Dreaming dictators; Eternal tyrants By: Greg Maresca

It was one of those spontaneous remarks caught on a live mic that quietly slipped under the radar but sticks in memory like a bad joke at a funeral, awkward, disregarded, but haunting.

At a massive military parade in Beijing China’s Tiananmen Square that commemorated the 80th anniversary of the victory in World War II over the Japanese, Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China were recorded discussing the prospect of medical longevity and even immortality.

In a livestream discussion that sounded more like a wellness infomercial crossed with a Cold War sequel, China’s state-run CCTV aired a bizarre conversation about organ transplants as the latest fountain-of-youth craze. The phrase “younger and younger” was lobbed around with the carefree abandon of Botox at a Hollywood brunch.

Xi: “In the past, it used to be rare for someone to be older than 70 and these days they say that at 70 one’s still a child.” 

Putin: “With the development of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality.” 

Xi: “Predictions are, this century, there's a chance of also living to 150.”

Putin grinning with the kind of self-confidence of a James Bond villain confirmed the exchange during a press conference, voicing enthusiasm for breakthroughs in biotechnology and organ replacement. Putin praised its promise as trappings to extend life provided one does not suffer from the longstanding Russian condition that is always terminal: political dissent. 

In this brave new world of eternal youth, it is not just your internal organs that need compatibility but your political ideology.

Rather than discussing strategy or national defense, Putin and Xi are casually formulating ways to become immortal.  While such an exchange may sound absurd, almost satirical, it starkly reveals the disturbing ambitions of both tyrants. Their offhand remarks offer a rare and telling glimpse into the dangerous grandiosity that underpins their worldview loaded with unchecked hubris.

Power corrupts, but the conception of eternal power comes with delusions of grandeur.

Dictators are adept at exploiting fear, consolidating power through control and propaganda, while dismantling institutions that safeguard dissent. They garner power by manipulating crises, silencing opposition and presenting themselves as the sole solution to national instability whether through charisma, coercion, or calculated brutality.

Putin and Xi are convinced their countries would spiral into chaos without their daily micromanagement of borders, bodies, and belief systems where religion is banished.

Their hubris treats aging as an impediment to power, productivity, and personal legacy that must be delayed and defeated and understood as some kind of solvable problem.  For the prospect of medical science stopping biological time, remember hair plugs still scream counterfeit louder than a three-dollar bill in a poker game.

At their core people like Putin and Xi are deluded men with God complexes whose ambitions stretch beyond mere governance and into the metaphysical of life and death.

What about preventing the real deaths caused by these atheistic communists?  

Putin has sent hundreds of thousands of troops into a meatgrinder war against Ukraine, a nation that never threatened Russia.  During the COVID pandemic, rumors of Putin’s phobic behavior were legion. Xi presides over a brutal and deadly campaign that has incarcerated more than a million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities including Christians.  Moreover, China’s unethical genetic and bioengineering experiments have been circulating for decades as the origin of COVID confirms.   

Mortality, like death itself, is a threshold. Death is not a deadline or defeat but a doorway, a sacred passage one must pass through to gain eternal life that is grounded in hope, humility, and communion with God. 

Their vision of immortality is strictly comprised of the material: organs, biotech, and transplants.  The soul is lacking.  They fail to realize that the soul is the protagonist of our life’s story and that the eternity they seek is not achieved through science but received through grace. 

To this atheist duo, “what profit is there for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul,” is just another verse from the bestseller of the millennium that is revered by billions.  It is no spiritual caution and more a cultural artifact emptied of metaphysical urgency.

Being ardent communists, they chose to dismiss how Christianity offers a counter-narrative to the secular chase for immortality offering peace where biotech only offers postponement.

In a world where biotech ambition tempts us with the dream of bypassing death, eternity is not engineered but received.

After all, time is short; eternity is forever