Samantha Bee tries to combat the racism that lies behind some of the fears raised over the coronavirus and that is being used to discriminate against and even attack Asian Americans.
Seth Meyers also has an excellent update on Donald Trump’s inept response to the coronavirus and the Democratic primary race.
Poor phrasing — it connotes that there is such a thing as an excuse for being racist.
While I agree 100% that there is no excuse to be racist, and am disappointed (but not surprised) at the people who have been avoiding Chinatowns and Chinese restaurants, etc. in this time…we can still be angry at the Chinese *government* (as distinct from the people) and the WHO for allowing this to get out of control. China’s message until the end of January was to initially deny that there was a problem at all, and then to downplay the severity. They held a banquet in an attempt to set a world record, IN WUHAN for the Chinese New Year, and tens of thousands of people attended (even though it was mere kilometers from the site of the outbreak). Then the WHO refrained from labelling this a global pandemic, and encouraged governments to take NO action regarding Chinese air travel to the rest of the world, proving that they are firmly in the pocket of the Chinese Communist Party. Thousands of lives could have been saved at the cost of some temporary economic damage (damage which, let it be known, is being felt NOW, and at least a couple orders of magnitude worse than it would have been if action had been taken in January or early February), had China been serious in its efforts to quarantine people, and had the world made a serious effort to quarantine CHINA. All of those Italians and Iranians who’ve died are the victims of incompetance writ large, proving to the rest of us that we are ALL subject to the whims of Winnie the Pooh.
And the greatest irony of them all (and this could be foreseen, based on so much recent history) is that the CCP are now trying to spread the narrative that this is an American virus, either deliberately introduced to China as some form of biowarfare, or that the first oubreak was in the USA (an invisible outbreak I guess), and that Americans spread it to their country (they’ve also been using that same narrative but with Italians or Japanese replacing Americans). Deny, downplay, dissemble. This is what happens when you live in a world where authorities decide that there is no objective truth…where truth is what is useful to the people in power at any given moment (and consider that China was throwing Wuhan government officials under the bus just weeks ago for failing to shut down this wet market in which the virus originated, a wet market that was only allowed to operate because of the corruption that is endemic not just to Wuhan, but to all of China). This is the world in which Donald Trump would have us all live. We all know he’s got a hard-on for authoritarian autocrats like Pooh and Putin (and most recently Narendra Modi, may he die a horrible death), wanting to be just like them…a world with people like that leading our countries is a world in which a pandemic like this can thrive.
So by all means, take reasonable precautions. But don’t blame this on all Chinese people, when the fault is really a tiny selection of Chinese people you’ll never meet. Their desperate need to hold onto power at any cost has led to this tragedy. I really hope this all dies down, but frankly, I don’t expect it to, nor do I think most of us have any idea of the scale of the chaos that is about to befall the people of planet Earth. The 1918 influenza outbreak would be a worst-case scenario…and that killed at least 3% of the global population at the time. I don’t think we’re going to see anything close to that this time, given the progress we’ve made in health care and medical knowledge in the last century. But developing nations, without the medical infrastructure to deal with this…they’re going to suffer the worst. The CCP’s inaction looks like it will lead to more deaths than many small wars. Let’s make sure they never forget it, lest history repeat itself.
@ 2 VolcanoMan
I am glad we are not being racist or even xenophobic.
WHO
Damn Chinese coverup.
The Chinese Gov’t probably could have reacted faster but it takes time to realize the extent of such a problem and they flubbed it.[1]
Other than that, most of the bad press i have been hearing seems to be coming fromthe usual lyinc US Gov’t officials ( Hi Mr. Pompeo) or their lapdogs in the US media.
You might find it enlightening to have a look at / Report of the WHO-China Joint Mission on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)
1. Taiwan seems to have acted almost instantly on the notification and had a trained response team in action on the 31st Dec. but I think this was before there was any real appreciation of the seriousness of the outbreak but but since SARS Taiwan seems ready to err on the side of caution.