4
5:36
Daily Beast columnist and The Great U.S.-China
Tech War author Gordon Chang said President
Donald Trump should use the Trading With The Enemy Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to
block U.S.-based multinational corporations from doing business with China,
offering his remarks on Monday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News
Tonight with host Rebecca Mansour and special
guest host John Hayward.
Hayward highlighted Bill Gates’ praise of the Chinese Communist Party’s
handling of the coronavirus outbreak as emblematic of “globalist billionaires”
— and the world’s most-capitalized technology companies’ — alignment with
China.
“We’ve gotten some sobering
demonstrations over the past couple of weeks that our own multinational
billionaire class is not necessarily on our side,” he noted. “More and more of
these globalist tycoons in the United States and Australia and Europe are
announcing [or] kind of quietly walking over to China’s side of this debate and
at least saying we need to back off, that we’re never going to get anywhere by
trying to investigate the coronavirus or blame them for it, and we should
instead work with [China] in order to address the remains of the global pandemic.
Is that surprising? Is there anything we can do about discovering that so much
of our monied elite to lead is really more on China’s side than on ours?”
Chang replied, “It’s not surprising.
Money is money. Business is business. I think that when we look at this, we’ve
got to understand that we shouldn’t expect loyalty from multinationals. It’ll
be nice to get it but that’s not the way business works. What we can do and
what would be very effective is for President Trump to use his power under the Trading
With The Enemy Act of 1917 and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act
of 1977 and just prevent the monied class from doing things which make them
disloyal.”
LISTEN:
Chang added, “What we have to do is to find American national
security and enforce it. Once we do that, business will get in line, because
our market is more important than China’s market, especially with China on the
way that it is now. So this is really up to us and we can do this.”
Hayward asked about China’s use of “sharp power” beyond its borders, referring to
the one-party state’s procurement of cultural, political, and social leverage
in the West by developing financial relationships with leaders within the three
spheres.
“Maybe it’s time for us to get into
the sharp power arms race,” considered Hayward. “China uses sharp power, which
is economic leverage to compel foreign companies to follow their speech codes
and toe the political line coming out of Beijing. We have vastly more financial
power than they do, but we don’t use it like they do — ever — and in fact, our
own political class would probably turn on any American leader who suggested
doing this sort of thing that the Chinese government does repeatedly. We can’t
beat them if we don’t start playing the sharp power game, can we?”
Chang quipped, “You should be
national security advisor, John. That’s absolutely right. This is what we need
to do. We need to use all the elements of our power. We haven’t been doing
that. We’ve had a series of presidents who’ve been much more interested in
protecting the interest of China’s communists than they are about the American
worker. That has to stop. That is stopping with President Trump, who has
decided he’s going to actually support the American worker over China’s
communists.”
Chang added, “We need to push
President Trump further, because he does have the power to make it really
uncomfortable for people who believe more in communism than they do in
democracy. Many of those people, unfortunately, are Americans.”
Mansour stated, “We shouldn’t expect
loyalty from our multinationals. Their focus is on their bottom line, but we
can use our policies to actually force them to comply… Our government can exert
power to basically protect our national interests. I’m also thinking that we
should be demanding certain things from these multinationals in terms of
complying with human rights. Any company that is making products in China using
slave labor or profiting from it should be held to account.”
Chang responded, “Absolutely,
Rebecca. What we have is, for instance, Uyghurs who are being forced from their
homeland to work in factories far from where they live. This is a crime against
humanity. This is forced labor. This is Third Reich-type stuff.”
“First of all, the American people
just need to hold these companies to account, and we know their names,” added
Chang. “They’re big consumer companies. Also, it’s up to President Trump to use
his powers to say, ‘No, this is going to be absolutely illegal. You’re not
going to do this.’ It’s up to the President of the United States to change the
incentives [and] to change the boundaries under which these companies act.
These companies will act in the most disgusting, horrific manner possible. We
just need to make sure they cannot do that.”
Chang concluded by maintaining his call for China to pay reparations to the
U.S. over its negligence related to the coronavirus outbreak.
“As of today, there’s about 69,000
Americans who have died of coronavirus,” remarked Chang. “China deliberately
spread the disease beyond its borders. Beijing killed 69,000 Americans and
counting.”
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The tech industry’s monopolies
have built a dystopian culture that has divided neighbors, families and a
nation. It’s time to break up the dystopia, end the monopolies, and
rebuild the American community.
Silicon Valley’s Control Virus
The tech industry’s
Chinese surveillance solution to the Wuhan virus.
Thu Apr 30, 2020
Daniel Greenfield,
a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an
investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic
terrorism.
Silicon Valley was both the epicenter of one
of the country’s first Wuhan Virus outbreaks, hosting the 2nd case
in California and the 7th in the country, and of the
technological tools of the lockdown, from contact tracing and drone tracking,
to the virtualization of everything from education to socialization.
The tech industry represents
the apex of both globalization and repression. On its massive campuses, foreign
workers likely played a role in spreading the virus even as their industry
became the public face of fighting the virus by unleashing a new wave of
censorship and surveillance against Americans.
Before long, Facebook’s Mark
Zuckerberg could be seen warning that the social media giant would delete any
protests against the lockdown, YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki declaring that any
videos that contradicted WHO would be deleted, and Microsoft’s Bill Gates
speculating about immunity passports.
And Google and Apple came
together to build a contact tracing system that would track everyone.
Silicon Valley’s titans and monopolies
want to be the heroes of this pandemic, but the only things they have to offer
are the totalitarian tools of surveillance that have destroyed public trust in
the industry.
Santa Clara County has, as of
this writing, experienced nearly 100 deaths. A Stanford study last month
speculated that there were 48,000 infected. Even as Silicon Valley has helped
spread the Wuhan Virus, it has its own form of immunity. Barbers can’t work
online, but interface designers can. Tech industry stocks may have taken a
beating, but unlike countless small businesses, they will bounce back.
And the virus culture of
lockdowns and social distancing, wholesale civil rights violations and the
elimination of privacy is trending the tech industry’s way. The massive
databases of the huge monopolies are making it a lot easier for the authorities
to track lockdown scofflaws. The creepy visions of an automated posthuman
society have become the default response to the virus across America.
Social distancing is completing
Silicon Valley’s vision of a world of isolated people who can only connect to
each other through the mediation of their services. The brave new world in
which Facebook is family, Twitter is politics, and Google is reality is a lot
closer than ever before in the new Safer at Home society.
While the tech giants have much
to say about what people can and can’t do, they have little to say about the
origins of the Wuhan Virus and how Santa Clara County ended up with its own
pandemic.
"China did a lot of things
right at the beginning, like any country where a virus first shows up,"
Bill Gates told CNN. In a Washington
Post editorial, he described Microsoft China as a model of
whose "roughly 6,200 employees", "about half are now coming in
to work."
China is more than the tech
industry’s partner: it’s the future. The social credit system and surveillance
society, the skyscrapers and robotics, the high-speed rail and the massive
factories are more than just TED talks, they’re a grim chrome-plated reality.
The censorship, surveillance, and propaganda deployed by Silicon Valley in
response to the pandemic was a Chinese solution privatized in an American
fashion.
Gates, like other Silicon
Valley technocrats, has to keep spreading the myth of Chinese expertise in
battling the Wuhan Virus, not just because Microsoft needs the approval of the
Communists, but because the Peeps are to tech industry technocrats what the
Soviet Union with its collective farms and planned economy was to the New York
and Chicago academics of nine decades ago. The future.
That’s why Democrats have spent
the last generation mumbling that we should be more like China. Perhaps not the
forced abortions, organ trafficking, or camps, but they do make the trains run
on time. And California can’t even manage to build a train. It’s no wonder that
Silicon Valley looks westward even as it uses the pandemic to unleash
technodystopian solutions worthy of three William Gibson novels.
The one thing that China’s Xi
and Gates’ corporate culture in Redmond could agree on is that people are
stupid and need to be told what to do. Most will never do what they’re supposed
to unless they’re manipulated, prodded, and even bullied into doing what the
masters of the universe think they should.
That’s exactly why the tech
industry’s monopolies have created a toxic culture that has infected our
culture, poisoned our politics, and is depriving us of our civil rights. Its
number dot zero web divides and conquers, fragmenting our society along
algorithmic lines, creating crises for its own profit, and then brutally
stamping on the consequent conflicts with its unseen machinery of surveillance
and censorship.
Silicon Valley isn’t fixing the
pandemic with its control freak responses, instead it’s worsening it. The tech
industry might have learned from its Chinese cohorts that censorship doesn’t
inspire confidence, it creates distrust, manufacturing a consensus by silencing
everyone who disagrees spreads paranoia.
In a dissentless culture,
everyone echoes the propaganda, but no one really trusts or believes anything.
Control, surveillance, and
suppression don’t solve problems. They just convince members of the elite that
the problem is under control. That’s what the Communist elite accomplished in
China. Their lies, intimidation, and likely killings aren’t fooling the people
in the affected areas, just their bosses.
That’s also how Silicon Valley
works. Instead of proverbs from Mao’s Little Red Book, there are buzzwords. But
they all serve the same function, ghost cities and vaporware, phantom industries
and fake economics, entire Potemkin realities built on lies that fall apart
when you pull back the curtain.
Who really needs this level of
control and deceit? Thieves and liars. The bigger the con, the harder you have
to grip the tiger so it doesn’t eat you. That’s as true in China as it is in
California.
Communist China’s dirty little
secret is that it doesn’t work. Its fake economy is built on massive thievery
and fraud. If the United States ever stopped buying its own stolen property
back from the Commies, along with the rest of the world, the whole thing would
collapse as badly as Mao’s sparrow hunt.
American technocrats who insist
that we imitate China are falling for a fraud. And every time the Democrats try
to sincerely imitate a fraud, the whole thing fails miserably on them like all
their high-speed rail projects that never get off the ground and only do one
thing at high speed, spend money.
High-speed rail, like an
internet run by a handful of monopolies, seems very appealing to control
freaks. But the American model is two cars in every garage and a decentralized
web that has room for everyone. The pandemic solution championed by American
technocrats envisions one lockdown for everyone and one token ring to bind them
all. People, both Commies and dot commies often assume, are interchangeable.
What holds true in New York will be just as true in South Carolina or Wyoming.
The Wuhan Virus is a wake-up
call about globalization and centralization. America isn’t just a gear in a
global machine, and states aren’t interchangeable parts in a national puzzle.
Americans are as individualistic as their communities. We’re not glowing dots
to be herded by drones, barked at by public safety announcements, and lied to
for our own good by dot com and gov public-private partnerships.
The tech industry’s monopolies
have built a dystopian culture that has divided neighbors, families and a
nation. It’s time to break up the dystopia, end the monopolies, and
rebuild the American community.
Pinkerton
– Josh Hawley Is Right: The World Must Know the Truth About the Origins of the
Coronavirus
26 Apr 20207
19:56
The Need for a Deep Investigation
On April 14, the Washington
Post headlined a scoop, “State Department cables warned of safety issues
at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses.” As
the article explained, two State Department officials had visited the Wuhan
Institute of Virology (WIV) in early 2018 and cabled back on January 19 of that
year:
During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, [the
State Department officials] noted the new lab has a serious shortage of
appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate
this high-containment laboratory.
In other words, here was clear
evidence that the Chinese lab could have been the vector of the virus—perhaps
accidentally, perhaps purposefully, we don’t yet have any way of knowing—that
has killed more than 150,000 people worldwide. (The
true number might never be known, since not every country provides an accurate
or honest accounting of fatalities.)
A few hours after the Post story
appeared, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) retweeted it,
declaring, “This is why we need an international commission to get all the
facts, publish them to the world, and hold #China Communist Party accountable
for its lies & suppression that have cost so many lives.”
We might note that many other
senators, including Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Tom Cotton (R-AR), Ted Cruz
(R-TX), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Marco Rubio (R-FL), have also called for
investigations of one kind or another. Similarly,
two senatorial candidates this year, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee and Jeff
Sessions of Alabama, have also been notably outspoken in their determination to
chase down the facts about the virus.
Indeed, it’s likely that when all is
said and done, there will be many official investigations going on in the U.S.,
covering every aspect of this crisis, foreign and domestic. Some will be fair-minded, while others
will be witch hunts; the American people will have to judge which is
which.
And yet perhaps the most important
of these investigations will be the one that digs into the origins of
the virus. Because while we can
study the response to the virus—what was done badly, what was done well, what
could have been done better—all we want, surely the most important goal
is to keep it from happening again.
The Value of a Timeline
In the course of any thorough
investigation, it’s necessary to build a timeline. That way, all the investigators, as
well as outside observers, can proceed on the basis of a shared body of
sequential data points—this happened, then that happened, and so on.
Already, many journalistic outlets
have published timelines, but here’s the thing: Most of them are focused on
the response to the virus, not the origins of
the virus.
For instance, the New York
Times starts its coronavirus timeline on December 31, 2019. Fox News starts
its on January 4, 2020. And NPR starts
its on January 5.
These timelines can be useful in
terms of assessing the national and international response to the virus. But if we want to learn more about
the origins of the virus, we need to push our timeline further
back—much further back.
The Virus Timeline
Here’s a timeline for the virus itself:
— October 2007: A peer-reviewed
medical publication, Emerging Infectious Diseases, released an
article titled, “Evolutionary
Relationships between Bat Coronaviruses and Their Hosts.” The piece, coauthored
by 15 scientists, argued that bats are a “natural reservoir of a range of
coronaviruses” and included this ominous sentence: “This finding has
implications for the emergence of SARS and for the potential future emergence
of SARS-CoVs or related viruses.”
SARS, of course, stands for Severe
Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which emerged from Yunnan province in southern
China in 2002—not far from Wuhan, China.
— December 1, 2017: A news story
appeared in the magazine Nature headlined, “Bat cave solves mystery of deadly
SARS virus—and suggests new outbreak could occur: Chinese scientists find all
the genetic building blocks of SARS in a single population of horseshoe bats.”
Author David Cyranoski begins the
piece, “After a detective hunt across China, researchers chasing the origin of
the deadly SARS virus have finally found their smoking gun.” We should note that at the time,
Cyranoski was not imputing any malign intent; he was simply noting that many
nasty viruses seemed to be emerging from this part of China.
The Nature article
detailed the efforts of two Chinese scientists, Cui Jie and Shi Zheng-Li, as
they studied the nexus between the horseshoe bat and the coronavirus. The piece include this ominous
paragraph:
Cui and Shi are searching for other bat populations that could
have produced strains capable of infecting humans. The researchers have now
isolated some 300 bat coronavirus sequences, most not yet published, with which
they will continue to monitor the virus’s evolution.
We might pause over some of the
words above: The researchers have now isolated some 300 bat coronavirus
sequences. We can quickly
see: With that many kinds of coronavirus on hand, a simple application of
Murphy’s Law—that which can go wrong, will go wrong—could have devastating
consequences.
So with that fearful prospect in
mind, we might take note of the Nature article’s closing
lines; speaking of researchers Cui and Shi, the author wrote, “They warn that a
deadly outbreak could emerge again. … The risk of spillover into people and
emergence of a disease similar to SARS is possible.”
— January 19, 2018: As we have seen, on that
date, a State Department cable went from China to Washington, DC, stating that
the WIV suffered from a “serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians
and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”
— January 2019: Four Chinese
scientists—including Shi Zhengli, who has come to be known as “Bat Lady”—published an article in Viruses, concluding, “It is highly likely that future SARS- or MERS-like
coronavirus outbreaks will originate from bats, and there is an increased
probability that this will occur in China.”
— February 2020: Two Chinese
scientists, Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao, published a paper suggesting that another facility, the Wuhan Center
for Disease Control, could have been the source of the epidemic. As they wrote,“The killer
coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.”
Interestingly, this laboratory,
which held some 605 bats, as well as other risky animals and materials, is just
300 yards from a Wuhan “wet market.”
— February 26: Just days after its
publication, the Botao/Lei paper, pinning responsibility on the Wuhan Center
for Disease Control, was withdrawn. Why? The reason has yet to be fully
explained.
— April 7: Joshua Philipp, an
investigative journalist associated with the Epoch Times, a
publication hostile to the People’s Republic of China, released a video on
YouTube, “Tracking Down the Origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus.” In less than two weeks, the video,
which puts the blame on these Chinese government labs, has garnered more than
1.5 million views.
— April 13: International relations
scholar Walter Russell Mead published an op-ed in the Wall Street
Journal headlined, “China Still Misleads the World on the Coronavirus: A truthful
account of the virus’s progress there would help us know what to expect.”
Signaling his doubt about China,
Mead pointed to a study by the
American Enterprise Institute that suggested that the People’s Republic has
been covering up its population’s exposure to Covid-19. That is, instead of the 82,000 cases
that it has reported, the real number was likely 2.9 million. (As Breitbart News has since reported, China has since
revised its Covid numbers upward, although not to 2.9 million.)
— April 14: Asked about the possibility
that the coronavirus could have been weaponized by China, Gen. Mark Milley,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters:
It should be no surprise that we’ve
taken a keen interest in that, and we’ve had a lot of intelligence [agencies]
take a hard look at that. And I
would just say at this point it’s inconclusive, although the weight of evidence
seems to indicate natural. But we
don’t know for certain.
We can observe that Milley is a
military man, and yet he speaks with the ambiguity—perhaps the precise ambiguity—of
a diplomat.
We know that this virus originated
in Wuhan, China. We know that there is the Wuhan Institute of Virology just a
handful of miles away from where the wet market was. There’s still lots to
learn. … We really need the Chinese government to open up. The Chinese government needs to come
clean. … They say they want to cooperate. One
of the best ways they could find to cooperate would be to let the world in, to
let the world’s scientists know exactly how this came to be, exactly how this
virus began to spread.
— April 16: Fox News headlined an ominous new scoop: “Sources believe coronavirus
outbreak originated in Wuhan lab as part of China’s efforts to compete with
US.” The article continued:
There is increasing confidence that
the COVID-19 outbreak likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory, though
not as a bioweapon but as part of China’s attempt to demonstrate that
its efforts to identify and combat viruses are equal to or greater than the
capabilities of the United States, multiple sources who have been briefed
on the details of early actions by China’s government and seen relevant
materials tell Fox News.
In other words, the Fox piece was
saying, the People’s Republic of China was not seeking to use the coronavirus
as an actual weapon; instead, it simply wanted to show off what it could do
with viruses. To some, that’s a
distinction without a difference.
— April 16: Asked at a White House
press conference about the possibility that the virus somehow emerged from a
Chinese lab, President Trump answered, “More and more we’re hearing the story … we are doing a very
thorough examination of this horrible situation.”
— April 17: Zhao Lijian, a spokesman
for the Chinese foreign ministry, pushed back on Trump and other inquisitive Americans, saying that
suggestions of Chinese responsibility were intended “simply to confuse the
public, divert attention and shirk responsibility.” Zhao added: “We have said many
times that tracing of the virus’s origin is a serious scientific issue and
requires scientific and professional assessment.” (We might note that back on March 12,
Zhao tweeted, outrageously, that the U.S. Army might be the
source of the coronavirus.)
— April 17: At the White House,
Trump was asked again about the horseshoe bat-coronavirus connection, and answered, “It seems to make
sense, they talk about a certain kind of bat, but that bat wasn’t in that
area.” Trump’s implication was
clear: The bat, or its virus, was brought to Wuhan. By whom? And why? To do what? Inquiring minds should want to know.
— April 19: At the White House, Trump was asked again about
China’s possible responsibility, and answered, “Well, if they were knowingly responsible, certainly. If they
did—if it was a mistake, a mistake is a mistake. But if it were knowingly
responsible, yeah, then there should be consequences.”
— April 20: Sen. Tom Cotton tells Fox News, “The most plausible explanation for the origins
of these viruses is one of those two labs in Wuhan.”
— April 21: White House trade and production adviser Peter
Navarro tells Fox News’s Sean Hannity that China “spawned the
virus, probably in that P4 lab right there in China, and then they hid the
virus behind the shield of the World Health Organization. And Sean, what that
did over a six-week period is allow hundreds of thousands of Wuhanians,
basically, to get on aircraft and seed the world.”
— April 22: Headline in Breitbart News: “China Lashes Out at Australia for Proposing International Probe
into Coronavirus Origins.” One is reminded of the old saying from World War
Two: The flak is always
heaviest when you’re getting near the target.
— April 23: Pompeo said at a press conference that China
had “destroyed” samples of the coronavirus and “covered up” the bad news about
the virus, thereby hindering the chance for the U.S., and the rest of the
world, to prepare for its onslaught.
— April 24: Per the BBC, China rejects the call of
Australian prime minister Scott Morrison (among others), for an international
investigation, claiming such an effort would be “politically motivated.”
— April 25: Navarro tells Fox News’s Neil Cavuto, “This is a war. It’s a war that China started by spawning the
virus, by hiding the virus.”
International Investigation? National Investigation? The Katyn Precedent
We might return to Sen. Hawley’s
suggestion of an international investigation of China. We certainly should hope that that all
the countries of the world should wish to get to the bottom of the question of
the coronavirus’s origins. After
all, the vast majority of coronavirus-caused
illnesses and deaths have occurred outside the U.S. This is, for sure, a planetary crisis.
Some might be concerned, of course,
that an international investigation would be inevitably tangled up in the
United Nations, which has so often shown an anti-American bias. Indeed, some
U.N. agencies, such as the World Health Organization, have proven themselves,
as Breitbart News has documented, to be in the
pocket of China.
Still, history tells us that there’s value to an international
inquiry—at least as a starting point.
For instance, way back in April
1943, the Nazi Germans discovered that the Soviet Union had massacred some
22,000 Polish military officers and intellectuals three years earlier, at a
place in Russia called Katyn. (It’s
not well remembered that in 1939, Joseph Stalin’s Reds had joined with Hitler’s
Nazis in attacking Poland; both aggressors seized hundreds of thousands of
Polish captives—many of whom met a bad end.)
The Germans had overrun Katyn back in 1941, but it was only two
years later that they discovered the Polish corpses mouldering in mass graves.
The Nazis were plenty guilty, of course, of their own heinous crimes against
humanity, and yet they hadn’t committed this crime. So
Hitler’s propagandists jumped on the opportunity to highlight this mass murder
and cast the blame on their enemy, the Soviet Union.
Katyn massacre (Public Domain)
Members of the foreign press and the Katyn Commission watching
officials exhume the bodies of the Polish soldiers killed at the Katyn massacre
during World War Two, Russia, 1943. (Gabriel Hackett/Archive Photos/Getty
Images)
The Third Reich Health Leader Leonardo Conti (right) holds the
Report of the International Katyn Commission, May 4, 1943, in front of Dr.
Ferenc Orsós from the University of Budapest. (German Federal Archives)
Germany managed to bring in
independent observers from 12 countries, including the International Red Cross,
to inspect the Katyn site; the bodies were easily identifiable through their
uniforms and other personal effects. So
the outside observers concluded that yes, this was a Soviet crime.
For their part, the Soviets denied
any involvement, blaming the Germans, and yet the proof was obvious to anyone
but a communist. Later in 1943,
the Red Army recaptured Katyn from the Wehrmacht, and the
Russians quickly destroyed the remaining evidence. Indeed, the Russians set up their own
big-lie propaganda commission, which dutifully pinned culpability for Katyn on
the Germans.
Yet Nazi crimes notwithstanding, the
reality that the Soviets had committed this particular crime
echoed around the world. In particular, Poles, and Polish-Americans, as well as
friends of Poland everywhere, shuddered at the thought that the Soviets were
coming to Poland not as liberators, but as conquerors—even mass-murderers.
Interestingly, the very next year,
1944, the Red Cross, having participated in the Katyn fact-finding, among many
other activities during those terrible war years, was honored to receive
the Nobel Peace Prize.
In fact, all through the 1940s,
various international groups pursued the Katyn issue, interviewing witnesses
and gathering data where they could. The
result of all these international efforts was the building of convincing, and
enduring, proof that it was, for sure, the Soviets who were guilty of the Katyn
Massacre.
In the meantime, back in the U.S., outrage was growing over
Soviet domination of Poland; if the Soviets could lie so brazenly about Katyn,
then they could lie about everything else. Indeed, particularly among ethnic
communities that could trace their ancestry back to Central and Eastern Europe,
the realization that the old countries–now dubbed captive nations—were being held in bondage by the
Red Army and their Communist Party overlords contributed greatly to anti-Soviet
pro-Cold War sentiment.
So we can see: Those early investigations of Katyn paid big
dividends in terms of making the truth known. Yes, the truth was grim, but
better to know it than not know it.
Then, in 1951, the U.S. House of
Representatives formed a fact-finding body of its own, the Select Committee to
Conduct an Investigation of the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances of the Katyn
Forest Massacre—better known as the Madden Committee, after its chairman, Ray Madden (D-IN). The following year, 1952, the
committee concluded, “No one could entertain any doubt of Russian guilt for the
Katyn massacre.”
Needless to say, the Soviets
continued to deny everything. Still, the diligent work of international and
national fact-finders proved that the Polish blood was on Russian hands.
Finally, in 2010, long after the
U.S.S.R. had collapsed, the Russian government belatedly conceded that the
Soviets were guilty. (In 2011, Poland made a dramatic and
compelling movie about Katyn.)
So we can see: There is great value
in building an international consensus on the basic facts of a case. There’s never a guarantee that an
international inquiry will succeed, but if it does, it’s a success worth
having.
So now, back to China and the
coronavirus. We don’t know what
happened with the virus. We can
have our suspicions—even our strong suspicions—but until we fully investigate,
we won’t know for sure.
So Sen. Hawley is right to call for
an international investigation. If an honest
international commission—perhaps including the Red Cross—could be formed and
allowed to do its work, the findings would be enormously valuable, not only for
the sake of finding out the truth, but also for the sake of making sure that
this sort of debacle is never repeated.
Of course, it’s always possible that
the Chinese might find a way to block an international commission from finding
the truth about the coronavirus, using the same big-lie tactics that the
Russians used about the Katyn Massacre.
If so, then America will have to
rely on itself to find the truth about the origins of the virus. We can do that, of course, if we
choose to—whether or not the rest of the world wants to be a part of it.
Because the truth about the
coronavirus, whatever it proves to be, is too important not to be known.
We can’t let this happen again.
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