In this mailing:
- Richard Kemp: Coronavirus: The West's 9/11 Moment
- Drieu Godefridi: Coronavirus: Belgian Carnage
by Richard Kemp • April 22, 2020 at 5:00 am
Commentators and politicians today worry that the current situation might trigger a new cold war with China. They fail to understand that, in a similar but much more far-reaching pattern to the jihadist conflict, China has been fighting a cold war against the West for decades, while we have refused to recognise what is going on.... Like 9/11, Covid-19 must now force the West to wake up and fight back.
For decades China has been working on its three-pronged strategy: building its economy and fighting capability, including intelligence, technology, cyber and space as well as hard military power; developing global influence to exploit resources and secure control; thrusting back and dividing the US and its capitalist allies.
China's arms exports are not motivated primarily by revenue generation, but as a means to impose influence and control, create proxies and challenge the US.
Chinese investment penetrates every corner of the UK, giving unparalleled influence here as in so many countries. Plans to allow Chinese investment and technology into our nuclear power programme and 5G network will build vulnerability into our critical national infrastructure of an order not seen in any other Western nation. Even the BBC, which receives funding from China, has produced and promoted a propaganda video supporting Huawei to the alarm of some of its own journalists. All this despite MI5's repeated warnings that Chinese intelligence continues to work against British interests at home and abroad.
China has been fighting a cold war against the West for decades, while we have refused to recognise what is going on. Like 9/11, Covid-19 must now force the West to wake up and fight back. Pictured: Chinese President Xi Jinping (center) oversees the military parade for the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the People's Republic of China, on October 1, 2019 at Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China. (Photo by Andrea Verdelli/Getty Images)
The coronavirus pandemic is a 9/11 moment. Al Qaida had been at war with the West for years before the destruction of the twin towers. But it took that barbarism to galvanise its largely supine prey into action.
Now we have Covid-19. Unlike 9/11 we have seen no evidence so far that China deliberately unleashed this virus on the world. There is certainly evidence, however, that it resulted from the policies of the Chinese Communist Party and that Beijing's habitually duplicitous and criminally irresponsible actions allowed it to spread around the globe, leading to tens of thousands of deaths that could have been avoided.
by Drieu Godefridi • April 22, 2020 at 4:00 am
There were no masks, so the government decided to announce that no masks were needed. This supreme culmination of the ineptitude of the Belgian government still can be found online on the personal website of Health Minister Maggie De Block: "Wearing masks to protect yourself from the coronavirus makes little sense".
No masks, no screening, almost no tests and people left to die in nursing homes -- that has been Belgium's situation in the middle of the worst pandemic since the Spanish Influenza of 1918. This Belgian carnage is entirely due to the tragic incompetence of the Belgian governing "elites" -- and was completely avoidable.
Beginning in 2015, the Belgian government destroyed the country's entire "strategic stock" of 63 million protective face-masks, in order to "make room" for housing refugees. With no masks available when the coronavirus pandemic spread to Belgium, the government announced that no masks were needed: "Wearing masks to protect yourself from the coronavirus makes little sense". Pictured: Police organize a line of customers outside a gardening store in Brussels, Belgium on April 18, 2020. (Photo by Eric Lalmand/Belga Mag/AFP via Getty Images)
It is too soon to make a final assessment on the management of COVID-19 by the countries of the world, but one thing is sure: Belgium is in the middle of a great carnage.
It all began in 2015, when the government of Prime Minister Charles Michel (today's European Council president) decided to destroy Belgium's entire "strategic stock" of 63 million protective face-masks, including the precious FFP2 type -- 1,200 pallets carefully stored and guarded by the army in the Belgrade Barracks, in Namur. Because they were "out of date," said Minister of Health Maggie De Block, who is still on the job today. "Not at all," said the main union of the Belgian army, "these masks were incinerated... to 'make room' for housing refugees." In 2015, Belgium and Europe were overwhelmed by migrants at the invitation of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the laws of the EU and the European Convention on Human Rights made it effectively impossible to reject them.
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