Lockdown Mark 2

Mighty Quinn, Going Postal
A capitalist & a communist
“US President Barack Obama during a bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping” by U.S. Embassy The Hague is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

What the bloody hell are the motives behind the second lockdown?

Given that the official line seems to hold less and less water, it’s no surprise people are coming up with crazy sounding theories. Even guarded, sensible people in my circle are feeling brave enough to admit something fishy is going on.

One of the earlier theories touted – that China was trying to destroy the West – has kind of walked quietly off the stage. This seems to have been firmly replaced by fears of a ‘Great Reset’ – a dystopian world in which cash, property ownership and freedom no longer exist. It sounds utterly bonkers.

Perhaps though, it’s time to revisit the China connection; but this time from a different angle.

The official line

The March lockdown was not about preventing deaths – instead we were told it was to ensure the NHS wouldn’t be overwhelmed.

Now we’re told the lockdown will stop people getting it, but scientists are saying this is patent nonsense. Even now, the numbers Boris used to justify his announcement last Saturday are looking wonky.

The official reason has been pretty much demolished by a group of highly-qualified scientists. The Great Barrington Declaration states that locking down is a damaging course of action that will merely delay, not prevent, deaths.

Despite being dismissed as “flat wrong” by professional politician Matt Hancock (who does not have a science degree), thousands of highly qualified scientists, many working in the field of disease planning and virology, have told us the lockdown will not work.

We can stay indoors all we like, they say, but the virus will simply wait. It won’t stop waiting until it has infected X number of people. We don’t know what X is but the science boffins know you can’t simply hide from it.

In fact, they add, locking down will increase the overall death toll by causing suicides and preventing people from accessing healthcare for other illnesses, like cancer.

As for a magic vaccine; even if someone were to produce something credible that actually worked within the next 12 months, the chances of people taking it voluntarily seem slim.

The history books are peppered with tales of medical science dishing out untested vaccines with nasty consequences within living memory, so anyone with their head screwed on would be understandably suspicious.

Preventing people from travelling or accessing public services without the vaccine is unlikely to work either, without the use of force – which might work short-term, but won’t do in the longer-term (see below).

The ‘Great Reset’

How likely is it that millions of people across the West are going to bend over and be placed in special camps if they refuse a vaccine?

How likely is it they will simply shrug and nod their heads if a man from the Ministry knocks on their door and says ‘your mortgage has been cleared, but this house now belongs to the State’?

I suspect even mild mannered people might have a problem with that. The army could be mobilised to support the police to enforce this, but even then their numbers simply are not high enough to sustain it. It’s why there is an unspoken agreement that we give them permission to police us – it’s not the other way round.

Let’s not forget too that the army and police are us – most live in our communities, have families and property they’ve worked hard for and might feel as aggrieved as the rest of us. We can assume there will be a small hard core of Napoleons who ARE willing to try and enforce it, but they won’t have the numbers or the energy needed to sustain this.

For all I know there may well be a small cabal of evil world leaders intent on placing humanity into slavery. But then, I also know there’s a bloke in a remote African village who is building himself an aeroplane from spare parts to carry him off into the sky. Put it this way … I’d like to see them both try.

China’s motivations

Without doubt, China’s number one motivation is to protect themselves and their borders. There is a fear their number two motivation is to aggressively impose their will and communist system on other countries.

I’m not so sure. For centuries China has been isolationist and I don’t think that has changed.

Also, there is no need for China to carry out an experiment to find out if an aggressive policy of military expansionism would be a success or not. The USA has tested that experiment several times over during the preceding decades and the results have been fairly unequivocal.

Maybe they want to damage the West’s economies so that they can overtake the USA?

Tim Marshall’s brilliant ‘Prisoners of Geography’ has it that China is still about a century away from being properly able to challenge the USA on the high seas. They want to do this so that they can guarantee their own borders, reclaim Taiwan, control the region and be absolutely certain of no external threats.

Who knows, there may also be a desire to one day force an apology from Japan for their slaughter of millions of Chinese people less than 100 years ago. Imagine how the UK, France, Russia & Jewish people as a whole might feel if Germany still refused to apologise for Nazi atrocities and denied they ever happened.

China could easily build more warships, but they lack the generational experience and expertise the USA and its allies have. Tim’s theory is that the US and Royal Navy’s centuries old naval traditions cannot simply be learned from a book. China needs to develop this tradition on their own terms and they still have a long way to go.

Besides, wrecking the US economy temporarily – even if they could – wouldn’t help them catch up militarily. The US is simply too big for any of this to have made any difference.

Maybe they have a secret plan to turn the West into communists? 

For a start, life under a Great Reset doesn’t sound much like life in China. I’ve visited twice and it’s a highly aggressive capitalist society with boutiques, shopping malls, posh restaurants, a growing middle class and an army of property owners, many of whom think nothing of fighting the authorities over land ownership (see ‘nail houses’). The Chinese can be surprisingly forthright in standing up to officialdom; and officialdom doesn’t always win … to a degree (see the Tiananmen Square protests).

Also, what would China gain from assisting the West’s secret conversion to communism? From the 1960s onward, they had famously poor relations with the only other communist superpower, the Soviet Union. It’s fair to say, China has better relations and is doing more trade with the West now than it ever did with Soviet Russia.

Besides, why would they want individual Western states to seize the trillions of dollars worth of the wealth they themselves have exported in the form of property and business investments?

Controversially, I think it is in actually China’s interests for us to remain largely who we are (though weak enough to never challenge them), which brings me to …

My crazy theory (which seems no more crazy than the others)

Is it possible that China is indeed responsible for the virus and is steering the West’s reaction to it … but only because they have a vested interest in saving us from ourselves, and in turn eventually saving their own hides?

There is no doubt that China wants one day – perhaps by the 2090s – to dominate the South China Seas and, most likely, a large portion of the Pacific. They know that this will eventually happen, but that there’s precious little they can do to speed this process up.

When you’re confident something will eventually happen, your only concern becomes preventing anything that will disrupt that end goal.

I can climb in my car and head towards London knowing that in 200 miles or so I will eventually get there. It’s a given … unless I crash, or someone crashes into me. During the drive therefore, my prime focus is on minimising the risk of that happening by driving carefully and keeping a constant eye on other motorists.

Who or what could disrupt China on its path to dominance of the high seas? It’s probable the US is working to disrupt this process already, but they know this has its limits without the use of real military force, which seems unlikely.

Longer-term though, perhaps there is a potential threat which China has perceived and is trying to act on right now.

In the last week, France’s Macron has apparently declared war on the Islamic world. Macron says he’s declared war only on a radical strain of Islam, though according to Turkey’s Erdogan, there is no radical strain – Islam is simply Islam.

Macron did have the offending Mohammed cartoons projected onto the side of a building in defiance of the beheading of poor Samuel Paty, but I’m not convinced this represents much of a declaration of war.

I’ll tell you what does look like a declaration of war though and that is China’s actions within their own borders – putting Muslims in prison camps, forcing them to apostatise, closing mosques, banning Islamic dress and the like. Curiously the Islamic world and their allies in the West appear to be fairly quiet about this. But will they always remain so?

The future of the West

China knows that a Christian dominated West will probably never challenge them militarily. What about a Muslim dominated West though?

We’re told that, thanks to higher birth rates and immigration, a Muslim dominated West is almost certainly on the cards. Eventually, Muslims might not simply be a large minority, they might actually be the largest religious/cultural group in Western European countries. After that, politics will firmly follow.

Imagine the world in 2065. A coalition of Muslim European powers – the UK, Germany, Italy, France and Turkey – declare economic war on Chinese goods, disrupt shipping and threaten military action for China’s crimes against Muslims. The states of these countries seize Chinese assets and threaten to send gunboats to back up their threats. The coalition can rely on military support from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. They can even get their nuclear warships fairly close to the mainland using newly established naval bases in Indonesia.

Can China really depend on this not happening? Just at the point when they are about to finally achieve dominance of the South China Seas, do they really want to face such a large, aggressive and determined enemy?

How does a virus help China?

At this stage it seems there is a fork in the road. Either Europe and the extended West becomes dominated by those demographics, or it doesn’t.

I know I’m not alone in worrying that one day Europe will descend into war and chaos again. And if I was to cast about for the thing most likely to cause this, I would put my money on the way Western Europe increasingly resembles Yugoslavia just before the war there kicked off – with separate communities and cultures living cheek by jowl, just waiting for the tinder to catch fire.

Thanks to a relatively prosperous economy though, concerns about the actual existential threat posed by Islamic terrorism seem to barely exist in the mainstream. Concerns about the impact of demographics are discussed even less.

While people have comfortable lives and prosperity, it seems they’re willing to turn a blind eye or just change the subject. Of course, that attitude might change significantly if someone crashed the economy and Europe experienced a real 1930s style recession.

Perhaps China considers that a future European civil war is now ‘baked in’. If that’s the case, does it serve their interests for that war to happen sooner, while the demographics favour traditional European Christians, or much later when they don’t.

Really?

I don’t know. My theory sounds as bonkers as the other theories.

Given the shambles of the single currency causing widespread unemployment in southern Europe, the opening up of borders to African and Middle East migrants and ultimately creating policies that led to Brexit, it’s fair to say Western European governments seem to be fairly incompetent and don’t really know what they’re doing. There does not seem to be any long-term workable plan.

I’ve heard it said that Europe/the West is tired, drifting and lost. We do seem to have been easily led in recent decades and more especially during the pandemic. Perhaps we seem to China rather like a large, docile but powerful bull that can be led back and forth by its nose ring.

I think we should consider the possibility that China has simply got the ball rolling and our dopey politicians have done the rest.

No, there is no proper evidence for any of this, but in the absence of a credible scientific reason for our own politicians wrecking the economy, I offer this to the floor, however bonkers it sounds.
 

© Mighty Quinn 2020
 

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