The Great Memory Hole of China

I highly recommend the story Kremlin, Inc. in last week's New Yorker. It's a very good piece, and it awakens me to the corrosive by degrees nature of our own compliance in corporate evildoing. If this age truly is the age where the most technically useful aspects of all the previous ages are gathered up and re-used, then the practice of dealing with ones' enemies by simply having them killed, which here and there throughout history has enjoyed some popularity, would certainly be central to the combo platter of options considered available to today's leaders. And while we may be correct in saying: we can't fight them, the fact that we likewise refuse to protest in small ways seems the most disingenuous of all.

I'm thinking specifically of Google, both the richest company and the first to ever adopt as its mission statement "Don't be evil." I'm thinking of hanging out with Sergei Brin, which I actually did a couple of weeks ago at a party, and what we talked about. And I'm thinking of Professor Ding Zilin, whose son was shot dead protesting freedom on the night of June 3rd, 1989, and who since has been collecting names of those who were killed around that night. At the end of June 2006, she was able to confirm 186 deaths. But when she logged onto the Internet and went to Google.cn, which began operating in China in January of 2006, and typed in Tienanmen Square, zero results showed up. She typed in her son's name. There was no such person. In exchange for what could be billions of dollars of revenue, Google agreed to censor all of its Chinese searches to exclude, how did the Nazis put it, "any unpleasantness."

How many people died at Tienanmen? According to Wikipedia: "Estimates of civilian deaths vary: 23 (Communist Party of China), 400–800 (Central Intelligence Agency), 2600 (Chinese Red Cross). Injuries are generally held to have numbered from 7,000 to 10,000." Wow. That’s a lot of human sacrifices for freedom, in a country without, shall we say, a history of strong protest movements. These people were killed or injured for doing nothing but peaceably assembling, one of the cornerstone reasons for why there is an America. And while it was American freedom that gave birth to the Internet, ironically none of these people will ever turn up on a Google search in China. Look it up. It never happened. Imagine being someone who knew them, loved them, someone like their mother, like Professor Ding.

The BBC wrote: "Google's launch of a new, self-censored search engine in China is a 'black day' for freedom of expression, a leading international media watchdog says. Reporters Without Borders joined others in asking how Google could stand up for US users' freedoms while controlling what Chinese users can search for." The article continues: "The BBC news site, for example, is inaccessible, while a search on Google.cn for the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement directs users to a string of condemnatory articles." Please keep in mind: this isn't the fascist Chinese government building these algorithms; it's Google! Big Brother says these people are disappeared, and Google complies. They fix it so these trouble makers never existed. I know it sounds shocking, but this is the deal Google made.

Microsoft and Yahoo!, by the way, do the same thing. Big surprise, but they aren't run by two Jews who founded a company with an ethical imperative. The lame argument they make is: "They would do it anyway, so why not make money on it?" What would happen though if the big search engines refused to play China's game? Government's wage war but if the soldiers won't pull the trigger there isn't much of a war. Is it really better to assimilate and hope for the best? What possible motive would China have for changing? But unless we as Web users agree not to support them, which is almost impossible, why would they ever feel the need to change?

I'm only 230 years old, a young adult in Nation Years, but I remember being a grown teenager and coming out of the shadow of the Cold War, with Rod Serling and Hannah Arendt and Mad Magazine and Edward R. Murrow and Elie Weisel laying bare the cultural shame surrounding what it means to be silent. It was as if a generation of WWII survivors were dedicated to teaching the next generation never to stand by as they come for your neighbors, for they will soon be coming for you. I witnessed a tremendous amount of science fiction and social fiction and social analysis, created in the aftermath of WWII. What Americans learned about human nature after WWII was unprecedented, and there was an unprecedented effort then made to ensure that a society would be able to identify it when the powers that be start to wear these freedoms down. Through melodrama and satire, a new and clear picture was painted of what constitutes an unacceptable un-human response. And yet that is the picture I see today.

It's tough to watch it all go to hell. I have a particular soft spot for that generation that received giant cultural inoculations of this freedom virus. I am still moved by all the TV shows that have the lone man stand up and shock the community and say, "But I saw what happened..." or who refuses to pretend that all is well. And yet I see virtually none of my fellow 'liberals' and 'activists' paying attention to this pernicious threat. Indeed, I did all my research for this article on Google. And so when should you begin to doubt its complete objectivity?

For more on the subject, here is Human Rights Watch's take:
http://hrw.org/englishwr2k7/docs/2007/01/11/china14867.htm

And here's the original New Yorker story: http://royaldutchshellplc.com/2007/05/31/the-new-yorker-kremlin-inc-why-are-vladimir-putin%E2%80%99s-opponents-dying/

Osama, Obama, what's the diff?

I couldn't have seen it until I saw it but now here it is. They’re going to try to take down Obama by tarring him as a Muslim. Say it enough and it will stick, especially with a scandal-hungry press ready to report every rumor and lie as a “controversy.” Obama’s only hope of survival is to meet the charges head on, exactly as he would have to if the charges were actually true. He must realize, as Kerry was to dim to understand, that it simply doesn’t matter whether a political attack has any basis in truth. TV creates the reality; the truth is whatever is on TV.

It was reported the other day that Barack means 'Blessed' in Arabic, and that Barack's grandpappy was a hard core Muslim. That means in the minds of most Americans he was hanging out fighting whitey with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden's grandpappy. And Barack's middle name is Hussein, and his first name rhymes with Osama, so that’s that. He might as well be wearing a turban and carrying a scimitar.

OK. There's only one way to handle this. Right here, right now, big throwdown. Obama has got to hold a Checkers-style, prime-time 1/2 hour of plain speaking about himself and his God-blessed American-ness. And at the end he's got to cry about how much it hurts him to have anyone cast aspersions about how much he loves this country. He's got to detail everyone in his family's lineage that was Muslim, and tell the heartwarming story of their conversion to God’s real religion, and how converting is part of what a free nation allows its free people to do.

But mainly, he's got to say that we're not in a war against Islam, we're in a struggle for the hearts and minds of a billion Muslims. He's got to say that our leadership, by making this moral struggle a shooting war on terror, has terrorized the Muslim base, which is at it's core actually quite conservative and religious, and apt to be friendly to good American Heartland people. Obama has to compile a list of all the great people who say that we are not at war with Islam and read it to us. He's got to paint a devastating, super-scary and super-detailed picture of what's going to happen if we keep treating this like it is a war--really paint the full-on doomsday scenario. And all the while he does this he must wrap himself in the flag.

He has to explain that we can't militarize our way out of this situation, and that while we will go after specific people who are known to be bad, we have created a global war out of our conflict with a few small and isolated bands of fanatics. It is only a global war because we made it one. And he's got to make it look bad. Really bad.

Then he's got to offer us a way out. Instead, he would say, we will play the long game, using our real strengths: our moral vision, our honesty, our can-do attitude and good old American ingenuity. And we're going to do what half a trillion dollars has been (intrinsically) unable to do: we're going to calm these people down. We're going to get enough of them back on our side that we aren't doomed. How? Well, he'll explain, we're going to try to become as energy independent as is reasonable, we are going to reach out to the international community, we are going to try to work with the world to stabilize this region, we are going to try to figure out what the source of disaffection among the populace at large is such that we can help address their grievances in ways other than having them blow themselves up and us with them. Subtext: I can deal with these people.

So he gives this talk and the whole thing shifts. Imagine the headline: Presidential Candidate Denies US In War on Terror! It would make worldwide news. Can you imagine Obama in the follow up interview: "Look, one crazy guy with a few crazy followers managed to do something very smart and cunning, but the cleverness of the hijackings doesn't prove that entire countries and their populations were behind it. Indeed, prior to the bombings, only 3% of the Muslim populations advocated bombing US soil. Now 56% do! It wasn't the bombing of Americans that made their world hate us. We had their sympathy! It was our idiotic and indiscriminate response. We have to undo some serious damage here, and you are lucky you have me at your disposal to do it."

Then, by not fighting, we win. In summary: if Obama creates a strong enough cognitive dissonance, and makes it utterly clear at the outset that the problem is that we've ignited a world to hate us, and that only a guy with an Islamic inoculation can address the situation, we win. Though not a Muslim, Obama has Muslim antibodies. It's not a liability. He's our secret weapon. If Obama flips his Muslimness thus, in essence saying: “I can get these guys off your back,” then with each subsequent attack he only gains strength.