PANDEMIC!: COVID-19 Shakes the World

if we in Europe don’t accept responsibility for the Third World poor and act accordingly, then they will have no choice but to come here, which is precisely what anti-immigrant sentiment is ferociously opposed to

Hegel wrote that the only thing we can learn from history is that we learn nothing from history, so I doubt the epidemic will make us any wiser.

Viktor Orban said: “There is no such thing as a liberal. A liberal is nothing more than a Communist with a diploma.”

Another weird phenomenon that we can observe is the triumphant return of capitalist animism, of treating social phenomena such as markets or financial capital as living entities. If one reads our big media, the impression one gets is that what we should really worry about are not the thousands who have already died and the many more who will, but the fact that “markets are panicking”—coronavirus is ever more disturbing the smooth functioning of the world market.

other catastrophes are looming on the horizon or already taking place: droughts, heatwaves, killer storms, the list is long

Up until now, one of the few good things about the epidemic, alongside the basic fact that it has made us sharply aware of the need for global cooperation, has been that is has not been attributed to immigrants and refugees—racism was at work mostly in perceiving the threat as originating from the Oriental Other. But if the two issues get mixed together, if refugees are perceived as linked to the spread of the epidemic (and of course there are likely to be widespread infection of coronavirus among refugees given the conditions in the crowded camps they occupy), then populist racists will have their heyday: they will be able to justify their exclusion of foreigners with “scientific” medical reasons.

Maybe only virtual reality will be 43
PANDEMIC!
considered safe, and moving freely in an open space will be reserved for the islands owned by the ultra-rich.

What cannot but strike the eye is the similarity between Putin and Erdogan, who evermore stand for the two versions of the same political regime, led by a com-posite figure that we can call Putogan.

Speculation is widespread that coronavirus may lead to the fall of Communist rule in China, in the same way that, as Gorbachev himself admitted, the Chernobyl catastrophe was the event that triggered the end of Soviet Communism. But there is a paradox here: coronavirus will also compel us to re-invent Communism based on trust in the people and in science.

this urgent need for other voices to be heard does not necessarily mean Western-style multiparty democracy, it just demands an open space for citizens’ critical reactions to circulate. The chief argument against the idea that the state has to control rumors to prevent panic is that this control itself spreads distrust and thus creates even more conspiracy theories.