There was a moment in class today when the idea of speaking out against a leader was mentioned in the context of “Bad Joke.” Last semester, I took a class on Machiavelli and the first thing I thought of when it came to this story was the idea of power and authority and how you keep power. Machiavelli teaches the idea that a leader must stop revolutions before they begin because a spark will produce a flame and any revolutionary ideas can grow. This idea was very present in both “Saboteur” and “Bad Joke.” The police stop speech against authority before it become something more. A Machiavelli quote from The Prince that sums this up is his ideas about fear and love, “Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? One should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved.” The communist party realizes that it must employ fear to keep the people in line, and this concept is very present in Machiavelli’s teachings. This is still seen today in the rule of Xi Jinping. He evokes love in the citizens who follow his laws and benefit from them, but he is not afraid to produce hate in those he needs to control. Whether it is other party officials who disagree with him or ethnic groups that challenge the China he wants, Xi Jinping understand that he must suppress these groups in order to maintain absolute power. However, before we judge China, we must remember that the United States was founded on some of the same beliefs that Machiavelli had, and Thomas Jefferson is known to have kept a copy of The Prince.
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