John Robson: We May Laugh at Totalitarian Rhetoric and Ideology, but the Pronouncements of the ‘Woke’ Are No Less Ridiculous

A pro-democracy activist (C) from HK Alliance holds a placard of missing citizen journalist Fang Bin, as she protests outside the Chinese liaison office in Hong Kong on Feb. 19, 2020. Isaac Lawrence/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry at the news that the Chinese communist authorities might release COVID whistleblower Fang Bin after three years in jail for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” It’s a classic unfree-society story in that we don’t really know whether they’ll release him, where he’s been, what his sentence was or anything else except that their conduct was as appalling as their rhetoric was absurd. But we who live in free societies could learn an important lesson from the stilted way totalitarians justify their cancellation of unwelcome opinions and their holders.

It won’t be easy. Free societies were famously bad at learning from the past even before we converted history, along with the other humanities, into grievance studies in which you know everything without studying anything, churning out literature majors convinced Shakespeare, Twain, and so forth must never be read lest it “trigger” people in their “safe spaces” who have never read their double-plus-ungood works to see what if anything is wrong with them.

Even before this tragicomic transformation, it was hard for us to take tyrants seriously because they do so often seem ridiculous. And not just Mussolini, a buffoon whose evident clownishness helped people underestimate Hitler, who was also clearly absurd in his theatrical posturing, rantings and vainglorious ambitious. At least until Paris fell. After that not so much.

Leonid Brezhnev was also preposterous, an inexplicably semi-animate gargoyle lampooned in a Soviet joke that in the 1969 assassination attempt it was a bullet that bounced off his forehead that killed his driver. The late great P.J. O’Rourke mocked Brezhnev and his colleagues for their “steel teeth and cardboard suits,” and if they were a parody of themselves, Radio Moscow was even more so, though nothing to Radio Peking (back then) or Radio Pyongyang.

One can listen to their torrent of contorted abuse for entertainment, and I don’t overlook the power of ridicule in bringing truth into politics. But it’s important to remember that behind the nonsense was a murderous drive to stamp out dissent, assassinate nonconformity not just of behaviour or even speech but of thought, and accumulate weapons that might destroy humanity. (And in the Soviet case nearly did in September 1983, with the technician who saved us all by concluding that it was a radar malfunction being punished, naturally.)

So what of us? If we’re going to laugh at totalitarian rhetoric and ideology, can we also spare a tear or two for how closely the pronouncements of the woke follow its contortions? And perhaps tremble at what might occur if the sorts of people currently storming podiums to silence speakers on campus were actually in a position to kill people? Talk about a trigger warning.

Remember that the famous “Tank Man” who became a global hero for opposing the armoured column in Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989, was then hustled off and strangled. Or something. Typically, we don’t know. In 1990, then-CCP General Secretary Jiang Zemin told Barbara Walters, “I think [he was] never killed.” If he was, it was after being charged with “political hooliganism” which is pretty funny until they shoot you.

We do know that he was called a “scoundrel” by the government, which again has this weirdly prissy and contorted feel until you recall what became of hundreds, or perhaps thousands of protesters slaughtered by the regime. And that we don’t even know to an order of magnitude how many were killed, let alone their names. But we do know that the Chinese Politburo is not amused at the absurd thoughts of those who favour freedom and diversity; when Mao said “Let a hundred flowers blossom,” he didn’t add out loud “so we can uproot them, burn them, and sow thorns instead.” But it’s what they did. And they did it on purpose.

Now consider our own petty tyrants who get people fired, shamed, and ruined for uttering words proclaimed hurtful and thus forbidden even if permitted. And also our petty political bullies who seek to regulate the internet to forbid “hate speech” even though things like sedition and incitement to violence are already illegal.

What they’re cracking down on is people picking quarrels and provoking trouble. Even in a democracy where free speech is guaranteed in our Constitution. And of course, it doesn’t apply if you smear people seeking freedom as “extremists … who don’t believe in science … often misogynists, also often racists.” Oh no. Then you ask “Do we tolerate these people?” and the answer is obviously no.

It’s only if someone questions vaccine mandates or transgenderism that we need stiff legal or quasi-legal repression. Including throwing punches at these scoundrels and dousing them in offensive substances during a legal event. Because just questioning orthodoxy is picking quarrels. And it provokes trouble.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.