Practice: What If The Pandemic Or The Insurrection Was No Accident
By
Leonard Zwelling
In 1993, a bomb exploded in the garage below the World Trade Center in New York City. I guess that was practice. On September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda succeeded where it had failed eight years earlier. Bad guys may very well practice until they get it right.
It has now been at least a year since the deadly coronavirus emerged to threaten the lives of people all over the world. During that time, Western governments that were supposed to be the leaders in crisis management and disaster preparedness have proven to be inept at best. That group of malfunctioning nations was led by the United States which should have been prepared for this contagion given the fact that books and movies with this precise scenario had been written prior to January 2020. Of course, planes flying into buildings were hypothesized before 9/11, too.
Today though I don’t want to dwell on our poor response to the virus or even the poor response of the Capitol Police to the insurrection of January 6 when that too could have been anticipated. Rather I want to focus on the fact that these two events, like 9/11, were planned and that their occurrence could have been and should have been anticipated because the goals of the bad actors were well known.
I understand that the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party deny any responsibility for unleashing the coronavirus on the world. This is despite the fact that it was first discovered in Wuhan, attributed to a virus jumping from animals in an open-air market, and the viral genome first sequenced by Chinese scientists. This virus came from China. The only real question is whether it accidentally jumped from bats or some other creature to humans, was a product of experiments in a lab, or was malevolently set free by the Chinese as a master plan to overtake the economies of the rest of the world, which China is in the process of doing. China’s was the only economy to grow last year. Was SARS and MERS just practice for this latest outbreak? I doubt the WHO investigators now in China will ever be allowed to find out. That the high containment virus facility in China is in Wuhan may be just a coincidence. May be. A thorough airing out of what is in that facility and an audit of its records might shed some light on the true origin of the covid-producing virus, but that is not likely to occur.
As for what happened on Capitol Hill on January 6 and why, this is just as likely to be the result of a virulent contagion spreading via the Internet called white racism. There can be little doubt that the attack was planned (meaning it is really questionable whether or not Donald Trump incited it that day). It is likely that the attack on the Capitol like the virus from Wuhan was the result of a carefully considered campaign of nastiness to further the agenda of white supremacists on one hand and the Chinese Communist Party on the other.
Just beware. In both the case of the coronavirus from China and the homegrown terrorism of the Proud Boys, these were mere practices for bigger things. The Biden Administration and the FBI had better get busy rooting out these white supremacists, identifying, catching and prosecuting all those who stormed the Capitol on January 6, and be ready for future attacks.
Likewise, now is the time to insist in the global halls of power that China own up to what it did and answer for how it did it. The Chinese depend upon the currency of the West. Deny them access to that currency until they allow a thorough external examination of the origin of the Wuhan virus. It is clear that the Chinese have humanitarian scientists in their labs. They warned some outsiders, at great risk to themselves, of what they were seeing in their own hospitals. There are good guys in China, just not leading it.
China has become the 800-pound gorilla in the international arena. There is only one other such creature and that is the US. Similarly, it is the federal government that must mount a campaign to root out white supremacists and bring them to justice. They are free to espouse their filth as they must be. But once they go beyond free speech to a free-for-all as they did on January 6, the FBI must act.
The bad guys like to practice. The good guys need to get into shape as well. The coronavirus that has devastated so many will not be the last of its kind. White supremacy has been alive and well and living in America for four hundred years. It was emboldened under the last president. Now is the time for some preventative measures in both arenas. Prepare for the worst and hope for the best, but the bad guys are still in practice. The good guys need to be as well.
