Democracy: the Opposite of Communism?

I grew up exposed to a lot of political
propaganda probably you did too whether or not we're aware of it most of us grow up in the school system on television that the newspapers when we're children and were not really sophisticated yet to analyze and unpack what were being told most of us grow up stewing in political propaganda and later we have to kind of unravel its implications one of the really distinctive trains of thought I encountered in mainstream political propaganda including my school textbooks primary school grade school high school even university was this assumption that democracy is inevitably and inexorably linked to mediocrity that democracy is a moderating force in human nature this is a total contrast to the opinion of people in ancient Greece by the way if you actually read Aristotle if you read through Sidda T's people who experienced democracy in ancient Athens said well the problem is that democracy is very slightly and passionate and tempestuous they could just have a kind of town hall meeting and decide that we're gonna start a war they'd have a town hall meeting and decide what they were gonna do with the prisoners of war and decide that they should Massacre them all that tell one person could get up and give a past passionate speech and in a democracy there'd be terrible decisions made with terrible consequences whereas the perspective in ancient Athens was being ruled by a king or other forms of more dictatorial government didn't have these features so real contrast between the modern assumptions and the ancient apprehensions about democracy and this reflects the fact that modern democracy it's not all that democratic um you know there's some truth to the prejudice when you're looking at an extreme tyrannical totalitarian system like communism in contrast to modern democracy there's a great example when you look at the history of communism in India some of you it may be news to here that India does have its own history of communism but yeah it wasn't just in China was interesting Europe wasn't just in South America India has its own paradoxical and peculiar history of communism but basically today there were two types of Communists in India there are the Communists who embraced their role within democracy the idea that whatever they were going to accomplish politically they had to convince thousands of people to vote for them they had to participate in elections they had to speak in Parliament they had to debate their plans and be subject to criticism in the newspapers yeah and then there are the Max alights there are the extremist violent militaristic communist who don't accept any of that and who engage in armed warfare to achieve their ends who only believe in revolution now as you can imagine the number of people who are moderate and reasonable and participate in democracy they very much outnumber the people who want to live in the jungle with a machine gun in extreme poverty and be in a state of perpetual war against the government but that's that's still ongoing they still have constant armed conflict with these armed communist guerillas by the way um there's a sense in which the process of participating in democracy removes some of the worst war successes in human nature or at least puts a procedure in place where the government is going to notice something that's going terribly wrong people are gonna complain and then something will be done to adjust moderate the harm of terrible decisions that the government may have made let's just say Canada decided it nailed wanted to catch up with the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt and we were going to build a pyramid we're gonna build a giant pyramid made out of solid stone and we decided that the way to do this was to force every able-bodied man and woman for two months of the year to be slaves carrying these heavy stones all right Mason like a surreal example but this kind of is at the basis of what we think about democracy and its moderating influence in the 21st century you can imagine if you have a free press if you have people facing election and reelection unless these people who are working like slaves to build this pyramid are being treated in fantastically positive conditions unless they're really soozee astok about building the pyramids this is not going to last long now meanwhile the government the United States of America using only professional soldiers and professional security corporations what have you they can wage war in Afghanistan for many many years as long as it's out of sight out of mind and nobody has to think about it nobody has to personally participate they can spend billions or more than a trillion dollars on that war and however uncomfortable the public is with it it seems there seems to be no check no oversight and so on democracy seems to be not terribly interested in that war over the last twenty years so you know certainly democracies are capable of doing things much worse than enslaving the population to build pyramids if they're out of sight out of mind if the cost isn't too much to you personally or to your own children personally or fairly president as long as the damage is spread out evenly enough over the population modern democracies are capable of doing absolutely terrible things and obviously you know the history of how the United States of America has treated its own indigenous peoples there are lots of examples of the terrible thing as democracies can do it's important that when we're criticizing what's wrong with communism we state very precisely what the problem is and we stayed very precisely what the solution is because it is simply in this sense democracy I would have no objection to the Communist Party of China if it were behaving like the left Democratic Front of Kerala in India okay the left Democratic Front of Kerala that's what's that's what remains of the once radical revolutionary communists of India right they have been watered down and moderated and and what moderated them you know they have to go through the same humiliating process of any other political party of asking for donations going to talk to people door-to-door or listening to people giving lectures asking people to vote for them when people don't want to vote for them they have to figure out what it is they said that was so unpopular and changed their platform if the Communists Party of China were going through that kind of process it wouldn't even take ten years for them to become quite a reasonable and responsive sort of political party and if you actually listen to the rhetoric from si Jinping of the current dictatorial leader of China it's obvious that he personally does not in any way believe in the same doctrines Mao Zedong believed in the past he doesn't even encourage his followers to believe in it the main thing he encourages people to believe in is the sense of destiny that China has as a whole and the special role the Communist Party has in that supposed destiny um whether you think of democracy as something that disciplines human nature or is a sort of peculiar lack of discipline a sort of freedom for human nature to let us show everything that's wrong with that and for us to sit back and judge it and what have you this really is the crucial problem with with Chinese communism and it's a problem that ironically can be solved when communism is combined with real democracy the only footnote there is that very rapidly communism loses all of its distinctive features I think that anyone who takes a glance at the Communist Party in Kerala India would very rapidly come to the collusion look this is just a mainstream left-of-center Democratic Party these people do not represent communism in any meaningful sense of the term by the strict definition of communism they're still using the symbols of communism still literally use the hammer and sickle but this has been diluted past the point where it can be recognized as communism by any any strict definition any any textbook definition I'm making this video in response to the fact that I got the sort of strange but inevitable news today from JJ McCullough's channel that um you know this horrible YouTube channel China uncensored seems to be to some extent a front for and linked to the Falun Gong cult the Fenland f uh you know movement and have to say I'm a very harsh critic of that YouTube channel and there was a time in the past when I forced myself to try to listen to their podcast that very high level of interest in the politics of both Taiwan and China there very few podcasts there very few news sources in English to listen to on that stuff and my main impression of who those people were and what they were about was simply that they were complete idiots now you know these are not mutually exclusive explanations it's possible that they are complete idiots and they are at the same time in the pocket of or you know in some sense working for felon gong I find that hard to believe for a couple of reasons one the host eats meat and boasts about it that may not mean much to some of us but it's telling this guy is a very very low level of knowledge of China a very low level knowledge of Chinese he knows nothing about Buddhism he knows nothing about Chinese esoteric philosophy or wisdom he's a former classical music major who openly boasts that his favorite food is steak and when he goes to cover the elections in Taiwan as a journalist and he was treated as a serious journalist there he was shown a great deal of you had the red carpet rolled out for him as if he was a legitimate journalist in Taiwan he's largely boasting about what he ate in each city and its dead animals of one kind or another he does not seem like a candidate for recruitment into or to be a representative of felon gong now the counter-argument is maybe precisely that is the point maybe this is a cult group that's really smart enough to realize they need a meat eating joking informal guy to wear the suit and sit there on camera and try to make them look like less of a creepy and ridiculous cult which in the year 2020 make no mistake that is that is very much what they are um what always seemed to me strange about China uncensored is that they seem to be opposed to communism without any of the caveats I've just set out in this video you know what is it exactly you oppose about communism I've been very clear I'm against communism because it's not democratic I I don't think in the year 2020 any political regime should be allowed to exist that doesn't allow its people to vote for the new leader that doesn't allow those people even to issue recall ballots to get rid of a bad leader I don't think any political regime should exist that doesn't allow its people to criticize the authorities that are in power and this would have very definite implications for Saudi Arabia communists are not the only dictatorships in the world but I think there is just very fundamentally no legitimacy possible in the absence of a shortlist of check marks that defines democracy in this sense this is without even getting into how what an ideal democracy might be for example the gap between the kind of elections you have in the United States of America and what you have in Switzerland there are important differences in distinctions but I'm talking about minimum standards of democracy communism fails it and that's I'm against to it but if you're actually opposed to an ideology that espouses atheism equal rights for women modernization the upliftment of the poor the idea that factory workers and farmers should be more important than corporate bigwigs Oh what is it exactly that the people behind China uncensored object to now it's tragic that we live in a world where the best criticism of psychiatry is in the hands of a completely insane cult called Scientology we know this but they have front organizations that are engaged in the criticism of everything that's wrong with psychiatry today including people being put in shackles and losing their civil rights just horrible horrible things that go wrong at mental hospitals you're really important and somebody needs to kind of bring the fight forward including raising money for lawyers and legal cases and questioning the use of psychiatric drugs and their side effects I think the only major NGOs and charities doing this sadly are fronts operated by Scientology also has drug rehabilitation front groups where they pretend to be helping people get over drug addiction and alcoholism and it's actually to promote their cult this is a dark side of the you know the cult and religion industry the United States of America but we also have to question why is nobody else doing it why isn't someone else doing it better if you want to talk about the critique of Chinese communism in English in the 21st century who else is even doing this who else is publishing anything like a newspaper or a magazine who else is making YouTube videos on this the pickings are shockingly slim why is it that it's only this laughable odious immoral cult that's motivated to do this and like any kind of criticism they can't be wrong all the time even a broken watch is Right twice a day I remember reading an article that dealt with a really heart-rending example of activism they did were they asked people across China including people were currently you know employed by the government of China to sign a declaration that they wanted to abolish and tear down the Communist Party so this stage it's very moving that's very sympathetic and you realize that the people signing this in China they know the consequences it may mean that they are unemployable you know within China their their job options have just gotten much much narrower they won't be hunted down and executed it's not quite that harsh in China but any kind of sensitive job you'll never be able to work as a teacher or a university professor you won't get a government job again you're gonna be black less than it's quite likely your own children and grandchildren are gonna be blacklisted because you stood up and said hey enough with communism already but I remember I begin reading this this article and it included some moving quotations from people some of them were elderly who said look I'm old enough to remember the old days with communism I'm enough I'm old enough to remember the old ideals this movement used to represent and I've lost faith I think this is just a crummy corrupt dictatorship now I want something better it's time for China to move on this these kinds of things to get someone 80 years old or somebody says yes I'm willing to sign this declaration and put my name to it and I'm willing to be persecuted because I'm I'm done with No so there were a lot of really emotionally moving personal histories about communism but what was absence was democracy like this didn't seem to be pushing that the what's really missing from communism and again atheism no problem equality for women no problem modernization factory workers farmers you know the the missing element is democracy and keep in mind again I know this may have sounded like a ridiculous example when I said well what if the government wanted to enslave people to build the pyramids government of China did that government of Cambodia did that but there was no Free Press there was no democracy there's no votes there was no there were no consequences to the people in power and people starved to death people were massacred people were murdered in you know forced work projects that that really happened there are people alive still today who remember it it's not such a change in history and it's very clear to see that what's missing there is this moderating effect of of democracy like even if the government gets a stupid idea and people start dying because the government starts implementing it or at least there's some capacity to complain reconsider debate vote before you get up to a body count in the millions or tens of millions of people right as I continued reading this article what became clear to me was that the authors of this article and I don't know but the people who actually signed the Declaration each one had different you know motivations but the authors of this article were not interested in directing China towards a new era of democracy at all what they were interested in was returning to the virtues of the Tang Dynasty they were addressed they were turning to Chinese feudalism Confucianism men with long beards who write the Imperial exam and live in service to the Emperor they wanted to return to you of course not the real history of medieval China you know not the reality of feudalism in China they wanted to return to a kung-fu movie idea of what China supposedly was like in the fabled good old days and that is the agenda of felon Gong that is the agenda in general of most eighty communist conservatives within Chinese culture sadly what you see not everyone but the voices that have money the voices that have magazines and newspapers and YouTube channels are mysteriously anti-communist but not pro-democracy there are anti-communist but what they really want is return to a fantasy of the supposed glory the supposed grandeur of of pre-modern China and that is every bit as insidious every bit as revolting as meeting a white man in the American South meeting a white man in Georgia who wants to go back to the situation before the Civil War when you've had feudalism aristocracy and white people owning slaves and make no mistake slavery was a very important part of pre-modern China we don't talk about so much and the struggle to achieve the abolition of slavery is another very important history that we don't talk about okay I grew up with Communists there's nothing exotic about it to me you know I'm I'm just as familiar with communism as as I am with democracy from my own childhood forward including the periods of my life in which I lived in China Laos and Cambodia in many ways I grew up being taught that all of the virtues belong to communism and none of them belong to democracy the question of what is and what is not virtuous what is and what is not the right thing for the government to do is always going to be an open any question there's always going to be things that are unknown was it really the right thing to do for the United States to put itself billion and billions of dollars into debt so that they could plant an American flag on the moon right I don't think that's a that's a question that has a simple answer okay I think it's actually crucially important that you have freedom of speech and discussion and debate and you have a parliament or a Congress or at least some people are willing to stand up and say hey I think this is a stupid idea guys I think this is gonna bankrupt our grandchildren I think we're gonna be paying billions of dollars in taxes for this ego-trip that's not gonna accomplish anything oh I realize I'm in the minority here I realized that if you put it to a vote in the United States of America not only would 51% of people have voted to put a flag on the moon back then probably today if say you know what the country is almost bankrupt you want to go a few billion dollars into debt we'll put a flag of them they probably 51% of people vote for it again right now 2020 it'd probably vote to build a lunar base just cuz they think it's cool all right what is virtue and what is vice what is a good idea and what is a bad idea which policies are which worth pursuing and which ones are going to be a disaster I think it's something fundamentally unknowable right and it's because we live with the push and pull of those unknowns that we need to have forms of government that are undergoing constant evaluation constant criticism and self-criticism where you know whether it's a dictator or democratic leader someone comes up with an idea they think they've found the solution in China they thought they found the solution Fri don't lift millions of people out of poverty and they ended up destroying the ragam culture sector starving tens of millions of people to death it was a disaster but the reason why that disaster went so far was because of totalitarianism it's because nobody was allowed to complain nobody was allowed to moderate or counteract or say look we realize you had you thought this was a brilliant plan but it's not working we need to go back to the drawing board we need to re-evaluate totalitarianism doesn't have any particular color it's neither left nor right you can have a centrist government that's totalitarian also right the fundamental thing to understand is that democracy isn't just the ops of communism democracy is the opposite of totalitarianism and it's not the case that totalitarianism has all the bad ideas and democracy has all the good ideas but what democracy has is the capacity for us to sit down and reconsider again and again was this a good idea was it was it really