Dr. Heinz Dieterich 24.3.2020
Director, Center for Transition Sciences (CTS)
Coordinator, World Advanced Research Project (WARP)
1. Trump defeated, Xi triumphs
When Donald Trump poisonously praised President Xi’s efforts to contain the COVID-19 coronavirus in China, he did not know that his words would soon come back to haunt him. “President Xi is strong, insightful, and totally focused on conducting the Coronavirus counterattack … There is great discipline in China and President Xi is effectively running what will be a very successful operation …”, he said in his usual demagoguery. He downplayed the danger of COVID-19 in the United States by claiming that seasonal flu kills far more Americans than coronavirus and that “life and the economy go on”.
Last week, Trump was forced to declare a national emergency, authorize an economic rescue package of more than $ 900 billion, actívate the National Guard and place all of Europe under quarantine. In Europe, whose death toll has already surpassed that of the whole of Asia, the President of the European Commission, the German Ursula von der Leyen, used the same Trump newspeak to hide the cynical negligence and operational inability of their governments, saying that the European Union leaders “underestimated” the magnitude of the virus’s danger. Thus, while the American Union entered into a “national emergency” and the European Union closed its borders in panic, China shut down its 16 emergency hospitals in the epidemiological epicenter of Wuhan, reporting zero cases of infection in that epicenter and building a global Sanitary Silk Road with socialista chararcteristics.
2. Great success of the Chinese model
Faced with Trump’s lies, which he himself calls “truthful hyperbole, an innocent form of exaggeration and a very effective form of promotion,” Xi responded at the time with great measure and dignity, stating that the Communist Party of China (CCP) was “fully capable” of stopping the epidemic and that he was waging “a people’s war” against evil, with “national mobilization” and “very strict prevention and control measures”.
Today, that the epidemic is effectively defeated (in its expansive force) in China and that the country’s counter-epidemic strategy has shown that it is the only effective paradigm to control that pandemic danger, Xi’s worthy response to Trump’s imperialist marketing has turned into an incontrovertible empirical truth. And conveys to the country’s socialist governance system and Xi Jinping’s leadership justified pride and glory.
3. The keys to triumph
Governing the most effective state of contemporary global society, Xi had plenty of reasons to be confident. He correctly assumed, that the synergy of the coordinated effort of the State, the Party and the people, guided by the materialistic dialectic science of the 21st century and supported by the extraordinary advances of the organization and technology of the country –5G robots, hospital rooms printed in 3D, a digital monetary system based on QR codes, artificial intelligence, etc.– guaranteed the victory of the “people´s war” against the pathogen. The very rapid sequencing of COVID-19 by Dr. Wang Jianwei of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences through next generation sequencing (NGS), less than three months after the outbreak of the epidemy; building fully equipped hospitals with 1000 beds in ten days (!); organizing the survival logistics for 11 million people quarantined in the city of Wuhan and of 60 millon in Hubei province; announcing recently the first phase of clinical trials with a recombinant vaccine, as well as the massive industrial production of the effective Japanese drug Favipiravir (T-705, Toyama Chemical Co, Tokyo) and the zero infection rate of the last week in Wuhan are irrefutable global evidence of the vanguard position of Chinese Socialism in the war on the pathogen.
4. Chinese Science for the World
In the theoretical journal Qiushi, whose name means “seeking truth from facts”
(shí shì qiú shì, 实事求是), President Xi succinctly explains the keys to Chinese success, the tasks of the future, and a global commitment to sharing knowledge and paradimgatic experiences with all countries around the world. It is obvious that the scientific axiom of “seeking truth from facts”, which has oriented Chinese society for thousands of years and was “repotentiated” by the “New Democratic Revolution” (Mao Zedong) of 1949 and marxism-based development, does not have the same conductive cultural strength in other countries. And it is also evident, that there is no state in the global system, which has the efficacy of CCP-led China, the high level of education and the stability of Chinese families. Yet, despite of these particular features, the world’s governments and peoples can benefit from China’s great social and scientific effort and sacrifice and its supportive offering to share its anti-epidemic know-how for the sake of “a common destiny for the benefit of all humanity”(Xi).
5. Chinese Solidarity for the World
That the “shared future of all humanity” is not a mere rhetorical foreign policy figure is shown in the facts: 250,000 masks and four epidemiological experts were sent to Iran, where Trump’s criminal sanctions aggravate the health crisis public; 100,000 high-tech masks, two million ordinary masks, a thousand lung ventilators, a total of 31 metric tons, and a team of experts were dispatched to Italy; Madrid recived a shipment with 8 million masks and 100,000 reagents; 1 million surgical gloves and masks were dispached to France; South Corea was supported with over a million masks and other medical supplies; 5,000 protective suits and 100,000 masks went to Japan; 12,000 diagnostic kits to Pakistan; 300,000 masks to Belgium; 1000 quick test kits to Serbia. Last but not least, the first shipment of 500,000 diagnostic kits and one million protective masks to California, donated by billionaire Jack Ma, was delivered from Shanghai recently.
6. New York wants nationalization
New York’s millionaire mayor, Bill De Blasio, publicly criticized the Trump administration for its inoperability and lack of diagnostic kits, fans, masks, ECMOs and other protective equipment, in the American Union. We are in a wartime scenario with a Mar-a-Lago attitude being used by the federal government, declared the mayor of the most powerful center of global capitalism and demanded –overtaking “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders on the left– “the nationalization of factories that can produce the medical supplies we need.” In other words: the mayor of the financial capital metrópoli of the world understands, that only the effectiveness of a Chinese socialist state can sway the catastrophe produce by the inoperability of the neoliberal lumpen-capitalist state.
However, not even the critique of the mayor has changed the situación. Two days ago de Blasio said on CBSNew York televisión, that he believes, New York City is ten days away from widespread shortages of medical equipment including “really fundamental supplies” like ventilators and surgical masks. “We’re not getting shipments. We’re not getting the stuff we need…If we don’t get more ventilators in the next 10 days, people will die who don’t have to die. It’s as simple as that.”
7. Washington´s Criminal Negligence
New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo compared Trump’s neoliberal government’s cynical negligence vis-a-vis COVID-19 with neoliberal President George Bush’s criminal laissez faire government style towards Hurricane Katrina. In Cuomo’s words, Trump’s failed epidemiological policy “is the public health version of Hurricane Katrina.” “We knew that this (the H.D. epidemic) was happening in November and December. We saw China. China did about 200,000 tests a day. South Korea conducted about 15,000 tests per day. The United States has only conducted about 5,000 tests to date,” Cuomo said in a devastating public critique of Trump. He’s right. Massive and systematic scrutiny, along with immediate quarantine, is the most important variable in the battle to defeat COVID-19. Trump and the rest of the plutocratic power elite of the imperialist Empire only think about the protection of the stock markets, not about the people. Capitalist social darwinism at its worst.
8. European Union´s delinquent Negligence
Cuomo’s criticism, of course, is valid for Italy, Spain and the entire European Union. Since the emergence of the virus in China, experts from chinese and international institutions have endlessly stressed, that the systematic and forceful action of the Chinese state in the first phase of the epidemic was the decisive element in containing it. But, caught up in their anti-communist-class ideology and function, their racist attitude towards China and the incessant global psychological warfare of their capitalist NATO media apparatuses, they fell prey to their own lies about the alleged violations of human rights in China by the quarantine of Hubei Province.
Now, their citizens are paying the price of their government neglect, operational ineptitude and ideological attitude of cold war, which have left these European countries without logistical preparation or strategic forecast in the face of the pandemic. They acted with the cynicism typical of neoliberal laissez faire, the lies of bourgeois democracy and blaming China for the so-called “Wuhan Virus”. Now, overcome by the reality of the pandemic, they are looking for someone to blame for the disaster and stay in power, alternatively slandering China and Russia and acting on the logic of socialdarwinism; knowing that the rich will have adequate hospital care by 21st century medical standards, while the poor will die from lack of doctors, beds, equipment and resources.
9. U.S. Psychological Warfare operation against China
In the face of the tsunami of criticism of Trump, which may cost him the presidential election, and in the face of the enormous economic cost to global capitalism – unlike China, whose GDP will grow again this year between 5 and 6% — the governments of the Atlantic bourgeoisie accuse China of having “started a global pandemic” (State Department). Trump himself insists with his usual ignorance and malice that talking about the “Chinese virus” is a “very adequate” way to refer to COVID-19.
Now, a psychological warfare guide from the U.S. National Security Council, obtained by the Daily Beast, demonstrates, that the propaganda attack on China is a concerted Goebbels-inspired disinformation campaign by the neofascist Trump government. One section of the cable reads “NSC Top Lines: [People’s Republic of China] Propaganda and Disinformation on the Wuhan Virus Pandemic.” “Chinese Communist Party officials in Wuhan and Beijing had a special responsibility to inform the Chinese people and the world of the threat, since they were the first to learn of it,” the cable reads. “Instead, the… government hid news of the virus from its own people for weeks, while suppressing information and punishing doctors and journalists who raised the alarm. The Party cared more about its reputation than its own people’s suffering.” (See appendix 1).
The heinous lies of the Trump government become even more cynical in the light of a recent Washington Post article, which reveals, that United States intelligence agencies were warning President Donald Trump about an impending pandemic as early as January. The agencieswere giving Trump classified briefings on the matter at the same time that the president “was publicly downplaying the risk of the novel coronavirus and insisting the US was well prepared to handle the outbreak”. “The system was blinking red,” one US official with access to the intelligence told The Post. Agencies “have been warning on this since January.” “Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were — they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it,” the official added.
10. Biological warfare or natural event?
By geopolitically labeling the phenomenon, Trump is trying to win the “blame game” and the november elections, adding one more lie to the 17,000 fake news he has produced over the past three years, according to the Washington Post Fact Checker.
Of the about 1450 known human pathogens, nearly two-thirds are zoonotic. That is, transmitted via an animal-human interface. As long as this interface and the “patient zero” (first patient infected) are unknown, there is no way to scientifically identify the place of origin of COVID-19. Hence, Beijing’s argument that there is no evidence to show that the pathogen’s place of origin is Wuhan and that the virus was possibly introduced last October by a US military delegation to that city, is absolutely valid. Indeed, China could argue a very strong forensic hypothesis based on circumstantial evidence, which would satisfy, inter alia, the aspects of motive (cui bono), intentionality and historical background. For space reasons we mention only some forensic backgrounds widely documented by American scientists.
11. Biological warfare experiments in New York subway
From 1949 to 1969, the United States conducted at least 239 experiments on a “germ war testing program”, which used bacteria to simulate biological weapons and were conducted on civilians without their knowledge or consent. All of these bacteria are “considered pathogens now”. In one of the experiments on “The Vulnerability of Subway Passengers in New York City for the Covert Attack with Biological Agents,” secret agents broke bulbs filled with nearly 175 grams of bacus subtilis bacteria, approximately 87 trillions of organisms in each, and then measured their spread through the subway tunnels and trains. The clouds enveloped people as the trains drove away, but they didn’t suspect anything. As a result of this experiment, army scientists concluded that it took four to 13 minutes for train passengers to be exposed to the bacteria. Five minutes after the bacteria were released at the 23rd Street station, the bacteria could be detected at every station between 14th and 59th Streets, according to the report. Between June 6 and June 10, they estimated that more than one million people were exposed. (See Leonard Cole, Clouds of Secrecy: The Army’s Germ Warfare Tests Over Populated Areas.)
In July last year, the primary U.S. public health system control institution, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), banned the U.S. military’s largest biological warfare center in Fort Detrick, Maryland, from continuing their work on the deadliest “select” pathogens, such as Ebola and anthrax, among others, because a CDC inspection found serious flaws in the sterilization system of the used materials (sic).
12. What will happen in Latin America?
The only country in Latin America that has an effective system of government similar to China’s, and which has the experiences of strategic planning, mass organization, educational level, public health system and comparable scientific logistics, mutatis mutandis, to China, is Cuba. It also has the geographical advantage of being an island and of not playing any significant role in the world trade system. The impact of the pandemic on the island will therefore be comparatively low.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of other Latin American countries, because they are
following the same fatal laizzes faire, laissez passer strategy used by the inept European and North American governments, rather than emulating China’s successful experience. Latin American people will pay the costs in terms of sick and dead victims of this cynical negligence of their governments. However, cynicism of the bourgeois ruling elites comes with a price. Those governments who ignore the preventive and therapeutic scientific evidence of pandemic control, but seek to reassure the people and middle classes with populist phrases and, perhaps, the “strength of faith”, will be removed from their public functions through elections, intra-elite dissent, military ultimatums or mass social protests.
The fact that, in the face of this danger of removal, even the neoliberal cynics Trump and Bolsonaro are beginning to reconfigure their cynical minimisation and improvisation strategies, must make all the social democratic governments of Latin America, particularly in Mexico, reflect.
Unfortunately, they don’t seem to understand, that with their mismanagement of COVID-19 they putting their own political fate on the line!
Follow Heinz Dieterich’s video and text editorials at:
https://www.facebook.com/LibertadDiario/
APPENDIX 1
White House Pushes U.S. Officials to Criticize China For Coronavirus ‘Cover-Up’
A State Department cable obtained by The Daily Beast says the U.S. and the American people are the “greatest humanitarians the world has ever known.”
Erin Banco
Updated Mar. 21, 2020 4:51PM ET / Published Mar. 21, 2020 2:57PM ET
EXCLUSIVE
Aly Song/Reuters
As the number of coronavirus cases continues to grow at a rapid pace in the U.S., the White House is launching a communications plan across multiple federal agencies that focuses on accusing Beijing of orchestrating a “cover-up” and creating a global pandemic, according to two U.S. officials and a government cable obtained by The Daily Beast.
The cable, sent to State Department officials Friday, lays out in detail the circumstances on the ground in China, including data on coronavirus cases and deaths, the local business environment and transportation restrictions. But it also issues guidelines for how U.S. officials should answer questions on, or speak about, the coronavirus and the White House’s response in relation to China.
The talking points appear to have originated in the National Security Council. One section of the cable reads “NSC Top Lines: [People’s Republic of China] Propaganda and Disinformation on the Wuhan Virus Pandemic.”
“Chinese Communist Party officials in Wuhan and Beijing had a special responsibility to inform the Chinese people and the world of the threat, since they were the first to learn of it,” the cable reads. “Instead, the… government hid news of the virus from its own people for weeks, while suppressing information and punishing doctors and journalists who raised the alarm. The Party cared more about its reputation than its own people’s suffering.”
The cable was disseminated to officials at a time when the administration is engrossed in a communications battle around how to disseminate the flow of crucial health information to the American public while at the same time deflecting criticism that the White House was unprepared for the pandemic and that President Trump is at odds with members of his coronavirus task force.
One of the results of those internal deliberations appears to be a renewed focus on underscoring China’s missteps. Two U.S. officials working on the administration’s coronavirus response said the White House is pushing federal agencies to stick closely to the national security council’s talking points, especially when senior officials take to the podium, to ensure continuity with President Trump.
“These talking points are all anyone is really talking about right now,” one official said. “Everything is about China. We’re being told to try and get this messaging out in any way possible, including press conferences and television appearances.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Over the last several weeks top administration officials, including President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have referred to the coronavirus as both the “Chinese virus” and the “Wuhan virus.” Beijing’s leaders have pushed back on the designation, claiming the terms are xenophobic and inaccurate now that the virus has spread to dozens of countries across the world. American doctors and scientists involved with the administration’s task force operations continue to call it “the coronavirus.”
“The [Chinese Communist Party] is waging a propaganda campaign to desperately try to shift responsibility for the global pandemic to the United States. This effort is futile,” one of the talking points in the cable reads. “Thanks to the… cover-up, Chinese and international experts missed a critical window to contain the outbreak within China and stop its global spread. Saving lives is more important than saving face.”
But the administration isn’t just focusing on criticizing China, it’s also painting America’s response to the global pandemic as “extraordinary humanitarianism”.
“The United States and the American people are demonstrating once again that they are the greatest humanitarians the world has ever known,” according to the cable. “The United States stands ready to provide more assistance to China, if the Chinese Communist Party would allow us to do so.”
The cable notes that the U.S. has donated millions of dollars worth of medical supplies and provided financial assistance for countries trying to fight the coronavirus.
As of last week, about “95 percent of China’s cities and prefectures had reported zero new cases in the past 14 consecutive days as of March 19, including 16 of the 17 prefectures and cities in Hubei Province,” according to the cable, which noted that the State Department had conducted an analysis of the data.
“Cases among Chinese travelers infected in other countries accounted for virtually all the new cases reported outside Hubei since March 13,” according to the cable. “While the vast majority of these cases are Chinese nationals, the first confirmed imported case of a U.S. citizen was reported in the Shanghai consular district.”
Meanwhile, in the U.S., the number of positive coronavirus cases ticked above the 20,000 mark Saturday morning, with more than 270 deaths reported.
Paul Cockshott's Blog 
First text is a really vulgar, unbearable – and mostly unreadable -, piece of common propaganda. Really poor article, specially in the sense that being so blatantly biased, no one can give it none credibility at all…
Your own comment would have more weight were you to actually cite points that you think that the author got factually wrong. As it stands, your comment is no more than saying that you disapprove of the politics of the author.
It is not at all clear how the stability of Chinese families resolves C19 epidemics or why anyone would think it does. It is not common knowledge China has a lower incidence of premarital sex, extramarital sex, homosexuality, alcoholism and other drug abuse, domestic violence, child neglect, separation of spouses, etc.
There is no reason to expect anyone to engage in biological warfare who has not prepared a vaccine for its armed forces. A suspiciously early arrival of said vaccine is the only circumstantial evidence for biological warfare.
According to the Chinese newspaper Global Time, there was indeed an explicit cover-up by the Wuhan local government. See, https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1183520.shtml
Please see:
COVID-19 shows the Emperor has no clothes.
How can any one protect herself and the love ones without health insurance to pay for a “caring doctor” ?
Twitting and propaganda are worthless and will cost lives, the mighty nuclear weapons and stealth fighters can’t help either,. Only solidarity, humanism, care , love, socialised medicine and cooperation will save us all.
If COVID-19 wipes out the population supporting individualism, selfishness and Laissez-faire Capitalism, together with their greedy market invisible hand, then may be it will get rid of the main cancer at the same time and we all can share a healthy planet after that.
China and Cuba show what works when life is at stake.
China and Cuba – and Vietnam, too
Paul, Can I offer you a critique that was posted on one of your videos. That was “Economic Factors in Soviet Collapse”. By Хризантема?
Well here it goes.
“I was not too lazy to find the original. Why engage in disinformation if you claim that your research is scientific?
These are false reasons, because there is a false view of the Soviet economy. First, there was no such thing as a “tax” in the Soviet economy, which is typical of modern Eastern despotisms. The entire product produced was accumulated by the Soviet ruling class in its own hands. There is simply no need for taxation (in the Eastern sense), it is meaningless. This did not exclude any additional exemptions (in Soviet practice, they were called a levy or tax, for example, a tax on childlessness), but the purpose of such exemptions was to minimize the consumption of consumer products (and thus to minimize the material production of consumer products). This is not a tax in the modern (Asian) sense. Accordingly, the phrase “the financial basis of the Soviet state lay in taxes” is false.
Everything else is derived from the original false thesis. The basis of the income of the Soviet ruling class was human labor, which had two dimensions-the production of means of production (group “A”) and the production of consumer goods (group “B”). Accordingly, income was thought of as an increase in resources entered into economic turnover, and the production of consumer goods as a loss (cost), which was tried in every possible way to minimize (to make the Soviet people consume as little as possible) through minimizing wages, dacha plots, the deficit, and so on. Within such a political economy, income is the entire resource attracted, and the difference between it and consumption is net income. Which can be maximized in different ways. If we imagine the ideal business of a Bolshevik, then this is completely unpaid human labor, that is, labor in which consumer goods are not produced. This is a model of net and maximum profitability of the enterprise. Which is unattainable because the worker will starve to death..
Secondly, the reason for the decline and orientalization must be counted from Gorbachev’s reforms. Namely, permission to transfer non-cash money to cash (i.e. legitimization of losses-costs and their maximization). What happens to an enterprise where loss maximization is allowed? That’s right, it’s going bankrupt. It is from here that we need to count the appearance of the money supply, unsecured by goods. Permission for free business activity. Permission for pricing. Permission for the free sale of products (abolition of the monopoly on foreign trade). The consumer Fund has rapidly flowed abroad, which means that money has become even more insecure. And so on. It was these measures that bankrupted the Soviet enterprise. But these are not economic factors, they are a consequence of economic factors. Why in the early 80’s most representatives of the ruling class were for the market? What goals did they want to achieve, and why did they think of the” market ” in a completely different way than the orientalized US or Europe? Here’s where to start..”
It was translated from Russian to English. Paul what do you think?
Here is what I think this article gets wrong:
1. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. Citing a NSC document stating (accurately) that the Chinese government tried to downplay the spread of Covid-19 does not equal a US conspiracy to run a PsyOps operation. In military parlance, PsyOps doesn’t even refer to “propaganda campaigns” that Heinz think it does – a fact that would be immediately obvious to anyone with a modicum of military experience. Moreover, it’s not wrong to state that the Chinese government censored its internal social media platforms en-masse to clamp down on anti-party anger over the CCP’s initial coronavirus response, because the Chinese government did in fact do that.
2. Again on the extraordinary claims demanding extraordinary proof, Heinz needs a lot more than circumstantial evidence that a US diplomatic delegation caused the coronavirus pandemic. If I were to say “because we don’t know who patient zero is, patient zero could be anyone, including a baboon from Jupiter” – that would be about as nonsensical as what Heinz argues. If this was a courtroom, his argument wouldn’t hold water. Not to mention that the Chinese government has a huge incentive to run their own Information Ops campaign (not Psych Ops, again, there’s a difference) to blame someone other than (party) incompetence for the pandemic.
3. Cipolla’s first two axioms of human stupidity (a very real thing – look it up) suggest that ineptitude is always more likely than conspiracy to explain an event. In 2016, a US consular official warned that a (new) Wuhan laboratory studying coronaviruses had lax safety features. The most banal explanation – that some kind of accident or mistake caused this coronavirus – might actually the most likely. This becomes more probable considering the massive obstructionism of the Chinese authorities into outsiders investigating the origins of this coronavirus, suggesting the CCP government is trying to hide something. For reference, see an Atlantic Monthly article about the growing number of holes in the original storyline from the Chinese government, (before Beijing supposedly started peddling the conspiracy theories Heinz parrots), that the virus centered around a market in Wuhan.
4. Just on a deeper level, one has to ask why Heinz is taking the time to write this (poorly argued) article, which basically comes down to the argument “China good, US/West bad!” I cannot speak for Europe, but as an American I say this: Heinz is putting way too much faith in a dictatorship. He does that because, to him, putting faith in a half-socialist dictatorship makes more sense than putting faith in a non-socialist democratic republic with free elections/free press. But that faith in dictators is, I believe, misplaced.
Not speaking for Europe, but US as an incredible ability to reinvent itself, should a political movement understand the American system intelligently enough, and has in fact reinvented itself as a country numerous times. The US might be capitalist now, but it has the possibility to change. Dictatorships, by and large, do not change unless someone at the top by luck happens to initiate such a change. “Reformed” dictatorships are a chimera – either the reforms get terminated, or the dictatorship is terminated. Not to mention the fact that, in China, the moment he disagreed beyond a certain threshold with the government, he would be imprisoned for it. That Heinz is putting his faith in a dictatorship suggests a profound sense of powerlessness on his part. He doesn’t think anything can change, so he’s given up, and puts his faith in an authoritarian party (which is not an improvement over wishing for an authoritarian person).
My suggestion would be for Heinz to doff the powerlessness ASAP. It’s not attractive. It doesn’t win supporters. And it doesn’t help him get to where he wants to go.
In any case, we must not fall into the opposite error: bad China. The West is good.