China Is Our Carthage – China's Influence Will Have to Be Weakened in Order for the West to Survive as a Democratic and Humane Culture

Let's recall China's modern history. Starting from the end, we can see that China has become the world's second richest country in the 21st century (2000-2020), thanks to the hybrid blend of communist terror with ruthlessness of early capitalism, resulting in ecologically devastating its own territories and reducing the quality of consumer goods around the world. During the preceding twenty-years   (1980-2000),   a   gleam   of   hope  for  democratic   development   appeared,   but  it   was   stamped   out   after
crushing the students protest on Tiananmen square with 10,000 dead (here), as well as after suppressing a mass Buddhist movement, Falun Gong, while imprisoning half a million and driving 70 million people into illegality. About 65,000 Falun Gong members were killed and dismantled into organs for transplants (here), including skin which was peeled from living people. Still earlier, during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), many millions of people were killed in various "cultural" and "re-education" events; the number of casualties is unknown, but it is known that people died of beating, beheading, stoning, live burial, drowning, boiling, disemboweling, slicing off flesh, blowing up with dynamite, and cutting out heart, livers or genitals; hundreds of people were reportedly eaten (here). And at the very beginning of the communist era (1949-1966), people were dying by introducing socialist agriculture; most died in the era of "big leap" between 1958 and 1960, when between 35 and 45 million people starved to death, according to various estimates.

Let's get back to the present. China has acquired all modern technologies from the willing West without complying with the Western intellectual property laws. China acquires technologies from returning students, by scientific cooperation, but also through espionage. Chinese scientists now excel in all disciplines, including virology. For more than 7 years, the Chinese scientists have studied the bat coronaviruses (here), being led by Wuhan coronavirus scientist Dr. Shi Zheng-Li (called „batwoman“ by media). In 2015, a harmless bat coronavirus was modified to be capable of infecting human cells (here); the work was strongly criticized as a dangerous “gain-of-function” experiment (here). In 2017, an article in the prestigious journal Nature warned about the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV); the labs were built to withstand a magnitude 7 earthquake, but the Western scientists worried about possible escapes of the viruses even without any earthquake, in view of known repeated escapes from the high-level containment facilities in China (here). In 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing warned the U.S. government about safety and management weaknesses at the Wuhan WIV labs, mentioning a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic (here and here). Strangely, in September 2019, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board of the WHO, consisting mostly of Western scientists, including Anthony Fauci, published an “Annual report on global preparedness for health emergencies”, named “World at risk”, in which they “prophetically” warned about having to be prepared for the worst in a possible rapidly spreading, lethal respiratory pathogen pandemic (here). It turns out that the current epidemic started much earlier than admitted by the Chinese authorities, possibly already in August and September 2019 (here, here, here), so that one may guess that the above “prophetical” Annual report might have been inspired by first indirect indications. 

Incredible sloppiness of the work in the Wuhan labs was indicated by the reports about experimental animal appearing on the local meat market as some Chinese researchers sell the laboratory animals to street vendors (here). Even Dr. Zheng-Li inadvertently admitted, in her interview for Scientific American in February 2020, that she had wondered whether the new virus could not originate from her laboratory (here).

When the news about the virus started to circulate toward the end of 2019, Chinese scientists extremely quickly published the whole sequence of the new virus, its detailed properties, and its relatedness to other coronaviruses in two articles published in Nature on February 3; both articles located the disease origin to the local meat market (here and here). The first of the articles identified and totally characterized an allegedly new unknown agent of an unknown disease from one patient only within an incredibly short time of six days. The second article, co-authored by Dr. Zheng-Li, independently also identified the new coronavirus, and in addition announced existence of a bat virus having 96% homology with the freshly discovered virus CoV-2 to suport its possible natural origin, said bat virus having been known to the authors allegedly since 2013, even though never been published. Reviewing the two Nature articles strongly suggests that the authors knew the SARS-CoV-2 virus from their earlier research and not only from victims of the epidemic.

At the beginning, the Chinese government directed attention to the local meat market as an animal source of the new virus, which could have evolved “naturally” in exotic animals. The “natural origin” of the new virus was generally supported by the mainstream media from the beginning, an example being condemnation of any attempts to look for an artificial origin in Guardian on February 20, 2020: “Experts fear false rumors could harm Chinese cooperation on coronavirus” (here). The scientific establishment has mostly been intimidated to freely consider the origin of Covid-19; for example, the Nature editors retroactively added a note to their article of 2017 saying that the theory of the virus lab origin is unverified (here). Lancet of March 7, 2020 stated: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin” (here). However, a research scientist of University of California at Berkeley, Xiao Qiang, said bravely: “I don’t think it’s a conspiracy theory. I think it’s a legitimate question that needs to be investigated and answered... To understand exactly how this originated is critical knowledge for preventing this from happening in the future” (here and here).

The fact is that Cov-2 virus comprises unique structural features. For example, the RNA segment coding for the spike protein, which binds to the human ACE2 receptor, was found to have an insertion of 12 nucleotides, not found in any other coronavirus species, resulting in four extra amino acids in positions 681-684 of the protein, allegedly conferring CoV-2 increased contagiousness (here). The origin of SARS-CoV-2 has not been explained so far; its genome may have been artificially edited or not, but its escape from Wuhan labs seems hardly refutable.

For case the meat market story will turn out false, China has created a fallback version for the virus origin – unbelievably revealing that the Wuchan inhabitants had in fact been infected with the Covid-19 disease by the United States (here). Strangely enough, all Chinese accusations and contradictions are quickly forgotten. Regimes like communist China today, or Nazi Germany before WWII, can say anything and are forgiven – in order to maintain peace. As in 1938, when the Nazis accused Jews, Austria, or Czechoslovakia of endangering the German nation, and the world pretended to believe them, also today the Chinese are “believed” when simultaneously accusing the U.S. and pangolins of the same disease – the world believes them since it prefers truce to truth.

Appeasement needs people who are cautious not to irritate the enemy, but it also requires useful idiots who support ideas destructive for the Western society. There are a lot of such useful people among the leftist or liberal politicians. For example, Charles Michel, as Belgian Prime Minister (nowadays he is European Council president), decided to destroy Belgium's entire strategic stock of 63 million protective face-masks in 2015 to use the stock space for accommodating migrants (here), which resulted in higher morbidity during the current epidemic. Another example is provided by the Spanish leftist government, which organized broad celebrations and a march on the Stalinist holiday of International Women Day in March 2020, thereby contributing to quicker spread of the virus (here). When the epidemic started in Italy, the social democratic Florence mayor,  Dario Nardella, asked the residents to hug Chinese people in the streets to “encourage them in their fight against the novel coronavirus” (here).

The debate about the origin of the virus is legitimate, and it is immoral to fear that China will be offended, after the atrocities the Communist Party of China has committed, and in the time when a million people are tortured in the Chinese concentration camps (here). It is certain that the virus originates form the Wuchan laboratories; the first question is whether the virus had been artificially modified in the labs, and the second question is whether the virus escaped due to criminal negligence, or whether it was released on purpose. Let's hope the last scenario is not real, but nothing can be ruled out until China will not have satisfactorily answered the questions. This is not about inciting hatred against the Chinese people; they suffer from the terrorist regime too. Also threatened are people of Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and even Nepal.

Nowadays, all the production is being transferred to China, which, however, often closes its markets to the others. The West loses its self-sufficiency, while having to consume Chinese products of lower quality. The economic help to the developing countries, as well as budgets of global organizations including UNO, WHO, or WIPO, are paid by the democratic countries, but both the developing countries and the organizations are still more under the Chinese influence. The Western world has long been weakened by the pro-Chinese propaganda, as well as by political correctness and green measures. We need not fear of viruses but of low standard of our technical education. The Western society should start promoting technical education and exact sciences over pure humanities and politics to strengthen capitalism and democracy, and to be ready for facing still more difficult problems of the future.

The current pandemic has frozen the whole world outside China, as if the invisible hand of panic was trying to cripple the normal life and economy of the world. With the morbidity and mortality not too different from flu epidemics (here), one wonders how our society will react when a virus with a 90% mortality rate appears, or when an earthquake occurs in more parts of the world, or when a big asteroid hits the Earth. Surely, the West will have to unite and gather courage to strengthen its independence on China, and then to use the remnants of its economic, scientific and moral superiority to force China to move to more openness. However, we will also have to convince our fellow citizens who are looking for something good about China's "successful communism", that the Chinese leadership is completely unscrupulous and has a psychology entirely strange to us, and that the People’s Republic of China is not only an economic threat but that it is an existential danger to the entire Western world.

Let us not forget that never during the whole history have people gone through a global lockdown, with state borders closed. Even the greatest political terrors have not closed people at home or banned on visiting parents and grandparents. Prayers in churches and synagogues have not been stopped for thousands years, even in the darkest ages. Therefore, scientific and political conclusions will have to be drawn from the COVID-19 epidemic. At least minimal reparations should be claimed from the PRC.

An influential senator in the antic Rome, Marcus Cato, famously related to the city of Carthage which threatened Rome's power around 150 BC: "Carthage must be destroyed", after which Carthage was erased in 146 BC. We could say today that China is our Carthage. China cannot be destroyed, but its influence must be weakened in order for the West to survive as a democratic and humane culture.