The incredibly low bar for white people

Germany has more COVID-19 deaths than Iran but is still held up as an example of great coronavirus management. It’s really not. It’s just structural racism. The western world desperately needs a great white hope, and Germany is it.

Germany has over 150,000 confirmed cases and over 5,500 deaths. Vietnam — a country with a similar population, far less wealth, and a land border with China — has 268 cases and 0 deaths. Not a few deaths, ZERO. That’s what success in fighting coronavirus looks like, and it’s not Germany. Vietnam, however, is not white people, therefore they don’t count. Did you know Angela Merkel was a scientist?

Update: I’ve sadly had to update this just a few weeks later. Germany now has over 175,000 confirmed cases and 8,000 dead. Vietnam has just 56 more cases and still zero dead.

If you read the western press, truly successful countries like Vietnam, South Korea, and Taiwan are only held up as oriental curiosities, never as just human nations that could be learned from. They might as well be on Mars.

Instead, we get coverage of how well Angela Merkel speaks, all while studiously ignoring the horrific death toll in her country. Iran was covered as if it was completely falling apart, and yet the death toll there is almost exactly the same. What gives?

The western world still cannot understand that it has collapsed. Not in part, not just Trump, the whole rotten edifice has fallen down. Instead, they just grade themselves on a whites-only curve. Italy, France, and the UK have completely failed and America is telling people to drink bleach, so Germany is head of the class.

But in global terms, they’re still near the bottom. For all the science background of Merkel, all the wealth and manufacturing capability of Germany, by any objective measure they have failed. East Asian countries have limited their deaths to the hundreds. Many have suppressed the virus completely. That’s the global standard if you include non-white people. And it’s not some great oriental mystery. You don’t need to climb up to some mountain temple and study at the feet of a monk. It’s just boring old governance, much of it copied from the west.

Western people need to learn this. There is a world out there. It contains human beings who are not white that might teach you something. White people have relied on structural racism for so long (west good, east bad/strange) that they’ve become stupid. Their media needs to start covering their homelands like foreign countries, and start covering foreign countries like places that contain similar beings.

They need to stop twisting the story to put some white person in a heroic role — Angela Merkel, Jacinda Ardern — and just look at reality. They need to stop the knee-jerk dismissal of China and actually learn something. China has a whole bunch of problems but they somehow suppressed a terrible outbreak to zero. If all you learned from China is fear and blame, you’ve really missed the point.

If that’s too hard, then at least look at South Korea or Taiwan. If western people can listen to BTS they can surely learn something from the KCDC.

Western media and western people have got to wake up. Your arrogance is getting people killed, specifically you. If the west had looked east earlier and taken action they could have saved lives but even now — even with so many lives lost — they still can’t see.

For example, in a recent New York Times piece, they bemoan the lack of American leadership, but make little or no mention of the countries actually leading.

Germany and South Korea, both products of enlightened postwar American leadership, have become potent examples of best practices in the coronavirus crisis. (NYTimes)

Nevermind the fact that these countries are not American products, Germany and South Korea shouldn’t even be mentioned in the same sentence. Korea has 240 deaths. Germany has 5,500. What is the connection here? Both places that America bombed?

The article spends zero time on Korea (an actual success) and only talks about Germany (an objective failure). Taiwan, Vietnam, and Kerala (India) are not mentioned at all. They are unable to see or learn because of the white wool over their eyes.

It’s just racism. Now that America is obviously gone, they had to find a white hero somewhere, so they looked at the top of the failures and found Germany. Nevermind the fact that Germany did 22x worse than Korea despite having much more time and money, let’s get a quote from them. The western media grades white people on a curve, creating a literal hill for them to die on.

In order to make western readers feel better about themselves, they are reading stupid, racist articles that ultimately get them killed. And I don’t just blame this on an amorphous media, white people are really just blind. It’s not personal racism, it’s just structural. This was dangerous to everyone else for decades, but now it’s also dangerous to them.

We are witnessing the suicide of western civilization by stupidity and hubris. The greatest western contributions to this pandemic have been ‘what if everyone just gets the disease?’ and ‘shall we just kill our grandparents?’ It is only by this tremendously low bar that Germany is judged competent. If Merkel were in Korea, her government would have been overthrown (again). Instead, she’s getting applause. What a respectable failure. How well-spoken. She didn’t even mention bleach.

This bigotry of low expectations has to stop. We need to look at countries as comprised of equally capable human beings, just as the virus views us all as a long buffet. We must learn from the best, wherever and whatever color they are. Asian countries advanced because they copied from and adapted western institutions and ideas. If the west is too proud to learn back they’ll just die. Literally.

Let me be clear. Stop citing Germany as a success story. Germany is a failure. Drop the hubris, the structural racism, and learn something from the rest of the world. It might just save your life.

People have commented that Iran’s numbers are off, which they are. Every country’s are, Iran likely more than most. The point is that people were appalled at Iran’s numbers and yet not at Germany’s.