Xi Jinping Tells America To Behave, Biden Silent

• 1 year ago

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions” — Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, Rule #5.

• + + Hillary Clinton wrote her undergraduate thesis at Wellesley on Saul Alinsky. When she called Trump supporters “Deplorables” some years back, she was following Alinsky’s method: Demean and mock the enemy whenever possible.
  
  But Hillary was just following orders. Alinsky emphasized the power of mockery as a tool of the radical Left that Lenin had taught long before. Mao used it as well, and this week so did his successor, Xi Jinping.
  
  His target? Communist China’s obedient lapdog, Joe Biden.
  
  Harsh? Hardly. Xi has Joe Biden firmly in his thrall. Biden might perpetrate his domestic crimes with pompous swagger, cheered on by the chorus of media sycophants in Plato’s Cave, but it ends there. And last Monday, China’s “Dear Leader” reminded us of that unhappy docility once more. Xi didn’t bother to do it himself: he sent out a lackey to hammer the point home.
  
  While Americans were reeling from the swarm of Chinese spycraft traipsing through U.S. airspace, a minor ChiCom functionary, instructed Kowtow Joe on the proper way to behave in addressing the People’s Paradise.
  
  “The first thing the U.S. needs to do is change its ways and reflect on itself, and not to smear and incite confrontation,” said Wang Wenbin, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, at a press briefing last Monday.
  
  Ah, there you go. “Know thyself.” Right?
  
  Alas, no, Wang’s not referring to Socrates. In Xi’s endless march to consolidate power beyond even that of Mao, “self-criticism” is the first step one takes upon entering the Communist reeducation camp — that’s before “volunteering” for forced labor while undergoing “ideological transformation.”
  
  Bottom line: Joe Biden must simply learn to behave. To date, he has done pretty well — consider: after it had become clear that the China virus was produced in the Chinese military’s Wuhan lab, he didn’t blast Xi for launching the most virulent biological weapon in history.
  
  In fact, Joe didn’t confront the ChiComs at all.
  
  Far from it. Instead, he attacked Americans: “They won’t get vaccinated! They won’t wear masks!”
  
  Shortly after his inauguration, Biden had sent his secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, to convey to Xi his subordinate role in Sino-American relations. After two minutes from Blinken, China’s leading diplomat, Yang Jieqi, blasted the United States for over a quarter of an hour. Blinken’s obsequious response signaled to the Communist Party of China that Joe Biden was not going to be a problem.

“Humanity”:

A License To Cheat

“I love mankind,” he said, “but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular” †Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.

One line from Yang’s objurgation merits closer attention. The great nations of the world, he said, “should come united together to contribute to the future of humanity and build a community with a shared future for humankind.”

This formula resonated a line from Leonid Brezhnev some fifty years ago in the back of a limousine, as he plied Richard Nixon with praise for “peaceful coexistence”: “We’ll do it for humanity,” Brezhnev reportedly told the president.

So the butchers of Beijing and their heirs believe in “humanity.” What gives?

“Humanity” used to refer to our unique nature as human beings, and/or a person’s own unique character as a human being. The question, “Where is your humanity?” would arise to criticize someone who was acting bestial, rather than human, in a particular situation.

In the eighteenth century that reality dissolved in the wave of secular modernity.

Anne Robert Jacques Turgot was an early classical liberal, celebrated still today as a pioneer of the free market. But he was also a product of the Enlightenment — a “true believer” in progress. He almost invented the modern sense of the term.

In the fifth century, Augustine introduced “progress” to mean the advancing of an individual soul in virtue and grace. But that was it. In our fallen world, our fallen nature was the same in Eden as it will be until the day of the Second Coming.

Turgot considered that view to be too disconcerting. He wanted “progress” to indicate how much better we were than our Neanderthal forebears.

But who are “we”? That’s where “humanity” comes in.

In his landmark 1750, Discourse On The Successive Progress Of The Human Mind, Turgot coins the term “the total mass of humanity.” The term includes everyone — all past, present, and future generations.

“The human race,” he wrote, “considered from its origin, appears to the eyes of a philosopher an immense whole, which itself has, like each individual, its infancy and its progress….And the total mass of the human race, through alternations of calm and turmoil, of good and evil, is always marching, albeit with slow steps, towards a greater perfection.”

Instead of referring to the very real and identifiable humanity of each person, Turgot’s “humanity” is an abstraction, an empty vessel that conveniently justifies crimes committed against millions of individual human beings, from the French Revolution onward. “Humanity” could achieve “progress” only at the cost of the lives of countless individual humans who resist it.

Hegel and Marx produced the formula for ideologies that promised that perfection, each with an accompanying political pathway to tyranny required to achieve it.

Today, that sense of “humanity” is no longer the province only of the Left; both “progress” and “humanity” have become meaningless buzzwords employed to avoid reality, definition, and logic, all for the simple acquisition and maintaining of power.

Carl Schmitt, a German jurist and political theorist, put it this way:

“The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism. Here one is reminded of a somewhat modified expression of Proudhon’s: whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat. To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.”

America’s Missing Stop Sign

Perhaps that’s why today’s American “progressives” are silent in the face of Xi Jinping’s crimes, both at home and abroad. His brutal suppression of Christianity, Islam, and any other creed merely reflects his fervor to perfect the establishment of “Marxism-Leninism with Chinese characteristics.”

And that’s why “Catholic Joe” Biden, his administration, and the American Left say nothing. In their hardened hearts, they envy the success of Xi’s “Social Credit System” that herds his Chinese subjects in every aspect of their lives. In fact, they have emulated Xi’s methods in every possible way as they manipulate American domestic life, because (in Schmitt’s phrase) “they want to cheat.”

And they cheat indeed. And, like the classical Marxists they brazenly emulate, they will keep doing it until they are stopped.

But they dare do so only here at home: They know that Xi is their superior, their model of tyranny, whom they might envy but will never oppose.

So, Joe Biden won’t stop Xi, and Xi knows it. The lapdog knows his place.