Mad Rant: Freedom in the Far East

Recently, the eyes of the world have again been drawn to the Far East thanks to the antics of the Orwellian real-life nightmare that is North Korea. Such incidents make me think and that is usually not a good thing, at least not for any poor soul who happens to come see me in the aftermath and is subject to a long, manic lecture on my obsession of the moment. Well, you happened into this corner of the inter-webs so you get it too. When I look at Korea, I am reminded of a few things. For one, I am reminded of why I could never condemn all American intervention overseas. True, I look back on American military history and see no vital reason for most of the wars America has fought, but when I look at South Korea as compared to North Korea, I say, “well done America, Great Britain and all the other allies”. Too bad the whole peninsula could not be as prosperous as the south. It also makes me angry again at the U.S. government (or the Democratic Congress anyway) for the abandonment of South Vietnam, which could be just as successful today. However, after such a pat on the back, I also think about what an obvious nightmare it is that countries like Korea, China and the Indochinese lands broke from their own long established traditions to embrace the political feuds of the western world.

I think of the fallen dynasties and the whole populations nearly brought to ruin in wars driven by competing allegiances to totally alien ideologies, being used as proxies usually for the United States or Soviet Union. Not that those two were in any way comparable, as the contrast between North and South Korea clearly shows, but it is a crying shame it ever came to that in the first place. Now, usually, when I go on this tirade, someone will mention that it was from the west in general or the United States in particular that people learned about things like freedom, liberty or the great “gift” of democracy. Please, spare me the sanctimony. There were certainly things the east needed to learn from the west but there were also plenty of things the west could have benefited from learning from the east. On a moral level, each seem fairly well matched to me. The most basic traditional values of right and wrong were much the same in both parts of the world, and both have abandoned many or most of these in our time anyway. However, it positively infuriates me that so many people seem to think that before the era of republicanism all the peoples of the east were living in grinding poverty and near slavery. That, in a word, is idiotic.

You could say the same thing about the west. How everyone seems to think that before the era of the so-called “Enlightenment” and especially before the revolutionary era, everyone lived in oppression and ignorance. They forget all about the great universities established in the Middle Ages, the tremendous scientific, literary and artistic discoveries of the Renaissance or how, even in feudal times, most Europeans had more holidays from work and paid less to their governments than they do today. But in the east this same ignorant attitude has often also been combined with a disgusting dose of condescension and thinly veiled racism. I will never forget finding an old school book, written sometime in the 1910’s, that spoke with such arrogant, ignorant pride about the 1911 Revolution in China. This was from a contemporary American perspective of course, and the book spoke so smugly about how the Chinese had finally “grown up” and were embracing the idea of the republic which, of course, Americans were “smart” enough to have figures out two centuries earlier. One would think the very concept of “freedom” had only been invented in Philadelphia in 1776!

This is obviously garbage for anyone with even a passing familiarity with the facts. Under the Confucian monarchy, for example, Korea actually had a more meritocratic system hundreds of years ago than the United States has even today where your popularity can get you a high position even if your ability is nil. The imperial system in China certainly could not have survived for thousands of years and maintained a vast country with the largest population in the world without doing something right and the masses would not have just submitted for so many centuries if they were all living like slaves. The Mongol Empire, for example, had freedom of religion, vibrant commerce and laws protecting property and all without a written constitution or elected national assembly. Tell that to a republican today and blow their mind.

Human beings the world over had plenty of time to learn what worked and what did not and, unlike today without our collective safety nets, if something didn’t work the consequences could not be ignored. People learned from it, adapted and moved on. When a system was found that worked, they stuck with it until it became sacred tradition. Many attributed foreign influences with the establishment of the Japanese constitutional monarchy in the Meiji Constitution. However, it embodied the same values held by the Japanese going back at least to the Seventeen-Article Constitution released in 604 by Prince Shotoku. This document included such points as being tolerant of disagreement, not to be envious, not to conscript people at times that would prevent them from providing for themselves and that important decisions should be left to one ruler but taken after discussion. Those who believe that government which governs best is that which governs the least might also be surprised to learn that many Chinese came to the same conclusion a thousand years ago. In Imperial China there was the famous saying, implying considerable freedom through benign neglect that, “Heaven is high, and the Emperor is far away”.

Today we smart, modern people in our republican world think that we have to have a small army of politicians at every level of government and all of these people always think they have to be “doing something”. Are these hordes of compulsive regulators really creating more freedom as compared to the traditional systems of the past where the Emperor of Japan just prayed for his people or where the Emperor of China was “far away” in Peking? In Imperial Vietnam there was a very old traditional saying that the authority of the Emperor stopped at the village gate. This was, obviously, not absolutely the case but it arose because of the considerable autonomy that existed from village to village. The Emperor in Hue or (prior to that) Thanh Long focused on the big issues while for the most part the people were governed on the local level by their own village elders with an occasional visit from an itinerate mandarin. They also had sense enough to appreciate the importance of saving for a rainy day whereas today we seem to have made a “virtue” out of not saving anything and even spending money we don’t have. Remind me again; who are the ignorant ones? Those people ruled by kings and emperors who actually produced things or the populations of today who have every minute detail of their lives regulated and have based whole economies on betting on the profit or loss of products that no one has even made yet? They had a government with one emperor and an economy based on real money and real goods. We have governments made up of thousands of parasites and economies based on moving around “potential” (imaginary) money no one has even earned yet.

People in the past, as I am so fond of saying, were not stupid and the Vietnamese who used to watch tigers and elephants fight in an arena were a hundred times more civilized than the people who watch “The Jersey Shore”. People in the East, as well as the West, were not living a nightmarish existence before the revolutionary republic was introduced and I have no doubt that all would be better off to return to tried and tested traditional ways, adapted for the modern world and technological improvements, while throwing away modernistic concepts that have so clearly and painfully failed. I think such a thing would be beautiful, but then I am, as any will say, just … The Mad Monarchist.