PM Modi gave a powerful address about the crisis in Afghanistan, the cost of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the need for reform at the UN

The Indian media has just reported that China has deployed tens of thousands of PLA troops and encampments along the India-Tibet border.

At the proceedings of this year’s UN General Assembly in New York City, a new global order was on display. In a disjointed speech, US President Joe Biden failed to explain his disastrous retreat from Kabul or hold Communist China to account for causing a global pandemic. China’s strongman Xi Jinping issued a baleful warning to any “challenges” to “China’s Rise”. Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave a powerful address about the crisis in Afghanistan, the cost of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the need for reform at the UN. Only one Asian nation has a seat on the Security Council -- the People’s Republic of China, which has infiltrated all levers of UN power to ensure that democratic India will be denied a seat at the table.

Of all the major powers, it is India that faces the greatest risk from the new terrorist super state in Afghanistan, which has declared Communist China as its new “global partner”. The Taliban is now ranked the eighth largest army in the world, thanks to Mr Biden’s inexplicable decision to abandon billions worth of weaponry and the huge Bagram airbase near Kabul to the Taliban. An Indian diplomat posted from New Delhi: “We were not consulted, we were not forewarned. Can we ever trust the USA again?”

Since the start of the global lockdown in March 2020, the American media has run cover for the Communist Party of China, pushing the narrative that China had “handled the virus much better than the West”. This same corporate media will not cover India’s success in containing the virus with Ivermectin, and attacks India over human rights while ignoring China’s massive concentration camps. Palki Sharma of Gravitas broke the story of how the New York Times was looking for a reporter to portray India in a negative light. India does not operate a global propaganda machine to spin power projection, but every major city in the United States is peppered with news boxes of China Daily, the bearer of the CPC’s agitprop. China Daily is also delivered to every US congressional office, despite strong objections from several senators. (I don’t recall the former Soviet Union’s Tass having such access during the Cold War.)

Since President Biden took office in January 2021, trust in the media has collapsed in the United States, as multiple crises overwhelm the nation; gas lines, shortages, inflation, the invasion at the southern border, where over two million migrants have entered the US without receiving any virus or disease testing. Americans are truly appalled by the callous indifference of the Biden administration to the catastrophe in Kabul. In recent polls, nine out of 10 Americans now view the CPC as a dangerous entity, and many support China paying reparations of $15 trillion for the losses suffered in the pandemic and are alarmed by President Biden’s appeasement of the Chinese.

As the CPC expanded its power and influence, democratic societies have witnessed a shocking erosion of civil liberties and press freedom, big tech censorship, unconstitutional lockdowns and mandates, as citizen protests are met with increasing violence. Is it merely a coincidence?

Tenzing Lobsang, a Tibetan political prisoner now living in New York City, says: “First the CPC exported their virus, now they are exporting their police state.”

This was the great failure of the West: maintaining the Kissinger Doctrine of the “special engagement” with the CPC when the rationale for the policy was nullified after the Berlin Wall collapsed. In 1989, when Mikhail Gorbachev allowed the peaceful dissolution of the USSR, he visited Beijing in May, and was cheered by the students who had gathered at Tiananmen Square to mourn the passing of Hu Yaobang, the reformer who was exiled by Chairman Mao. When the tanks rolled in for the kill on June 4, Deng Xiaoping made it clear that he was not going to cede the Hammer & Sickle.

And what was the American response? Henry Kissinger actually defended Deng’s slaughter of the students. In 1994, President Bill Clinton delinked trade and human rights and got the CPC into the World Trade Organisation in 2000. The Western elites, anxious to cut lucrative deals in the white-hot Chinese economy, normalised the CPC’s totalitarian system, the concentration camps, secret police, religious persecution and censorship, and assured that market capitalism and the Internet would conjure up democracy. Doug Schoen, author of The End of Democracy, observes: “In hindsight, this assumption was incredibly naïve.”

On October 2 and 3, Chinese PLA Air Force fighter jets invaded Taiwanese airspace as Chinese engineers were photographed touring the Bagram airbase, located 3.149 km from captive Xinjiang. The Indian media has just reported that China has deployed tens of thousands of PLA troops and encampments along the India-Tibet border. In the US media there is very little reporting of this, or the Evergrande default, or the massive power shortages all across the Chinese mainland. Gordon Chang of the Gatestone Institute warns: “China’s internal problems make Xi more dangerous, it’s is a very perilous situation with all the elements of aggression in place.”

Will the Western powers sit on their hands and blush if the PLA strikes Taiwan, India or Japan? What cards will they have to play when they have willingly handed critical computer codes and factories to the Chinese Communist Party in their quest for profits? Rudyard Kipling comes to mind: “At the end of the flight stood a tombstone white, with the name of the late deceased, an epitaph drear: ‘A Fool lies here, who tried to hustle the East’.”