Boris Johnson has stressed that “there really is such a thing as society” in a message released he is while self-isolating with Covid-19, in which he also revealed that 20,000 former NHS staff have returned to help battle the virus.
The prime minister chose to contradict his Conservative predecessor Margaret Thatcher’s endorsement of pure individualism made in 1987, when the then PM told a magazine: “There is no such thing as society.”
In his video message, Johnson said: “We are going to do it, we are going to do it together. One thing I think the coronavirus crisis has already proved is that there really is such a thing as society.”
An excerpt from an article by Robert Saunders writing for the New Statesman (31 March 2020):
Thatcher tended to see only one side of any question, and had little conception either of the social damage that could be wrought by acquisitiveness or of the implications for human dignity of relying on charity given on someone else’s terms. Charitable giving did not surge with the economic boom of the late 1980s, a fact that puzzled and perturbed her. She was never well attuned to structural disadvantage; the tale she told of her own success turned almost entirely on her hard work and personal characteristics, rather than on the social advantages of a wealthy husband and a good education. But she was making an argument about the character of the social bond, not denying its existence.
Thatcher’s office put this more clearly, in a doomed attempt to clarify her views. “Society”, it explained, was not “an abstract concept”. It was “made up of people”, and it was “the acts of individuals and families” that formed “the real sinews of society”. So, for that matter, did David Cameron in 2005, when he told the Conservative Party that “there is such a thing as society; it’s just not the same thing as the state”. Cameron’s “Big Society”, like Johnson’s later remarks, was presented as a breach with Thatcherism. Yet its emphasis on voluntary organisations, community action and neighbourliness sat comfortably with Thatcher's own vision.
Whether Johnson is aware of all this seems doubtful. Unlike Thatcher, he has never shown much interest in philosophical debates about society or its relationship with the individual. Ironically, the very things he has praised in the current crisis – the mobilisation of an army of volunteers, the call to look out for one’s neighbours and the emphasis on personal responsibility for the good of the community – would have fitted comfortably in Thatcher’s vision, too.
A question of numbers
In any reasonable and logical sequence it is to reasonable to expect Lesson No. 1. to be followed by Lesson No. 2. But if lessons learned are of equal value, how can this be emphasised in the organization of a sequence or list. An old convention used in China employs a technique where matters of equal importance are listed beginning with No. 1. and then followed by another No. 1. and then again by No. 1.
No. 2. tells the Prisoner "You are No. 6!"
Listen for the tune of "Pop goes the weasel."
Half a pound of tuppenny rice, Half a pound of treacle. That's the way the money goes, Pop! goes the weasel.
Every night when I go out, The monkey's on the table, Take a stick and knock it off, Pop! goes the weasel.
Up and down the City road, In and out the Eagle, That's the way the money goes, Pop goes the weasel.
One of the suggested meanings for this English nursery rhyme and singing game is the pawning of a good coat, when times were hard, to put food and drink on the table. A "weasel (and stoat)" was Cockney rhyming slang for "Coat", so "Pop goes the weasel" meant pawning a decent coat, and other clothes that were handmade, expensive and pawnable.
The "monkey on the table" in verse two was the demand for payment of a mortgage or other secured loan. If knocked off the table or ignored it would go unpaid and accrue interest, requiring the coat to be pawned again. The stick itself may also be rhyming slang - "Sticks and Stones: Loans"
The "Eagle" on City Road in the song's third verse probably refers to The Eagle Tavern, at the corner of Shepherdess Walk. The Eagle Tavern was an old pub in City Road, London, which was rebuilt as a music hall in 1825, and rebuilt again in 1901 as a public house. The pub is still there, but it is closed, due to thelock-down.
Hard times . . .
When it comes to hard times for numbers of people, in the emerging sequence of lock-downs that governments are employing to manage the impact of Covid-19 upon the capacity of very different health systems, it is the poor, low waged and exploited in gig economies world-wide, who end up making the greatest sacrifice.
In the wealthy countries affected so far in the Covid-19 pandemic, we have seen huge borrowing by the state to mitigate the impact of lock-down upon the economy, employment and income during this immediate period, but it is those who are, and have been, most insecure in their employment and in their shelter, that are suffering most. In poorer countries, often with huge discrepancies between the rich and the poor, it is going to be a living nightmare.
No. 1. In a crisis it is the poor who end up living and dying as a result of the extreme consequences of political action and/or inaction!
What we are learning now in the coronavirus crisis is how governments, political classes, vested capitalist interests behave, making decisions, invoking palliative mantras;
"we are all in this together,"
mobilising propaganda machines, and, meanwhile;
"looking after their own."
It is not a pretty sight, but it gives us a truth as to how current politics has been unable to grapple with the even graver threat to humanity of global heating. The LODE Zone Line traverses India, and at this moment in the crisis, looking at what is happening in India is truly shocking.
“In the backdrop of such a challenging situation, it is imperative that we devise probable mechanisms to support our unorganised workers who sustain their livelihood on daily wages,” Santosh Kumar Gangwar, MoS for labour and employment, noted in the advisory. An amount of about Rs 52,000 crore is available as an access fund, while about 35 million workers are registered with construction welfare boards.
NEW DELHI: The Centre has advised state authorities to transfer funds directly to the bank accounts of construction workers to help them amid the lockdown due to the Covid-19 outbreak.
Under the Building and Other Construction Workers Act, 1996, the Central government can advise the states and Union Territories to frame a scheme for transfer of adequate funds in the bank accounts of construction workers through the direct benefit transfer mode, Gangwar said.
An amount of about Rs 52,000 crore is available as cess fund, while about 35 million workers are registered with construction welfare boards. The amount to be granted to the workers will be decided by the respective state and Union Territory governments.
“Financial assistance at this point of time would help to mitigate the financial crisis of our construction workers to some extent and boost their morale to deal with this epidemic,” Gangwar said.
Mar 27 2020 India Lockdown: Ground Report From Ghazipur, Migration Continues
ABP News
There is lockdown across the country but the migration of people is still going on. Thousands of daily wage workers are going on foot migration from Delhi. They say that they do not have food and money here. Despite all the arrangements and claims of the government, thousands of people are migrating from Delhi. There is a long queue of migrants from the Ghazipur border flyover. A large number of people have left the city .
#Ghazipur#IndiaLockdown#ABPNewsLive
This is a policy capable of supporting registered workers. What about those workers in India’s enormous off-the-books work force — believed to make up 80 percent of India’s 470 million workers — who are likely to have trouble getting access to any offer of benefits?
This article by Maria Abi-Habib and Sameer Yasir includes those voices of the dispossessed and abandoned that we all need to listen to:
NEW DELHI — In one of the biggest migrations in India’s modern history, hundreds of thousands of migrant laborers have begun long journeys on foot to get home, having been rendered homeless and jobless by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of the coronavirus.
With businesses shut down in cities across the country, vast numbers of migrants — many of whom lived and ate where they worked — were suddenly without food and shelter. Soup kitchens in Delhi, the capital, have been overwhelmed. So far, more than a dozen migrant laborers have lost their lives in different parts of the country as they tried to return to their home, hospital officials said.
Thousands of migrants in Delhi, including whole families, packed their pots, pans and blankets into rucksacks, some balancing children on their shoulders as they walked along interstate highways. Some planned to walk hundreds of miles. But as they reached the Delhi border, many were beaten back by the police.
“You fear the disease, living on the streets. But I fear hunger more, not corona,” said Papu, 32, who came to Delhi three weeks ago for work and was now trying to return to his home in Saharanpur in the state of Uttar Pradesh, 125 miles away.
While dozens of countries across the world are under lockdown to contain the virus’s spread, in crowded and impoverished places like India, many fear that the measures could spark social unrest. Millions of people live in Indian slums, and staying at home for three weeks — as Mr. Modi has ordered — is a daunting prospect in such places, where dozens of family members often share a few rooms.
Migrant laborers have been protesting the lockdown across India. On Saturday, thousands came out to the streets in the southern state of Kerala, saying they had not eaten in days. The authorities urged them to disperse for their own safety, but they ignored the commands.
As of Sunday morning, just one of India’s 36 state and territorial governments, Uttar Pradesh, had made arrangements to bring migrants home, commissioning about 1,000 buses. On Saturday, migrants waited in lines miles long on the outskirts of Delhi to board a few buses, and the overwhelming majority were turned away.
But by Sunday afternoon, the central government had ordered states to reverse course and seal their borders, ordering migrants to stay where they are. The reversal added to the already confused rollout of the lockdown, which has prompted state government actions often at odds with the central government’s orders. The police, often confused, have resorted to violence.
India already had one of the world’s largest homeless populations, and the lockdown has swelled its numbers exponentially, workers for nongovernmental organizations say. A 2011 government census put the number of homeless at 1.7 million, almost certainly a vast underestimate in this country of 1.3 billion, experts say.
“You fear the disease, living on the streets,” said Papu, a migrant worker in Delhi. “But I fear hunger more, not corona.”
Mr. Modi announced the lockdown, which includes a ban on interstate travel, with just four hours’ notice on Tuesday, leaving the enormous migrant population stranded in big cities. Jobs lure at least 45 million people to cities from the countryside every year, according to government estimates.
Many of those migrants are fed and housed at the shops and construction sites where they work, and as businesses closed, hundreds of thousands — if not millions — were suddenly without their homes and a regular source of food.
A group of 13 men walking along a Delhi highway last week, bound for their homes in Uttar Pradesh, said they had not eaten in nearly two days. They had about $3 between them, they said.
“This may have been a good decision for the wealthy, but not those of us with no money,”
said Deepak Kumar, a 28-year-old truck driver, referring to the lockdown.
Sirens approached in the distance, and the men ran away, worried it was the police. It turned out to be an ambulance, and the men regrouped and set off again.
Aid workers warn that the situation could deteriorate into violence if the desperation increases and people continue to go without food.
Soup kitchens across Delhi are unable to cope with the demand, which aid workers estimate has tripled. Fights have been breaking out. The government has given the police no explicit policy for dealing with stranded migrants, and many officers have lashed out.
“In the absence of a clear policy, the migrants have been left to the whims of police. And there are instances where the police treat them inhumanely,” said Ashwin Parulkar, a senior researcher for the Center for Policy Research in Delhi who studies India’s homeless population.
Usually, the homeless are fed by India’s array of religious institutions: Hindu temples, Sikh gurdwaras and mosques. But now, everything is closed, and shelters are feeling the strain.
Giving out food outside a government-run shelter in New Delhi on Saturday. Soup kitchens have been overwhelmed.
“The pressure has increased drastically. People can't walk the streets, and if it remains like this, the situation will explode,” said Nishu Tripathi, 29, a supervisor at a soup kitchen opened by Safe Approach, a Delhi-based nongovernmental organization.
“Every time we start distributing food, we are charged by the crowd,” he said.
Safe Approach started an open-air soup kitchen in northeast Delhi last week. It now serves 8,000 people. As people lined up for food there on Thursday, police cars circled, sirens blaring.
“Leave this place! Go inside. Separate! Separate! Maintain distance!” the police yelled through a loudspeaker.
As a group of men and boys, some disabled and hobbling on makeshift crutches, walked along the highway toward the soup kitchen, police officers suddenly began beating them with bamboo sticks. “Maintain social distance!” they yelled.
A boy of about 15 was hit in the mouth, his wails exposing his blood-soaked teeth. An angry crowd formed to console him. “Why would they do that!” screamed a man waiting for food. “He was walking here. Why would they treat us like this!”
Mr. Tripathi, the supervisor, turned to reporters. “Go, we cannot ensure your safety,” he said.
Despite government orders to allow the transportation of essential items like food and medicine during the lockdown, vendors complain their delivery trucks are being harassed by the police and their stores forced to shut.
A shelter for homeless women and children in Delhi.
“I’ve never seen such desperation,” said Ricky Chandael, a supervisor at another shelter. “Before, charitable people would come and donate to our shelter, but they can’t reach us because of the lockdown. And every day, there are at least 100 new people showing up here for food.”
As lunchtime neared and the crowd grew, Mr. Chandael, like Mr. Tripathi, advised reporters to leave for their safety.
On Thursday, the government announced a $22.5 billion relief package to support the millions made unemployed by the lockdown. But it is unclear how much that will help migrants and others in India’s enormous off-the-books work force — believed to make up 80 percent of India’s 470 million workers — who are likely to have trouble getting access to the benefits.
The aid, including cash and food handouts, is tied to registration in national labor databases, which omit many migrant workers, or a home address, which many migrants do not have.
Mr. Modi has said that shutting down for three weeks is India’s only hope to prevent a devastating epidemic. As of Sunday, 980 people in the country had tested positive for the coronavirus, with 24 dead.
Supervisors at a shelter for women and children in Nizamuddin, a neighborhood in Central Delhi, said the government had given them soap for the first time, and that they were under orders to teach those seeking shelter about the coronavirus, and to force them to wash their hands and take showers.
“It’s hard; they aren’t used to washing all the time,” said Rajesh Kumar, the shelter’s supervisor.
The previous night, he said, about 70 women with dozens of children had started banging on the gate to the shelter, begging to be let in, saying they had been beaten by the police for sleeping on the road. But the shelter was full and Mr. Kumar had to turn them away.
Mr. Kumar said most homeless people he encountered had known nothing about the coronavirus, and had awakened one day to find the police shooing them off the streets, ordering them to practice social distancing — a new catchword in India, as in most of the world.
“But where do the homeless go?” he asked.
Migrant workers headed out on foot from Delhi, hoping to reach their homes in the neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh.
The violence meted out to migrants by the police, on the roads and bus stations, is an institutional violence, the same institutional and criminal violence meted out to many Muslim inhabitants of Delhi, following demonstrations by Indian citizens against new citizenship legislation. The Hindu nationalist government of the BJP has created a political environment where this kind of institutional violence against the "other", be it migrant worker, or worse, a muslim, is not only tolerated, but encouraged.
Michael Safi reporting for the Guardian (Mon 16 Dec 2019):
Protests are most significant show of dissent in nearly six years of Modi in power
Student protests are not unusual in India. Nor is police violence. But the scenes of officers entering one of Delhi’s Muslim-majority universities, teargassing the library and beating demonstrators and bystanders have shocked a country thought to have become inured to both.
Fuelled by the apparent police brutality, protests against a controversial law to fast-track citizenship for everyone but Muslim asylum seekers were spreading on Monday to other major universities and cities across the country, in what is becoming the most significant show of dissent in the nearly six years since Narendra Modi took office.
Modi’s thumping re-election in May has been the green light to ram through the most-wanted items on the Hindu nationalist wishlist. The restive Muslim-majority region of Kashmir has been annexed, with its phones and internet blocked and leading politicians arrested. The government says it will soon force hundreds of millions of people in the country to prove their citizenship, modelled on a disastrous exercise in Assam state that has left up to 2 million people in legal limbo.
On Monday, as the protests raged, Modi’s right-hand man was boasting to a rally of the “sky-high” Hindu temple he would build in the north Indian city of Ayodhya on the torn-down remains of a medieval mosque.
Perhaps most contentious among Indians was the passage last week of a citizenship bill that explicitly excludes Muslims, which has prompted the cancellation of state visits from Bangladesh and Japan and a warning from the UN that it is “fundamentally discriminatory”.
Each of these recent developments have sparked demonstrations and a forceful police response. But those in Kashmir were largely obscured by a continuing digital blackout, the longest of any democracy in the world. The internet has also been blocked in past days in north-eastern cities such as Guwahati, where protesters have clashed with special forces and police. Both areas are on India’s periphery, where state violence is regularly reported and rarely makes waves.
In the capital, Delhi, the popular rage – and the forceful response of authorities – is not so easily hidden.
Mainstream newspapers have been able to give blow-by-blow accounts of Sunday’s police violence against protesters, students and even campus guards. Demonstrators have used social media to publish footage including of officers dragging an unarmed man to the ground and beating him with sticks until a group of women, many wearing hijabs, shielded him with their bodies. Videos of terrified students cowering from teargas in a library, breaking windows to try to ventilate the room, have been played on national TV.
Police say the crackdown was in response to rock-throwing and violence on the part of the demonstrators, who they accused of burning a bus and other property damage.
The images of students and Muslims, two groups who claim to be targeted by the Modi government, coming under attack by police, appear to have crystallised a wider feeling of unease about the direction of the world’s largest democracy. In an extraordinarily diverse country, they may provide a rare national rallying point for discontent.
They also come at a time of renewed scrutiny of India’s human rights record in Washington and European capitals in the wake of the Kashmir decision.
On Sunday, the prime minister played to his base, telling a rally in Jharkhand state that those who were violently opposing the citizenship law could be “identified by their clothes” – taken to mean to their Muslim religious garments.
The following day, to his global audience on Twitter, he struck a more statesmanlike tone, writing that the law posed no threat “to any citizen of India of any religion”. “No Indian has anything to worry regarding this act,” he said.
Dec 17 2019 New Delhi - India - Women protect unarmed man from police beating in student protests against new anti-Muslim citizenship law
Macho Man
Trump welcomed by Village People's "Macho Man" in India
Only a month before the lockdown in India Donald Trump and Narendra Modi held a mutually supportive rally that was more about image building and electioneering than significant outcomes.
Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Ahmedabad writing for the Guardian (Mon 24 Feb 2020) writes:
The event, organised in Ahmedabad in Modi’s home state of Gujarat on Monday afternoon, was the pinnacle of Trump’s visit to India and a platform for the two leaders to show off their enthusiastically friendly relationship. Before taking to the stage, Trump rally favourites Madman Across the Water by Elton John and Macho Man by the Village People boomed out across the giant stadium.
The effusive bond between the two leaders was on full display, and Trump delivered a gushing speech paying tribute to an “exceptional leader ... and a man I am proud to call my true friend”, while Modi sat behind him looking pleased. “Everybody loves him but I will tell you this, he is very tough,” added Trump, who unusually did not appear to divert from his speech script at all.
. . . Delhi was rocked by deadly protests during Donald Trump's India visit!
Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Delhi (Tue 25 Feb 2020) writes:
The unrest in the capital began on Sunday in north-east Delhi, when a Kapil Mishra, a local leader from Modi’s BJP party, threatened to violently remove a group of Muslim protesters who had been peacefully blocking a local road in protest against a controversial new citizenship amendment act (CAA), which many believe discriminates against Muslims.
Mishra’s incendiary rhetoric against the Muslims riled up a Hindu mob, and Hindus and Muslims began clashing in the streets, throwing stones and setting alight to local businesses. The communal violence further escalated as rumours that Hindu icons had been demolished by local Muslims and a mob of Hindu rioters were pictured violently beating a Muslim man with sticks and baseball bats as he lay bloodied in the street, crying for help. A policeman was killed when he was hit in the head by a flying rock, and multiple journalists were hospitalised as they were attacked by mobs.
As shops, cars and homes were set alight and rubble and smoke filled the neighbourhood, the streets of the Khajuri Khaas and surrounding areas of north-east Delhi resembled a war zone. The police responded with teargas and grenades and were reportedly firing molotov cocktails at the clashing groups. However, the unrest continued to spread across the capital. On Tuesday evening, a mosque in Ashok Nagar, north-west Delhi, was set alight, with Hindu rioters seen climbing the minaret and attaching a flag of the Hindu god Hanuman.
Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Shaikh Azizur Rahman in Delhi (Mon 16 Mar 2020) investigate this travesty of justice and civil society:
On one side of the marketplace, it was carnage. As the Hindu mob descended, Muslim-owned stalls selling car parts were slowly reduced to debris and ashes. But just 100 metres away stood two police stations.
As the mob attacks came once, then twice and then a third time in this north-east Delhi neighbourhood, desperate stallholders repeatedly ran to Gokalpuri and Dayalpur police stations crying out for help. But each time they found the gates locked from the inside. For three days, no help came.
Revolution Loading - WHO DO YOU CALL WHEN THE POLICE MURDERS?
. . . was a British strategy to destroy the harmony between various religions and use it following the wake up call of the ‘Great Mutiny’ of 1857 in which the Hindus and Muslims jointly fought against the British. This shocked the British government so much that after suppressing the Mutiny, the British collector became, in effect, an agent provocateur. He would secretly call the Hindu Pandit, pay him money, and tell him to speak against Muslims, and similarly he would secretly call the Maulvi, pay him money, and tell him to speak against Hindus.
In a nation that emerged from the partition of British India and that was divided according to religion rather than language or ethnicity, a resurgence of the identity politics and exploitation of a Hindu nationalism, in a class society, where a caste system used to historically define some sections of society as "untouchable", is a regressive modern phenomenon. This includes the "over-enthusiasm" of the fire-brigade as evidenced in this recent video of the treatment of migrant workers trying to return to their villages.
Mar 30, 2020 India - Migrants Hosed Down with Disinfectant
VOA News
Migrant workers in India traveling from the capital New Delhi to their villages during the country’s coronavirus lockdown are hosed down with disinfectant by men in protective suits, Monday, March 30, a move which has sparked criticism of government officials online.
A local official later tweeted that the fire brigade had been instructed to sanitize buses, but sprayed the passengers because of "over-enthusiasm.” The district where the incident took place - Bareilly in northern Uttar Pradesh state - reported its first coronavirus case on Sunday.
Fear, and the politics of fear . . .
Meanwhile, medics in India are sleeping on floors after being evicted from their homes.
Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Delhi and Shaikh Azizur Rahman in Kolkata report for the Guardian (Mon 30 Mar 2020). Here are a couple of excerpts:
Doctors and medical workers in India are being ostracised from communities, evicted from their homes and forced to sleep in hospital bathrooms and on floors over fears they may be carrying coronavirus.
In cases reported across the country, healthcare professionals described the growing stigma they are facing from their neighbours and landlords, resulting in many being refused taxis, barricaded from their own homes, or made homeless.
And it not just medical staff who are being affected by this form of social distancing:
Women who work as private ayahs – domestic servants – in hospitals described how they too had been driven out of their homes in the past few days. Kajori Haldar, 48, an ayah at a Calcutta Medical College and Hospital, said neighbours had visited her husband and told him they would not let her return to the community for the next three months because of fears she was carrying coronavirus.
“While I am not on duty, I just find some space to spread out a plastic sheet and take rest here,” said Haldar. “This is my makeshift home now.”
It is only a matter of time before the fear of contagion will be projected onto minorities within society, and muslims, as potential carriers of the disease. Such is the condition of modern India!
Reuters reported that on 9th March Donald Trump tweeted that the coronavirus was not as perilous as the flu, he said, “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!”
Two days later, Anthony Fauci, head of infectious diseases at the National Institutes of Health and a member of Trump’s task force on the outbreak, said the coronavirus was far more deadly.
“This is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu,” Fauci said on Wednesday, when was asked by a House of Representatives committee for a fact that would help Americans gauge the danger.
These are textbook examples of contradictory communication during disease outbreaks, according to some researchers into the psychology of pandemics and how leaders can most effectively communicate to keep the public safe during them.
Trump has also said he is not worried about having had a direct exposure to the virus and that the United States is in far better shape than other countries, leading some experts to criticize him for playing down the dangers of the disease and lulling citizens into complacency.
History has shown that leaders trying to manage pandemics without full transparency hamper citizens from acting to help, said Steven Taylor, a psychiatry professor at the University of British Columbia and author of the 2019 book “The Psychology of Pandemics.” He maintains that if the public loses the trust of its leaders, people will not listen to them when they offer good advice.
Today France 24 reports that President Donald Trump said Tuesday that the risk from coronavirus is emphatically worse than regular flu, reversing his previous statements. Trump told a White House press conference that "a lot of people" had previously suggested the country should simply let the coronavirus take its course, just like the seasonal flu.
"Ride it out, don't do anything, just ride it out and think of it as the flu," they said, according to Trump, who said: "But it's not the flu. It is vicious."
Trump's clear statement contrasted with numerous recent times when he made the argument himself that the pandemic was comparable to the annual spread of flu.
He appeared to favor this thinking while questioning the need to shut down the US economy through social distancing measures and travel bans.
So writes Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian (Fri 27 Mar 2020). Here are two extracts:
No. 1.
"An imbecile at the head of the US government would always be a problem. But an imbecile so narcissistic that he elevates his own stunted knowledge above the judgment of medicine and science is a calamity."
No. 2.
“WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF,” he tweeted in caps lock at the start of the week, shortly after Steve Hilton, one-time adviser to David Cameron, had made that same argument on his Fox News show. (If you look up the word “chutzpah” in the dictionary, it now directs you to a clip of Hilton warning on that same broadcast that austerity policies in the UK caused an extra 130,000 deaths – failing to mention that he was at the right hand of the prime minister who imposed that austerity.)
Trump and his outriders contend that, while mass death is not ideal, it’s better than allowing the US economy to stall. Some, like Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, are explicit, urging the elderly to risk their lives so that their grandchildren might enjoy the fruits of uninterrupted American capitalism. “If that’s the exchange, I’m all in,” Patrick said. He was taking his cue from Trump who, while not putting it quite as baldly, has been quite clear. If coronavirus is a stick-up artist asking America, “Your money or your life”, Trump’s response has been: “Take the lives of the old and the weak: I want the money.”
So, Lesson No. 3. is also a No. 1.
Contemporary populist leaders are rubbish at leadership in a time of crisis!
In Indonesia, the vast archipelago situated across the LODE Zone Line, a lockdown regulation was announced on March 27 2020, according to this Jakarta Post report.
As coronavirus infections and the death toll from COVID-19 continue to surge, calls have been mounting over past weeks for President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo to lock down virus-plagued areas, especially as more cases recorded in many of the country's regions were linked to cities with the most severe outbreaks, particularly those in the Greater Jakarta area.
Medical professors from the University of Indonesia’s (UI) School of Medicine were among the latest to call for "local lockdowns" as they argued that the central government's policy of physical distancing only was not "effective" to curb the coronavirus spread.
Jokowi, however, had so far remained adamant against imposing lockdowns because of the social and economic concerns as he instead called for the public to stay at home and leaned toward extensive COVID-19 rapid testing to gain a view of the virus' spread.
Indonesia had recorded 1,046 coronavirus cases and 87 fatalities as of Friday, making the country's mortality rate among the highest in the world at 8.3 percent.
Concerns about popular support resulting from the economic and social fallout of decisive action caused populist politicians to fail their citizens through fatal delays.
Keeping the economy going is a priority for some . . .
It has been the same with a UK government, elected on the populist mantra "Get Brexit Done". And Bexit does indeed look, in present circumstances, parochial and self-indulgent. And, according to Rafael Behr in a Guardian Opinion piece today, The scale of the coronavirus crisis exposes how pointless the Brexit cause is. A reluctance to upset voters by closing the pubs, especially those new conservative voters from working class communities, proportionally disadvantaged by ten years of austerity.
Apart from lacking common sense and empathy, and ignoring the welfare of his customers, and generally being an irresponsible idiot, Tim Martin proved to be a crass and insensitive communicator to his staff in this time of crisis.
If some consider Tim Martin's judgement was compromised by financial interest and a concern to keep the economy "open" regardless, then what about the UK government, and its scientific advisors coming up with a strategy, a strategy it now busily claims it never had because the "optics" are just so bad, a strategy to allow the spread of the disease amongst the entire UK population in order to develop so-called "herd immunity".
Making a gesture? Boris & body language?
Herd immunity as a strategy has a particular appeal to those who are averse to the possible economic impact of a lockdown, because it would allow for the continuation of economic activity whilst the epidemic rages. Sarah Boseley reports for the Guardian (Fri 13 Mar 2020):
Ministers look to have given up on containment in favour of a novel approach some experts are wary of
To reach herd immunity, about 60% of the population would need to get ill and become immune, according to Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser. Though it could need as much as 70% or more. Even scientists who understand the strategy are anxious. “I do worry that making plans that assume such a large proportion of the population will become infected (and hopefully recovered and immune) may not be the very best that we can do,” said Martin Hibberd, professor of emerging infectious disease at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
“Another strategy might be to try to contain [it] longer and perhaps long enough for a therapy to emerge that might allow some kind of treatment. This seems to be the strategy of countries such as Singapore. While this containment approach is clearly difficult (and may be impossible for many countries), it does seem a worthy goal; and those countries that can should aim to do.”
The government’s “nudge unit” seems to favour this strategy. Dr David Halpern, a psychologist who heads the Behavioural Insights Team, said on BBC News: “There’s going to be a point, assuming the epidemic flows and grows, as we think it probably will do, where you’ll want to cocoon, you’ll want to protect those at-risk groups so that they basically don’t catch the disease and by the time they come out of their cocooning, herd immunity’s been achieved in the rest of the population.”
But Anthony Costello, a paediatrician and former World Health Organization director, said that the UK government was out of kilter with other countries in looking to herd immunity as the answer. It could conflict with WHO policy, he said in a series of Twitter posts, which is to contain the virus by tracking and tracing all cases. He quoted Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director general, who said: “The idea that countries should shift from containment to mitigation is wrong and dangerous.”
Herd immunity might not even last, Costello said. “Does coronavirus cause strong herd immunity or is it like flu where new strains emerge each year needing repeat vaccines? We have much to learn about Co-V immune responses.” Vaccines, he said, were a much safer way of bringing it about.
Modelling . . .
The New York Times has the story of how the publication of a startling new report on the virus from a team at Imperial College in London which warned that an uncontrolled spread of the disease could cause as many as 510,000 deaths in Britain, triggering a sudden shift in the government’s comparatively relaxed response to the virus.
By Mark Landler and Stephen Castle Published by The New York Times March 17, 2020
LONDON — When Boris Johnson was campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union in 2016 — a path that many experts warned would end in disaster for the country — one of his close allies, Michael Gove, famously declared that “people in this country have had enough of experts.”
Now, Mr. Gove and Mr. Johnson are leading the British government as it confronts the calamity of the coronavirus, and Mr. Johnson, now the prime minister, insists the process is being guided by experts. The trouble is, those experts can often disagree with each other or change their minds about the right course of action.
That messy back-and-forth has been on vivid display this week with the publication of a startling new report on the virus from a team at Imperial College in London. The report, which warned that an uncontrolled spread of the disease could cause as many as 510,000 deaths in Britain, triggered a sudden shift in the government’s comparatively relaxed response to the virus.
American officials said the report, which projected up to 2.2 million deaths in the United States from such a spread, also influenced the White House to strengthen its measures to isolate members of the public.
Imperial College has advised the government on its response to previous epidemics, including SARS, avian flu and swine flu. With ties to the World Health Organization and a team of 50 scientists, led by a prominent epidemiologist, Neil Ferguson, Imperial is treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies.
But outside experts pointed out that the report’s alarming conclusions — that the virus would overwhelm hospitals and that governments had no choice but to impose radical lockdown policies — had been made in previous reports on coronavirus or on social media sites devoted to the outbreak.
“A lot of it is not what they say, but who says it,” said Devi Sridhar, director of the global health governance program at Edinburgh University. “Neil Ferguson has a huge amount of influence.”
Imperial College, experts noted, was part of the advisory group for the government’s now-abandoned strategy, which played down radical social distancing and accepted that the infection would spread through the population. The theory is that this would build up so-called “herd immunity,” so that the public would be more resistant in the face of a second wave of infections next winter.
But such a strategy, the report noted, would lead to a flood of critically ill patients in a country without enough beds. Instead, it said, Britain needs to pursue “suppression,” which involves far stricter lockdowns, like the closing of schools and the quarantine of infected people and their families. That would drive down the number of cases and spread out the flow of patients over a longer period, allowing hospitals to cope.
Dr. Ferguson has been candid that the report reached new conclusions because of the latest data from Italy, which has seen a spiraling rate of infections, swamping hospitals and forcing doctors to make agonizing decisions about who to treat.
“The U.K. has struggled in the past few weeks in thinking about how to handle this outbreak long term,”Dr. Ferguson said in an interview on Monday, just after the report was released. “Based on our estimates and other teams’, there’s really no option but follow in China’s footsteps and suppress.”
The report added, “this conclusion has only been reached in the last few days, with the refinement of estimates of likely ICU demand due to COVID-19 based on experience in Italy and the UK.”
But other experts said the burden on hospitals was clear as far back as the original outbreak in Wuhan, China. Lancet, the British medical journal, published an article in January, based on studying a small group of patients, which found that a third of people had to be admitted to intensive care units.
“I can’t help but feel angry that it has taken almost two months for politicians and even ‘experts’ to understand the scale of the danger from SARS-CoV-2,” said Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of Lancet, on Twitter. “Those dangers were clear from the very beginning.”
Some said governments should treat the report’s projections about suppression policies with the same caution. It says social distancing measures might have to be imposed for 18 months or more, at least intermittently, until a vaccine is developed and tested. But the report acknowledges this is uncertain, given the possibility of drug treatments and the mystery of how the virus is transmitted.
“We’re all using the 1918 pandemic flu handbook,” Dr. Sridhar said. “But we’re in a different position than in 1918. We’re in 2020.”
After days of confusion about the wisdom of encouraging “herd immunity,” the government sought to play down the dispute, arguing that this was not a deliberate part of its strategy but a byproduct of it. But it shifted to a policy of urging people not to go to pubs, restaurants, theaters or museums.
On Tuesday, the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, said he expected these new, more stringent restrictions to last for months — and that the authorities would have to monitor very carefully what would happen when they are eventually lifted.
British officials recognize that their health service faces a moment of truth. All non-urgent operations in England will be postponed for at least three months, starting April 15, to free up 30,000 beds to help tackle the coronavirus.
Britain lags behind other European nations in its supply of ventilators. Plans are underway to ramp up their numbers from over 8,000 to 12,000, though officials are reluctant to promise that even this is sufficient.
Underscoring the change in tone, Britain’s finance chief, Rishi Sunak, announced a gargantuan fiscal stimulus to salvage reeling British businesses and to try to stem job losses. The package, worth £330 billion, or $422 billion, will include government-backed loans and tax breaks for companies and a three-month break in mortgage repayments for strapped homeowners.
“We have never in peacetime faced an economic fight like this,” said Mr. Sunak, who also promised support for airports and airlines in the coming days, after Britons were advised against all non-essential travel.
Mr. Johnson hinted on Tuesday that schools could be closed soon. But he still faces criticism for a lack of clarity, including his decision to urge people to avoid pubs and restaurants but not to order their closing. In fact, the government now intends to relax laws to allow pubs to stay open and produce takeout food.
To Mr. Johnson’s embarrassment, one of those promising to visit his local pub was his own father, Stanley Johnson.
Ian Sample the Guardian Science editor in an Analysis of modelling, its use and misuse, appeared in the print edition last Thursday (Thu 26 Mar 2020):
The lessons to be learned from the coronavirus pandemic will keep scholars and university lecturers busy for decades to come. Chief among them is the value of modelling, and the fact that an uncritical reliance on their findings can lead you badly astray.
Take a recent model from Oxford University. It assessed how well different outbreak scenarios fitted the rise in coronavirus deaths in the UK and Italy. The most extreme UK scenario assumed that only a tiny fraction of people were at risk of serious illness. It also estimated that, as of last week, 68% of the population had been exposed to the virus. The study, which has not been published or peer-reviewed, unleashed a flurry of headlines declaring that coronavirus may have infected half of the people in Britain. That is 34 million people.
But as infectious disease modellers and public health experts, including the Oxford team themselves, have pointed out, the model used assumptions because there was no hard data.
No one knows what fraction of the public is at risk of serious illness. The study merely demonstrates how wildly different scenarios can produce the same tragic pattern of deaths, and emphasises that we urgently need serological testing for antibodies against the virus, to discover which world we are in.
Devi Sridhar, a professor of global public health at Edinburgh University, said the Oxford study set out a hypothesis and nothing more. “It’s like me sitting here and putting into very fancy equations what would change if we had a vaccine tomorrow. I could model how a vaccine would save lives and you would see headlines reading ‘New vaccine is going to save lives.’ But we don’t have a vaccine.”
The modelling from Imperial College that underpinned the government’s belief that the nation could ride out the epidemic by letting the infection sweep through, creating “herd immunity” on the way, was more troubling.
The model, based on 13-year-old code for a long-feared influenza pandemic, assumed that the demand for intensive care units would be the same for both infections. Data from China soon showed this to be dangerously wrong, but the model was only updated when more data poured out of Italy, where intensive care was swiftly overwhelmed and deaths shot up.
Nor was that the only shortcoming of the Imperial model. It did not consider the impact of widespread rapid testing, contact tracing and isolation, which can be used in the early stages of an epidemic or in lockdown conditions to keep infections down to such an extent that when restrictions are lifted the virus should not rebound.
It is not a question of whether models are flawed but in which ways are they flawed, and models can still be enormously valuable if their shortcomings are appreciated. As with other sources of information, however, they should never be used alone.
“Models are a useful input among many when you are doing public policy, but you have to use triangulation. You have to look across different sources of information and not just rely on one. It’s more messy and complex than just saying ‘OK here’s a number’, but you get to a more accurate answer for our world,” Sridhar said.
Never have the words of the British statistician George Box rung truer than in this pandemic: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
So lesson No. 4. is that where leadership is weak, and the science works on assumptions rather than data, it is more a case of the blind leading the blind.
The coronavirus crisis has shown that even with good scientific advice, especially from The World Health Organization, populist politicians, while bowing to the wishes and interests of capital, and a volatile electorate, waste valuable time but end up having to take necessary action anyway, but potentially with more lives unnecessarily lost.
In contrast to this state of affairs the climate change science is robust, but the political will to face down powerful interests is almost non-existent.
Polly Toynbee asks this question in the Guardian Journal section of the print edition yesterday:
Polly Toynbee reflects on the hope among those on the left that the coronavirus crisis will lead to change (Mon 30 Mar 2020). But, she warns such a change is "far from certain". About half way through this Opinion piece she asks:
How about the climate?
Polly Toynbee's answer includes references to the work of climate change deniers and the climate change denial machine discussed in previous posts so far in 2020 THE YEAR OF TRUTH:
Now we see the air clear across the world and Venice canals turn blue, a life without car, cruise ship and air-traffic pollution looks suddenly possible. As Extinction Rebellion calls off its planned spring actions, the virus makes its case instead.
But pause your optimism there for a sobering thought. The other side is investing in its own coronapolitics too, with the libertarian right ready to pounce, especially on the climate crisis. The Global Warming Policy Forum of Nigel Lawson uses the virus to call for immediate cancellation of £15bn worth of climate-saving energy costs, such as the renewables obligation and the climate change levy. Just watch who’s tweeting and re-tweeting blame-the-EU and blame-the-UN messages. Brexiters relish the EU’s early failure to help member states. The Taxpayers’ Alliance, a perennial enemy of the overseas aid budget, has called for it to be diverted to corona work. Despite the crippling 40% cut in local government funds, it wants corona cuts in council tax, as it always does. Deregulators are having a field day as inspections and regulations in all sectors are abandoned: suspending physical inspections of livestock in the Red Tractor scheme pleases the farmers. Now Farmers Weekly has called for footpaths to be shut down across their land, for fear of infection.
Under cover of the virus, all manner of things may be done that may not be undone. In the Times, Mark Littlewood, the director of the Institute for Economic Affairs, sees a “silver lining” in the waiving of the working time directive, driving-hours limits for lorry drivers, a pause in the 5p plastic bag charge and competition law suspended so food companies can collude. “Perhaps they should become permanent features of our regulatory landscape,” he writes.
So the virus is an easy pretext to double down on familiar agendas. No surprise that the Jehovah’s Witnesses gleefully announce this pestilence proves we are living in the “final part of the last days”.
The lessons seem blindingly obvious: never again leave the public realm so perilously weakened as we rely on it for everything, including life itself. Never again let this grossly under-taxed and unequal country tolerate an economy that leaves half the population unable to weather storms. Let’s hope enough people are shocked by the social deficits this virus has revealed. But then, looking back on past times when crises seemed to augur a better future, remember that old football fans’ adage:
it’s the hope that kills you.
Meanwhile:
Greenpeace exposes how rightwing thinktanks are using Covid-19 fears to attack plastic bag bans.
The plastics industry has been waging a PR war in an attempt to interfere with legislationbanning or regulating the use of single-use plastic, notably around plastic bags. Through frontgroups, corporate-funded research, and misrepresentation of scientific studies, the plasticsindustry has exploited the COVID-19 emergency to create fear about reusable bags and assertthat single-use plastic is necessary to keep people safe.
As COVID-19 spreads, and the public struggles to keep up with evolving understanding of its transmission, we have seen corporate front groups like Competitive Enterprise Institute,Manhattan Institute, and American Energy Alliance circulating a string of similar stories and op-eds which explicitly warn anxious consumers that reusable grocery bags could be spreading coronavirus, and urge municipalities to repeal bag bans and/or fees.
These groups have a documented history of fossil fuel industry funding.
These stories about reusable grocery bags potentially spreading the coronavirus have been picked up and reprinted in an increasing number of news outlets.
This well-established public relations strategy, designed to create a crisis-driven media ecosystem “echo chamber,” has already helped influence a few states and municipal governments to delay or pause bans on disposable plastic bags, citing concerns of COVID-19.It appears that a media campaign was designed to establish and spread the narrative that“reusable grocery totes could be spreading COVID-19,” and “bag bans should be suspended due to COVID-19 concern.”
The irony is that the campaign relied heavily upon studies that found that the virus persisted longer on plastic surfaces than other materials. Whoever initiated this narrative was clearly able to draw on previous industry-funded and front group-linked “research,” recycling past PR efforts to try to deflect attention from the longevity of COVID-19 on plastic.
A chronological analysis of news reports and established industry connections to front groups and public relations firms reveals some key corporate participants in this carefully orchestrated misinformation echo chamber:
Novolex, one of the country’s largest manufacturers of plastic film and packaging, uses Edelman as its PR firm. Edelman has a long history of representing fossil fuel industry clients (who often launder information through these same corporate front groups). Novolex has been involved in legislative efforts to prevent communities or states from restricting the use of single-use plastic bags, often through the American Recyclable Plastic Bag Alliance. Novolex (then Hilex Poly) had underwritten a study by Robert Kimmel, who appears to be one of the first public voices linking reusable bags to the spread of COVID-19.
The American Chemistry Council (ACC) has underwritten at least one of the studies referenced, specifically a study authored by Charles Gerba and Ryan Sinclair at University of Arizona and Loma LindaUniversity School of Public Health in 2011. The ACC has been documented to be interfering in legislative efforts relating to plastic.
Many of these think tanks that circulated the story early on have a long, documented history of deploying similar PR tactics for fossil fuel industry clients, such as the Manhattan Institute, a front group which has been involved in efforts to dismiss climate science and battle against environmental policies for decades. It is one of the few remaining anti-climate organizations recently funded by ExxonMobil, which has been expanding its plastics operations as part of its $20 billion “Growing the Gulf” program.
Shaun Walker in Budapest reporting for the Guardian (Tue 31 Mar 2020):
The coronavirus has already overwhelmed medical services, grounded flights and halted economic growth, but one of its most enduring effects could be to usher in a political age in which soft authoritarians have turned harder, and the surveillance state becomes a way of life even in some democracies.
In Hungary, after a set of measures introduced on Monday, it is now a criminal offence to spread misinformation about coronavirus, and the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, can rule by decree for an indefinite period. In neighbouring Serbia, soldiers patrol the streets as part of the coronavirus response plan. In Moscow, authorities are reportedly mulling measures that would require everyone who wants to go outside to submit the reasons online, and then be tracked via their smartphones.
By now, most countries across the world have introduced some form of extraordinary measures to battle coronavirus, and even many democratic governments have faced little dissent over changes that in normal times would have been met with months or years of furious parliamentary debate. But what happens when the pandemic is over?
“Extraordinary legal situations are very easy to introduce, but it is much harder to return to business as usual afterwards,” said the Budapest-based thinktank Political Capital in response to the Hungarian measures. The sentiment could be equally applicable elsewhere.
Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian political scientist who has written extensively on European political shifts, referred to the Hungarian law as “a kind of authoritarian entrepreneurship”, comparing it to people selling masks and other equipment at inflated prices. Orbán, he said, is experimenting with what might be possible in this sudden new reality. “He’s trying and testing, to see what the market will take.”
While Orbán is a leader flying high who has sought to push the boundaries even further, in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu has looked to use the situation to ease himself out of a sticky spot. Despite having failed three times to form a government in the past year, he is now in talks with his rival, Benny Gantz, to agree on a deal for him to remain prime minister for at least the next two years. Additionally, Netanyahu’s trial on charges of bribery and fraud has also been delayed for two months because of the state of emergency.
The report continues:
At a time when even stepping outside could be dangerous, mass protests against government moves are a non-starter, and international criticism is not likely to be robust given other leaders are occupied with combating the crises in their own countries.
Additionally, citizens may feel more willing to give governments the benefit of the doubt in the current circumstances, preferring an entrenching of the status quo to weak or divided government.
Krastev compared the current crisis to the financial crisis of 2008 and the migration crisis of 2015, and said that while then the responses in Europe were driven by anxiety, this time the dominant emotion is fear, which is much more direct. “This makes people ready to tolerate everything, because when the danger is everywhere, you believe only the government can help you,” he said.
The terrifying situation in which anyone, anywhere, can be a potential threat is a perfect mobilising force for authoritarians, and many have explicitly compared the current situation to a state of war, applying military terminology to civilian life, and implying that the kind of restrictions applicable in wartime, when questioning the government could be seen as unpatriotic or even traitorous, should now apply.
“Just as in wartime, a state of emergency could extend until the end of hostilities. Today, we confront not a military power but are in a war-like state to defend our people against a pandemic the likes of which we have not seen in a century,” said Orbán’s spokesman Zoltán Kovács earlier this week, defending the Hungarian measures.
Opponents, predictably, were cast as indifferent to saving the lives of Hungarians, while Kovács also said it was logical to introduce jail terms for spreading false rumours. He said the new law only covers those who intentionally spread fake information that hampers the government response to coronavirus. How those judgments are made is a big question; however, given that Kovács and others in the government regularly accuse journalists reporting critically on the government of deliberately spreading lies.
Measures reportedly being mulled in Moscow would bring Russia a step closer to the Chinese model of surveillance, but it is not just Vladimir Putin who may soon be keeping a closer eye on his citizens. Throughout Europe, policymakers are wondering how best to monitor the population, especially if in the not-too-distant future lockdowns can be carefully eased. Once surveillance measures are brought in for the coronavirus, it may be hard to argue against keeping them in place for hypothetical future threats.
Just how many of the “extraordinary” measures introduced now will stick around to shape our world over the next years and decades will partly depend on how severe and how long-lasting the medical situation turns out to be, and how various governments’ responses to the pandemic look in retrospect.
“If in the end, people have the feeling they were manipulated then maybe we will see resistance to all these measures. But at this stage I see much more acceptance than resistance,” said Krastev.
So, lesson No. 5. is definitely another No. 1. Remember that the climate denial machine and the entire Right Wing in politics and business are well organised and well resourced. The challenge to the Left is to organise and unite behind a Green New Deal for the entire planet.
And, as we find ourselves at Lesson No. 5. we should reflect on the way "viral" "Fake News" is part of a psychopathology that is occasionally weaponized by the Alt-Right brigade and, when useful, co-opted by the denial machine on the right. For example the 5G conspiracy virus.
CBC News debunks an American doctor’s viral video claiming 5G networks caused the coronavirus and shows why it’s untrue.
Kate Proctor political correspondent for the Guardian reports (Mon 30 Mar 2020):
Downing Street’s anti-fake news unit is dealing with up to 10 cases of misinformation about coronavirus a day as it emerged some articles are getting more views than all of those posted by the NHS put together.
Oliver Dowden, the culture and digital secretary, said the government’s new rapid response unit was looking at removing “falsehoods and rumours” about the illness that could cost lives and was trying to clamp down on phishing scams.
An article on the website WND.com that claims a US doctor cured hundreds of patients of coronavirus, despite the fact the information in the piece contradicts official guidance, received more than 160,000 Facebook engagements by UK users in a 24-hour period.
According to research carried out by NewsGuard, this was more than all of the NHS website engagements received from Facebook and Twitter during the past 30 days.
The article on the doctor, who claimed to cure people with an anti-malarial drug and zinc, was one of the top five most shared articles on Covid-19 in the UK last week.
Dowden said: “We need people to follow expert medical advice and stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives. It is vital that this message hits home and that misinformation and disinformation which undermines it is knocked down quickly. We’re working with social media companies, and I’ll be pressing them this week for further action to stem the spread of falsehoods and rumours which could cost lives.”
But it gets weirder and weirder . . .
The psychopathology of the conspiracy theorist, both as creator and as consumer, has been monetised through advertising by commercial enterprises, like Infowars, to become both profitable and influential. The InfoWars website receives approximately 10 million monthly visits, making its reach greater than some mainstream news websites such as The Economist and Newsweek, even though the site has regularly published fake stories, stories which have also been linked to the harassment of victims. It is not harmless entertainment, it is reflective of the modern phenomenon of "angry white men" railing against "the state".
Even at a time when the state itself becomes the only practical means to adequately respond to the current coronavirus crisis, this does not prevent audiences from actively pursuing confirmation of a particular and narcissistic form of paranoia, on YouTube and other platforms. The production of these commodified fantasies are driven as much by advertising revenues, as the particular psychopathology associated with conspiracy theories. Infowars has been removed from several of these platforms in recent years for repeated violations of their policies.
One of the most pernicious types of conspiracy theory peddled by Infowars is a category known as New World Order (conspiracy theory), that has a history that includes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an antisemitic canard, originally published in Russian in 1903, alleging a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy to achieve world domination.
The common theme in conspiracy theories about a New World Order is that a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government—which will replace sovereign nation-states—and an all-encompassing propaganda whose ideology hails the establishment of the New World Order as the culmination of history's progress. Many influential historical and contemporary figures have therefore been alleged to be part of a cabal that operates through many front organizations to orchestrate significant political and financial events, ranging from causing systemic crises to pushing through controversial policies, at both national and international levels, as steps in an ongoing plot to achieve world domination.
The present crisis provides more grist to this particular mill, and advertising revenue, as can be seen in the example of one David Icke.
He argues in favour of reincarnation; a collective consciousness that has intentionality; modal realism (that other possible worlds exist alongside ours); and the law of attraction (that good and bad thoughts can attract experiences).
In The Biggest Secret (1999), he introduced the idea that many prominent figures derive from the Anunnaki, a reptilian race from the Draco constellation. In Human Race Get Off Your Knees: The Lion Sleeps No More (2012), he identified the Moon (and later Saturn) as the source of holographic experiences, broadcast by the reptiles, that humanity interprets as reality.
Icke also thinks climate change is a hoax.
The existential paranoia at the heart of the 1967-68 television series The Prisoner is, by comparison, a picnic.
No. 6. asks No. 2. "Who is number one?"
A major theme of the series is individualism, as represented by Number 6., versus collectivism, as represented by Number 2. and the others in the Village.
Lastly, for this post, it was announced today that the crucial UN COP26 conference and climate talks scheduled to take place later this year in Glasgow will be postponed.
So, it is presumed that the current public health and economic crisis requires 100% attention from the government.
On the other hand, there is no postponement, so far, of Boris Johnson's self imposed deadline on talks to establish Britains future trading relationship with the EU.
Lesson No.6 is a No. 1. Brexit trumps climate emergency!
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