I’m neither a member of the Socialist Equality Party, host of World Socialist Website, nor likely to become one. I find SEP good on some things (e.g. defence of Syria, where most of the left takes at face value an evidence-free and even evidence-defying slew of self-serving Western accusations) but weak or risible on others (e.g. the hype that Trump posed a credible threat of fascist coup).
I say WSWS is a curate’s egg. Take with ample salt, and avoid its more scrambled offerings.
Here’s one that pretty much calls it right. China’s true crime – gob-smackingly transparent if we only wake up and smell the coffee – is that of breaking out of its allocated role as source of low paid labour for Western capital. Giants like Apple were happy to export capital and jobs to have iPhones made in China for eighty bucks apiece in sweatshops on the eastern seaboard. But now China is not simply an economic superpower – even doing its own outsourcing to labour pools in Vietnam – but is about to overtake the USA as the economic superpower.
And neither Wall Street nor Washington like this one bit.
Russia’s recovery from the Yeltsin years defied Wall Street plans for her economy. It sent the West (i.e. the West’s real rulers) into a frenzy, also self serving, of Russophobia. No allegation – witness the Skripal and Navalny cases1 – was too comic-book silly to be served up to western media consumers unaware of being more product than customers; their most exploitable conceit a belief that media driven by market forces (indirectly in the case of state broadcasters) could possibly be independent speakers of truth to power.2
So too does a China rising send corporate media and politicians into Sinophobic overdrive. The attacks are on many fronts but the example here is Covid-19. This piece, by Andre Damon, ran yesterday on WSWS:
Washington’s Wuhan laboratory lie
In the face of universal scientific consensus on the natural origins of COVID-19, the Biden administration and the US media have doubled down on the lie that the disease was released from a Chinese laboratory.
There is not a shred of truth to this claim. The most recent, and most damning, refutation came from members of the World Health Organization team researching the origins of the pandemic. They announced that the WHO would abandon any investigation into a man-made origin of the disease because there was no evidence to support the claim.
Professor Liang Wannian from Tsinghua University, speaking at the WHO press conference, made clear that the theory that the “virus was engineered by humans” had “already been refuted by the whole scientific community around the world.”
As to the claim that the virus escaped from a laboratory by accident, Liang added, “in all the laboratories in Wuhan, there is no existing virus of SARS-CoV-2. If there is no existence of this virus, there will be no way that this virus would be linked.”
WHO food safety expert Peter Ben Embarek added that “nowhere previously was this particular virus researched or identified or known.”
Read the full piece (1467 words) on the WSWS site …
* * *
- One of the many credulity stretchers in the official Skripals narrative is the whopping coincidence that first on the scene was the British Army’s most senior nurse. As for Mr Navalny, a BTL comment I came upon (can’t recall where) nails it. “Putin poisons water in hotel room. Navalny gets sick and is taken to Russian state hospital. Nobody kills him there, though a hospital is an easy place to do so. Doctors find no poison, authorities approve his transfer to Berlin, where medics find novichok and accuse Russia. France agrees, the EU imposes sanctions. Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?”
- To those who regard media willingness to embarrass senior politicians and wealthy individuals from time to time as proof of fierce independence, I offer Chomsky: ‘The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.’
I have learned never to completely trust nor to completely mistrust any site. Actually – that’s not true. The one site I would indeed completely mistrust is the “fact checking” or “verification” site i.e. the one that gives out brownie points to those “most promising pupils”.
So, I welcome them all with open arms – and then sift.
All sites have their biases.
“Anarchist” sites can be beneficial as long as you see and make allowances for the basic tendency to idealise some kind of phantasmagorical return to a pre- civilisational age.
Fascist sites can be interesting so that you “know your enemy” and understand the often-deep emotional appeals to – ironically – the same idealised past as the anarchists.
Conservative sites are ones where you can actually find much to agree with – although they usually don’t go deep enough. (The arch conservative Roger Scruton once spoke about three kinds of thinker: the conservative, the radical (Marxist) and the reformer (liberal). He considered the second one to be his worthy enemy and the third his unworthy enemy. What links the conservative to the radical is that both reject the notion of atomised autonomous individuals floating in a void.)
Even the ranting sites (sometimes especially these) can offer up a gem or two.
(Also bear in mind certain disinformation devices e.g. to smear by association. Gold can be deliberately mixed with dross for purposes of discrediting it.)
Hal Draper once said that Marx’s most fundamental demand for any society with pretensions to decency and intelligence should be the demand for free speech. Only by permitting such can the exercise of critique happen. And his wonderful maxim also provided another angle on this: “Nothing human is alien to me”.
“Anarchist” sites can be beneficial as long as you see and make allowances for the basic tendency to idealise some kind of phantasmagorical return to a pre- civilisational age.”
George, I thought we had got beyond this kind of stuff. Anarchism is just as forward looking as Marxism. We aim for a better future for all, based on present circumstances, not the past. If you can’t resist useless, counter-productive, sectarian and partisan sniping it would be better for all of us that you stopped mentioning the subject.
Yours in comradely but constructive criticism.
I know of two anarchist writers who seem to think that you can reverse time by a few millennia and return to a hunter gatherer society. I would not say that was a credible idea. I’m sure that not all anarchist sites are like that so I’m just going by the ones I know.
Maybe you should get to know a few more then? Two anarchist writers do not a make a movement, and it’s a bit misleading to almost-quote them as if they do. Although if ‘civilisation’ keeps on with it’s insane capitalist ‘endless growth’ project, these ‘two writers’ might end up by inadvertently being right.
What is problematic with this linked piece is that its reliance on objective evidence (and the discovery of this virus by scientific researchers in various places going back almost two years represents another strand of objective evidence) places it well inside the reality based community.
And herein lies the problem. Because Liberal (US) America, it’s ruling elite and fellow travellers on the Liberal identity “left” don’t do objective evidence. Nor do they do due process. Both are inconvenient to their interests and dialect.
On the present trajectory it surely cannot be too long before the US elite threatens the leading figures in the WHO, as it has done with those in other international organisations, for taking an independent line inconvenient to the interests of the sociopaths who make up that elite who will not be satisfied until the WHO is run by placemen subservient to them and which produces a report congruent with the fantasy this originated in a Chinese lab.
It also surely cannot be too long before attempts to silence scientists who don’t toe the line are carried out by the useful idiots via the current favoured method of cancelling.
You have it right, Dave. But there is a bright side emerging too. The recent outbreak of hubris from Facebook v. the Australian Government shows an encouraging outbreak of blatant over-reach and lack of situational awareness on the part of the largest information-stealing and fake-news [ 🙂 ] source on the planet. They have revealed their power for all to see, and it can’t be too long before individual governments react to this now obvious threat to their own monopoly of power.
With any luck there may be an outbreak of slightly more honesty and investigation on the part of the media too to fill the presumed information gap if FB are forced to shrink (but only because of the possible pressure through increased public awareness – if there is increased public awareness). But hey! I’m forgetting why the media are there in the first place, so maybe forget this paragraph.
I think this is a pretty interesting contribution to the discussion.
I’d probably lend more credibility to it than to anything the inherently corrupt WHO tells us, anyway. I mean, the same organisation that originally estimated the IFR of Covid-19 to be 3.6%.
Sorry to rain on the parade.
This sentence stands out:
Simply because the whole case of this argument rests on that date as the origin.
I’ll leave to one side, in terms of the details (which are obvious on any reading) the weakness of an argument built around circumstancial terminology which stretches the logic of the scientific method using phrases such as because we claim A it is likely B occurred.
Because unfortunatly this spurious politically motivated narrative is totally undermined by the reality of actual credible research which has traced this virus to earlier dates – as early as March 2019 in one case – in other parts of the world. Months before the outbreak in Wuhan.
This research is easily available via even the highly censored big tech search engines.
Seeing as I’m in a good mood today, because I might not be tomorrow, it would seem reasonable to provide at least one media article link as starting point. Unfortunately, it does not seem possible to successfully submit a BTL post containing more than one link on this blog site.
Once again, as with other matters (some of which have been recently covered on this blog), we seem to be straying into Karl Rove territory in which the narratives of those who inhabit the reality based community are cast assunder in favour of the fantasy narratives of those who have the power to create their own reality and who, along with their sycophantic forelock tugging and cap doffing army of fellow grifters further down the hierarchical pecking order, gaslight that fantasy reality in their own heads onto the rest of us.
But don’t fret. It cannot be too long before inconvenient reality based narratives which contradict the emperor with no clothes narratives are outlawed and cancelled as “fake news”, “conspiracy theories” , “hate speech” blah blah blah.
The play book is so predictable.
I just checked Dave. The limit was set at 4 URLs. I’ve upped it to 6. More than that will not prevent a comment being submitted but will place it in a pending tray for moderation. As WordPress rightly says, multiple URLs are a common indicator of Spam, so I’m loath to remove the limit altogether.
Oh yes the old Wuhan virus story. Well try a little investigation of Fort Detrick and the emergency closure of that leaky little lab in Maryland USA. It was closed by the US Centre for Disease Control for more breaches than you could imagine and it is on the periphery of a metropolitan city. Fort Detrick was where the USA Military Olympics training team spent two weeks of intensive training before departing to Wuhan for the games in September 2019.
The lab could not effectively process any of its sewage and other lab wastes prior to discharge in the local river! Look it up – search ‘fort detrick lab closure report’
Did it uncle tungsten: interesting. I found only lightweight pieces though. Can you point to something more solid? Granted, given corporate media silence (I found just one brief Independent story from 2019 on the now lifted ban) this may be hard.