11-17-2019, 10:36 PM
(11-17-2019, 11:52 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 17-Nov-2019 World View: The Mandate from Heaven
Guest Wrote:> The Chinese communists aren't the brightest bunch. They seem to
> make the wrong choice every time. Why should this time be any
> different? I expect war to break out any day now. Most likely by
> accident.
I can't overstate how completely I agree with this. I'm constantly
astounded by the abject stupidity of the CCP and the decisions they
make.
In my book, "War between China and Japan - Why America must prepare,"
I detailed China's "century of humiliation." And while the
West did things to humiliate China, what came through over and
over again was that the Chinese were humiliated because of their
own stupidity.
Since WW II, the biggest example was Mao's Great Leap Forward,
which was the most disastrous agricultural policy of any nation
in world history. Then you can point to the mass slaughter
of Christians, the Tiananmen Square massacre, and so forth.
OK, Marxism-Leninism sucks, and Maoism is even crazier.
Quote:So the question is: Why does China make so many stupid mistakes, one
after another? I've thought about this, and I've come up with two
reasons.
China has practically no heritage of democracy. Leaders of the 1911 revolution called for it, and the successors of that revolution in the Kuomintang gave lip service to it while establishing a nearly-totalitarian dictatorship whose authority did not extend far from Beijing. Warlord government is itself despotic, and Mao Zedong became the one warlord with a modern ideology. Unfortunately that modern ideology was Stalinism with Chinese characteristics.
Quote:First, they're a dictatorship. Dictators are no smarter than leaders
of democracies, and they may be even stupider, since their major
skills are torturing and killing people. But the big difference is
that when a leader of a democracy pursues a policy leading to
disaster, then the political opposition stops him -- through the
bureaucracy, through the courts, or through the legislature. But when
a dictator adopts a stupid policy, then there's nobody to stop him.
Trump may go down because the so-called "Deep State" has found people who will cooperate with it. Trump is not only a medicrity, but also an arrogant one who gets more objectionable seemingly every day. He got elected under freakish circumstances unlikely to be repeated in 2020. Our Deep State (military, intelligence services, diplomatic corps, and federal law enforcement) may not be that different from its analogues even under dictatorial systems, but it is not going to let certain things slide.
Trump was stupid enough to purge the Republican party before marginalizing the Democrats, so guess who is in a position to gain politically by cooperating with the Deep State? Or was our Deep State unwilling to do partisan dirty work for one Party?
Quote:The second reason applies specifically to China: The CCP is a
religious cult. For millennia, the Chinese people have said that
their leaders can govern only if they've received a "Mandate from
Heaven," and Confucius and Sun Tzu set down rules for how a leader can
keep his Mandate from Heaven, once he's received it.
And that is how things were when China was an Empire whose Heaven-sent ruler was to be treated as if a god even if the Emperor is a near-infant. In the beautifully-made The Last Emperor, the literal last emperor gets a little taste of freedom after his prison term and is shocked to find that Mao Zedong is getting the same elevation to god-like status as he saw.
Quote:But then the religious cult goes deeper. Everyone refers to China as
"the Middle Kingdom," but that's a highly racist characterization.
Since ancient times, the highly racist Chinese have viewed the
universe in three layers -- The highest layer is the Kingdom of
Heaven. The second layer is China, the Master Race, the Middle
Kingdom -- yellow race, black hair, brown eyes, yellow skin. And the
bottom layer is you and me -- the barbarians.
Koreans and Japanese seem to have the same characteristics, so it goes beyond race. Chinese culture is difficult to crack. There have been people who assimilated into Chinese life as refugees and political operatives (the pre-Islamic Sassanid dynasty took flight to China and assimilated over a couple centuries)... Persians look much more like Europeans than even South Asians.
What you say of the Chinese also applied to the Japanese before 1945, when the Japanese had to admit that however different they were by culture from the rest of the world, that they were at most equals. This said, most peoples have hierarchies in which some people are most like themselves, some less like, and so on until one finds a gap between humans and bonobos.
The real hierarchy in China better fits this one:
CCP leadership
capitalists
intellectuals and professionals
workers
pariahs (seen as criminals for any show of dissent)
In the United States the hierarchy is more like this:
big capitalists
the political elite
executives
professionals and small-business owners
intellectuals and skilled workers
unskilled workers
people on the dole
criminals
Government by lobbyist, which many not have foundation in our Constitution, is practically the norm with elected officials as window-dressing. The lobbyists are of course retainers of the rich-and-powerful. Because our system has debased formal education into career training, college education now gets away with college professors who get paid as badly as restaurant workers. Civil servants can be anything from unskilled laborers (the people who fill pot-holes and catch stray dogs) to executives.
All social orders are hierarchies, ours included. China is poorer and has no democratic tradition -- and little heritage of capitalism.
Quote:So if you're Xi Jinping, and your policies are guided by the
view that you're head of the Master Race, that you're dealing
with barbarians, and that you have to follow the policies of
Confucius and Sun Tzu to deal with these barbarians, then there's
no choice: You really are a total idiot. And if you're a dictator,
then you can adopt the stupidest and most idiotic policies
possible, and no one will stop you.
That applies to all dictators and despots everywhere and at all times.
And if you are a bigot like Donald Trump, then you are convinced that you are part of some Master Race that can rarely trust anyone unlike oneself unless that other is utterly servile. Someone from overseas can attribute such to chattel slavery, abuse of First Peoples, brutal treatment of people in American colonies (especially the Philippines), and Jim Crow practice. Every nation has blood-soaked pages in its history, and America is no exception.
In time there will be democracy in China, and as in Japan it will have distinctive characteristics fitting the culture.
Quote:So that explains why the Chinese make one unbelievably stupid mistake
after another.
With regard to Hong Kong, that's why I say that I don't know what the
CCP is going to do, but there's only one thing you can be sure of:
That whatever the CCP does will only make things worse.
People keep doing stupid things because they get away with it. Nicholas II of Russia kept making military blunders until revolutionaries overthrew him. Hitler kept doing stupid things until he shot himself as the Red Army closed in on the Fuehrerbunker. Nicolae Ceausescu
kept doing offensive deeds in the belief that his style of government was right -- until he saw a crowd turn against him. It's not only political leaders. This even applies to gangsters like Al Capone and John Gotti, business crooks like the Enron clique, and the coterie at Lehman Brothers who were the focus of the 2008 financial crash.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
