With Wuhan virus, political correctness is being ‘monetized’ for the first time ever

Coronavirus originated in China. This is on China. (image: aljazeera)

Let us be clear on this. This pandemic is China’s fault.

First case of China traced to November 17, 2019

China, this is on you! YOU are responsible for thousands of deaths across the world. YOU are responsible for the global economic crisis and recession which is coming. YOU are responsible for what could be hundreds of millions of people losing their livelihoods.

China had the first case on Nov 17. They didn’t tell the world anything. They hid it all. By mid December, several Chinese labs had found evidence of a ‘mystery virus’. But China destroyed the samples, stopped the tests and covered up the news.

Chinese scientists destroyed proof of virus in December

Even when the news filtered to the world, China kept feeding us nonsense news. Here is the World Health Organization on Jan 14, reporting what they had been told by Chinese authorities.

No evidence of human to human transmission? Really?

Why do we need to keep repeating this is China’s fault? Doesn’t everyone know by now has heard that the virus began in Wuhan in Hubei province in China?

Well, yeah. But history is an ever changing thing. Public memory is short. China has hit the propaganda game hard to stave off the PR nightmare.

Just two months ago, it was acceptable and totally commonplace to refer to this as the Chinese virus.

By mid-March, opinions published on CNN had shifted.

Opinion about referring to coronavirus as ‘Chinese virus’ change

In fact, liberal media was now publicly challenging Trump on why he and other Republicans were calling it “Chinese virus.” Suddenly the term that everyone was using just two months ago had been declared racist.

You know what’s coming. They will scrub it all clean. That tweet from CNN may disappear some day. Any website containing any reference to that term might be scrubbed clean. Algorithms of social media giants might start identifying the expression “Chinese virus” as hate speech and start auto deleting any post with those words.

Nothing is secure, except the thoughts in our head. They know human memory is perishable and they will work non stop to make us forget. See if you notice the game being played in this tweet.

That man is an Associate Professor of Government at Harvard University.

Did you catch that? Did you see how cleverly he framed the sentence? He tried to misdirect us like a street magician. The really relevant part of that sentence is in the first part (which you are likely to miss), not the second (which you are likely to remember). Cleverly and wickedly, Prof. Wang has sown the idea that there is some “debate” over where the virus came from!

That’s how it starts. Now they will say we must “teach the controversy” over where the virus came from.

Nothing is safe, except for the thoughts that we can hold on to in our heads. And the thoughts we can pass around to those we know. The future generations must know what the world suffered because of the fault of the Chinese government.

With the Chinese virus pandemic, we are seeing something new and terrifying. For decades now, the network of political correctness has been laid all across the free world. But like many tech startups that later became giants, the revenue model for this was not immediately obvious. A lot of liberals got highly paid jobs working for this startup.

But, ultimately, the funding was coming from something resembling venture capital. A vast network for manipulating public opinion was being created, but it was not immediately clear how it would be ‘monetized.’

Well, now we know who would be willing to pay big $$$ for access to this network.  Right now, the Chinese government wants history wiped clean. And liberals can help. Liberals can use their vast network to declare this or that as “politically incorrect.” And once something is declared politically incorrect, it is as good as banned!

That’s exactly what China wants. That’s exactly what China is getting right now.

The Chinese govt does not want the world to remember that the pandemic is their fault. Liberals have declared the term “Chinese virus” as racist, thus effectively banning it.

We all suspected that political correctness was a veiled form of fascism. And for the first time, we are literally seeing political correctness being made into a tool for serving dictators. Be very certain that this tool will be used again and again.

Abhishek Banerjee: Abhishek Banerjee is a columnist and author.