In a development that would make Orwell weep into his Earl Grey, South Korea has detained a Chinese dissident who fled the authoritarian embrace of Xi Jinping’s China. The dissident, a man whose name we shall not utter lest it be swallowed by the Great Firewall, was scooped up by Seoul’s finest just as Britain, in a fit of Churchillian fervour, was championing free speech against the very crackdowns he sought to escape.
Let us paint this farce. Here is Britain, a nation whose own free speech credentials are about as robust as a sandcastle in a tsunami, wagging a disapproving finger at authoritarian crackdowns. And there is South Korea, a supposed democracy, doing the bidding of its overlords by picking up a man who merely wanted to say something that was not permitted in his homeland. The hypocrisy is so thick you could spread it on a crumpet.
Our dissident, let’s call him ‘The Squid’ for the purposes of this gonzo report, had fled the People’s Republic after falling foul of its whispers and wires. He sought refuge in the Land of the Morning Calm, only to find that calm is code for compliant. The South Korean authorities, perhaps eager to curry favour with Beijing, nabbed him at a Kimchi stand, because nothing says ‘we respect your human rights’ like a bowl of fermented cabbage.
Meanwhile, in the hallowed halls of Westminster, a gaggle of MPs with faces like pugs and suits that cost more than a small car were banging the drum for free speech. “We must stand up to authoritarianism,” they cried, as they siphoned off tax revenues for another vanity project. The irony would be delicious if it were not so damn tragic.
This is a tale of double-think on a global scale. Britain, a nation that has quietly introduced laws to clamp down on protests and online dissent, is suddenly the defender of the free world’s right to speak. South Korea, a country that puts its own dissidents in jail for criticising the president, detains a man for the crime of having bolted from a bigger jail. And China, the quiet orchestrator, watches from behind its Great Firewall, chuckling into its state-sponsored whisky.
What is reality here? Is it the dissident’s desperate flight, the South Korean snatch, the British posturing? No, my friends. Reality is the gin bottle in my desk drawer, the only thing in this world that makes any sense. It is a world where words are weapons, but only if you cannot buy the politicians pulling the strings.
The dissident, for his part, will probably be deported, or worse. And Britain will continue its crusade, safe in the knowledge that its own house is a shambles, but you can’t throw stones if your windows are already broken. This is the modern world, a theatre of the absurd where we are all actors in a tragedy written by hypocrites.
And the punchline? The punchline is that I am sitting here, in a rented flat in London, typing this on a laptop that could be confiscated by the very free speech champions I am mocking. But I will drink my gin, and I will laugh, because if you do not laugh, you will cry. And crying leaves a terrible hangover.
South Korea, you have detained the wrong man. You should have detained the lot of us. We are all dissidents in this circus, each to our own cage. The only difference is that some of us have a better view.
