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Viral Falsehoods

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

There are no viral truths, because health-promoting viruses don’t exist (except maybe for some non-human species). Viruses are similar to lies, in that they spread like wildfire because they exploit some natural human vulnerability.

Not all viral beliefs are created, or were initially spread, online. Many are continued from before the Digital Age. For example, the idea that killing non-believers is good (such as in Christianity’s crusades, and in Islam’s jihads), didn’t wait for computers in order to become able to infect millions or perhaps even billions of people, by this war-promoting tendency of religions.

Similarly, nationalism — the idea that “My country is the world’s best and should be the model for all countries” — goes back thousands of years. (Some people confuse nationalism with patriotism — support of a country against an imperialistic invader — though patriotism isn’t a belief, but instead an emotional commitment, and is admirable in any country, no virus at all. It is the basis of national sovereignty. Patriotism is essential for any democracy to be able to survive. And no nation can be a democracy that isn’t sovereign. National sovereignty is the basis for any democracy. Therefore, any empire is intrinsically a dictatorship. It dictates to its colonies. And each of its colonies dictates to its subjects. So, an empire is a multi-level dictatorship.) Nationalism can’t only exist, but can even thrive, in many dictatorships, because it’s not about sovereignty, but is instead about supremacism, and it is therefore entirely compatible with imperialism, and with any other type of dictatorship. Unlike patriotism, which naturally increases in a country that’s invaded, nationalism is instead part of the intellectual construct that an invader uses in order to endorse or ‘justify’ its invasion; so, there is a very big difference, amounting almost to an intrinsic opposition, between nationalism and patriotism; but equating the two with each other is a common viral lie. It is used especially by imperialistic countries, to ‘justify’ their ‘us’ against ‘them’, so as to deceive their public to believe that ‘we’ should sanction or overthrow, or even invade, ‘them’. It is an especially dangerous viral lie.

Religious wars, and nationalistic invasions, blossom from viral falsehoods. Politics and imperialisms especially thrive from such lies. So, these are conceptual viruses: viral falsehoods.

For example, right now, the U.S. regime is trying to build an international coalition to conquer China, and is using various viral lies in order to do it. On 16 June 2021, The Hill headlined “Nikki Haley warns Republicans on China: ‘If they take Taiwan, it's all over’”, and reported that, 

Potential 2024 GOP presidential hopeful Nikki Haley sounded the alarm to House conservatives Wednesday that China is hell-bent on world domination — and that Taiwan is ground zero.

In a closed-door meeting with members of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), Haley, who served as former President Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, said that if China takes control of Taiwan, Beijing will be emboldened to seize other territories around the globe.

The U.S. must take stronger action against China, Haley said, starting with organizing a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing with allies like India, Australia, Japan, South Korea and Canada.

The CIA-edited and written Wikipedia, which blacklists (blocks from linking to) sites that aren’t CIA-approved, says in its article “History of Taiwan” (which means that this is accepted even by the U.S. Government):

The Dutch East India Company (VOC) came to the area in search of an Asian trade and military base. Defeated by the Portuguese at the Battle of Macau in 1622, they attempted to occupy Penghu, but were driven off by the Ming authorities. They then built Fort Zeelandia on the islet of Tayowan off the southwest coast of Taiwan. (The site is now part of the main island, in modern Anping, Tainan.) On the adjacent mainland, they built a smaller brick fort, Fort Provintia.[21] Local aboriginals called the area Pakan[22] and on some old maps the island of Taiwan is named Pakan.[23]

In 1626, the Spanish Empire, viewing the Dutch presence on Taiwan as a threat to their colony in the Philippines, established a settlement at Santísima Trinidad on the northeast coast of Taiwan (modern Keelung), building Fort San Salvador. They also built Fort Santo Domingo in the northwest (modern Tamsui) in 1629, but had abandoned it by 1638. The small colony was plagued by disease and a hostile local population, and received little support from Manila.[24] The Dutch Governor Pieter Nuyts got entangled in a dispute with the Japanese Hamada Yahei.

The Dutch were defeated at the Battle of Liaoluo Bay by the Chinese Zheng Zhilong in 1633.

The Dutch set out to turn Taiwan into a Dutch colony.[11] The first order of business was to punish villages that had violently opposed the Dutch and unite the aborigines in allegiance with the VOC [Dutch East India Company]. The first punitive expedition was against the villages of Baccloan and Mattauw, north of Saccam near Tayowan. The Mattauw campaign had been easier than expected and the tribe submitted after having their village razed by fire. The campaign also served as a threat to other villages from Tirossen (modern Chiayi) to Lonkjiaow (Hengchun). The 1636 punitive attack [by the VOC] on Lamay Island in response to the killing of the shipwrecked crews of the Beverwijck and the Golden Lion ended ten years later with the entire aboriginal population of 1100 removed from the island including 327 Lamayans killed in a cave, having been trapped there by the Dutch and suffocated in the fumes and smoke pumped into the cave by the Dutch and their allied aborigines from Saccam, Soulang and Pangsoya.[25] The men were forced into slavery in Batavia (Java) and the women and children became servants and wives for the Dutch officers. The events on Lamay changed the course of Dutch rule to work closer with allied aborigines, though there remained plans to depopulate the outlying islands.[26]

Far a more direct, and more informative and much briefer, discussion of the colonization and the Christianization of Taiwan, this excerpt from Mike Rothschild’s excellent article “The Longest Wars In History” (to which I have here added documentation [in between brackets ]) presents: 

Taiwan Vs. The Netherlands (359 Years)

The Dutch arrived on Taiwan in 1623, and within a year tried to Christianize the native tribes. Some converted willingly, but others resisted. The Dutch response was decidedly un-Christian: They burned their villages. In 1651, the Taromak tribe took up arms against their oppressors and the Dutch declared war. The Dutch were defeated and expelled from the island in 1662 by a Ming Dynasty loyalist named Koxinga, but no official peace was ever declared.

In 2010, Dutch diplomat Menno Goedhart [ https://archive.is/dpnfD ] sought out the tribe’s current leader for an official end to the conflict. The peace process was simple: Goedhart went to the village’s spirit hut and asked for forgiveness and understanding from the tribe’s ancestors.[ https://archive.is/U2Ur2 ] Thus ended one of the longest declared wars in history.

What Wikipedia is especially hiding is that Taiwan was conquered by Christians, including clergy brought in by the Dutch aristocracts who owned the Dutch East India Corporation, and the Company’s hired henchmen slaughtered the natives that didn’t want to convert to Christianity and that wouldn’t bow down to their foreign ‘superiors’. (Part Two of this 310-page pdf THE COLONIAL ‘CIVILIZING PROCESS’ IN DUTCH FORMOSA shows that it was essentially the same as what Spain, England, and France, were doing at the time, in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere.) Therefore, when the fundamentalist-Christian “Nikki Haley warns Republicans on China: ‘If they take Taiwan, it's all over’”, she is urging that Republicans and America’s allies must re-conquer Taiwan. Right now, Taiwan is a province in China, and the U.S. regime (along with its allies, now to include not only Christian nations but also Shinto Japan, which had been the last imperialistic conqueror of Taiwan when fascist Japan became conquered by the Soviet Union, UK, and U.S. in World War II) demands that it be reconquered, for the Christians. America is now going full-bore imperialist-fascist, which the anti-fascist Allies had conquered in WW II, but which has now itself become bipartisanly The American Way, after WW2.

Even the Wikipedia article on the “History of Taiwan” acknowledges that:

In 1661, a naval fleet led by the Ming loyalist Koxinga arrived in Taiwan to oust the Dutch from Zeelandia and establish a pro-Ming base in Taiwan.[35] Koxinga was born to Zheng Zhilong, a Chinese merchant and pirate, and Tagawa Matsu, a Japanese woman, in 1624 in Hirado, Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan. He was raised there until seven and moved to Quanzhou, in the Fujian province of China. In a family made wealthy from shipping and piracy, Koxinga inherited his father's trade networks, which stretched from Nagasaki to Macao. Following the Manchu advance on Fujian, Koxinga retreated from his stronghold in Amoy (Xiamen city) and besieged Taiwan in the hope of establishing a strategic base to marshal his troops to retake his base at Amoy. In 1662, following a nine-month siege, Koxinga captured the Dutch fortress Zeelandia and Taiwan became his base (see Kingdom of Tungning).[36]

The Taiwanese Aboriginal tribes who were previously allied with the Dutch against the Chinese during the Guo Huaiyi Rebellion in 1652 turned against the Dutch during the Siege of Fort Zeelandia and defected to Koxinga's Chinese forces.[37] The Aboriginals (Formosans) of Sincan defected to Koxinga after he offered them amnesty. The Sincan Aboriginals then proceeded to work for the Chinese and behead Dutch people in executions. The frontier aboriginals in the mountains and plains also surrendered and defected to the Chinese on 17 May 1661, celebrating their freedom from compulsory education under the Dutch [Christian] rule by hunting down Dutch people and beheading them and trashing their Christian school textbooks.[38] 

Though China liberated Taiwan from the Dutch in 1661, the U.S. and its imperialistic allies now want to grab it back, perhaps for Christianity, but certainly with imperialistic, nationalistic-American, intent.

Britannica’s “Taiwan as part of the Japanese empire” notes that:

In 1894 China and Japan went to war over their conflicting interests in Korea. Japan won the conflict handily. The Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895), which ended the war, contained a provision that ceded Taiwan and the P’eng-hu Islands to Japan in perpetuity. The Western powers regarded the treaty as legally binding, but China did not, seeing it as an agreement imposed on it under duress [which it certainly was]. …

The Taiwanese worked in Japan’s defense and war-related industries in Taiwan and in other ways abetted Japan’s war efforts. Many Taiwanese served in the Japanese military, including units that fought in China. Taiwanese troops even participated in the atrocities against Chinese civilians at Nanjing (Nanking) and other places on the mainland. …

Taiwan became part of the Republic of China on October 25, 1945, which has been celebrated since then as Retrocession Day. However, Taiwan was not made a standard province of China at that time, as most people on the island had expected.  

This needs some explaining. U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died on 12 April 1945 and was immediately succeeded by Harry Truman whom the Democratic Party’s megadonors had forced upon FDR as his V.P. running-mate in 1944. On 25 July 1945, Truman reversed FDR’s anti-imperialism and within two years replaced his entire Cabinet with pro-imperialists. Wherease FDR had invented the United Nations intending for it to be the ultimate arbiter in international relations, his successor Truman was determined that America’s Government would serve that function instead, and would ultimately conquer both the Soviet Union and communist China. It would, in other words, take over the world. So: Truman blocked Taiwan’s becoming (as it had been) a Chinese province. However, the rest of the world already recognizes Taiwan’s being a Chinese province. As-of 2021, only 15 out of the world’s 194 countries recognize Taiwan as being an independent country: In order, from the largest to the smallest, they are: Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Paraguay, Nicaragua, Eswatini, Belize, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Marshall Islands, St. Kitts, Palau, Tuvalu, Nauru, and Vatican City. They represent a total of 55 million people. As-of 19 June 2021, the current population of the planet is 7,873,780,198. In other words: out of every 1,431,596 people on this planet, 1 lives in a country that recognizes Taiwan as being anything other than a province in China. But not only does Nikki Haley want to increase that 1 person to the 332,440,655 people in the U.S.A., but so too does the current U.S. President, Joe Biden, and so too does Donald Trump. It’s based upon viral lies.

However, the most-basic viral lie regarding Taiwan, in the propaganda of America and its allies, is the lie that America is a democracy and that China isn’t. Without that lie, the U.S. regime’s allegations against China collapse. Yet, in point of fact: at the time when Haley made her statement about China’s being a dictatorship, a NATO-affiliated poll of a thousand people in each one of 53 countries came out less than a year after Haley’s statement that China is a dictatorship did, and this poll reported (Q2, Question 2, in the poll) that 83% of Chinese had answered “Yes” to “My country is democratic” — it was the very highest percentage among all of the 53 sampled countries — whereas only 49% of Americans did. In my 22 August 2022 article “NATO-Affiliated Poll in 53 Countries Finds Chinese the Most Think Their Country Is a Democracy”, I showed the 53 nations’ rankings on this (which, NATO, being NATO, didn’t do), and I reported that, “U.S. was worse than average, and was tied at #s 40&41, out of the 53 nations, with Colombia, at 49%. Less than half its citizens think that they live in a democracy. By contrast, 83% of Chinese think that they live in a democracy. Whereas NATO, America’s military alliance against Russia, is considering to add to its target-list (of nations to defeat) China, China ranked #1 for democracy on NATO’s poll of 53 countries, while America ranked #40 or 41 there.” Furthermore: whereas per million inhabitants, 639 Americans out of every 100,000 (which was the highest population-percentage of any country in the world at that time) were in prison, that number in China was only 121. Obviously, therefore, the nationalistic American lie, that America is the world’s leading democratic country, is a viral falsehood, not at all true, though it gets circulated  incessantly by the lying U.S. Government and its propagandists. Any politician who spouts it, is intending to deceive, not to inform, voters.

Moreover: ever since 1972, the U.S. has officially recognized that “Taiwan is a part of China” and this commitment was the basis on which Henry Kissinger and Mao Tse Tung formally agreed in 1972 to end America’s treatment of Taiwan as being separate from China, and for China to be able to start open commerce with America. America’s billionaires wanted their corporations to reduce their labor-costs; so, their politicians did this: they sent millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs to China. However, now, the U.S. is arming Taiwan to encourage Taiwan to announce that it is not a Chinese province, so as to provoke China to invade Taiwan so that America will then call that “aggression” and unleash a nuclear invasion of China. Either Nikki Haley is intentionally evil, or else she is so stupid that she believes her own lies (such as “if China takes control of Taiwan, Beijing will be emboldened to seize other territories around the globe”). This doesn’t mean that Trump or Biden are any better, because all three of them spout the same lies against China: it’s bipartisan lying in America, ever since FDR died and Truman took control and transformed the U.S. Government in the way that he did, into the U.S. empire.

Viral lies kill — they create wars, they create sanctions, they create or ‘justify’ coups and invasions — and the people who spread them are assisting such evils. Spreading viral lies can be just as bad as — or even worse than — spreading a physical virus. It’s a plague, and now it is a rabid infection throughout the U.S. federal Government and its ‘news’-media.

This was also pointed out by me regarding not Taiwan and China but instead Crimea, Ukraine and Russia, in my 23 March 2017 “Are U.S. Economic Sanctions Against Russia Based on an Obama Lie?” I also did it regarding what Israel’s troops and America’s weapons and ammunition are now doing to the residents in Gaza, under the headline, “What You Didn’t Know About Hamas’s October 7th Attack”. In post-WW2 U.S. foreign policies, viral lies are the pervasive tool, more effective even than atomic weapons, regardless of whether they might result in a nuclear WW3. 

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.