Milton to Xi Jinping (a tweet)

Give me Liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to Conscience, above all Liberties.

John Milton, Areopagitica (1644)[1]

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[1] John Milton, Milton’s Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, ed., Thomas Osborn (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1873), p. 64.

Why the Chinese Communist Party leadership succeeds in holding power: A Toquevillean view

… the anti-hierarchical sentiment has always existed and the chief social contradiction is precisely the contrast between the necessity for hierarchy and the sentiment for equality.  Men then experience the need, not to destroy government – man is naturally an archic animal – but to destroy and weaken, as far as lies in their power, all the deputy governments, all the authorities, castes, classes, corporations, which come in layers between them and the central government.  What they commonly call Liberty is no other than this thing. The subject in the Oriental empire thinks he is free; the Roman people hailed Caesar as a liberator.  It is noticeable that people never, or very slightly, lavish a religious respect upon a caste, but very often and very easily do so upon a single master, an Oriental despot, a Roman Caesar, a French Napoleon.  He represents the popular force incarnate in one man.  In what way does he then represent it?  By suppressing hierarchy, which popular force always wants to suppress. In this way he represents not, it is true, the people itself, but one of the people’s instincts, and the keenest of them, in a state of victory.  Therefore the people is not entirely mistaken in seeing itself represented by him.[1]

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[1] See Emile Faguet, “Tocqueville” in Politicians and Moralists of the Nineteenth Century, tr. Dorothy Galton (London: Ernest Benn, 1928), pp. 81,82.  This English translation of Volume 3 of Faguet’s, Politiques et moralists du dix-neuvième siècle (originally published in 1899) appears in the Library of European Political Thought series edited by Harold J. Laski.

China in the oil sands (and provincial Canadians)

Premier Alison Redford’s approval of the China National Offshore Oil Corp’s investment in Alberta is shameful.  This state-owned company has bid some $15.1 billion for Calgary-based Nexen Inc., a significant Canadian power in the energy industry.  How can Canadians speak of national self-determination and of control of oil sands development in the same breath when China is making its biggest overseas investment ever here in this country? 

Effectively, the Chinese government will have greater and greater authority over the oils sands, once considered a provincial resource, regardless of what Albertans or other Canadians say or do.  For good reason most of the people of China are not members of the Communist Party, singular in that nation, so why should Canada be subject to it? I am reminded of the beginning of WWII when American business leaders were reluctant to reduce car production because they did not want to make room for arms development.[1]  Where is the loyalty to national sovereignty, or sovereign interests, when provincial business figures gravitate only to money?

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[1] J.K. Galbraith, The Liberal Hour (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1961), p. 112.