A dream: China without dictatorship

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See the Lev Navrozov Archive By Lev Navrozov SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 He settled in New York City where he quickly learned that there was no market for his eloquent and powerful English language attacks on the Soviet Union. To this day, he writes without fear or favor or the conventions of polite society. He chaired the "Alternative to the New York Times Committee" in 1980, challenged the editors of the New York Times to a debate (which they declined) and became a columnist for the New York City Tribune. His columns are today read in both English and Russian.

In mid-October 1941 it could well have been supposed that Hitler was advancing successfully to his ghastly world domination. Especially since it was unknown in the United States how much Hitler's nuclear weapons program had slowed down because of the emigration of Einstein and other German nuclear scientists of genius and it could well be feared that Germany would be in possession of nuclear weapons ahead of any other country.

Yet the dictatorship in Germany did not eliminate the fact that the post-Roman European culture is inconceivable without German music, which has nothing to do with the Nazi dictatorship and its war for world domination and which has been performed all over the world before the dictatorship came and after it was gone.

Nor did the dictatorship in Germany eliminate the fact that Einstein, with other German scientists of genius, saved the United States by fostering the development of nuclear weapons ahead of Hitler. Einstein held top scientific posts in the Kaiser's Germany in 1913, about seven years before his Nobel Prize and when few Americans knew his name. It was only when Hitler came to power that Einstein emigrated from Germany. Yes, he and his German nuclear colleagues were deeply rooted in German culture and German science, but they saved the United States from Hitler's nuclear weapons that might have been developed in Germany ahead of the United States.

Nor did the dictatorship in Germany obliterate the fact that some Germans risked their lives to save Jews.

Similarly, the danger that Western civilization will share the fate of the Tiananmen Square gathering in 1989 did not eliminate the four millennia of great Chinese culture or the fact that 1 million young Chinese participated in the movement centered on Tiananmen Square.

ÒBut what is 1 million young Chinese?Ó I have been asked. ÒThis is less than one-thousandth of the population of China!Ó

Yet I heard similar remarks from American Sovietologists in 1990. ÒThose world-famous Soviet dissidents number several dozen inhabitants of Russia, less than one-millionth of her population. What do they matter? As against the world's most powerful Soviet armed forces? No, you Russians have never known freedom and therefore you never will.Ó

But next year the Soviet dictatorship collapsed with hardly any resistance. Is it coming back? Well, but it did collapse in 1991, and there was a lucid interval. Some or many members of every nation tend to glorify themselves and their nation, and underestimate other nations.

Some of my Chinese readers declare in their e-mails to me that by criticizing Mao (a Chinese) I disparage all Chinese since even one imperfect Chinese (Mao) is impossible. Similarly, some of my American readers declare in their e-mails that all Americans are ready to die for freedom, and if I do not understand it, Ògo to your Russia!Ó

But here I have been listening to the exchanges between the Democratic presidential candidates and their potential voters. What is the percentage of those interested in politics, and not in their prosperity? It is rarely or never that we hear any concern that the CIA misinforms, not informs, and hence the United States is geostrategically blind, or worse; that the university humanities are mills for the sale of degrees for tuition fees; that the former prosecutor and supreme judge Burton Katz is right, contending in his book ÒJustice OverruledÓ that legal justice does not exist in the United States; or that the dictators of China have been developing since 1986 post-nuclear superweapons capable of destroying the Western means of nuclear retaliation and hence annihilating the West with impunity.

All we have been hearing is the poverty vs. prosperity issue. Not that I don't sympathize. But this is not politics. An American who wants more social benefits or better and less expensive goods and services may not care whether or not dictatorship will come to the United States as it did to the world's most civilized and best educated Western country of the 1930sÑGermany!

As for the prospect of annihilation by Chinese molecular nano weapons, an American businessman told me: ÒSo what? I will die anyway sooner or later. Why should I worry that I will die with all the other Westerners?Ó

So, let us not exaggerate a political awareness among Americans and underestimate it among Chinese.

In the 13th century the Italian Marco Polo admired the splendors of the world's most advanced civilization of China, including its tolerance (a Christian church next to a synagogue, and both tax-exempt) as compared with the squalor, bigotry, ethnic and religious persecutions, and general barbarity of post-Roman Europe, which did not know, to the horror of the Chinese, even china or silk!

Two centuries later the barbarian Europe began to advance culturally. In the 19th century China was too technologically backward to defend itself against England, while the 20th century saw its invasion by Japan, which only the world war stopped.

Stalin helped Mao to rout the Kuomintang in 1949. Without Stalin, there would have been no Mao's dictatorship, which ended only with his death in 1976. But what had been going on before, ever since Dr. Sun Yat-sen was elected president of China in 1911? I have never heard the word ÒKuomintangÓ in the U.S. media.

After Sun's death on March 12, 1925, the Kuomintang adopted his Three Principles of the People: independence, democracy and livelihood. It is significant that after the Kuomintang had been routed (owing to Stalin), its supporters flocked to Taiwan, and for the past 53 years Taiwan has been living without dictators Given peacetime in the absence of geostrategic post-nuclear superweapons in the hands of the dictators of China, the country may become politically similar to Taiwan (the Kuomintang!), not vice versa.

Will the new political system of China be called ÒdemocracyÓ? That is like asking Marco Polo what the political system in Europe be called in the 21st century.

Marco Polo did not know even the word Òdemocracy.Ó Trial by jury, a vital element of what is called ÒdemocracyÓ today, appeared in England in the first millennium. But it was only in the 20th century that the word ÒdemocracyÓ (referring originally to universal suffrage) began to apply (unofficially!) to Òconstitutional monarchyÓ (as in England) and, somewhat earlier, to the Òconstitutional republicÓ of the United States.

Why should the new China (China without dictatorship) call its political system by a word (ÒdemokratiaÓ) from Athens in the 5th century B.C., if China had already existed for a millennium and a half as a sophisticated civilization where Òlighting-gasÓ had been used for lighting, cooking, and heating, 2300 years before it appeared in the West?

Yes, owing to dictatorship in China, Western civilization may be annihilated by molecular nano superweapons as this column is posted, but all Chinese as a people will be no more responsible than all Europeans as a people were responsible for religious wars and persecutions in Marco Polo's time, or than all of them were responsible in the 20th century for the dictatorship in Germany and its war for its ghastly world domination.