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PrintMarch 28, 2011
Panic sets in on the left
Two recent headline stories: 1) Chinese police have arrested prominent writer Ran Yunfei for challenging the ruling Communist Party; the latest in a string of arrests in a deepening crackdown on dissent. 2) the George Soros-funded Media Matters has announced open guerilla warfare and sabotage of Fox News and various conservative blog sites. They plan to intimidate, through character assassination and opposition research, the executives and personalities at all levels of these organizations.
China has become the symbol to many Americans of a monolithic financial and economic giant with an insatiable appetite for power. The fact of the matter is that China's greatest dilemma is that it has become a financial and economic powerhouse in a comparatively short time with a governing structure that is anathema to a capitalist system which inherently promotes freedom and individuality.
No one group is aware of that more than the current Chinese leadership. The recent upheavals in the Middle East and the call by many Chinese pro-democracy activists for their own "Jasmine Revolution" (the term for the Tunisian rebellion) have the Chinese leaders initiating crackdowns that border on paranoia. They have arrested and detained hundreds of lawyers, bloggers and dissidents in China's harshest crackdown in years.
The Chinese leadership also knows that the economic miracle with which they legitimize power is in danger. The country is experiencing a massive real estate bubble and unchecked food inflation. Many provincial officials are fueling this phenomenon by selling more and more land, stirring up resentment in the process. Farmers who protest are tormented by police officers and government thugs, or even thrown into jail without being charged.
Despite these risks, thousands of Chinese rebel against communist authority year after year, almost always in protest against the same chronic abuses: corruption, land grabbing, low wages, food prices and an ever increasing resentment toward the Chinese Ruling Class and their extravagant lifestyle.
As with all totalitarian regimes and organizations in history the Communist Chinese are no different, instead of looking to expand freedom and become more inclusive as way of combating future problems, they have embarked on new repressive measures and a massive surveillance and intimidation program.
It is apparent that the leadership of China is not confident in the future and secure in the Communist Party's ability to maintain an iron-fisted control of the 1.3 Billion people that make up modern day China. The current paranoia reveals many cracks in the image they portray to the world and as with so many despotic regimes before them; time is not on their side.
That same paranoia is sweeping the Left in the United States. The hegemony of the media they enjoyed for decades is crumbling around them. The rise of the Tea Party movement, the myriad of conservative web sites, the dominance of right-wing talk radio and Fox News combined with the public's awareness of the imminent financial disaster facing the country and the need to cut-off spending to special interest groups has inspired panic among the die-hards on the Left.
As so much of their power is derived directly from spending on government programs and indirectly from government workers union dues, many on the Left will see a major erosion in their lifestyle if the conservatives fully take over the levers of government in Washington D.C.
The Left is no longer confident in their ability to maintain control of the message and the political class. Thus, they turn to the only weapons they have: intimidation by causing chaos (see: unions and Wisconsin et al) and blackmail. These tactics will used with greater frequency and the war of words will become more vitriolic; but it is a certain sign they are losing because by reverting to these actions they reveal their true nature and goals to the public which now has the alternative media the Left so despises.
