DYSTOPIAN Scenes From Shanghai TOTAL Covid Lockdown | Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar Krystal and Saagar show the dystopian scenes and authoritarian policies enacted by China in Shanghai to implement their covid ...
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The war in Ukraine is far from over. Yet already even the so-called "alternative media" are softening us up for the next conflict - this time with China.
That's the conclusion easily drawn after witnessing a recent Sinophobic segment of "Breaking Points" with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti (see above). Together they gleefully tag-teamed on China's Covid-19 "dystopia." ("Dystopia," you recall is an "imagined world or society in which people lead wretched, dehumanized, fearful lives.")
According to Enjeti and Ball, that's China for you. Under its "authoritarian" regime, the people there lead wretched, dehumanized, fearful lives. A familiar story this side of the pond.
But are such charges valid? To find out, consider first the accusations themselves, secondly the hubris behind them, and finally a real-life example suggesting caution about indictments of cultures and policies few in the west can understand.
Accusations Vs. China
According to Enjeti and Ball, the People's Republic lockdown strategy, though admittedly spectacularly successful in combatting the first two waves of Covid, is failing miserably with the Omicron version.
"Whew, thank God," they seemed to gloat. "That was a close one. Imagine, if we'd have to admit that China's universal healthcare system and prioritization of citizens' lives and community health over business profits and getting people back to work has something to teach us." Close one indeed.
Ball specifically expressed her happy relief by observing that she and others like her initially experienced a kind of "China envy" regarding the way the country so efficiently and effectively dealt with Covid since the pandemic's dawn in 2020. She then admired the way lockdowns, testing, contact tracing, provision of personal protective equipment, vaccinations, and expansions of hospital facilities kept Chinese fatalities minimal compared with the nearly one million pandemic deaths in the United States where such policies took months to develop. All of that seemed to explain why even though China has four times the U.S. population, over the first two years of the pandemic, it experienced only a fraction of America's Covid fatalities.
Thankfully, however, in the welcome light of China's struggles with Omicron, the truth has come to light. According to a chuckling Enjeti, China's "dystopian nightmarish lockdown" reveals the sad truth. "This is what full communist collectivism really looks like," he said.
Say what? "Full communist collectivism?" China?
In other contexts, commentators like our intrepid pair explain China's economic and social successes as "not really socialism." Instead, China's capitalist nature is what accounts for its success.
Now however it's "full communist collectivism" that explains everything.
Such self-contradictory and infantile analysis enabled Ball to chime in that though there's "a long way" before we in the U.S. have a real true democracy, "at least the say of the people (she rolled her eyes appropriately at this point) "means something. And I will take that and all of the strife and messiness that it entails on a daily basis over drones circling overhead chastising your soul for wanting freedom."
Ball's reference was to Shanghai residents' being admonished by drone loudspeakers to (according to somebody's translation) "Please comply with Covid restrictions. Control your soul's desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing."
Oh, the horror! What could be more authoritarian than asking people to control their soul's desire for freedom and ask them not to sing? What evil masters the poor Chinese have!
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