A couple of days ago, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial decrying the Hong Kong government’s suppression of a song entitled “Glory to Hong Kong.” The editorial points out that the song became popular during pro-democracy protests in 2019 but now the Chinese regime has made it a criminal offense to sing, broadcast, or publish it.
The editorial states: “A sure sign that you’re living in a dictatorship is that the government dictates what you can sing,” adding that “Hong Kong has warned that playing or even posting it online can violate national-security and sedition laws.”
Of course, the Journal is correct about the Chinese regime’s suppression of free speech, but, at the same time, the Journal overlooks something critically important about dictatorship and tyranny: It’s not just the suppression of free speech that is the problem here. It’s also the fact that China is a national-security state. Notice that this tyrannical law, as the Journal points out, is being justified by the concept of “national security,” a nebulous, meaningless term that dictatorships use to justify their tyrannical measures.
Glory to Hong Kong in Times Square in 2019. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Why is this important? Because the U.S. government is a national-security state too! And guess what U.S. officials use to justify their tyrannical acts, such as secret surveillance, torture, state-sponsored assassinations, coups, invasions, wars of aggression, sanctions, and embargoes. You guessed it: “national security,” just like the Chinese national-security state does.
Of course, America wasn’t always a national-security state. The nation began with a totally different type of governmental structure — a limited-government republic. No Pentagon, no CIA, no NSA, no military-industrial complex, no empire of military bases, and no concept of “national security.” Just a government of few, enumerated constitutional powers, with a small, basic military force. That was our governmental system for more than 125 years, until the 1940s, when U.S. officials converted the federal government to a national-security state, just like China is.
Once the conversion took place, the two most important words in the American political lexicon became “national security,” just like in China. Moreover, those two words became the justification for all sorts of totalitarian measures on the part of the U.S. government, just like in China.
For example, when America was a limited-government republic, the federal government had no power under the Constitution to engage in state-sponsored assassinations. In fact, state-sponsored assassinations were expressly prohibited by the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits the federal government from killing people without due process of law.
With the conversion to a national-security state, the Fifth Amendment was nullified, at least insofar as the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA are concerned. The national-security establishment automatically acquired the power to kill people without due process of law, just like in China.
Unfortunately, the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state has become so deeply embedded among conservatives that it’s not even questioned or challenged anymore. Notice that the Journal’s editorial criticizes the new law that the Chinese authorities have adopted but doesn’t challenge the fact that China itself is a national-security state, just as the United States now is.
The worst mistake America has ever made was converting the federal government to a national-security state. It’s what vested the federal government with omnipotent, dark-side, totalitarian powers, just like China. Ironically, the justification for the conversion was to protect America from a communist takeover of the United States, including from the Chinese Reds. Thus, we became like them to prevent us from being taken over by them.