HOW do you know when politicians are lying? When they are signalling virtue. As the last three years has shown, their supposed liberal values are a façade, masking a self-serving and authoritarian outlook. Unless useful to their career, they are not really interested in the wants and needs of ordinary people. They want to be seen as progressive and compassionate, but by performance rather than by principles and practice. Our corrupt mainstream media do their bidding.
Such pretence is evident in the brazenly hypocritical reactions to protests in China against Covid-19 restrictions. Political leaders and mainstream newspapers are competing for the most sanctimonious grandstanding.
The New York Times declares that ‘strict Covid restrictions are hurting the country’s economy and angering members of the public, who are taking to the streets’. Yet three years ago this same ‘Zero Covid’ was the aspiration of the West’s public health bureaucrats and politicians who, when protests inevitably broke out, violently suppressed them and slandered the protesters as conspiracy theorists and fascists, as Eugyppius writes here.
He reminds us how the New York Times ‘played a leading role in this long and excruciating charade’. In April 2020, it reported that ‘an informal coalition of influential conservative leaders and groups, some with close connections to the [Trump] White House‘ was responsible for ‘quietly working to nurture protests and apply pressure to overturn state and local orders intended to stop the spread of the coronavirus’. In March 2021, it ran ‘an obnoxious opinion piece about What Happened When Germany’s Far-Right Party Railed Against Lockdowns, which called German protesters ‘an amorphous mix of conspiracy theorists, shady organisations and outraged citizens’ and appeared to accuse the right-populist party Alternative für Deutschland of opportunism for joining their ranks.
Equally preposterously the Guardian reported yesterday that ‘US and Canada urge China not to harm zero-Covid protesters amid new clashes with police’. Justin Trudeau said that people in China ‘should be allowed to share their perspective and indeed protest’. That’s the same Trudeau who invoked the Emergency Act to quash a peaceful truckers’ protest in Ottawa, who closed supporters’ bank accounts, and who described anyone complaining about his vindictive vaccine mandates as ‘racists and misogynists’. And the same Joe Biden whose administration imposed federal vaccine and mask mandates, resulting in tens of thousands of key workers being dismissed.
As the Covid-19 crisis theatre draws to a close, Western leaders are striving to rehabilitate themselves as champions of liberal democracy and human rights, contrasting their sophistication, tolerance and inclusivity with the regressive regimes of Iran, Russia and China. In Australia 33,000 fines for breach of Covid-19 regulations are being cancelled or repaid. But we freedom fighters will never forget what the authorities and their media collaborators did.
In September 2020 I spoke at a large and friendly freedom rally in Trafalgar Square before it was charged by riot police wielding batons. I saw people next to me struck by these thugs in uniform; several victims had bleeding head wounds. Scant media reports were limited to derisory underestimates of the crowd and emphasising a few provoked arrests. At least three of the London marches in 2020 and 2021 were attended by well over 100,000; they filled Oxford Street, called at the BBC and were ignored by politicians, broadcasters and newspapers.
The ‘news’ is what the establishment wants you to know. No more, no less. The size of demonstrations in China is small compared with the millions protesting against the allegedly rigged election in Brazil, now on the 29th consecutive day of appeal to the military to step in and save Brazil from the convicted criminal Lula, a World Economic Forum stooge. Whether or not Western media approve of this revolt is irrelevant; it’s a major development that they refuse to cover.
With the twisted logic we’ve come to expect, anyone highlighting the staggering hypocrisy of Western leaders and commentators on the police crackdown in Shanghai, Guangzhou and other cities is accused of being a China apologist. That’s after they spent two years denying the rights of people who resisted the unscientific and unethical public health coup, and promoting apartheid and vaccine coercion. Conservatives and libertarians have never shied from criticising the oppressive culture in China, but are we really so superior in the West? Draconian censorship laws, developing a dystopian surveillance state in partnership with the World Economic Forum, imposing ‘zero carbon’ policies that will freeze folk in their homes this winter, taxpayers’ money splurged on missiles for a proxy war in Ukraine, flooding the land with foreign migrants, and our children indoctrinated with subversive gender ideology and critical race theory – what’s not to like?
Okay, China bad. Yet something is missing in the Western media reports: the vast quarantine camps for tens of thousands of detainees, built outside major cities. These are now being populated, probably by citizens who dared to protest against the tyrannical lockdowns. Isn’t it interesting that the mainstream media don’t want you to know about this?
In words attributed to Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn: ‘We know they are lying; they know that we know they’re lying; we know that they know that we know they’re lying, but they still lie.’
