RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-coronavirus-could-imperil-putins-presidency-11587682524?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The path of the coronavirus pandemic in Russia has been similar to that of other countries: Denial gives way to fear, even despair. Covid-19 has exacerbated tensions and exposed political and economic inadequacies, testing the strength and legitimacy of institutions as well as confidence in national leadership. In this regard, the pandemic could hardly have come at a worse time for the Kremlin.

The days when an overconfident Russia dispatched planeloads of medical supplies to Italy, Serbia and the U.S. now seem like ancient history. As of Thursday there have been more than 57,999 confirmed cases, up more than 5,000 from Wednesday, and 57 more deaths for a total of 513. Those numbers are proportionate to about 131,731 infected and roughly 1,165 dead in the U.S.—numbers America hit before the end of March.

The independent Russian medical union Alliance of Doctors charges that the government is covering up the actual number of infections, so worse may be coming. Even officials are saying it. “I can tell you for sure that there has been no peak [in Covid cases] yet whatsoever,” said Mayor Sergei Sobyanin of Moscow, where more than half the infections and deaths have occurred. “We are at the foothills of the peak, not even in the middle.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15914/erdogan-approval-coronavirus

One of the laws Turkey’s rubber-stamp parliament passed before the recess allowed the release of tens of thousands of common criminals to ease overcrowding in jails and protect inmates from the coronavirus pandemic. The amnesty, however, excluded hundreds of political prisoners including journalists, writers, academics and social media users critical of Erdoğan’s authoritarian regime

In 2020, the collective fear is the coronavirus pandemic. And just as in the previous instances based on fear, it seems to be working in Erdoğan’s advantage.

“The people tend to unite behind strong leaders in times of national crisis like war, terror, security threats, disasters or pandemic.” — Özer Sencar, president of Metropoll, non-partisan pollster, Hurriyet, April 16, 2020.

When a group of military officers attempted a putsch to overthrow Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in July 2016, the Islamist strongman replied with two reflexes: survival, and a vigorous political campaign to make political gains from the failed coup. He succeeded in both.

Most Turks, including Erdoğan’s opponents, weary of decades of military coups, united behind him to resist the putsch that ended up killing 250 people and wounded more than 2,000. Erdoğan’s approval rating rose sharply from 45% before the failed coup to 67.6% in its aftermath. For many observers, that was not a surprise. Only a year earlier, Erdoğan had gambled over the Turks’ collective security concerns and won.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15923/iran-struggle-oil-price

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has tried to put a brave face on the latest setback to hit the regime, claiming that Iran is unlikely to suffer as much as other countries from the oil price drop because it is less reliant than others on crude exports.

If that were truly the case, then Tehran would not be asking the IMF for a bailout, and Mr Rouhani, together with Javad Zarif, Iran’s Foreign Minister, would not be begging Washington to remove sanctions.

The truth of the matter is, for all the regime’s attempts to claim it has everything under control, that the country is teetering on the brink of collapse, and the ayatollahs are fast running out of options to save themselves.

At a time when Iran’s Islamic regime is already facing unprecedented pressure over its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, as well as its disastrous handling of the economy, the global slump in oil prices could well prove to be the final straw for the ayatollahs.

Even before this week’s dramatic collapse in global oil prices, which saw the key gauge of U.S. crude prices, the West Texas Intermediate benchmark, tumble into negative territory for the first time in history, the mullahs were already under intense pressure over their catastrophic running of the country during their four decades in power.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/facing-new-crises-macron-repackages-old-bad-ideas/

The French president sees COVID-19 as yet another opportunity to deepen European integration.

At the end of last week, the Financial Times published a lengthy interview with French president Emmanuel Macron in which Macron referred no fewer than nine times to humility and may, occasionally, have meant it:

I don’t know if we are at the beginning or the middle of this crisis — no one knows. . . . There is lots of uncertainty and that should make us very humble.

Macron’s humility only goes so far, and will not have been encouraged by his starstruck interviewers, who write that he is “overtly intellectual [and] always brimming with ideas.”

They are right, but unfortunately, Macron’s ideas are old ideas, if sometimes repackaged.

In his view, the interviewers report, COVID-19 represents an opportunity to put an end to the “hyper-financialized world,” a phantom that exists mainly in the fevered imaginations of communitarians, academics who refer to “late capitalism,” and European politicians. (Recall that, shortly after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, an earlier French president, Nicolas Sarkozy — seemingly oblivious to the political and economic developments of the previous hundred years — announced that laissez-faire capitalism was “finished.”)

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/katie-hopkins-video-life-under-lockdown-uk-frontpagemagcom/

Britain’s freedom fighter unveils The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

[This video is brought to you by a David Horowitz Freedom Center-Glazov Gang collaboration. Please help the Freedom Center continue to bring you these vital perspectives on the news – perspectives that you won’t find anywhere else. Donate to the Freedom Center HERE.]

Subscribe to the Glazov Gang‘s YouTube Channel and follow us on Twitter: @JamieGlazov.

This new Glazov Gang episode features Katie Hopkins, U.K.’s freedom fighter. Katie unveils Life Under Lockdown in the U.K., shedding a sober and telling light on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Don’t miss it!

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/gordon_chang_calls_the_coronavirus_probably_a_deliberate_leak_and_probably_an_act_of_war_.html

We had a Zoom meeting with China expert Gordon Chang, author of The Coming Collapse of China, last night and learned that Chang thinks the “release” of the coronavirus into the public sphere was either “accidental,” which he disputes, or deliberate, to gain a march on the U.S., which is out of favor and being degraded and derided by the important media and groups in China.

In other words, it was no “wet market” selling bats for soup.  It was, as some have been saying for…months, the Level 4 Biolab, which failed U.S. inspection as far back as 2018, in safety protocols as a Level 2 hazard, rather than a Level 4 safety security, making it likelier that such haphazard safeguards could readily enable a leak or two.  Refrigerator seals crucial to containment were…breached.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, Chang warns, is no friend of the United States.  Nor must we rely on him for any of our vital supply lines.

Although unquestionably at the top of the Mainland ladder, now, Chairman Xi, who leads the Chinese Communist Party, CCP, is not a guaranteed lifelong mainstay of the party or the country, as he has been lauded after jockeying himself into the permanent seat a few scant years ago — as there are tectonic rumbles against his leadership evident to observers today.

In keeping with this observation, Chang says we must stop giving China our business, particularly in critical arenas like pharmaceuticals, and stop behaving favorably toward China, as we do with our allies.  Chang repeats that this entire coronavirus saga, over months of death, infection, fear, and barely managed emergency, is nothing short of an all-out war.  Xi knew of, and tried to maximize, our dependency on China to resupply our personal protective equipment and other necessities.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15915/coronavirus-west-911-moment

Commentators and politicians today worry that the current situation might trigger a new cold war with China. They fail to understand that, in a similar but much more far-reaching pattern to the jihadist conflict, China has been fighting a cold war against the West for decades, while we have refused to recognise what is going on…. Like 9/11, Covid-19 must now force the West to wake up and fight back.

For decades China has been working on its three-pronged strategy: building its economy and fighting capability, including intelligence, technology, cyber and space as well as hard military power; developing global influence to exploit resources and secure control; thrusting back and dividing the US and its capitalist allies.

China’s arms exports are not motivated primarily by revenue generation, but as a means to impose influence and control, create proxies and challenge the US.

Chinese investment penetrates every corner of the UK, giving unparalleled influence here as in so many countries. Plans to allow Chinese investment and technology into our nuclear power programme and 5G network will build vulnerability into our critical national infrastructure of an order not seen in any other Western nation. Even the BBC, which receives funding from China, has produced and promoted a propaganda video supporting Huawei to the alarm of some of its own journalists. All this despite MI5’s repeated warnings that Chinese intelligence continues to work against British interests at home and abroad.

The coronavirus pandemic is a 9/11 moment. Al Qaida had been at war with the West for years before the destruction of the twin towers. But it took that barbarism to galvanise its largely supine prey into action.

Now we have Covid-19. Unlike 9/11 we have seen no evidence so far that China deliberately unleashed this virus on the world. There is certainly evidence, however, that it resulted from the policies of the Chinese Communist Party and that Beijing’s habitually duplicitous and criminally irresponsible actions allowed it to spread around the globe, leading to tens of thousands of deaths that could have been avoided.

Commentators and politicians today worry that the current situation might trigger a new cold war with China. They fail to understand that, in a similar but much more far-reaching pattern to the jihadist conflict, China has been fighting a cold war against the West for decades, while we have refused to recognise what is going on. The reality, in Beijing’s book, is that the cold war between China and the West, which began with the communist seizure of China in 1949, never ended. Despite the Sino-Soviet split and subsequent US-China rapprochement in the early 1970s, for the Chinese leadership the US was still the implacable enemy.

Like 9/11, Covid-19 must now force the West to wake up and fight back.