How should we react to the unproven claim that "They did it!"?

This blog piece springs from a query from a dear friend asking what I thought about a video looking to place the blame for the current horrors hard onto the back of Chinese communism.

I loath "communism," not just as a disastrous economic system, but far more as an encroachment on the human sprit.

As Albert Einstein said "Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom."

Communism by its very nature destroys that.

But my response to the video was short; my viewing of it yet shorter. And in response to this friend's question I wrote...

I only watched a bit beyond the introduction. That was enough for me because it did what an introduction is supposed to do -- it laid out the thesis.

The fact is, to my mind, that neither you, nor I, nor the makers of that video know the answer to that question; those questions. But this is exactly how every HATE begins and spreads.

"It was the _________. They are to blame."

It does seem apparent that the Chinese bureaucracy hid the truth and punished those trying to make it known. That is what every bureaucracy does. Lower members play 'cover your ass' to protect their place within the structure.

That is, yes, evil. But it is not the same as concluding that some nefarious evil monster-man created this disease and intentionally spread it among mankind.

That humans want such a clear and simple answer -- that someone "did it" -- is again a historical truth. That people profit in numerous ways, including emotional ones, from "finding" and then "revealing" such a "truth" is equally historical. And that truth has killed far more people than any virus.

The simple, but hard to accept  truth is that there is much we do not, will not, and cannot know. And that emptiness is like a vacuum.

I avoid such theorizing -- such trying to fill that vacuum -- as useless and often harmful.

"I do not know" suffices for me. Adding, as best I can, "but what can I do to help?"

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