An ambulance sits outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, Monday. Photo: AFP

As of Wednesday, the total confirmed COVID-19 cases around the world have topped 2.5 million, with the US and European countries being the hardest hit, while the US alone has reported over 825,000 infection cases. What are leaders and politicians of these countries doing when their homelands are suffering from the coronavirus? Are they busy flattening the curve? Given the reports of Western media outlets, this seems to not be their focus, as they are sparing more efforts to duck the responsibilities for their inability. 

Over the past month, some Western politicians have been shouting more loudly than ever to demand compensation from China, as if they will manage to call white for black with their political hysteria. Since the pandemic became increasingly severer day by day in Europe and particularly in the US, some Western countries that dominate the world's public opinion have been engaging in a ridiculous show of 1,000 ways to slander China. 

To steal the spotlight, a batch of Western politicians dare say anything they want and pass any legislation they wish regardless of truth or facts. They have thoroughly interpreted their deep-rooted pirate-style mentality and how it works.

These politicians have accused China of so-called disinformation and delay in information sharing, while they have been neglecting what China has been trying to share with them from the very beginning and warn them out of goodwill. 

From the moves of US senators such as Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley to Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, we can see the ghosts of Western imperialists and colonialists who raided around the world, burning and looting with guns and cannons. 

What if these Western countries are treated with their very own pirate-style mentality? They shall be held accountable for what humanity is suffering in the past decades, even centuries. A great number of Westerners seem to have forgotten how they managed to quickly complete the original accumulation of capital and embark on the road of leading the world's development. In the Age of Discovery, Western civilization has spread across the world and the traditional powers seized a huge amount of resources in that process. Meanwhile, diseases such as cholera, malaria, yellow fever, and smallpox brought by the West's explorers doomed aborigines in the new continents. 

The 1918 influenza pandemic, the most severe pandemic in recent history, infected an estimated total of 500 million people or one-third of the world's population at that time. The number of deaths was estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide. Some suggest the virus originated from Kansas, where it was identified in military personnel in spring 1918; while some believe New York City was the origin. If we adopt the West's above-mentioned mentality here, how dare the US not compensate the rest of the world for its failure of containing the virus within its borders?

If such mentality is justified, has the US compensated the world or at least apologized after the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic that originated from the country and resulted in an estimated range of deaths from between 151,700 and 575,400 people during the very first year the virus circulated?

There is no logic and no rationale that China has to bear infamy and compensate for mistakes it has never made. Is it that in the mind of many Westerners Chinese are born inferior to white people, so they never believe the Chinese can do anything better than them?

Things have changed in the world we are living in. Long gone are the good old times of imperialists and colonialists. If some people still uphold their political hysteria, they had better be prepared for China's counterpunch.