David Craig, on January 10th, 2022Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday blog
The inevitable results of one-party communist states?
Today I’d like to propose that three disasters – Chernobyl, the Kursk submarine in 2000 and the lab-leak of the Wuhan plague in 2019 are all caused by exactly the same three features which are pervasive in one-party, totalitarian communist states:
- slovenliness and corruption at all levels
- an oppressive closed system preventing problems being recognised and reported
- the authorities always try to cover up the disaster
Before I get going, I’ll just remind you of the details of the Kursk mess as these are probably less familiar than the disasters of Chernobyl and the Chinese Wuhan plague.
The Kursk submarine disaster
The nuclear-powered Project 949A Antey (Oscar II class) submarine Kursk sank when a new experimental (and dangerously unstable) torpedo exploded on 12 August 2000 in the Barents Sea during the first major Russian naval exercise in more than 10 years, and all 118 personnel on board were killed. The crews of nearby ships felt the initial explosion and a second, much larger, explosion, but the Russian navy did not realise that an accident had occurred and did not initiate a search for the sub for more than six hours. Because the submarine’s emergency rescue buoy had been intentionally disabled during an earlier mission, more than 16 hours were needed to locate the sunken boat.
Over four days, the Russian Navy repeatedly failed in its attempts to attach four different diving bells and submersibles to the escape hatch of the submarine. Its response was criticised as slow and inept. Officials misled and manipulated the public and news media, and refused help from other countries’ ships nearby. President Vlad ‘the impaler’ Putin initially continued his vacation at a seaside resort; he authorised the Russian Navy to accept British and Norwegian offers of assistance after five days had passed since the accident. Seven days after the sinking, British and Norwegian divers finally opened a hatch to the escape trunk in the boat’s flooded ninth compartment, but found no survivors
Feature 1 – Slovenliness and corruption at all levels
In totalitarian communist systems there is seldom any sense of people having pride in the quality of their work. Instead, most people seem to spend their time cutting corners and playing the system for their personal comfort or gain. Most workers will do the minimum real work in order to make their own lives easier, most materials and products will be substandard and in most transactions, people involved will be taking a cut for themselves.
I suspect that the management at Chernobyl was lazy and ineffective. We know the new experimental torpedoes loaded onto the Kursk were poorly welded and contained unstable chemicals. And just a few months before the Wuhan plague lab leak, American diplomats who visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology reported back that the supposed level-4 biosecurity facility was dirty, unhygienic, badly-managed and that many staff had insufficient training. I also suspect that dangerous pathogens were being experimented with at the level-2 biosecurity Wuhan Centre for Disease Control.
Feature 2 – An oppressive closed system preventing problems being recognised and reported
I suspect that there were operating problems at Chernobyl long before the final disaster. But in a closed, oppressive, totalitarian system where the Party is always right and any criticism of any institution is immediately branded as criticism of the Party, there was probably no mechanism for Chernobyl workers to report any concerns. Similarly, people working with the Kursk’s new experimental torpedoes knew they were unstable and liable to overheat and explode. But this information was never allowed to reach anyone who could have taken action. And, we all saw what happened to the Chinese hospital doctor who first reported the emergence of a new disease in Wuhan.
Feature 3 – The authorities always try to cover up the disaster
When Chernobyl caught fire, the Soviet authorities tried to deny there was any problem and tried to cover up the scale of the disaster. With the Kursk torpedo exploding, the Russians refused the help of specialist ships with Norwegian and British rescue workers for several days. Instead the Russians tried to use their own badly-maintained and defective rescue equipment. When the Russians finally relented and allowed the Norwegian and British specialists to intervene, it was too late and the submarine crew, who had survived the initial torpedo explosions, had died from lack of air. As for the Wuhan lab-leak, the Chinese have ensured that the truth will never be discovered and have been helped in their cover-up by the craven and utterly corrupt Chinese-controlled World Health Organisation (WHO).
Democratic societies with their checks and balances
While we in the West are far from perfect, our more open societies mean that there tends to be less corruption, that problems can be reported and that there are often regulatory agencies who can help avoid disaster – there were no deaths at Three Mile Island, 31 died directly in the Chernobyl disaster and the U.N. estimated about another 4,000 suffered serious radiation poisoning. I doubt the Royal Navy would have dared load highly unstable experimental torpedoes onto one of its nuclear-powered submarines as someone would have reported the issues with the torpedoes. And I think we can be sure that if Gro Brundtland who served three terms as the 29th prime minister of Norway and as the director-general of the World Health Organization from 1998 to 2003 had still been running the WHO in 2019, the organisation would have acted much more quickly to contain the Chinese plague.
What new disasters are coming our way?
So, my hypothesis is that Chernobyl, Kursk and Wuhan are not isolated incidents. Instead, they are the inevitable results of the way one-party, totalitarian, communist societies operate.
As the West’s influence around the world diminishes and China’s and Russia’s influence increases, we can expect more disasters like Chernobyl, Kursk and Wuhan. Some are easy to spot now. For example, it’s clear that Chinese dams being built on the upper parts of the Mekong river will affect water flows and fish migration in countries like Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam:
Maybe Chinese greed will end up making the Mekong Delta just as wonderful as Russian corruption, stupidity and greed made the now dead, but once thriving, Aral Sea?
Around 60 million people rely on the Mekong for food and water.
It’s also clear that vast fleets of Chinese fishing vessels will plunder most of the world’s fish stocks impoverishing fishing communities around the world. There’s probably some U.N. body supposedly regulating fishing. But this is no doubt stuffed with corrupt Third-worlders and controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) so will be just as useless as the WHO.
There will be other such disasters coming our way. We don’t yet know what they are. But they will all be a result of the three main features of one-party, corrupt, totalitarian communist systems:
- slovenliness and corruption at all levels
- an oppressive closed system preventing problems being recognised and reported
- the authorities always try to cover up the disaster
Category: 
Interesting the parallels with the Rotherham child abuse and the Stafford hospital scandals. The SNP in Scotland also seem to be surrounded by similar scandals.
Covid, climate change & Brexit also have similarities with ideologues preferring to silence challengers and cover up truth.
Much like the catholic church persecuting Galileo. And Socrates!
Just been reading about the current managing director of the International Monetary Fund, one Kristalina Georgieva. She has an interesting CV.
A Bulgarian, Georgieva was born in Sofia into a family of bureaucrats. Her grandfather was a prominent Bulgarian revolutionary. Georgieva gained her PhD in Economics and MA in Political Economy and Sociology from the Karl Marx Higher Institute of Economics in Sofia, back in Iron Curtain days. A consummate bureaucrat, she rose to become first a European Commissioner, then a Vice-President of the World Bank.
On 29 September 2019, Georgieva was named the next managing director of the International Monetary Fund, to succeed the notorious Christine Lagarde. Normally, she would not be considered for the position (the tradition was that candidates could not be older than 65 at the start of their term), but following pressure from, er, French President Emmanuel Macron, the rule was waived for Georgieva.
On September 16th last year, a World Bank Ethics Committee report stated that then-Chief Executive Kristalina Georgieva applied “undue pressure” on staff to boost China’s ranking in the bank’s “Doing Business 2018” report, raising concerns about China’s influence at the World Bank.
Wow, who’d have ever imagined that a Marxist-trained political economist tasked with masterminding the entire international financial system might promote the interests of the Chinese Communist Party? Quelle surprise!
I wonder how many other products of Iron Curtain-era Marxist training have ended up cosily embedded in Western governments and bureaucracies?
I understand the points you are making, but socialism now dominates every western country and there is little difference between communism and socialism. Communism has a one party state, here we suffer from the delusion that democracy and voting makes us free. Look no further than the present parliament. We have an opposition supporting the government. Look around the world and every government has acted in the same way over covid, ignoring all their plans for dealing with a pandemic, and doing exactly what China did. What is democracy doing for us?
You focus on major incidents but look at the decline of the economy of the west. This is more important. I think it started in 1913 with the 16th Amendment allowing the federal government to raise taxes. This is when the socialists knew they could take over America. Then followed the end the gold standard and the creation of central banks with the endless printing of worthless money, when that did not work after the last crash they reduced interest rates to zero and now they are in a bigger mess with nowhere to go. All made worse by the ridiculous zero carbon policies and the shutdown of the economy for a virus that is not much different to flu. I would not want to live under the Chinese or Russian regimes but in energy policy they have leaders who are not set on destroying their countries, unlike the idiots in the west, and even worse most people in the west support these policies.
You focused on major incidents which they could not keep secret, but what about all the smaller incidents here that show how incompetent we are. Which was the biggest disaster, the Kursk, or the Titanic and Costa Concordia, both avoidable?
The Chernobyl reactor apparently was not a good design and they were doing experiments at the time of the explosion. But what about the Fukushima disaster which was also the result of a poor design, in that case not the reactor but the emergency power supply.
We may never know what happened at Wuhan, but if they were working on a dangerous pathogen it is certainly not SARS CoV2, which is no more dangerous than flu. The problems have been created by government policies and the imposition of an experimental and untested genetic therapy. Data collection has bern corrupted here and in the USA which is making it difficult to carry out statistical analyses. The USA had established an reporting system for deaths but they brought in a new system for Covid which is completely unsatisfactory and there is a legal process which should have been followed but which was ignored. We have also changed the way deaths are recorded. Analysis of the available data is producing nonsense. It is becoming increasingly obvious that PCR testing has produced predictions of cases that do not exist. The pandemic is one of testing and government policy, not a disease. Kary Mullis constantly warned that PCR should not be used for diagnosis and there are example of how it has failed in the past, a hospital Whooping cough outbreak that turned out to be just a cold, for example.
Look at the failure to catch the Yorkshire ripper, the Rachel Nickell case and more recently the four gay men who were murdered in Barking. Look also at Grenfell Tower and Aberfan. We are far from being perfect, even in the west and many small failures add up.
You mention dams in China. People need water. Isn’t China is doing what it has to do to supply its growing population and industry?
Focus on our problems first, and we have a lot.
The communist countries have their spectacular failures, just as the West does, but the people who are politicians, scientists, creators, CEOs, sports stars, etc., have always had all the freedom and privileges that they could desire.
In the West, failure is increasingly becoming rewarded, but the responsible people in communist countries pay a very high price for failure, such as losing their status completely and even being executed.
A case in point was the 2008 Chinese milk scandal, a significant food safety incident in China. The scandal involved milk and infant formula along with other food materials and components being adulterated with melamine. The chemical was used to increase the nitrogen content of diluted milk, giving it the appearance of higher protein content in order to pass quality control testing. Of an estimated 294,000 victims, 6 babies died from kidney stones and other kidney damage and an estimated 54,000 were hospitalised.
A number of trials were conducted by the Chinese government resulting in two executions, three sentences of life imprisonment, two 15-year prison sentences
No one was even jailed, as far as I know, for the mad-cow disease and the foot-and-mouth catastrophes. Never before has there ever been such insane reactions to two diseases. That is, until Covid-19 came along to put them into the shade. Indeed, it occurred to me that maybe those two insane overreactions, along with the huge HIV overreaction, were intended as training for Covid.
And, as I have just recalled, there was also the superbug scare story that ran for ages in which the overuse of antibiotics was said to be creating superbugs that are immune from antibiotics. That one seems to have disappeared.
As ever more diversity implementation takes place, which is really just a politically-correct term for allowing the less talented and competent into jobs that they would not get in an open job marketplace, are we going to see things increasingly going tragically wrong, such as planes falling out of the sky for technical reasons, etc.
As it is, the UK navy already has a very expensive aircraft carrier that has no planes.
Russia is already taking advantage of the stagnancy that has beset Boeing by producing its own MS-21-300 passenger plane.
Our form of totalitarianism is far more serious than communism. It is what Nietzsche called the values that pass undeniable judgement on everything. In short, woke political correctness. Value judgements that have little or nothing to do with reality. That attempt to turn reality on its head.
The people who are behind this drive are the seemingly liberal physiologically-exhausted nihilists who have used ostensible virtues, such as equality that the plebs cannot fail to support in a plebeian age, in order to infect the Church, the education system, the media and the body politic in order to be able to turn as much as possible on its head.
This highly negative state of affairs actually creates physiological exhaustion because the healthiest and most creative people get labelled as the ones to be avoided because of their non-compliance to the reverse values that pass judgement, such as the boldest individuals, who are almost always the intellectually fittest of men.
Communism does not create physiological exhaustion, just corruption, from which recovery is always possible.
The only way out of having almost comprehensive physiologically-exhausted leadership is to oust it. Achieving that is about as difficult as tasks get because it requires very long open and and direct actions, not the very long, lying, creeping subterranean actions that the physiologically exhausted used to gain their almost universal leadership in the first place.