Pandemics are not parochial

I began to write this blogpost a little over a week ago, on March 11, 2020, the day that the World Health Organization finally got around to admitting that the coronavirus outbreak had indeed become a global pandemic. This is one of those worldwide epidemics that many observers like myself have been predicting over the past few years, that would break out over and over again as a result of most top-level big-shots refusal to prepare for any type of crisis that did not initially seem to threaten their own domineering control over every possible form of human activity. The kind of pandemics, like the coronavirus, that would inevitably intersect with every other known variety of international crisis, such as the enormous recent expansion in the emission of greenhouse gases, or the increasingly dangerous escalation in the number of countries possessing ever greater quantities of nuclear weapons. To provoke a perfect storm of mutually reinforcing threats to the quality, and even to the duration, of human life on this planet.

This is the kind of world we are entering right now, when it is becoming increasingly difficult to figure out how we can get any kind of hold on what is happening to all of us these days. Six years ago, when Canadian social activist Naomi Klein published her book about how “This changes everything”, she assumed that people’s worldwide reaction to the reality of climate change would be more than enough incentive to, in fact, change everything drastically. To finally realize that we had to dump our much too long-lasting, eternally hegemonic system of capital accumulation into the garbage. And to come up instead with an entirely different approach to running a modern, “cooperative commonwealth” of almost eight billion highly interdependent human beings.

In place of that , what we got in the real world was even more regression than we had already accumulated since the late 1970s, when the coordinated juggernaut of neoliberalism (deregulation of everything) and neofascism (ultra-religious, ultra-ethnic communitarianism) was unleashed on the world by the central banks monetarist “war on inflation”. The worldwide recession that they deliberately created in the early 1980s inaugurated a period of forty years during which private and state forms of capitalist empire-building combined together to make sure that no one anywhere would be able to escape their total control over world politics, the world economy and subordinated social conditions.

The proof of which being the fact that most of the new wealth created in the world over the past forty years has gone to an extremely small group of people, centred on the 2000-plus billionaires to be found spread out all over today’s world. Resulting in an ever-increasing gap between a handful of extremely rich people (some of them “earning” up to 100 million US dollars per day) and hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people (still barely surviving on only one or two dollars per day). An income gap that is dozens of times greater than it used to be, as recently as fifty years ago.

Now, however, it looks very much like their coordinated control of everything has broken down completely, not just because of the pandemic itself but also because of their hyper-ridiculous reaction to this latest crisis. Especially in the USA, still the world’s largest economy, where their “striatum president” deliberately dragged his feet for several weeks, obstinately refusing to do anything at all capable of containing the spread of the virus. Even after that, his idea of an appropriate response was to declare a “national emergency” that focused on merely blocking individual travel for 30 days between the USA and the European Union. Initially leaving out the UK and Ireland, even though their exposure to the coronavirus was as dangerous as that of the designated 26 EU countries overall average. Which idiotic reaction set off an unprecedented meltdown in the world’s stock markets, that all began falling apart faster than they ever have before, weak little rallies never coming close to catching up with much greater losses. Not just 1987 but even 1929 do not seem to have been this bad, if not for any other reason than that of the much more inter-dependent nature of recent economic globalization.

This is where we find ourselves nowadays, in a hyper-individualist period of history during which the most egotistical members of the ruling elites, against all odds, are still deliberately trying to ignore not only the laws of physics (notwithstanding Greta Thunberg’s reminder that “You cannot make deals with physics”), but also to ignore the laws of biology as well. Not to mention specifically ignoring what is euphemistically known as “the rule of law”, a series of agreed-upon rules among elitist rulers that underly any possible attempts at international coordination against exactly this kind of threat. Even though a few eternal optimists are still trying to argue that “everyone seems to be pulling together” against the coronavirus, it ought to be obvious to everyone now that completely disconnected, hyper-narcissistic maniacs like  Donald Trump, and all the other ultra right-wing populists currently in power in dozens of other unfortunate countries, are again doing their best to use the fight against the virus as just another way of preserving their own personal hold on power. Creating even more chaos by constantly trying to convince their extremely foolish supporters that they are in fact god-kings, always automatically doing the right thing from the outset, without even breaking a sweat.

Even in the UK, prime minister Boris Johnson, who seemed to be intelligent enough to have finally set aside the extreme neoliberalism left over from Margaret Thatcher’s antediluvian approach, has nevertheless decided to constantly downplay the coronavirus threat, at first openly refusing to do anything at all about the spread of that disease into his unfortunate country. Then trying to play catch-up with the French quarantine a few days later by talking about (!) taking much more drastic action. More or less in the same way that the Canadian government caved into Québec’s criticism about not doing anything about controlling foreign visitors, by shutting out most countries, while still exempting the USA for a few days, as if it were not also a foreign country. Now that the border with the USA has finally been closed, by mutual agreement, Canada still seems to be sharing with its huge neighbour, and with Germany, the absurd notion that most people do not have to be tested for the virus, not even those arriving at airports from abroad. How long is that ridiculous idea going to last?

For their part, the rest of the world’s only slightly less self-centred chieftains, those who still claim like France’s Emmanuel Macron to be “doing something real” about the crisis, making a big show about “getting tough”, are nevertheless coming up with the same kind of “one quarter, or maybe half of the way” solutions. Just like they have always been doing in every other crisis situation that has arisen over the past several decades, since at least as far back as when everyone started hearing about the concept of “climate change” for the first time.

However, none of the official reactions to the current crisis, be they totally or partially inadequate, in no way justified the completely opposite kind of hyper-individualist reactions to the pandemic, committed by millions of panic-stricken ordinary shoppers. Who demonstrated their total indifference to the needs of everyone else in their respective neighbourhoods by at least temporarily cleaning out local stores completely. Stocking up with such weird choices as an entire year’s supply of toilet paper!

All of which has brought at least one major change throughout the world, namely a whole lot of speculation (in those places where it has not already gone way beyond that stage) about hospital triage setting in. In other words, public and private health systems becoming so overwhelmed by treating victims of the coronavirus that they deliberately decide not to treat selected groups of “ordinary patients”, such as everyone over 80 years old and/or anyone at all suffering from life-threatening problems not related to the virus itself!

In fact, governments all over the world have also been proclaiming in the last few days a similar kind of political triage, namely their intention to “put off” doing anything at all about such “unrelated” problems as climate change, until the coronavirus itself has been defeated once and for all. Which, given the way that such governments have functioned over the past few decades, could mean doing nothing about anything else for a very long time. Long enough for any one of those “other” problems, or all of them ganging up together, to turn our eventual triumph over the virus (if ever that happens) into a pyrrhic victory, the effect of those other crises making it totally impossible for anyone to celebrate the projected end of this particular epidemic.

The recent geopolitical spat between the USA and China over the origins of the virus has underlined just how easy it is for diplomatic quarrels between rival nuclear powers to affect their judgement about other things. The USA chose to emphasize over and over again the Chinese origins of the virus by reminding everyone how dozens of other major epidemics in the past have begun in those parts of central China where the poorest peasants have always been in close proximity with wild animals as a source of food. And China chose to reply to those endlessly repeated taunts by claiming that it was in fact the US Army that initially planted the virus in that particular region!

But the problems being constantly magnified by the world’s most important propagators of deliberate ignorance are not just the ones already mentioned: the pandemic itself, unprecedented levels of environmental degradation, equally unprecedented levels of nuclear proliferation, record-level income differentiation and the stock-market pandemonium, all of them resulting in the extremely negative effect of all of those things together on the fragile world economy. Recent reports attempting to estimate just how disastrous the economic effects of the COVID-19 crisis have been, in every one of the affected countries as well as throughout the globe, have emphasized the fact that both local and international recovery efforts will be  blocked for quite some time by the intersecting effects of the pandemic.

It does not seem possible to overcome the effects of the coronavirus merely by government intervention, nor indeed by central-bank intervention, as several previous financial crises and economic recessions were overcome. For the simple reason that most world governments have lost much of the power, and most of the financial clout that they used to possess. Having gradually abandoned anywhere between one-half and three-quarters of their former strength, even in countries like China, after forty years of neoliberal deregulation of practically everything. All the world’s public authorities seem nowadays to be acting a lot like older, already-sick people succumbing to the virus more than anyone else, because those public authorities have also been greatly weakened before the coronavirus itself came into being.

In any case, even government largesse in dire circumstances always goes mainly to relatively well-off people in every affected region, in spite of official fake-news messages claiming that the most underprivileged people among us are being helped the most. Just like some wit pointed out a few years back about foreign aid, which in spite of government propaganda to the contrary, usually ends up with “poor people in rich countries helping rich people in poor countries”. Commentators like Craig Kielburger, the WE-Movement co-founder who writes a column published by a Canadian newspaper chain, has tried to argue that the pandemic could have been avoided if all the world’s richest governments and richest individuals had combined together over the past few decades, to spend the 5 trillion dollars necessary in order to attain the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Thereby eliminating poverty in the poorest parts of the world and avoiding the pandemic altogether; see his article, “Complicit in COVID-19”, “The Montreal Gazette”, March 17, 2020. What Kielburger left out of the equation, however, is the fact that even the world’s richest countries are not at all well prepared to face up to the virus, since even they cannot control poverty in their own countries, let alone in the rest of the world.

Not to mention the fact that a whole series of other major crises, that particularly insensitive people consider “less important” or “totally unrelated” to the ones already mentioned, are also taking place right now, and also depend for their own propagation on the same completely narcissistic, irrational and irresponsible attitudes. Another example of which being the recent, atavistic revival of male chauvinism, all over the world, resulting in a whole new wave of targeted attacks on most of the world’s female population, including a recrudescence of “feminicide”, wife battering, gang rape, excision, forced marriage imposed on really young girls, trafficking of millions of sex slaves, and ever more degrading forms of domination pornography than those that already existed in all the earlier periods of history.

Even though, paradoxically enough in the USA, Harvey Weinstein, the extremely powerful film producer, serial rapist and Trump clone, was finally brought down, in France the equally well-known film director Roman Polanski got rewarded instead. In spite of having accumulated an almost equivalent pedigree of sexual violence over the past several decades. He won a “César” award for best film, an event that set off a fire-storm of denunciation of sexual predators in that country. Including the publication in the “Libération” newspaper of an extremely hard-hitting article by novelist Virginie Despentes, accusing the “clan of powerful people” using their “financial fire-power” to glorify one of their own. Thereby spitting in the faces of millions of innocent victims, in France even more than in any of the other Western countries. Her analysis of that excessively painful event was particularly insightful, when she accused her country of proudly exhibiting its true nature as a class-based society, bent on deliberately mistreating everyone not belonging to the ruling circles of power, either because they belong to “inferior” social classes, or to the “weaker” sex, or to the wrong political orientation.

What made the whole thing so incredibly poignant was the fact that the Polanski film that won the national award, “J’accuse” (“An officer and a spy” in English), was in fact a reasonably accurate depiction of the Dreyfus affair in France, during the years leading up to the First World War. When Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French Army, was falsely accused of spying for the Germans and sent off to a prison camp in French Guyana, before being eventually reinstated after an immensely important national debate over that very anti-Semitic affair. In other words, today’s ruling elite in France is quite content to pretend to repudiate one small part of their predecessors racist attitudes, just so long as they are allowed to continue to crush, dominate and exploit most of the rest of the population. Exactly the same kind of flamboyant hypocrisy that people like Donald Trump (and Harvey Weinstein before his fall from grace) exhibit whenever they also laughingly pretend to support social equality (“equal opportunity”), gender equality and/or “racial” equality.

Yet another excellent example of the convergence of these seemingly independent crises, all of them stemming from the same sources of hyper-individualism, is the eternally head-in-the-sand attitude of many otherwise intelligent observers, especially in Western countries, to the ongoing threat of religious fundamentalism, particularly virulent these days in the Muslim world. And not at all unrelated to the revival of those extreme forms of male-chauvinism in the preceding example. In Canada, Don Macpherson, a columnist for the Montreal Gazette, followed up recently (March 7, 2020) on his 50-year career of Quebec-bashing by again attacking Québec’s “Bill 21”, an  attempt to shore up provincial laicity, ever so slightly, by making it illegal for civil servants “in positions of authority” to wear proselytizing religious garments and symbols while at work.

His column was published just after it was revealed in the news that two fundamentalist Muslim daycare workers in Montréal were observed trying to convince Muslim-origin girls in a daycare facility attached to a public school to be “good Muslims” by wearing the hijab, praising Allah at every available opportunity and getting their parents to complain about the absence of halal food in the school cafeteria. The parents of the children affected, however, were Tunisian immigrants who came to Canada specifically to get away from just that kind of religious propaganda. Instead of complaining about no halal, they complained to the authorities about how their children were being brainwashed, and threatened to go to court if need be to put an end to such practices. In his column, Macpherson, like many other such commentators from English Canada, downplayed the significance of this latest development by claiming that it failed to “make the case for Bill 21”, since Islamic fundamentalism in Québec only represents a minority opinion, even inside the relatively small Muslim minority currently living in Québec.

What Macpherson and all the other commentators like him refuse to recognize, however, is that even though the Muslim minority in Québec is still quite small by comparison with the Muslim minority living in such countries as France, increasingly fundamentalist control over the entire Muslim world is quite capable of doing a considerable amount of damage to human rights wherever it shows its ugly head. Macpherson and his crowd like to think that they live in some kind of near-perfect Canadian society, completely isolated from the horrible things going on in all the Muslim-majority countries spread out from northwestern Africa all the way over to southeast Asia, not to mention Muslim-minority countries like France.

In fact, many of the things that people like Macpherson fear so much are also taking place right now in France, whose Muslim minority of almost six million people, constituting slightly less than nine percent of the total population, is hugely affected by the current wave of fundamentalist sentiment, and by its terrorist offshoot, to the same proportional extent as in every other part of the Muslim world. France’s well-known and long-lasting laicity laws, much more extensive than any such legislation in Québec, have not succeeded all that much in blunting many of the negative effects of Muslim fundamentalism. Which, after all, is merely the hyper-violent Muslim equivalent of the kind of ultra-right-wing populism, and white supremacy, that has affected all the European, and European-origin, Christian populations spread out over many other parts of the  world.

As president Emmanuel Macron put it in a recent speech denouncing “political Islam”, also known as “Islamic separatism”, the French republic finds it inacceptable whenever someone refuses to shake hands with a woman simply because she is a woman, or refuses to be cared for or educated by a woman, or refuses to be educated at all for the same reason, or imposes virginity certificates on women before they are allowed to marry, or considers the laws of religion to be superior to those of the republic. (See “Macron s’engage contre l’islam politique” in “Le Devoir”, February 19, 2020.) In hundreds of different neighbourhoods in France, particularly in those suburban regions in which the majority of the local population is Muslim, the apolitical, “moderate” Muslims of days gone by have been largely replaced by militant Muslim fundamentalists, who insist on making life very difficult indeed not only for every Muslim, or person of Muslim origin, who does not want to kowtow to their deliberately backward way of doing things. But also for every other French citizen living in the same area, regardless of his or her ethnic background, religious affiliation, or lack of a religious affiliation.

Wherever ultra-right-wing populists congregate, in whatever part of the world, they always produce local situations just like the ones that Macron was denouncing in the fundamentalist regions of France. It makes no difference whatsoever if the neofascist movement inside any particular country or region is of imperial-Western/evangelical-Christian/white-supremacist origins, or if it originates among colonial-Eastern/Muslim-fundamentalist/non-white-supremacist origins, or for that matter in any other combination of world regions, religions and forms of racism anywhere else in the world (including Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Confucian, Shintoist and animist communities) . Intolerance toward ethnic and religious majorities or minorities, intolerance toward women or other “inferior” genders, intolerance toward “inferior” social classes: all the different kinds of intolerance are equally spread out all over the world, and are not just reserved, or even particularly concentrated, as some ultra-alienated, Western “anti-colonialists” imagine, uniquely or exclusively in the Western world.

So, as I have been pointing out over and over again in my blog, human beings have to drastically repudiate, very quickly indeed, this jointly neoliberal and neofascist trajectory that we have all been on for the past forty years. Otherwise, we are going to self-destruct, not because of any particular kind of epidemic, economic crisis, environmental degradation, geopolitical confrontation, or social atavism, but because of what happens when all of those crises come at us all at once. It is highly unlikely that we are all going to be saved in the nick of time, by some unforeseen miracle, without changing our own attitudes in a major way. As Johnny Cash put it, during his Folsom Prison concert more than 50 years ago, in his song about a jailed murderer waiting for a pardon: “But this ain’t the movies, so forget about me.” We all have to become much better people than we were before, right away quick, but that certainly does not seem to be happening nearly often enough at the moment.

It is not just the hyenas like Warren Buffett who have been profiting from every “lesser” person’s problems, even mistreating other tycoons possessing somewhat less money than he does, over the past few decades. It is also the fact that the example provided by such billionaires has been replicated at all levels of society, even among middle-class and lower-class people, sadistic copycats in even “ordinary” circles constantly mistreating their more masochistic neighbours and family members, keeping everything for themselves (goods and services) that were supposed to have been shared with everyone else in their particular social group. Even people in the union movement, at least those practising what is called “business unionism”, try to keep for themselves all the crumbs that regularly fall off the big investors tables, rather than sharing whatever is left over of the world’s wealth with unorganized labour, weaker unions or retirees.

Liberation from all of these multiple crises coming together at the same time has to be coordinated world-wide and become universal, rather than parochial, if any of us can hope to survive this particularly disappointing period of history.