Which of These Is 2020’s Greatest “Crime against Humanity”?
The concept of “crimes against humanity” has evolved through the jurisdictions of international courts.
The United Nations (U.N.) notes that the concept of “crimes against humanity” has evolved “through the jurisdictions of international courts.” In the U.N.’s opinion, the 1998 Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court (the Rome Statute) “is the document that reflects the latest consensus among the international community on this matter.”
Article 7 of the Rome Statute states:
For the purpose of this Statute, ‘crime against humanity’ means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack [emphasis mine].
The acts in themselves include many crimes including murder, enslavement, enforced disappearance, etc. and also “other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.”
The U.N. adds:
In contrast with genocide, crimes against humanity do not need to target a specific group. Instead, the victim of the attack can be any civilian population, regardless of its affiliation or identity.
Systemic crimes by communist regimes, such as the Holodomor (the famine manufactured by the Soviets in Ukraine) and the Great Leap Forward (Chairman Mao’s “reconstruction” that killed 45 million) have been described as “crimes against humanity.”
Calendar 2020: A Most Unusual Year
Human Rights Watch (HRW), which bills itself as an independent NGO, produces an annual report which claims to “scrupulously investigate abuses.” Virtually every nation gets a mention in their 652-page 2020 report. Here is a sample:
- “Iranian law considers acts such as ‘insulting the prophet,’ ‘apostasy,’ same sex relations, adultery, and certain nonviolent drug-related offenses as crimes punishable by death.” Numerous executions are carried out.
- In Russia, “torture and other ill-treatment [of those accused or convicted] remained widespread; especially in pretrial detention and prisons.”
- “Saudi Arabia applies Sharia (Islamic law) as its national law. There is no formal [tightly-worded] penal code,” which allows judges and prosecutors to “convict people on a wide range of offenses under broad, catch-all charges such as ‘breaking allegiance with the ruler’ or ‘trying to distort the reputation of the kingdom.’”
The 2020 HRW report, however, lists the wrongs of 2019. Not since WWII has there been a year in which almost every human adult was adversely affected by one global event, when even the topic of conversation around the globe converged on the same issue so frequently. But we shall not await HRW’s report on the injustices of 2020.
Instead, let me submit for your consideration an unusual account that will not make it into the U.N.’s files or the left-liberal HRW’s catalog of abuses. Nothing in the list below will test the Rome Statute or secure a trial in the hallowed international courts of justice.
But first, let’s remind ourselves of the most critical ingredient for the thriving of humanity.
The Quintessential Nature of Humanity
Human beings are organisms capable of directing themselves, governing and even manufacturing, their emotions. They can also modify, physiologically, the very source of directedness and emotion (i.e., the brain) with purpose and practice (neuroplasticity).
Autonomy is a primal source of joy, creativity, and productivity.
This self-directedness (autonomy), is a primal source of joy, creativity, and productivity. It does not follow that we must each secure knowledge in every field from cooking to medicine to virology. In a world full of specialization, we can decide to follow experts we choose to trust. In a free-speech world, we may make errors in seeking and following experts that turn out to be wrong, but reality promptly corrects wrongheaded science. Science, when unhindered by willful mind-criminals, never goes backward.
For more on why autonomy, or self-directedness, is the primary psychological need of humanity at large, see The Number 1 Psychological Need of Human Beings.
Yes, we do live in societies. Here’s philosopher Ayn Rand on the key to proper societal living:
The precondition of a civilized society is the barring of physical force from social relationships—thus establishing the principle that if men wish to deal with one another, they may do so only by means of reason: by discussion, persuasion and voluntary, uncoerced agreement.
It’s a “crime against humanity” to force humans to act against their better judgment.
It’s thus a “crime against humanity” to force humans to act against their better judgment, to coerce them into accepting the rule of “wise men.” It’s even worse to hoodwink them into thinking that the unbiased counsel of experts is freely available to citizens via governments, and by those who have assumed the responsibility of holding governments to account (the media). So deceived, humanity, willingly but unknowingly, acts against its own interest.
I submit to you, the reader, that there is no greater moral crime than this deception.
The Year 2020’s Most Egregious Crimes against Humanity
Our foundation laid, we are now in a position to call out the worst abuses of this calendar year.
A caveat, here. Much of this foundation was laid across several essays that were published on Savvy Street through 2020, and like the paragraph on autonomy above, are summaries of longer arguments. Hyperlinks are provided for those who wish to dig deeper.
- Green Ideology Murdered People, Destroyed Property, and Burned Livestock
The year 2020 erupted with monstrous bushfires in Australia. The bulk of these, it was determined, did not have a natural cause such as lightning strikes (for which advanced meteorology keeps an accurate tab on locations and timing), but arson.
However, arson was the catalyst, the ignition, not the underlying cause.
Simply put, any sustained fire needs three elements: ignition, oxygen, and fuel. But when the fuel—the forest canopy, runs for miles as a single, unbroken circuit, all that a monstrous crown fire needs is one spark. And governments, by stealth, have been opposing the significant breaking of these fire circuits. For more detail, see The Reason “Green Ideology” Can Light Catastrophic Fires in Australia, and “Green” Science Is as Bogus as “Scientific Socialism.”
By the end of the northern summer, the western United States, too, was engulfed by record-breaking but preventable mega fires that claimed or destroyed human lives and other species. As children and their grandmothers were burned alive, mass media peddled the false narrative of the primary cause being “climate change.”
And yet, the Climate Racket’s abuses against humanity are not limited to forest fires— a reversal of fossil fuel usage would be catastrophic for civilization.
- Was It Criminal Negligence or Design? China and the Virus
Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a Chinese virologist, was involved in investigating the first reported outbreak of COVID-19 in the world in Wuhan. In April 2020, she fled China and came to the U.S., where she sought refuge.
She later claimed, on several U.S. channels including Fox News that the COVID-19 virus was engineered in a lab—that the genome fingerprint reveals a manufacture—“a cow with a deer’s head, a rabbit’s ears, and a monkey’s hands cannot arise in nature [minute 2.30 to 2.40];” that the wet market origination story was a smokescreen. Dr. Lan also asserted that the World Health Organisation (WHO) was complicit, courtesy China’s intrusive domination of many developing countries via strategic lending (the Belt and Road Initiative) and its subversive machinations.
Dr. Lan’s claims may be false. But they are being suppressed by mass media despite other virologists making similar claims. Google raises only the dismissals to the top of its search engine; its algorithms, it appears, are designed to promulgate the establishment narrative.
Even if the virus was lab engineered, its escape into the world may have resulted from negligence rather than intent. But, at the very least, in the initial phase of the pandemic, China actively suppressed information that could have saved countless lives—this is not disputed. That suppression of vital information alone marks it as a morally heinous crime.
If we consider the more sinister interpretation of events, the question arises: Can the Chinese Communist Party be this evil? Let’s recall Holodomor, a communist-party manufactured famine that killed around 10 million.
But why would China intentionally dampen its own economy at the cost of gaining only in relative terms? Even if it knew that WHO, CDC, and other public health agencies would create the conditions that would devastate the world’s economies; that laying a platform for a Democratic Party win in the U.S. was just another bonus.
The sinister take sounds far-fetched (it did, to me, at first) until one reads up on China.
Hence the sinister take sounds far-fetched (it did, to me, at first) until one reads up on China. Then even the sinister version sounds plausible.
Readers wishing to get up to speed on China could start with books on China by Newt Gingrich or Michael Pillsbury (Trump’s China expert), or first read essays about the dark secret of China’s economic domination here, and of China’s quest for global domination in a two-part essay linked here: Part I and Part II.
- WHO, CDC, and Public Health Agencies’ Crime against Humanity
What if the virus arose in nature and escaped China inadvertently? The public health agencies are not exonerated by that hypothesis.
What if the virus arose in nature and escaped China inadvertently? The public health agencies are not exonerated by that hypothesis.
Early in 2020, there were plenty of signs of asymptomatic carry and a cure as the immune system overcame the virus, and also evidence that certain treatments, if given in the initial stages of the disease, were extremely effective.
Never in human history have vaccines been invented, tested, manufactured on a grand scale, and distributed in a year or two from the identification of a virus. If the disease was spreading fast asymptomatically, if promising treatments helped dramatically reduce fatalities and intensity, the solution was obvious: natural herd immunity (while conveying information about who was most vulnerable and what they could do to reduce their risk). Prior carriers are identified by simple, pin-prick blood tests that reveal long-term antibodies.
But health agencies actively pooh-poohed studies of antibody testing and refused to engage on the cardinal numbers that really mattered. Hospitals inflated deaths by COVID to get access to more funds and the agencies turned a blind eye. Fraudulent studies that demonized HCQ were published in the world’s most prestigious medical journals. Studies that did have valid data deliberately researched late-stage administration, which had never been touted as an effective treatment. Did the deniers commit mass murder? Any national public health agency that had stayed objective and committed to science could have saved countless lives.
Advised wrongly to create mass isolations and lockdowns, some governors and governments simply rolled over and destroyed livelihoods, cratered economies, worsened mental health, aggravated other diseases, and topped it all with papering over the problems they created with fiat money paper “stimuli” that will come back to haunt us in the next decade.
And now WHO has even rewritten the very definition of herd immunity to be one that’s reached only via mass vaccination. Entertaining conspiracy theories just got easier.
- The Enablers: Mass Media and Academe’s Capitulation Is a Crime
The neo-Marxists long march through our institutions began nearly a century ago. The critical capture was of academe, and then, media.
Economics was an easy prey once Keynes published his outlandish departure from logic. The humanities were re-erected with “grievance studies,” a scientific hoax. Mass media’s shift away from objectivity toward leftist advocacy masquerading as journalism was predicated on the falsification provided by “peer-reviewed” journals, which, in the humanities, had become subtle advocates for unreason.
Restrained by the First Amendment in the U.S., mass media used European regulation to strangle the multinational tech giants like Facebook, Twitter, and Google (owner of YouTube). Inventing pseudo-objective paradigms like “fake news” and “hate speech,” they succeeded in flooding the social media public square with neo-Marxist bias.
Mainstream media used to report facts, coloring only their opinions. But, by mid-2020, wholly consumed by a hatred of Donald Trump, foaming at the mouth from their failure in 2016 to impose the establishment-elect, the media totally abdicated its fundamental role of news reporting. Violent riots became mere protests. Uncomfortable interpretations were dismissed as conspiracy theories; the phrase itself became associated only with “wild conjectures.”
The 2020 U.S. presidential election was reported in a scripted way. The reported results are almost magical: (1) Biden managed to secure victory while also losing in almost every bellwether county across the country. No presidential candidate has been capable of such electoral jujitsu until now. (2) Trump became the only incumbent president in U.S. history to lose his reelection while his own party gained seats in the House of Representatives. (3) Biden managed to gather a record number of votes while consistently trailing President Trump in measures of voter enthusiasm. (4) Trump set a record for most primary votes received by an incumbent when more than 18 million people turned out for him in 2020. Yet Biden prevailed in the general election turning a century’s worth of precedent on its head.
None of that was proof of electoral fraud. But the claims kept piling up, including in sworn affidavits. However, no questions were raised, no investigative journalism budgets allocated. It’s clear that the watchdogs have become the cheerleaders for one side. Sans only the pom-poms.
Have Your Say
Let’s recall the Rome Statute’s key criteria for labeling a wrong a “crime against humanity”:
Intentionally causing great suffering, an attack that is widespread or systematic, and directed against any civilian population at large.
Which of these four, do you, the reader, believe to be the most egregiously heinous criminals against humanity of the year 2020?
Using these criteria, which of these four, do you, the reader, believe to be the most egregiously heinous criminals against humanity of the year 2020—the green ideologues, the Chinese Communist Party, the public health agencies, or the media & academe enablers?
Or do we need to add to this catalog of misfortune? Savvy Street welcomes your opinion (please do so by clicking on the “Have Your Say” button on the site or have your say on the platform where this essay is shared).
Note: My vote goes to the enablers, their capitulation in the free world amounts to a concerted attack on truth itself—causing incalculable long-term damage, enabling many a “crime against humanity.” Unless, of course, China did willfully engineer and export a mutating virus, which has already claimed over 1.7 million lives, and infected over 80 million. The pandemic has provided the impetus for a neo-Marxist reset of the world.
Apologies to all our readers and benefactors for ending an eventful year with a discouraging reminder of how humanity has been duped. We do wish you all a blue-ribbon 2021, but caution that adverse winds, augmented now by the Great Reset, continue to blow against humanity.
And fight them we must. For in that fight lies our salvation.
About the Author: Vinay Kolhatkar
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