State of Affairs

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To Xi or not to Xi, that is the question

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    State of Affairs
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In 2019 I wrote about the New Cold War, how the Communist Party of China was actively working to undermine American strength and influence in the South China Sea, on its borders and in international organizations like the United Nations and OTAN. At the time many people scoffed at my work, claiming that there was no such competition with China – Yet, here we stand. We are living through a shift in eras, the Rules Based International Order our great-grandparents helped build is actively being torn down around us and American superiority is being challenged.

With the emergence of COVID-19 the World Health Organization, controlled by the UN, came under significant scrutiny as Dr. Tedros Adhanom’s, Director of WHO, connections to the Communist Party were unveiled. Tedros is from Ethiopia, a nation which sold its allegiance to China in the 2010s for assistance with infrastructure, broadband, and other 21st Century necessities. In 2020 Tedros was accused of using his powers at WHO to cover up investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and was accused of not pushing hard enough against the communist regime to find the truth.

Now, the world has the Omicron COVID-19 variant – still COVID, but more transmissible than the original strain. But, why Omicron? Strain names are supposed to be named using the Greek Alphabet, that’s where we get Alpha (the original COVID strain), Delta (the deadly wave we are combatting actively), and Lambda (a lesser known, more recent strain of COVID).

The Greek Alphabet goes Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, Zeta, Eta, Theta, Iota, Kappa, Lambda, Mu, Nu, Xi, Omicron, Pi, Rho, Sigma, Tau, Upsilon, Phi, Chi, Psi, Omega. So far the world has seen multiple strains of COVID-19, from Alpha to Lambda, skip two, and we are now at Omicron.

When naming this new variant, they skipped the letters Nu and Xi. Why? So as not to offend the Communist Party of China. Xi is the first name of China’s “president” Xi Jingping. WHO said that Nu sounds too close to “new” and that is why they didn’t use that letter, but as an official statement, WHO said they skipped “Xi” because it is a common name.

This is harrowing, inappropriate, and wrong.

Couple this chokehold over science with their recent promises of an invasion of Taiwan, and their development of military technology to counter US tech. Taiwan is a Democratic society where the people are free.

China seeks to subjugate the people of Taiwan, claiming pre-World War II territorial claims. China is an authoritarian society that is actively committing genocide against the Uyghur Muslim people who live in their nation. They are an authoritarian society that actively subverts religious freedom and denies people their freedom of speech. Taiwan is a free, Democratic society where the people are given opportunity and aren’t under the control and influence of their government. In Taiwan the people are free, in China the people are subjugated.

The free people of Taiwan deserve to always be free.

As Americans we have a responsibility to uphold human rights and liberty across the world. We enjoy freedom and immense liberty in the US, I couldn’t image ever willingly giving up these freedoms, and when China invades Taiwan – a promise they intend to keep before the end of the decade – we must stand strong to defend their freedom.

In recent years the communist party has increased their military to an astronomical size, growing larger than the US’ navy. We are currently living through a Cold War.

Before tensions rise to conflict level, President Biden has formed a Summit For Democracy, the first of which will take place now at the beginning of December. This seeks to do three things: Defending against authoritarianism; Addressing and fighting corruption; Promoting respect for human rights.

This will draw lines in the sand, already China and Russia have released a joint statement saying that this summit could be damaging to relations between the two authoritarian governments and any democratic nation that attends.

We must stand ready to defend Democracy. If Taiwan falls to the communists, the standing of our nation and strength of Democracy will crumble across the world. Democracy is the most important system of government to ever exist, it is the only one that ensures the government doesn’t get too powerful by forcing the government to listen to the whims of the people. Even when the people try to disrupt Democracy, like the QAnon crowd tried to do in January, those anti-Democratic people are unable to subvert the will of a whole country.

Democracy is fragile, and we must be careful with it. Defending Democracy at home requires us to defend Democracy abroad. If we are called, we have an obligation to the future of this nation and to all free people of the world to stand up in defense of Democracy.