Delightful article from the Wall Street Journal about smoking in China.
Although already a target of Big Pharma, China continues to maintain some sanity and some good values.
It goes without saying that those values are considered "diseased" by such bastards as the World Health Organization because they concern smoking. Let it be clear that for as long as smoking is holding its own in a given country, that means that far less antidepressants and smoking cessation products are going to be sold by the official partners of the WHO, Big Pharmaceutical. It is therefore logical that the WHO prostitutes address China as having a “bad problem with smoking” that requires “correction” – hence the Big Pharmaceutical meeting a while ago.
“For the Chinese, smoking carries connotations that might seem outdated, even quaint to Westerners. Real men smoke, period. And when real men hang out together, they smoke a lot. The presence of women is appreciated, of course — if they are quick with a lighter. At a formal meal or banquet, each course may be followed by a cigarette, as if to cleanse the palate, and a few more cigarettes will be smoked at the end, in place of port. As the saying goes, fan hou yi zhi yan, sai guo huo shenxian — a cigarette after a meal and you feel better than a living god.”
Outdated? Yes, we have to agree that those are “outdated” values in the West – very much like common sense, ethics, science, truth, honesty – should we go on? – all stuff that has gone the way of the dodo and that have been updated with moral inversions, intellectual confusion, epidemiological junk science, constructions of lies, political correctness and megatons of hypocrisy, the big flags of the “health revolution”.
“Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping smoked like chimneys” – that’s why they died at a ripe, old and “premature” age, we may add – “even when they were meeting foreign dignitaries”. Absolutely: if a Chinese leader goes to the smoke-free White House, he cannot smoke, can he, even if he is a foreign dignitary. Why should then the Chinese not smoke when they receive dignitaries from antismoking nations? Actually, let us hope that they smoke right in their face!
Be that as it may, smoking reigns in China. What will happen in the future will depend on how much money the pharmaceutical multinationals are willing to invest in corruption and propaganda; on whether China will ever need international loans from, say, the International Monetary Fund, which works in cooperation with the WHO crooks and blackmails countries in need into pushing antismoking beliefs and laws.
Given the current economic explosion of China, however, the blackmail scenario is improbable, while the scenario of big pharmaceutical corruption is more likely – and that will depend on other industrial agreements, officially and especially under the table. In the meantime, China is still a smokers’ heaven, and certainly a much more welcoming place than London or New York.
Isn’t it ironic that the last bastion of Communism in the world shows more respect for personal choice than the formerly “free” West? How low have we fallen!
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