Twenty Years On, Indeed

Peter Hitchens writes:

Just 20 years ago we were thrilled by the collapse of the Soviet Empire. I thought it was a new birth of freedom. We ought to have paid more attention to the crushing of the protesters in Peking’s Tiananmen Square. For this was a much more important new birth – of tyranny mixed with the market. As a result of this ruthless action, China is now a World Power, chief creditor of the USA, heir to the future.

And that power is the model for us all. We can have consumer goods and cars and electronic junk we don’t really need, oceans of drivel on TV to keep us numb, even drugs too. We can live in colossal concrete mega-cities, Livingstonegrads or Borisgrads, where we can only tell which continent we’re on by checking the script on the neon signs. But we can’t be free, and we can’t have countries of our own, or borders, or histories.

We also cringe to China, and in future we will do so even more.