For the first time ever, foreign countries are recommending that their citizens should no longer travel to the usually gentle and peaceable United Kingdom on the ground that the growing frequency of violent riots has made us a dangerous destination.
How has this happened?
Our Marxstream media, now more or less entirely captured by agents of influence for Communism, have – almost without exception – blamed the riots over and over and over again on “the far Right”. Even the once-conservative Daily Telegraph goes on and on and on about “the far Right”.
By curious contrast, our Communist communicators have somehow failed to describe as “far-Left” the openly racist, anti-Semitic rioters who have raged on our streets almost unhindered by the police ever since the totalitarian enemies of democracy joined forces deliberately to provoke Israel into self-defence by invading its territory and brutally torturing and murdering its women and children.
Very nearly always, it is the totalitarian far Left – Islamists who call themselves “freedom-fighters”, Communists who call themselves “Socialists”, repressives who call themselves “progressives”, illiberals who call themselves “liberals” – who take to the streets in large numbers and commit crimes of violence and destruction.
Particularly in the United Kingdom, perhaps the world’s most tolerant and kindly-intentioned nation, it is very rare that those who believe in democracy, liberty, free markets and Western, Judaeo-Christian civilization march in the streets, and still rarer that they preach hatred or cause damage and destruction.
The proximate cause of the now-widespread alarm among conservative, libertarian citizens is unchecked mass immigration. Even during the past 14 years of strikingly rickety and incompetent government by the formerly Conservative party once successfully led by Margaret Thatcher, millions of immigrants – whether legal or illegal – have arrived in Britain.
When I served as a policy advisor to Margaret Thatcher, the population of the UK was about 60 million, and the net influx of migrants was 20,000 to 40,000 a year: equivalent to little more than a twentieth of one percent of the population. That level of net immigration was sustainable. The nation could, and did, welcome and absorb the incomers, most of whom were willing – indeed, eager – to play their full part as British citizens.
However, after Margaret Thatcher was driven from office by the far Left in her own party because she had dared to oppose the ever-tightening grip of the European tyranny-by-clerk on the British economy (on this, as on much else, she has since been proven spectacularly right), a succession of limp-wristed, ineffectual and inept prime ministers of both parties have made no attempt to prevent the dangerously-increasing inflow of both lawful and illegal immigrants.
Since she left office the population of the UK has risen from 60 million to more like 70 million, and most of that growth has come from net immigration. At least 6 million net immigrants have settled in the UK since Margaret Thatcher left office.
In 2023 alone, net inward migration was 800,000. Only 600,000 live births were recorded in Britain, and there were 200,000 deaths among little children killed by abortion (and torn limb from limb and removed in pieces from their mother’s womb, without even having been given an anesthetic first).
For the first time in modern history, more people arrived from overseas by net immigration than from this country by being born here.
When Margaret Thatcher was in office, from 1979-1990, everyone knew that immigration would be kept firmly under control. The Prime Minister took a no-nonsense approach. Early in her premiership, her staff arranged for a Conservative back-bencher to ask her a Parliamentary Question about immigration. In her answer, she made it crisply clear, in her inimitable style, that anyone thinking of entering this country illegally would be swiftly, firmly and decisively dealt with and sent packing. As a direct result of her plain speaking, illegal immigration more or less ceased.
Tony Abbott, the Conservative prime minister of Australia, would take the same no-nonsense approach a decade or two later. When small boats overladen with immigrants from the Indonesian archipelago began to arrive from the north, he sent the formidable Australian navy straight into action. Every small boat was intercepted; the immigrants and their racketeering smugglers were taken off by a warship; the smugglers were imprisoned for several years under harsh conditions and then sent packing; and the small boats were repaired, refueled and reloaded with the immigrants, who were pointed firmly northward and told to make their way back to Indonesia, with a warning ringing in their ears that if they made any attempt to return they would be treated no less harshly than their smugglers. Within just two weeks, the message got through and the boats stopped coming.
In this country, the Home Office – captured decades ago by Communist agents of influence as part of what the Marxist commentator Antonio Gramsci called “the long march through the institutions” (the deliberate penetration of all the centers of power and influence in Western nations) – has been deliberately bungling immigration control.
Minister after Minister arrives eager to stop the boats, but each is subjected to a stern but mendacious lecture by or on behalf of the Permanent Secretary of the Home Office about the alleged impossibility of doing anything effectual about immigration because the United Kingdom is a signatory to numerous international treaties requiring us to give asylum to just about anyone who asks for it, and preventing us from deporting illegal immigrants unless an impossibly elaborate process is followed.
Nearly all the small boats arrive from France and other European nations bordering the English Channel. What the international refugee treaties actually say is that anyone who arrives illegally after passing through a safe country (such as France, Belgium or Holland) on the way may be sent straight back to that safe country. There is, therefore, no obligation on Britain, legal, moral or other, to permit the small boats to land. The Tony Abbott approach, therefore, is no less lawful here today than it was in Australia from 2013 to 2015.
Why, then, have the “Conservative” prime ministers of the past 14 years done nothing about illegal immigration? The answer is that they are terrified of the army of far-Left immigration lawyers who have threatened them, time and time again, that if they act as the international treaties fully entitle them to act they will face interminable and expensive challenges in the now Left-dominated courts.
What is more, the taxpayer must then pay the costs not only of the Government’s lawyers but also of the lawyers acting for the illegal migrants. And the courts have proven adept at tying up each case for years. While Ministers or the courts are expensively dithering, the migrants are sent not to prison but to swank hotels, where they are accommodated at taxpayers’ expense. Those who are scheduled for deportation simply abscond without trace and usually end up living on benefits paid for by taxpayers.
So desperate is the Home Office to find accommodation for the millions of migrants now waiting for their bogus asylum claims to be heard that it has been ringing around my friends who own large stately homes and offering them £1 million each if they will vacate their homes for seven years to allow them to house immigrants. Now, any competent Minister would never allow any such offer to be made on his watch, for a very good reason. Imagine yourself as a penniless economic migrant – typically male, aged 18-25. You arrive in Britain and, instead of being sent to prison, are put up the most elegant of stately homes, at no charge. The first thing you do is get on the phone and tell your mates in Albania or Syria or wherever that they must come to Britain quick.
A growing number of hotels that are housing immigrants now exclude all other guests, but they do not like to admit that they are making a fortune at taxpayers’ expense charging full rates to the taxpayers for 100% occupancy by immigrants.
Aa a result, an after-dinner party game has become popular in Britain. Hundreds of the hotels that now house only immigrants are known. The game consists in ringing the hotel reception and asking to book a room on a typically unbusy termtime weekday about a year hence. The hotel will respond that it is fully booked that day.
Then another dinner-party guest telephones the hotel and asks for a booking on another unbusy day, with the same response. The game continues until the hotel realizes that all the calls are from the same dinner party. But at no time will any hotel (or, for that matter, stately home) admit that it is filled with immigrants: for the Home Office makes them all sign a confidentiality agreement.
In this and other ways, the Blob – the increasingly effete and incompetent civil service and wider governing class – does its best to prevent the British people from finding out the sheer scale on which it is deliberately encouraging net inward migration on a scale unprecedented in the history of Britain.
Why does the Blob thus deliberately encourage net immigration? The reason is that the Blob is now Communist-dominated. The principal aim of any totalitarian regime – and the Communist-led or Communist-influenced giants of the East (Russia, China, North Korea et hoc genus omne) is to ensure that their own populations do not do as the people of Russia did under Boris Yeltsin, and overthrow the cruel Communist regime.
The Communist tyrants of Russia during the dismal Soviet era had good reason to fear the freedom and prosperity and democracy enjoyed by the peoples of the West. For, although the Soviet butchers took elaborate steps to prevent their populations from ever discovering that life in the West was vastly better than under Communist misrule, they were unable to hide the fact that life under the rule of the ballot box was vastly safer, richer and better than under their drab, cruel tyranny.
One of the steps the intelligence community in the West took to make sure that the peoples of the Communist countries found out that life in the West was best was to smuggle in Western goods that were simply unobtainable under Communism. For instance, one could not get well-made, well-fitted jeans behind the Iron Curtain. So, when I used my bright orange British Military Mission card to cross from West to East Berlin, I used to wear half a dozen pairs of jeans, which I would then give to my contacts in the East for distribution to their friends. By simple measures like this, the subject nations groaning under Communism came to long for the Western lifestyle, and, in the end, helped themselves to it. The Communists could not stop them. The Soviet empire collapsed. Good riddance.
However, when Mr Putin’s silent coup of 1999/2000 deposed Mr Yeltsin and replaced him with a new tyranny, this time led by some 6000 former KGB colleagues of his, the new Communist-led regime vowed that it would never again allow the West to retain its freedom, its prosperity or its distinctive, Judaeo-Christian philosophy of peace, plenty and love.
To this end, the Disinformation Directorate of the former Kamitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti was set to work finding ways to bring the Western political and economic hegemony to an end, rendering life in the West just as miserable as in the East.
One of the most important of the many methods adopted by the Directorate was and is the promotion of the climate-change nonsense. Since the long march through the institutions of the West had already captured the universities, the news media, the civil service, the trades union leaderships and the scientific community, it was not difficult to sell the idea of global warming as a problem. As a result, the West has replaced the free market in energy with a badly-managed market controlled by the Blob. Therefore, electricity prices in Britain and most European countries are seven times those in Russia and China, India and Pakistan, all of which are greatly increasing their emissions of CO2 while ensuring that their agents of influence here peddle the climate-change nonsense.
When we defeated the Communist-led miners’ strike of 1984-5, the Russians were furious. They had trained the Communist leader of the mineworkers, Arthur Scargill, for almost six months in 1979, starting a couple of months after Margaret Thatcher had been elected to office. They had paid at least $25 million (that we were able to trace) to the mineworkers’ leadership via the then-Communist Czechoslovak embassy, hoping we would not notice. They had successfully brought down the previous Conservative government in 1974, and had been confident of doing the same to Margaret Thatcher, who, however, was very much better prepared than her incompetent predecessor, Mr Heath.
When the strike was defeated in the spring of 1985, the Directorate held a crisis meeting in Moscow that summer to work out how to continue the destruction of the feared Western economies now that their previous method of choice – capturing the leaderships of the major Western trades unions – had failed. It was then that they decided to capture the environmental movement, and, by December of that year, they had already captured the leadership of Greenpeace, driving out the true environmentalists who had founded and led it, as Patrick Moore, one of those driven out by the entryists that winter, told me a couple of years ago.
When global warming came along, the Directorate rapidly captured the issue and, through its many agents of influence throughout the institutions Communized by the long march, began pushing it sedulously in the West. For it was essential to their program that they should destroy the free market, by which the decisions of everyone deciding how to spend his or her money shaped the economy, and replace it with a managed market. Nowhere is this more evident than in the market for static and locomotive energy, which is now totally and ineptly controlled by the Blob, causing not only a visible collapse in manufacturing industry in the West but also a growing disbelief in the value of the free market among young people in particular.
But the most significant and damaging method of destroying the freedom and prosperity of the West is the promotion of net inward migration. The galloping growth in illegal immigration in Britain, in the United States and in many other countries of the West has been sudden. In the intelligence community, there is a near-infallible rule of thumb: if a damaging societal change occurs suddenly or over a very short timescale, it has not happened by accident. Someone has made it happen.
Net migration serves the purpose of the Communist regimes in making life in Western nations ever poorer, costlier, less pleasant and more dangerous in several ways. For the consequences of net mass immigration are numerous and severe.
To begin with, when I worked in 10 Downing Street 40 years ago we had immigration under control, and we had no need to lay plans for the staggering increase in net immigration that has since occurred. If we had had the slightest notion that subsequent British governments, following the capture of power in Russia by Putin and his KGB cronies in 1999/2000, would allow net immigration on anything like the present scale, we could have laid plans for more hospitals, schools, power stations, roads and railways, factories, houses and prisons.
But no such plans were laid. For instance, one of my earliest briefs to Margaret Thatcher, in the early 1980s, showed that there was no shortage of housing anywhere in Britain. There was the artificial appearance of a shortage, particularly in central London, where there were numerous cardboard-box encampments, particularly along prominent streets and close to railway termini.
Given that there was plenty of housing everywhere, I decided to investigate. At the time, a lad of 18 who had fallen on hard times was living in my tiny cottage in Richmond, a London suburb. I learned from a friend that a house owned by the Communist-run Lambeth Council, a local authority in south London, had been standing empty for 20 years. I contacted the Council and offered either to buy the house or to pay for the lad to homestead it, rescuing it from dereliction, and then to live in it.
The Council’s housing commissar gave me a most revealing answer. He said that it was not the policy of the Council to let homeless people live in the empty houses owned by the Council. I asked how many such empty houses there were, and the commissar refused to tell me. I asked why the Council was prepared to leave its houses empty rather than housing the homeless. Again he refused to tell me.
Therefore, I contacted the Environment Department, which controlled housing policy. I asked the press office to tell me, for each of London’s 33 boroughs, what percentage of the housing stock owned by the boroughs was standing empty. The press office refused to give me the information. When I asked why not, I was told that the information was “political”. Of course it was political: the Department of the Environment is a government ministry.
So I asked how many “dwelling units” (the bureaucratic term for houses and apartments) each of the 33 boroughs owned. The press office gave me the figures, borough by borough. Then I asked how many dwelling units were standing empty, borough by borough. The press office gave me the figures. I worked out the percentages for myself.
At that time (1987) there were 15 Communist-controlled boroughs, 3 “Liberal Democrat” boroughs and 15 Conservative-controlled boroughs. Ranked by percentages, the 15 Communist-controlled boroughs had the highest percentages of empty dwelling units; the 3 “Liberal Democrat” boroughs had the next highest percentages, and the 15 Conservative boroughs had the lowest percentages.
I wrote an article for the then London newspaper, the Evening Standard, exposing this plainly deliberate attempt on the part of the Communists to cause homelessness in London by leaving taxpayer-funded homes empty. I say “deliberate” for two reasons. First, the probability that the borough-by-borough percentages of homes standing empty would be so clearly and so neatly divided along political lines by accident was near nil as made no difference. Secondly, I knew that Shelter, then a “charity” supposedly representing the homeless, was run by a self-confessed Communist.
I went to see her, gave her a copy of the article from the Evening Standard and reminded her that her action in working with her fellow-Marxists in the Communist-controlled boroughs to keep homeless people visibly on the streets in an attempt to destabilize Margaret Thatcher’s duly-elected Conservative government was high treason, for which the penalty is death.
I told her, in no uncertain terms, that she faced prosecution for her role in this scandal. I gave her six months to get all the cardboard boxes off the streets and all the homeless people into accommodation. Sure enough, within six months, the cardboard boxes and tents and other mainfestations of artificial, politicized homelessness had vanished.
Now, however, there is a very severe shortage of houses, because there are six million extra people suddenly in the country who ought not to be here, and for whom no plans have been made.
And the economy has been so fatally weakened by the cost and disruption caused by climate-change mitigation policies that are entirely unnecessary that the private sector, on its own, simply cannot afford to build enough houses for the millions of immigrants.
Likewise, the roads are clogged, the railways jammed, the airports overrun, the health service swamped. But the Blob – the Communist-dominated or Communist-influenced governing class – is either actively promoting the economic and societal harm resulting from this unprecedented mass migration or burying its pampered heads in the sand and doing nothing serious to address the crisis.
Now, the Blob – whose members, for instance, enjoy pensions worth four times the pensions of ordinary taxpayers – is wealthy and powerful. It simply does not come into contact with, or suffer from, the endless problems caused by the decades of uncontrolled mass net immigration over which it has so incompetently or malevolently presided.
Who, then, are those who suffer first and foremost from the destruction caused by unbridled net immigration? They are the poorer working-class white people – particularly young people – living in the inner cities. Demand for ever-scarcer housing has forced house prices up so fast that most young people at school today (if, that is, the school system still has room for them at all) will never be able to afford a home of their own.
Immigrants are housed at no expense to themselves, while young people who leave home have to pay massive rents for accommodation that is often very poor value for money. Naturally, they are more than a little upset by the difference between how they are treated and how illegal immigrants are pampered.
If a young person wants a job, he will find it hard to get one, because immigrants are for various reasons given priority. If anyone falls ill, he will find it hard to get an appointment even with a local doctor, still less a bed in hospital for a much-needed operation.
Recently, I went to St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London for a check-up. I decided to arrive an hour early. I sat in the waiting room and watched the screen on which the names of patients appeared as they were called into the consulting rooms one by one for their appointments. In that entire hour, the only English name on that screen was mine.
But the Blob doesn’t care. Civil servants can afford private hospital treatment; they can use Government cars; they often get Government housing; and, above all, they are vastly overpaid and still more vastly over-pensioned. So they simply don’t care. That is why they have no understanding of, or sympathy with, the genuine and pressing concerns of the people who have taken to the streets in recent weeks to protest at the destruction of their lives, their hopes and their futures by mass immigration.
The intelligence background to mass net immigration is also worth reviewing. The Communists, whose agents of influence have been doing such damage for decades throughout the institutions of the West, realized some years ago that they could do enormous harm to the Western nations if they took charge of the people-smugglers, funded them and organized them, just as they had long ago taken charge of the drug-smuggling trade, again to promote harm in the West.
Here, it is not just the Communist-led giants of the East who are promoting and organizing the people-smugglers. It is also other nations that can save themselves a fortune by not bothering to imprison their most hardened criminals. Instead, they quietly give the felons a choice: a long period of penal servitude, or voluntary illegal immigration to a Western country. All choose the latter.
No surprise, then, that the crime-rate has soared as the immigration rate has soared. A significant proportion of the immigrants are young criminals who, instead of doing time in their countries of origin, are instead doing crime in the West. At the misdemeanour level, for instance, shoplifting – once rare in Britain – is now near-universal. Shopkeepers who resist are often subjected to violence, and many have simply decided to go out of business. As a direct result, many city centers, even in rural areas, are now boarded up, lifeless and decaying.
Now, in a democracy there is supposed to be something one can do about a governing class so captured by Communism that it is on the point of completing the utter economic and social destruction of the feared and hated West. In theory, one can vote out an incompetent or Communist government and replace it with a government that believes, as I do, that Western civilization and its gentle, loving, free-market, Judaeo-Christian philosophy, is rare, precious and worthy of protection.
To borrow from the Portuguese-American philosopher George Santayana when speaking of the British Empire, “The world never had sweeter masters”.
But voting either for the former ruling “Conservatives” or for the Communists who took office after the recent British general election would not make any difference to the pressing problems for working young people some of which I have outlined here.
That is why Nigel Farage (whom I had been begging to come forward a second time after his masterly victory in the Brexit referendum) has done so well as the leader of the Reform party that he established two or three years ago. As a result, he obtained nearly as many votes as the “Conservatives”. Had Reform and the “Conservatives” stood on a joint ticket, as Reform’s predecessor the Brexit party and the “Conservatives” had stood on a joint ticket in 2019, the Communists would have been kept out of office.
However, a couple of Communist stooges in Conservative campaign headquarters in London have for some years been carefully excluding true Conservatives from standing as candidates in parliamentary elections. The most recent and most startling of these exclusions was that of David Frost, the civil servant who had successfully negotiated the Brexit deal, and who has since been publishing a first-class, truly Conservative weekly article in the Daily Telegraph. Several constituencies had wanted him as their MP, but the stooges at campaign headquarters kept him out. It was that malevolent exclusion that led me, for the first time in my life, not to give my vote to the “Conservatives”.
Will there ever again be a libertarian, free-market, Judaeo-Christian government in Britain (or, for that matter, in the United States? It will not be easy, because the first two generations of immigrants always vote Communist, though eventually they learn not to.
That was the reason why Mr Biden, having stolen the 2020 election with the assistance of his paymasters the Chinese regime, which put $200 million into the Dominion voting machine corporation just one month before the 2020 election (I bet you haven’t seen that fact reported anywhere), issued a series of executive orders whose effect was to end President Trump’s controls on immigration, particularly at the southern border. Since then, some 8 million illegal immigrants have crossed the Colorado River and have then been carefully bussed to the swing states, where nearly all of them will vote Communist (or “Democrat”, as it is quaintly but misleadingly called).
I was recently asked whether I thought Mr Trump, in the wake of his heroic response to the assassination attempt against him, was a shoo-in for the 2024 election. I said No, for three reasons. First, the replacement of the sick and ineffectual Mr Biden with the cackling Communist Kamala Harris and her even more Marxist choice for vice-president will make Mr Trump’s task harder.
Secondly, the Republicans, during the Trump presidency, did nothing either to deal with voter fraud on the part of the Communists or to uphold the constitutional right to freedom of speech against the censorship of all non-Communist viewpoints increasingly openly practiced by the electronic as well as the legacy news media. Democracy cannot work if the voters are not given fair access to information from all sides of the political spectrum. They are not given fair access, and the Republicans, despite the plainest of repeated warnings, did nothing about the anti-culture of censorship, deplatforming, cancellation and Goebbels-style Rufmord (reputational assault) that has all but silenced genuine political debate throughout the West.
Thirdly, imagine 8 million recent immigrants, nearly all voting for the Communist ticket. Mr Trump, unlike the “Conservatives” here, tried to get on top of mass illegal immigration and was beginning to succeed when Mr Biden, for self-serving political reasons, ended his successful measures, particularly including the Stay-In-Mexico policy. In Britain, since the Communists took over scant weeks ago, several thousand further illegal immigrants are known to have entered Britain.
The new Communist government here, like the Communist government in the United States, will do nothing to control immigration, for every immigrant turns the political terms of trade to the near-permanent advantage of the far Left. It is as simple as that.
Now you will understand why it is that the so-called “far Right” have been driven, by sheer desperation, to take to the streets in this normally peaceable nation. The vast majority of them are not racists, for Britain is more at ease with people of all nations and all backgrounds than anywhere else on Earth. But, though they could not vocalize their concerns as I have vocalized them here, they feel a profound unease that the entire political system no longer gives them an effective voice, even at the ballot box, for their votes are drowned out by the votes of non-citizens whom the far-Left-dominated Blob happily registers to vote even though they have broken the law by arriving here illegally.
In this connection, it is striking that in Minnesota, Ms Harris’ vice-presidential pick is notorious for having extended the franchise to illegal immigrants on an unprecedented scale. Their unlawful votes are what keep him in office. And that makes a mockery of democracy, as it is intended to do.
Strategically, then, the West is now in mortal danger. The world’s leading totalitarian regimes – Communist-led Russia and China and the extreme Islamist states of the Middle East – are now joining forces to complete the destruction of the West’s hegemony, its economies, and its democratic systems.
President Trump, who is good at acting upon intelligence briefs sent to him, promoted the Abraham accords – bilateral agreements between Israel and several prominent Arab states. Had a Communist been so successful in brokering peace, he would have been given the Nobel Peace Prize. Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel’s women and children in the October massacre was planned by the unholy alliance between the Communist and Islamist regimes, and its timing was governed by the fact that Israel and Saudi Arabia were about to enter into a bilateral treaty under the Abraham accords.
Thanks to the intellectual weakness and habitual idleness of the RINOs in the United States and the “Conservatives” in Britain, the people who are taking to the streets are doing so in desperation. That in no way condones the violence that has occurred; but it is vital to understand that the concerns underlying the protesters’ actions are real, substantial, legitimate, and in urgent need of attention.
About the author from the Heartland Institute’s website:
“Christopher Monckton, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, has held positions with the British press and in government, as a press officer at the Conservative Central Office, and as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s policy advisor. He is a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute.
Lord Monckton was Special Advisor to Margaret Thatcher as U.K. Prime Minister from 1982 to 1986. In 1986 he was among the first to advise the prime minister that “global warming” caused by carbon dioxide should be investigated. Two years later she set up the Hadley Centre for Forecasting: but she, like him, later changed her view.
On leaving 10 Downing Street, he established a successful specialist consultancy company, giving technical advice to corporations and governments. The first of his two articles on global warming in The Sunday Telegraph in November 2006 crashed its website after attracting 127,000 hits within two hours of publication.
A speech by Lord Monckton to 1,000 citizens of St. Paul, Minnesota in October 2009, in which he drew public attention to a then little-known draft plan by the U.N. to establish an unelected world government at the (now-failed) climate summit at Copenhagen in December 2009, received 1,000,000 YouTube hits in a week – thought to be the fastest-ever YouTube platinum for a political speech. Some five million have now seen the presentation on various websites.
Lord Monckton’s 2010 speaking tour of Australia played to packed houses and generated some 650 reports in news media. It is credited with having achieved a 10% shift in public opinion away from climate alarmism in one month, particularly among opposition parties. He was invited to give a personal briefing to Tony Abbott, at the time leader of the Opposition and subsequently prime minister.
Lord Monckton returned to Australia for another successful tour in June/July 2011, during which he delivered the annual Hancock Free Enterprise Lecture at the University of Western Australia and addressed the nationally televised weekly meeting of the National Press Club in a debate against the head of the Australia Institute.
On Labor Day, 2012, Lord Monckton addressed an enthusiastic crowd of 100,000 West Virginia mineworkers and their families on a mountain-top, the only venue large enough. He has also addressed 15,000 Tea Party supporters at the North Houston Racetrack and a similar number on the National Mall in Washington DC.
Lord Monckton has been crisscrossing the globe giving speeches, lectures, and university seminars to people on every continent with the exception of Antarctica. He has testified four times before the U.S. Congress. He spoke at United Nations conferences in Bali, Bonn, Copenhagen, Cancun, Durban, Rio, and Qatar.
His lecture to undergraduates at the Cambridge Union Society on climate change was released as a feature-length movie, Apocalypse? NO! He triumphed in debate at St Andrews University, where undergraduates voted against climate alarm for the first time at any British university, and at the Oxford Union, where undergraduates voted against climate alarm for the first time at any English university.
For his work on the climate, Lord Monckton, who was Nerenberg Lecturer in Mathematics at the University of Western Ontario in 2013, has been presented with numerous honors, including the Meese-Noble Award for Freedom, the Valiant-for-Truth Award of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, the Santhigiri Ashram Award, and the Intelligence Medal of the Army of Colombia.
Lord Monckton has authored numerous papers on the climate issue for the layman, as well as for leading peer-reviewed scientific journals. He established in a paper for the World Federation of Scientists that CO2 has a social benefit, not a social cost. He was also a co-author of the paper that showed the claim of “97% scientific consensus” about climate change to be false (the true figure is 0.35).”
(Editor: Lord Christopher attended Camp Constitution’s 2018-2019 annual family camps and as an instructor and via Zoom at our 2020 annual camp.
It’s Us
One of the many virtues of my late seventh cousin twice removed (on the wrong side of the blanket, via the Second Duke of Portland) was Her Majesty’s seven decades of dedicated silence. A constitutional monarch, like a child, should be seen and not heard, and should adhere to the ancient Chinese proverb to the effect that “Those who speak do not know: those who know do not speak”.
With fitting reluctance, Her Majesty was induced by the Johnson administration to attend the 26th Gabfest of the Parties in Glasgow last winter (amusingly, Glasgow has not warmed in several decades). There, she let slip a rare indication of her thinking, when she pointed out the hypocrisy of those who preach about the imagined catastrophe of unabated global warming but do nothing about it personally. Think Gore and his private jets.
In private, Her Majesty was famous for her sense of humor (which she needed – just look at her last few Prime Ministers). At Balmoral, her favorite royal residence deep in the Aberdeenshire countryside at the foot of the Highland scarp below Lochnagar, she was prone to drive herself around in a Land Rover. She used to tell the story of a tourist who had lost her way in the hills. The tourist rapped on her window to ask for directions.
Balmorale, as Her Majesty loved it and called it
Her Majesty wound the window down and the tourist, suddenly recognising her, jumped and let out a shriek of astonishment. When visitors to Balmoral (or “Balmorale”, as she called it, for it cheered her up to be in her beloved Scotland) asked Her Majesty to tell the story, she would perform the jump and the blood-curdling shriek for them at the dinner-table.
Her Majesty’s humor – a gentle and always kindly exercise of statecraft – won her the devotion of all who were close to her. Here are a couple of examples.
By tradition, a regiment of the Guards is always stationed at the Victoria Barracks, just below Windsor Castle. Every night, one of the young officers was Captain of the Guard at Windsor Castle and was obliged to take up residence in the Captain’s Quarters just to the left of the main gate.
In the late 1970s, the Irish Guards were on public duties. From time to time, if an extra man was needed to make up numbers at the Royal dinner-table, the Queen’s Equerry would telephone the guardhouse and order the Captain of the Guard to attend. All of the young officers had thus been invited to dinner at least once, except one, who – by an accident of statistics – had never received the call and was known to be upset about it.
My old friend the late Captain Nigel (Nosher) Morgan, a.k.a. Football-Face, a Boris Johnson lookalike, was the regimental jester. He was wickedly good at imitating accents, including the icily snotty accent of the then Equerry to the Queen. One evening, the officer who had not yet dined with the Queen had just settled into the Captain’s Quarters when the phone rang.
The Equerry, in his customarily peremptory voice, said that Her Majesty was short of a man for dinner that night; that the officer should get into his mess kit at once, and should present himself at the door to the Maiden’s Tower, where a footman would be waiting to take him up to the Drawing-Room. “If not, just carry on up the helical stair to the drawing room and help yourself to a drink.”
[Architectural footnote: The Royal Household does not perpetrate the transatlantic solecism of describing a helical stair as a “spiral stair”].
The delighted officer struggled into his Gilbert & Sullivan mess kit and went to the Maiden’s Tower. No footman being in sight, he carried on up the helical stair to the drawing room, where Her Majesty’s guests had not yet begun to assemble. After a few minutes, Prince Edward came in with a catapult and began to play Ping the Ming, long a favorite game of the young Royals.
Shortly thereafter, the Duke of Edinburgh arrived and chased Ginge away. He saw the officer and said, “What the *!?= are you doing here?” The officer explained that he was under the Equerry’s orders to make up numbers at dinner. By then, the guests were beginning to gather.
The Duke hissed: “Well, you’re not on the list. Somebody (I can guess exactly who, and so can you) has played a practical joke. So Go. Away. Now!”
Faced with that direct order, the disconsolate Captain of the Guard returned to his quarters, where an unaccountably large number of his brother officers were waiting to console him by helping themselves to his whisky.
A few days later, the officer was Captain of the Guard again. The phone rang. The Equerry’s cut-glass tones shivered the instrument: “A man short … Gilbert & Sullivan … Maiden’s Tower … footman … helical stair.”
The officer replied: “Morgan, you prize ass, you can’t work the same trick twice!”
There was a curt, frosty silence at the other end, following by the shattering of over-stressed Bakelite as the telephone disintegrated [the Royal Household does not use plastic]. “This is Her Majesty’s Equerry. You will attend, or you will face a Court Martial!”
The officer duly attended as ordered and found that he was not there merely to make up numbers. The Duke of Edinburgh, who had told the Queen the story, personally introduced him to Her Majesty, who sat him at her right hand at dinner and regaled him with a string of anecdotes, and he gave as good as he got. She enjoyed his company so much that she went on to invite him and his belle to attend the annual Summer Ball at Buckingham Palace. None of his brother officers had ever attended that swankest of cotillions.
The second story also concerns the regimental jester. Football-Face had written a spoof article for The Soldier, the Army’s monthly magazine for the troops. His men, who adored him, had selected the handsomest four to attend a local barber’s shop, where they sat in a row in the chairs to have their bearskin hats trimmed, while a photographer took pictures.
The article duly appeared in the April edition of The Soldier, under the authorship of “Colonel I.A. Prylle”, who explained in scientific detail that bearskins contained so much natural sebum that the hair on the Guards’ bearskin bonnets continued to grow for up to 25 years. Therefore, before every State occasion, it was necessary to arrange for those on public duties to have not only their own locks but also their bearskins trimmed, for which each Guardsman received a special allowance, voted annually by Parliament, to pay the barber’s extra charges.
The Commanding Officer of the Irish Guards, affectionately known to those under his command as the Plank (thick as two short), immediately on seeing the article, put Football-Face on Part One Orders (disciplinary action, for the use of).
When the Regimental Sergeant-Major marched Football-Face in, the Plank, bright red in the face and seething with fury, hollered: “This latest Billy Bunter jape is the vewwy last stwaw. You do wealize, don’t you, that Her Majesty personally weads evewy issue of The Soldier fwom cover to cover evewy month, and she will be FUWWIOUS!”
At that pwecise instant (so goeth the tale, and who are we who were not there to argue with Tradition?) the telephone on the Plank’s desk shattered. The Plank picked up the receiver from among the pieces, went down on one knee (for it was indeed the Queen’s Equerry in person) and went even redder in the face.
“Yes, sir, I’ve got the perpetwator wight hewe in fwont of me. Yes, Part One Orders. I’ve told him Her Majesty … Er, … Eh? What? Her Majesty is delighted? Indeed, fwilled? She says it’s the funniest fing she’s wead in a vewwy long time? And that it’s bally good for mowale? Yes, yes, I’ve already congwatulated Captain Morgan. Yes, him.”
I once had a taste of Her Majesty’s humor myself. On the 25th anniversary of the Queen’s Jubilee, I wrote a leading article for the Yorkshire Post recalling the last speech addressed by Queen Elizabeth I to the Speaker and Members of Parliament, all of whom she had invited to Whitehall Palace a few months before her death:
“Mr Speaker, We perceive your coming is to present thanks to Us. Know, then, that I accept them with no less joy than your loves can have desire to offer such a present, and do more esteem it than any treasure or riches; for those we know how to prize, but loyalty, love and thanks, I account them invaluable.
“And though God hath raised me high, yet this I account the glory of my crown, that I have reigned with your loves. This makes me that I do not so much rejoice that God hath made me to be a Queen, as to be a Queen over so thankful a people, and to be the means under God to conserve you in safety and to preserve you from danger.
“It is not my desire to live or reign longer than my life and reign shall be for your good. And though you have had, and may have, many mightier and wiser princes sitting in this seat, yet you never had, nor shall have, any that will love you better.”
The leading article ended with the heartfelt statement that the second Elizabeth, like the first, might justly say that she reigned with our loves. The BBC World Service cited it in its review of the British Press. The Queen’s Equerry heard the broadcast and put the leader before Her Majesty, who bade him invite the Editor of the Yorkshire Post to lunch tête-à-tête at Buckingham Palace.
The Editor picked his way though the shards of plastic where his telephone had once stood and came to find me at the leader-writers’ station. He plonked himself into a chair and groaned, “Oh, God, Monckton! Now look what you’ve dropped me into.”
“Not to worry, chief,” I responded cheerily, “I’ll go in your place.”
The Editor wasn’t having that. He muttered darkly about the need to preserve the last shreds of the Yorkshire Post’s reputation. He sighed and said that he had been summoned and it was his duty to go.
He thought for a bit and said, “Christopher, the problem is this. You toffs know just what to say, but we horny-handed sons of toil don’t. What happens if we’ve done the weather and we’ve done the cricket and she looks at me and I look at her and neither of us can think of anything to say to the other?”
“Oh,” I said cheerily, “That’s easy. Just explain to her that your leader-writer is her seventh cousin twice removed” [I thought it tactful not to mention the wrong side of the blanket].
He groaned and tottered off to get the train to King’s Cross.
That evening, he returned and re-plonked himself into the chair. “Oh, God, Monckton!”
“How did it go? Tell all!”
“Well, we did the weather, and we did the cricket, which she knows a lot about. But then she looked at me and I looked at her and we couldn’t think of a thing to say to each other. So, I blurted out the one thing I’d sworn I wouldn’t say. I said, ‘Ma’am, do you know that my leader-writer is your second cousin twice removed?’”
He swears that Her Majesty replied: “Oh, really? Well, kindly have him removed a third time!”
And who are we who were not there to argue with Tradition? How sorely we shall miss her, and how fondly we shall remember the feast of innocent merriment she laid before us, as the reign of the Climate King begins.
The Heir, the Climate King and the Spare at Balmoral
This is the story of Hal Shurtleff, the Third Flagpole and the Christian flag.
Hal Shurtleff is one of this column’s titular saints. For decades he has devoted his life to Camp Constitution, a Christian summer camp for teenagers in the back country of Massachusetts. I was a camp counsellor there for two years before the Chinese virus struck. For an intensive and exhilarating week, the teenagers are given course of instruction in everything from why Christianity is a good thing to why the climate change scam is a bad thing. But above all they are given a firm grounding in the splendors of the United States Constitution.
Outside the City Hall in Boston, long controlled by the generally anti-Christian “Democrat” Party, stand three flagpoles. On the first three flagpoles, the City flies the flags of the United States, of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and of the City of Boston. Amiably, it allows anyone else to fly a flag for a week at a time on the third flagpole. I have long wondered what would happen if I were to ask the City to fly the Union Flag.
However, in 2017, when Hal Shurtleff and his organization applied to fly a Christian flag on the third flagpole, the City of Boston turned them down flat. Almost 300 other organizations, including the Holy See and the Chinese Communist Party, had had their flags flown. But Camp Constitution was refused, solely on the ground that, on its application form, it had mentioned that the flag it proposed to fly was Christian. It bore the Cross.
The Communist city fathers weren’t having that. For the only time on record, they refused to fly a flag on request.
Don’t mess with Hal. In 2018 he applied to the District Court for an order telling the City of Boston to let him exercise the same free speech as they had permitted their fellow-Communists from China to exercise.
However, the courts in the United States are not the impartial tribunals to which we are accustomed on this side of the pond. They are political and, these days, that means they are far Left. Scandalously, the District Court turned Hal down.
So in 2019 Hal appealed to the First Circuit Court, which scandalously turned him down. In 2020 he went back to the District Court and tried again. The District Court scandalously turned him down again. In 2021 he went back to the First Circuit Court. The First Circuit Court scandalously turned him down again.
After four refusals, most people would have given up. But Hal Shurtleff is made of sterner stuff than most people. He appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States.
This is where the fun began. For the Supreme Court, like all the courts below it, is intensely political. But, unlike the judges in the lower courts, who are near-exclusively totalitarian, particularly in far-Left States such as Massachusetts, the justices of the Supreme Court are directly appointed by the President of the United States. Since the Republican Party is not (yet) Communist, on average about half the justices are libertarians, because the White House is Republican about half the time.
Since the Supreme Court justices are appointed for life, it is pot luck whether a President will get to appoint anyone during his term of office. As it happens, more justices have retired during Republican than during Democrat presidencies recently. Therefore, the Supreme Court is less than half totalitarian. There are three very far-Left justices, five libertarians and Chief Justice Roberts, who started out as a libertarian but has drifted towards totalitarianism over the years.
Usually, this most intensely politically partisan of courts votes strictly along party lines – five votes for libertarianism, four for totalitarianism. Sometimes, when chief justice Roberts remembers his roots, there are six votes for libertarianism and three for totalitarianism.
But get this. When Hal went before the Supreme Court, the score – just announced – was nine to nil in his favor. Even the totalitarian justices could not keep a straight face and find in favor of the ghastly City of Boston.
The issue that Hal presented to the Supremes was this: When private religious viewpoints are censored from a public forum open to all speakers, does government violate the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution?
The City of Boston had disreputably sought to maintain that in deciding which flags to allow and which to deny it was, in effect, exercising “government speech” and was, therefore, entitled to decide what it wanted to say on its third flagpole. It was willing to speak up for the Chinese Communist Party, which unlawfully occupies and represses free Tibet, imprisons millions of Muslim Uyghurs in concentration camps, forcibly harvests the organs of living opponents to prolong the lives of the trembling gerontocrats of the Party, spreads fatal disease worldwide and tears down crosses and other Christian symbols from churches. But it was not willing to speak up for the world’s largest religion.
The Supreme Court did not buy Boston’s cheesy argument. For it was clear that, until the City had decided to veto Hal’s Christian flag it had allowed anyone and everyone who had applied to fly a flag to fly it. No exceptions.
It was Justice Alito who got right to the heart of the matter. He wrote: “Courts must be very careful when a government claims that speech by one or more private speakers is actually government speech. When that occurs, it can be difficult to tell whether the government is using the doctrine as a subterfuge for favoring certain private speaker over others based on viewpoint”, so that the government-speech doctrine becomes susceptible to dangerous misuse…
“To prevent the government-speech doctrine from being used as a cover for censorship, courts must focus on the identity of the speaker. The ultimate question is whether the government is actually expressing its own views or the real speaker is a private party and the government is surreptitiously engaged in the regulation of private speech…
“Government control over speech is relevant to speaker identity in that speech by a private individual or group cannot constitute government speech if the government does not attempt to control the message. But control is also an essential element of censorship.”
As totalitarianism tightens its grip, increasingly Christians are being persecuted for saying Christian things. Recall the London Methodist pastor arrested, offensively interrogated and flung into prison for 21 hours for daring to quote Genesis: “Male and female created He them.”
Recall the whistle-blower, David Daleiden, who faces nine baseless criminal charges for having exposed Planned Parenthood’s buying and selling of aborted children for medical experimentation so that its director could afford a Lamborghini.
Recall the numerous instances in which the British police, now thoroughly totalitarian, have recorded supposed “hate-speech” “crimes” on individual citizens’ criminal records, but without even telling the individuals, and without going through the boring formality of taking the alleged offenders to court.
Hal’s nine-nil victory, following four previous rejections in the lower courts, is not quite unprecedented, but it is rare and precious. Its beneficial effect will be felt worldwide. For it is a badly needed reminder that if you love your neighbor you let him have his say, even if you disagree with him.
In the words of John Milton, successfully arguing against the imposition of a tax on books:
This is true liberty, when freeborn men
Having to advise the public, may speak free.
Which he who can and will deserves high praise.
Who neither can nor will may hold his peace.
What can be juster in a state than this?
The Resurrection is impossible. So says science. And yet our belief in it has endured for two millennia. It has survived repeated and determined attempts to stamp it out.
The Arian heretics decided that the Lord of Life was not of the same nature with God, but merely of a like nature. No Resurrection for Him, then. When even a Pope vacillated over Arianism, St Athanasius came to the rescue and proclaimed the truth in his magnificent Creed.
The Communists maintained that religion was the opium of the people, and resurrection was ridiculous, but they were seen off by a Polish Pope.
A notorious Anglican Bishop of Durham some decades ago declared that he could not bring himself to believe in the Resurrection. He was one of many wobbly clerics. The then Catholic Bishop of Leeds, Bishop Gordon Wheeler, whose Easter sermons making it quite clear that the Resurrection actually happened were deservedly famous, used to tell an elegant joke at the Bishop of Durham’s expense:
“And Jesus said unto the Bishop of Durham, Whom dost thou say that I am? And he answered and said, Thou art the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the kerygma of which we derive the ultimate meaning in our interpersonal relationships. And Jesus said, What?”
Dean Cupitt of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, also professed his disbelief in the Resurrection. There was a joke about him, too: “There is no God, and Dean Cupitt is His Prophet.”
Today, the totalitarian majority of the scientific and academic community regards anything unprovable as false. That is bad logic, but then totalitarianism and logic have never gone together. The present-day obsession with “the science” represents a dangerous and persisting but ultimately doomed attack on the Christian religion.
After all, scientists these days – particularly the totalitarians – believe in all manner of arrant nonsense that they cannot prove. For instance, they profess to believe in catastrophic global warming, even though there has been far less of it than they had predicted, and even though it has been and will continue to be generally beneficial.
Alice in Wonderland was sceptical of difficult beliefs such as ours. She said to the White Queen, “One can’t believe impossible things.”
The White Queen replied: “I daresay you haven’t had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Born of a virgin? Yeah, right. Rose from the dead? Come off it, mate. Bread is God? Pull the other one, squire, it’s got bells on. Pass the marmalade.
Pliny, the scholar of ancient Rome, wrote to his friend the Emperor Trajan to describe the bizarre beliefs of us Christians. In doing so, he provided what remains the most succinct description of transubstantiation: “They make their God and then they eat Him!”
How is it, then, that the things that we Christians believe, things that are surely more bizarre and off the wall than those of just about any other religion, have endured so successfully, despite all attempts to sneer at them and to suppress them?
No small part of the reason is that at every point the Christian belief is a belief in the family. Every man of good will understands the value and importance of the family.
The Christmas story is a family story. That is why it appeals so strongly to children. The story of the Holy Trinity is a kind of family story too: God the Father, God the Son and, proceeding from these two, God the Holy Spirit.
Above all, the Christian emphasis on love is rooted in the ideal of the family as the central unit of society, whose members are bound to one another by love.
People get that. They understand. For love is – or ought to be – part of everyone’s daily life. The Christian emphasis on love as the only rule of life comes to us, like much else in our philosophy, from the Jews. It was they who first enunciated in the Old Testament what became the two great Commandments of the New.
First Commandment: love God. Second Commandment: love thy neighbour. Third Commandment: there is no Third Commandment. That attractively comprehensible simplicity is reflected in the Code of Canon Law, which, after 2000 years of development, is no longer than a typical paperback novel.
We Christians instinctually measure the world around us by that simple, straight yardstick of love. When we observe agonizing events such as Mr Putin’s massacre in Ukraine, we are particularly moved by the stark contrast between the amiable, benevolent and generally Christian-influenced system of government under which we are fortunate to live and the bestially cruel and savage conduct of the Communists in Moscow and Peking not only towards the citizens of neighbouring countries but also towards their own.
The four great freedoms that we in the Christian West enjoy – the freedom of religion, the freedom of election, the freedom of markets and the freedom of speech – are all manifestations of love. We love our neighbour even if his religion is not our religion. We love him enough to allow him to participate with us in making and unmaking our government. We love him enough to let him sell to us and buy from us without let or hindrance. And we love him enough to let him say or write or print what he wants, even if we disagree with his opinion.
And that is why, when East meets West in battle, as now in Ukraine, we can say that this is a battle between love on our side and hate on theirs, right on ours, wrong on theirs, life on ours, death on theirs. Ours, then, is the future. And that is the meaning of the Resurrection. The Lord of Life did battle with the darkness and overcame death itself.
Likewise, that is why, this joyful Eastertide, we believe so cheerfully and so readily in that notion, impossible to mere rationalists, that He is truly risen – alethos anesti, as the Orthodox say in their reply to Christos anesti, their Easter greeting.
For the Resurrection, the ultimate triumph of love, is our guarantee that love will always triumph, and that Communism, together with all such shoddy embodiments of the anti-religion of hate, is doomed. Omnia vincit amor. We are on the winning side.
(This article originated in A Catholic Voice special supplement )
At the time of writing, there have been almost 2 million reported cases worldwide of the Chinese virus first identified by Communist authorities in Wuhan on 17 November 2019 but not reported to the World Health Organization until more than six weeks later. And the death count is approaching 200,000.
There is significant under-reporting of deaths in China (to deceive the people and preserve the regime), in third-world countries (through administrative incompetence) and even in Western countries (through embarrassment at failure to act in time: in Britain, for instance, statisticians say the Government death count, now above 16,000, is more like 25,000).
Though some might argue about whether some of those reported as having died of the Chinese virus merely died with it, it is likely that the true death count associated with the pandemic is a great deal higher than the published figures. It is certain that the global death toll will be a great deal higher still before the pandemic is over.
This special supplement asks what, at first blush, may appear to be outlandish questions.
Should the 25-strong Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party and its wholly-controlled subsidiary the World Health Organization be haled before the International Criminal Court on multiple counts of conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity?
Should all nations who owe money to China band together to repudiate their debt to it in compensation for the deaths of those of their citizens whom its wilful actions and inactions intentionally killed?
Should the WHO be abolished, all its personnel dismissed, the senior leadership tried for crimes against humanity, and a new body excluding Communist China but including Taiwan established?
Should China be expelled from the United Nations and Taiwan admitted?
Should Taiwan, for its own protection against the ever-growing military aggression of China, which is conducting exercises in the ocean around Taiwan as I write, be admitted to NATO?
Should Western nations stand shoulder to shoulder with the oppressed peoples of China and occupied Tibet, just as we once stood with the oppressed peoples of the Soviet Union, to assist them in overthrowing Communism and becoming the world’s largest democracy? And should world leaders lean on China to pull out of Tibet and set it free?
Should universities which openly practice, support and argue for Communism, and are intolerant of any less brutal viewpoint, be defunded, and their degrees derecognized?
Communism, the cruel, bitterly anti-religious politics of concentrated and distilled hatred that now holds sway throughout the universities of the West, in extreme-left political parties from the “Democrats” in the United States to the “Labour” party in Britain and even in the Pontifical Academies of Sciences and Social Sciences, has killed at least 100 million people worldwide. Now, through the Chinese virus, the death cult that is Communism is going to kill many millions more.
Communism, throughout its history, has posed a clear and present danger to life, liberty and well-being worldwide. Wherever it goes, piles of bodies follow. It has been viscerally opposed to religion, and especially to the Catholic Church, right from the start. It represents a grave and continuing risk to national and global security. As this history of the Chinese virus will show, Communist regimes such as that in China, can no longer be tolerated. Like viruses, they should be repudiated and rejected.
The history of Communism is written in blood. It is time to make Communism history, not by the argument of force but by force of argument.
China’s control over the World Health Organization
We begin in 2003, when for many months Communist China denied the existence of an epidemic of lethal respiratory disease – SARS, caused by a coronavirus – in several cities. SARS eventually spread to many other countries and was detected as far afield as Canada. The WHO estimated the case fatality rate of SARS as 2%. It was actually closer to 10%.
China’s failure to disclose the epidemic promptly as demanded by the governing statutes of the WHO, which are binding on its member states, led to a tightening of the rules as a result of China’s misconduct. Despite China’s misconduct, three years later Margaret Chan, a Chinese Communist from Hong Kong, was appointed director-general of the WHO, even though a report by the Hong Kong Legislative Council had criticized her failure to control the epidemic properly.
On 18 November 2016, towards the end of Chan’s term as WHO director-general, she visited Peking and said: “In the eyes of the world, China is increasingly seen as a model fro development at many levels … China is extremely fortunate to have a president who has made health the centre of all government policies.”
In 2015, towards the end of Chan’s second term as WHO director-general, she was criticized by a six-man investigative body appointed to review WHO’s flawed handling of an Ebola outbreak in Guinea and Sierra Leone. The team found that, under her direction, WHO had lacked the “independent and courageous decision-making” that had been needed during the early stages of the epidemic. The investigators called for changes in the leadership and decision-making processes of the WHO.
In 2017, Chan was replaced. But her replacement was also China’s chosen candidate, this time a Communist trained in the immunology of infectious diseases and in the ideology of Marx and Lenin at the University of London, notorious even by the lamentable standards of today’s academe for opposing free speech on its campus. His name is Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Ghebreyesus is – for now, but perhaps not for much longer – director-general of the World Health Organization. He was a member of the nine-strong politburo of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, one of the four race-based Communist parties comprising the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, which ruthlessly ruled Ethiopia from 1991-2019.
According to Lawrence O. Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, Ghebreyesus, during his undistinguished tenure as minister of health in Ethiopia’s vicious Communist regime, thrice covered up fatal cholera epidemics in Ethiopia by falsely declaring them to be “acute watery diarrhoea”.
News outlets including the Washington Post and even the Communist Guardian have reported that during earlier outbreaks of cholera Ethiopian officials had lied, and had pressured aid agencies not to use the word “cholera” and not to report how many were infected. However, stool samples tested by outside agencies had revealed the presence of vibrio cholerae bacteria. Furthermore, as soon as severe diarrhoea began appearing in countries bordering Ethiopia, the cause was identified as cholera.
However, China wanted its man as head of the WHO, and, in the current enfeebled state of Western international diplomacy, China gets what China wants, so Ghebreyesus was unduly appointed. Like his predecessor, he is a Communist. Like her, he had previous form in failing to act promptly or properly to contain epidemics. This, then, was the man whom the world was supposed to be able to trust to prevent infections wherever they arose.
During Ghebreyesus’ time as a member of Ethiopia’s ruling politburo, the U.S. State Department and Human Rights Watch had both criticized the ruling Communist front for having displaced thousands of citizens, shot hundreds of protesters and imprisoned and tortured political opponents and journalists.
Ghebreyesus called these crimes the “growing pains” of a “nascent democracy”, and said that those who opposed his appointment had a “typical colonial mind-set aimed at winning at any cost and discrediting a candidate from a developing country”. As we shall see, he has played the race card again after coming under fire for his mishandling of the current pandemic.
Within a year of Ghebreyesus’ appointment to the WHO, he had taken the bizarre decision to recognize Chinese traditional “medicine”, in accordance with the wishes of his fellow-Communists in the Peking politburo but in flagrant contravention of one of the fundamental principles of the organization, which is that all its decisions and interventions must be based on proper scientific evidence.
Now, I cannot tell you whether Chinese traditional medicine is efficacious. And nor can anyone else, because no clinical trials to establish its efficacy have ever been conducted. A proper clinical trial has the following necessary minimum characteristics.
First, the trial must be randomized. There must be two groups, one tested with the remedy under consideration and the other tested with a placebo. The two groups must be randomly selected.
Secondly, the trial must be prospective. The researchers must set out, and obtain independent approval from a competent body for, a written protocol describing the methods to be used and the formal statistical criteria by which the success or failure of the trial will be judged.
Thirdly, the trial must be double-blind. Neither the doctors administering the treatment or placebo nor the patients should be aware of who is receiving the treatment and who is receiving the placebo.
In the absence of clinical trials, it was entirely inappropriate for the WHO to give any recognition whatsoever to Chinese traditional medicine. Worse, that catastrophic decision by the WHO under Ghebreyesus to recognize Chinese traditional medicine indirectly contributed to the emergence of the pandemic.
For Chinese traditional medicine relies heavily on eating a wide variety of animals not eaten anywhere else in the world. If the Chinese virus did not emerge from the Wuhan biolab, and if the Wuhan contact-tracers who originally found that most of the early cases were traceable to the Huanan “wet market” were correct, the virus emerged from one of the numerous species kept alive in tightly-packed cages right next to one another, or slaughtered and laid out on the filthy floor of the market amid the ice-slurry that gives the wet markets their name.
By recognizing Chinese traditional medicine, the WHO was, in effect, recognizing that the sale and consumption of species such as those available in the Huanan wet market was safe and appropriate, even though wet markets have been implicated in some of the many previous epidemics that have originated in China. A genuinely independent WHO director-general would not only have resisted any blandishments from the Communist Party to recognize Chinese traditional medicine: he would also have put the Party under intense international pressure to reform the wet markets. Under the loyal Communist Ghebreyesus, the WHO did none of these things.
In 2013 Peter Humphrey, a British private investigator, was jailed in China, where he was drugged, chained to a chair, locked in a cage and made to read out a statement drafted by the police in front of the cameras. The anchor-man for Chinese state TV who presented that footage, one “James” Chau, is now a “goodwill ambassador” for the WHO.
In 2017, at a meeting between Chinese Communist leaders and their creature Ghebreyesus, the WHO received a large financial contribution from China, which wanted to build an $80 million headquarters for the African Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. The new centre was to be in Ghebreyesus’ home country, Communist Ethiopia. U.S. intelligence services reckon that China intends to use it as a base for spying.
As part of China’s debt-trap diplomacy, by which it allows third-world countries (and some once-first-world countries, such as the UK) to borrow large sums from it and then dictates policy to those borrowers in return for not calling in their loans, half of all Ethiopia’s enormous debt is owned by Peking. Most of the debt was incurred under the Communist administration of which Ghebreyesus was a member, to build the Ethiopia-Djibouti railway, backed by $3.3 billion in loans. The railway has been an economic disaster, crippled by under-use, electricity shortages and disruption by protesters.
Also in 2017, an expose by the Associated Press news agency showed that the WHO was spending more on first-class travel and swank hotels for its 7000 personnel than on HIV. More than $800 million, nearly half of the WHO’s annual $2 billion budget paid for by taxpayers in its 194 member countries, was squandered on premium-rate travel and accommodation.
The WHO has the active support of the Communists who control Google and YouTube. The WHO is tackling what Communist China calls “misinformation” by working with Google to “correct” it. Searchers, therefore, get “facts” from the WHO first when they look for information about the virus.
Worse, YouTube – also directed by Communists and owned by Google – has been actively demonetizing videos critical of Communist China’s role in lying about the pandemic and thus allowing it to spread worldwide. And it has also been “shadow-banning” sites of which Peking disapproves, and furtively unsubscribing the subscribers to such channels.
WHO kow-tows to China over Taiwan, with fatal consequences
One of the most important respects in which the WHO serves as China’s poodle is in the matter of Taiwan’s membership of the WHO. The nationalist Kuomintang government of China, driven out by Mao Tse-Tung’s Communists in 1947, established itself in Taiwan, which has been independent of Communist China ever since. However, now that China is a member of the United Nations, Taiwan has been expelled from that and all related international bodies, including the WHO. As will be seen in the chronology of China’s lies, deceits and corruption that follows, the exclusion of Taiwan has had very serious – indeed, fatal – consequences for the world’s health.
At a WHO meeting in 2019 Luke Brown, Minister of Health for St Vincent and the Grenadines, said: “There is simply no principled basis why Taiwan should not be here. The only reason why it is not here now is because the government in Peking does not like the government in Taipei.”
Because China insists on excluding Taiwan, Taiwan cannot even join the WHO as an observer, let alone as a member state. Natasha Kassam, an expert on Chin/Taiwan relations at the Lowy Institute in Australia, said: “Taiwan’s exclusion from the WHO leaves its population vulnerable during this crisis. A lack of direct and timely channels to the WHO has already resulted in inaccurate reporting of cases in Taiwan.”
Taiwan has repeatedly complained that China and the WHO are not sharing information about the pandemic. The same exclusion of Taiwan by the WHO had occurred when SARS had broken out in China in 2003.
In January 2020, a WHO spokesman called Taiwan “China-Taiwan”.
On 4 February, a WHO report referred to Taiwan as “Taiwan, China”. The report, bizarrely relying on data from Peking about cases and deaths in Taiwan rather than on information from the government in Taipei, got the numbers wrong.
By late February, under further pressure from the Chinese Communist regime in Peking, the WHO no longer mentioned Taiwan at all in its situation reports. The 22 February sitrep, for instance, described Taiwan as “Taipei and environs”, listing it among affected cities in Communist China.
The origin of the Chinese virus
Not far from the filthy, unhygienic Huanan “wet market” where China originally said the new pandemic had originated (the Communist Party would later attempt to peddle the nonsensical notion that the U.S. Army had created the virus) stands the largest virology biolaboratory in China. The lab, partly funded by the United States, has for some years been investigating coronaviruses in bats, which are breeding-grounds for infection because they live in colonies sometimes numbering in the billions in humid caves.
It is not clear that bats were on sale at the wet market, but pangolins – a protected species eaten in China despite its protected status – were on sale there, and it is known that viruses are transmitted from bats to pangolins, and from pangolins to humans.
A doctoral student at the Wuhan biolab is said to have been splashed with blood and urine from an infected bat when an inadequately-maintained automated device that should have vaporized the contents of the containment vessel failed to detonate.
It has been suggested that this student researcher was Patient Zero – the first to acquire the infection. However, we shall never know, because, though the researcher’s name still appears on the lab’s website, her photo and curriculum vitae have vanished, as has she.
It is thought that she has died, but we shall never know because the Chinese regime has disappeared her and refuses to answer any questions about her whereabouts.
The timeline of Communist lies and deceits about the Chinese virus
In 2016 and 2017 China had been reporting extremely low numbers of deaths from flu: just 56 and 41 respectively, for the entire year, for the whole of China. In Britain alone, there are 20,000 flu deaths in a typical winter season.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that the Communist authorities in Wuhan first knew of the existence of the new pathogen as early as 17 November 2019. The governing regulations of the WHO require all member states to report any such new infection to it within 24 hours. However, as with the SARS coronavirus in 2003, so with the latest Chinese virus, the Communist Party did not report the outbreak at once. In fact, it delayed reporting it for more than six crucial weeks.
The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission falsely stated on 5 January 2020 that “the earliest onset of the disease was 12 December 2019”.
On 21 December 2019, the Chinese Centre for Disease Control mentioned internally that “a cluster of pneumonia cases with an unknown cause has occurred in Wuhan”.
On 25 December medical staff in two Wuhan hospitals were suspected of contracting the infection and were quarantined. Yet the WHO would not admit to human-to-human transmission until four weeks later.
On 30 December Dr Li Wenliang, a hospital doctor in Wuhan, issued a warning that seven patients from a local seafood market had been diagnosed with a SARS-like illness and had been quarantined in his hospital. He said: “When I saw screenshots of my messages circulating online I realized that the news was out and I would probably be punished.”
On 31 December the Taiwan Central Epidemic Command Centre told the WHO that it had had to place several patients in isolation because of the virus. The WHO, however, does not permit Taiwan to be a member, because China – though Taiwan is independent – claims it as a province of China. Therefore, the WHO responded with the curt word “Received”, and nothing more. Ghebreyesus would later try to deny that Taiwan had provided the WHO with information to the effect that human-to-human transmission was occurring (why else would Taiwan have isolated those infected?). Then, when Taiwan provided the evidence, Ghebreyesus accused Taiwan of “racism”, but was unable to provide any details of the alleged “racism”. It was only that day that the Communist Party in China informed the WHO that yet another fatal infection had emerged from the territory under its rule. However, on the same day the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission issued a ban on all public mentions of the epidemic: “No organization or individual is allowed to release treatment information to the public without authorization.”
Ghebreyesus’ former deputy, one Aylward, when asked by Hong Kong TV why Taiwan was not permitted to be a member of the WHO, pretended not to hear the question and then, when it was repeated, he disconnected his webcam and hung up the call. When the reporter rang back and asked whether WHO was pleased with Taiwan’s response to the pandemic, Aylward said that all provinces of China had handled it well. Taiwan is not and has never been a province of Communist China. The interview was such a catastrophe that the following day Aylward was “unpersoned” – his biography was removed from the section of the website devoted to senior management, and he appears no longer to be Ghebreyesus’ deputy.
On 1 January 2020 the Communist authorities in Wuhan issued the following statement: “The police call upon all citizens using the internet not to fabricate, spread or believe rumours.” Instead, web users should “jointly build a harmonious, clear and bright cyberspace”. That day, Dr Li Wenliang and seven other doctors were arrested, taken to the Wuhan police headquarters and ordered to sign statements acknowledging “misdemeanours” and undertaking not to commit further “unlawful acts”.
From 1-21 January up to 7 million residents of Wuhan travelled all over the world during the Chinese New Year holiday season, carrying the infection with them and ensuring that it became a pandemic, for tens of thousands of them were infected.
On 6 January Dr Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control in the United States, offered to send a team into China, but the Communist Party refused permission for the mission to enter the country.
On 11 January the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission falsely stated that “At present no medical staff infection and no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission have been found.” Professor Gostin has commented: “We were deceived … Myself and other public health experts, based on what the WHO and China were saying, reassured the public that this was not serious, that we could bring this under control.”
On 12 January the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre published the genome of the virus on open platforms, but the Communist Party closed it next day for “rectification”, hindering its research into the pandemic.
On 14 January the Commission again stated that “Existing survey results show that clear human-to-human evidence has not been found, but the possibility of limited human-to-human transmission, though it cannot be ruled out, is low.” That day the WHO, which had at that stage been denied entry to China to investigate, nevertheless issued a statement saying: “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.”
In January, the Czech counter-intelligence agency discovered that the Chinese embassy in Prague had mobilized Chinese interests in the country to buy massive quantities of Czach medical materiel which was immediately sent to China, indicating that the virus was spreading there. At the same time, and through February, the Chinese Communist Party-backed global property corporation the Greenland Group was instructed to halt normal operations and source bulk supplies of essential medical items to ship back to China.
On 19 January 2020 the WHO’s China office said: “Not enough is known to draw definitive conclusions about how it is transmitted, the clinical features of the disease, the extent to which it has spread or its source, which remains unknown.”
On 20 January, the Chinese lung specialist Zhong Nanshan, who had discovered SARS in 2003, said: “It is no longer animal-to-human transmission but human-to-human transmission.” For the first time, the Chinese Communist Party admitted that human-to-human transmission was occurring. Thereupon the WHO admitted “at least some human-to-human transmission … Infections among healthcare workers strengthen the evidence for this.” The U.S. Centers for Disease control said: “The key issue we all need to understand is how easily and sustainably the virus is spread from human to human.”
On 21 January a man in his 30s from Washington State was the first confirmed case of the Chinese virus in the United States. He had contracted the infection while travelling in Wuhan.
On 22 January the vice-minister of the Chinese National Health Commission said: “We will disclose information on the outbreak in a timely, open and transparent manner, objectively reporting the development of the outbreak.” The following day, Ghebreyesus dutifully said: “I would like to thank the Government of the People’s Republic of China for its co-operation and transparency.”
On 23 January the Communist Party shut the stable door after the 7 million birds had flown. It locked down Wuhan and cancelled the New Year celebrations due to take place on 25 January, saying that it would “strictly implement emergency response measures, enter into a state of war and execute wartime measures resolutely to curb the spread of this epidemic”. Ghebreyesus, however, said that, while the epidemic was an emergency in China, “there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission outside China”. Ghebreyesus said: “China has taken measures it believes appropriate to contain the spread of coronavirus in Wuhan and other cities. We hope they will be both effective and short in their duration.”
In late January Ghebreyesus met Xi Jinping in Peking to take orders from him.
On 26 January the Chinese social-media platform WeChat announced that it would enforce the Chinese Communist Party’s Criminal Law Amendment 9: “Those who seriously disrupt the social order shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment, detention or control.”
On 29 January Chen Qiushi, a journalist, and Fang Bin, a salesman in Wuhan, posted several viral videos describing the rapid spread of the infection in Wuhan, and calling for free speech about the outbreak. They disappeared in mid-February and their whereabouts are unknown. That day, Ghebreyesus said: “In Xi Jinping’s words, the measures China has taken are good not only for China but for the rest of the world.”
On 30 January Ghebreyesus said: “I was in China just a few days ago, where I met with President Xi Jinping. I left in absolutely no doubt about China’s commitment to transparency and to protecting the world’s people … We appreciate the seriousness with which China is taking this outbreak, especially the commitment from top leadership and the transparency they have demonstrated. China is actually setting a new standard for outbreak response … The speed with which China detected the outbreak, isolated the virus, sequenced the genome and shared it with WHO and the world are very impressive, and beyond words. So is China’s commitment to transparency and to supporting other countries … WHO continues to have confidence in China’s ability to control the outbreak. … There is no reason for measures that unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade .WHO does not recommend limiting trade and movement.” That day the first case of human-to-human transmission in the United States was confirmed. Ghebreyesus Tweeted: “In many ways, China is actually setting the standard for outbreak response. Our greatest concern is the potential for the virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems, and which are ill-prepared to deal with it.”
Subsequently, the Chinese state media repeatedly broadcast Ghebreyesus saying: “China took action at the epicentre, at the source of the outbreak. This is heroic. The actions of China have made the world safer.” In the same interview, Ghebreyesus was criticizing other countries, especially the United States, for imposing travel bans to and from China. He is seen saying: “There is no reason for measures that unnecessarily interfere with travel and trade. We call on all countries to adopt decisions that are evidence-based.” When China, just weeks later, imposed a ban on all travel from anywhere else in the world, Ghebreyesus said nothing.
That day, Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, quoted the WHO as saying: “China is committed to combating the transmission of the virus and has demonstrated co-operation with other countries. Its actions helped to prevent the spread of coronavirus to other countries.”
On 2 February the authorities arrested and interrogated Fang, who disappeared a week later.
On 6 February Hua Chunying, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said: “We have noted some rumours and lies about this epidemic, which are worse than the virus itself. You may have noted that even the WHO director-general has repeatedly called on people not to believe in or spread rumours.”
On 7 February Dr Li Wenliang, who had first gone public with the news of the infection, died of the Chinese virus. Social-media platforms throughout China demanded that the Communist Party should apologize for having silenced him, and should in future permit freedom of speech.
That day the U.S. State Department sent 18 tons of donated medical supplies and $100 million to China to “contain and combat” the outbreak.
On 8 February Ghebreyesus said: “At WHO we’re not just battling the virus: we’re also battling the trolls and conspiracy theorists who push misinformation and undermine the response to the outbreak.”
On 10 February China, having taken elaborate steps to erase all information and samples that would have assisted in detecting the source of the pandemic and in preventing a repetition, finally allowed the WHO to send a mission into Wuhan, more than two weeks after the WHO had made a formal request for such a mission, and six weeks after the WHO had first asked China for more information about the outbreak.
On 11 February Dr Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the United States’ Centers for Disease Control, said: “We absolutely assume that the reported cases are an underestimate.”
On 15 February the Chinese Communist police arrested, took away and detained Xu Xhiyong, a Chinese legal scholar who had criticized the Communist party for its falsehoods, negligence and corruption in handling the outbreak.
The same day, at the Munich Security Conference, one of the last international gatherings before the world lockdown, Mike Ryan, head of emergency operations for the WHO, said:
“Where we are now, certainly we would not be here with the opportunities we have without one of the largest public-health responses in history, on behalf of the Chinese government and their people. And when we use words about populations in China being scared or unsure, in fact my experience there is that they feel protected, that their government has stepped in aggressively and quickly to protect then, and that is the ultimate social contract between any government and its people, and I believe the Government of China is honouring that contract with its people.
“It’s interesting, before this outbreak began Hubei [the province whose capital is Wuhan] had 137 isolation beds. Now there are over 14,000 isolation beds. You tell me any other country in the world that could achieve that, really, so I think we all just need to take a step back and just admire what’s happened,
“There’s 82 different trials underway in China right now, ranging from traditional medicine all the way through to anti-HIV drugs, and that’s done in collaboration with external scientists, with external investigators. That’s an incredible advance in just basic knowledge over the next two to three weeks. For some of these trials we’ll have results in just two to three weeks. We need that knowledge, generating that knowledge, and developing the counter-measures we need.
“So protect the vulnerable, get our health systems ready, support China, not only with its response but also with the scientific work that’s going on there. And people say to me all the time, has China shared the virus, has this country shared the virus? Well, what we should be doing is sharing the viruses with China, because they’re the ones with the expertise, they’re the ones who need to see what’s changing in the virus because they’ve got the best chance of understanding this disease.
“So again some of the rhetoric – and we’re in a security conference – some of the rhetoric for me has not been helpful. Not been helpful at all. China has a strong public health and health system, demonstrated. China has a strong scientific and discovery system. China has the capacity to develop and scale up vaccine product, so we need to work with China. Using words like ‘probe’, ‘investigation’, ‘discovering cases of healthcare workers’, a lot of the language is pejorative and unhelpful.
“So I think we as a global community need to change our narrative if we’re going to work with China and other countries to stop this disease.”
The Chinese foreign minister replied:
“The novel coronavirus outbreak indeed poses a grave challenge to China and the world. Under the leadership of Xi Jinping our whole nation has come together.
“The fatality rate is 2.5% in China. The case count outside China is only 1% of the case count in China [Now, just two months later, not 1% but 97% of reported cases are outside China]. This shows the responsible approach of China for its own people and for people around the world.
“We have rich experience in tackling public health emergencies. China has been acting in an open, transparent and responsible manner. We share timely information with the international community, including the genome sequence of the virus, diagnostics, treatment solutions, and containment measures.
“We have also been working with WHO … WHO will soon send a technical mission to China. We care about the safety of foreign nationals, just as we care about our people.
“In some countries, Chinese nationals are even shunned or stigmatized. China is protecting the safety of people around the world with its own sacrifice. We hope that countries continue to support and understand China’s efforts. Respect WHO’s professional advice and see that normal cooperation and exchanges between countries go unaffected.”
On 19 February Ghebreyesus said: “Outside China we have not yet seen sustained local transmission.” That day, China announced it would expel three Wall Street Journal staff in retaliation for a column in the paper headlined China is the real sick man of Asia.
On 26 February 26 and 10 March, in emails sent to Roger Roth, president of the Wisconsin State Senate, Ms Wu Ting, wife of Zhao Jian, the Chinese consul-general in Chicago, asked Mr Roth “to consider adopting a resolution expressing solidarity with the Chinese people in fighting the coronavirus”. One of these extraordinary emails reads as follows:
“The Consulate General wonders if the Wisconsin State Senate could consider adopting a resolution expressing solidarity with the Chinese people in fighting the coronavirus. Yes, it would be a great moral support to the Chinese people combating the disease. Much appreciated if you could give it a serious consideration. We have drawn up a draft resolution just for your reference.”
The resolution drafted by the Chinese Communist Party read as follows:
“China has been transparent and quick in sharing key information of the virus with the WHO and the international community, thus creating a window of opportunity for other countries to make timely response.”
At first, Senator Roth thought the original email was “obviously a hoax”, for he had never before received any contact from the Chinese. However, when the second email came on 10 March he told his staff to find out whether the request was real. When they found out that it was real, and had been sent from a private account to avoid the red tape involved in using the Chinese Consulate-General’s email system, Mr Roth was furious. He said: “Just the fact that they felt it was OK for them to do something so brazen … for this Communist Party to so desperately crave for and look for legitimacy, wherever they could get it – including in Wisconsin – by passing this sham of a resolution that they wrote tells you just how worried they must be right now about how they’ve reacted to the outbreak here of the coronavirus.”
On 22 February the Global Times reported that “A new study by Chinese researchers indicates the novel coronavirus may have begun human-to-human transmission in late November from a place other than the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan.”
On 24 February Ghebreyesus said: “For the moment, we are not witnessing the uncontained global spread of this virus.”
On 26 February Ghebreyesus said: “Using the word ‘pandemic’ carelessly has no tangible benefit, but it does have significant risk in terms of amplifying unnecessary and unjustified fear and stigma and paralyzing systems. It may also signal that we can no longer contain the virus, which is not true.”
On 28 February Ghebreyesus said: “Our greatest enemy right now is not the virus itself. It’s fear, rumours and stigma. And our greatest assets are facts, reason and solidarity.” That day a report by the WHO said: “General Secretary Xi Jinping personally directed and deployed the prevention and control work.”
On 1 March it was reported that some 21 former cellphone subscribers in China are no longer listed. This is the first time that cellphone ownership has fallen. Though it is possible that economic hardship arising from the Wuhan lockdown may have reduced subscriber numbers, it is also possible that large numbers of former subscribers have died of the Chinese virus but the regime has not reported their deaths.
On 4 March the Communist Party’s Xinhua News Agency said that if China were to impose restrictions on pharmaceutical exports the United States “will be plunged into the mighty sea of coronavirus”.
On 5 March Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said: “COVID-19 is our common enemy. I don’t understand why some think anyone should apologize. The WHO has said many times that stigma is more dangerous than the virus itself.”
On 8 March Mr Robert O’Brien, the National Security Advisor to President Trump, gave a talk at the Heritage Foundation in which he said that China had covered up the initial outbreak of the virus, delaying an effective global response by two months. This chronology confirms that analysis.
On 9 March Ghebreyesus said: “Of the four countries with the most cases, China is bringing its epidemic under control.”
On 10 March President Xi Jinping visited Wuhan and declared victory over the Chinese virus. However, a local doctor said that the number of patients in Wuhan had been manipulated in preparation for the dictator’s visit.
On 11 March the WHO, having previously stated that calling the outbreak a pandemic was not helpful, declared it to be a pandemic.
On 12 March Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said: “It might be the U.S. Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent. Make public your data. The U.S. owes us an explanation.”
On 16 March Ghebreyesus said: “You cannot fight a fire blindfolded, and we cannot stop this pandemic if we don’t know who is infected.”
On 17 March the Communist Party expelled journalists from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, and demanded revised working practices from Voice of America and Time after President Trump had expelled five Chinesse state-run news organizations.
On 18 March Geng Suang, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, boasted of deliveries of medical supplies from China to other countries: “We also support countries’ procurement of medical supplies made in China. Our local governments, enterprises and civil institutions also made donations to other countries.” On the same day, Czech authorities are reported as having seized over 700,000 masks and respirators in a warehouse owned by a member of the Communist “United Front Work Department”. Some of the boxes were labelled as “aid” from China not to the Czech Republic but to Italy. The shell company that owned the masks was trying to sell them to Czech citizens at a premium.
On 19 March Ghebreyesus said: “We have a list of agreed suppliers in China now, and they have permission to export to WHO. We’re now finalizing the arrangements.” The same day Chinese state television said: “With no new cases in Wuhan, the Chinese mainland reduced the increase in domestic transmissions to zero, according to the National Health Commission. The mainland now faces a greater threat of infections imported from overseas.” Dutifully, Ghebreyesus said the same day: “For the first time, China has reported no domestic cases – an amazing achievement.”
On 20 March, a doctor in Wuhan told reporters that his hospital was under pressure from the central government to report no cases and to refuse to admit new patients suffering from the Chinese virus. Meanwhile, Ghebreyesus said: We have now identified some producers in China who have agreed to supply WHO … WHO can only buy or recommend kits that have been evaluated independently, to ensure their quality.”
From 22-27 March, seven funeral homes in Wuhan handed out the cremated remains of about 500 people a day to their families, indicating that far more had died than had ever been reported in the official statistics.
On 23 March, the Health Commission in Wuhan said that infected people with no symptoms were being isolated in quarantine centres but were not being included in the public tally of confirmed cases, even if they had tested positive and were, therefore, confirmed cases. That day, hospitals in the Czech Republic had to stop using any of the 150,000 rapid test kits the country had bought from China, after finding that they had a failure rate of up to 80%. According to data from 2018, some 131 people die every day in Wuhan. However, on the truck there were more urns delivered in two days than the entire reported death toll from the virus in three months.
Some 2500 urns stacked inside the funeral home in Wuhan (Caixin News)
On 26 March China barred entry to all foreigners. Peter Navarro, a White House trade advisr, said: “The Chinese did not tell us in early to mid-December that there was a crisis of human-to-human transmission with a new novel coronavirus. That has set the world back six weeks.” Laboratories in Spain reported that the rapid test kits bought from China were only 30% sensitive, far below the minimum useful requirement of 80%. That day, the Caixin news agency in China interviewed a truck driver in Wuhan, who said he had loaded up 2500 ash-filled urns and delivered them to a funeral home in Hangko District. He had delivered the same number the previous day.
On 26 March State Senator Roth put forward 2019 Senate Resolution 7, “acknowledging that the Communist Party of China deliberately and intentionally misled the world on the Wuhan Coronavirus and standing in solidarity with the Chinese people to condemn the actions of the Communist Party of China.”
The resolution read as follows –
“Whereas the State of Wisconsin is currently in a state of emergency due to the rising spread of the Coronavirus that originated in the Wuhan Province of China, as the number of infected individuals in Wuhan rose to over 700 and also consisted of 8 deaths as of March 26, 2020; and
“Whereas the Chinese people are a great people, and heirs to one of the greatest civilizations in human history, held hostage by a brutal and oppressive regime these past 70 years; and
“Whereas the Communist Party of China has engaged in a continued pattern of human and natural rights abuses perpetrated by the country’s Communist administration, including the Communist Party’s treatment of Tibet, the internment and “re-education” OF 1.5 million Muslim Uyghurs in concentration camps, the enactment of a one-child policy responsible for aborting hundreds of millions of children, the majority of them female, a record of organ harvesting and forced sterilization, crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests, and restrictions on individual expression and religious practice; and
“Whereas the Communist Party of China has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of interest in respecting international norms, including a history of currency manipulation, intellectual property theft, and restricting Chinese market access, while receiving the condemnation of numerous American Presidents and Legislators from both political parties for these practices; and
“Whereas the Communist Party of China, led by President Xi Jinping, has moved to consolidate power, scrapping term limits to create a de facto life term for the President of China and continually squashing democratic-based initiatives in and outside of mainland China; and
“Whereas the Chinese government has imprisoned its own citizens who dared disseminate accurate information on the Coronavirus, destroyed early samples of the virus, refused to release timely and accurate information on the virus, and continued to allow infected individuals to leave the Wuhan Province after reasonable evidence of person-to-person contamination was present; and
“Whereas reports have indicated that had the Chinese Government acted in a more efficient, transparent and responsible way, cases worldwide of the virus may have been limited by 95%’ and
“Whereas, on February 5, 2020, the first confirmed case of Coronavirus was identified in Wisconsin; and
“Whereas on February 26, 2020, and again on March 10, 2020, the Chinese Consulate reached out to the Wisconsin Senate President requesting that the Senate pass a resolution – written by the Chinese Consulate-General – including propaganda and falsehoods such as –
“China has been transparent and quick in sharing key information of the virus with the WHO and the international community, thus creating a window of opportunity for other countries to make timely response”; and
“Whereas the Wisconsin State Senate deems it necessary and expedient to combat the spread of misinformation propagated by the Communist Party of China and the need to push back on the claims that the virus originated anywhere but China;
“NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE SENATE –
“That The Wisconsin Senate acknowledges that the Communist Party of China has deliberately and intentionally misled the world, suppressed vital information on the statistics and spread of the Wuhan Coronavirus both domestically and abroad, allowed millions of individuals to travel outside of the province and country despite clear warnings that the virus could be transmitted person to person, and engaged in active suppression and persecution of individuals looking to truthfully discuss information related to the Coronavirus, which has led to a global pandemic the like of which has not been seen for generations,
“AND BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED –
“That the Wisconsin Senate hereby stands in solidarity with the Chinese people, condemning the actions of the Communist Party of China in the strongest possible terms, and acknowledges that millions, both in China and around the world, are at rks of illness and death due to the negligence and hostile actions of the Chinese Communist Party.”
On 27 March Turkey announced that it would stop using test kits recently imported from China, after finding they were not accurate.
On 28 March the Dutch Ministry of Health ordered a recall of 600,000 masks out of a shipment of 1.3 million from China, after they failed to meet safety standards. Spain’s government said it had bought hundreds of thousands of test kits from China, but almost 60,000 of the test kits were incapable of determining accurately whether a patient had the virus. Josep Borrell, a senior EU diplomatist, put up a blog posting saying that there was “a geopolitical component including a struggle for influence through spin and the politics of generosity. China is aggressively pushing the message that, unlike the U.S., it is a responsible and reliable partner. Armed with facts, we need to defend Europe against its detractors.”
On 31 March the Communist Party changed course and said it would begin counting everyone testing positive as a confirmed case in their official numbers, beginning in April. A U.S. intelligence report concluded that China had concealed the extent of the outbreak, the numbers infected and the number of deaths. Deborah Birx, a State Department immunologist advising the White House, said: “The medical community interpreted the Chinese data as ‘This was serious but smaller than anyone expected’, because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data.”
By 1 April, notwithstanding the indications from funeral homes that there had been thousands of excess deaths in Wuhan alone, little more than 3300 deaths from the virus had been reported throughout the whole of China.
On 5 April the Henry Jackson Society, founded in honor of a Democrat who became an effective critic of détente with the Soviet Union, issued a research report that reached the following conclusions:
The report says the minutes of the UK’s scientific advisory group on emergencies record how the lack of information from the Chinese regime delayed the response to the virus. The report particularly highlighted the lack of travel screening. A University of Southampton study had previously found that, if strict quarantine had been introduced three weeks earlier, the transmission of the disease, and the consequent loss of life, would have been reduced by some 95%.
The report’s co-author, Matthew Henderson, said:
“The Chinese Communist Party has learned no lessons from its failure in the SARS epidemic of 2002-3. Its repeated blunders, lies and disinformation, from the start of the COVID-19 epidemic, have already had far more deadly consequences.
“This report apportions no blame to the people of China for what has happened. They are innocent victims, like the rest of us. This is the fault of the Chinese Communist Party.
“How this will translate into practice, time will tell. By computing the cost of damage caused to advanced economies and assembling a series of possible legal processes to which the rules-based order can have recourse, we offer a sense of how the free world might seek recompense for the appalling harm the Chinese Communist Party has done.”
On 15 April the Chinese Communist Party, under intense international pressure, reluctantly admitted to 1300 virus-related deaths that it had previously not reported. On the evidence, this declaration was merely a sop. The true figures are likely to be very much higher than the 4500 deaths reported to date. Evidence of serious new outbreaks in Harbin and Suifenhe in China’s north-easternmost province, with very long queues outside the hospital in Harbin, has come to light. There also appears to have been a major outbreak in Canton. However, these outbreaks have not been officially reported by China.
On 16 April the New York Times reported that senior British officials, having been approached by two Chinese companies – AllTest Biotech and Wondfo Biotech – offering 2 million home test kits said to detect antibodies for the Chinese virus, took the deal. Boris Johnson, the prime minister, said the tests were “as simple as a pregnancy test: it has the potential to be a total game-changer.” However, the tests did not work. Half a million are in storage, and another 1.5 million are also unused. British officials are trying to recover the taxpayers’ money they wasted.
Crimes against humanity: a legal analysis
First, a brief discussion of the facts to which the chronology attests.
Why does it matter that new pathogens should be reported within 24 hours of their first discovery, as the International Health Regulations insist? The reason lies in the elementary mathematics of how infections spread. That branch of mathematics is known as epidemiology. The first, iron rule of epidemiology is that any new pathogen, in the early stages of a pandemic, will spread exponentially.
What does exponential spread mean? It is like compound interest: very rapidly, more and more people will be infected. For instance, in the world outside China and occupied Tibet, in the three weeks from 22 February to 13 March, when President Trump declared the pandemic a national emergency, the number of confirmed cases – those ill enough to have come to the authorities’ attention – had grown at a compound rate of 19% every day. There were only 9 cases on 22 January, but, after just 51 days, by March 13 there were 64,659 cases. By April 18, another 35 days later, there were 2,248,047 cases, implying that the compound daily growth rate was still running at more than 10.5%, implying a doubling every seven days. Even if that growth rate were to fall by two-thirds to 3% daily, by the end of June, another 43 days later, there would be almost 10 million cases worldwide. Since most of these are the more serious cases, which produce frank symptoms, some 20% of these cases would result in death, implying some 2 million deaths by the end of July.
Exponential growth is, literally, a killer. That is why the International Health Regulations, which were tightened after Communist China failed to report the SARS epidemic promptly, require reports of new and fatal infections to be sent to the WHO within 24 hours of first discovery.
The Chinese New Year on January 25 is the biggest of the national holidays. For three or four weeks up to that date, the Chinese travel all over the world to celebrate the New Year. It is thought that up to 7 million residents of Wuhan travelled all over the world during the New Year holiday season, carrying the infection with them and ensuring that it became a pandemic. The Chinese Communist Party’s lies, destruction of evidence, arresting and disappearing dissidents and whistleblowers were directly responsible for the pandemic, which would never have occurred if the Communist Party had not tried to cover up the infection and then, upon admitting it, had not tried to pretend that it was not being transmitted from person to person.
But, though the Chinese Communist Party had not reported the new infection to the WHO by 18 November 2019, as it should have done, surely the WHO, on learning of it on 31 December, could have acted in good time to instruct China not to allow any travel outside Wuhan?
The WHO could indeed have shut down travel outside Wuhan. Even though it had no direct power to compel China to obey, it could at least have urgently alerted the rest of the world to impose travel bans on anyone whose journey had originated in China.
There are two reasons why the WHO did not act. First, even when the Communist Party reported the infection to the WHO, it pretended that the disease could not be transmitted from human to human. Both China and later its Communisst poodles in the WHO maintained this pretence long after both can be proven to have known that person-to-person transmission was possible.
Secondly, as the remarks of China’s foreign minister at the Munich security conference reveal, China’s instructions to the WHO were that it should publicly oppose on travel to and from and trade with China, long after it was clear that such bans should have been introduced. Had such bans been introduced in good time, the crippling infection rate in northern Italy, for instance, would not have occurred.
Very nearly all of the millions of deaths that will arise worldwide from this pandemic could, would and should have been prevented if the Chinese Communist Party, having failed to comply with the International Health Regulations in respect of the SARS epidemic in 2003, had learned its lesson and had reported the new coronavirus infection to the international community on 18 November 2019.
Likewise, very nearly all those millions of deaths could, would and should have been prevented if the World Health Organization had required China and other countries in south-east Asia to shut their wet markets; if it had maintained proper supervision over the ineptly-run biolab in Wuhan; if it had alerted the world to the pandemic as soon as Taiwan had reported that it was having to isolate cases of the new infection; and if it had not bowed to China’s instructions, evident in the foreign minister’s remarks at the Munich Security Conference, to oppose bans on international travel to and from China long after it was obvious that such bans should have been put immediately in place.
Given the Communist background of the WHO’s past and present leadership, and the evidence in the chronology demonstrating that the WHO was doing and saying whatever the Communist Party of China required it to do and say, and without the slightest regard for the health and well-being of the millions who have suffered and died, or will suffer and die, from the Chinese virus, the intent of both the Chinese Communist Party and the leadership of the WHO to conspire together to perpetrate crimes against humanity is established by the facts.
The Statute of the International Criminal Court, the Rome Statute, defines “Crimes against humanity” as, among others, any act or acts of murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, rape and other grave sexual crimes, persecution, enforced disappearance of persons, apartheid, or other similar inhumane acts intentionally causing great suffering or serious injury to mental or physical health” that is or are committed “as part of a widespread or systematic attack against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack.”
Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court
An “attack directed against any civilian population” is defined as “a course of conduct involving the multiple commission of acts referred to in paragraph 1 against any civilian population, pursuant to or in furtherance of a State or organizational policy to commit such attack”.
“Extermination” is defined as “the intentional infliction of conditions of life, inter alia the deprivation of access to food and medicine, calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population.
“Enforced disappearance of persons” means the arrest, detention or abduction of persons by, or with the authorization, support or acquiescence of a State or a political organization, followed by a refusal to acknowledge that deprivation of freedom or to give information on the fate or whereabouts of those persons, with the intention of removing them from the protection of the law for a prolonged period of time.”
On the facts, it is self-evident that both China and the WHO knew exactly what they were doing: each covering for the other as they failed to sound the legally-required warnings in time, knowing that failing to circulate those warnings was bound to lead to widespread disease and death both in and outside China and occupied Tibet. They knew that the virus was passing from human to human, but they denied it. They knew that the virus was fatal, but they persisted in their unlawful extermination of a significant fraction of the world’s populations. The Chinese Communist Party additionally deprived several whistleblowers of their freedom without any public trial, and has since refused to say what has happened to those citizens, so that it is not only guilty of extermination but also of enforced disappearance of persons.
The Rome Statute makes it clear that to establish an offence it is necessary for the prosecution to prove mens rea – the intent on the part of the accused to act in such a fashion as to breach the Statute. As the Statute puts it, “a person shall be criminally responsible and liable for punishment for a crime within the jurisdiction of the Court only if the material elements are committed with intent and knowledge.”
The Statute says a person has intent where he means to engage in the conduct complained of; and where that person means to cause the consequence of his action, or is aware that it will occur in the ordinary course of events.
The Chinese Communist Party, which had failed to comply with the International Health Regulations in 2003 when it had failed to notify the international community promptly of the SARS epidemic, knew perfectly well that a second failure to comply, particularly given that the regulations had been strengthened as a result of its first failure, would cause the infection to spread worldwide. It knew this because it had seen the effects of the virus in its own population. It knew full well that it was condemning millions to disease and death. And its maladroit subsequent attempts to cover up its wrongdoing, such as its ludicrous approach to the Wisconsin State Senate, shows full well that it knew it had done wrong and was desperately looking for cover for its wrongdoing.
The WHO likewise knew that its first duty was to prevent the spread of the pandemic, and yet at every stage it acted solely to protect the interest of the Chinese Communist Party, with which its leadership can be proven to have had long-standing and close links.
Therefore, the intent to do wrong, and the knowledge of the terrible consequences of that wrongdoing, were both manifestly present in the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party and in the Politburo of the World Health Organization. All members of both these bodies should be individually prosecuted, along with the bodies themselves corporately. Any such prosecution would be bound to succeed.
As the map shows, China and occupied Tibet are not parties to the Rome Statute. However, cases against China can be brought before the Court if any State Party – the United States under Donald Trump, for instance – refers the case to the Court. China and the WHO, even as non-signatories, have the right to defend themselves before the Court, which, if they refuse to defend themselves, can nevertheless try them and find them guilty in absentia.
Other remedies available to the international community
Perhaps the simplest of all remedies available to the international community, faced with the crimes against humanity committed by the Chinese Communist Party in conspiracy with the World Health Organization, is for the large number of countries that China has ensnared by its long-standing policy of debt-trap diplomacy (lending money that creates a costly, long-term obligation on the part of the recipient state, which, in effect, cedes its national sovereignty to China in exchange for cash) simply to repudiate that debt.
For this solution to work, it would be necessary for a sufficiently determined country (once it would have been Britain, but we now are too close to Communism ourselves to find the moral courage to act against it) to coordinate debt repudiations among all the nations whom China has trapped into taking on large debts. There would also need to be a NATO-like organization, which all nations enslaved by debt to China would be invited to join, that would stand in the defence of any nation against which China tried to move by military force.
China should be removed from the United Nations and all its bodies, including the World Health Organization, and should be replaced by Taiwan. If China wishes to reapply to those bodies, she must first undertake solemnly, and upon pain of considerable financial and other penalties for future defalcation, to comply in future with the international treaties to which she puts her name.
China should also be required, as part of the price of readmission to the international community, to withdraw forthwith from Tibet – and not just from the territory that China now describes as the “Tibet Autonomous Region”, but from the whole of Tibet as it was when the Communists unjustifiably invaded that fragrant, holy kingdom by brute force. All Han Chinese would be required to leave Tibet and settle elsewhere, and the property, businesses and undertakings of China would all pass to Tibetan ownership.
This might also be a good moment to require China, under international supervision, to hold a referendum to determine whether the people of China would rather be governed by a democracy than by the Communist Party, and whether the people wish Communism to be made illegal.
It is also necessary to recognize that numerous political parties of the far Left in the West, including the “Democrats” in the United States and the “Labour” party in Britain, are now in essence Communist. In view of the clear and present danger that Communism continues to pose to the peace, security, prosperity and health of the world, the time has come for Communism to be outlawed in precisely the same manner as other forms of murderous terrorism are outlawed.
Communist institutions in the West – notably the universities, which now increasingly act against the right of non-Communists to express their opinions freely on subjects from State control to climate change, should also have their activities circumscribed. One way to deal with academe is to defund those bogus subjects, falling under the general heading of “grievance studies” – for instance, women’s studies, Black studies, gender studies, sociology and the like – that have no sort of academic rigour or respectability, and to defund entirely any university that allows its Communist students and academics to “no-platform” those with whom they disagree, and to derecognize their degrees.
At long last, it is time for the free West to stand up and be counted against the totalitarian system that has killed hundreds of millions and will kill millions more unless the world stands together, looks Communism in the eye and says, firmly, “Enough is enough.”