Opinion: China has us all seeing red, from critics to supporters

What drove a normally civil letter writer to blow up with putrescible prose over my views on China and coronavirus, wonders Peter Gleeson.

ONE of the great joys of writing newspaper columns is the wonderful feedback that goes with the territory – the good, the bad and the ugly.

Most people are incredibly polite and respectful, even though they may clearly disagree with the sentiment of a column. Some are visceral, others dumb.

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Like the State Government employee who invited me to kill myself, but wrote his 800-word essay from his government computer, on taxpayer time. His career flatlined the Tuesday morning he hit send.

Then there’s readers like Merv Bartlett, one of the true gentlemen of our many contributors, a man who worked on the railways for years, who mostly writes with remarkable lucidity.

Except on China, where he seems to have a blind spot, or should that be red spot.

As you can see from his putrescible prose below. Mr Bartlett has got his knickers in a knot because I believe China has something to hide by vehemently opposing an independent inquiry into how coronavirus started.

Did it start in a so-called wet market with a bat? Did it start in a lab, man-made by some Chinese scientist? Was it transported to planet Earth by aliens?

Whatever the outcome, we deserve to know, so we as mankind can make sure it never happens again. China needs to know. Everybody needs to know.

Merv, the evidence is in. The Chinese – more to the point, their grubby Communist Government – are trying to cover up the worst health crisis seen in a century. And it is people like Merv Bartlett that are waving them through. Nothing to see here.

Merv suggests I’ve been on the sauce and he’s right. Tomato sauce. I have it on everything, much to my wife’s chagrin.

He questions whether I’ve gone insane, describing me as a “rabid cocksure and arrogant

Australian who’s lost every vestige of common sense, practicality, tolerance and a knowledge of what racism actually means.’’

Gawd. Do me a favour, Merv, send me the number of a psychiatrist. I’ll need a good shrink to sort those personality defects out.

Merv then goes on to defend the cunning, conniving, secret ways of the Communist Chinese.

A country that kills people who express honest, passionate views like Merv Bartlett. In fact, if Merv Bartlett had written that letter in China, replacing my name with the dictator Xi Jinping, he’d be in a gulag now, or worse, be shot dead and they’d bill his family for the cost of the bullet.

Merv wouldn’t last five minutes in China – a country that suppresses any public criticism from its subjects.

Australia has been good to people like Merv Bartlett. It is terribly sad that he is the one here not putting our country first.

By defending Communist China, he exposes himself as an emperor with no clothes, a man prepared to go into bat for a cruel, secretive despot.

My goal is not to cause animosity between Australia and “our Chinese friends’’.

My goal is to point out that the Chinese Government are not our friends.

They are opportunistic bullies, who have a long-term plan to rule the world.

Dare I suggest they are cocksure and arrogant?

READ MERV’S LETTER

Dear editor

Your highly paid assistant Mr Peter Gleeson sure gives the impression he’s been hitting the sauce going by (last week’s) sneering comment about Australia’s best and most reliable trading partner: China.

For a minute or two reading his cant and skew I was led to think that McCarthyism had come among us as good ol’ Peter had this to say: “It is the communist way. Secrecy, obfuscation, distrust. This is a regime that gives nothing away. If Australia must downgrade trade ties with China, so be it”.

Is the fellow insane?

Spoken like a rabid cocksure and arrogant Australian who’s lost every vestige of common sense, practicality, tolerance and a knowledge of what racism actually means.

Mr Morrison and his loudmouthed US-leaning sidekicks in our current federal Parliament have stirred the possum with China without thinking it through – it may not be those right-wingers who’ll feel the brunt of what’s likely to ensue in regard to our trade relations with China but I’ll bet future Australian will: and it won’t be pretty and as easygoing as we’ve been accustomed to for so many years past.

Throughout our media, television, radio and print, even on the ABC (which always has an eye on the government because they know it can chop off their income at a whim) there has been this madness emerging where all the teeming millions of China are being held out to dry over a flu-like bug which has hit hard so many people who’re aged, exceedingly obese and/or already diseased in some way or other.

It, the virus, introduces respiratory distress in humans especially those who are hampered with age, grossly excessive weight, or any other debilitating disease – and they of mankind, having contracted the virus may, surprisingly, quickly die.

… but having said that it seems to me that too many of our younger and now middle aged set, those like Mr Gleeson, have convinced themselves that death is not an option to humans nowadays: that the very idea that one would die is an affront to men who’ve been coddled and pampered since birth; men and women who’ve never really had to live with what people of ages past accepted: that their time on this earth was a temporal gift; a mystery that had to be lived, not a mystery that had to be solved.

Up until recently religions covered that aspect of human life and death but with the decline of a faith in an unseen God too many people are now airily expecting nothing but the best of what life offers with no end in sight.

It’s a form of madness and I fear it will only get worse.

Mr Peter Gleeson will just have to get it into his thick skull that no one will ever know how this current viral epidemic kicked off; or where.

Indeed, as I’ve said before the fact that the Chinese people first detected a disease which may have been visited upon their country from God knows where should be considered a boon to all mankind yet we are being told by representatives of the US hierarchy that China is the guilty party in all of such hatred and bias based, not on reason or knowledge, but on conjecture and guesswork designed to isolate our Western nation from the greatest and most honest trading nation currently on this earth.

It’s getting out of hand when a local journalist like Mr Gleeson can dredge up his brand of McCarthyism as he tries to win kudos from his American employers – Mr Gleeson should recant … and if he feels he cant withdraw he should take leave from his quite evil quest to cause animosity toward peoples who’ve now become our Asian friends.

Sorry, Peter, but it had to be said.

Yours faithfully,

Merv C Bartlett.

Pallara