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Full transcript below ^_^
In this interview, Nick and Dr. Paul Monk discuss:
Background on epidemiology, virology and global transmission as they relate to COVID-19
Major plagues throughout history, and literary representations of pestilence and plague
The context of wet markets, corruption, totalitarianism and secrecy in China
The divergence in global reactions to the outbreak of COVID-19
The emergence of conspiracy theories about the virus
Silver linings from the current crisis, such as the need for global coordination and cooperation to respond to similarly global problems
Dr Paul Monk is a poet, polymath and highly regarded Australian public intellectual. He has written an extraordinary range of books, from Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty (which resides in former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s library), to reflective essays on the riches of Western civilization in The West in a Nutshell, to a prescient 2005 treatise on the rise of China in Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China.
Dr. Paul Monk
25 April 2020
Melbourne, Australia
Full interview transcript:
00:00 Paul:
Such was the funeral that took place during this winter, with which the first year of the war came to an end. In the first days of summer, the Spartans and their allies, with two-thirds of their forces as before, invaded Attica, under the command of Archidamus, son of Zeuxidamus, King of Sparta, and established themselves and laid waste to the country. Not many days after their arrival in Attica, the plague first began to show itself among the Athenians. It was said that it had broken out in many places previously in the neighbourhood of Lemnos and elsewhere; but a pestilence of such extent and mortality was nowhere remembered. Neither were the physicians at first of any service, ignorant as they were of the proper way to treat it, but they died themselves the most thickly, as they visited the sick most often; nor did any human art succeed any better. Supplications in the temples, divinations, and so forth were found equally futile, till the overwhelming nature of the disaster at last put a stop to them altogether.
00:58 Nick: That was Dr Paul Monk, reading from Thucydides, Book Two of his classic The Peloponnesian War, and his opening description of a plague in Athens. So, Paul, we're all in lockdown today in the midst of fears about a global pandemic on the scale of the Spanish Flu of 1918. Why?
01:16 Paul: Well, I think you put your finger on it by referring to the Spanish Flu. So, the moment it became clear that COVID-19 had broken out of China and was spreading around the world - because it was a new virus and the degree of its infection, you know, its infectiveness and the mortality rates from it were hard to gauge; there was an immediate fear among specialists that this could be the pandemic we've been fearing for many years and that it could replicate the Spanish Flu in its impact.
01:47 This has been a meme in wide circulation in the last few months for obvious reasons, but it's worth recapitulating, that the Spanish Flu killed an estimated 50 million people in 1918 to 19 in a world with a population a quarter of what it is now. So, the equivalent now would be 200 million people dying. That's unimaginable. I mean, that's four times the number of people that died in whole world during the Second World War, for example. So, it would be a true catastrophe.
02:15 People felt that something like that could be in the offing, unless we were able to react quickly. Of course, we hadn't reacted altogether quickly for a number of reasons we can discuss.
02:24 So, the concern was that it's out, the horse has bolted, and we don't know how dangerous this is We don't know infection rates or mortality rates. We have to move quickly to find a way to keep this under control, or it could be devastating. That's why we're under lockdown, because the consensus was that the only way to stop this becoming devastating was to stop people from freely associating and thus spreading the disease.
02:51 Nick: So, how good a grasp do we have on projections and mortality rates?
02:55 Paul: I think it has to be said that even now, after specialists, you know, virologists and biologists and analysts, have been pondering this for the last three months, we still don't have a clear analysis of exactly what the expected infection rate or mortality rate is.
03:13 This is due to a number of factors. One is that we don't have good data out of China where it began. The Communist Party has been very secretive about at all. Secondly, that it's a new virus and so we don't have, as it were, population data to build upon. Thirdly, because the mortalities that have occurred so far have been confused somewhat by comorbidities. So certain cohorts of people have been more prone to get the disease and to die from it than others, because they were old or were already ill and vulnerable for other reasons.
03:50 It's been difficult to get this data clear. The mortality rates appear to have varied from one country to another. The data collection has been different in different cases and getting global cooperation, coordination and analysis hasn't come readily.
04:04 That's indicated for example by the fact that the World Health Organisation has played an ambiguous role in this matter. So much so, that the US government, rightly or wrongly, has chosen to defund the World Health Organisation now, on the basis that UN organisation failed us all.
04:23 Whether it did fail us and, in particular, whether defunding it is the appropriate responses is something one could debate. but that's what's happened. That's indicative of where we're at with data. We're still trying to make it up as we go along.
04:35 Nick: Leaving aside for a moment the matter of broader public reactions, how did you come to terms with the outbreak and the projections?
04:42 Paul: Well, it's worth pointing to, I suppose, three factors, maybe four factors, that position me to think about this relatively clearly. So, the first thing is that it originated in China and a lot of controversy concerning it was swirling around because of the way it had been handled by the Chinese Communist Party. As much as the question of infection rates or virology, the role of China was central and this attracted my attention because, as your listeners may be aware, I was at one time head of the China Desk at the Defence Intelligence Organisation and I have remained a student of and a commentator on China and the Communist Party and geopolitics ever since.
05:22 So, that meant that I was drawn to the subject from an analytical angle. Secondly, one of the things I had long being interested in, which was connected both with China and the question of viral disease, was the SARS crisis of 17 years ago. Now, many of your younger listeners won't even have been, as it were, intellectually conscious 17 years ago.
05:46 It's worth recapitulating that at the time, in 2003, under very similar circumstances to what appears to have happened in this case, a new coronavirus broke out of China and there were alarm signals, because it was feared this could be a global pandemic. It didn't turn out that way. The total number of mortalities in that case was fewer than 1000, most of them in China.
06:08 However, the way it was handled at the time by the Communist Party was disturbingly similar the way it's handled this case. That is, that it was in denial. Early, it suppressed stories. It tried to tell the Chinese public and the world that there was no problem. It wasn't believed. Eventually the virologists managed to get some action taken and things brought under control.
06:31 The problem originated in wet markets in Guangzhou rather than Wuhan and the general lesson that was derived from this by specialists was, "well, we've got to do this better next time." Well, we didn't do it better next time and because I was aware of that SARS case, I immediately started thinking, "Oh-oh, so this is SARS2 and it's not going well." So, that's the second reason why I was well positioned, in a sense, to make sense of what was going on.
07:00 The third is that I had been familiar for many years with a great novel about epidemic disease, if not pandemic disease - one which a number of your readers may have encountered for the first time in this present context. That is, a novel published in 1947 by the French writer, Albert Camus, called The Plague.
07:23 Now, it's a fictional story set in Oran and the disease is confined to one city, but it's a magnificent portrayal of human reactions to the breakout of disease. In a lot of ways, he modelled that story and what happens in the city on his knowledge of the Thucydides - we had that brief reading from Thucydides at the outset.
07:46 He also used it as a kind of allegory at two levels. He wrote it during the Second World War, when France was occupied by the Nazis. So, it was an allegory in a sense of the occupation of an oppressive and indeed barbarous power of another country, and how human beings respond to that.
08:04 Secondly, he was an existentialist philosopher and he was using this as a way to explore the way in which human beings more generally respond to the intrinsic precariousness and, as he would have said, absurdity of the human condition.
08:24 It's beautifully written at all three of those levels and it's still powerful. I had read it many years ago. I'd reread it in recent years and one of my first instincts when COVID-19 broke out was to pick it up and read it again.
08:40 So, all of that pre-positioned me to respond. The fourth factor - as I said, there's perhaps four and not just three - is that due to having had problems with illness myself in recent years, I had retired from active consulting work. I was already a kind of pioneer of self-isolation before we were urged to undertake that because I live on my own, I work from a home office. I spend most of my time reading and writing. I go for a solitary walk most days on a constitutional basis.
09:11 Nick: A monkish existence...
09:12 Paul: A monkish existence, you might say, yes. So, I didn't have to change my lifestyle terribly much, while everybody else was drastically changing theirs. It gave me an unusual point of view on the requirements of the circumstances.
09:25 Nick: So, if we could unpack each of those four responses you've outlined in a bit more detail. Talk to me a bit more about your knowledge of the history of pandemics.
09:35 Paul: Yes, well again this was something, you might say, exhibited by the fact that I would have begun with a short reading from Thucydides that was familar to me from deep background reading, long before there was a COVID-19, and indeed in my personal case, before there was SARS. I'd read Thucydides as a young person and have always regarded The Peloponnesian War as one of the master classics in the Western canon.
10:00 His description of a plague of Athens is very sobering, because he was interested not only in symptoms and in trying to figure out what was this disease and where did it come from, but in the impact it had on society, on people's morality, the way they behaved, their belief systems, etc. It's a very searching few pages of his history.
10:23 What I also knew, of course, which Thucydides for obvious reasons didn't, is that there'd been major epidemics or pandemics after that. There was a major one in the late second century in the Roman Empire, generally known as the Antonine plague, which is estimated to have killed about 5 million people. That’s about probably 25 times the size of the population of Athens in Thucydides time, right, so that's a lot of people.
10:52 It sapped the vitality of the Empire towards the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius, generally regarded as the last of the so called ‘Five Good Emperors’ in Rome. It was a geopolitical event, quite as much as an epidemiological one.
11:05 But there was a much bigger one with more dramatic consequences several centuries later, when Justinian was emperor of a shrunken Roman Empire, which was in fairly robust condition, even though it was half the size of the Empire at its height.
11:19 A plague of monumental proportions hit the Empire and it's estimated that 25 million people died. Now, that's something like half the population of the empire. It's a devastating plague and had it not also smitten the Persian Empire, the great rival of the Roman Empire, then the Roman Empire might have been in very serious difficulties. At any rate, it certainly did sap the strength of the Roman Empire at a critical point in its history.
11:47 One consequence of it smiting both those empires, combined with the fact that they fought each other to a standstill for about 50 years, is that they were so weak by the early seventh century that the Arabs were able to overrun both empires and establish the Islamic empire, which is a major geopolitical shift in world history.
12:09 All of this was familiar to me again, as I stress, before anything like what's just happened to a place. People are generally aware of the Black Death of course which killed about a third of the population of Europe and many people outside Europe in the 14th century.
12:24 There was the great plague of London in the 17th century. There was the Spanish Flu. As a student of history, I was familiar with all of these so...
12:32 Nick: Smallpox in the Americas is one you've written about.
12:35 Paul: Well, indeed. That's true and thanks for reminding me, because that was the mother of all plagues, as it were. As some people may be aware, there's a famous book by Jared Diamond called Guns, Germs, and Steel about the European conquest of the Americas.
12:51 He makes the point that we didn't - I say we in a loose sense - but Europeans didn't arrive in the Americas only with better weapons than the Native Americans had, which they did, and with horses which the Native Americans didn't have. They arrived also, and much less intentionally, with germs to which many Europeans had immunity and to which there was no immunity in the new world.
13:13 So, plagues swept the Americas well ahead of the conquistadors themselves. In the first instance, smallpox. Smallpox spread from European landing points in the Caribbean and Mexico down into South America and up into North America, well ahead of the conquistadors themselves, who had nothing to do with it. They were oblivious to it. They had no germ theory of disease, so they were themselves ignorant of what was going on.
13:39 By the time Pizarro, for example, arrived in Peru to conquer the Incas, the Incas had already been swept by disease and were somewhat weakened in consequence. In the century between 1492 and roughly 1600, the population of the Americas is estimated by the specialists to have dropped by 95%. So, just compare it with the black death. A third of your population dies in the 14th century, 95% of the Native American population is swept away.
14:09 Nick: How many tens of millions is that meant to be?
14:11 Paul: Well, there is considerable debate about exactly how many Native Americans they were in 1492. To put it concisely, until about the 1970s, the consensus was probably about 7 million in the two continents combined.
14:27 As a result of a lot of spade-work done in the 1960s and 70s, that consensus shifted radically. It is now agreed, even by people who were sceptical initially, that the native population of the Americas as of 1492 was probably more like 60 million. So, the number of deaths we're talking about extending over a century, allowing for reproduction, is in excess of 60 million people dying.
14:49 Nick: Very sobering indeed. You've also got an angle in response to the virus, given your work in the Defence Intelligence Organization on the China desk, and your particularly interest scholarly and personally as well in China, and the Chinese Communist Party. So, could you talk more about that?
15:05 Paul: Yes, well, the deeper background to that is that when I joined Defence Intelligence in 1990, I had a degree in European history. Hence, the Antonine Plague and the Black Death and so forth. I had a PhD in international relations on the United States in counterinsurgency in the Cold War.
15:24 Defence Intelligence said to me, "That's all very well but we want you to work on East Asia - that means China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan." I gravitated towards China, because it's the biggest player on the block, even then and certainly now. I became head of the China Desk by 1994, and it was a very, very interesting job even then. It would be far more so now.
15:46 Since leaving government, I've continued to take an active interest in it. I taught Chinese politics in 1999 at one of our universities. I published a book in 2005 called Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China. So, actively thinking about the way the Communist Party governs China, about the implications of China's economic growth, about its military and strategic ambitions, about secrecy and human rights and so forth positioned me, you might say, very well indeed to understand what the party was doing - in this case, what was going on.
16:22 Inevitably, of course it attracted my interest. The key thing here is that from very early, once it became evident not only that a disease like SARS had broken out again, but that it had got out the door and it was becoming a global problem, not just a Chinese problem, and that the party had arrested and detained people who were trying to tell the truth about this.
16:46 It arrested and imprisoned people who were criticizing it for arresting those people. Inevitably one thought two things. First of all, well this is par for the course of the Chinese Communist Party. This is what it does. It's deeply dishonest, totally self-interested and strategic in the way it behaves. It's not transparent, it's not accountable and it's not just.
17:06 That activated interest in pursuing the matter of secrecy and repression. Secondly, because it is now a global problem of disease, one had to take an interest in, "So, how is it that this happened exactly?" That's where, very quickly and globally - nothing to do with me personally of course - a number of conspiracy theories arose.
17:29 Now, as an analyst - as an intelligence analyst - I was very interested. So, where are these conspiracy theories coming from and how much credibility is there in any of them?
17:38 Nick: Yep, and you've also got an academic interest in the virology and globalization as well.
17:43 Paul: Yes, I wouldn't say an academic interest but because of my interest in the SARS problem years before there was COVID-19, I read things about Ebola in Africa and how it was handled. I read about SARS and, in particular as a reference point I read a book published in 2011 by an American biologist, Nathan Wolf, called The Viral Storm, in which he was saying in the wake of SARS and Ebola and so on, we really need better global early warning systems for pandemics, and we need to share information. We need to be open about this, and we need to better understand the public health implications and the economic implications of possible pandemics because - and he elaborated on this beautifully in his book - we need to understand that two things are happening in lockstep in our time.
18:34 One is that our science and our understanding of what viruses are, how diseases spread. how to treat them is all improving rapidly and this is good news. The other is that the vectors that drive the outbreaks of pandemics are all getting worse. Why is this? Well, he says - and he explains this very carefully - in historic time, diseases - pandemic diseases that have killed a large number of human beings - have actually been able to germinate and spread because of the human invention of agriculture, because of the storage of grain, because of the building of cities and people living in close proximity to one another in the various unsanitary conditions that result from that, because of trade and travel. All of these things in the 20th and 21st centuries have grown enormously. So, huge numbers of people now live in vast cities. Vast numbers of people travel all over the world, right?
19:27 It's very difficult therefore to quarantine a bug when it starts to travel because it looks for extra parties and hey, there's lots of humans around in cities, there's lots of them traveling. That, he says, means that the danger of a viral pandemic is greater now than ever before but so is our science better than ever before and it's an arms race between these two things.
19:50 Now, he's writing this a decade ago. He was quietly confident he said at that point, that we would be able to set up a global early warning system. Well, we now know that we didn't. We failed. Globally, we failed. The early warning system didn't function adequately. The World Health Organization didn't do its job properly. The Chinese Communist Party didn't work on a cooperative basis, it was secretive and mendacious. The US government was all over the map and trying to figure out whether there was a pandemic and how serious and what to do about it. Everybody basically had to act on an improvised sauve qui peut - that is, you know, every man for himself basis. Now, that's a mess and we'll come back to it, doubtless.
20:34 Nick: Could you also do a bit of a deep dive on Albert Camus and The Plague, that novel you mentioned before?
20:40 Paul: Yes, well I described it before, I think, - and I posted this on Facebook very early in the current situation where I said if you're looking for some reading to help position yourself in these contexts, one of the best things you can do is read the The Plague.
20:56 It's remarkable to reflect that Camus himself wrote this when he was in his early 30s, a very young man, and the maturity of his description of human behaviour and of character and of the nature of the disease is still very impressive.
21:13 But why in particular is it relevant now? Because it's not a sensationalized story. It's a philosophical, deeply reflective story. The main character in it is a doctor in Oran called Bernard Rieux. You realize only at the end that if any character in the novel represents Camus' personal standpoint, philosophically and morally, it's Bernard Rieux. Rieux responds to the disease in a stoic way. He's responsible. He's reflective. He doesn't panic.
21:47 He's a doctor and so he sees it as his job to help people and to try and create with the civic authorities regime which can contain the disease and quarantine people that are seriously ill and treat those that it's possible to treat and prevent people getting out of the city so that they don't spread it to other cities. All of this is striking relevant right now because we have faced the same basic problems. Rieux’s composure and seriousness and rationality are admirable.
22:21 He's not an enthusiast. He's not self-conceited. He doesn't think he's got all the answers. He's not sure that his measures will work. He's not even very quick off the mark to diagnose the plague when it starts because his mind is elsewhere. He's doing these other things.
22:41 The particular reason that I would emphasize the beauty of this is because right at the end - and I might read the final paragraph of his novel - what Camus has Rieux reflect is that okay, so we've contained this disease. People died and the city went through a trauma, but the disease is subsided and we're going to recover from this.
23:08 We will probably in the near future be in that situation ourselves. The question is what are we - what lesson do we draw from that? What Rieux reflects on which I'll read, is that people didn't expect this to occur and they'll probably want to go back to the way they were and assume, "Well, that was just an accident or misfortune. Don't make too much of it. Live as we would have lived."
23:26 He said what they're not taking account of is that just as when it started, they didn't initially take it seriously because they thought the plague disappeared a long time ago, that plagues don't occur anymore. Well, it did occur. We have been struck by a pandemic. Most people it seems to me are probably caught short thinking, "Where does this come from? Why is this happening at all?" So here's the way he concludes the novel.
23:51 This is Rieux reflecting as I said:
"As he listened to the cries of joy that rose above the town, Rieux recall that this joy was always under threat. He knew that this happy crowd was unaware of something that one can read in books, which is that the plague bacillus never dies or vanishes entirely, but it can remain dormant for dozens of years in furniture or clothing, that it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs and old papers, and that perhaps the day will come when for the instruction or misfortune of mankind, the plague will rouse its rats and send them to die in some well contented city."
24:30 So, metaphorically that's precisely where we are now, right? In a beautiful kind of way, the very end of that French novel from 1947 gets us to precisely where we started at the beginning of this year and where we're at. What we need to bear in mind as we come out of the immediate crisis is the wisdom of that paragraph.
24:52 This is not a one-off event. This is not a random accident. We live in a century where pandemics are going to be a danger because as Nathan Wolf pointed out in 2011, all the vectors that drive pandemics have been exacerbated by the very prosperity and globalization that most of us rejoice in.
25:11 Those aren't going away anytime soon. If they do, the consequences would be catastrophic. So, we don't want to throw those away, and therefore we're going to have to deal with this danger.
25:20 Nick: Yeah, and despite the universality of pandemics and plagues in this experience, there have been wildly divergent global reactions and experiences of the virus itself, thinking about Italy and the US and those high death rates and mortality rates there. The strange case of Iran, and obviously the Chinese obfuscation and in Australia and New Zealand, the antipodes, the almost complete suppression or squashing of the curve, as they say.
25:47 Paul: Yes, there have been different policy reactions, different public reactions, different epidemiology. I mean, the infection and mortality rates seem to have varied sharply. In part, because of public policies, in part for factors or for reasons that we don't seem to really have a clear or firm handle on just yet. So all of that is very interesting.
26:08 If one was to draw a general conclusion, it would be this. That, in the absence of a global regime of early warning and public health management, in the absence of agreed protocols for heading off and handling something like this, each country has reacted according to its local circumstances and culture on an improvised basis. That's precisely what Wolf hoped we would have overcome before now, and had we done so, we would have been much better placed to handle this than we were in fact.
26:38 It's worth I think putting this in a bit of depth and perspective, by remarking that that very frequently, when people talk about politics or economic management, they talk in generalized ideological terms, as if everybody is more or less the same or should be and they know what that way should be.
26:56 They need to keep thinking because it's much more complex than that. Although this will seem a long way from the pandemic context and current politics, this was driven home to me many years ago when as part of my doctoral studies, I was looking at the history of El Salvador and the brutal violence took place in the 1980s.
27:14 There was a book by a specialist on Central America - they're a rare breed. Specialists in any field are, by definition, a fairly rare breed. This was about the little republics that make up the isthmus in Central America.
27:29 The author made a very instructive point. He said that all of these countries have the same basic geography. They grow pretty much the same cash crops, prominently among them coffee, but they all have different political histories. They all have differing levels of inequality, of state violence, of democracy and dictatorship. How can that be if geographic circumstances or economic geography are determinative?
27:57 Well, because they have different human communities that have made different choices and these have had consequences, right? Now, without digressing to discuss how we reached that conclusion, it was very illuminating to me. I think we need to bear that in mind now.
28:12 So, whether you're in Western Europe where there are differences between countries, or you're comparing Western Europe with East Asia or either of them with the United States or Australia with New Zealand or Oceania with Europe and so on - all these different comparisons - what we're encountering is that different political cultures from different starting points with different public habits and attitudes to public policy have, for those very reasons responded, differently.
28:39 That's not to lay blame actually at anybody's door. It's just to be analytical. It's just to understand what's happened and why it's happened. If there were clearer global protocols and greater confidence in early warning systems, that would be modified, and we're not there yet.
28:55 Nick: Could you also reflect on the virus in its politicized or popular imagination? In particular I'm referring to the kind of, well, proliferation - viral proliferation even - of conspiracy theories and sort of, you know, human kind of incomprehension at where these viruses come from, in the absence of that deep history you've just outlined.
29:18 Paul: Yes, well it's important to remind ourselves that, without wanting to sound condescending, most people for very understandable reasons don't have an historical context on which to base their judgment, so they don't know about previous diseases. They might be only vaguely aware of them occurring at all. They don't know about biology. They don't do probability and statistics. So, when you talk about exponential infection rates and the implications for mortality as a matter of probability, it's like talking to them about meteorology and weather. You know, they don't understand how you make probabilistic estimates. They think this is either going to happen or it's not. Weather isn't that way. It's chaotic and infection rates will vary enormously depending on density, comorbidities, public policy, and as we've seen, self-isolation or quarantine.
30:14 In the absence, therefore, of a sound basis for making judgments and given fear and rumour, people will respond in what we would regard, from a sober point of view, as irrational ways. The remarkable thing, certainly in the case of Australia and New Zealand, as overwhelmingly despite discomfort and concern, people have heeded public policy warnings and government advice. As a consequence, we appear to have sailed through the worst of this and have a situation, epidemiologically, at least, largely under control. That's good news. The economic consequences? They're another matter. We might come back to that.
30:53 Why is it in those circumstances - given uncertainty, given ignorance, given fear and concern - that conspiracy theories will spring it up? Well, that's what happens under those circumstances. Where there's bewilderment and fear, people will latch on to fearful and dramatic explanations or pseudo explanations.
31:16 This happens chronically in human affairs. You know, let's take an illustrative example. So, in the mid-18th century, there's a major earthquake that destroys a lot of Lisbon in Portugal.
31:30 It set a lot of people speculating as to as to why this had happened? Now, they didn't have a theory of seismology and earthquake incidence and probability at the time. They didn’t even have what we would recognize as modern geology. So, this is 80 years before Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, right?
31:47 So, various theologians weighed in helpfully and said, "It's God's punishment for the vices of the citizens of Lisbon." This is a very traditional religious view, right? The philosopher, Immanual Kant, among others, pointed out, "Well, I'm not sure that theory works, because one of the areas of Lisbon that was not destroyed by the earthquake was the red-light district."
32:07 Now, that's a use of empirical data to upend sloppy thinking, right, and the way people jumped to conclusions and pseudo explanations. What's happened in present circumstances is that in a great deal of uncertainty and apprehension to do with how quickly this disease might spread - whether they themselves are in danger, whether the government is concealing stuff, whether the lockdown is going to hurt them financially and so on, which it has a lot of people - people are susceptible to rumours and conspiracy theories. There's been some really wild ones out there and we can talk about a few of those.
32:43 Nick: Yeah, let's do it. I mean, firstly who would believe such things; but also, what kind of conspiracy theories have there been about coronavirus?
32:50 Paul: Yeah. Well, so the answer to the first part of your question is the people who will be inclined to believe these things are those who suffer most from ignorance, uncertainty and fear, right? So, those who have a scientific training, a public policy training, an education in the nature pandemics, etc. are better placed, than Joe citizen to say, "Okay, I think I get the general idea. I think I understand broadly, at least, what's happening, what the implications are, and what it might make sense to do about it." They can participate more or less rationally in the discussion or respond to public policy, even if they're not a direct participant in the making of it.
33:33 But if you already are of a mind that the world is manipulated by secretive elites - and alas, very many people are these days - then you might well be susceptible to the suggestion that, for example as has been doing the rounds on social media, there is no Coronavirus. This is a hoax perpetrated by these global elites, because they're imposing on us new social media technologies like 5G and when they tell you they're going to vaccinate you, don't go near them. Don't have the vaccination, because it's going to be a means to secretly implant in you tracking devices that will make you even more vulnerable to manipulation and control through 5G.
34:17 This is actually out there. You can listen to videos and audio recordings where this is being preached. That's a hell of a conspiracy theory, right? You know, without spending our precious time discussing why it's mad, let's just pronounce that it is. Yet it has gone viral.
34:37 I know of people personally who have taken it seriously. They asked innocently and honestly, "Is this true?" Why would they ask me? Because even though they're susceptible of believing such a thing, they respect my knowledge and judgment. So, I gently try and explain to them that it isn't true and they need to just calm down a little.
34:59 Nick: There are some conspiracy theories which are taken up at the highest level of the United States government even or other world governments - sorry. I sound like a conspiracy theorist myself.
35:08 Paul: Haha.
35:08 Nick: No, by other national governments. You know, for instance, that you know, the Chinese plot theory is that this was some sort of form of biological warfare that the Chinese government which is known to be, you know, malicious and scheming in many ways - or that it was simply accidentally leaked from, you know, the Wuhan virology lab for instance.
35:30 Paul: Yes, there are what you might call a hierarchy of conspiracy theories regarding Chinese Communist Party behaviour in this. It's worth setting these into clear perspective for two reasons. One is because they are out there and unlike the 5G or other madcap conspiracy theories, they have at least a general plausibility.
35:51 So, the gravest accusation has been that the Wuhan Virology Institute and another the Bio Research Institute were actively and deliberately working to create humanly transmissible Corona viruses that could be used to conduct what two senior Chinese colonels in 1997 called 'unrestricted warfare'. In other words, instead of launching biological warfare with unambiguously, you know lethal military biological weapons, the plot putatively was to develop something that would look like it was something like SARS, that had just broken out accidentally, but would in fact be deliberately leaked.
36:37 Then there would be a time interval between it being deliberately leaked and any announcement by the party that this was a humanly transmissible disease until it had gone global. Then they would shut it down in China so that it would limit the damage to themselves and let it wreak havoc in the outside world, in order to increase or further their strategic agenda of becoming the master power in the world.
36:59 That theory has been put out there, alright? Now, why is there any plausibility to it? First of all, because the book Unrestricted Warfare was in fact written, in 1997, by two senior colonels at the National Defence University in Beijing. They did argue these kinds of things.
37:16 So, there's as what you might call that background plausibility, they could do this. They were thinking about doing something like this. Well, it doesn't take very much imagination then to apparently put two and two together or connect the dots.
37:31 So this is not like 5G. This is not completely off the wall. The question is, of course, as in any such conspiracies, granted that background suspicion of plausibility, what is the evidence that that in fact is what happened?
37:45 Well, the first reality check you need to make is so let's suppose somebody at least, like those colonels, thought, "Why don't we do this?" Why would the Party as a whole and the power brokers in China buy into that, given that the consequences would be so grave?
38:04 So, first of all, how could they guarantee that if they deliberately let it loose, they could control it in China? Secondly, if they let it out in the outside world, how could they be confident that the outside world wouldn't cotton onto the fact that they had deliberately done this and there would be hell to pay?
38:19 Thirdly, if in order to bring it under control, even in China, you had to shut down the economy, what about the huge cost of doing that? Why would you do that? If you want to become the predominant economic power, why shut down your economy? China's economy has shrunk in the last few months.
38:33 Nick: For the first time in thirty years...
38:33 Paul: For the first time since 1976 in fact.
38:36 Nick: Oh, right.
38:36 Paul: This is dramatic. So, when you do that basic reality check, you think, "Hmm, it begins to look rather implausible that they would take those huge risks and some of those immense costs for a putative gain they couldn't guarantee." Alright?
38:50 Oh, but that's quite separate from the question of, is there any direct evidence that that happened? The answer to that is no. We don't at the moment have any direct evidence that's what happened.
38:59 What we do know, to a near certainty, is that the disease did originate in Wuhan. This brings us to a second level, as it were, conspiracy theory; which is not that it was deliberately released by the Chinese government for strategic reasons, but that it unintentionally escaped from their experimental labs, got into Wuhan, possibly through the wet market, and they were initially shutting down news about it because they thought, "We don't know the truth yet. We don't know whether it came from the lab. We don't know whether some mad subcomponent deliberately leaked it. It wasn't policy but jeepers, this is going to look really bad." So, this is giving the party in fact benefit of the doubt. They're trying to bring it under control and figure out what happened before it sets hares running. Then they realize, "Wow, this is serious," and at that point, they actually come out and say, “This is a pandemic." Alright?
39:57 So, there's a lot of ground to be gone over. That is more plausible in all the circumstances than the big conspiracy theory. That is that, yes, they conspired to conceal it but they did it because they themselves weren't certain what was going on.
40:11 The third conspiracy theory is that they didn't deliberately leak it. They didn't try and exploit it geopolitically once it had leaked, but once it had leaked out of control, they thought, "We've got to bring it under control domestically and now we've got to look good domestically and internationally."
40:33 So, they conduct a propaganda campaign. Now, that is true. That is what they're doing. So, that's not in a pejorative sense, a conspiracy theory. That's actually what's happening and it's causing quite a bit of irritation and pushback because people are saying, "That's a bit rich. You act irresponsibly so that this thing starts to happen. You don't warn us and so it spreads globally. We're all paying the cost and now you want to tell us you're the good guys in this? I'm sorry, that doesn't cut any ice." But that's where we're at right now.
41:03 Nick: Yeah. So, go back to the biological warfare sort of theory. Greg Sheridan made the point in The Australian newspaper, on the second of April, that the biological warfare story doesn't stack up in terms of evidence and has been rejected by Five Eyes intelligence analysis. So, would you differ with him in any way, especially given that you've got Senator Tom Cotton from United States Senate basically putting two and two together, trying to sort of assert that it was indeed a biological warfare agent, which was either leaked deliberately or accidentally, and that there was some sort of malicious intent behind the virus?
41:39 Paul: Yes, I would say that basically what Greg Sheridan was doing - and let's bear in mind that Greg would be in the eyes of most people, a right-wing correspondent, right? So, if somebody in his newspaper was going to accuse the Chinese of getting up to mischief, it might be Greg, right? Instead he says, "No, look we need to hose that down, because that actually doesn't stack up."
42:07 His point of reference is not a personal opinion. It is that the Five Eyes - which for those who are not aware of this means the five English speaking countries who, since 1947 or basically since the Second World War have had an intelligence alliance around the world, the United States, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand - their intelligence communities which have long cooperated globally which share information, which do our analysis, have agreed among themselves, "We don't think this is what happened."
42:36 Now, if anybody was going to blow the whistle on the Chinese conspiracy to launch biological warfare, it would be Five Eyes and there would be hell to pay. I mean, imagine if the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour and then somebody in Washington said, "Nah, that's not the Japanese." Well, of course, in that case there was no way to conceal it. That was very obvious, right?
42:55 In this case, of course, if it had been covert warfare, if it had been a biologically engineered virus launched to cause mayhem and mischief, that would be an act of war. It would be the job of Five Eyes to pin that down, and then what would happen next? Well, that's not at all clear, which is why I said it's actually implausible that the Chinese would have done it in the first place.
43:16 The fact that they looked at this very closely, given their responsibilities and their access to secret information, they drew a conclusion, "No, we don't think so." Says Greg, almost certainly that's not what we're seeing. It's not biological warfare from the Chinese.
43:32 The nature of critical reasoning is that, as with scientific theories, you don't say categorically there's no possibility that it was. What you say is there's a high degree of probability that it's not, right? If there was any serious degree of probability, the Five Eyes intelligence agency would have been saying to the government, "We have grave concerns that the Chinese have acted completely out of school here. This is a big problem." Then we've got to decide very quickly what to do about it because they're on the offensive.
44:06 Nick: Publicly and privately as well.
44:07 Paul: Well, they would certainly have been doing that on a confidential basis in briefings to the leaders of these five countries. It's very difficult to imagine that if there was any serious grounds for believing that, that you wouldn't have had the Western countries - the Five Eyes countries - and their allies, saying, "This is an act of war and there's going to be very serious measures as a result."
44:27 What measures? Well, gee, one doesn't even like to think, right, because it would have been the secretive and biological equivalent to Pearl Harbour. It would have been an attack on the outside world.
44:39 Nick: Yeah.
44:38 Paul: what they're saying is, "We don't think that happened," and we should draw the breath and say, "Well, probably therefore it's not what happened." Alright? But here's the thing. What Greg didn't do and he didn't have the space to do in a single newspaper article is go back and say, "However, when you consider the clear strategic ambitions of the Chinese state and the Xi Jinping, which have been made very explicit - not guesses or conspiracy theories - when you consider the proposals laid out in the book Unrestricted Warfare and the statements being made by a number of other leading Chinese strategic thinkers about the US since then, you can see why people might have leapt to the fearful conclusion that this is what happened."
45:19 There is a serious discussion here. This is not the 5G nonsense. This is the nature of the problem we've got in assessing China's intentions and actions. Until the Chinese state becomes more transparent and cooperative in international affairs, that problem is not going to go away.
45:35 Nick: Yeah, and regardless of whether it was a Pearl Harbour incident or not, there has been a massive recalibration already amongst Five Eyes partners. The most, sort of, I suppose high profile one would be the reconsideration of Huawei being allowed to sort of run that 5G network in the UK. That sort of partnership is being reconsidered. There have been talks at number 10 Downing Street in the UK about a massive sort of reckoning with China has been the language. So, you know, regardless of whether it was purposeful or not, I think that the relationship with China is going to be reset going forward.
46:12 Paul: Yes, it was very striking as you say that the UK, in particular the Johnson government, said, "Okay, we are going to reset the relationship with China. In fact, there's going to be a serious reckoning once we've got past the immediate crisis."
46:30 That is because for some considerable time now - and this has been true in Australia as well as elsewhere in the Western world - there's been growing exasperation with the Communist Party. Without digressing to go into chapter and verse on this, for the better part of 30 years, the policy consensus in the Western world was if we invest in China, if we open up to China, if we allow it to sell its manufactures, China will prosper. That'll be good for us. We can profit from trading with China. As it becomes more prosperous, its middle class will grow. They'll want political liberalization and the Communist Party will become a more tractable regime and open up and everybody will have - a rising tide will lift everybody's boats. It hasn't happened.
47:12 So there's been a sea change in much of the Western probably the last five years, and that's certainly true in Australia on a bipartisan basis really, despite the fact that we have indeed benefited greatly from China's growth. We've profited handsomely. We've run a big trade surplus with China.
47:29 But the consensus is China is not well intentioned. It's not benign. It's intending to take over and we don't want it to take over. It's not liberalizing. In fact, it's becoming a harsher dictatorship and that's a serious concern.
47:45 So what are we going to do about it? Boris Johnson's shift about five year, a small part of that bigger picture, and the pandemic has precipitated it. So, one of the things we're going to be looking at, as we emerge from this crisis, is the way the outside world responds now to an unrepentant, mendacious and manipulative China.
48:04 Nick: Yeah. So how does this all play out globally then?
48:08 Paul: Well, that's as it were the $64,000 question. In fact, to update it in the light of the expenditures we’re seeing, you might call it the $64 trillion question, because the costs to countries around the world of just coping with this pandemic have been enormous, and the irritation with China for behaving in an irresponsible and opaque manner about it is running deep.
48:38 So, the most constructive and enlightened approach would be for the Western democracies first of all to confer with one another. Secondly, to rally to their side as many aggrieved countries in the developing world, notably in Africa, where there's much discontent with the way China's behaved, in a coalition to say to the Chinese, "Okay, so here's the way it has to play. You don't get to dominate. You must cooperate. We welcome you and we have been welcoming you for 30 years to trade with us, to become a senior partner in global security, and we've been hoping that because we invited you into the World Trade Organization, we invested, we opened our markets to you, that you would play cricket, but instead you're playing hardball. That must change because this cannot work. It can't work for us and because it can't work for us, you're going to realize it cannot work for you. You need to rethink your strategy, and we know you're capable of doing that, because Deng Xiaoping underwent a sea change in his outlook on basic things after Mao died. China began to open up, and then you got cold feet about that and you killed thousands of people in 1989 to crush their aspirations for democracy in your country. That's got to change. We know that there are powerful interests in your country that don't want to go that way. We're here to tell you, there's no other choice. If you want to be a responsible and welcome participant in global affairs, instead of trying to seek to be Masters of the Universe, you must change and the best way to do that is peacefully and intelligently and gradually the way we've been hoping for 30 years that you would, but now's the time."
50:18 You know, now will that occur? Will there be that cohesiveness in the outside world’s response? That's anybody's guess, because Donald Trump is supposed to be leading the free world, and he's not going there. He's all over the map on this. There isn't a clear consensus. There's a common irritation, but it's a long way yet from being a clear strategic consensus about what to do.
50:41 Nick: Yeah.
50:41 Paul: China is dug into its foxhole at the moment. It's by no means evident that Xi Jinping and the Party are thinking, "Gee, this was a screw up. We better talk to the outside world about how to manage better." They're not thinking that way at all. They're thinking about exploiting this for all it's worth.
50:57 Nick: When those cascading social and economic impacts which are as severe as they've been since the Great Depression, are fully sort of realized over the next 12 months, combined with the kind of the trend of the last five years towards sort of rising domestic populism and nationalism, it paints a pretty bleak picture, I think, not just between China and the rest of the world but also within different sort of geopolitical arenas like Oceania or Europe, you know? Much more sort of long running tensions could sort of boil over.
51:31 Paul: Yes, they could, and one doesn't want to overplay analogies, but many people have been solely reflecting it seems to me - I mean strategic thinkers, not necessarily members of the public - but reflecting on the precedent that haunts us all who know any history and that is of the Great Depression, and what then happened in the 1930s because the global depression introduced a degree of wildness and unpredictability and reactionary politics around the world.
52:05 Most famously, it precipitated the rise to power of the Nazis in Germany. It precipitated the takeover in Japan by the military from a parliamentary government. It precipitated in - for example we referred to Central America earlier, in El Salvador, you went from a basically nascent democracy, a constitutional government to a military dictatorship. You had a peasant uprising and thousands of peasants were massacred by the army to restore conservative rule.
52:34 That was happening all over the world. Fascist Italy, you know, rose and it invaded Libya and Ethiopia. So, the fear is that instead of the liberal international order which, despite the reaction against it by many populist groups in the Western world in recent years, did in fact make possible the greatest expansion in average human wellbeing across the planet - the greatest growth in wealth, including China's growth in wealth - over the last 30, 40, 50 to 70 years ever in history.
53:11 That should not be underestimated. That was the Pax Americana. That was the American created order based on Bretton Woods, and without the role America played it would not have happened.
53:22 It's now all in danger. To the extent that countries now start to do what China clearly is doing which is to say, "Our interests are paramount. Bugger everybody else," then we're back in the 1930s, and the results will be predictably the rise of more nationalist xenophobic governments, a recrudescence in at least some places of militarism, and as a reaction to that defensiveness, in certain other countries.
53:51 I'm not suggesting we're going to have World War III because the nuclear arsenals of major states still are overwhelmingly likely to inhibit major war, but unhappy and non-constructive things are distinctly possible. So, the great challenge before us all is to think as clearly and calmly as we can and advocate for intelligent policies and try to build coalitions, rather than build armed camps.
54:19 Nick: Yeah. When you think about that as a sort of prognostication coupled with existing global problems, such as climate change or environmental destruction, global hunger and the eradication of major development gains across the developing world, are there any silver linings behind these rather dark and ominous clouds?
54:41 Paul: Well, it seems to me that there are, provided we work with that metaphor advisedly. So when one talks about silver linings behind dark clouds, it's not to say there aren't dark clouds. That's the whole point of a silver lining behind dark clouds. So the dark clouds are indeed the things to which you just referred, right? That things could fall apart rather severely here in a number of ways. This pandemic has, as you rightly said, occurred in a context where there were already a number of serious global concerns that weren't being handled optimally, to say the least.
55:17 So what's the silver lining, if there is one? Well it seems to me that more immediately and driven home more personally to masses of people around the world than the climate change thing ever really has been - what the pandemic has highlighted is, we need global solutions and those solutions have to be based on accountability, transparency and cooperation. They can't be based on fierce opportunistic interstate competition because that's precisely what generated this problem. Therefore, we have to think more clearly than ever about what form international conventions and cooperation can take, such that we can head off or overcome challenges of this generic nature - not just pandemics, but other global problems that transcend national borders.
56:06 I think that is a silver lining because it is something that people have been very focused on and during a lockdown, because of enforced sort of time off, stand down time, I think there's growing evidence that a lot of people have been thinking, "You know, I'm living differently now than I was before. I'm spending more time with my family. I'm using social media to communicate with people where perhaps I didn't before because I was too busy or I met them at work on the street anyway. I'm thinking about, gee, disease. I'm thinking about how I run my household budget. I'm thinking about priorities in life. I'm thinking about life and death." These are actually all quite healthy. These are, actually, good things to be thinking about.
56:46 The big one is the question of global governance. We are in this together. In the popular film The Martian, a feel good movie, you have Matt Damon marooned on Mars and what happens? Not only does he think very clear headedly and scientifically about how to survive and he does it successfully, but his colleagues, who were in the spacecraft heading back to earth when they realized that he's actually alive not dead, they think, "We've got to go back. He's our mate. We’re not going to abandon him."
57:19 The people back on Earth debate. "Okay, so what can we do? How can we do it? What should we do?" This is such a big problem. It’s a human problem really. It's a species problem. Let's for heavens' sake reach out to the Chinese. They're getting really technological advanced. Maybe they can help. As I say, this is a feel-good Hollywood movie but it's beautiful precisely because it's not cynical, purely realistic and it's saying to us, "Suppose we behave this way. Suppose we are scientific, team based, cooperative and internationalist? Wouldn’t we get better results?” That's the silver lining.
57:54 Nick: On that note, Paul, thank you very much for your time this evening. It's been a pleasure as always.
57:58 Paul: It's great, Nick. It's good to have these conversations.