This article appears in the February 14, 2020 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Statement by the President of the International Schiller Institute
China Deserves Praise and Cooperation in the Fight against the Coronavirus
[Print version of this article]
Feb. 7—The name of the German weekly magazine, Der Spiegel, means in English, “The Mirror.” And indeed what you see this week on the cover of the print version of Der Spiegel—a person with a gas mask, goggles, earphones and a red hoody—is the mirror image of the ugly face of the racism of its editors. The headline “Coronavirus Made in China” should actually be “The Ugly Face of the Racist Monster Spiegel.”
This piece of yellow trash journalism was so bad that the Chinese Embassy in Germany issued a formal complaint on its website. The notorious Jyllands-Posten of Denmark had an equally disgusting so-called cartoon putting the coronavirus on the Chinese flag. Various American so-called mainstream media use the abominable, racist term “The Yellow Peril.” What all of these portrayals demonstrate is the ugly reality of an obviously deep-seated racism under a very thin varnish of “Western values.”
The reality of the matter is, that the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has praised China repeatedly for its excellent handling of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) epidemic, noting that China has set a new standard of dealing with such problems. The Chinese government published a full genome-mapping of the new variants within days of the outbreak, making it easier for scientists in other countries to start working on possible vaccines. China has made significant breakthroughs in the biological sciences over the past 15-20 years. Other health officials have stated that the response of the Wuhan city government and the regional government in the dissemination of information has been “state of the art,” and that an extremely impressive quantity of new information has been made available in their daily updates, which began on Dec. 31.
To call any virus a “Chinese” virus is as silly as saying that it is someone’s fault if he catches the flu or gets sick. It can happen anywhere in the world and it can happen to any person on the planet. The lesson from the reactions to the outbreak of the coronavirus is that it shows who in the international community is capable of responding to dangers that threaten all of humanity, and it shows who is a troglodyte, and who is not.
If Europe and the U.S. want to be credible in talking about “human rights” and “Western values,” then they should join hands with China and cooperate in the fight to defeat this new coronavirus. The coronavirus, and the hundreds of thousands of deaths annually from the complications of influenza, show how urgent it is to make new breakthroughs in the fundamental understanding of living processes to overcome what are now life-threatening diseases. Europe and the U.S. should also cooperate with the most future-oriented vision on the international agenda, namely the extension of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) into Southwest Asia and Africa and the join in on the international cooperation in the Space Silk Road.
For sure we should reflect on the current relevance of the judgment of Gottfried Leibniz, who wrote:
In any case it seems that the situation of our present conditions, in light of the growing moral decadence, is such that it almost seems necessary that Chinese missionaries are sent to us, who could teach us the application and practices of natural theology. . . . I therefore believe, that if a wise man were elected, not to judge the beauty of goddesses, but the excellence of peoples, he would give the golden apple to the Chinese.
I think Leibniz was a lot wiser than, let’s say, Der Spiegel, Jyllands-Posten and The New York Times.
