With anti-statist paranoia and acts of vandalism now part of the coronavirus crisis in the UK, in one outrageous video sent to me by a friend (I will not produce it, due to the responsibility to prevent the spread of false information) a British man denounced the virus as a hoax.
The brevity of this post is out of proportion to the enormous importance of the subject. But I want to let you know I am thinking and working on it. It is a recognised pattern for dictatorship to commence with emergency measures designed to combat a threat. Those emergency measures then become normalised and people exercising arbitrary power find it […]
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Jonathan COOK
If a disease can teach wisdom beyond our understanding of how precarious and precious life is, the coronavirus has offered two lessons.
The first is that in a globalised world our lives are so intertwined that the idea of viewing ourselves as islands – whether as individuals, communities, nations or a uniquely privileged species – should be understood as evidence of false consciousness. In truth, we were always bound together, part of a miraculous web of life on our planet and, beyond it, stardust in an unfathomably large and complex universe.
In 2015 Bill Gates gave a talk titled “We’re Not Ready for the Next Epidemic” in which, in a remarkable exhibition of understated and uncannily accurate prescience, he reflected on the outbreak of Ebola virus and forecast worse to come. This amazing man told us that “As awful as this epidemic has been, the next one could be much worse. The world is simply not prepared to deal with a disease — an especially virulent flu, for example — that infects large numbers of people very quickly.
To expose another human being to serious illness, and to the threat of losing their life, is grotesque and quite unnecessary. This is not justice, it is a barbaric decision.
— Kristinn Hrafnsson, editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, March 26, 2020
The UK’s involvement in the U.S.-led air war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria has slowly and quietly wound down over the last few months. Official figures show that the UK hasn’t dropped a single bomb as part of this campaign since September last year.
Three world leaders have displayed a total lack of leadership qualities during the worst global calamity since World War II. Not surprisingly, all three are products of the extreme right-wing, a political faction that excels at carnival stunts and outrageous rhetoric but has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of governance ability. Among the leaders who have done the most miserable jobs at the helms of their respective ships of state are U.S. President Donald Trump, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Epidemiologist William Hanage was more than perplexed by the plan. “When I heard about Britain’s ‘herd immunity’ coronavirus plan,” he reflected in The Guardian, “I thought it was satire.” Much public policy, foolishly considered and expertly bungled, tends to succumb to satire; having Prime Minister Boris Johnson leading the show provides an even better chance of that happening.
These days, local is global. Dorset is a small rural county on England’s south coast. That doesn’t mean that its inhabitants aren’t worried about climate change. They are. Very. Unfortunately, Dorset Councillors are more concerned about following government policies, policies that back using public money to invest in climate-damaging projects. ‘Global’ doesn’t do ‘local’. Global makes money for corporations and their investors, not the people who have to live with the result.
It takes only a cursory scanning of what counts as journalistic product in the significant mass media to see that whereas it may be impossible to keep public hospitals sterile, what passes for news and public debate is beyond normal standards of sterility—it is clearly a vacuum. We can largely discount the alternative media—including where I have been able to post—because this is NOT what feeds the public debate or motivates public action, whether official or unofficial.
