Both China and the United States seem to be anti-libertarian trailblazers recently, albeit coming from different angles. Of course, for decades, still-very-much-communist China has been a harbinger of the anti-freedom plague that has been encroaching the world. That country hates free association, especially for religious people (notably Evangelicals), and loves to install social controls. It feigns being globally-friendly and inclusive or open-minded economically, while its scaly underbody slithers along the same old paths. Many U.K. and other newspapers reported recently that, as the Independent's headline said, "China bans George Orwell's Animal Farm, [1984, too,] and letter 'N' as censors bolster Xi Jinping's plan to keep power indefinitely: Experts believe increased levels of suppression are sign Xi Jinping hopes to become dictator for life." The Evening Standard wrote a similar story, as did The Guardian. Lump this latest trashing of liberty onto China's appalling censorship of Google, YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter.
China is also progressing to install (by 2020) a "social credit system," where they score various aspects of one's life to determine his overall value, based on how well he pays his debts and how much time he spends "wasting" his time on video games, especially if he is unmarried and therefore of questionable diligence. An article from Futurism rightly states: "This citizen score comes from monitoring an individual’s social behavior—from their spending habits and how regularly they pay bills, to their social interactions—and it’ll become the basis of that person’s trustworthiness, which would also be publicly ranked. This actually sounds worse than an Orwellian nightmare." The Wall Street Journal reported that the system will “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.” Hello totalitarian police state a la 1984, goodbye users privacy in Chinese-sanctioned social media like QQ and WeChat. The Chinese government will now rate its people based on what it determines is "socially acceptable behavior."
The world is a doleful, scary place, especially for those who live under such behemoth states.
But is the United States much different? Not to be outdone, the U.S. government is now going beyond its radical feminist policies, blatant political correctness decrees, nonsensical and fear-monger, radical ecology-based environmental rules, destructive family court and child services division rulings. It is now clamping down on free speech without shame. While books written by neo-nazis and other assorted idiots are not banned, such irksome people are being assaulted by the state right and left. One example is the racist, nationalist Oregon State University doctoral student who was arrested recently for "hate crimes." The student, Andy Oswalt, is also involved in student government. Sure, he did violate property rights by plastering over pro-immigration bumper stickers with nasty, racist ones of his own. But the main charge against him revolved around what he said. Yet, where does that slippery slope lead to? If the U.S. government censors idiots and racists now, will they next censor the speech of Baptists, Opus Dei Catholics, homeschoolers and libertarians? The F.B.I. already deploys "predictive crime prevention" (akin to Orwellian 1984 horrors, moving toward being the "thought police").
A friend of mine just yesterday had his sea container torn open by customs agents. He was moving to Chile and the state thought that he might be moving something against national security, mixed inside with all those household goods. After finding nothing, they sent him a bill for US$3,160 for their "services" to protect the American public. He had to pay it to have his personal goods released by these lawful scoundrels. Of course, the U.S. customs bureaucrats have been practicing this craft for decades. James Bovard's The Fair Trade Fraud (1992) records many other issues stemming from self-righteous U.S. Customs officials chain-sawing totem poles (artwork) and dismantling small airplanes at the border while looking for drugs or contraband, and then requiring the recipients to pay for services rendered to destroy their property. It was just one of those books and articles I read while doing my doctoral work in public policy at George Mason University that impelled me to leave the land of the free. Property confiscation extends to farms, estates, houses, cars and tracts of land in the U.S.A., making for hideous stories of abuse.
China already bans Chinese passport holders from attending Evangelical church services, but how long will it be before the U.S. prohibits Christian church pastors from preaching against homosexuality, abortion, feminism, perhaps lumping those topics in with racial and other "hate" crimes? Soon, both countries might also be marked by their respective, massively-long great walls, at least if Trump has his way. Both China and America's states are intrusive and debilitating, albeit in different, repulsive ways. The victims in either place would be hard-pressed not to identify their respective governments as totalitarian. Maybe that's why fewer people find it shocking that I renounced my feudal allegiance to America and my U.S. citizenship.
Are you feeling free today?
John Cobin, Ph.D.
Escape America Now
