What is the function of conspiracy theory with a “wink wink” support from the highest leaders in the land? Deflection of responsibility. Finding scapegoats to distract those who believe. Assigning blame to targets that focus hatred and a desire for retaliation. Rallying support to those who claim to offer a “solution” to the manufactured mythology. Creating an “us versus them” attempt to redefine loyalty and patriotism. A justification for a “necessary” and often brutal response. Getting and keeping power.
Conspiracy theories linking Armenians as subversives against the government and as sympathizers to Western allies against the Ottoman Empire in WWI led to the mass slaughter and dislocation of millions of Turkish Armenians. Baseless claims of Jewish powers designing the financial ruin of post-WWI German led to the mass extermination of millions of Jews before and during WWII Germany. They were blamed for sucking the lifeblood out of Germany. Joseph Stalin, during and after that same war, used conspiracy theories for some of the most murderous purges in recorded history. Anyone accused by Soviet Union leader Stalin and his henchmen was simply taken out and summarily shot. Mao Zedong implemented policies and disruption that killed millions of Chinese.
Ethnic cleansing reared its ugly head as anti-Muslim sentiments, fanned by mythology and historical distortions, led murderous Serbian leaders to a mass murder of Muslim Bosnians in the early 1990s. The use of conspiracy theories to ignite hatred continued into Rwanda, pitting Hutus against Tutsis, and most recently, in Myanmar (Burma), watching purportedly “life respecting” Buddhists purging Muslim Rohingyas. There are so many additional examples, but the ultimate lesson in all this focuses on how those in power can use conspiracy theories to gain and maintain power and how the resulting hatred spawns dissention, hatred and often brutality (too frequently culminating in wars and mass extermination). In short, there are no benefits and substantial costs to any society where conspiracy theories have any semblance of mass acceptance.
Even as George Washington rejected the notion that he remain as this nation’s absolute leader at the beginning, referring to the necessity of avoiding the extreme centralized power of a monarchy which is why the Colonies fought the Revolutionary War, Washington deferred instead to a nation of laws with constitutional checks and balances among the three branches of government: executive, legislative and judicial. To him, the notion of a president was apolitical, a leader who was simply a servant of the people. He presided over the passage and installation of the first ten amendments to the Constitution (the Bill of Rights), and reluctantly accepted a second term to stabilize the factions that were rising within the Congress.
If you look at political leaders who support these groundless conspiracy theories, they generally abhor critics and criticism, rail at those elements within their own government that threaten to limit or contain their power and use that mythology and false blame to rally populist/nationalist support for their increasingly centralized power. Almost always, there are tones of racism (including ethnic and religious bias) behind the self-proclaimed “purity” of their intentions.
In our current political environment, even without the coronavirus pandemic, we have seen long-standing credible press lambasted as the “enemy of the people,” Congressional and party opponents labeled as unpatriotic, rising to the level of “treason” and “scum.” We’ve watched powerful efforts to ignore or circumvent statutes, the Constitution and judicial orders, anything that interferes with a modern American populist remaking of America into a nation for which its citizens had died to prevent: in the Civil War and during both WWI and WWII.
So I decided to focus today on the most recent conspiracy theory that has gathered traction and direct Trump administration support: that China manufactured and then intentionally released COVID-19 into the world to generate demand for their medical PPE manufacturers and to circumvent the provisions of the recent Phase One trade agreement with the United States.
I’ll start with my own personal feelings about the motivations of the Chinese leadership. They are clearly trying to replace the United States as the most powerful and influential nation on earth – with unwitting assistance from the Trump administration – and I do not trust their intentions as far as I can throw them! That they covered up the earliest information about their CV-19 outbreak as part of their repressive censorship is, in my mind, beyond question. That China benefitted from the sale of PPE to the United States – Trump made China richer?! – is also beyond question.
Just as Donald Trump promised that he would build a “beautiful” border wall that Mexico would pay for, his attempt to assess direct blame on China, asserting financial responsibility on the Peoples’ Republic, is producing the same result. Mexico didn’t and will not pay for that wall. China will not pay for virus costs. And aside from the United States, no other major nation on earth is demanding that China assume the costs of the pandemic. Even though Woodrow Wilson mandated censorship about the Spanish Flu (1918-20) – see my April 20th 102 Years Later blog – and even though the outbreak of that pandemic was traced to a farm in Kansas, the United States did not write a check for one penny of reparations for killer disease (50 million plus global deaths) that was spread initially by US troops traveling to Europe. Are we ready to go to war with China?
Today’s conspiracy theory: “The novel coronavirus was cooked up in a Chinese lab and either escaped or was intentionally released.” That mythology “has drawn support from the highest levels of the U.S. government… By contrast, strong and widely available evidence supports a very different hypothesis about the virus’s origins: It evolved naturally…
“Scientists believe the direct ancestor of the coronavirus now known as SARS-CoV-2 has lived for so long in bats and other animals that it is no longer capable of making them sick. At some point near the end of 2019, the virus’s genetic code mutated in a way that allowed it to jump from its animal ‘reservoir’ to its first human host.
“At the time that leap was made, the virus had recently developed — or soon would develop — the ability to spread easily from human to human. The result is a global pandemic that has sickened at least 3.9 million people and caused more than 274,000 deaths.
“Scientists cite several layers of evidence to support their surmises. Though they acknowledge gaps where further research would strengthen their position or shift their reading of the exact path the virus has taken, they are firm on where the evidence ultimately leads.
“Here’s how a team of biologists, infectious disease researchers and biosecurity experts put it in a report published in the journal Nature Medicine: ‘We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.’
“To reach that conclusion, the authors drew on research that compared the genetic signatures of three sets of viral samples. The first were drawn from Chinese patients who became sick late last year with unexplained pneumonia; the second came from bats living near Wuhan, China, and which were sometimes brought to an open-air market for sale; and the third was from pangolins, mongoose-like animals from Malaysia that were known to have been illegally imported into China.
“The analysis revealed a direct family relationship among the three. Bats were the likely origin of the coronavirus that appeared in Wuhan patients, but the virus neededed to undergo some key genetic shifts to infect humans. Mysteriously, many of the required changes were found in the more distantly related viruses from pangolins.
“With an improbable amount of luck, a coronavirus might take on the mutations needed to infect humans while being cultured in a lab, the researchers conceded. More likely, nature simply made that jump once in the pangolin, and somewhere in the vast diversity of unsampled bat species, it appears to have done so again.
“Meanwhile, other researchers who sifted through the genetic sequences of dozens of preserved viral samples found that the new coronavirus is a distant cousin of the coronavirus that caused the SARS outbreak of 2002 and 2003, and the coronavirus that gave rise to MERS in 2009. The virus responsible for COVID-19 has distinctive features that separate it from its predecessors by many, many generations, according to their report in the Journal of Virology.
“But none of the genetic mutations looked like ones a scientific genius would engineer in a lab to tweak a virus for better performance, the researchers wrote. Instead, they have all the hallmarks of the gradual accretion of changes that occur over time as a virus encounters new environments and the immune systems of new organisms.
“In other words, SARS-CoV-2 looks like a virus that has evolved, the team wrote… [Scientists also] looked for the telltale signs of genetic tampering that would have been left behind by purposeful manipulation in a lab. These so-called reverse genetic systems are used in the making of coronavirus vaccines and treatments, and they have been described in detail in scientific reports. None are present in SARS-CoV-2, the investigators found… All of this scientific work has been in the public domain since mid-March.
“In recent days, however, President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have breathed new life into the assertion that the novel coronavirus is the product of a state-run virology lab in Wuhan… At the White House last week [first week in May], a reporter asked Trump whether he had ‘seen anything’ that gave him ‘a high degree of confidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the origin of this virus.’
“‘Yes, I have. Yes, I have,’ said the president, without offering further details. He then added, ‘and I think the World Health Organization should be ashamed of themselves because they’re like the public relations agency for China.’… Asked later that day to clarify what he had learned about the virus’s origins, he said: ‘I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that.’ [The President of the United States needs permission to release plain evidence of malicious actions against the American people?! From whom?]
“Pompeo went further, telling ABC News on Sunday [5/3 – pictured above] that ‘there is significant evidence this came from the laboratory’ in Wuhan. He did not give any specifics, but added that he could not say whether the release had been intentional because ‘the Chinese Communist Party has refused to cooperate with world health experts.’
“Those claims ran into scientific turbulence almost immediately… Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, called the assertion that the coronavirus originated in a lab ‘a circular argument.’
“‘If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what’s out there now,’ there’s a strong scientific case that ‘this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated,’ Fauci said in an interview with National Geographic. ‘Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species.’
“The Office of the Director of National Intelligence had previously issued a statement to the same effect: ‘The intelligence community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified.’” Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times, May 9th. Once again, American credibility plunges.
Of course, new conspiracy theories have arisen to vilify Fauci and anyone who contradicts the underlying premise against that Wuhan laboratory. Facts simply are not allowed to enter the dialog of this wave of conspiracy theorists, so they can cling to their malignant beliefs and point to presidential support to justify their “patriotic” commitment to their mistaken allegations. If a piece of tangible evidence contradicts the mythology, that alone is sufficient to question its veracity.
I’m Peter Dekom, and I wonder, in a world where “we reject facts that contradict our baseless opinions” has become the watch-phrase for a very substantial segment of the US population, exactly how can democracy and solid governance survive?
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