Until now, it has been customary in Western countries to believe that epidemics are the destiny of poor and non-white states. Now, for this confidence in one’s own exceptionalism, one has to pay, which not everyone wants.
This was told by a professor of history at the University of Philadelphia Villanova Andrew Lew in a publication for the publication “The Guardian”.
According to him, amid the growing number of erroneous decisions of Western governments in a pandemic, the attempts to blame China for spreading the coronavirus infection were gaining popularity.
“For the US and Western European politicians seeking to divert attention from their disastrous inept leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic, China has become a convenient scapegoat”, – the expert notes.
American liberals and conservatives criticized the Chinese Communist Party, accusing it of hiding information about the disease at the beginning of the year. The United States claims that in this way the Chinese government tried to protect itself. At the same time, Andrew Lew wonders: “Are authoritarian and democratic regimes so much different from each other, as Western ideologists say?”
The author drew attention to how much time it took the governments of other countries to begin to respond to the spread of the deadly virus. Both the United States and Great Britain ignored the obvious threat for about two months.
“This inaction was partly the result of the exclusivity of the West, which believed that viruses and epidemics occur only there, in poor and non-white countries. In Italy’s worst weeks, officials admitted that they initially viewed the Wuhan crisis as “a science fiction film that has nothing to do with us”. In the United States, a Kansas politician stated that his city was safe because only a few Chinese people lived in it. In Philadelphia, in a more tragic outburst of racial thinking, there were rumors that the virus could not infect black Americans because it was a Chinese disease”, – the expert explains.
It is precisely such statements and the criminal inaction of politicians that make them throw accusations against China. They are trying to convince people that the crisis and unemployment in the United States are not at all consequences of the mistakes of domestic political and business elites.