Know Thy Enemy

“The whole secret lies in confusing the enemy, so that he cannot fathom our real intent.”

“To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”

The Art of War – Sun Tzu

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson had an extraordinary monologue on last Friday (March 19, 2021). (For those of you who missed it I urge you to Google “Tucker Carlson’s monologue 3/19/2021” and then scroll down to the videos.) The Daily Caller sampled Mr. Carlson’s discussion thusly:

“Fox News host and Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson said Friday that the Chinese dismiss ‘white liberals’ who are ‘woke’ with a derogatory term: ‘baizuo.’

“’The Chinese know our leaders very well. In fact, they have a name for our self-hating class. They call them ‘baizuo’ — the rough translation of the mandarin is ‘white liberal’ and it is definitely not a compliment,’ Carlson said on ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight.’

“’Here’s how Chinese state media describe baizuo,’ Tucker began, quoting, “‘They are people who only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment, who have no sense of real problems in the real world, who only advocate for peace and equality to satisfy their own feelings of moral superiority and who are so obsessed with political correctness that they tolerate backward Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism.’”

You can agree or disagree with the description of the “woke” politicians but your disagreement is irrelevant. It is what our enemies think of our “woke” politicians because that is the basis upon which they act towards the United States. Regardless of what the masses think in America, this is what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) perceives occupies the “woke” leadership. In other words, the CCP thinks that the Democrat left’s obsessive focus on political correctness, on racial injustice, on global warming and on income inequity are stupid and they have learned to weaponize that obsession to exploit the American leadership’s vulnerability.

The CCP government treated former President Barack Obama (D) with the disdain reserved for the leadership of the biazuo movement. And, of course, because of Mr. Obama’s obsession with racism he and the mainstream media treated that disdain as evidence of racial animus. It was not. Rather it was disdain for the obsession on racism that distracts the baizuo. It is the false perception by baizuo that they are morally superior as they engage in virtue signaling by criticizing others as racist, sexist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, etc. And it carries over to President Joe Biden who the CCP view as a bumbling old man overwhelmed by his position and pushed this way and that by the forces of baizuo.

But it goes well beyond that. The CCP sees baizuo as a fundamental weakness to be exploited. They see baizuo as the instrument for creating doubt by the American citizenry in the their own government, in America’s own leaders, and in Americans themselves. They see it as a means to distract American leaders from the critical issues challenging America as the leader of the free world.

It is, therefore, little wonder that the Chinese in the first high level meeting with the Biden administration attacked America as a racist society, as Islamaphobic, and as a colonial power. They detailed the complaints of Black Lives Matter as if they represented the totality of American culture. They characterized the police as an occupation force. In large part they sounded like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rashida Talib (D-MI) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA). There is no truth in any of those allegations but the Biden administration, petrified by such allegations, was stupefied as to the direction of relationships with China thus leaving China to chart its own course in world affairs without concern about the most powerful country in the world led by the most self-loathing administration in American history.

While Communist China may focus its public disdain for baizuo on Mr. Biden and his administration, it actually applies that disdain to the whole Far Left movement. The obsession with race, the obsession with ethnicity, the obsession with climate change, and the obsession with diminishing the authority of the police and the strength of the military are all viewed by Communist China not just as signs of weakness but also signs of decay and the corruption of Western style democracy. The Wall Street Journal noted on Tuesday, March 22:

“That was some tongue lashing a senior Chinese official delivered last week in Anchorage to top Biden Administration officials in their first meeting. This is the new reality in U.S.-China relations, as adversaries look to see if they can exploit President Biden as they did Barack Obama.

* * *

“China’s director of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs, Yang Jiechi, then went on a 20-minute tear (including translation) about the superiority of ‘Chinese-style democracy’ and America’s sins. The latter included a reference to Black Lives Matter, human-rights problems, and that the U.S. ‘has exercised long-arm jurisdiction and suppression and overstretched the national security through the use of force or financial hegemony.’

“Mr. Yang added: ‘So we believe that it is important for the United States to change its own image and to stop advancing its own democracy in the rest of the world. Many people within the United States actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States.’ As we’ve noted, the Chinese like to echo the woke U.S. media critique of America.”

But let’s return to Sun Tzu and the Art of War. Sun Tzu was a military strategist and philosopher who lived some 500 years before Christ. He has been and is revered by virtually every dynasty of Chinese including the current CCP party. His observations are echoed in the thoughts and actions of military leaders for millennia. According to the History of Strategy, Sun Tzu believed that two elements are required in the confrontation with one’s enemies. One element is the direct force that confronts and fixes the enemy in place (Zheng) and the other which encircles the enemy actually or physchologically (Qi) – this later force being indirect, unexpected, distracting and unorthodox. The use of both elements will allow the concentration of force to occur where least expected and ensure victory.

Now, does any of this sound like the current posture of the CCP? In furtherance of the Zheng China has increased its military presence in the South China Sea, clamped down and eliminated democracy in Hong Kong and regularly threatened Taiwan including the overfly of Chinese bombers reserved for carrying nuclear weapons. And for the Qi . . . well just consider the Wall Street Journal article referenced above. The former is to fix the United States military attention on the increased military presence of China in Southeast Asia while the latter is an indirect attack on the commonweal of the American public designed to cause doubt in the purpose and attention of our government and it institutions.

It is fine that Mr. Biden has heightened the government’s concern over the actions of the CCP government but he is looking only at the Zheng. But the Zheng is just there to focus attention and to distract from the Qi. Unless Mr. Biden is willing to take the leadership in changing the national dialogue over race, ethnicity, climate change, and the role of the police and military, we will lose this battle to the enemy.

Look, the issues of race, ethnicity, climate change and the role of the police and military require our attention but not our obsession. Everything cannot be seen in the context of race or color, gender, etc. The recent trip (including the trip on the stairs) by Mr. Biden and Vice-president Carmello Harris to Georgia in response to the recent murder of massage parlor workers in Atlanta was an attempt to inject race into an incident that had nothing to do with race and everything to do with sex and mental health. They were out of bounds, but they were predictable because they see everything through a “racism” lens. They are baizuo and my fear is that they are incapable of changing that to the substantial detriment of our democracy.