by Vince McLeod

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Xu Xiaodong is a Chinese MMA fighter and wind-up merchant who has gained fame for making fools out of bullshit artists. This has made him a target for the ire of the CCP, who have punished him through use of the Chinese social credit system. Xu’s example provides a cautionary tale about what might be coming the way of New Zealand dissidents.

In particular, Xu has made a fool out out of several supposed martial artists, who claimed to be teaching useful martial skills, but who were really just fraudsters. He has challenged several of them to bouts, which he invariably wins within 30 seconds.

This has upset the CCP because they consider the promotion of kung fu and tai chi to be in China’s cultural interests, and therefore that Xu’s actions are harming those interests by making people take kung fu and tai chi less seriously. Xu echoes the master morality of preferring the painful truth to the comfortable lie, in contrast to the slave morality of the CCP.

The most egregious thing about the CCP’s actions here is that Xu is revealing and destroying falsehood. He isn’t telling lies or making outrageous moral pronouncements. He isn’t going around saying that the CCP are evil and should be overthrown. He’s just telling the truth about the ineffective nature of certain traditional martial arts.

Xu Xiaodong is of the same spirit as the men who said that the Earth rotates around the Sun, and who were persecuted for it.

Simply for exposing the truth, Xu is suffering social credit penalties that have a significant impact on his life. One story holds that Xu had to travel for 36 hours without rest to get to the location of one of his fights, because he had been banned from planes and trains. He has also been forbidden from renting rooms in certain hotels.

If New Zealand ever introduces a central bank digital currency (a.k.a. a CBDC), they will have a similar power to suppress dissenters.

The Chinese system already allows the CCP to, for example, switch off a person’s ability to buy alcohol. A New Zealand social credit system based on a CBDC could easily achieve the same ends. Criticise the Government? No alcohol, tobacco or flights for you. No renting a room outside of your delegated containment zone.

A CBDC-based social credit system in New Zealand would also mean that, in the case of a repeat of last year’s Parliament Lawn protests, the New Zealand Government could simply shut off the bank accounts of anyone observed protesting. They could also pre-empt protests from starting by blocking known protesters from accessing the transport necessary to take them to Wellington. 

It could mean that the people running alternative media channels like Counterspin and VJM Publishing could be prevented from owning property, as is currently the case in China for people with the lowest ratings. We could even be prevented from legally accessing the Internet.

New Zealand is already getting close to a situation where a Kiwi cannot hold a government office unless they parrot known lies about the Treaty of Waitangi being a partnership agreement. A social credit system in New Zealand would mean that you have to agree with the Government, even when it’s wrong, or face a penalty.

Imagine not being allowed to take domestic flights because you disagreed with co-governance, or the mass importation of cheap labour, or cannabis prohibition, or any one of the numerous evils that the New Zealand Government inflicts upon its long-suffering people.

The control freaks that forced the Covid mandates on us would love nothing more than to have another go. We already know that they’re planning a CBDC that central governments could use as a social credit system to silence dissenters. Some likely proposals are based on carbon credits, such that each person is allocated a set number of credits per set time period and can lose credits for displeasing the Government.

There are two major ways that freedom-lovers can fight against this.

The first is to raise awareness that it is happening. It’s not schizophrenia to say that powerful ruling-class interests are conspiring to strip rights and freedoms away form the masses. Ruling classes have always done that, all throughout history. The CBDC is just another step towards a Chinese-style social credit system. Make people aware of this.

The second is to explore alternative economies. Sometimes (but not always) this includes criminal ones. The black market has always existed to meet the needs of those who have been ostracised by tyrants. As entheogen users could tell you today, it still does. In any case, people can practice barter or trade for silver bullion without needing to become criminal.

What the case of Xu Xiaodong teaches us is that the tyrannical impulse on the part of the world’s ruling classes never goes away – it simply takes new forms depending on the technology available to it. The Covid mandates showed that the will to totalitarianism still exists among our ruling class. Letting them control us through a social credit system is the last thing the New Zealand nation needs.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms! https://linktr.ee/vjmpublishing

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