What’s Xi Jinping getting his knickers in a knot about?
Was it a diplomatic faux pas for President Biden to call him—at a campaign fundraiser—a “dictator”? Yes, of course. Was that description a “smear,” as Xi’s spokesman in Washington complained? Not at all.
Don’t misunderstand the adjectives in that phrase. In the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist sense, a dictatorship is democratic because it empowers Communists to do whatever they consider necessary to serve the “people”—or, rather, the people who matter: the proletariat, aka the working class.
A priority task is to prevent the establishment of a “liberal democracy,” which would act in the interests of the bourgeoisie and other counterrevolutionary classes.
Xi’s most important ally, however, is Vladimir Putin who, over 23 years, has transitioned from Russian leader to Russian dictator. His rivals have ended up in prisons or graveyards.
Which leads me to briefly digress about Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose checkered career has included serving time for robbery, running a hot-dog stand and amassing a fortune as a caterer to the Kremlin.
Without firing a shot, Wagner troops took Rostov-on-Don, command center of the Russian forces waging war on Ukraine. Wagner troops then began heading north toward Moscow.
Late in the day, however, Prigozhin announced that he’d accepted a truce brokered by Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko
You can be sure that Xi has been paying close attention to how his brother dictator copes with this crisis.
One obvious lesson: A shrewd dictator does not allow anyone—not even those he regards as his faithful servants—to acquire significant power.
Xi, over the more than 20 years he’s ruled, has only become more dictatorial. He has genocidally imposed his dictatorship on the peoples of Tibet and East Turkestan, the latter better known by its Mandarin name, Xinjiang, which means “New Frontier,” indicating that it’s an imperial possession.
Under that system, all members of the United Nations are to abide by “international laws”—none more fundamental than the prohibition against erasing the borders of sovereign nation-states by force of arms.
But Putin suffered no serious consequences when he took territories from Georgia in 2008 and from Ukraine in 2014. After seeing the United States capitulate to the Taliban in 2021, it was logical for him to attempt to further expand the shrunken Russian empire. He figured Ukrainians wouldn’t put up much resistance and expected only finger-wagging from the West.
Similarly, Xi is threatening to invade Taiwan if the Taiwanese people continue refusing to submit to his dictatorship.
Produced in association with Jewish News Syndicate
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