Professional Protesters and the Political Class
by Tim Swanson When was the last time you looked up the Falun Gong, Tiananmen Square or the history of Tibet? I’m assuming it’s hourly. In fact, your homepage is the Wikipedia entry on one of these, right? As I previously noted, anti-China rhetoric reaches louder decibels every day. And while I don’t condone government-mandated and funded censorship of any kind, the question remains, are you practicing what you have preached? Have you done your patriotic duty and talked to a member of the Taiwanese Independence movement lately? Did you reenact the Tank Man scene with your American Legion compatriots last weekend? Every morning you unfold and hang Old Glory along with the Tibetan colors from you balcony, right? If you didn’t march against the Iraq war, against warrantless wiretapping, against the persecution of the polygamist sect in Texas, or against the millions of other coercive actions enacted by the state each year, then you probably shouldn’t trot around on your midget pony. Raging against the real machine So you’re out of school for summer break and don’t want to work. A person you’ve never met invites you to an event on Facebook. It’s an anti-dumping campaign targeted at Chinese manufactures who are selling products for prices that make you blush. It’s also a rallying call to inform Americans that Chinese laborers work more than you would ever want to. What a grave injustice! Something must be done to prevent consumers from paying too little for products you will never buy. And so you climb into your Honda hybrid, whose parts were forged in Changchun and Guangzhou – China. On the way you stop by Wal-Mart (China’s 8th largest trading partner) and purchase a megaphone (assembled in China) and an American flag (stitched in China). You finally arrive with your compatriots and are quickly shuffled behind some chain-link fences by riot police. You pull out your cell phone (assembled in China) to send a status update to your Twitter and Facebook accounts (which reside on hardware assembled in China). You feel proud that you’re telling everyone how evil and anti-human the Chi-Coms are – while you fumble around your pocket to find your camera (made in China). Heroically you fight the elements underneath your umbrella (made in China) all afternoon long. And after an energetic day of screaming about China’s responsibility for ungreen environmentalism (1/3 of China’s carbon emissions are purportedly tied to creating exports: your productive tanning bed and cappuccino machine) you call it a day and declare a win for human rights activism. So my question is: did you have a fun time hanging out in the government-restricted free-speech zones? The serial suburban activist with a lot of time on their hand doesn’t know this but there were more than 20,000 documented protests in China in 2006 alone. Take that NED! One of the reasons why these huge numbers don’t make the headlines of the Worker Weekly is because why the Chinese are protesting. The vast majority are farmers upset over land confiscation, families fighting over eminent domain, and business owners frustrated with kleptocratic officials. Or in other words, against property violations by the coercive actions of the state. While historical ignorance and political suppression could certainly be key factors as to why more Chinese don’t have the opportunity of being a professional protestor, perhaps another reason so many residents aren’t filling the streets protesting is that they are preoccupied working – you know, making money and stuff – so they can feed their families. Because after decades of living in socialistic subsistence the vast majority of the population is finally (relatively) free to actually accumulate wealth, property and even become rich. Do as we say, not as we do The modern act of peaceably assembling in the West began as a means to redress the government for injustices such as any taxation, property confiscation and ex post facto laws. It is dead and has been wholly replaced by a throng of tax consumers who rally for more government intervention, regulation and omnipotence. Despite an ever increasing series of injustices conducted by the government, the vast majority of organized protests in the West are designed as bully pulpits, to rail against globalization, against trade, against companies, against working as many hours as you want to. They are led by what Joseph Schumpeter referred to as a "leisured-class" of student council wash outs, most of whom have never worked an honest day in their life.
Their kvetchy chants, body odor and stitched pieces of flair are synthesized into a cacophonous chorus of hate. Hating individual decision-making and responsibility. Hating the capitalist factory owners. Hating the factory employees for not unionizing. Hating the factory products… such as the megaphone which is used to spew the kvetchy chants. And this anti-capitalistic mentality is selective. After all, where are the rallying cries "Free the Lower East Side" to protest the past actions of then-Governor LaGuardia and President Roosevelt who condemned apartments and forcefully removed thousands of New Yorkers in Manhattan to make way for public works projects? What about "Free Hawaii?" After all, it was colonized by the American military who forcefully dethroned its monarchs. And unfortunately this list continues (e.g. Native Indians) and takes forever to read so let’s ignore it and move on. Our hours Residents of continental Europe and even much of North America also own the dubious distinction of wanting to legally limit the maximum amount of working hours. Yes, instead of negotiating hours individually with your boss, sycophants of Big Labor have effectively politicized how much your neighbor can work each week. In contrast, millions of Chinese factory workers seek and desire overtime, so they can make sure their children won’t ever have to work in a factory. And oddly enough, many Chinese factory owners actually have to limit the hours of their employees, not out of a malevolent desire to repress them, but because they just don’t have the product demand to warrant overtime. It is these same Chinese laborers that have been unwittingly duped into handing over at least $4000 of their own money to prop up the US dollar. Yes, that is right, China’s $1.8 trillion reserve helps the Jones’ at the expense of the Wang family. Might want to add them to your Christmas card list for this year (and thank them for the American flags too). Yet as Lew pointed out last year, both Sinophobic politician and professional protestor alike have called for increased government intrusion and intervention in the germinating enterprises, in the Chinese factories that are the lifeblood of the Western consumer who scream incessantly about phantom menaces from afar. Didn’t China just try socialism en masse? Dot protest And this deafening temper tantrum has reached cyberspace as well. Instead of investigations of Cisco, RSA and Sun – companies that actually built the Great Firewall of China – Google executives faced a congressional inquisition two years ago. This was done despite the fact that Google does not actually remove information at all. Eric Schmidt has noted, in the event a user searches for non grata sites Google does not upload a doctored webpage. Rather, Google simply displays an error message noting that the page the user is looking for has been blocked due to political restrictions. Schmidt rightly says that this approach will plant a seed of desire, a desire to find out what is on that page. As a consequence, years of information holes could easily cascade and snowball into a grassroots effort to have the blacklists wholly expunged.
Thus, the next time you feel like yelling, screaming and chanting about how evil the Chinese are, make sure you have exacted the same amount of energy and animosity towards the FCC, towards public schools, public libraries, IP law firms and other agencies that use taxpayers money to censor speech and block search results domestically. August 7, 2008 Tim Swanson [send him mail] is a graduate of Texas A&M University. He currently lives in South Korea and protested the Iraqi invasion on February 16, 2003 in Dallas. Visit his blog. Copyright © 2008 LewRockwell.com
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add insult to injury: this is the same bellicose congress that has
spent billions in taxpayer funds to secretly design and deploy NSA
wiretapping surveillance stations across the country. It is the
same congress that passed a slew of anti-civil liberties laws including
the 