Photo: IC

In his speech Thursday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo once again slammed China for its "tyranny." Tyranny is a concept often used by the West to accuse the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Pompeo is trying to mobilize the West into a new cold war with China by reviving it and putting the label on China.

The definition of tyranny by John Locke, a 17th-century English philosopher, had a great influence on later generations. He emphasized that rulers use power not for the good of those who are under it, but for his own private separate advantage, which is tyranny.

If one must judge the two great powers of China and the US with the definition of tyranny, it's clear the US is more tyrannical with its governance. Both at home and on the world stage, the US government has abused its laws and the power vested in it by its national strength, exploited legal loopholes, and done a lot of things that harmed the American people and the world.

Take a look at what the US government has done since the turn of the century. The Iraq war of 2003 was clearly an unjustified war based on false information that disrupted the Middle East and destroyed social stability in Iraq. This war without a UN mandate provided a model for the West to launch military strikes against small states, and the huge humanitarian disaster it created was whitewashed by the moral excuse of "overthrowing tyranny". After that, the Libyan regime collapsed and the Syrian civil war broke out. The military intervention of the West was very arbitrary, which not only harmed the people of the countries being intervened, but also made the West, especially the European society, suffer from the influx of refugees in the Middle East and the spread of more terrorism.

In the current US government, the brutality of tyranny is almost out of control. First it launched a global trade war. After the outbreak of COVID-19, it seriously misjudged the risk of COVID-19 and refused to take strong prevention and control measures in the face of the lessons learned by China and Europe. As a result, the US was gradually engulfed by the epidemic and became the worst-hit country.

If the US were a truly democratic country with power truly for its people, no matter how serious the novel coronavirus is, the country would not have reached this point. But since it became apparent that the epidemic was seriously out of control, the tyranny side of the US politics has been fully activated. The response to the crisis, from the President to the Secretary of State to other key officials, is not to find effective solutions to the problem, but to mobilize the whole government to fabricate lies against China and WHO and shift the blame. The White House is trying to convince Americans that fighting the epidemic is useless, that restoring the economy requires ignoring the risk of an outbreak. They claim that the death of a few hundred thousand people is not a big deal. It is a good result thanks to correct command by the US government which has avoided the death of millions of people.

Why all these big lies? The purpose is to exonerate themselves and to win the reelection. Isn't it a typical feature of tyranny to put the reelection of a political group above the health of the American people with means of deception?

How can such tyranny survive in the US? It has two big secrets. The first is that the Trump administration is a populist one, based on lower-middle-class white Americans. They account for less than half of the US electorate, but their political mood is fierce. By exacerbating the divisions in the US society, the administration has muddled the judgment of all the people and made the confrontation between truth and lies look like a political conflict between different interest groups. 

The second secret is the current administration's all-out efforts to mobilize the US and the West to confront China have further confused many Americans about right and wrong. By creating hatred of China among the US voters, they diverted attention from the White House's negligence in fighting the epidemic. In order to boost the odds of winning the reelection, they are willing to push China-US relations into a new cold war.

In contrast to the US government, which is blatantly selfish, the Communist Party-led government in China has really put the well-being of the people at the center of its governance. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, the protection of people's lives and health has immediately become the country's overriding priority. Some corrupt officials emerged, the masses were dissatisfied, and the toughest anti-corruption campaign in history was launched vigorously in the country. In addition, the government attaches great importance to any incident in which people express their dissatisfaction, and any mistake will be corrected. How can such a country and government be associated with tyranny?

The US ostensibly has all the tools and procedures of a Western-style democracy but none of them has really done much to stop the current government from messing around. The Trump administration is a de facto tyrannical regime. Officials opposed to the President were quickly replaced, including many core cabinet members. The interests and will of President Trump and his loyalists are the absolute focus of the US politics at present. If all of this is not a typical modern tyranny, what is it?