China was always reluctant to kill the golden-egg-laying goose in Hong Kong, and the trade war made them even more hesitant, but it was inevitable their cost/benefit calculations would eventually make a crackdown appear less costly than continued chaos. That moment is at hand.
When it happens, remember it. Remember the courage of the protesters and the principles they stood for. Make Communist China pay the most agonizing price possible for its brutality, and make them aware of how high that price will be RIGHT NOW.
Today is a rare moment. Between Hong Kong and Moscow, it's one of the few times in the Internet era that freedom and democracy are more viral than totalitarianism. The tyrants are actually sweating a little.
Watch as China and Russia, the two states most enthusiastic about corrupting the politics of other nations, shriek in paranoid fear that protesters are the puppets of America and Europe, deployed in a bid to destabilize their tyrannies.
For the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union, evil empires are trembling with fear as revolutions threaten to spread like wildfire. They will suppress those revolutions, because they studied the end of the Soviet era carefully and developed counter-measures.
We have learned to our sorrow that the Internet is not the unstoppable force for liberty and free speech we wanted it to be. It's at least as useful as an instrument of oppression, and arguably more so. Combined with old-fashioned violence, it cements repressive regimes in power.
But we CAN use the Internet to make those regimes pay the maximum price for suppressing freedom. We can make it cost them more, MUCH more, when they roll the tanks. We can keep the memory of freedom alive and give them more speech to repress.
I doubt we can make the cost of repression so high that Beijing recalculates its spreadsheets and decides concessions to the Hong Kong protesters would be less costly than a crackdown. We should try, but they're too worried about the liberty contagion spreading if they give in.
But after the crackdown happens, it will be up to each of us - every Western government, corporation, and individual - to decide how much Communist China should suffer for its evil. We get to decide how weak this monstrous empire becomes.
You can send their investors home empty-handed. You can decide their cheap electronics are not worth the moral cost of doing business with a bloody dictatorship. You can tell them Communist money is not welcome in your economy.
They made a not-unreasonable calculation that in the end, Western principles are negotiable and have price tags attached, while the Communist will to power is not. They know international debate societies like the UN are easily corrupted and defanged.
They think OUR systems of government, our societies, are weak-willed and riven by internal contradictors, forever on the verge of civil war... and our love for free speech gives them unlimited license to pick at those weaknesses, meddle in elections, and sow chaos.
Notice how every other word out of China's collective mouth is "globalism." They think globalism turns capitalism against democracy, creating a wilderness where every principle is for sale, democracies are packs of sheep riddled with traitors, and authoritarians are wolves.
Look at this moment when the authoritarians are panicking, mobilizing thug squads in foreign countries like Australia and New Zealand to beat down free speech, and understand they are truly afraid. They are showing you where their weak points are.
Above all else, the world's authoritarian regimes - communist, Islamist, kleptocracy, you name it - are haunted by the fear they have miscalculated the resolve of the free world, as their predecessors did almost a century ago. May the sleeping giants awaken again. /end
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