What awaits humanity after the coronavirus?

 
What awaits humanity after the coronavirus?
x Vicky Peláez: The pandemic suddenly opened the eyes to the world

And it showed us that power and intelligence are worthless against a tiny pathogen, which can make thousands of people disappear in an instant. Stumbling upon this truth, humanity has taken refuge in their homes, concerned about health and wondering what the world will be like after the coronavirus.

Will an "alternative society of cooperation and solidarity" be formed, as advocated by the thinker Slavoj Zizek, or will society enter a greater "isolation where individualism will prevail", as the philosopher Byung-Chul Han is affirming, or perhaps the will humanity follow its usual course?

To try to answer this question, it should be clarified that the same questions people have surely asked themselves during previous pandemics. The measures taken by the authorities to prevent contagion from their citizens are not very different from the restrictions imposed by the rulers of the world today.

It is enough to review the book by Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment (1975) to verify it. In his work, Foucault describes how an 18th century plague forced French authorities to enact "disciplinary measures" during quarantine.

The author says that "the street is under the authority of a trustee who watches over it, that each of the inhabitants is ordered to lock himself in his house, with the prohibition to leave, that each family will have accumulated provisions, when it is absolutely precise to leave the houses, it is done in turn avoiding all encounters ... There are only the mayors in the streets, the trustees, the soldiers of the guard and also among the infected cases, the 'crows walk from one corpse to another 'for whom the presence of death is indifferent ".

According to biogeographer Jared Diamond, "Germs and infections have shaped humanity." In his book Weapons, Germs and Steel (1997) the author tells how the black plague that killed 30 to 60 million inhabitants of European countries in the mid-fourteenth century, especially the workforce in the countryside.

All this led to the weakening of the feudal system and caused a profound transformation in the European social and economic structure, giving rise to its Renaissance period. It also turns out that "until the First World War, infections caused more deaths in wars than weapons," according to Carol Reeves, an expert in the history of medicine.

Yale University historian Frank M. Snowden explained Epidemics and Society in his book. From the black plague to the present (2019) that "pandemics in the historical perspective altered the life of societies especially, their political and social stability, reinforced racial and economic discrimination, destroyed revolutions."

Epidemics also influenced the results of wars. Napoleon's military campaign against Russia in 1812 became a disaster not only from fighting, but from typhus and other lice-borne diseases. Only 58,000 of Napoleon's men survived the Russian campaign, with losses reaching 300,000 French, 70,000 Poles, 50,000 Italians, 80,000 Germans, 200,000 horses and 1,000 artillery pieces.

The Spanish flu, called "the mother of all epidemics" (1918-1919), devastated Europe, killing 50 to 100 million people.

According to the writer and journalist, author of the book Pale Horseman: The Flu of 1918 and How the Epidemic Changed the World (2018) Laura Spinney, the pandemic arose among American soldiers fighting in France during World War I. That flu had three waves, the first appearing in May 1918, the second in the autumn of 1918, and the third in February 1919, causing more deaths than fighting and, possibly, as the author of the book thinks, the epidemic "could have accelerated the end of the First World War. "

No one can affirm this hypothesis, but what is known is that that "mother of all epidemics" spread throughout the world from Zamora to Rio and from the mines of South Africa to Alaska, plunging the entire world into post-viral syndrome or fatigue. . Its effect was so devastating that in some Alaskan towns its inhabitants swore an oath of silence regarding the epidemic as if nothing had happened.

Now humanity has had to live through complex times of the coronavirus pandemic, which from December 31, 2019 to April 28, 2020, has produced 210,193 deaths and more than three million people infected, one million in the US, according to European Center for Disease Prevention and Control. To fight the epidemic in different countries of the world, governments have been using various strategies.

 In China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, strict biovigilance was established to detect viruses in each individual through multiple tests and constant digital surveillance of coronavirus patients using mobile phones. Each of these cell phones has a GPS application that controls the movements of its user, monitors the temperature of its body observed by the digital eye of the cyber-authoritarian State.

This strategy has yielded very positive results in stopping the pandemic in most of the countries that have been applying it and has been endorsed by the World Health Organization (WHO). Germany's Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said the successful and well-organized campaign against the pandemic "demonstrated the superiority of the Chinese political and economic model."

In European countries, Russia, Latin America and Africa, their rulers appealed to the compulsory confinement of their inhabitants in their homes, restricted movements outside the place, as in the case of the plague described by Michel Foucault in his book Discipline and Punishment.

Also in many of the Latin American countries such as Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, a state of exception has been decreed with the curfew. The most powerful country in the world, the US, was less prepared than the rest of the planet for the current pandemic, despite the fact that as early as 2008, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) warned in the report, Global Trends 2025: a Transformed World , on the appearance before 2025 "of a new, highly transmissible and virulent human respiratory disease for which there are no adequate countermeasures and that could turn into a global pandemic."

In 2017 and 2019 there was confirmation from the national intelligence services of an imminent danger of an epidemic and that there will not be sufficient deposits of medical tests, respirators, masks, sanitary equipment, which the Trump Administration completely ignored, initiating the Once in 2018, the cut of the programs of preparation against contagious diseases. With the start of the pandemic, the White House Administration rejected the need for quarantine (March 24) to declare a national emergency four days later. In fact, until now, Washington does not know how to deal with the epidemic and from there comes the result of 61,700 deaths in the country by April 30 and of them more than 18,000 in New York.

The only country that has so far defied the mainstream science that advised confinement is Sweden, whose government decided not to stop the economy, but to take serious and well-thought-out protection measures. The people have been well informed about the health risks that the coronavirus represents. Workplaces, restaurants, bars, gyms, schools, playgrounds are open and the Government is confident of voluntary action by its citizens to stop the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

It must be taken into account that Sweden is a particular country as well as its traditions and way of life. Almost 30% of the population works from their homes and more than 50% of their homes are made up of one person, which facilitates social distancing. The death rate from coronavirus in the country of 10,230,185 inhabitants is 0.02%. By April 30, there were 2,586 dead and 21,092 infected.

Only time will show which is the best strategy to fight against COVID-19. Meanwhile, the world is preparing to live the post-pandemic. At the moment there are not many hopes for radical changes in our terrestrial globe. Substantially it does not seem that the world will change, the only thing that would be improved, or should offer a more adequate service, as in the case of the Spanish post-flu (1918-1919), is the health system that had been reformed in Europe in the 1920s.

For the Spanish poet and essayist Ramón Andrés "the history of humanity is a history of ambition and mirages as it happens today. And if the two world wars have not changed us, this virus will not do it any less".

This is not a crisis of epidemiology. It’s a crisis of epistemology. It’s nor a health or economic crisis. We are in a crisis of how we think. In a world awash with knowledge we are struggling with the truth; how we discuss and discover the truth. This is exacerbated by much of the narrative being controlled by those who have no interest in the truth, but rather power. 

As modern history teaches, the owners of power who have ruled the West for centuries act like lions who never change where they rule and where they hunt. Currently, in the US, 26.5 million people are applying for unemployment benefits, the economy contracted in the first quarter of the year 4.8% and GDP is expected to drop 30% in the second quarter.
 
At the same time, according to the report of the Institute for Policies Studies, Billionaire Bonanza 2020, the wealth of American billionaires increased in 23 days from March 18 to April 10 of this year by $ 282 billion. Eight of these pandemic speculators managed to profit from more than $ 1 billion. Elon Mask increased his wealth by more than 5 billion dollars and Bill Gates' wealth grew from the first of January last by 25 billion dollars.

We are definitely not facing the "end of capitalism that we know" but the beginning of "pandemic capitalism" from which the military, pharmaceutical, media, agribusiness and, of course, Wall Street, military complexes will benefit most. . As always, despite the severe recession that is currently affecting North America, the strongest win and the weakest lose.

The COVID-19 in this context, serves as an instrument in the hands of the State to keep the population frightened, isolated and docile, each breathing his individual air through the mask.

The current recession will not make the Donald Trump government disappear, nor will national bankruptcy occur, and the Treasury Department printer will continue to print billions of dollars to ease corporations and soothe the crumbs of $ 1,200 to its citizens.

To counter its inefficiency in fighting the pandemic and distracting the population, President Trump's speech is becoming increasingly bellicose, pointing to China as the main culprit in the epidemic. The possibility of the formation of a strong geostrategic alliance between China and Russia, where Chinese economic power merges with Russia's military power, altering the current unipolar world order that terrorizes Washington.

Hence their sanctions against Russia and threats of war against China, Iran, sanctions against Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela. According to Trump, China is the country responsible for the spread of coronavirus and must be punished, for this reason it is already surrounded by North American submarines, knowing that its fleet, including aircraft carriers, Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Nimitz, Carl Vinson, is affected by coronavirus or by technical problems in the case of aircraft carriers Gerald R. Ford. Encouraged by Washington, NATO also talks about the possibility of participating in the North American crusade against China without taking into account the strong crisis that is also affecting the European Union powerless in the face of the pandemic. All pure blah, blah Trump style. Despite these conditions, it is very early to speak of a close multipolar world.

What lies ahead for the moment is a non-polar world order where each country will lock itself in its own problems, especially the economic, health and psychological crisis of its frightened citizens. When the media at the service of the richest and most powerful talk about a possible Third World War, we must remember a warning from the poet Ramón Andrés that "in a few years war will not consist of weapons, but computer attacks and epidemics very harmful caused by laboratories. "

Currently, speaking of wars, Donald Trump and his government cannot win their own war against the coronavirus, in their own country, ordering the acquisition of another 100,000 body bags for people killed by COVID-19.

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