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.
So, now we know they lied - which we knew for a long time - and now we have an undeniable proof they lied. The question is - will there be an consequences at all, or the society would just say "well, oops, tough cookies, nothing to do about it" and move on, to the next Big Lie, and the next one after that?
I am not very optimistic about that - even in the US, while Trump was elected, I don't see the society en masse realigning enough to deliver real consequences to the liars. The folks on the right who hated them on principle, still hate them. The folks on the left who defended them on principle, still do. The middle-ground folks are largely eager to forget everything and move on - and to believe The Experts the same way next time, because how can you not believe The Experts - are you one of those awful Science Deniers that The Experts warned us about?! And that's the US, where some degree of irreverence to the establishment has always been a virtue. In Europe, I don't have any hope at all for any change at all.
As usual life is a bit more complicated than that. The medical experts still don't believe in the lab leak, and they have explanations when asked that sound convincing but I don't have the expertise to evaluate. You don't have to believe, and it's entirely possible they were told what to think and are now rationalizing it, but that doesn't change that their is a counter narrative to this explanation which is still present, and is quite potent.
I doubt the truth is particularly simple.
This means that anything as rock solid as "undeniable proof they lied" is unlikely to apply to most, and those it does apply to it would be impossible to prove.
I agree that a lab leak seems like a great explanation, but I don't have the expertise to evaluate if that's more likely than normal transmission explanation and we have to take a beat and admit to ourselves that a lot of devotion to the lab leak hypothesis stems from frustration that it wasn't allowed to be considered in the moment, not from the fact that it honestly seems more epistemically reasonable.
I am not talking about one specific medical expert, which can honestly be convinced it's zoonotic (or not). I am talking about governmental and scientific establishment that have been for extended time pushing the dogma that only one version of the events is possible, and others are not just incorrect, but wild conspiracy theories driven by ignorance and racism, and anyone who even considers them, even gives them a platform by discussing it, should be immediately expelled from the polite society. This is what the big lie was, and this is what should have lead to consequences. Disagreement about complex subjects is normal. Suppressing one of the sides - and yet, with knowledge that there are at least very good and very strong arguments behind it - and making openly discussing the merits and arguments of the sides impossible - this is the big problem. It's not taking one side that must be rejected - many very smart people and very honest people sometimes took a side that turned out to be wrong, and there's nothing shameful in that if they honestly defended what they thought was true with honest arguments - but trying to put the jackbooted foot on the scale is what is wrong. And what makes it infuriatingly wrong is that at the same time they knew that what they are suppressing is not some random cookery (which shouldn't be suppressed either, but at least here you could understand why they made this mistake) but the position that had at least as strong, if not better, argument than their own. It was pure anti-scientific and anti-societal exercise of power, and society should have reacted to it much stronger than it did. Since it did not, it will happen again.
Absolutely agree with most of this - suppression happened and was a problem, but just because of that doesn't mean we for sure have a consensus/lies.
Again, my point is that the lie wasn't "it's zoonotic". The lie was "it's zoonotic and there's nothing to discuss anymore, and anybody who keeps saying it's possible that it's not zoonotic is a racist idiot". "The truth is X" may be true or false, and we may not know which for a while, but "the consensus is X and there's no good argument for Y" is a proven lie. It still may turn out X is true, but - at that point of time - the claim that there was no good argument against X is what was the lie. And that was definitely a deliberate lie, not a mistake, because people who claimed it knew that there was a good argument against zoonosis - good enough to convince BND. Maybe BND was ultimately duped - it can happen. But it at least established a strong controversy and not a consensus. However this controversy is resolved, the lie had happened.
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