There’s a bunch of people posting their opinions on the current state of Geo-political affairs, now that the COVID-19 is ravishing the United States. These opinion pieces run the gambit from “Donald Trump is the best President ever, and handing this emergency like a Pro“, to “China is going to collapse any day now“. It’s pretty much evenly divided between the same tiresome shrills.
However, independent bloggers and outliers are providing other points of view. Much of which are way outside the “Washington DC beltway”, and more connected to what is really and actually going on. Here we look at one of these opinion pieces.
It’s a good read.
The premise is that the handling of the COVID-19 is pretty darn obvious. China found out about the virus, and took immediate and drastic steps. America dilly-dallied around, made mistake after mistake and relentlessly blamed China for all of the problems that America has encountered. That’s pretty much it.
Simple. Accurate.
These bloggers and writers are observing these events and thinking about them. They are also coming to some rather obvious conclusions about this entire mess, and the “Washington DC beltway” and their supporters are absolutely clueless as to what is going on. They are far too caught up in their isolated bubble of reality.
So read on, and check out this particular writer.
He postulates that the success that China has had tackling the COVID-19 wasn’t due to blind luck, but rather to a strong leadership and a successful governance. While the opposite is true about how America handled this event.
Ouch!
While people might not want to face these facts, we all know that this is the truth, and it WILL affect what is going to occur in America in the next few months and years.
Listen up and take notes. It’s a taste of what will drive what happens in the next six months or so in the United States.
The following piece is titled “Coronavirus has vindicated China, exposed the West” and was written by Ravi Veriah Jacques on March 18, 2020. It was edited to fit this venue. All credit to the author.
Coronavirus has vindicated China, exposed the West
Coronavirus has been unfairly used to attack Chinese governance. Those in the West have roundly condemned China’s handling of the virus as reeking of authoritarian oppression and censorship.
Amnesty International has declared that… “[c]ensorship, harassment and punishment for speaking out are hindering the fight against the coronavirus outbreak,” …while The Washington Post proclaimed in February that…“[t]he coronavirus outbreak shows the vulnerability of the ‘Chinese Model.’”
Against these denunciations, however, China’s response to coronavirus has been resounding vindication of the country’s deeply efficient and competent model.
Not Perfect
China’s response was not perfect, of course. Its initial response in early January was poor, as Wuhan city authorities covered up the virus and made some serious errors that slowed the Chinese response. But far too few have recognized that this was a fantastically difficult situation to handle. China was going in blind: This coronavirus was new, and nothing was known about it. These mistakes, moreover, happened in a two-week period in January when infections were still in the dozens. The United States — now with over 7,000 cases — is still dallying.
China takes action
China more than made up for its slow start. As soon as the full gravity of the situation became apparent in late January, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leapt into action. Wuhan, with a population of 11 million, was promptly shut down, while broad swathes of the country — including Beijing’s 21 million people — were quarantined. These measures were certainly drastic, but they have proved highly successful and have saved thousands of lives. Indeed, China now has coronavirus largely under control: The country recorded just 13 new infections yesterday.
This is an extraordinary achievement
This is an extraordinary achievement, recognized as such by the experts. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), commended China for… “setting a new standard for outbreak control.”
Responding to the fierce Western criticism of China’s approach to Wuhan, he quipped, “Can’t you appreciate [the shutdown]? They should be thanked for hammering the epicenter. They are actually protecting the rest of the world.”
Rather than accepting the words of these international experts, though, many in the West have instead cast aspersions on the WHO’s objectivity, suggesting that the organization is somehow a vassal of the Chinese state. This is to succumb to a Trumpian mindset, to disregard scientific and medical expertise in favor of prejudice and ignorance.
The Chinese Model
Ultimately, coronavirus has demonstrated the strength of China’s “model.” To quote Tedros again, “China’s speed, China’s scale and China’s efficiency … is the advantage of China’s system.”
China built a hospital in 10 days and shut down a city with 3 million more people than New York. This display of deep competence, expertise, and efficiency should come as no surprise. China, after all, has put 25,000 kilometers of high-speed rail-lines into operation since 2008 and, most impressively, has dragged 700 million people out of poverty in 40 years.
Europe and America
Europe and America should have been able to combat coronavirus with ease. After all, they had a crucial head start: Not only do we now know hugely more about the virus than was known in mid-January, but Western countries were also given a two-month head start to prepare for potential outbreaks.
They also had the chance to learn from China’s success.
But the opportunity for proper preparation was wasted. The widespread attacks on China lulled Europe and America into a false sense of security — instilling the belief that the severity of China’s outbreak was down to some fundamental flaw in the country’s governance.
In fact, rather than exposing the vulnerability of the “Chinese model,” coronavirus has instead highlighted the deep ills of contemporary Western governance.
Western incompetence
Incompetence has been the order of the day in the West. America has so far fumbled the fundamentals of containing the virus — above all, testing. Washington botched its attempts to produce a test, meaning that as of the start of last week only 8,554 people had been checked for the virus.
South Korea is conducting 10,000 tests per day. Moreover, New York’s attempts to quarantine its cases have been slipshod, and counts have risen from 105 to over 2000 in just over a week. The contrast with China couldn’t be starker.
The Western response has been further hampered by a neglect of expertise at the highest levels of government.
President Donald Trump stated last week that COVID-19…
“is a flu. It’s a little like the regular flu that we have flu shots for … We’ve done a great job keeping it down to a minimum. Tremendous success at keeping the virus away.”
Trump proceeded to place Mike Pence — who believes that “smoking doesn’t kill” and “global warming is a myth” — in charge of containing the virus. And while visiting a hospital housing coronavirus patients earlier this week, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson “shook hands with everyone.” Championing ignorance seems to be rather popular among Anglo-American leadership.
Deep Problems
But the problems go deeper than incompetent, inefficient and philistine political leadership. The crisis has served as a damning statement on the chronic Anglo-American underinvestment in healthcare in the neoliberal era.
Symptomatic of America’s deeply backward healthcare system, it is still unclear whether Americans will have to pay for their coronavirus treatment, and the signs aren’t good.
An American family flown back from Wuhan faced medical bills totaling thousands of dollars while Trump suggested that the coronavirus vaccine may be unaffordable to most Americans — let alone the 18 million Americans who have no medical insurance.
China, by contrast, made testing and treatment for the virus free. In the U.K., underinvestment in the National Health Service over the past decade has left healthcare workers in a profoundly vulnerable position in the face of coronavirus.
The Chinese System of Government
The current crisis has fully demonstrated the superiority of Chinese governance. And as things worsen in the West, many are coming round to the realization that China is the coronavirus model.
A Forbes report last week was headlined “Italy takes China’s approach to fighting rampaging coronavirus.”
Indeed, the Italian government has now quarantined the whole country, while America has already had to deploy National Guard troops in the state of New York. The real, troubling question though, is whether European and American governments will actually be capable of replicating China’s efficiency, competence and expertise.
Don’t hold your breath.
Comments
Well, this fellow is gonna anger a lot of Americans, especially conservatives, that think and believe inside their hearts that the most superior model of governance is a “democracy”.
Maybe you don’t agree with this narrative?
Well, that puts you in the minority. All you need to do is check out any conservative website and the narrative will all be along these lines.
But it need not be.
America was NEVER intended to be a “democracy”, let alone a “democracy in name only”. What it is today is a functional Military Empire ruled by the global elites. The PTB (Powers That Be) don’t you know.
America today is the direct result of the last two-hundred years when progressives, and their conservative ilk reformed, and changed America to make it “better”.
But you know what?
That utopia never materialized.
Now, an awful COVID-19 is tearing through the fabric of American society, and it’s going to cause some serious people to do some serious thinking. This thinking and thought process is important and is the reason why solutions can end up resolving the most difficult of problems.
It must happen this way.
Otherwise, there will be two outcomes;
- Domestic war inside the United States on many levels, and…
- International war against a global power or two.
Let’s pray that there is a peaceful resolution to this conundrum, and perhaps America can revert back to individual state control instead of the big ultra-powerful gigantic Federal monster.
We can only hope.
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Very happy to glean from the experience of others, here some are not fooled it feels good to remember it from time to time and share. The cascades of consequences can be broken, analogy to the path of the mapping of the mwi mountainous image, we are on your way thank you for showing us the traps. Let’s not doubt the unshakeable solidity of power if I may say so Rufus universal