Viktor Belenko died on September 24u. Belenko defected from the former Soviet Union in 1976 and brought with him what then-CIA director George H.W. Bush described as an “intelligence bonanza.”
You see, Belenko didn’t just leave the Soviet Union, he left with the country’s most advanced fighter jet. This was the “bonanza” Bush mentioned. According to Clay Risen’s obituary for Belenko in New York Times
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the MiG-25 “Foxbat” flown by Belenko in Japan and quickly delivered to the US “was the weapon the West had long feared, believing it capable of shooting down hypersonic bombers and reconnaissance aircraft that had until then crossed Soviet airspace with impunity” .
Other than that, according to Risen’s report, “The MiG-25 turned out to be a paper eagle.” Worst of all for the Soviets, he couldn’t even do his job.” Funded to be fast, it was in fact “no match for the American aircraft it was going to shoot down”.
Even better than what Belenko revealed to the US about the low quality of Soviet weapons was what he told the authorities about the morale of the Soviet army. Belenko reported that Soviet airmen were “often half-starved and beaten, forced into cramped living quarters and subjected to sadistic punishment for the slightest infraction.” This is life where people are not personally or financially free.
Belenko’s story is hard to separate from all the paranoia Americans are expressing about China and TikTok today. Think about it. A recent conservative op-ed questioned how platforms like TikTok are “shaping American education and political discourse.” The bet here is that the article in question will not age well.
If China is a communist, totalitarian country in the way conservatives seem to imagine, the obvious answer is for Americans not to worry. People who lack personal and financial freedom are miserable and their weapons are inferior. As Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane once observed after visiting the Soviet Union in 1981, the ruined, smelly country full of miserable, bent over people had no economy contrary to what US intelligence reported, and without an economy it had no inside. to fight with the richest country in the world.
To which some readers will reply that China is not like the thankfully defunct Soviet Union. No it is not. What is the point. Or should be. Unlike the half-dead people of the Soviet Union, the Chinese are eating more and more, so much so that McDonald’s, arguably the biggest symbol of American capitalism in the world today, plans to increase the number of its stores in China from 5,500 to over 10,000 . And it’s not just McDonald’s. While Starbucks
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So, yes, China is not like the Soviet Union in that it is not communist. We know what communism looks like, how it smells, and how incredibly closed and ineffective it is. Yet conservatives want us to believe that the CCP is actively operating TikTok for the purpose of “shaping American education and political discourse,” ostensibly for the worse? Ok, but format it to what? If we ignore the accepted conservative wisdom that what the government controls is abhorrent (150 million Americans use TikTok…), we cannot ignore this opposite of what the conservative pundit imagines about a “CCP-controlled” brainwashing TikTok to Americans, American businesses continue to expand into China. However, why would they do this if the CCP, ostensibly because it was Chinese (?), was so adept at turning opinion against all Americans?
After that, increasingly paranoid conservatives can’t have it both ways. If China is in fact communist and bent on destroying us, then why do its people produce so much for us (thus empowering us) that they can lavishly consume so much of what we produce for them? Of course, if all this rampant Americana consumption is just fake (or whatever), and it’s fake because the Chinese say they’re the conservatives, then we needn’t worry. Look up Viktor Belenko if you are confused.
