China’s Xi Jinping is now “ruler for life” and taking on a new ultra-aggressive expansion of Community Party power and repression inside China, and also actively exporting “surveillance state” tools of oppression around the world.
We are the proverbial frogs in slowly boiling water.
Jeremy Hunt (no relation) is now effectively the prime minister of the UK. This is a man who spoke approvingly of China’s “sealing the doors” behind his sister for two weeks during lockdowns in Beijing, with a police detail outside her window (see the link to this video in this essay by Michael Senger).
China, following its insane “Zero Covid” policies, continues to impose rolling lockdowns on hundreds of millions of its people. I crunched the numbers for Shanghai in April of 2022 and I found it almost certainly the case that 99% of the alleged “Covid cases” were simply false positives that resulted from widespread and repeated testing of people with no symptoms.
The sci-fi dystopia of the ultra surveillance state is no longer sci-fi — it’s here, now, in China. And China’s leaders are actively exporting this model around the world. An unholy marriage of capitalism and scientism has taken place behind closed doors, and this newlywed pair is now set to re-make the world, with large centers of power in just about every nation, east and west.
Now Xi Jinping is set to become (this week) China’s ruler for life, the next Mao, as he has taken every rein of power in China, and he is looking to aggressively expand China’s power and influence around the world.
While not as draconian or as bold in their pursuit of power, the western nation Big Pharma, Big Defense, and Big Media “captains of industry” are continuing to corrupt western nations all in the pursuit of the almighty dollar.
This combination of powermongers working toward the same objectives, such as further medicalization of illness, more stringent pandemic and public health policies, and a world in which populations are forced to comply with ever-more-demanding impositions on daily life, is a recipe for human oppression like we are already seeing in China over the last decade.
I’m reading The Surveillance State, a new book by WSJ reporters Josh Chin and Liza Lin, focused on China’s use of ubiquitous cameras, facial recognition, QR codes on every doorway that track who is in that house (yes, literally), extreme censorship of free speech, forced “reeducation” of millions of Uighurs in Xinjiang, and many many other affronts to human dignity and freedom.
It’s all the dystopian stuff of nightmares, but it’s real and here now.
These trends are coming to the West, including the US, if we’re not extremely vigilant. Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a deep dive into the details of how western nation companies like Google and Facebook are actively exploiting user data and ensnaring billions of people in their world-wide web of surveillance, manipulation and exploitation of not only buying habits but also of voting and other forms of power.
Jeremy Hunt is part of this trend and he represents an extreme arrogance that is common among the ruling and “educated” classes that “we know better.” The masses must be controlled — for their own good, of course.
The debacles of the last decades, from the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, to the 2008 financial crisis, to the gain of function research that pretty clearly was behind the pandemic, to the massively over-wrought pandemic response around the world that has caused far more harm than good, and many other policy catastrophes, demonstrate very well that they do not know better.
In fact, they have achieved failure after failure.
Future essays will look at how we can prevent this dystopia from coming to the west, and what we can do personally to ensure we are protected.
