National Review: Who controls the past controls the future,” wrote George Orwell in 1984. “Who controls the present controls the past.” In the aftermath of the coronavirus outbreak that originated in Wuhan, China, many interested parties have attempted to rewrite recent events that are barely even history, much as happens in Orwell’s dystopian novel. These parties hope to cast in their own favor the still-congealing consensus about the sequence of events that led to the outbreak, its spread, and its severity.
One would think that, CNN — a news organization that declares itself fond of speaking truth to power, that likes to declare that an apple is an apple — would block the CCP’s attempts to rewrite recent history.
But one would be mistaken. In a CNN “analysis,” James Griffiths admits that China’s leaders “have not been blind to the opportunity” that coronavirus presents to flaunt the supposed superiority of their own political model. Yet Griffiths then proceeds to toe the Beijing line on China’s handling of the coronavirus, America’s efforts, and the global implications of both. It’s propaganda thinly disguised as reporting.
Griffith’s most egregious propagandizing concerns the Chinese government itself, which deserves most of the blame for the spread of COVID-19. Griffiths seems eager to whitewash that government’s conduct and undercut its critics’ valid concerns.
It is “debatable how communist modern China actually is,” Griffiths offers.
That may technically be true — China is no longer taking Great Leaps Forward, to be sure. But its political apparatus remains oppressive enough to send hundreds of thousands of Muslim Uighurs, a disfavored minority, to concentration camps. And, directly bearing on the crisis at hand, China engaged in typical totalitarian behavior by suppressing early knowledge of the infection’s spread. By imprisoning whistleblowers, it delayed public awareness of the virus’s spread by several weeks (something it had done before, in the 2003 SARS outbreak).
Read the full article at National Review.
