Ron Unz Reflecting On China

It seems like forever ago, but it turns out that it was only December 10—that’s when I wrote about Ron Unz’s presentation of Chas Freeman career. The substack here was:

Ron Unz's Disturbing Article On Chas Freeman

Here’s the first paragraph:

No, Unz has nothing disturbing to say about the former ambassador. He simply chronicles the man’s career—one of the most eminent diplomats in US history—cut short by the Anglo-Zionist Israel Lobby. As is typical of Unz, this is a very long article, so you need to persevere to the end to get to the disturbing part (you may think my excerpt is lengthy, but you ain’t seen nuthin’ if you don’t follow the link). That has to do with China, a country and culture with which Freeman is very familiar. Freeman, during the Trump 1.0 years, decried the Cold War against China in an address at Stanford. And then Unz adds some disturbing speculation—admittedly an Unz speciality, but with the addition of some basis in fact. Nothing proven, but in these matters that’s often the point. This may ring some bells with readers and commenters who want Trump to offer an accounting regarding Covid. See what you think.

So today I got around to perusing Unz’s latest. It takes off from Chas Freeman’s fascination with China:

American Pravda: Propaganda-Hoaxes vs. Chinese Reality

Last week I published an article discussing former Ambassador Chas Freeman, one of America’s most highly-regarded professional diplomats of the last half-century. Very early in his career, Freeman had been the personal interpreter for President Richard Nixon during his historic 1972 trip to China and meetings with Mao, and that country remained one of his areas of special expertise.

Typically for Unz, the article covers a vast spectrum of China related topics. For example, at one point he contrasts the two great genocides of recent years:

after Israel began its massive campaign to annihilate Gaza’s Palestinians, I noted the huge apparent differences between these two alleged “genocides.”

What made these accusations about Xinjiang seem so totally absurd was that the huge province was completely open to both Chinese and foreign tourists, who regularly traveled there in large numbers,

The mention of Xinjiang leads him to a lengthy—and I mean very lengthy—presentation of an American woman living and working and doing video presentations from China—including from Xinjiang. It’s all quite fascinating, of course, and presents a China through rose colored glasses view. I’m not about to dispute much of that, nor the comparisons to America. I’ll just say that it’s a partial view.

Finally, toward the end, he returns to the matter of Covid origins, which I highlighted in my earlier substack. In the leadup to the matter of Covid origins he also presents two theories of “what’s been going on”—yes, I’m quoting one of my favorite books/movies. Again, you may think my excerpt of the concluding paragraphs is long, but I assure you it’s a small part of the total.

During the long decades of Soviet decline, visitors from that country who came to the West were shocked by the possibilities of what they saw, with so many aspects of our daily lives being almost unimaginable in their own society. The notion of simply going to a local market and seeing large quantities of delicious fruit, vegetables, and meat freely available for sale seemed almost utopian compared to their own practice of standing in endless long lines hoping to stock up on whatever random product had suddenly become available.

The dishonest propaganda of Soviet media always concealed these favorable aspects of Western society, so visitors from that bloc often became outraged when they discovered the lies that they had been told. Such individuals sometimes declared how much they longed to live “in a normal country,” rather than under a regime whose irrational ideological constraints had inflicted so much unnecessary misery upon its suffering people. Many Americans traveling abroad, including to China, probably sometimes experience similar sentiments.

So in many respects, the astonishing Chinese success may be less difficult to properly explain than the long record of our own American failure, which has become increasingly obvious over the decades. I suspect that if a few thousand experienced members of China’s political leadership class were simply brought to our own country and given sufficient legal authority to fix matters, within a couple of years most of our serious social problems would have been completely eliminated.

One hypothesis advanced by Prof. Kevin MacDonald is that the West has fallen under the control of a “hostile elite,” that for various reasons hates the population that it governs and has therefore deliberately sought to inflict harm upon its own society. Although I’m willing to accept that this might apply to a small fraction of those individuals, I’m skeptical that such animus is any broader than that. My own contrary explanation is that for the last generation or two, a substantial fraction of our ruling elites have consisted of parasitic and totally incompetent criminal sociopaths. But I’d freely admit that the two possibilities may sometimes be difficult to successfully distinguish in empirical fashion.

MacDonald does, in fact, use the term “hostile elite”, which Unz latches onto—although the term itself seems somewhat at odds with MacDonald’s actual thesis. Uncharacteristically, Unz has little to actually say on this score. I’d be interested to read something by Unz that provides a more in depth contrast of his own ideas with those of MacDonald. It’s easy enough to agree with Unz regarding the sociopathic element in our ruling classes.

However, I do think that there are at least a handful of major cases that much better fit my own explanatory framework, and some of the video evidence from Chinese society enters into this analysis.

The dishonest anti-China propaganda foisted by our government and its media lapdogs upon ignorant Americans has sometimes taken a very sinister turn. One of the most important examples of this came in the aftermath of the sudden appearance of the deadly Covid virus in the large Chinese city of Wuhan during late 2019.

Our intelligence agencies almost immediately began circulating the claims that the virus had been the result of a lab-leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, probably a consequence of its unsafe working conditions. However, there was never the slightest solid evidence that any such lab-leak had occurred, and an experienced Western virologist working there at the time was extremely skeptical of such a possibility, while she also described the lab’s safety procedures as being outstanding.

Most Americans probably still possess the vague mental image that Chinese cities are filthy and Chinese enterprises remain backward and poorly run, and these assumptions would naturally support the idea that a careless lab-leak might have been responsible for the global pandemic that killed tens of millions. But such completely outdated and totally erroneous beliefs are very different than the actual reality of today’s absolutely spotless streets of Shanghai, a city of thirty million, and the stunning technological infrastructure found all across Wuhan. With mundane Chinese engineering functioning in almost flawless fashion everywhere across that huge country, the notion of a dangerous viral lab-leak at a highly-secure research facility seems extremely implausible.

When he earlier worked for the Times, Michael Gordon became notorious for eagerly reporting the fraudulent, planted stories of Saddam’s WMDs. Now employed at the Wall Street Journal, Gordon passed along similar American intelligence claims that three Chinese lab-workers had allegedly fallen ill with Covid in 2019 many weeks before the outbreak began, strongly suggesting that a lab-leak had occurred. Shortly before the end of the first Trump Administration, Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo had his subordinates release a brief summary report making those same claims.

But when our government officials were repeatedly pressed to provide the factual details of those allegedly-infected laboratory workers, the individuals they finally identified turned out to be data analysts who never had had any direct contact with the live viruses studied there, strongly suggesting that their names had merely been plucked off the Internet to fill out a propaganda-hoax.

The obvious reason for this desperate subterfuge was to deflect attention from the strong, perhaps overwhelming evidence that the global Covid epidemic had been due to the blowback from a botched American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran), and protect the rogue operatives responsible for that gigantic, worldwide disaster.

So it seems quite likely that our national government was so disorganized and poorly run that during 2019 some of its elements launched an unauthorized biological warfare attack against our Chinese and Iranian adversaries while their own president remained completely ignorant of what had taken place. Moreover, the illegal operation was so badly planned that the virus soon spread back into our own country, resulting in two years of severe social disruption while killing well over a million Americans.

I think that this unfortunate sequence of events much better fits into my own analysis of the reasons for America’s problems than that of MacDonald.

YMMV applies.