​The Real Take-Away from China

By Bobby Casey

China is an interesting place. Much like the US, it has regional diversity in cuisine and dialects. China as a place, and the Chinese as a people are great! China as a government, on the other hand is quite a different story.

You would be hard-pressed to even find many Chinese who would defend it… off the record. On the record, they will sing high praises of course.

I​t used to be that World War 2 Germany was the harbinger of what could happen if people didn’t stay vigilant. That simile has been worn down to an almost incoherent — if not unrecognizable — pulp of what it was.

T​he epithet of likening everything we hate to the leader of the time has diluted the significance of what he did tremendously. And what is lost is how and what lead to his rise in power. A crucial piece that is often mistaken for denialism.

T​he US played a role in setting that up; and depending on how deep you want to go down that rabbit hole, it could even be argued they wanted that war. I’ll leave the foil hat stuff out of it, but it goes to show how little tribute the precipitating events leading to that war receives to where the details are dismissed for more reductive assessments.

He and his leadership found its way to the cover of Time Magazine as man of the year, in fact.  A similar praise can be found for China by leadership in the World Economic Forum, calling China a “role model for many nations”.  A clear oppressor getting praise from other global leaders is not a good sign.  A clear oppressor being covered by the MSM is also not a good sign.

(Note: I am deliberately avoiding the name here.)

People in general have a tendency to treat people with conflicting ideas as adversaries, rather than as a portent of what could be. Given the season, it might make sense to liken Germany to the ghost of Christmas past, the US and Western Europe as Christmas present, and China as the ghost of Christmas yet to come.

T​he most natural response to seeing what is happening in China is to avoid going. That’s also true for any country demonstrating these onerous measures. There are 195 countries, so the options are finite. There’s a line between being a jet-setting globe trotter and a fugitive of tyranny.

A​t some point, people will need to say, “Enough”.

T​here’s a documentary called “One Child Nation”, and it is about the one-child policy China recently overturned. The things people were willing to do, that they otherwise would never have considered doing to anyone, much less to family, friends, and neighbors is truly heart-breaking.

W​hat people fail to piece together is what starts as “greater good” policy, when enforced, becomes much more deadly than whatever the policy was meant to prevent in the first place.

Inevitably, the people become the default enemy of the state, and no amount of kowtowing will save you.

​We wrote about their digitized social credit score. If you look online, the mainstream media is rather eager to defend the policy and “clarify” the “misconceptions” of what exactly is entailed (case in point, and another one, that isn’t as mainstream). It’s that motte-and-bailey fallacy at play: On the motte is this benevolent, uncontroversial intention; in the bailey is the atrocious entailment of what that intention is. Between them is the slippery slope.

T​his is the augury. The specific events and headlines are just revelations of what lurks in the bailey. The sugar-coating and interference run by the media is arguing the motte.

China continues to terrorize the citizenry with secret police visits to vocal dissenters and fleets of drones hovering above city streets monitoring foot traffic and blaring propaganda messages. Some drones even spray unknown chemicals across entire city blocks. In the meantime, China has fully implemented digital vaccine passports systems tied to public venues and retail stores. You cannot function in a major Chinese city without an up-to-date vaccine passport or a negative covid test taken every couple of weeks.

W​e wrote about the run on Chinese banks earlier. N​ow there are protests on the continued lock-downs. The protests aren’t borne of just general frustration. Apple factory workers were held and detained in factory quarantine against their will with little sustenance provided.

People are protesting lock-downs because they were barricaded into their own homes from the outside, and a fire broke out. They are protesting because a father couldn’t access a hospital for his child.

I​t’s reported that a few places have eased their lock-downs in response to these protests, but the protesters themselves are now being tracked down digitally.

Edward Snowden exposed a lot of and about the US surveillance state. They didn’t really stop, rather some posturing and throat-clearing happened, but otherwise the NSA and DHS are continuing their efforts to spy on average Americans.

Elon Musk recently decided to unlock the “Twitter Files” to intrepid reporter Matt Taibi. Within them, we are seeing how the government sanitized and censored posts that challenged their narrative with Covid and Hunter Biden’s laptop.

I​t shouldn’t, then come as a surprise that military contractors are operating behind the scenes on our browsers:

This week several major web browsers quickly severed ties with a mysterious software company used to certify the security of websites, three weeks after the Washington Post exposed its connections to a US military contractor, the Post reports.

TrustCor Systems provided ‘certificates’ to browsers to Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge, which vouched for the legitimacy of said websites.

The same article points out another instance this happened:

In a previous case which illustrates the importance of trusting root-level authorities – a security company controlled by the United Arab Emirates, DarkMatter, applied in 2019 to have top-level root authority from their status as an intermediate authority with less independence. The request followed revelations that DarkMatter had hacked dissidents and even some Americans – after which Mozilla denied it root power.

T​his isn’t to infer that this was some sort of deliberate action. But the fact that it happened, exposes a vulnerability for a watchful NSA to later exploit.  That the company wasn’t forthcoming, until reporters exposed them is also concerning.  

People complain about “conspiracy theories”. It’s the secretive nature and defensiveness by these questionable actors that creates the fertile ground for such theories to flourish. Things like:

I see folks cheering the Chinese protesters on, but look how far gone the situation became before they finally pushed back. It took being cooked in a building, deprived of food and water in a factory, and watching your child die from denied access to medical care?

O​f course I err on the side of the protesters. But I do so, with a cautionary tale for the rest of the free world: don’t let it get to this point! Don’t let the oppression of the Chinese become yet another trope in history. Be vigilant. Protect your freedom and question everything.