Left-liberals are washing away the sins of China, WHO

Moral equivalence is a despicable strategy deployed by the Left and liberals to shield somebody or something they like. Their favorites at present are China and the World Health Organization, so the thought leaders are using moral equivalence to the hilt.

But first the term itself. “Moral equivalence,” Conserapedia.com says, “is the claim that two radically different ethical actors are really doing the same thing and that they should be judged and treated the same way. For example, if two schoolchildren are scuffling and hitting each other in the playground, a judgment of ‘moral equivalence’ by the teacher may result in separating the two and (perhaps) punishing them both equally (for ‘fighting’).”

That would be okay if both were naughty, undisciplined boys. “The problem with moral equivalence as an ethical doctrine is that it completely sidesteps the crucial issue of right and wrong; see good and evil,” the website says. “If one of the children in our example was a notorious school bully, and the other child was fighting back in self-defense, then it would clearly be wrong to punish them both equally.”

In the case of the coronavirus, moral equivalence is used by magnifying the real or imaginary shortcomings in the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic and, concomitantly, downplaying the evilness of Beijing and the WHO in spreading the deadly disease all over the world.

In the wake of US President Donald Trump’s decision to cut funding to the WHO—America is the biggest donor to the global agency—a Hindi news channel was commenting a few days ago as if the dispute was over some contentious issue. As if America and the WHO were two parties in a dispute, as if there were pros and cons of and issue which could be debated rationally.

It didn’t occur to the editors concerned that there were no two sides in this particular issue; Americans, and the world, are suffering because of the WHO’s incompetence, corruption, and worse. Trump may have made some loose remarks and mistakes but he certainly did not bring the coronavirus to the US or other countries. It was the Chinese virus, spread all over the world because Beijing, intentionally or otherwise, let it spread and so did the WHO. This is the reason that Japan’s Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso called it the CHO—the Chinese World Organization.

Some issues have only one side, because the other side has banished itself out beyond the pale. The Holocaust, the September 11 attacks, and 26/11 are some of the most poignant examples of one-sidedness. Each of these events was evil. Period. No amount of sophistry can ever justify the butchery of Hitler, Himmler, and other Nazi thugs who systematically slaughtered, among others, millions of Jews.

Auschwitz freezes certain lines of argumentation; so do September 11 and 26/11.

So should Covid-19.

There can be debate over the effectiveness of the Trump administration. There can be two or more views whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi should have ordered a nationwide lockdown. But there cannot be and should not be any debate about a few well-documented and indisputable facts: the coronavirus emerged at Wuhan in China; China, for some reason, wanted to suppress the truth about its virulence and deadliness; the WHO blindly and slavishly accepted whatever Beijing told it; had the WHO not been subservient to China, the disease would not have spread to other parts or at least not have been as deadly as it has proved to be.

As we mentioned earlier, the prestigious science magazine, Nature, reported about a model simulation by Lai Shengjie and Andrew Tatem, emerging-disease researchers at the University of Southampton, UK. It showed that “if China had implemented its control measures a week earlier, it could have prevented 67 per cent of all cases there. Implementing the measures three weeks earlier, from the beginning of January, would have cut the number of infections to 5 per cent of the total.”

Yet, some experts on geopolitics and the mainstream media are defending China and the WHO. They are defending the indefensible; they are trying to obfuscate and deny the un-obfuscable and undeniable facts. In an April 29 article, for instance, Colum Lynch, a senior staff writer at Foreign Policy, tried to do that only. She wrote: “For the United States, the gambit [to pressure the WHO] would test the willingness of Tedros and key allies to stand up to China, which Washington emphasizes has suppressed information about the virus and its origins, intimidated and censored its doctors and researchers who spoke out…”

Notice “Washington emphasizes,” as if suppression of facts about the virus and its origins, intimidation and censor of doctors and researchers, etc., were not facts but the opinion of Trump & Co.!

This is typical of Leftists and liberals: transform facts into opinions and vice-versa. Moral equivalence comes in handy. This is how China, which is evil in unadulterated form, and its lackey, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, are getting rehabilitated by the world’s top intellectuals..