Everyone here knows the Parenti quote referenced in the title by now.

“During the Cold War, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence.”

That is to say, if the Soviet Union does something bad, that’s bad. If the Soviet Union does something good, that’s also bad. “Communism is evil” is an implicit truism Americans and westerners carry with them everywhere.

Parenti was writing for the audience of late 20th century America, before the maturation of the internet. Now, in the 21st century, we still see this thinking (or lack thereof) applied against the PRC, the DPRK, Cuba, and even modern Russia. Even so, it has changed with the times and the media technology available.

For most of the 20th century, there was a relative dearth of information. You only got your news from television broadcast or even radio if not newspaper, meaning geography and language constituted a significant limitation to the information you could even theoretically receive. There are no such barriers anymore. The world wide web lives up to its name, and google will translate anything for you with the click of a button. Forums also allow distant people who would have never met thirty years ago to talk to each other in real time about subjects never discussed in a person-to-person setting, often with a metaphorical crowd of onlookers. Now, there’s too much information to make sense of, too many different perspectives, coming from everywhere.

This makes control of information by governments, corporations and police forces extremely difficult. For every person decrying the barbarity of Hamas, the five genocides conducted simultaneously by the evil Chinese Commie Party, Putin’s unprompted aggression in Ukraine, etc, there are naysayers in the comments, alternative media outlets contesting these claims, “Russian trolls” in your twitter feed, and so on. Twentieth-century unfalsifiable orthodoxy requires a set of shared data to act upon. Now, we don’t have that.

So you want to demonize the Chinese communists, but it’s increasingly difficult to persuade anyone of anything, at least consistently. You can trick HBO viewers into buying into Uighur genocide as quickly as they bought HBO, sure, but what about all the people who aren’t idiots? In my observations, “unfalsifiable orthodoxy” now resembles splattering paint over a canvas randomly and seeing what emerges from the chaos. It relies less on objective events and more on the preexisting anticommunism embedded in the American political consciousness, and the possibility of something bad happening rather than the possibility of something that happened being bad.

I once argued with a redditor while browsing a gardening subreddit. Someone made a post claiming they were shipped “mysterious” seeds of unknown species, package said they were from China, didn’t remember ordering them. Said redditor posted a comment, claiming it was a Chinese bioweapon designed to destroy the Usonian ecosystem. I asked him to give evidence, and they cited the police response to the then-recent Hong Kong riots.

Bill Maher, a couple months back, called China “the new Islam,” saying “the left” “couldn’t be honest about them.” He went on to claim that Covid-19 was a bioweapon cooked up in a lab. Evidence? “China does some bad things!”

It is not anymore “USSR bad, therefore the thing they did (objectively) was bad in some way.” It is now “China bad, therefore China did something bad. If there’s no evidence of anything happening, it’s being hidden.” This bad thing that China did can itself become evidence of a different bad thing China also did. “What do you mean no Chinese bioweapon? Hong Kong! Uighurs!”

Eventually, it becomes impossible to dissuade someone of any claim about China’s atrocities, because it’s embedded in a dozen other falsehoods assumed true themselves based on other unproven accusations. It’s fractal, identical all the way down forever.

The need for actual data has been conveniently boiled away. China could have performed any act of villainy simply because it seems like the kind of thing they might do. Since they could have, and since it seems like they would do it if they could, they did. What did they do? Something. Anything at all. There are no wrong answers.

So be watchful of people doing this, note it when it happens. I don’t know how to stop them from doing it. Sometimes listening to liberals feels like talking to cultists.