Precedents
Nancy Pelosi, a profiteering progressive fool who happens to be the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, made a brief visit to Taiwan this week. Communist China objected, and claimed her visit was a terrible provocation — because they want to do to Taiwan what Vladimir Putin is currently trying to do to Ukraine. Time Magazine, or whatever they call their online edition, has just posted a Chinese Communist Party propaganda piece disguised as a news article, “‘A Wake-Up Call.’ Pelosi’s Visit to Taiwan Has Badly Damaged U.S.-China Relations, But Not Irreversibly.” The article highlights the “damage” done to the diplomatic relationship, and explains, oh so reasonably, how the Biden administration might be able to “mitigate the damage” by distancing itself from Pelosi’s transgression. The international relations experts cited throughout the article, to explain how precarious the situation has become, from a balanced (i.e., morally equivalent) perspective, just happen to be Chinese scholars, including one based in Hong Kong, where no academic would dare to speak on the record, let alone be permitted to do so, unless he were an obedient shill for the CCP’s talking points.
Let me offer my own commentary on the situation without any pretense of its being mere reportage. The Communist Party of China is not looking for “ways to reestablish trust” in its relations with the U.S. It is looking for ways to lull the West to sleep so that it can begin the next phase of its longstanding strategy to establish domination over the entire eastern hemisphere, which phase includes the violent annexation of Taiwan. Neither Nancy Pelosi nor any other Western leader has any obligation to mollify and appease totalitarian dictatorships with expansionist aspirations.
I do not trust Pelosi much more than I trust the Chinese Communist Party, but I know that any notion of “avoiding antagonizing the CCP” in a case such as this is nothing but a euphemism for abandoning the principle of freedom under a regime of cowardice and slow-motion surrender. It is no more appropriate to play neutral on Taiwan than to say, as Donald Trump did for his hero Putin, that the 2014 annexation of Crimea was “a long time ago” so everyone should just let it go.
Get ready for your next social distancing regulations, your next work-from-home rules, your next vaccination mandates, your next school shutdowns, public event cancellations, and endless rounds of government-authorized experts telling you through the media what you must comply with in order to save yourself and the world from the latest public health emergency.
The precedents have been established, we might say superabundantly established, since the spring of 2020. Governments around the globe, working in coordination, and encouraged by one another’s “successes” (not against the virus, of course, where they have failed dismally, but rather against their citizens’ self-determination), have granted themselves unlimited authority to curtail civil society and restrict human liberty with lawless abandon, as long as they can provide any excuse, however flimsy and implausible, related to any sort of public health risk. The very fact that Covid-19 (the disease, not the totalitarian phenomenon) was not as cataclysmic as they claimed will play into their future power grabs perfectly. For if this pandemic provided sufficient warrant for the wanton violation of the rule of law and the shredding of any deference to the premises of a free society — which the vast majority of people on the planet, having long been indoctrinated to obedience and fear, and propagandized into ceding their common sense to the official spokesmen, would unquestioningly agree that it did — then the next emergency imposition should be relatively easy. We have all been inured, to varying degrees, to the notion that government has not only the authority but the obligation to determine when, and to what extent, the economy must be commandeered and private life coercively restrained in the name of protecting us all. (“Us all” meaning “we, the ignorant and inexpert masses who couldn’t possibly make reasonable and responsible calculations regarding our own or our neighbors’ safety, and must therefore be regulated into good behavior by our superiors, the state.”)
It is just a matter of time and political utility.