I’ve had the bad luck (or good, being ‘in’ the arts) to have lived in two police states so far: Apartheid SA and CCP China. I’ve lived in Nazi Germany too, and Gaza, of course, but that’s phenomenologically—by sheer weight of received representation, in the abstract, as a consumer of films and media.
So have you.
Police states don’t want to leave us alone. They’re overbearing. They’re Richard Serra sculptures in the living room. Covid universalized them—remember that shit show? Police states really, really want to get in your face and ruin your day. Apartheid, not so much as a white guy, but here in China, the CCP are in everything—like weevils in rice, like plastic in the Atlantic, like yearning in a Chet Baker song.
Everything.
I had cops literally open my apartment door and walk in unannounced in China. Luckily I wasn’t, you know, but I might have been. They demanded my passport and thumbed through it while I reminded myself to watch Welles’ The Trial again—sexiest of all Orson’s finessed patchwork wonders. At the end, K is taken out into the rubble and stabbed to death, or was it shot “like a dog”—”as if,” writes Kafka, “the shame of it would outlive him…”
To be outlived by shame is ironically the fate of the police state.
Once it collapses—and it always collapses—history and popular memory heap great shame on it, and rightly so. When you turn on the light, Apartheid is the roach in the kitchen meant to scurry away: a visceral signified of moral disgust, like Zionist Israel. But before the police state collapses, in its pomp, it expends great resources to get in your face—quite literally, to en-map your face into coded streams of closed-circuit relays of surveillance. China is teeming with security cameras; millions of them perch like doves in sinister clusters on every street in every city, constantly feeding faces back to the police state archive to annotate, designate, and deploy.
It was an outrageous invasiveness sold as security to the citizenry, but really these panoptical arrays police agglomerations of potential solidarity. Any coordinated and conscious public cluster of the aggrieved over wage theft, say, exploitation, inequality, or free speech, and out come the goons of the status quo to re-atomize everyone by threat or force back into their seething, isolated, joyless lives. The police state demands quiescence. Noise is only ever the mandated state-capitalist noise of propaganda, AI boosterism, Party feats of forward-thinking ingenuity, votive struggle piety, and gestures of selfless self-sacrifice for the good of all—decrepit Stalinist horseshit the ANC would love to get away with if it could, if it had any shred of popular legitimacy left after decades of looting, incompetence, and calamitous decay.
Apartheid couldn’t afford hi-tech surveillance back then, so it bribed informants—just like in Eisenstein’s Stachka—who often ended up necklaced. Most of us, besides the oligarchy, are trying to survive with tires around our necks today: the burning tires of inflation, war, climate meltdown, cultural exhaustion, stress, precarity, and debt. Death by the fire of prioritized shareholder returns over safety links Tai Po in Hong Kong to Grenfell Tower in London—both preventable social murders against the working class that should never have happened, thoroughly enabled and whitewashed by venally compromised ruling orders beholden to financial capital.
This is who the police state is ultimately for—even the CCP. It is for the owners and speculators of capital and assets, the ones up there in the skybox looking down in disgust on us, dreaming of neuro-prosthetic immortality or the lost Nabokovian delights of Epstein’s wild island getaways.
So what’s to be done, as Lenin famously asked? What should we do about all this suffering, injustice, and horror? There are two responses open to us. One is valid, historically vetted, and almost guaranteed to change our lives for the better. The other—the response we tend to default to—leads only to more of whatever it is our unexamined lives amount to, trapped as we are in this disorienting historical intake of breath, this baleful interregnum, before yet another world war…
Cluster in solidarity and learn to fight back together, in unity—viva Paris—or burrow ever deeper into ourselves, thinking of Welles and Kafka, say, all those beguiling higher things, even when the agents of terror are right in front of us, going through our passport.
The choice is Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte or 1917 redux: something like the Bolshevik revolution, or yet another privileged helping of platformed distraction while the planet burns.
Time to face the police state—that face in our face.