4 Whistleblowers And Modern Heroes (Who Got Screwed Over)

The thing is, though, things could always be a lot, lot worse -- and it's (arguably) thanks to Dr. Li Weliang that they're not.

Dr. Li was an ophthalmologist in Wuhan, China, and one of the first people to openly raise the alarm about the virus, all the way back in December 2019 -- after he stumbled across a concerning report about a patient who was being treated at his hospital for "SARS coronavirus." Several days later, Dr. Li took to the country's popular messaging app, WeChat, and posted a message to a group of his old medical school classmates, warning them about the potential for a pandemic, and also to start taking precautions to keep themselves and their loved ones safe from whatever nightmare was about to break out.

A member of this group took a screenshot of Li's post and soon it was going viral on forums and social media networks (including WeChat) across the country, where it was read by thousands upon thousands of people. Before Dr. Li could even think of plugging his SoundCloud, however, he was summoned by the ominously-named Wuhan Public Security Bureau over his posts and issued a citation for "making false comments on the internet." Which appeared to dissuade other healthcare professionals from leaking information and possibly clear the way for Chinese authorities to allegedly downplay the extent of the virus, just as they were accused of doing with SARS in 2002 and H1N1 swine flu in 2009.

After his unpleasant brush with the law, Dr. Li returned to work in his hospital's ophthalmology department, where he came into contact with a glaucoma patient suffering from a nasty side-case of the virus. Within days, Dr. Li was diagnosed with COVID-19 and, by February 7, was dead after suffering massive respiratory failure.

Immediately, angry Chinese citizens took to social media to call out the government's persecution of Dr. Li and its wider censorship and repression of uncomfortable truths, which garnered thousands of posts under the hashtag #wewantfreedomofspeech -- or at least, it did before everything was deleted by state censors.
 

And then there's Gordon Sondland and Alexander Vindman, who were fired from their posts in the Trump administration earlier this year, after testifying at Trump's impeachment trial that he had withheld foreign aid payments to Ukraine unless the country provided political dirt on Hunter Biden, son of presidential candidate Joe Biden. After Trump was acquitted, both Sondland and Vindman were fired by Trump for repeating " 'perfect' calls incorrectly" -- presumably on account of how, when they testified, they didn't sound like drooling doofuses.

This is a major problem for Assad and Russia because, as a result of the White Helmets' work, they don't control the narrative of the war. You know what they say, though. When all you have is a propaganda hammer, every problem looks like a nail, and so the last few years have seen the White Helmets become the focus of a major disinformation campaign designed to convince the world that they're the secret bad guys of the war.

The basis of this campaign is a bunch of bullshit conspiracy theories about how the White Helmets are actually terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda who double twist are also carrying out the bombings to which they're responding. Pro-Assad propagandists and the Kremlin regularly promote these claims, and for the most part, they don't tend to get much traction. Except for April 2017, when the aftermath of a chemical weapon attack by government forces on the town of Khan Shaykhun -- the so-called #SyriaHoax -- went viral among stateside conspiracy mongers like Mike Cernovich, Ron Paul, Tulsi Gabbard, and Alex Jones. The crux of the "hoax" was that the attack was carried out by the White Helmets ("an al-Qaeda affiliated group funded by George Soros and the British government," according to Alex Jones) to make Assad look bad.

While these conspiracies are obvious trash, the trolls and bots and propagandists and media outlets who boost these claims are very good at what they do, and so they're starting to stick. And that's a huge problem because the disinformation campaign isn't meant to shame the White Helmets into quitting (because they won't); it's to tarnish their reputation and by extension, the evidence that they gather and provide to international war crimes investigators. And that's important, because, as we mentioned, Assad is totally committing war crimes.
 

Adam Wears is (allegedly) a comedy writer. Want to read other articles he's written for Cracked? Click here! Want to follow him on Twitter? Click here! Want to check out his website? Click here!

Top Image: The White Helmets (@SyriaCivilDef)