Thursday, May 14, 2020

Pamphlet For A Geo-Political Make-Over


Pamphlet For A Geo-Political Make-Over
Pamphlets were made famous by Giuseppe Garibaldi (of the 19th century Risorgimento), the mastermind that unified Italy into a republic. This pamphlet however outlines the coming decline and fall of the might-have-been Chinese domination as the world’s No.1 power.

The plan, authored by President-for-life Xi Jinping was to get this done by the third decade of the 21st Century. Effectively, he meant to depose America as the leading power on the globe, and take over all the spoils of pre-eminence that go with it. But what looked like legitimate competition, albeit with sharp corners, has tipped over into bio-warfare. And this will not be tolerated.

In the present, Italy is called China’s uncomplaining Trojan Horse into the EU. But today the 28 member EU is a shaky economic entity, devolving on just France and Germany as the biggest economies within it, to keep going.

This has been putting cracks into China’s plans to attack the EU economy as  a  whole, from the inside, for a creeping takeover. It has chipped away at parts of it, even succeeded to a degree, but now that a halt has been called, it finds itself a long way yet, from home.  And the latest moves to buy beaten down stocks and assets during the pandemic have revealed its predatory hand and shown it up in a bad light. Italy and Spain in southern Europe with considerable trade relations with China have been key victims of the peculiar Aids –like pneumonia inducing Covid-19 virus. Complicit as these two countries are, they refuse to point the finger at China still.

But it is a virus that may have come to stay, with no known cure, just like Aids, that the lab-grown Covid-19 is based on.

Covid-19, an invisible contagion from a man-made virus, originated and spread from a single nation to start with. And it was accompanied by a totalitarian state led cover-up, in tandem with the world’s foremost health body. A part of the largely broken United Nations.  One headed currently by a non-medical doctor. A WHO director general, hopelessly beholden to China for his appointment and continuance.

An organisation cut off from the funding of its biggest erstwhile donor, the United States. One that President Trump calls a PR agency for China. An organisation, peopled by quite a few medical doctors. But reduced, by the fraudulent lead of its director general, to selling misinformation. 

Snake Oil, good for every ailment, never seems to lose its hold on the imagination. Ask China’s well appointed PR machine, which is faltering nevertheless under the burden of truth.

The offending totalitarian state has mounted a multi-million dollar PR campaign to suggest Covid-19 originated in Maryland in the US, and not China. It has chosen to stoutly play victim. Dark Ops. it suggests, are the native province of the United States. China cannot be made its scapegoat it says.  China is being maligned. This is racism. China is a responsible global citizen. China will not sit on its hands while it is being vilified unfairly. It will retaliate. It will ban imports from offending countries.  It will impose sanctions and   tariffs of its own.It might use force.

The narrative is relentless. It continues with a good-cop-bad-cop routine. China has resolutely improved quality and moved up the value chain. It is reliable and trustworthy. It is a major global investor and force for stability. It has lent the United States trillions and accounts for over 5 million jobs in the country. It has many friends, academics, lobbyists and think-tank mavens rooting for it.  President Trump is misguided and must be stopped.

China’s diplomats are also using a muscular language. The strategy is to be aggressive and unapologetic. It has moved rapidly towards a new normal with masks and social distancing and limited crowds in China, even opening Disney World at Shanghai, as a second wave of infections has hit it. Of course, there is no virus spread to Shanghai and Beijing, even as it travelled 15,000 miles to America.
The PR firms working for China, incidentally, are American joint ventures with the dragon.

China now attempts to hide in the crowd of fellow victims around the globe. It points out tens of thousands of Red Chinese, killed in droves, though they were sacrificial lambs of the regime in power.

China is now, six months plus into the pandemic, proactive in reporting fresh outbreaks realising it had made a big mistake by hiding facts the first time around. It has declared news of Shulin, near the Russian border as a new hotspot. It has messaged it will test all 18 million Chinese in Wuhan to protect the entire city population against a new wave. This is its transparency strategy now.

WHO too, in tandem,  in trying to regain some vestige of credibility afresh, has warned of second and more waves of contagion and the  possibility of a cure never being found. Is this considered information or an over correction of its earlier messaging? Meanwhile, there are hectic efforts on around the globe to repurpose existing drugs and  develop a preventive vaccine.

This depiction of innocent Red Chinese sickened and dying of Covid-19 is probably true. They are cannon fodder, after all, small potatoes in an overall population of 1.4 billion.
But, it is patently false that the diabolical Chinese State led by President Xi Jinping has not deliberately unleashed the first global bio-warfare pandemic.

It may not have leaked the virus deliberately, at least the world does not know that for sure, but it definitely decided to take advantage of the opportunity it provided as its subsequent actions make clear. Crisis in Chinese is written as one part danger and one part opportunity.

The intelligence authorities in America, Germany, France, have come to this conclusion from their independent investigations, and have said so. One or two legal suits asking for trillions in reparation have already been instituted. Leading governments of Western Europe, Australia, Japan, and America have made it clear they will fix accountability for this pandemic.There will be, they promise, punishment for this. Meanwhile, China has stopped importing Australian beef in retaliation for calls for an international investigation at Wuhan.

It is true we live in a time when Islamic and other terrorists regularly kill innocents. But to use germ warfare or a virus in state policy is a new level of monstrosity.

Meanwhile, the ravages of the virus defy solution. There are no specific drugs for its treatment. Medicines previously applied to alleviate symptoms of the Aids Virus have  been pressed into service. Others used for Malaria, Leprosy are being used too. Anti-virals, one in particular, are being tried. Plasma treatments, using material from recovered Covid-19 patients, thought to be rich in anti-bodies, have been used with inconclusive results.

Milder symptoms are being treated with Paracetamol. Critically ill patients, mercifully a small number of the total, and often with existing co-morbidities, with Respirators, Ventilators, and Oxygen in a last ditch attempt to save their lives. But Covid Warriors  such as policemen, medical staff and journalists have sickened, and some have died, because of prolonged exposure  to the virus too.

Lock-downs, employed with different levels of stringency all over the world have failed to end the sickness. They have even failed to control its growth. Testing, quarantining, early hospitalisation – none of it has proved completely effective.

There is some doubt now on whether Covid-19, being a lab-grown deadly virus and not a hop, skip, and jump from a Bat, can be prevented at all by using any single vaccine.
Covid-19 is seen to mutate regularly in different geographies. Expert thinking around the world is now saying it may be necessary to live alongside the virus, which may perhaps weaken and dissipate on its own like other corona viruses before it.

People will have to take their own precautions with medicines and tonics that strengthen immunity as moth-balled economies stir back into life. They will have to avoid crowds of strangers as much as is practicable. Going out will mean sunglasses, gloves, masks and the new norms of social distancing, sanitising and hand washing. Hot weather may help. Public transport, trains, planes, metros, buses, will allow fewer people on board.

Covid-19 crossed over the walls of the Wuhan Virology Research Centre, intriguingly part financed by the US, and proceeded to creep along the streets of Wuhan City on silent slippered feet.

It infected people it met at random. Were there also infected laboratory technicians who unknowingly spread the virus during its fortnight of gestation? Like Aids too, some people are carriers, but show no symptoms themselves. When did this begin? Was it in November 2019?

Covid-19 racked up early Chinese victims in Wuhan in their thousands even before  the virus had been given a name. Nobody from the outside world knew about it for months. Early whistleblowers from Wuhan including treating doctors were quickly silenced. Others disappeared or died.

The Chinese leadership knew, and used WHO to misguide the world. Director General Tedros said it was not contagious to humans at first, and issued no travel advisories against it. There was no intruder alert. No alarms were allowed to go off.

By the time it did, after a trade treaty with the US was signed towards the end of January 2020, the virus had already spread far and wide.

The virus, in its virulence and mutations, went on to become a global pandemic in weeks. It bears some comparison with WWI when Mustard Gas was used by the Germans during the interminable trench warfare.

But then use of Mustard Gas was Chemical Warfare – a very different thing.  One well known to genocide. Communities that were sought to be eliminated. Jews in the Holocaust. Kurds in their as yet unrealised struggle for an independent Kurdistan, carved out of Iraq. Armenians, who now buy Indian radar, when largely Christian Armenia was part of Muslim Turkey.

World Wars change the prevailing order. WWI killed off the land owning aristocracy on both sides because they liked to lead from the front.  In its wake that Great War enabled the entry of women into the workforce and later, with Communist and Socialist overtones, the rise of the other classes, colours, merchants, tradesmen, the less educated and connected.

WWII, in turn, broke the back of European colonialism.  It established America as the dominant world power in the West. It was rivalled by the USSR and its Iron Curtain satellites.  This stand-off and the subsequent Cold War took the sheen off the Communist regimes. China and the USSR, their proxies and satellites around the world were regarded as the other by Western eyes.

Many of the newly liberated colonies however were unabashedly Socialist, and leaned towards Moscow.

Covid-19 was quickly named so by the WHO, instead of the Chinese Virus or the Wuhan Virus,  as the Spanish Flu of 1918 was.

The ravages of Covid-19 have quickly driven the world into recession, shrinkage, and mass unemployment, inflation.  It will not be possible to bounce back quickly. The scourge has crashed stock markets, bankrupted companies, engineered loan defaults, destroyed airlines, emptied beaches, bars, hotels, cinemas, concerts, cruise ships, malls.

In the US, the great wound of 9/11 and its over 3,000 dead, has receded in the rear view mirror. This even as, once again, crowded rebellious, leftist, New York became the chosen epicentre of Covid 19.

Across the Atlantic, death defying Italy and Spain, and a bumbling, initially gung-ho Britain were hit hard too.

Does this pandemic qualify as a different kind of  WWIII? Or will there have to be a shooting war to follow as China is brought to book?

Over 180 countries are cowering under its sway. Covid-19 has disturbing long term effects for survivors as well. Nevertheless, have leaders and governments jumped on this pandemic bandwagon as a means to dwarf other inconvenient shortcoming in performance and governance?

What of the culprit that set the whole wagon train in motion? What should the world do with Red China, the manufacturer to the world set up by Richard Nixon’s America?
The arrangement worked well for decades and helped to  breach the Iron Curtain and finally destroy the USSR as well.

By outsourcing all routine manufacturing at relatively low cost to China, America lost out on its own skills to manufacture almost everything except high technology items such as aeroplanes and armaments. And China became the second richest country in the world.
The friction between the two powers has been simmering for the decades after the Deng Xiaoping era ended in 1992.

The new Chinese leadership became arrogant as America found it increasingly difficult to fund its role of globocop all by itself. Even its NATO allies took financial advantage of it.
But under President Trump, the policy of ‘America First” has been at its sharpest. The US  bluntly declared its unwillingness to put up with a trade balance tilted so sharply in China’s favour, while chiding its European allies to the same end as well. Trump threatened China at bilateral summits, and then imposed tariffs. China retaliated, but not with much confidence in its ability to see it through. It needed its US trade more than America needed Chinese goods. Yet, it was a cat and mouse game that China hoped to win. A key desire on its part was to get rid of an obdurate Trump as US president at the end of his first term.

That time has nearly come, with the elections due in November 2020, even if it postponed a few months under the circumstances. But it appears China decided to jump the gun. By using the Covid-19  virus  it may have lost control of the narrative.. What will actually happen remains to be seen, because Trump has a relatively weak opponent in Joe Biden at the head of the Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, Trump has already taken the battle into the Chinese lines, blaming it squarely for suppressing information on the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan. He is determined to seek both justice and reparations. Other European allies are beginning to line up behind him.

So, culpability and consequences may become the biggest question of all going forward.
Who could have imagined that the next great war would be fought using a laboratory made Aids Virus, laced with a natural Bat Virus plus a lab altered kink to help it infect humans?  

This virus is a deadly and subtle thing. If it doesn’t kill you in the first flush, it kills you slowly. Your immune system and vital organs are ravaged in the primary survival, even if you’re cured. It can and does recur with once infected and cured people testing positive again. Those who wobble away, have 10 years cut off their life span. Because of this knock to human vitality, the US Armed Forces have decided to not recruit anybody who has had Covid-19.

The astrologers say the stars were no different during the world wars and the Spanish Flu pandemic of a hundred years ago. The economists and strategists say, in that case, it is clear, when this is over, a new world order is sure to follow.

Nobel laureate ( 2008), French virologist Luc Montaigner, who isolated the Aids Virus in 1983, says Covid-19 used it as a base, and it is definitely laboratory grown. It has had elements of the bat Corona virus added to it with a modification to enable it to infect humans. There are in fact over 600 bats kept in the Wuhan laboratory for research.
The situation has been aggravated by the fact that China has sold millions of dollars worth of test-kits that don’t work, substandard masks, respirators, ventilators and protective body suits.

India now has developed its own PPE suits, N95 masks, respirators and ventilators. Its working on its vaccine independently in several teams, and has manufactured 40 million doses of the Oxford developed vaccine, in anticipation that the human trials going on there will prove successful soon. India could, of course, start another controlled test group here.

The death count in India is relatively lower and the various drugs it is using to treat the infected are also in great demand around the world. Many Indians are apparently immune to the ravages of the virus even when they test positive, and others develop mild symptoms that do not need hospitalisation.

There is much scepticism about China’s claims that it has already developed a viable vaccine. Other countries are working on their own vaccines. But can there be one vaccine broad spectrum enough to tackle all strains of the virus?

Beijing has started border skirmishes with India at Sikkim and Ladakh as a prelude to India chairing the board of directors at WHO from next month. It refuses to let in any inspectors into Wuhan .It has issued angry denials and counter narratives to what it calls 24 preposterous allegations from Western governments.  It used thirty pages and 11,000 words to say it.

Thousands of Chinese from Wuhan flew in scores of planes all over the world during, before and after the Chinese New Year 2020.  Meanwhile the pandemic was in full swing in Wuhan. Accounts eventually emerged that the crematoria in Wuhan were operated night and day like the ovens of the holocaust. And that there were tens of thousands of urns sent in for the ashes.

The story of President-for-life of Red China, Xi Jinping’s over-reach started some time ago. The Belt and Road and Silk Route ambitions are a case in point. He has already accomplished much but it is likely to come to nought. Xi Jinping has neutralised all critics in the Chinese Communist Party’s top body and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). He has bought land for agriculture, and mines that yielded rare earths in Africa. He has cornered the market for many of these minerals including the Lithium that goes into all the Lead-ion batteries. He has captured much of the world’s oil and gas via long term contracts. He has built, modernised or expanded ports at Hambantota in Sri Lanka, Gwadar in Balochistan, Piraeus in Greece, Male in the Maldives and elsewhere. He has lent vast sums of money to the United States and held the line on a very askew trade imbalance in China’’s favour. He had outsmarted several American presidents in series without conceding anything.

 Xi Jinping has built railways and roads in a dozen countries. He has, written unequal treaties with everyone involving the handover of key assets on long lease to China in the event they could not service their commercial loans from Chinese Banks.

Was Red China therefore preordained to this misstep sooner or later? That it has come will mean its downfall.

To want to deliberately ruin the economies of the world using a highly contagious virus, and then go in and mop up assets at rock bottom prices is rapacious.

But how did President Xi Jinping think he could get away with it?  Did he think he could divide and rule the world? Instead  he has made China a pariah in the international community. It may experience an increasingly stringent economic  boycott that will bring it to its knees.

This cannot happen overnight, because China is literally the manufacturing hub of the world, particularly America. The calculation has been that no American president will dare to economically sanction China at this point in time, or even seek reparations. This is because it is so dependent on China’s elaborate manufacturing infrastructure. And more so when its own economy is in recession. There is a  30% unemployment rate, and worldwide economic chaos.  This would get even worse if China is shunned. 
America’s  European allies are also weakened to the point of crisis. Everywhere there is concern and anxiety for both physical and economic survival.

However, other tyrants before Xi Jinping have thought his opponents would not have the spine to resist. But they did. Underneath all the present tribulations, there is a sure feeling that the world will revive. And a desire to punish the perpetrator of so much misery and mayhem.

In fact, most countries have begun to open up their lockdowns while bracing for a spike in infections or even a second wave to the pandemic. Several experts have said  outbreaks of the virus may keep cropping up from time to time.

But for China, this is the point of no return. It has gone too far. It is in for a long season of being blackballed and resisted.  As a first step its assets abroad will be seized as reparations.  There will be a mass exodus and relocation of companies using China as a manufacturing base. This in turn will vastly aggravate China’s economic woes as Chinese exports reduce as new sources are developed. There will be a closure of its construction and infrastructure building activities abroad using Chinese bank financing. Dams and river-blocking that affect flows to other countries will have to stop. Territorial concessions, including some involving  Pakistan’s   occupation of PoK and Gilgit-Baltistan, would have to be made. In multiple disputed areas.

 If this is resisted by China, it may discover the limits of its conventional military prowess, because no nation, not even its rogue satellites, can hope to survive a nuclear escalation.

As consequences grind on, and they will, the Chinese Politburo will replace Xi Jinping at the helm. It will have to overthrow him in a Stalinist style sweep of the president and his coterie to succeed but there will be little option.

But even after this, there will be further consequences. If a more get-along as opposed to predatory leader is installed in Xi Jinping’s place, there will still be a huge bill to pay.

Much of what will come will sound very much like a post world war treaty of surrender.
 It will mean a change of China’s aggressive trade tactics. An expanded UNSC will have to be agreed to, with India, Germany , Japan and Brazil added as permanent members and with majority veto powers. This has been a long standing wish of some of the five country UNSC, formed after WWII.

The world’s monetary system established at Bretton-Woods that more or less made the US dollar the currency of international trade may allow for some digital currency additions. But China will not be allowed to weaponise the Yuan as it apparently wants to, in order to undermine the basket of convertible currencies from the West including the US dollar.
No more will China alone, or along with Russia, much weakened after the fall in oil prices, be able to block the UNSC initiatives. China will not be able to block a new UNSC resolution indicting it for  this bio-warfare.

China will have to relinquish claims to Taiwan, and let it be recognised everywhere as an independent country with full rights to be admitted into the powerful fora of the international community.

China will have to provide substantial autonomy to Hong Kong in perpetuity, or even concede its independence outright. It will formally have to renounce all Chinese claims to the South China Sea along with all attempts at bullying those nations in its littoral.
China will have to restore the autonomy of Tibet at a minimum but more likely its independence.

Chinese joint ventures abroad as well as its balance of trade will stand abrogated and much changed.

China will have to do these things and yet face further balkanisation. This, not so much because of direct foreign diplomatic or military action, but because of massive popular unrest in many of its provinces. This, brought on by economic hardship and a political system that denies the population a political voice.

Other things are more nebulous. China will have to undertake to not spy, subvert, hack into the secrets of other nations or face further economic consequences. China will be warned off menacing its neighbours or attempting to dominate the Indian Ocean. China will have to desist from threatening any country that does not do its bidding.
China’s influence in the world will drastically reduce.

For: Sirfnews
(3,998 words)
May 14th, 2020
Gautam Mukherjee


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