The quicksand effect: sinking in deeper and deeper

The coronavirus pandemic seems to be getting worse and worse with every passing day, hundreds of thousands more cases constantly being added just about everywhere, especially in the USA, and tens of thousands more deaths, in many different places, than those that have been officially reported. Especially in China, which seems to have chalked up at least 15 times more victims than what has so far been acknowledged, according to clandestine corpse-counters based inside that country. Even the name given to the virus seems to be wrong, since it apparently started as far back as last September, or maybe November, and not in December at all, which means that we ought to be referring to COVIS-19 or COVIN-19, instead of calling it COVID-19.

The Chinese government tried really hard to sweep the problem under the rug at the beginning, before finally dealing with it head on. The whole world would have been a lot better off, however, if the dictatorship had succeeded in banning wild-animal meat-markets before anyone started dying, even in the ultra-poor, central regions around Wuhan, belonging to the traditional Han-majority. Even recently, Chinese officials reported that they had been forced to backtrack on a projected return to “normalcy”, given the arrival of new infections apparently caused by overseas Chinese returning home. At the same time the Chinese regime is doing its very best trying to convince all the other countries in the world that it has the best political system available on this planet. But its reputation as a beacon of hope for everyone, everywhere, has suffered an enormous hit, from which it should not be allowed to recover. Nothing that Chinese officialdom says about anything can ever be relied upon at face value.

Which is not to say that any other country can legitimately claim to have a much better system, nor can any other large bureaucracy, public or private, legitimately claim to be consistently avoiding fake news. Especially not those currently denouncing other people’s fake news the loudest: Donald Trump and his millions of clones, more or less evenly scattered all over the world. Anyone following the news (real or fake) in any format (newspapers, television, Internet), is constantly being told by some of the experts that in this kind of situation, human beings have a built-in tendency to be overly optimistic. And by another group of experts that in this kind of situation, human beings have a built-in tendency to be overly pessimistic.

As a result, none of the current predictions about the pandemic starting to go away right now should be believed by anyone, not for a long time to come. Neither should anyone believe that the coronavirus is going to end up killing everyone on the planet, all by itself. People have to use their own judgement, to the best of their abilities. In situations like these, none of the experts end up being all that expert, and none of the large bureaucracies are genuinely interested in taking care of everyone under their official jurisdiction. In any case, not nearly as much as they clearly exhibit a genuine interest for taking care of their own interests first. After all, even many of the owners of small Mom and Dad shops in everyone’s local neighbourhood lie, cheat and steal pretty much all the time, albeit on a much smaller scale than do any of the large bureaucracies.

As usually happens with every other major calamity in this world, such as accelerated environmental degradation or austerity programs deliberately aimed at victimizing the poor, the virus especially affects people already suffering from previously existing conditions. Even some of the world’s major corporations, like those in the airline industry (“air sardine”), are also suffering more than others from the consequences of this contagion. Not only because of the airlines strong ties to the collapsed tourism business, but also because they were also already fragile even before the recent viral outbreak. Normally, the fragility of huge corporations, constantly seeking to maximize short-term profits at the expense of everyone else, should not concern people nearly as much as the fragility of hospitalized patients, especially those undergoing intensive care. Unfortunately, most large corporations always seem to possess an uncanny capacity for getting their victims to help them solve their problems, even in the midst of a murderous pandemic.

Most of the world’s medieval confinement strategies, currently affecting about 40% of the world’s population, were also put into place to cover up official denial and prior stupidity among all those countries that refused to, or were unable to, test large numbers of people right off the bat (so to speak) and thereby zero in on treating those who needed help the most. Every country, particularly in the West, that had succumbed to the neoliberal siren-call of just-in-time economies, not only for ordinary “widget-making” but also for health, education and social welfare, suddenly found itself unable to produce the tons of protective medical equipment, or ordinary medication, required in times of crisis.

Unlike South Korea and Taiwan, the world’s stupidest governments completely ignored the lessons of the SARS scare, occurring only about fifteen years ago, and decided to rely instead on imports from places like China and India, which (surprise, surprise) needed those same supplies for their own enormous populations. As usually happens in such cases, the worldwide war between ruthless buyers of those supplies offered an excellent opportunity for unscrupulous traders, most of them belonging to organized crime syndicates, to accumulate billions more dollars, profiting from the tremendous increase in the death rate, especially among older people. For their part, South Korea and Taiwan apparently used electronic tracking, including cellphone information, in order to test targeted populations, spying on their own citizens for their own good.

Autocratic Russia, and many other countries like it, also used electronic information to spy even more than before on their own populations, blaming it all on the virus as well. But without doing much at all in the way of testing after that, nor in taking care of the general population. Unfortunately, no government, just like no private corporation, can ever be trusted to use such information, or any other kind of information for that matter, exclusively in the public interest. Personalized dictatorships, like the one in Turkmenistan that banned even national-media use of the very word “coronavirus”, deliberately avoid doing anything at all about the much-maligned public interest. Preferring instead to concentrate on staying in power forever, and enjoying the perks that go along with not sharing anything good or valuable with anyone outside their number one honcho’s immediate circle.

True to form, the duly-elected, ultra-right wing populist government in Hungary also decided to use all the worldwide hype about the virus as a scapegoat for another power grab, banning future elections and reserving all decision-making for itself, without setting any time limit whatsoever. Which is quite similar to the same ruling party’s proclamation of a state of emergency during the European migration crisis of 2015. That is still in place nowadays even though that particular “emergency” was resolved very quickly, and never really affected Hungary at all. Even if the world manages to wipe out the coronavirus just as quickly, which does not seem remotely possible at this point, no one knows how many years it will take before the next pandemic breaks out.

In the meantime, the more strenuously that countries all over the world struggle to get out of the quicksand created by the coronavirus, the deeper they sink down into the morass. This is because most of the countries in the world are also suffering from a simultaneous scissors crisis. Vaguely similar to the first recorded scissors crisis, that took place in the USSR back in 1923, during Lenin’s semi-return to capitalism (“the new economic policy”), when industrial prices shot up much faster than agricultural prices. In the current, worldwide, scissors crisis, the ever-increasing number of deaths from the pandemic has forced most countries to adopt the kind of confinement strategies that result in a collapsed economy, with many of the world’s major industries and services shut down completely.

Dozens of governments have abandoned neoliberalism, at least for the time being, stepping in massively to offer necessary aid to private (and public) employers in hundreds of different industries and services. Such as the Canadian government’s numerous new programs for the duration of the crisis, including an offer to finance 75% of the private-sector salaries of millions of ordinary employees during a “carefully calculated period of transition” back to a “normal economy”. As well as similar programs currently being adopted by provincial and municipal governments in that country, and many others. Over the past forty years of neoliberalism, massive tax evasion by ultra-rich people and their corporations, backed up by complacent politicians in power, led to extremely serious austerity programs aimed at reducing (but not eliminating) government debt, that caused a great deal of suffering among ordinary citizens, through massive government cut-backs at all levels, all over the world. As well as employing millions of severely underpaid workers, in public and private services such as residences exclusively reserved for old people.

Now, however, the pandemic has forced all those governments (national, regional and local) to rack up a new, even more enormous debt load that will have to be paid back to the financiers at some point. In order to avoid the kind of complete meltdown of high finance that almost wiped out world money markets back in 2008. It would be nice if we did not have to worry about the God-forsaken financiers, either, but like the world’s other large corporations, they always seem to be able to get everyone else to pay for their excesses. True to form, almost all the big financial institutions in the world (banks, shadow banks, insurance companies and so on) have consistently refused to help out during the current crisis, by eliminating dividends completely, or by substantially reducing credit-card interest rates. But just because they refuse to help anyone right now does not mean that they are not looking forward to forcing everyone else to help them again a couple of months from now.

This also means that dozens of countries that could presumably have activated already-planned, long-term strategies to save the natural environment from any further calamities are now in the process of cancelling those plans for quite a long time to come. Which means that any small progress that any country may have made in the past to avoid climate change on a global scale has now been wiped out. In the same way, countries all over the world that were also debating, prior to the pandemic, about whether or not to embark on bold new programs to spend a lot more government money helping ordinary people (rather than just underwriting the world’s biggest personal fortunes), will now be mothballing all those ideas as well. Meaning that the USA, for example, may very well never adopt Bernie Sanders proposal for installing a public health system like the one that Canada already possesses, while Canada may never go one step further by adopting a previously discussed, nation-wide, public drug-paying program.

Other, much poorer, countries like India will probably never succeed in providing indoor toilets for all of their enormous populations, and may not not even succeed in getting half-way to that laudable goal. Similarly, China may never get anywhere close to what, at least until recently, used to be called “Western levels” of average wages and salaries. Brazil (as well as many other countries) may never be able to clean up its enormous urban slum neighbourhoods (favelas). South Africa may never succeed in seeing its black-majority population become equally as prosperous as its white-minority population, which still controls most of the national economy, a quarter-century after apartheid. Algeria, and dozens of other unfortunate countries, may never be able to get rid of their ultra-corrupt, post-independence ruling elites. And so on and so forth, in practically every single country in the world.

For at least the past 50 years, anti-democratic control over the general population has continuously been intensified as a consequence of every difficult situation that arose, from the war on inflation, through the war on terrorism, all the way over to the war on the coronavirus. In some countries at least, some of that authoritarianism has also been accompanied by the adoption of a few beneficial interventions. While in other cases, such as that of the federal government of the USA, the national authorities try their best to do as little as possible, while still becoming much more authoritarian than they were before, anyway.

Some honest observers have come to the conclusion that despite several earlier reports about people banding together in solidarity to help the less fortunate during the crisis, the overall effect of the pandemic on every continent will most probably be a deepening of social rifts within the general population. Krzysztof Pelc, for example, a professor of political science at McGill University, recently predicted (in the “Montreal Gazette” on March 26, 2020) that the rift between white-collar and blue-collar workers will probably get even worse than it already has been getting, as will the rift between larger and smaller firms, and the one between younger people and older people.

Thereby adding to, and intensifying, negative effects on those already huge groups of people that have been downtrodden since just about forever: the lower classes of society, such as the poor and the chronically unemployed, as well as most of the female population all over the world, and a very large number of ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities in various different countries. Not to mention dozens of mistreated ethnic majorities as well, such as the black South Africans that were referenced earlier. Or even the francophone majority in the province of Québec, which has lost a lot of ground recently to the anglophone minority. Even though it is not nearly as far behind its more prosperous minority as is the black majority in South Africa.

Not to forget either the fact that many countries are not just divided into one ethnic and/or religious majority and several different kinds of minorities. A large number of those minorities are also divided up into even smaller minorities, that are even more downtrodden and exploited than most of the other people in their region, such as the “Khoi-San” minority in the southern part of Africa. Indigenous peoples all over the world do not just have to deal with much larger, “settler” populations (themselves often divided into dominant and dominated sections as in Canada/Québec), they also have to deal with political divisions between rival, dominant and dominated indigenous groupings. In many different parts of the world, such as China, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Brazil and Algeria, an ethnic-religious form of fundamentalism (regional imperialism) is still trying to wipe out minority populations altogether, by absorbing them all into some kind of  imagined “common origin”, imposed from above.

Reacting to the idiocy of recent neoliberal globalization, some observers have been proposing a new kind of world characterized by what one citizen has called “altruistic nationalism” (see Marc Boucher’s letter to the editor in the March 26, 2020, edition of the Montréal daily, “Le Devoir”). In other words, a new variety of all-round nation-building (political, economic, social and cultural nationalism) that is not at all an old-fashioned cover-up for some gang of corrupt politicians trying to grab everything for themselves. But instead putting into place a government that is extremely kind to the natural environment in every country, as well as to every one of its citizens, no matter which social class, sex, ethnic group, religion or absence of religion, to which they all belong. I wrote a 200-page book about this kind of thing back in 1992, that I called “Universal Nationalism”, but I never succeeded in getting it published anywhere. The least that can be said, however, is that the world we live in does not seem to be moving in that rather utopian direction, not even a little bit.

Strangely enough, all the horrible things already mentioned, up to and including the coronavirus outbreak, are taking place in the real world, in spite of the fact that all the world’s ruling elites were repeatedly informed in advance about all those developing crises, including the likelihood of a new pandemic. As Éric Desrosiers pointed out in an article in another edition of “Le Devoir” (“Ces crises inattendues qui n’en sont pas”, April 3, 2020), a group of highly intelligent people at the World Economic Forum (WEF) have been sending out extensive planning reports over the past several years, expressly aimed at the ruling elites, about all the different kinds of major crises currently facing humanity, specifically including pandemics. Another reasonably well-informed individual, by the name of Bill Gates, also sent out a similar reminder five years ago.

Not only that, but the WEF reports have also been putting the accent on how inter-connected all these different crises really are, just like I have been pointing out, over and over again, in my blogposts. It is not as though any of those ruling-class people can legitimately claim that they have not been made aware of all those constantly accelerating and cross-infecting dangers, the ones that we have already experienced as well as those that are yet to come.

What kind of blithering idiot does such a major decision-maker have to be, in order to ignore all those warning signs completely, at least since the neoliberal tandem of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan first came to power, forty years ago? How can anyone in the West, in particular, have been so dim-witted as to have handed over control of a very large portion of the entire world supply of manufactured goods, including medical supplies and disease-controlling pills, to the oddly-named “People’s” Republic of China? A grade three level reader like Donald Trump did not, after all, become president of the USA, still the world’s most important country, back in 1979 or 1980, but only in 2017. So not all of this incredible stupidity can be blamed exclusively on people like the USA’s current, completely idiotic “criminal-in-chief” (see Élisabeth Vallet’s excellent article, “Le petit président” in “Le Devoir”, 4-5 avril 2020).

Other leaders as well, such as the UK’s Boris Johnson, who has also caught the coronavirus, and is currently being treated in an intensive care unit, are nevertheless being hypocritical whenever they make public pronouncements these days about how a few ignorant people are putting other people’s lives in danger when they flout the current rules of confinement. On the one hand, it is certainly true, like Johnson said, that everyone ought to be following those rules to the letter, in every part of the world where governments have decided to put those rules into place. Even people living in parts of the world where the local governments are too delinquent to have adopted those policies should also try to observe the same rules anyway.

But a guy like Johnson, even though he has now been stricken by the disease, spent his entire life before that as a member of the ruling elite, and has been a Conservative Party stalwart for the past couple of decades. Which means that he is hardly well-placed to be accusing others of being inconsiderate of people whose lives are on the line (an endangered group of people to which Johnson now unfortunately belongs). Tory governments in the UK have been mistreating vulnerable people in that country since that party was founded several centuries ago, in a particularly intense way during Margaret Thatcher’s reign (1979-1990), and as recently as Theresa May’s period in power (2016-2019), not to mention during the early days of the Johnson regime. Millions of people in the UK have lived much more miserable lives than they otherwise would have lived if the Conservative Party had not been in power so often between 1979 and the present day. Many thousands of them have also died prematurely as a result of their austerity attacks on the poor, the unemployed and the physically and mentally disabled parts of the British population.

The Tony Blair faction of the British Labour Party (“New Labour”) also supported a somewhat milder version of neoliberalism during its periods in power as well. To be sure, the same kind of neoliberal garbage was also practised in dozens of other countries, such as in all the nations of the European Union as well as in Canada and the USA. Mostly by other Conservative parties (Canada) and by certain Republican parties (the USA), not to mention being also practised, to a slightly lesser extent, by other Liberal parties (Canada and Québec) and by certain Democratic parties (the USA). (For their part, the names of the leading political parties in the EU countries keep changing all the time, without a noticeable effect on the outcome.)

Flouting the rules of confinement is also not the exclusive prerogative of active young men in various different countries. Fundamentalist religion has also raised its ugly head once again, in many different parts of the world, seeking to participate as strongly as possible in ignoring the rules on social distancing. Acting as if all the world’s religious zealots wanted to go back to the old-fashioned way of dealing with epidemics, by proclaiming that mass death is just the “Heavenly Father”’s way of punishing us all for not believing in the common religious mythology of accepting great suffering in the (only) real world. So that all the true believers can be saved instead in the (unfortunately non-existent) “next world”. Different versions of this kind of nonsense characterize not only the fundamentalist factions within the world’s monotheist religions, but also all the similar factions inside all the other religions as well (Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Confucianism, Shintoism, animism and so on).

Hence the refusal of several backward states, mostly in the rural “Bible Belt” regions of the USA, to embark on that country’s national confinement program. Which is readily tolerated in that nation because its equally backward president keeps on desperately proclaiming that he wants to fill up all the churches, if not by Easter, then as soon as possible after that. Since he knows that most of his electoral base belongs to the huge gang of “redeemed sinners” who cling to religion so fiercely because they know deep down inside that they do not really live in a “truly Christian” way all that often. Church service on Sunday being absolutely necessary to atone for what they have been doing to their “fellow man” during the other six days of the week. Which is also why Brazil’s born-again neofascist, Jair Bolsonaro, got a step ahead of the US president by declaring churches in his country to be “essential services” during the coronavirus pandemic. Reacting more quickly than the NRA (Neanderthal Rifle Association) in the USA, which wants gun shops (of all things) to be also declared essential services.

Not to be outdone, fundamentalist Muslims in Iran have recently been shown on national and international television deliberately licking religious icons in their country, over and over again. In order to prove once and for all that because of their faith it is “absolutely certain” that Allah will be preserving their lives for a long time to come, while the unbelievers will all be dying off like flies. Such behaviour also being replicated in the kissing of similar icons currently going on in Christian Orthodox churches in Russia, as well as in other parts of Eastern Europe. One Orthodox Jewish city in Israel has also recently been cordoned off by the Israeli government because of the much higher incidence of the disease in that particularly religious place as well. Which may indicate that during the course of the pandemic all sorts of different people’s faith may turn out to be sorely tested, if true believers all over the the world end up dying just as often, rather than less often, than all the God-forsaken miscreants.

The same sort of thing has also been taking place in parts of the Montréal region of Québec, where the virus has been particularly virulent inside several Jewish congregations, especially among ultra-orthodox, Hassidic, communities. Some of which were getting together in synagogues, for well-attended weddings, up to and including the second week of March, three months after the official beginning of the pandemic. All such activity has since been severely condemned, if not necessarily eliminated, by officials representing al the different factions of the Jewish community. But not before quite a few people got sick, even though the numbers involved were considerably lower than the much more serious situations caused by the holding of large sporting events, during the same period, in countries like Italy and Spain. Many Jewish people in the Montréal region were also affected by their close ties with Jewish communities in hard-hit New York City. As well as by the return of several thousand Canadians (many of them belonging to the Jewish faith) from southern Florida, known as “snowbirds” (older Canadians who spend the winter months of every year in the warmer parts of the USA).

Non-Jewish people in Québec have also been duly reminded recently that they ought not to be indulging in anti-Semitism, as some of them so often do, since anti-Semitism, like all the other forms of racism, always makes every bad situation even worse than it was before. However, racism does not just consist of indulging in increasingly negative reactions toward constantly targeted people, often in the form of (scapegoat) conspiracy theories. It also consists in deliberately exonerating people, for religious reasons, who are indeed exhibiting dangerous behaviour. People who choose to congregate in large numbers three months after the official outbreak of a pandemic, even if they did so prior to the promulgation of strict confinement rules by a nearby government, are nevertheless putting other people’s lives in danger. As do ultra-religious people from any religion, such as evangelical Christians, who put human “herd immunity” in danger whenever they refuse to get their children properly vaccinated.

Unfortunately, nothing that has been going on during the pandemic, just like nothing that happened during other enormous crises in the past (such as the Great Depression or the Second World War), ever seems to convince people to change the system in any real way. Even the fact of having millions of old people die off a lot more rapidly than usual, in thousands of private and public retirement homes, does not seem to be enough. All we have so far put into place as a result of all the great catastrophes of the past, is either an almost completely privatized world in which practically everything is run for the exclusive benefit of a very small number of ultra-rich people, or a much less privatized system run by huge state bureaucracies that often treat almost everyone almost as poorly as the ultra-privatized systems do. Or something half-way in between those two extremes. As a species, we do not seem to have the capacity to put into place a world-system of some sort that really works for the benefit of the vast majority of the entire world’s population, erring neither on the side of total confinement nor on the side of a chaotic free-for-all.