First devastating societal blow in Late-Modernity (6)
I forgot to post about my last 3 articles. Here follows an intro to each one of them.
Part 4. The virus is the pin that deflated the bubble of everything
Without having had the time to rationalize what is happening we have entered ‘the greatest depression ever’. Minds are in shock and fail to question where big capital and its servants are leading Western nations. What should be clear by now is that they have destroyed the idea that interest should remunerate loans and that true price discovery is what establishes the level playing field of markets. Central banks are now purchasing corporate bonds and soon they’ll be buying equities too. Does this mean that the West is abandoning free markets and is heading for centralized planning to avoid collapse ?
If that is the case big capital and its servants will have total power to determine the winners and the losers in the economic game. But one would think that the citizens will not tolerate the emergence of such a new feudalism. Or will the institutions of power gain access to all information pertaining to the individuals thus ensuring their coercion into complete submission ?
Part 3. an unquestionable qualitative difference
By way of introduction let me first observe that, for the first time since the emergence of High-Modernity, Western governments have answered a pandemic by privileging peoples’ lives over the profits of capital. What is it that motivated such a political turning point ?
What impressed me most in this whole corona-virus episode was reading the words XI Jinping told visiting World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on January 28 :
"For the Chinese government people's safety and health always come first and the prevention and control of the virus are thus the country's most important tasks".
I strongly felt that these words are implying that the Chinese government privileges people’s well-being over economic calculations and I vividly remember how my mind registered this as if it was a subliminal message addressed to the world…
XI Jinping’s words appeared to me as a direct challenge to the traditional Western answer against pandemics which had always been to “let it burn down in silence” in order to preserve the interests of capital. The Obama Administration and its handling of the 2009 Swine flu had been the last example of this approach.
Part 2. Timeline of the Chinese answers to the outbreak of ‘Covid-19’
The fact that the COVID-19 epidemic broke out in Wuhan China does not imply that the virus originated in Wuhan. In matter of fact the origin of COVID-19 is still unknown. Calling it “China virus” or “Wuhan virus” is thus fundamentally dishonest to say the least. It reflects a will, by those who use such terms, to manipulate peoples’ minds and glue in the collective unconscious a narrative that satisfies their ideological interests.
But more importantly propagandizing such appellations as the “China virus” or the “Wuhan virus” is annihilating the possibility of a future successful communication, to the population of this earth, of the conclusion that the scientific community will eventually reach about the reality of what happened. This kind of “consent engineering”, about the scapegoating of another country in order to hide one’s incompetence, is simply inadmissible.
As shown in Part 1 there is no evidence out there that the Chinese government attempted to cover up COVID-19 as is portrayed in most Western mainstream media. Because of this Western propaganda the timeline of China’s answers in the initial days of the epidemic will remain a necessary part of the debates that will continue to rage in the weeks and months ahead. This timeline is our link to the facts. It is what keeps us grounded into reality.
