Crisis brings out worst kinds of disinformation

At a time when we are all locked down in probably the most frightening and dangerous pandemic in the past century, it is politics as usual for some of the key players. While jobs are lost by the thousands, economies crash and thousands of people are dying from COVID-19, the instinct to derive political advantage from this tragedy is simply too much for some nations to overcome.

Take U.S. President Donald Trump.

In the first two months that COVID-19 was beginning to kill people in dozens of countries including the United States, the president not only downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic, but also blamed China for its origins. At one point he was labelling the disease the “China” virus or the “Wuhan” virus in an obvious effort for to blame the Chinese government for loosing the plague on the world. It is only now that the United States has become the epicentre for the pandemic and thousands of Americans are already dead and thousands more are predicted to die in the next several weeks, that he has stopped putting the blame on the Chinese government.

Now, Beijing is not blameless in trying to cover up its lack of action in the first month or so that the virus began to spread in the city of Wuhan. The Chinese government did what all dictatorships do when something suddenly goes very wrong in its “perfect” society — it tries to cover up.

But China did not create COVID-19. COVID-19 isn’t a Chinese weapon. COVID-19 emerged, apparently in Wuhan, because — as far as anyone can tell — the virus jumped from the animal world to the human world, an event that has happened before in other places and which will no doubt happen again.

But President Trump is certainly not alone in trying to weaponize COVID-19. China, Russia and Iran are each doing so with somewhat different aims in mind.

Russia has been using social media to drive wedges between the NATO allies by alleging that the virus was introduced into central and eastern Europe by the U.S. military. By targeting already nervous populations with stories that U.S. military personnel had introduced the virus to the region, or that the planned NATO exercise called Defender Europe would go ahead as planned in Lithuania (an outright lie since the exercise was cancelled due to the pandemic), the Kremlin is clearly trying to sow dissent in the one Baltic state that is considered to have the weakest resolve to remain steadfast in NATO.

In Lithuania and elsewhere, anti-Western social media, fake news reports and hacked websites are aiming to divide NATO nations and blame the United States in particular for instigating the pandemic.

The Chinese now rival the Russians in their disinformation campaign. Far from admitting its own culpability in trying to cover up the initial spread of COVID-19, China is busy fostering conspiracy theories about the origins of the virus (that it began outside China) and attack Western leaders for blaming the pandemic on a deliberate effort by China to destabilize Western economies.

Iran, too, has been busy with its own disinformation campaign. In the last few days of 2019, Iran partnered with Russia and China in a naval exercise in the northern Indian Ocean. Now Iran adds its voice to the Russian and Chinese disinformation campaign partly by repeating Russian and Chinese fables but also by adding own twist that, again, the virus is an American and Israeli attack on Muslim countries. No matter that both the United States and Israel are battling COVID-19 at home.

For the most part, the world is too busy fighting this pandemic to pay close attention to the efforts of Russia, China and Iran to cause as much trouble as they can for the West, but they obviously are looking at the long run to drive divisions among NATO partners, convince their own populations that they are not at fault for the ravages of this disease, and lay the groundwork for future disinformation campaigns when the immediate danger of the virus begins to subside.

We like to think that when a ship is sinking, everyone pulls together because, literally, everyone is in the same boat. Unfortunately that is more myth than reality. Like looters in a natural disaster zone, such tragedies do bring out the best in most people, but they also feed the worst instincts in others.

THE KREMLIN IS CLEARLY TRYING TO SOW DISSENT IN THE BALTIC STATE OF LITHUANIA.