By CHRISTOPHER MANION
As the Chinese Communist Party reels from the terror and chaos caused by the spread of the coronavirus, everyone is looking for someone else to blame for the deadly epidemic. Given the nature of China’s totalitarian state, it might be years, if ever, before we know the truth. In the meantime, given the law of cause and effect, we can accurately identify the foul spirit that motivated it.
In chapter two of Humanae Vitae, St. Pope Paul VI observes that a “rapid increase in population . . . has made many fear that world population is going to grow faster than available resources.” That fear can compel man to defy the Church’s teaching about marriage and the family that “is based on the natural law as illuminated and enriched by divine Revelation,” he observes. As a result, man can be tempted to assume for himself the power to regulate life.
Pope Paul wrote as the sexual revolution exploded across the West. He was not naive — yes, population controllers had already taken a firm hold on international governments and institutions. But he was also calmly and unashamedly faithful. After all, “No member of the faithful,” he wrote, “could possibly deny that the Church is competent in her Magisterium to interpret the natural moral law.”
One might observe today that such an observation renders a population of the truly “faithful” to be mighty small indeed. To look at it another way, though, there are countless men who do deny the law of God, and the Church’s right to interpret it. Absent the authority of the Church or “The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” what state will confer on every man the power and authority to be his own lawgiver?
Not many — and not for long. The “autonomous man,” as political philosopher Gerhart Niemeyer calls him, cannot last in a lawless world. This Hobbesian condition quickly invites — even guarantees — the all-powerful Leviathan. Pope Paul saw the danger of such moral chaos, and warns of its consequences: “Finally,” he wrote, “careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law” (HV, n. 17).
The language isn’t apocalyptic, but the prediction sure is: And in today’s China, those “public authorities” are personified in the Communist Party of China (CCP) under the leadership of President Xi Jinping.
Pope Paul writes that “Marriage . . . is far from being the effect of chance or the result of the blind evolution of natural forces. It is in reality the wise and provident institution of God the Creator.” But on marriage, as in everything else, the CCP has no regard for the “precepts of the moral law.” The Party turns Pope Paul’s timeless truth upside-down, and it relies on no less an authority than Karl Marx himself.
Karl Marx, Family Man
Karl Marx hated the family. He hated his own family, and left them destitute while he spent countless hours in the Reading Room of the British Museum. But Marx hated the family that God created in His own image and likeness even more. This hatred inspired his theory of the “class struggle,” a vile contrivance that unleashes and empowers today’s gaggle of apostles of Prometheus.
That’s right. The class struggle was born in the family, and Marx’s desire to destroy it.
After Marx’s death, his collaborator Friedrich Engels observed that “The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male.”
There you have it. Since Adam and Eve, the woman has been made a slave, subject to her husband. Forget Genesis. Marx manufactures his own myth, and expunges the spiritual and the eternal. For Marx, woman is a mere “instrument of production.” The marriage act was for Marx the first “division of labor”; in the Marxist lexicon, God’s design for man, woman, and the family is the ultimate source of evil in history. This natural and spiritual unity constitutes the “bourgeois family,” and Marx hated it. So he attacked the family by reducing it to a crude one-dimensional fraud.
“The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation,” Marx and Engels write in the Communist Manifesto. But notice: It isn’t the natural family that reduces the family to a crass materialist blob. It’s Marx. And he does so in order to destroy the natural protection that defends the family from the state.
Once that natural barrier dissolves, the state can do whatever it wants. The atomized individual has no protection because state power has no limits. The “sentimental veil” of divine and natural law merely serves to condone “oppression,” and for Marx — and Xi Jinping — the laws of history give the party absolute and unlimited authority to “liberate” its subjects from such “exploitation.”
By what moral standard? Well, to paraphrase Lenin, “Anything that furthers the Revolution is ethical.”
Carte Blanche For
The Black Death
Since 1979, Communist China has killed hundreds of millions of unborn children in its forced abortion program. Their excuse? The “fear” that Pope Paul had identified eleven years before. Why, progress requires population control! Keep in mind that President Xi’s “Marxism with Chinese characteristics” is supposed to liberate Marx’s “oppressed” bourgeois woman. Instead, in one of the ideology’s classic contradictions, Marxism has oppressed her again. Her menstrual cycle is posted in public to make things easier for the abortion enforcers. She is monitored by Thought Police whose advanced technologies would make Big Brother’s torturers envious. The government claims the right to kill her children, subject them to vivisection, and sell their body parts to the highest bidder.
By the inescapable logic of cause and effect, the Party has decided that, if it can kill the most innocent by the millions, it can kill anybody.
And that brought the coronavirus, known as COVID-19, to the world stage.
The Wanderer spoke to Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, who first exposed China’s forced abortion policies in the West.
“China has all but admitted that the epidemic began when the virus escaped from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China,” Mosher says, “and we have the evidence.
“On February 14, China’s President for Life, Xi Jinping, hosted a political meeting called to address the means of stopping the epidemic and setting up a system to prevent similar outbreaks in the future. ‘In order to protect people’s health,’ Xi reportedly said, biosafety should be ‘integrated into national security,’ biosecurity laws should be drafted, and a national system to control biosecurity risks should be set up.”
“The very next day,” Mosher says, “China’s Ministry of Science and Technology released a new document entitled ‘Guiding opinions on strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses at the same level as the new coronavirus’.”
Of course, the coronavirus was developed as an integral part of the Party’s “national security,” designed to use on foreign adversaries, not only as a weapon, but also as a threat, Mosher says After all, the Chinese could use the virus as a very effective tool of extortion, threatening any number of world players with a pandemic offensive if they did not comply with China’s demands.
But now the extortion victims are China’s own citizens. And the Party has decided that, well, we will be more careful in the future.
“You’ve heard about closing the barn door after the horse has gotten out,” Mosher said. “This is locking down the bioweapons lab after a lethal virus has escaped.”
In China, the power of life and death has indeed “passed into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law.” Once again, Humanae Vitae was right.
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