The whispering revolution

Ai Weiwei writes about The whispering revolution in China. He describes the terror tactics of the government:

At midnight they can come into your room and take you away. They can put a black hood on you, take you to a secret place and interrogate you, trying to stop what you're doing. They threaten your family, saying: “Your children won't find jobs.”

It could be worse — he could be a Muslim living in the USA, UK, Australia, Canada, etc.. He could be taken to a secret place like Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.

Meanwhile the US Government is spying on its citizens to unprecedent extent by having The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say):

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

Emphasis Mine

If Ai Weiwei thinks the West is anymore freer than China, he is in for a big shock. The Capitalists are just as paranoid about correct thinking by its citizens as the Chinese government.

Ai concludes that the Chinese state:

…still hasn't come to the moment that it will collapse. That makes a lot of other states admire its technology and methods. But, in the long run, China's leaders must understand it's not possible for them to control the internet unless they shut it off - and they can't live with the consequences of that. The internet is uncontrollable. And if the internet is uncontrollable, freedom will win.

It is amazing how doublethink operates in a supposedly liberal newspaper. One can condemm tyranny and censorship as long as you are talking about an official enemy. Indeed, you are celebrated and feted for doing so. But talk about crimes committed by the US and its allied government, you are cast into the shadows with the possibility of disappearing.