The New Confederacy of Unfreedom

It was a parade tailor-made to retrieve history from the narrative hegemony of the West. Tiananmen Square had not seen this kind of pageantry featuring fear and domination in terrifying harmony since the dawn of June 4 in 1989. Then, in the now-familiar understatement of socialist objectivity, it was just an “incident” in which tanks rolled towards students who dared to revolt—and die. What the world watched in awe on September 3 was Beijing launching
a new culture war, which, like the Cold War, is a rejoinder to the Western (read American) interpretation of freedom—and the excessiveness of democracy. The guest list of Emperor Xi, who has already bestowed upon himself the mandate of the Eternal Helmsman, gave us an idea about who would form the vanguard in the new culture war: Xi, the undisputed leader of the unfree world, was flanked by Vladimir Putin of Russia and Kim Jong Un of North Korea. They were there not just to endorse China’s underappreciated role in ending World War II. They were there not just to raise a toast to Comrade Xi on the 80th anniversary of China’s sacrificial role in defeating imperial Japan, a greater feat than the defeat of Nazism by the West. They were there at the parade of the century to rebut the West’s bestselling story about freedom itself. No other ‘lie’ was given such a spectacular rebuttal.

And to tell the story in socialist hyperrealism, Xi has given autocracy an Oriental stage with World War II as a prop. A Beijing-Moscow axis in the new order of unfreedom follows the same rulebook of totalitarianism: the dictator feasts on the doctrine of hurt. Which alone explains why China and Russia are united not merely by mistrust of America but by an unjust history stretching from the Opium Wars to the orchestrated disintegration of the Soviet Union. Xi may be presiding over a Leninist apparatus that allows no space for questions. He may be more concerned about preserving nationalism marinated in Confucianism than keeping Marx in the marketplace. And a sense of Oriental exceptionalism may have added to his nationalist confidence, which is the great wall that separates China from the West. The world’s most powerful tyrant still plays the victim. The hurt is too deep to hide. That is every dictator’s existential trauma.

Putin at the parade, too, is having an angry conversation with history. He still carries within himself the last remains of an empire, which for him is a potent nationalist stimulant. He, too, is a claimant to a stolen history. He is aware of the harshness of it all. The tariff tyranny of Trump, for instance, has shaken the world, but America alone possesses the power to influence the strategic or nationalist options of others. No other country in the West can lead the conversation about power and the price it demands. Putin needs an old-fashioned war, straight out of the World War template, to keep his imperium intact, no matter what it costs—and to remain a true Slavic nationalist. WhatAmerica needs is just a profiteering tariff war. It hurts.

The confederacy of autocrats consecrated at Xi’s red altar is culturally different from the erstwhile Soviet bloc. The Kremlin ensured the ideological cohesion of the satellites; the jackboot of Stalinism was there to stop the first stirrings of deviation. They all claimed the legitimacy of revolution, which allowed the masses to dream within the limits set by the commissar. It was the moral certainty of communism that gave the earlier alternative the power of delusion. The emerging post-ideological resistance to the West is a house of diversity, the only common element being a commitment to populist sorcery. Left or right, they all rage against a culturally exhausted West. Paradoxically enough, Trump is not the ideal expression of the West, let alone Americanism, they oppose. Trump, in his cultural make-up, is not just un-American in many ways but an autocrat they can identify with. Haven’t Xi and Putin already learned how to deal with the American president, unlike some leaders from the democratic world? Anti-Americanism is not necessarily anti-Trumpism—or vice versa. This distinction is dawning upon not the confederacy of autocrats alone.

India, too, should acknowledge this distinction. Before Beijing, there was Tianjin, where the Indian prime minister beamed in the company of Xi and Putin. For Modi, it was not a historic shift but an instance of creative pragmatism in foreign policy. India’s natural ally was elsewhere, and Donald Trump was not its mascot.

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