By Zhong Sheng
What on earth does a U.S. Secretary of State do? The question has been really confusing for the world since Mike Pompeo took up the post. What the man has done showed the world that he never intends to solve problems for the U.S., but only wants to stir up troubles for the world.
At present, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.S. is approaching 2 million, and protests against racism and police brutality triggered by the death of African American man Gorge Floyd have continued to take place across the country for two weeks.
Under such circumstances, no one has seen Pompeo make efforts to put forward a plan or any idea to cope with the severe situation. All he has been doing were issuing statements or posting tweets, racking his brains to cook up rumors against and slander China shamelessly. He even falsely accused China of using George Floyd’s death for propaganda.
In the final analysis, Pompeo is just too arrogant to quit pulling the same old trick of shifting blame onto others. How absurd is that!
Making such great efforts to play the blame game that doesn’t work, Pompeo’s despicable act will end up achieving nothing but making a laughingstock of himself before the world.
The age-old systemic racism in the U.S. society exposed by Gorge Floyd’s death, which people from all walks of life in the U.S. are reflecting on, is the country’s well-known persistent malady, rather than something that can be created out of nothing.
Recently, four former presidents of the U.S. have made statements on the deeply entrenched racism in the country, expressing dissatisfaction with how relevant authorities have been handling the current crisis.
United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet urged in a recent press statement that U.S. authorities must address the deep-seated grievances at the heart of the protests that have erupted in hundreds of U.S. cities.
“The voices calling for an end to police violence need to be heard. And the voices calling for an end to the endemic and structural racism that blights U.S. society need to be heard,” said Bachelet.
As a matter of fact, the one who has been using the death of Gorge Floyd for misleading propaganda in an attempt to divert people’s attention is nobody else but Pompeo himself.
What people have seen was that Pompeo has continued to remain silent on the death of Gorge Floyd. Such indifferent attitude has provoked widespread criticism in the U.S.
In its recent article titled “U.S. diplomats ask ‘Where’s Pompeo?’ on Floyd death”, U.S. media Politico questioned why Pompeo has made no response to the killing of George Floyd.
Many diplomats of the U.S. voiced discontent at Pompeo’s silence on the topic. Some called his silence “deafening” while others said “Pompeo has literally decided he is not touching it,” adding that this is going to reflect on the U.S.’ image around the world.
Regarding acts of lying, cheating, and stealing as the “glory of the American experiment”, Pompeo, who is so narrow-minded, has probably seen maligning China as a life-saving straw for him.
To stigmatize China, the man has literally tried all he has to spread “political virus” around the world and arbitrarily fabricate malicious arguments against China, including the groundless claims that the novel coronavirus originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, and that the virus was man-made.
At such a critical moment when solidarity and cooperation is more urgently needed in the world than ever before, Pompeo is bound up in his roles as a saboteur in international cooperation and a spoiler in global efforts to fight COVID-19.
Constant efforts in playing these roles made Pompeo “one of the worst secretaries of state” and quickly “the worst secretary of state in American history” in the eyes of U.S. media.
Such accurate evaluations went straight to the point.
Lies are bound to be exposed.
According to Politico, an analysis of more than 2.6 million tweets about the novel coronavirus published in late March and 25.5 million times of retweets of these messages within ten days found that more than 5,000 Twitter accounts retweeted relevant information about the novel coronavirus for nearly 7,000 times in a coordinated manner, and spread the conspiracy theory labeling COVID-19 a Chinese bioweapon.
The analysis conducted by Australia academics has also revealed that many of the users who tweeted these messages were actually remote controlled robots, and a lot of Twitter groups that spread these messages were related to supporters of right-wing extremists in the U.S.
The latest disclosure reminded people of the memory of how Pompeo attempted to refer to COVID-19 as the “Wuhan virus” in a joint statement on the fight against COVID-19 at G7 Foreign Ministers’ Meeting at the end of March.
Could it be a coincidence or well-designed conspiracy?
No matter what it is, it is for sure that however hard Pompeo tries to shift the blame onto others, such evil efforts will not help solve the internal problems of the U.S.
After seeing so many notorious acts of the man, many people wonder if Pompeo is still able to quit his addiction to lying and cheating.
A word of advice to Pompeo: As the chief diplomat of the U.S., he should know that respecting facts and the truth is the basic requirement for and moral bottom line of the profession.
He had better neither overestimate the effects of his rumormongering and slander campaign against China nor underestimate the international community’s clear understanding of fairness and justice.
After all, numerous facts have proven that any attempt to challenge justice and universally acknowledged truth ends in failure.
(Zhong Sheng is a pen name often used by People’s Daily to express its views on foreign policy.)
