https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/28/the-nature-of-the-chinese-threat/
It is almost impossible to describe adequately how absurd the partisan abrasions of American politics appear after listening to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s virtual address earlier this week to the inevitable World Economic Forum at Davos. A more unlikely setting could not be imagined: Davos is a dingy, cold, little town inhabited by grumpy German Swiss with inferior hotels and restaurants and one of the few benefits of the coronavirus pandemic is that Davos is now virtual and the rigors of its Spartan, humorless, relentless globalism may be moderated somewhat by the comforts of home.
The industrious founder and head of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, is deservedly making a considerable fortune from his imaginative brainwave from some 50 years ago of inviting prominent people to address groups of other prominent people and pocket huge fees from the wealthy for the privilege of listening to and “networking” with other swells. He continually bootstrapped himself up decade after decade. I watched as foreign ministers gave way to prime ministers as delegation heads and the prime ministers to presidents. At my last attendance, about 20 years ago, I was astonished to see at Zürich airport, the nearest to Davos, Air Force One, and the official aircraft of the presidents of Russia, Brazil, France, and of the prime ministers of India, Canada, and a number of other important countries. I was invited because I was the head of a reasonably prominent newspaper company, and I must admit I conducted some useful business and met many interesting people there.
Klaus Schwab’s own remarks, however, including in introducing the Chinese president on Monday, remind us forcefully of what a mighty fraud globalism has become.
Acknowledging this takes nothing from Schwab’s achievement. And he is a perfectly agreeable and justly successful man. But the globalist message is to invoke a conjured planetary obligation to submit to arbitrary requirements of sustainability that are not based on any conclusive or even persuasive evidence of the ecological damage allegedly wrought by carbon emissions. The global order to which we must all strive, Klaus and all of his serried ranks of prominent speakers tell us, is a monochrome, implicitly anti-theistic, world-communal quest for the submergence of all nationalities, all civilizations more complex than folkloric trappings, all substantial variances in national and even personal standards of living, and with all power concentrated in the hands of an admittedly loquacious but undoubtedly authoritarian elite of international regulators and behavioral monitors.
It is a gradual and comparatively painless enactment of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and other fictional conjurations of human uniformity, though certainly not the totalitarian horror described by Orwell, Koestler, or Kafka. But it is no societal day at the beach either.
