Soviet bloc regimes can be broadly divided into two groups. On the one hand, the secret police, the brutality of censorship, the surveillance of people, the ubiquitous stupid ideological slogans and the shooting of their own citizens at the borders. On the other hand, the care for industry, agriculture, the enormous interest in education, the promotion of national culture and national pride, the promotion of social cohesion and, of course, the effort to ensure that even those from poor backgrounds had a decent chance in life.
In that sense, communist regimes have two kinds of heirs. The oligarchy that rules in the West continues the legacy of the communist secret police, censorship, surveillance of people and ideological brainwashing. In fact, it is no coincidence that their hero and the new Czech president is a former elite member of the communist repressive forces. It is typical of this layer. In the first years after the fall of communism, American corporations hired exclusively state security agents for senior management positions.
The nationalist opposition, in turn, is trying to build on the other part of the communist legacy. Good education, high technical level, industrial development, food self-sufficiency and so on.
In the post-communist countries, we are all building on one or other part of that heritage, whether we want to or not.
By the way, political processes are no longer rare, but a normal part of everyday life. During my childhood in the late communist system, every political trial was an event that was talked about for a long time. Now they are so common that no one addresses it.
So, eventually, cases where someone gets five years hard time for anti-state speech go by without much attention.
Last week, Ladislav Vrábel, the organizer of the demonstrations, got off with only probation. He got it for publicly expressing fears that the Czech government would use F35s to launch a nuclear attack on Moscow and that retaliation might follow. Yet the Czech government itself does not rule out such a possibility. Active supporters of the government speak publicly about the benefits of a nuclear first strike, and no government officials bother to refute this. In its brief to the court, the government office did stress that we are a peaceful state, but it completely omitted those scenarios in which we would feel imminently threatened by Russia occupying a city that the US State Department believes belongs to Moldova. Or if war broke out between Poland and Belarus (which is not at all out of the question, given Poland’s growing aggressiveness and their territorial ambitions). After all, no minister has yet explained why we are acquiring aircraft unsuitable for defending our territory but capable of shooting at Moscow. In other words, Judge Lukas Svrcek condemned Vrabel for a statement he knew to be true. This is what it looks like to do a political job.
Make no mistake. Personally, I don’t share Vrabel’s concern. I assume that the F35s will never be delivered to the Czech Republic. We’ll just pay some billions and that will be the end of it. And if by chance, the current Czech leaders have a reputation for being crazy even among allies, so no one would trust them with nuclear weapons. Fortunately. So it will probably end up with the Czech Defense Minister carrying a child’s model tank in her purse and officials lighting paper models of Moscow on fire again.
On American voting preferences
There is an attempt underway in America to remove the main opponent of the current president from political life, and no one can say how it will turn out and what the consequences will be. After the last few years, we know that the behaviour of the new aristocracy is difficult to predict because decisions are generated essentially at random. We can more or less predict how the Russian leadership will act, we can predict the Chinese leadership and even the actions of the George Soros gang – because each of them has distinct interests. But the American political elite as a whole is unpredictable – too many interests and irrational mob behavior.
However, there is something perhaps even more interesting. If Biden had faced Trump in a fair election, he probably would have beaten him! Albeit by a close margin. Most polls agree on this – regardless of the focus of the agency and the methodology used. Of the last 10 published polls, six show Biden winning and only two speak for Trump. And even those “Trump” polls show a shift of votes to Biden.
Yes, the old man with so much dementia that he doesn’t recognize other statesmen and forgets at times that he is president has the upper hand. Who, as his dementia deepens, loses his inhibitions so he farts in public and gropes the little girls around him. A man whose son is a proven criminal and who is visibly manipulated by monsters like Blinken and Nuland. These are the types of people who would otherwise be selling drugs to children and ordering contract killings and coincidentally have been given the opportunity to become war criminals and kill people by the hundreds of thousands. After the debacle in Afghanistan, the looming debacle in Ukraine and the disastrous economic results, he has a high chance of winning the next election.
How is this possible? Quite simply by answering the question in the election not “who would be the best president” but “what is in the interests of my social class”. So the winner is the one who has a stronger coalition of social classes behind him. And Trump’s 2016 coalition fell apart without being replaced by something comparably strong. The coalition that Soros put together before he retired is working for now.