A Date That Will Live in Infamy

A Date That Will Live in Infamy
The P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in China's central Hubei Province on April 17, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images)
Brian Giesbrecht
5/9/2020
Updated:
5/25/2020
Commentary
The theory that the CCP virus—now wreaking havoc throughout the world—is a bio-weapon produced in a Level 4 laboratory in Wuhan, China (Wuhan Institute of Virology) is probably the most popular “conspiracy theory” currently trending on the internet.

Millions—maybe billions—of words have been devoted to discussions about which horseshoe bats were found where, which Chinese scientists have disappeared, and on and on.

Quite frankly, we don’t yet know where the virus originated. Only the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) knows—and they aren’t telling. Was it at the “wet market” in Wuhan as CCP spokespeople originally maintained, or did it come from the nearby Level 4 lab—perhaps as an experiment gone horribly wrong? Was the virus natural or was it engineered? The Pentagon says the majority of views say it was natural, not engineered.
But that doesn’t rule out that it came from a lab. U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo says there is “enormous evidence” the virus outbreak began in a lab.
That “wet market” (really a seafood market) was conveniently bulldozed long ago and CCP officials now aren’t even admitting the virus originated in Wuhan—only that it was first found there. In fact, some of their officials are telling their own people that the virus originated at a U.S. military facility.
So, given the high likelihood that the CCP will continue to prevaricate, obfuscate, and prevent the truth from ever coming out, we may never know the truth. Quite simply, that the CCP spent a crucial six weeks covering up the seriousness of what was going on in Wuhan means that nothing said by the CCP can be taken at face value.
But one fact the CCP can’t hide is that it stopped all travel from Wuhan to other points in China, but didn’t stop tens of thousands of Wuhan residents from continuing to fly all over the world—infecting millions. On Jan. 23, Wuhan was completely locked down, and no one from the city was allowed to travel to other parts of China.

Remember that date—Jan. 23, 2020—because it will live in infamy. Just like Dec. 7, 1941, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Jan 23, 2020, will be remembered in history as the day the CCP—wittingly or unwittingly—unleashed a cataclysm on the entire world.

The Chinese Communist Party chose to infect the rest of the planet.

While the events of Dec. 7, 1941, left more than 2,400 dead, what happened on Jan. 23 has already resulted in the deaths of a hundred times that many and counting. Despite stopping all traffic from Wuhan to all other parts of China, the CCP—astoundingly—failed to halt flights to Europe, North America, Africa, and all other points.

In fact, those flights only ceased when travel bans were imposed by nations that belatedly came to the awful realization that they were admitting tens of thousands of infected travelers from Wuhan. It’s no coincidence that Italy, Iran, Britain, and the United States were so badly infected, since they were the destinations for so many of those travelers from Wuhan.

But it gets worse.

Not only did the CCP fail to voluntarily stop international flights from Wuhan on Jan. 23—or on any date, for that matter—they complained bitterly when infected countries started taking action to stop admitting travelers from Wuhan. The CCP used its World Health Organization (WHO) “friends” to complain that such action was “racist” and improper.

“There is no reason for measures that unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade,” said WHO chief—and virtual CCP puppet—Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus on the CCP’s behalf on Feb. 3.

Shockingly, he uttered those words at a time when he and the CCP were fully aware that the CCP virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus, was transmissible between humans and also very deadly—but before the rest of the world had been fully informed of those facts.

The CCP continued to both oppose the flight bans and hide the serious nature of the virus crisis until the WHO finally declared a pandemic on March 11.

So that’s what the CCP—the party of Mao—did to the world. We are now at a point where hundreds of thousands are dead, trillions of dollars of economic damage have been done to the world, and the future looks both uncertain and unstable. This was all because of Jan. 23—when the CCP failed to stop traffic from Wuhan to the world, but stopped traffic from Wuhan to the rest of China.

Is “infamy” too strong a word for what the CCP did? I think not.

There’s little doubt that if the CCP had stopped traffic from flowing to the rest of the world on Jan. 23, at the same time they stopped traffic flowing from Wuhan to the rest of China, there wouldn’t have been a pandemic at all. In fact, the outbreak would probably have been a controllable epidemic limited to Wuhan and parts of Hubei Province.

A credible estimate is that the CCP could have limited 95 percent of the damage simply by being honest with the world.

If there had been that simple honesty, there can be little doubt that the world’s nations would have promptly shut down all flights—even if the CCP failed to do that decent thing.

So, given the unconscionable actions—or lack of action—by the CCP, is “bio-weapon” too harsh a word to describe their decision to allow tens of thousands of infected Wuhan residents to disperse to all parts of the world? Wasn’t every one of those infected people who were allowed to travel the equivalent of a deadly weapon? In fact, I’m not sure there’s a word that’s too harsh for what the CCP has done. What could possibly possess the CCP to act in such an unconscionable—and probably racist—manner? What were they thinking?

After all, China has one of the world’s oldest and most sophisticated civilizations. Chinese cities, libraries, and high arts were flourishing when Europe was a backwater, and the Americas were without cities or libraries of any kind. The Chinese people have always been among the most decent and hardworking people on the planet.

And for those who argue that liberal democracy and freedom are somehow antithetical to the Chinese, they need only look to little Taiwan, off the China coast. There, Chinese people have successfully built a flourishing liberal democracy, where the people enjoy levels of both freedom and prosperity unimaginable on mainland China.

Or one can look at Hong Kong, where brave citizens desperately try to hold on to their freedoms—and avoid becoming just another CCP state-controlled city.

So what happened on the mainland? How could this truly impressive nation have degenerated to the point where it would knowingly export death and destruction to everyone outside its borders?

The uncomplicated answer is the CCP’s bloody-minded determination to stay in power at any cost.

Since coming to power in 1949, that party has alternately starved and brutalized its citizens, crushing all dissent. The Party of Mao was responsible for the death of at least 60 million people over the course of its brutal reign.

It was hoped that former President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972 would usher in a more humane, liberal, and cooperative China. And indeed—at least after the tyrant Mao Zedong finally expired in 1976—the new leaders allowed the natural ability of the people to flourish, and permitted elements of free enterprise to prevail. Through hard work and enterprise, millions of people then lifted themselves out of poverty.

But the CCP never did let human freedoms develop—so that increased prosperity has come at a huge price. The Party maintains absolute control, and won’t tolerate dissent. The Party also controls the media and increasingly has exerted control even over organizations such as the WHO, which, in theory, are apolitical. The CCP perverts such organizations.

It’s that ruthless control, determination to stifle dissent, and racist attitude to anyone not Chinese that has allowed this completely unnecessary pandemic to get out of control. The fact is, CCP totalitarianism has no conscience.

The next years will be spent examining how things went so badly wrong. But already it’s quite clear that the WHO was far too eager to please the CCP leadership. The combination of an arrogant CCP and a lickspittle WHO leadership is responsible for grief and suffering on a colossally tragic scale.

If anyone hoped that a more contrite CCP would emerge from this catastrophic pandemic, their hopes were dashed immediately.

A China now reportedly recovered from the virus is taking advantage of a weakened West to neuter Hong Kong and bully its neighbors. Instead of offering apologies and compensation, an emboldened CCP instead spreads false information that the virus originated within the American military, and refuses even to admit that the virus originated in Wuhan—admitting only that “it was first discovered” there.
A truly discouraging sign of how the CCP plans to conduct itself in the post-pandemic era is its attempted blackmail of France—namely, it will help a virus-battered France only in return for the French allowing Huawei 5G into that country.

Another discouraging example is that China continues to hold two Canadians hostage in medieval fashion in an effort to blackmail Canada into renouncing the rule of law. The audacity is mind-boggling—after bringing France to its knees with the virus exported from Wuhan, the CCP uses that vulnerability to get its way. Toward Canada, it acts like a gangster. This is Kafkaesque on a cosmic scale.

The lawsuits against China have begun. It’s ironic that the state of Missouri—where Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech officially announced the Cold War with the USSR—was the first state to sue.
The Cold War can be said to have begun when Churchill delivered that speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946. He famously said, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.”

Although the USSR is no more, that destructive Cold War continues in modified form to this day. Anyone doubting that the West is now engaged in an equally fraught and equally destructive Cold War with Communist China need only look at what the CCP did—or rather didn’t do—on Jan. 23.

What comes next, we don’t know. The West looks for some sign that the CCP wants to apologize and at least discuss compensation. At the very least, it wants some sign that the CCP will show more cooperation and less hostility to the West, and that it will offer more freedom to its own people.

If those signs are not forthcoming, the next decades will be very difficult ones. So far, we look in vain.

Jan. 23, 2020, is a date that will live in infamy.

Brian Giesbrecht is a retired judge and a senior fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.