Coming to you semi-live from a bunker somewhere in Guelph, Ontario, this is Back in the USSR and I am Siegfried. It has been awhile, my friends, there’s been a lot of complications this year which prevented me from doing the show, but fortunately enough of them have been sorted out to permit me to bring this episode to you now on CFRU 93.3 FM.
Let’s start with the elephant in the room. Yes, this is a plague year. The COVID pandemic is lurking in the back of everyone’s mind and it’s scary. And when people are scared, they often make decisions they later regret. They lay blame without evidence. They close ranks against those they perceive as “the other”. They rally to the side of abusers and exploiters. That’s the real tragedy of this pandemic, above and beyond the more than one million dead worldwide, most of whom would still be with us today had the factors I just mentioned not been driving the policies of certain powerful nation-states…combined with the overriding concern for the profit motive and the fanatical desire to “open up” and return to “business as usual” even as virus deaths continue to surge. In the world today we’re seeing which countries truly place the needs of people over profit and which countries do not: by comparing Cuba to the United States or Vietnam to Brazil or China to India, we see the real difference and distinction between socialism and capitalism.
The same is true in Canada where we’ve lost thousands of people, the private nursing home industry has been exposed for putting seniors into hellholes for the sake of wringing money out of them, and yet the government is all about “opening up” and “business as usual”. And we wonder why virus cases have spiked since the schools re-opened without proper planning and as bars and restaurants re-open. It’s no surprise that the medical system in Ontario, after years of cutbacks and neglect, is being strained to the breaking point and medical workers, who have been in harms way from day one, are burning out in record numbers. Canada has lost considerably more people to this virus than China has, despite having a far smaller population. We’re at close to 10,000 deaths right now, whereas China has lost less than 5000. Think about that for a moment.
This is the general pattern in capitalist societies when it comes to dealing with COVID: at first they deny the problem, they don’t take precautions until it’s too late, they impose lockdowns without ensuring adequate testing, medical care or food delivery, and proceed to re-open everything for the sake of business interests while the virus is still spreading. The fact that Donald Trump and the US Government are still trying to blame China for the more than 220,000 COVID deaths in America when they had almost three months advanced warning about the virus and did absolutely nothing is the height of hypocrisy. Working people are the ones who pay the price for this.
Socialist states, and countries that learned from socialist states, did things differently: they responded quickly, took advanced warnings seriously, tested everyone for the virus, imposed quarantines while making sure human needs were met, and only re-opened when the virus has been successfully contained and human-to-human transmission halted, and be prepared to go through the process again should the virus re-emerge. Even if you want to say that the Chinese Government didn’t act fast enough when the initial cases happened in December 2019, by January 10 of this year they had warned the World Health Organization and begun taking the serious precautionary measures that lead up to the complete lock-down of Wuhan and other cities and nationwide testing.
This is why the death toll in Vietnam, Cuba, Kerala, even China where the initial outbreak took place, is so much lower and why those societies are mostly back to normal now, whereas Canada, America and the so-called “advanced” countries of the First World are headed into a second wave even though the first never really ended. 600 million people traveled throughout China during the so-called “Golden Week” holiday at the beginning of October without any renewed outbreak. Even countries in Africa, where medical infrastructure is very minimal, have been far more effective in dealing with the pandemic because they take warnings about infectious disease seriously. Cuba’s international medical contributions since the pandemic began have been nothing short of spectacular, with Cuban doctors putting their bodies on the line on almost every continent: from Italy to Venezuela to Azerbaijan to Sierra Leone. Cuba is now in the advanced stages of developing its own COVID vaccine.
But I want to return to the theme of scared people who are quick to assign blame and quick to allow themselves to be manipulated for the sake of security. Because this isn’t a phenomenon that’s limited to Trump supporters or the far-right. If huge percentages of people in countries as diverse as Canada, Sweden and South Korea can have an overwhelmingly negative view of China in the wake of the pandemic, higher percentages than Americans by the way, there’s something else going on. Donald Trump’s Sinophobia, his bigotry, his insistence on referring to COVID as “the Chinese Virus” is part of something larger.
China has become everybody’s punching bag in recent months. Pundits and politicians have proclaimed a new cold war and regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum, the media will give you some reason to hate an entire country of 1.5 billion people as well as a reason to stand, at least tacitly, on the side of America in what is being billed as the global conflict that will shape the 21st Century. Whether it’s civil liberties, human rights, technological competition, geo-political concerns, espionage, pollution, the accusation that China isn’t truly Marxist, it’s truly remarkable to me just how many people on the political left have sided with America, and by extension with Trump, without apparently realizing they’ve taken sides. Because, regardless of how much they hate or disagree with the US or what it does, it’s still “their team” while China is “the other”.
If a crime is committed by “your team”, the response is to “redeem your team”, which is what most Western leftists seek to do…by electing Bernie Sanders, supporting AOC, voting Green etc. They don’t want to overthrow the United States or Canada, they want to clean it up, make it “live up to its promise” or some such thing. So when the US invades and devastates Iraq, destroys Libya, bombs and divides Syria, imposes deadly sanctions on Venezuela and Iran, terrorizes and murders black people in the streets and so on, these leftists will criticize American political policy but they will not condemn America. Because they believe America, “their team”, can be saved and they’re not willing to give up hope. So they keep giving more and more chances to “their team” in the hope that it will eventually do the right thing. Sound familiar?
This is not the way the Western left treats “the other”. China is not redeemable in their eyes. If China commits a crime, or is alleged to have committed a crime, they see it as confirmation of an inherent evil, not an aberration that can be corrected or fixed by electing the right person into office. China is not “their team”, so it gets no second chances, even though its real and alleged crimes pale in comparison to the things that America, the global hegemon, has done in recent memory. Nor does it require nearly as much evidence for them to condemn “the other” as compared to “their team”. Many people are willing to take it on faith that there are millions of Uighurs in concentration camps in north-west China, whereas they were only willing to acknowledge US war crimes in Iraq after Chelsea Manning leaked actual video evidence of American helicopters machine-gunning civilians in the middle of Baghdad. And even then, they continue to consider the US as “redeemable” and the war crime as an “aberration”.
This is a common denominator in many leftists in this part of the world, particularly white leftists, and it’s more than a little disturbing just how easily they can fall into factionalism. Even if they don’t like the US government, they won’t challenge its hostile policies in East Asia and call for peace because that would mean offering potential support to “the other”. And the US government and its allies in the media are perfectly aware of this. They’re not necessarily counting on the active support of the people for a confrontation with China, their goal is to make any form of solidarity with China and its people morally indefensible – something not even die-hard radicals would risk doing.
It also helps that while people are being stirred up by the corporate media about Hong Kong and Xinjiang, they’re not focused on US-backed neo-nazis in Ukraine, US-backed death squads murdering indigenous people in Colombia, the devastating US-backed war on the people of Yemen, or the US-backed Indian government’s blatant campaign of Islamophobic violence and settler-colonialism in Kashmir…stories which generally aren’t even touched on in the media and which Western activists could actually make a difference about if they mobilized people in sufficient numbers. But Western activists have failed to even mobilize people against the massive outbreak of Sinophobia and violence against Asian-Americans and Asian-Canadians that has emerged since the pandemic began. Approximately 1/3 of Chinese-Canadians have reported being physically attacked since the pandemic began. Let that sink in.
And I’m just going to say this, if this was the 1960s and the Black Panthers were still a thing and Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition was still a thing, there would be no question that the Black Lives Matter protests and the struggle against Sinophobic violence would be united and people from various oppressed communities would come together against the racist capitalist state in America. But, as impressive and inspiring as the BLM campaign has been this year, I haven’t seen much of that solidarity across the color line, the kind of “internationalism in one country” that made the Rainbow Coalition so powerful and threatening to a status quo that wants to keep people divided.
Internationalism is the only thing that can defeat imperialism. International solidarity is the only thing that can give working class and oppressed people a fighting chance against a global capitalist system. Right now – In the midst of a pandemic, isolation and rampant fear – that system is dividing and conquering our minds. We can’t let this happen.
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