Decades ago, science fiction writers described a future filled with totalitarian states, where the rights of individuals were sacrificed to the needs of the State. Novels such as Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, An Excess Male, and others, paint a bleak picture of surveillance, dogma, indoctrination, and soulless everyday living.
With the advance of technology, we are speeding toward those dark visions and in no country is it truer than in Communist China. What started to provide services in a timely manner has morphed into a means of intense control of the individual via mandatory apps which track every individual’s movement, purchases, and contacts. Such monitoring is supported by a series of rewards and punishments from which the individual cannot escape. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others of their ilk could only dream of such power and control.
The link below will take you to a recent editorial on how China is now using that type of power on the international level by controlling foreign diplomats accredited to work in China. It is a tale of how weak willed our State Department and political leadership is in their desire to maintain open links to a nation which has openly stated that they wish to supplant the United States as the premier power in the world and is willing to use any tactic or weapon to achieve that end.
History is again ignored by those who should be the best versed in its lessons, especially lesson number one, that weakness in the face to aggression only leads to more aggression. China is willing to violate international laws and norms which go back centuries and has found that the dictum that “might makes right” has truth. Let us hope that our leaders will demand that China obey the simplest international conventions and that ignoring such rules will only serve to isolate them.
