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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Notes -
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.
And that was all done with just some light media slander and unspecified negative future career outcomes. Imagine what they can keep secret if the potential leakers all know that they could end up in prison for 40 years or mysteriously shot dead in their own driveway....
I think unspecified threats to your career and your social circle suddenly treating you like you were a kiddie-diddler is far more effective. Your monkeybrain can grok direct threats and you might go "fuck you" depending on your situation, even if your demise is 100% guaranteed, but it has far more trouble processing the kind of social ostracism that was deployed during covid. Most people can't handle it, and come up with ways to not ask too many questions even in the privacy of their own brain.
That’s just because you can picture social ostracization better, because it’s something we all risk every day. It’s more real to you. You’ve (hopefully) never had someone sit you down and put a briefcase full of money on one side of the table, and a list of the names and addresses of your entire family on the other side. Years of field data in places like Mexico show that such techniques can compel an otherwise good person to keep quiet about, or even participate in, just about anything.
Yeah, fair, that would be quite effective.
Such a standard policy for dealing with the Latin American judicial systems that it has a specific name- Plato o plomo. Literally ‘silver or lead’ but really ‘money or gunfire’.
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