The human tendency to attack each other even when the entire species is under threat, especially as the U.S. goes after China, gives an advantage to viruses, which can even survive a nuclear attack, says Coleen Rowley.
By Coleen Rowley
Special to Consortium News
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.
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.
The US always blames others…always wants others to pay. How about paying reconstruction to all those nations the US left in rubble?
Interesting that “more highly developed intelligent life forms have… not been as … long-lived as lower life forms” and indeed intelligent life has been both more and less resilient than lesser animals. It is misgovernment that leads us against the interests of humanity and our own children, and the misgovernment of the US and EU under the tyranny of economic powers prevented our leading the rest of humanity out of the long night of poverty, ignorance, malnutrition, disease, and war.
The West lost its way as economic powers seized the institutions of democracy, all branches of federal government and mass media, the very tools needed to restore democracy. Only disaster can restore democracy and sanity in the West. If an epidemic could deny military force to the rich, and bring the people out in force and in anger, perhaps it would help. More likely the sheeple will cower before the dictates of rich tyrants, and sufficient anger will require one or more centuries of domestic tyranny.
Thanks for this, Colleen. I sure hope COVID-19 isn’t one of those viruses that can live through nuclear winter. In Canada, Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, which represent Canada north of 60 degrees lat, has zero confirmed cases and zero probables. I hope that means, perhaps, that 6 feet of frozen air between every Canadian and every other Canadian is the way to conquer this plague.
But given the way those territories are melting, those stats may change with the coming of spring—which, I might add, the oil and pipeline and shipping corporations are excitedly awaiting. For them, the Arctic is just something in the way of their making lots and lots more money.
The “simulation” 201 last October by Bill Gates, showing a coronavirus pandemic, just in time for the Wuhan Military Games where 300 US troops joined in the festivities (!) seems very odd a month before the first victim of the “Chinese virus” started its deathly trip. I would be very interested to hear if those 300 could be traced and tested.
It also seems that the Italian and Iranian strains of the virus are different from the Chinese strain(s).
Conspiracy theory? Or worth investigating?
Yes, such an investigation would do much to quell blaming, or place responsibility where it belongs.
I don’t hold out great hope for humanity in the face of covid19.
Case in point. People are flocking to Florida for spring break despite covid19. Call it what you may, but it’s social Darwanism at play.
I guess covid19 is nature’s way of thinning the herd by getting rid of the stupid ones. You can’t argue with mother nature.
Party on millenials.
On the other hand you can see this as millenials living in the moment which is the central message of enlightened philosophy. (Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, now is a present.) But problem with this YOLO thinking is life is long and you have to plan.
There are reasons behind their behavior that you clearly don’t seem to grasp. They aren’t esoteric or anything – you’re just looking past them in arrogance.
Millennials have grown up listening to nothing but lies from the government. Why should they believe anything they say now?
Those young people will contract the virus, get sick, and then not die. The vast, vast majority of them. Just saying.
America’s leadership has made such a royal mess of things over the past 75 years, ever since the regime in Washington crowned itself an empire and hegemon of the world in the wake of WWII and decided to wage endless hybrid war against any sovereign nation disputing that claim.
There was an article in Russia Insider recently reporting an interview with Putin about the relationships he had with the four American presidents during his tenure in office. One might have assumed that Dubya (sock puppet for Cheney) was the worst, but no, he said that was Obama who told him point blank that America had rights and prerogatives transcending those of any other country on the planet, indeed extending far beyond the limits of any laws or philosophy, because it was just so damned exceptional. Putin was not amused, but he never makes threats.
That’s the attitude they cling to in DC against all evidence and reason. The tyrants take our hard-earned tax revenues, give us nothing in terms of infrastructure, safety nets, social services, and providing for the next generation’s future. Rather, they squander that money maintaining the most powerful standing army in the history of the world which goes around beating up and intimidating every country on this planet that will not dance to their tune.
Demented, dishonest and corrupt Joe Biden, if “elected” president, will be just as evil a sock puppet for the true shadow government assembled by a trans-national aristocracy as has been dimwitted, dishonest and corrupt Donald Trump… and “Nobel Peace laureate” Obama before him. Biden won’t be calling the shots on pandemics, hybrid wars, or the further erosion of whatever is left of diplomacy by the Empire; they can’t keep his atrophied brain pumped up on powerful stimulants, as they obviously used for his last debate, for any lengthy period of time. It would kill him…though maybe that’s in the plans, as we’ve yet to learn who Madame Vice President will be.
I don’t know for a fact whether the covid-19 virus was bio-engineered at Fort Detrick, the Wuhan Institute, in Manitoba, Canada or wherever the Israelis concoct their WMD’s as many well-placed (though maybe not well-informed) commentators are wont to float before an engaged readership here and in many other venues where news is freely dispensed and discussed (I certainly don’t mean the mainstream media which dispenses only transparent pro-Washington propaganda). But I do think that there will be no reason to believe what any of the aforementioned parties say about this issue, that they will all lie to serve their own agendas and cover their own asses, and that if this latest episode of totally failed diplomacy spirals out of control there will be not just a hybrid war (for that effort is surely nearly spent–what lies and dirty tricks do they have left to dispense?) but a shooting war, most likely initiated by Washington and/or Jerusalem.
Well, this plague and war combo was the same double whammy my grandparents’ generation faced during WWI. Theirs was the “war to end all war,” ours will be the war to end all sensient life. I suspect that famine will not be late to join the merriment to make it the biblical trifecta. This is all so stupid. You don’t even see completely insensate entities like viruses making such self-destructive mistakes. Game over, man, game over: humans lose, creepy crawlies win.
Nice to read a comment by someone who can actually write. You are tougher on Washington than even I, a Canadian, am. I just want to draw out your comment on Biden:
“Demented, dishonest and corrupt Joe Biden, if “elected” president, will be just as evil a sock puppet for the true shadow government assembled by a trans-national aristocracy as has been dimwitted, dishonest and corrupt Donald Trump… ”
I think we might be looking at a presidency more like Reagan’s. Biden has a “nice guy” persona, which I think he’ll make effective use of. But one thing that continually made itself obvious to me on several occasions is that he’s not very bright. Put that together with what looks like the onset of senility, and you have a president whose cabinet will try to keep away from too many public appearances and leave the not-so-deep Deep State, managed by a seriously paranoid intel community, to run things. There will be a lot of fearmongering about those evil Ruskies, and Biden will be seen as “doing something” if he just keeps up the tradition of bloating out the Pentagon budget.
My sense of Putin is that he’s the only truly rational leader on the international stage right now. I rather doubt that he will make the mistake of responding super-aggressively to the anti-Russia propaganda machine. He is definitely not stupid, and I can certainly understand why he’s been so reluctant to step down and is therefore pressing for a constitutional change to remain somewhere on the scene indefinitely. Because if he goes, the oligarchs he’s been keeping under control for as long as he’s been prez, will be back in the driver’s seat–in which case Russia will become a REAL threat, not just a fantasy necessary to Make America Look Great Again.
Anyway, thanks for an eminently readable comment.
Yup! Well said! This scientific article looks credible finding through all the gene analysis that the novel virus began in an animal or animals and then “jumped” to humans: see: nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9?sf231596998=1
“(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.)”
They could file suit for a heck of a lot more than that.