The Exigent Duality
Class Conflict and China - 06:43 CST, 2/11/21 (Sniper)
My Murderapolis mortgage carrier told me I could refinance, with the exact same terms, and save fifteen bucks per month via a reduction in insurance, with them covering all of the closing costs. "Sure, why not." Fast forward past all of the time spent reading and "virtually" signing dozens of PDF files, and the notary tells me he won't enter my house unless I'm wearing a WuFlu Burqa, in my own home! "Thanks, but no thanks to that refinance", I told the mortgage company.

In any event, that rant isn't the reason I'm writing this morning. Rather, I came across this article the other day, and rarely do I think someone has found a closer historical analog to what we're experiencing at the moment in the country formerly known as "America". But first, the backdrop thanks to this rare, aberrantly untainted Wikipedia article; bold emphasis is mine:

"With Spartan support, the Thirty established an interim government in Athens. The Thirty were concerned with the revision if not erase of democratic laws inscribed on the wall next to the Stoa Basileios. Consequently, the Thirty reduced the rights of Athenian citizens in order to institute an oligarchical regime. The Thirty appointed a council of 500 to serve the judicial functions formerly belonging to all the citizens. However, not all Athenian men had their rights removed. In fact, the Thirty chose 3,000 Athenian men 'to share in the government.'"


In the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, Sparta capitalized on the long-growing sentiment among the Athenian elite that the plebes had obtained too much power, installing a ideologically-pure puppet government.

"Led by Critias, the Thirty Tyrants presided over a reign of terror in which they executed, murdered, and exiled hundreds of Athenians, seizing their possessions afterward.

The Thirty removed criminals as well as many ordinary citizens whom they considered 'unfriendly' to the new regime for expressing support for the democracy. One of their targets was one of their own, Theramenes, whom Xenophon depicts as revolted by Critias' excessive violence and injustice and trying to oppose him. Critias accused Theramenes of conspiracy and treason, and then forced him to drink hemlock. Many wealthy citizens were executed simply so the oligarchs could confiscate their assets, which were then distributed among the Thirty and their supporters. They also hired 300 'lash-bearers' or whip-bearing men to intimidate Athenian citizens.

Those who did not approve of the new laws could either fight - risking exile or execution - or accept the Thirty's rule.

The Thirty Tyrants' brief reign was marred by violence and corruption. Historians have argued that the violence and brutality the Thirty carried out in Athens was necessary to transition Athens from a democracy to an oligarchy. However, the more violent the Thirty's regime became, the more opposition they faced.

After the revolution that overthrew the Thirty Tyrants, Athens and its citizens struggled to reconcile and rebuild."


Let's move forward now to excerpts from the aforelinked opinion piece, and you'll see the connection to present-day America, if you haven't already:

"Undergirding the globalist enterprise was China's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. For decades, American policymakers and the corporate class said they saw China as a rival, but the elite that Friedman described saw enlightened Chinese autocracy as a friend and even as a model—which was not surprising, given that the Chinese Communist Party became their source of power, wealth, and prestige. Why did they trade with an authoritarian regime and by sending millions of American manufacturing jobs off to China thereby impoverish working Americans? Because it made them rich. They salved their consciences by telling themselves they had no choice but to deal with China: It was big, productive, and efficient and its rise was inevitable. And besides, the American workers hurt by the deal deserved to be punished—who could defend a class of reactionary and racist ideological naysayers standing in the way of what was best for progress?"


As anyone who has listened to Tucker Carlson or read any of my blog posts lately, it's extremely obvious that the elites are punishing the population-at-large out of contempt, as revenge for Trump. More:

"After an an NBA executive tweeted in defense of Hong Kong dissidents, social justice activist King LeBron told Americans to watch their tongues. 'Even though yes, we do have freedom of speech,' said James, 'it can be a lot of negative that comes with it.'"


Beyond the fact that the guy can't speak a single sentence of English without committing major grammatical errors, I hear this pattern a lot these days, following this formulation: "Yes, of course you have right XYZ! Of course! But... just be aware that there are consequences to what you do."

Obviously, a right isn't a right if it can't be exercised! According to the "LeBron" logic, even North Koreans "have free speech": they can say whatever they want! Of course, they'll be tossed into prison camps or executed by anti-aircraft fire if they say the wrong things-- but who ever said they couldn't speak freely?

But I digress:

"And because it was true that China was the source of the China Class' power, the novel coronavirus coming out of Wuhan became the platform for its coup de grace. So Americans became prey to an anti-democratic elite that used the coronavirus to demoralize them; lay waste to small businesses; leave them vulnerable to rioters who are free to steal, burn, and kill; keep their children from school and the dying from the last embrace of their loved ones; and desecrate American history, culture, and society; and defame the country as systemically racist in order to furnish the predicate for why ordinary Americans in fact deserved the hell that the elite's private and public sector proxies had already prepared for them.

For nearly a year, American officials have purposefully laid waste to our economy and society for the sole purpose of arrogating more power to themselves while the Chinese economy has gained on America's. China's lockdowns had nothing to do with the difference in outcomes. Lockdowns are not public health measures to reduce the spread of a virus. They are political instruments, which is why Democratic Party officials who put their constituents under repeated lengthy lockdowns, like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, are signaling publicly that it is imperative they be allowed to reopen immediately now that Trump is safely gone.

That Democratic officials intentionally destroyed lives and ended thousands of them by sending the ill to infect the elderly in nursing homes is irrelevant to America's version of the Thirty Tyrants. The job was to boost coronavirus casualties in order to defeat Trump and they succeeded. As with Athens' anti-democratic faction, America's best and brightest long ago lost its way. At the head of the Thirty Tyrants was Critias, one of Socrates' best students, a poet and dramatist. He may have helped save Socrates from the regime's wrath, and yet the philosopher appears to have regretted that his method, to question everything, fed Critias' sweeping disdain for tradition. Once in power, Critias turned his nihilism on Athens and destroyed the city."


The author explains his proof momentarily that the "lockdowns" are political instruments rather than "public health" measures-- but for anyone with two brain cells to rub together and any sense of what power does when it interacts with human nature, all of this WuFlu nonsense has been painfully transparent from day one.

Let's resume:

"Apple, Nike, and Coca Cola even lobbied against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. On Trump's penultimate day in office, his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States has 'determined that the People's Republic of China is committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, China, targeting Uyghur Muslims and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups.' That makes a number of major American brands that use forced Uyghur labor—including, according to a 2020 Australian study, Nike, Adidas, Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and General Motors—complicit in genocide.

That's not to say establishment Republicans are cut out of the pro-China oligarchy-- Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell's shipbuilder billionaire father-in-law James Chao has benefited greatly from his relationship with the CCP, including college classmate Jiang Zemin. Gifts from the Chao family have catapulted McConnell to only a few slots below Feinstein in the list of wealthiest senators.

The Central Intelligence Agency openly protected Chinese efforts to undermine American institutions. CIA management bullied intelligence analysts to alter their assessment of Chinese influence and interference in our political process so it wouldn't be used to support policies they disagreed with—Trump's policies. It's no wonder that protecting America is not CIA management's most urgent equity—the technology that stores the agency's information is run by Amazon Web Services, owned by China's No. 1 American distributor, Jeff Bezos.


Multi-billion dollar corporations actively using what amounts to slave labor manufacturing of their own products today, lecturing me about how I'm "systemically racist" for not handing over my paycheck to black people, whose ancestors from ten generations ago were once slaves, in the distant past. Got it.

And now, the history of "lockdowns": you see, pre-WuFlu China had been "locking down" dissidents in Wuhan and elsewhere, who were politically dissatisfied with The Party. When the virus hit, The Party used it as an excuse to further quell dissent.

In other words, the "lockdown" concept in Wuhan preceded the virus: it was merely put on steroids after the virus. Behold:

"When a real virus hit in the fall of 2019, Chinese authorities followed the same protocol, quarantining not just prospective troublemakers but everyone in Wuhan in the hope of avoiding an even larger public outcry than the one they'd quelled in the same city just months before.

There is a good reason why lockdowns-- quarantining those who are not sick-- had never been previously employed as a public health measure. The leading members of a city, state, or nation do not imprison its own unless they mean to signal that they are imposing collective punishment on the population at large. It had never been used before as a public health measure because it is a widely recognized instrument of political repression.

At the end of December 2019, Chinese authorities began locking down social media accounts mentioning the new virus, doctors who warned of it or spoke about it with their colleagues were reprimanded and another, allegedly infected by COVID-19, died. All domestic travel in and out of Wuhan was stopped. If the purpose of the lockdowns was really to prevent spread of the contagion, it's worth noting that international flights continued. Rather, it appears that the domestic travel ban, like the social media censorship, was to keep news of the government's blunder from spreading throughout China and leading to massive, perhaps uncontrollable, unrest."


Tom Cotton, one of the few members of the American Congress who seemed interested in getting to the bottom of what was going on, was given this treatment-- all so familiar-- when he suggested that more inquiry was needed to figure out if the virus came out of the Wuhan virology lab:

"The corporate American press disparaged Cotton's search for answers. Jeff Bezos' Washington Post claimed that Cotton was 'fanning the embers of a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts.'"


Debooonked! Debooonked! And by "experts", no less-- like Nancy Pelosi, or Eric "I slept with a Chinese spy" Swallowswell, no doubt. More from the article:

"The new American oligarchy believes that democracy's failures are proof of their own exclusive right to power."


So now we have the "divine right of kings". Great. So how does Trump fit into all of this?

"In November a video circulated on social media purporting to document a public speech given by the head of a Chinese think tank close to the Beijing government. 'Trump waged a trade war against us,' he told a Chinese audience. 'Why couldn't we handle him? Why is that between 1992 and 2016, we always resolved issues with the U.S.? Because we had people up there. In America's core circle of power, we have some old friends.' The appreciative crowd laughed along with him. 'During the last three to four decades,' he continued, 'we took advantage of America's core circle. As I said, Wall Street has a very profound influence... we used to rely heavily on them. Problem is they have been declining since 2008. Most importantly after 2016 Wall Street couldn't control Trump... In the U.S.-China trade war they tried to help. My friends in the U.S. told me that they tried to help, but they couldn't. Now with Biden winning the election, the traditional elites, political elites, the establishment, they have a very close relationship with Wall Street."


Just a few days ago, I wrote about how the real battle is class warfare: everything else is merely an extraneous distraction. But now I understand that this specific class-based dish has an egg roll flavor: it's rooted in the American elites having sold their soul to the Chinese, in exchange for vast riches.

The above is just a tiny sampling of what is in the article: the full monty most definitely warrants a complete read.