"COVID-19: Coronavirus and Civilization" by Diana Johnstone
Thanks to Starfire for contributing this article! Diana Johnstone's analysis is always well worth a read.
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Lockdowns reveal helplessness rather than power. While in a
crisis some will take advantage of disaster, it makes no sense that dominant
economic powers sought this crisis for some mysterious benefit to themselves,
says Diana Johnstone.
By Diana Johnstone
in Paris
Special to Consortium News
in Paris
Special to Consortium News
As time goes on in close
confinement, even people bound by love may start to find each other unbearable.
On a larger scale, in this crazy mass confinement, people brought together by a
common rejection of the lies of our criminal rulers may find themselves at each
other’s throats because of conflicting interpretations of why who is doing
what.
This is happening on
alternative media – especially in Germany. It seems that many anti-conformist
political analysts believe that the Coronavirus crisis is a fake, perpetrated
by media and governments for sinister reasons. They are actually calling for protest
demonstrations against confinement.
I can’t help seeing this as
an obsession of certain dissidents to prove to themselves that they are good
“anti-authoritarian” Germans who would never have bowed to Nazism. But is this
assertion of individual freedom appropriate in the midst of a public health
crisis?
The Limits of Power
Very clever people
naturally want to find motives behind whatever happens. At one time such people
might have been theologians, who explained the extremely mysterious ways in
which God carries out His cosmic plan. A flood, a plague, an earthquake? There
had to be a reason for it, a motivation in human terms. The All-Powerful was
punishing his sinful flock and reminding them of who was boss.
Today, quite a number of
alternative media commentators are ready to believe in the absolute power not
of God but of Mammon, of the powers of Wall Street and its partners in
politics, the media and the military. In this view, nothing major happens that
hasn’t been planned by earthly powers for their own selfish interest.
Mammon is wrecking the
economy so a few oligarchs will own everything. Or else Mammon created the hoax
Coronavirus 19 in order to lock us all up and deprive us of what little is left
of our freedom. Or finally Mammon is using a virus in order to have a pretext
to vaccinate us all with secret substances and turn us all into zombies.
Is this credible? In one
sense, it is. We know that Mammon is unscrupulous, morally capable of all
crimes. But things do happen that Mammon did not plan, such as
earthquakes, floods and plagues. Dislike of our ruling class combined with
dislike of being locked up leads to the equation: They are simply using
this (fake) crisis in order to lock us up!
But what for? To whom is
there any advantage in locking down the population? For the pleasure of telling
themselves, “Aha, we’ve got them where we want them, all stuck at home!” Is
this intended to suppress popular revolt? What popular revolt? Why repress
people who aren’t doing anything that needs to be repressed?
What is the use of locking
up a population – and I think especially of the United States – that is
disunited, disorganized, profoundly confused by generations of ideological
indoctrination telling them that their country is “the best” in every way, and
thus unable to formulate coherent demands on a system that exploits them
ruthlessly? Do you need to lock up your faithful Labrador so he won’t bite you?
If anything, the trauma of
this situation might actually awaken a somnolent population to the vital need
for basic transformation of society. The notion that this lockdown threatens to
be permanent is totally unrealistic, against all evidence from previous
lockdowns. On the contrary, prolonged confinement is most likely to lead to
explosions. The question is, can these explosions be constructive.
Blinded by Hubris
Rather than deploring the
all-powerful nature of Mammon, it would be more constructive to look for the
flaws in his armor, for his weaknesses, for the ways he can be massively
discredited, denounced and defeated.
Mammon is blinded by its
own hubris, often stupid, incompetent, dumbed down by getting away with so much
so easily. Take a look at Mike Pompeo or Mike Pence – are these all-powerful
geniuses? No, they are semi-morons who have been able to crawl up a corrupt
system contemptuous of truth, virtue or intelligence – like the rest of the
gangsters in power in a system devoid of any ethical or intellectual standards.
The power of creatures like
that is merely the reflection of the abdication of social responsibility by
whole populations whose disinterest in politics has allowed the scum to rise to
the top.
The lockdown decreed by our
Western governments reveals helplessness rather than power. They did not rush
to lock us down. The lockdown is disastrous for the economy which is their
prime concern. They hesitated and did so only when they had to do something and
were ill-equipped to do anything else. They saw that China had done so with
good results. But smart Asian governments did even more, deploying masks, tests
and treatments Western governments did not possess.
Western governments called
for confinement when experts explained the exponential curves to them. They
didn’t know what else to do. There is at least enough sense of social
responsibility left in our societies to oblige governments to take the basic,
classic quarantine methods usual during pandemics.
Of course, in every crisis
some are well placed to take advantage of disaster. The vultures didn’t cause
the cattle to die so they could eat the carrion. But they will gobble it up
when it’s there. Wall Street financial powers could quickly get Congresspeople
to vote laws to bail them out while small businesses sink and working people
are plunged into despair.
But in the long run,
without the small businesses, without the workers now being deprived of income
to spend, without normal economic activity, Wall Street itself will have no one
to bleed, nothing to exploit. It makes absolutely no sense to believe that
dominant economic powers sought this ruinous crisis for some mysterious benefit
to themselves.
In the European Union,
creditor countries like Germany and the Netherlands refuse to let the European
Central Bank issue “Coronabonds” to finance economic recovery of hard-hit
countries like Italy and Spain. That means those countries will have to borrow
from the private financial system, at high interest rates leading to
bankruptcy.
That sounds like a boon to
international finance, which, however, will find itself holding an infinite
amount of unpayable debt. And the European Union may split apart as a result –
not in the interests of any of these powerful masters of Mammon.
Public Health Is Not an
Individual Choice
In the West, “human
rights”, are conceived in terms of the “rights” of the individual, or of a
minority, to go against what we call “the regime” when speaking of countries
other than our own. The United States uses the absolute value of “human rights”
as a pretext to impose its will through sanctions and bombing on nations that
reject its global domination. The defiance of authority is celebrated as
resistance, without necessarily examining the details.
However, virtually all key
aspects of any civilized society go contrary to the absolutism of individual
rights. Every civilized society has some sort of legal system, some basic rules
that everyone is expected to follow. Most civilized societies have a public
education and (except for the United States) a public health insurance system
designed to benefit the whole population. These elements of civilization
include constraints on individual freedom.
The benefits to each
individual of living in a civilized society make these constraints acceptable
to just about everybody. The health of the individual depends on the health of
the community, which is why everyone in most Western countries accepts a single
payer health insurance system. The only exception is the United States, where
the egocentricities of Ayn Rand are widely read as serious thought.
Mammon and His Slave. (Wikimedia Commons)
The arrival of a plague or
an epidemic suddenly calls for totally abnormal, extremely unpleasant
constraints, such as quarantines. This is a case where the freedom of the
individual is sacrificed for the general good: the individual is confined not
merely for his own good but for the good of his community and indeed of all
humanity.
The paradox of our highly
technological societies is that the greater the impossibility of the general
public (all of us) to understand crucial functions and issues, the more we
depend on experts and authorities, and the more we distrust those experts and
authorities and suspect them of using their position to advance secret agendas.
There is thus a sort of built-in paranoia in our societies where the power of
invisible forces becomes constantly more inscrutable.
This paradox operates
forcefully on issues of medicine and public health, all the more in that the
authorities themselves are frequently divided in their opinions. In Germany
especially, where the crisis has been relatively mild, one can hear a doctor claiming that
fear of Covid-19 is artificially created and that nature should be allowed to
take its course, since healthy people will be spared and the few who die would
have died anyway.
Stay Home and Take a Pill
This opinion is readily
accepted by those who suspect every government measure of being an arbitrary
assault on personal liberties. But it is hardly a majority opinion in the world
medical profession.
Personally, I’ve been
there. I’ve seen this virus in action. This is not simply a bad cold, or a
seasonal flu. Yes, there are light cases, but there are fatal ones as well. It
does not just kill off superfluous elderly people that some commentators seem
satisfied to get rid of.
Still, it is quite
reasonable to question the usefulness of confinement alone. Here in France,
authorities turned to confinement with some delay, only because the illness was
spreading and they had nothing else to do about it.
There were no masks; a
factory in Brittany that provided the domestic market with masks and other
medical equipment had been bought up a while back by Honeywell and closed down.
This is an aspect of the deindustrialization of France, based on the assumption
that we in the West can live from our brains, our ideas, our startups, while
actual things are made for low wages in poor countries.
So there were no masks and
no immediate capacity to make them. There was also a shortage of ventilators,
even of hospital beds – in fact there was no ability to deal with the epidemic
other than to tell people to stay at home and prescribe paracetamol.
Surely there are better
ways to deal with it, and one inevitable explosion after confinement will be an
outpouring of criticism of the way the government has handled the crisis and demands
for drastic improvements in the public health system.
The argument that “oh well,
even more people die of ordinary flu, or cancer, or something else” is not
valid because this illness comes in addition to all the others that are
anticipated: it pushes already largely saturated health facilities over the
top, into collapse.
In Italy, Covid-19 has
killed off a hundred medical doctors in just over a month. They would not have
“died anyway, of something else” without the epidemic.
In France, in normal times,
dial the emergency service SAMU 15 and usually a team is there within minutes.
During the Covid-19 crisis, you could dial 15 and wait an hour or more for an
answer, whatever your health crisis might be, and help might never come.
The main purpose of the
quarantine is to reduce the pression on overburdened systems. Without the
confinement, the overload would have been even worse. This crisis is exposing
the inadequacy of existing facilities and the crucial need for major programs to
strengthen public health systems.
Irrational Fear of
Vaccination
Jonas Salk’s vaccine wiped out polio in the United States,
and
he didn’t patent it. (Wikimedia Commons)
Mass vaccination has always
been the surest way to wipe out deadly diseases. It is also an instance where
individual freedoms need be sacrificed to the general good. It is deeply
disturbing that many intelligent people are more afraid of the vaccine that may
be developed to combat this virus than they are of the virus itself.
One objection is that
profit-oriented Big Pharma takes advantage of every illness to make money. But
the answer is not to reject pharmaceuticals. The main problem with Big Pharma
is unleashed neoliberal capitalism in the United States, combined with the
absence of a government-run single payer health insurance, which allows
pharmaceutical companies to charge outrageous prices for their products, as
well as to focus on production of the most profitable rather than the most
generally useful medication.
The answer to this is not
to give up medication but to demand greater public supervision and price
control.
Finally, the pharmaceutical
industry should be considered a public utility rather than a business and
nationalized so that revenue can be used to finance research rather than to pay
dividends to Big Finance.
The prospects are different
from one country to another. Achieving social control in the United States
looks practically impossible because of the overwhelming belief that “free
enterprise” is the only way to do things. In France, which has positive
experience of a mixed economy, it could be politically possible to nationalize
pharmaceutical companies – if France were not under the domination of the
European Union and, less directly, the United States, which is always prepared
to do what it can to block socialist measures anywhere in the world.
No Longer the Center
But the West is no longer
the center of the world. The Covid-19 crisis has demonstrated the rising
capabilities and more human attitudes of East Asia. There will be vaccines
developed in China, in Russia, in other countries outside the NATO sphere.
Their achievements will break the monopoly of Western “Big Pharma.”
In Europe, and notably in
France, Italy and Spain, the total disillusion with the European Union is
strengthening the trend toward return of national sovereignty. And sovereign
nations, able to respond to their people’s demands can be able to break away
from the dictates of Big Finance in order to renew democracy in more
appropriate forms.
In France, labor unions and
progressives are demanding better protection of the population, starting with
all those essential service workers, in hospitals and grocery stores, bus
drivers, deliverymen, all those who are increasingly appreciated by their
confined compatriots and who need to reap the benefits of their public service.
Yellow Vests protest, March 7, 2020 in Paris before lockdown. (Joe Lauria)
Perhaps because of the long
tradition of social struggle in France, including the Yellow Vest movement
which is not dead but only
on hold, one can be sure that after confinement there will be an explosion of
demands to abandon the fantasies of neoliberal globalism and build a system
where the welfare of the people comes first.
In contrast, in the context
of the corona virus crisis in Germany, someone supposedly “on the left” has
initiated a petition calling on persons over 75 to declare that if they are
sick, they renounce medical treatment, in order to give preference to younger
people. This is a new twist of identity politics, of classifying people by
groups, and a step toward revival of the worst eugenics of Nazism.
Which is civilized and
which is barbaric: insisting on a system that gives equal care to all, or
deciding that the elderly be sacrificed for the others? What is this but a
suggestion to resort to human sacrifice to please Mammon?
For
Civilization
Sounding the alarm about
how horrible our ruling class is gets us nowhere unless we have an idea of a
real alternative – not just “resisting” but proposing and fighting for
something different and better.
Let’s start with a most
concrete practical issue and work from there: vaccination. Like other aspects
of public health, this is an issue of collective welfare rather than individual
rights. It is an element not of “resistance to oppression” but of the
construction of civilization.
The coronavirus has not
illustrated the need to get rid of vaccines – on grounds that “they” want to
use them against us – but on the contrary, of the need to make sure that
vaccines are developed under proper supervision for the public welfare and not
as a means for Big Pharma to make bigger dividends for BlackRock.
So the problem with
vaccines is not vaccination but American capitalism that has gotten completely
out of hand. Once upon time, the Food and Drug Administration was a reliable
monitor of pharmaceutical innovations. In recent decades, such control agencies
have increasingly been taken over by the companies they are supposed to control
and transformed into rubber stamps.
Alarms are also raised
about the alleged role of billionaires like Bill Gates whose philanthropic
institutions are suspected of manipulating vaccines for hidden nefarious
purposes.
The remedy is not to flee
medication and vaccination, but to dismantle these overgrown dictatorial powers
and build a society that can properly be called civilized because it is
balanced between collective and individual welfare. Of course, to say what
should be done is very far from knowing how to do it. But without an idea of
what should be done, there will not even be any effort to figure out how.
A Mixed Economy
In the United States, it
would be necessary to accept the fact that certain essential activities must be
considered public services. This requires a wave of reforms equivalent
to a revolution, not as prescribed by Marxist revolutionaries to situations
that no longer exist. Pharmaceuticals and hospitals are public services and
must be socially controlled. Internet has become a public service.
How should that be treated?
Innovators who used free market mechanisms to gain virtual monopoly control of
their sector should be invited to choose which of their mansions to retain as
residence as they are retired to the role of advisor, while their
disproportionate accumulated earnings should become part of the public
treasury.
What I am advocating is not
a “communist revolution,” certainly not for the United States. I am advocating
a mixed economy, which can take various forms, from France in the 1960s to
China today. The commanding heights of the economy should be under social
control, to ensure that major investment has social purpose.
The forms of this control
can vary. In the United States, the first task of the commanding heights should
be to shift investment away from insanely wasteful military production to
domestic infrastructure and measures to integrate all citizens into a genuinely
civilized society. Such a mixed economy creates a favorable environment for the
proliferation of small independent enterprises free to innovate.
Free from fear of illness
and homelessness allows more real freedom than the polarized lottery that
passes for capitalism in the United States today. Such a project of
civilization should win support from decent and lucid people in all classes of
society.
I am perfectly aware that
the United States today is ideologically light years away from such a sensible
project. But developments are underway in other countries to meet the threat of
Big Pharma and meddling American billionaires. The word that sums up these
developments is “multipolarization.”
This is the slogan launched
by Vladimir Putin in 2007. It drove Western champions of unipolar globalization
into a frenzy from which they are far from having recovered – witness the
insanely provocative “Defender Europe 20” military games practicing nuclear war
right up to the Russian border, stalled temporarily by Covid-19.
The United States and its
European satellites are in effect waging war against the Free World – that is,
countries free of U.S. domination, in order to perpetuate an imaginary global
regime along the lines of neoliberalism: rule of finance approved by
manipulated elections.
Nevertheless, unipolar
globalization is in the process of disintegration. All the slander against
China cannot change the facts. While U.S. propagandists blast their rising
rival, most of the world sees that China handled the epidemic with more
professional know-how than the West. The United States control of international
agencies is being threatened by growing Chinese influence – in particular, the
World Health Organization.
This is the greatest threat
to Big Pharma: a multipolar world. Bill Gates and U.S. pharmaceutical companies
will have no monopoly of vaccine development to combat Covid-19. A dramatic
shift from neoliberal globalization to multipolar national sovereignty will
restore genuine competition – not only in production of vaccines but in social
organization.
Let Western countries look
to their own problems and find solutions. Let other countries develop according
to models that suit their history, philosophy and popular demands. It is
obvious that the vaunted U.S. “free market democracy” is not a model that
should be imposed on every country on earth, nor even on the United States
itself.
Mixed economies can take
various forms. Some could evolve toward something that could be called
socialism, others not. Let every small country be as independent as Iceland.
Let the world explore different paths. Let a hundred flowers bloom!
Diana
Johnstone’s latest book is Circle in the Darkness; Memoirs of a World
Watcher, Clarity Press, 2020.
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