by Coleen Rowley, published in Consortium News, March 18, 2020
Friends who are smarter than I am noticed that Breitbart et. al. is now afire with anti-China rhetoric. Donald Trump’s designation of the Covid-19 virus as the “Chinese virus” has opened the floodgates.
For example, Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) said the U.S. should begin forcing China to “pay the burden and the cost incurred” by the U.S. due to the Wuhan coronavirus. ~BREITBART.COM, Rep. Jim Banks: ‘Demand Reparations’ from China for Coronavirus
Also showing his lack of gratitude for all the bribes and sinecures he was given, Biden displayed his open hostility to China during the last debate scolding Sen. Bernie Sanders for saying anything good about China having helped alleviate some poverty in their country.
The China-bashing and “hybrid war” (see this excellent analysis by Pepe Escobar) also dovetails with an American lawyer filing national class action lawsuit seeking to hold China responsible for the contagion due to its having first emerged there. (But if that’s how international law can be bent, then the rest of the world could sue or demand reparations from the U.S. for H1N1 having started here.)
Finally there are these Department of Justice indictments of espionage with arrests of three Chinese researchers/academics, along with all the officials designating China as our “top rival” and top counterintelligence threat, etc. which despite whatever validity of the evidence exists, are nonetheless kind of suspiciously timed:
It’s depressing to see how, when the people of the world need to most unite against a common enemy contagion, there is still this nasty human tendency of our psychopathically endowed “leaders”–(Hitler was a great example!)–to scapegoat and use the catastrophe to try to gain some relative power/wealth.
This is a sad realization for all humans. But maybe this explains why the more highly developed intelligent life forms have historically not been as resilient or long-lived as lower life forms. There’s virtually no chance that humans will even come close to the millions of years that dinosaurs enjoyed. And the most exceptionally resilient of all are the lowest life forms, the viruses and bacteria which stand to survive even a nuclear winter.
Coleen Rowley, a retired FBI special agent and division legal counsel whose May 2002 memo to then-FBI Director Robert Mueller exposed some of the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures, was named one of TIME magazine’s “Persons of the Year” in 2002. Her 2003 letter to Robert Mueller in opposition to launching the Iraq War is archived in full text on the NYT and her 2013 op-ed entitled “Questions for the FBI Nominee” was published on the day of James Comey’s confirmation hearing.