communism with a happy face

I remember soon after finally reading 1984 for the first time was when I first saw V For Vendetta. I was floored by the film, and was stunned to read later that the film's main villain, played by John Hurt, actually played Winston Smith (the polar opposite of his V character) in Michael Radford's 1984 film adaptation of, well, 1984. So obviously, I had to find it.

After much searching and waiting, I finally got a copy...and couldn't make it through more than a half hour before I had to turn it off. Maybe it was the slow Orwellian pace, or maybe it was just being exposed to Suzanna Hamilton's huge bush far too early in the film. But I think just the drab, dark nature and pace of the film made it hard to watch. Obviously its supposed to capture the dark, drab ethos of totalitarianism, and covering it up with happy, cheery images would certainly not be totalitarianism, would not be fascism, would not be communism.

Or could it be? Take a look below:

Care to venture a guess as to what this is? Perhaps just the desktop of a Chinese rabbit enthusiast?

No, this is the Green Dam Youth Escort, a new mandatory computer software instituted by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, that requires that all computer manufacturers shipping CPUs to China install this software, which acts as a filter to censor certain websites, track web uses, and create web logs of any computer in the entire country.

Yowza.

Chinese authorities claim the filter is mainly to censor online pornography...but one thinks that if you were to Google "Tiananmen Square" on your new Chinese-market Macbook, or search for the Beastie Boys at the Tibetan Freedom Concert on Youtube, you may only get articles and/or pictures on Mao back...and a friendly red flag would go straight to your neighborhood Ministry of I.T.

Now, while the program was halted the day before execution earlier this month, and is now on the shelf indefinitely, obviously state control over all forms of media still runs rampant in China. Sure, they may not have figured out the way yet to censor every computer in the most wired country on Earth, but the situation is still quite drab...so begs the question: why doesn't China look like England circa 1984?

Or better yet, how can China rule with a ruthless communist fist when everything looks so cute?

One wonders whether its just the influence of the Japanese on the Chinese government, or whether Hu Jintao and Co. have stumbled on to a brilliant masking device, to make the dystopia that is China seem like quite a cheery one. Rather than the bold, intimidating Agitprop ads that made the communist Soviets, the facsist Nazis and early Maoist China famous (or infamous), the new regime in the PRC has resorted to children's marketing techniques to enforce their brutal laws.

These are the friendly faces that evidently greet you whenever you try visiting an "indecent" website nowadays...no word on whether they will stick around when Green Dam launches, or whether actual Chinese cops look quite as giddy all the time...

It's just mind-boggling, frankly, to see that of all forms of communism that are still surviving, this is how the healthiest (if that's the word) communist state enforces it. Is it just sheer ignorance on the part of the Chinese people to buy into friendly anthromorphic characters, rather than menacing caricatures of state leaders? Or is it that outsiders may not see China as harsh as other totalitarian states like North Korea because, obviously, the Chinese can embrace cute and cuddly communist critters?

You wonder whether Cuba could turn it around if they made Castro a bit more animated...literally and figuratively. Or could the USSR have been saved if the front page of Pravda every day featured a sweet cartoon telling how the capitalist American pigs are trying to nuke your apartment and take your bread?

Adorable cartoon characters, masking their true evil intentions of world domination behind a soft and cuddly exterior...I do believe South Park has covered this before.