Communist China and Other Liars

There's a lot of public and private lying going on today. This always happens when a crisis arises. When the going gets tough, the incompetent and lazy and self-centered simply lie.

The lies of the self-important are usually designed to deflect attention from their current and past incompetence to the real or imagined mistakes of others. Once the crisis hits, they realize, or others make them realize, that their incompetence either caused or aggravated the crisis. Such knowledge, of course, must be hidden from the public. Hide the truth, identify a suitable scapegoat, and attack it aggressively. The truth, of course, is hard to hide, so this works for only a while. Eventually the truth becomes known. 

Sadly, the self-important, which include many politicians and most of the national media, are the least of our problems. The most dangerous of today's liars are not incompetent; they're simply evil. Perhaps the best example are the Chinese Communists.

The Chinese Communist Party really can't be called a political party because it's the only party permitted in China. Indeed, if you tried to start an actual political party in China, you would surely be arrested and likely imprisoned...if you were lucky. 

It's important to be aware of this, a key identifier of all totalitarian states. No totalitarian government, whether based on ideology or a cult of personality, can tolerate intellectual or political competition since it will always lose the argument. It must reject the very idea of truth, because it never has truth on its side. This is why those on the extremes must always distort history, creating fictional versions that support the ever-expanding structure of lies they want us to accept.

And here we encounter another key identifying trait of all extremist ideologies, whether national socialists like Hitler or international socialists like Lenin: their remarkable capacity for spreading lies. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao, Fidel -- yes, the whole bunch and so many others -- all encouraged telling the lie so long as doing so aided the spread of their ideology. For them the end always justifies the means, any means. 

This might lead you to believe that such extreme ideologues are not unlike most politicians who tell lies so easily when it suits their purposes. Yes, indeed, most politicians lie on occasion, and the longer they've spent in politics, the more comfortable they become with telling the lie. This is why I try to avoid voting for any man or woman who's spent a long career in politics. But communists and other socialists are different from run-of-the-mill politicians. The latter lie occasionally, but the former lie constantly. They must because their failing policies are indefensible.

Communist China's a wonderful case in point. Every agreement, every treaty, every official statement made by the ruling Chinese Communist Party is based on and filled with lies. The lie is present even in the nation's official name: the People's Republic of China. The people have no say in their government which cannot be described, by any definition I'm familiar with, as a republic.

Just look at how the party has handled the virus. When COVID-19 began to spread in Wuhan, the authorities clamped down hard on the doctors who were telling the truth about the budding crisis. Most were arrested because in a socialist state the truth will get you imprisoned. (See this story: Los Angeles Times.)

Now, months later, when the party offers statistics on the spread of the Coronavirus in China, you can be certain the data are intentionally inaccurate. This week we've begun to hear reports of tens of thousands of cremations taking place in Wuhan, where the virus apparently originated, and this despite the "official" death toll of 3,305. (See this story: International Business Times.)

The Communist Party can't completely hide the truth, so it changes the conversation and offers the world a spectacular lie: the United States Army is responsible for introducing the virus into Wuhan Province. 

Interestingly, many politicians and members of the mainstream media accept the Chinese "data" without question and use it to attack their favorite target: the president. In other words, they base their own lies on the lies of those whom they know are lying. Yes, it's all very interesting, and would actually be entertaining were it not so serous and so deadly.