Given it’s topicality, I’m giving another plug to this original essay by a best-selling, prize-winning novelist (writing under a pseudonym) about the price we’d be willing to pay if the lab leak theory turns out to be true. Will we just shrug and continue to buy cheap Chinese goods? Here is an extract:
The Western world will have to weigh up what the damage would be to their economies and international relations if they accept the lab leak theory. Because if we do then we will also have to accept that the CCP was involved in a cover-up which turned the contagion in Wuhan from localised outbreak to global pandemic. It would follow from this that the CCP would have to be held responsible for three and a half million deaths worldwide, an act of mass-death, albeit one caused by the ineptitude of China’s bureaucracy and the breaking of scientific safety protocols in laboratories overseen by the CCP.
This would be another historical mass-death caused by the CCP, comparable to the Great Chinese Famine (1959-61) which to this day is still not recognised officially by the CCP as a man-made disaster, and which to this day is not marked by any public remembrance monument even though 10-47 million people died. The CCP has a long history of systemic planning errors and accidents that have a high human cost which the CCP, by use of its one-party state apparatuses, has hidden from the rest of the world.
So, if the lab leak origin hypothesis for SARS-CoV2 turns out to be true, the people of the Western world must then ask, “What is the price that must be paid, and who will pay it? Must CCP governed China be held accountable? Will China be forced to pay reparations for the trillions of dollars of damage done to the economies of other nations in the world, along with compensation for the families of the three and a half million who died from the pandemic. Will there have to be sanctions on CCP-governed China, or regime change in China brought about by the other nations of the world? Will the half a trillion ($) in imports from CCP-governed China have to cease until CCP-governed China admits its error and commits to paying reparations?”
It’s an interesting dilemma. Would Western governments, scientists, corporations, consumers, etc., be willing to boycott Chinese investments, grants, cheap goods, and so on, unless the Chinese authorities admitted liability and paid reparations, given that they’d all be worse off if they did that?
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Thomas Frank has written a very good piece in the Guardian asking, ‘What if the lab leak theory turns out to be true?’ He thinks it will fuel a populist revolt against scientific expertise.
If it does indeed turn out that the lab leak hypothesis is the right explanation for how it began – that the common people of the world have been forced into a real-life lab experiment, at tremendous cost – there is a moral earthquake on the way.
Because if the hypothesis is right, it will soon start to dawn on people that our mistake was not insufficient reverence for scientists, or inadequate respect for expertise, or not enough censorship on Facebook. It was a failure to think critically about all of the above, to understand that there is no such thing as absolute expertise. Think of all the disasters of recent years: economic neoliberalism, destructive trade policies, the Iraq War, the housing bubble, banks that are “too big to fail”, mortgage-backed securities, the Hillary Clinton campaign of 2016 – all of these disasters brought to you by the total, self-assured unanimity of the highly educated people who are supposed to know what they’re doing, plus the total complacency of the highly educated people who are supposed to be supervising them.
Worth reading in full.
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