Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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The Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Zeit, two of the most respected mainstream-left german newspaper just released back-to-back articles on the BND (german foreign intelligence) internal evidence pointing to the lab-leak theory being correct with 90%+. Not surprising, you think, and old news too boot? Well, as it turns out, they concluded this ... in 2020. And given the risk of bioweapon development this implies, they'd have been near-required to tell then-chancellor Merkel. And health ministry Jens Spahn. When the administration changed in 2021 to Scholz, he was also told with overwhelming likelihood. According to the two papers, all of them were in fact told personally by then-and-current BND president Bruno Kahl.
Similar to the US establishment, the german establishment at the time went on what can only be described as a hunt against even mentioning the possibility of a lab leak. To quote the top german establishment expert of the time, Christian Drosten: "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. [...] Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus. We support the call from the Director-General of WHO to promote scientific evidence and unity over misinformation and conjecture."
The source here matters a lot, since both of these are consistently pro-establishment in general and especially so during the Corona crisis. There is very little reason for them to publish this spuriously, and frankly it's a surprise they're willing to publish it even now.
Whether you believe the BNDs internal evidence or not doesn't matter. Whether you personally think that the lab-leak theory is correct doesn't matter (FWIW, I think most foreign intelligence service have an obvious bias towards conspiratorial thinking, so if they say 90%+, it's probably more in the 60%+ range). What does matter, however, is that our own government secretly concluded that the lab-leak theory is correct or at the very least highly plausible, but instead of supporting what they viewed as the truth or at least the open discourse on a key question, they actively supported slander and misinformation.
Tbh, I'm still kind of reeling about what to conclude after Corona. Due to some personal experiences, but also the generally repressive climate of the time combined with the information coming out now that most mainstream talking points were wrong, it was a major step in my own worldview realignment. In particular, I used to have the naive anti-conspiracy view that it's almost impossible to keep an important one going due to a single defection blowing everything up, even if smaller and/or more specific ones may happen. Nowadays I think through a smart combination of only telling people as much as they need to know while also making clear what they're supposed to think through scare tactics, slander and repression, arbitrarily large-scale conspiracies can keep going as long as enough people can be convinced it's important. A single defector isn't a problem, because it's trivial to present them as just an evil person spreading misinformation for personal gain.
I'm not even all that bothered by the governments lying about it anymore, it's all par for the course at this point. It's not even hard to come up with reasons that explain why they did it.
What bothers me is the utter failure of the skeptic, rationalist, and all adjacent movements that went all in for Faucci, even though none of this could pass a basic sniff test, let alone rational analysis.
My personal biggest gripe is the increasing alignment between nominally independent groups in general. The idea of separation of powers, even the cynical version, assumes that you have different people sitting in different institutes all working to increase their own power and thus fighting against another. But since I've become a scientist and interact with a wide range of other college-educated people, it's become clear to me that the university serves as a homogenization hub through spreading a mix of information ranging from mostly-honest to blatant propaganda and everything in-between. This has massively negative repercussions, since it aligns politicians, journalists, scientists, lawyers etc. to the same worldview & blind spots, which means they can't meaningfully keep each other in check. The rise of the NGO state-industry complex has strengthened this symbiotic relationship further, since it's a general-purpose honeypot that they all can benefit from with minimal oversight.
I don't think it's a coincidence that this information is released now - not only is the Corona crisis over, even many people have lost interest in talking about it. So it not only gets difficult to justify keeping it a secret, but it's also much easier for the Süddeutsche and the Zeit to pretend as if they hadn't been just as bad as everyone else.
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