Catching the Wuhan Flu in Tibet
Words matter, all right. Don't let the Commies tell you what you can say.
One day years ago I got into a NYC taxi. The usual map of Manhattan was posted in the back, but this one looked spanking new. My eye was drawn to Hell’s Kitchen, or rather to where Hell’s Kitchen used to be. Apparently, some chucklehead had decided that “Hell’s Kitchen” might put off the tourists, so they named it “Clinton.” Where on earth they got that name, in a city dominated by Democrats, I have no idea.
Words matter. Not because they are “violence,” as the Loony Left will tell you (Did I just hurt some Leftists by writing that? Who knows? Who knows?) but because memory and understanding are grounded in language. Language shapes our perception and our memory.
Controlling language means controlling thought and behavior and that does matter. So it behooves us all to watch when tinpot dictator wannabes (and real tinpot dictators) insist on changing words and that we all agree or go along with the change.
The Commies in China are keen to focus the world’s - and their restive population’s - attention on anything other than the corruption and rot at the heart of their one-party system. Everything those top-down, heavy handed control freaks do is in pursuit of perfecting their control over every damned thing they can.
They invaded Tibet in 1950 and have been trying ever since to impose Marxist atheistic dialectical materialism on a population of deeply devout Buddhists. Now that the Dalai Lama is getting inevitably closer to death, the Communists want to tell Tibetans that the Communist Party of China has the “authority” to choose, er, detect the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama. Yup - avowed Godless Commies will now discern the lama’s next incarnation which they of course are counting on dismaying Tibetans and thereby eroding over time the people’s Buddhist faith.
Always trying to play chess with history, the CCP has decided now is the time to change Tibet’s name.
For decades, Chinese officials and state media typically referred to “Tibet” in English-language communications, applying a name widely used across the West. That began to change in recent years, as China’s Foreign Ministry and a nationalistic party tabloid switched to using “Xizang,” the standard Romanization of the region’s Mandarin Chinese name that is pronounced, roughly, “shee-ZAHNG.”
Beijing has stepped up its usage of the “Xizang” label in recent months. At an academic seminar in August, Chinese scholars advocated replacing English references to “Tibet” with “Xizang,” a view that the party agency handling ethnic affairs promoted on social media. Two months later, the Chinese government arranged a diplomatic conference in the Tibetan city of Nyingchi, titled “Xizang Trans-Himalayan Forum for International Cooperation,” where Tibet was generally referred to as “Xizang” in English.
Major state-media outlets, such as the Xinhua News Agency, increasingly referred to “Xizang” in English-language reports.1
There is a lot more to the article in the Wall Street Journal which I urge you to read. My focus is on what the CCP means for Western Civilization and the rational world order. Everything Western Civilization was built on - starting with an uneasy mediation between Greek philosophy and the radical, upstart notion in the Hebrew Torah concerning the existence of One Utterly Unknowable First Cause. The tension between those two fonts of Western thought was palpable and often deadly right up until the European Enlightenment. (Truly brilliant Enlightentainment would have to wait a few more centuries to arrive….)
The Godless Commies loathe everything about the Western tradition of individually accountable humans with rights and responsibilities judged by their omniscient, omnipotent creator. The entire Marxist program is designed off of Feuerbach and Hegel waffling on about a universal dialectic leading to emergent truth and, apparently, Jew Haters blocking the Brooklyn Bridge because Hamas likes to murder Jews and cannot stand it when Jews fight back.
The older I get, the smarter Emmanuel Kant2 becomes. His insistence that the only true moral path is to act in every moment from a priori principles, irrespective of how others may view one’s actions, is the smartest thing human philosophy has come up with.
When the Wuhan Virus appeared in Wuhan, China, it was named, well, the Wuhan Virus. That was not surprising. People infected by ticks in Lyme, CT gave us Lyme’s Disease. Similarly for Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Ebola similarly has a geographical origin story.
The hypersensitive Commies in China and their Useful Idiots in the Western Media started screaming that “Wuhan Virus” was somehow “racist” - which I love, given how insanely racist the Han population of China is - and would lead to violence against Asians. Oh, right, because people bitten by ticks in America ask, “Are you from Colorado or Connecticut?” before beating them senseless.
Back to Kant. His elaboration of a working philosophical framework of transcendental idealism is the sole bridge between rationalism and empiricism and permits the moral human to also live as a rational human, without suffering cognitive disjunct or moral compromise. Sweet deal, huh?
Because the Commies place so much importance on demanding that foreigners bow to their linguistic wishes, it is my a priori categorical imperative that I will never do a damned thing the CCP demands I do. From the time it was detected to today, I have referred to the Wuhan Virus, the Wuhan Flu and so on by their proper names.
I kept doing so even when idiots accused me of “listening to Donald Trump;” my nomenclature I can assure you has zero to do with our likely next President. I pay as much attention to his wishes as I do to President Xi’s.
Long live Tibet.
I suggest you peruse The Critique of Pure Reason and The Critique of Judgment for an in-depth tour of transcendental idealism. You’ll thank me later.
Taiwan is having elections in a few days. It sounds like it will not be China friendly so it might get interesting.