by Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog
Eight months into the modern, digitised world’s first-ever global pandemic the results are in: Every government has failed miserably.
Despite the vast differences between socialist-inspired nations and capitalist nations every single government in 2020 has forfeited the chance at the possibility of maybe perhaps having something like a little bit of a rightly-guided mandate of heaven.
Our 2019 taxes must be refunded everywhere. What a waste voting has been, to say nothing of those few countries which have sustained modern revolutions.
Those in the know are hunkering down and bunkering up because the pandemic is proving that “government” (social organisation and collective unity) is an outdated concept in our modern, digitised, disease-ridden world.
Thus, the way you certainly are – wherever you are – being egged into hating your local, rather-poorly paid bureaucrat is something of a major propaganda coup for government-slashing neoliberalism, is it not?
Neoliberalism, per its tenets, cannot congratulate any government for anything other than self-immolation, so how can Western corporate media – owned by a handful of neoliberals – publicly congratulate any government for their handling of this unprecedented corona crisis? They cannot, so neoliberals are publicly shining in glorious vindication that all government is bad, unless and inept, period: the pandemic has decisively proven There Is No Alternative to neoliberalism.
Who knew a virus had enough innate intelligence to contain a political ideology, and despite not even being a life form with a cellular structure? This only proves that God – in His wisdom – is an American neoliberal.
Preposterous, faith-based radicalism, of course….
But firstly: Call me contrarian if you must, but don’t call this “Leibnizian optimism”: I think every nation has done spectacularly well in dealing with Covid, regardless of their guiding ideology.
The West got what they hysterically demanded, yet government is still a Satanic beast?
I think countries like China, Iran, Cuba and Vietnam had a fantastic response to Covid. People died, but not anywhere as many as we initially feared. Tons of radical measures were taken designed to protect the public good, armies of volunteers answered the call, hardships were attempted to be standardised, their peoples showed huge amounts of bravery, self-sacrifice and patience.
However, I see nearly all of these same virtues in the peoples of Western nations as well – don’t you?
Sweden succeeded without a Great Lockdown because their people – who also compose their government – acted so correctly and courageously. The idea that the exact same self-sacrificing virtues aren’t evident all over the place in the US as well is contradicted by countless individual testimonies. The first article I wrote on corona was a backhanded compliment to the West, after all: Capitalist-imperialist West stays home over corona – they grew a conscience? The West FINALLY issued some “People’s QE” – that was a huge improvement over the West’s previous decade of fiscal policies, certainly.
Indeed, the global pandemic response was the best of all possible worlds, worldwide: incredible concern for public health, a rollback to rabidly right-wing economic policies, and not anywhere close to the number of deaths we all had wild-eyed fears about.
Some systems had more limitations than others – be they cultural, political, financial or whatever – but every government tried to limit the pandemic amid these differing limitations. And they did it democratically, in the broadest sense of that term: Which government truly defied the will of their own majority? I can’t think of any.
The West got exactly what they wanted according to all the polls back then – a Great Lockdown – amid total hysteria, and in total disregard for the political and socio-economic laws which govern their societies and… they are still not happy with their government?!
Clearly, those in their media are shaping public perceptions in order to foment unrest and dissatisfaction instead of urging clarity and stoic realism – this article praising governments should not be such an outlier, but it certainly is.
To be clear, the problem was not necessarily the Great Lockdown but what will come after such a drastic move in certain countries. The West has capitalist-imperialist ideologies which ensure that a Great Lockdowning cannot be coped with – in the US the Republican Party, which is refusing to extend unemployment insurance, is currently insisting this be proven emphatically.
I insisted from the start that when a natural disaster hits – you have no choice but to dance with the girl that brung ya. Mid-crisis is not at all the time to reinvent the wheel, but the time to trust the defences you have been building (or in the case of neoliberalism: not building). The West, of course, has very poor political defences thanks to four decades of anti-government neoliberalism and an even longer history of deranged frontier libertarianism. All the West can do is throw their tons of money at the problem – too bad that can’t buy a modern political infrastructure, culture, perspective, etc.
Building that modern, post-1917 political infrastructure is what the West now has to do, or collapse. Thus, covid is going to drag the West kicking and screaming into political modernity.
Voltaire never lived in the digitised world, much less a truly democratic one
I wouldn’t take down his statue but I would reject the bitter and individualistic (and thus very French) outlook he presented in Candide, where optimism is only for fools. For Voltaire the mantra of the character Pangloss – that “this is the best of all possible worlds”, despite his encountering one misfortune after another – is something to be derided: Pangloss is an idiot for not giving in to black resentfulness.
Well, that’s one view – a mighty cynical one. For those of us lucky to still be alive and fully healthy in August 2020 – that seems like a rather ungrateful perspective, no?
Voltaire’s final moral of “tend your own garden” sounds like Taoist individualism from a guy who was supposed to admire Confucianism, which is active, social and judgemental. We are all stuck at home tending our garden and, guess what: a monkish existence is a lonely, self-centered, unsatisfying and even unproductive life – it is unsurprising that the extremely social and active religion of Islam forbids monasticism and demands charitable social works.
I don’t know what people expected from our modern digitised world in our first-ever response to a pandemic, but judging from the criticism of civil servants it’s clear that many people were expecting way too much. No state worker could make unfat all the Americans who have perished prematurely; no state worker had a fountain of youth for the over-80s who compose the bulk of Sweden’s dearly departed. The Western “Karen’s” babyish “war on dying” was always setting up governments to fail and for faith in political institutions – any institution – to be incorrectly lessened.
Those who read the paper regularly know that the world was not paradise back in December 2019. When we consider how badly things were supposed to get back in spring, pondering the possibility that this is the best of all possible worlds is truly worth more than a moment’s reflection.
And then you can explain to me how this pandemic could have possibly been better handled with less government? This is the impossible task of the deranged American libertarian, the European technocrat, and the neoliberal aristocrat/comprador around the world.
If there is one thing I know for certain it’s this: Covid has definitively proved that big government is our ONLY defense against an often-cruel natural world.
Duh…. Countries who have endured an actual war – not a pandemic war – already knew this.
The US and Eurozone governments have done well in spite of the limitations presented by their elitist and reckless neoliberalism, but the “anti-all government crowd” will eventually be forced to admit that – when compared with socialist-style governments, with their central planning and authority to lead in a crisis – their neoliberal ideals have failed everyone, will continue to fail everyone, and are expressly designed to fail everyone and leave people at the mercy of that often-cruel natural world.
Honest critics of neoliberal capitalism saw all that long ago.
Covid will ultimately be seen as the killer of neoliberalism, not its vindicator.
That’s why it’s not surprising to see so many anti-socialist commentators trying to declare the opposite: they are the ones saying 2+2=5, not any “Big Brother” central government. Again, this pro-government article shouldn’t be so rare – this went pretty well for the first modern, digitised global pandemic. But what do we do now?
Answer: no way we go back to anti-government neoliberalism. This exact light is being switched on in minds around the world.
So, for socialists: it came at a very heavy cost, but this is the best of all possible worlds!
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Corona contrarianism? How about some corona common sense? Here is my list of articles published regarding the corona crisis.
Capitalist-imperialist West stays home over corona – they grew a conscience? – March 22, 2020
Corona meds in every pot & a People’s QE: the Trumpian populism they hoped for? – March 23, 2020
A day’s diary from a US CEO during the Corona crisis (satire) March 23, 2020 – March 25, 2020
Tough times need vanguard parties – are ‘social media users’ the West’s? – March 26, 2020
If Germany rejects Corona bonds they must quit the Eurozone – March 30, 2020
Landlord class: Waive or donate rent-profits now or fear the Cultural Revolution – March 31, 2020
Corona repeating 9/11 & Y2K hysterias? Both saw huge economic overreactions – April 1, 2020
(A Soviet?) Superman: Red Son – the new socialist film to watch on lockdown – April 2, 2020
Corona rewrites capitalist bust-chronology & proves: It’s the nation-state, stupid – April 3, 2020
Condensing the data leaves no doubt: Fear corona-economy more than the virus – April 5, 2020
‘We’re Going Wrong’: The West’s middling, middle-class corona response – April 10, 2020
Why does the UK have an ‘army’ of volunteers but the US has a shortage? – April 12, 2020
No buybacks allowed or dared? Then wave goodbye to Western stock market gains – April 13, 2020
Pity post-corona Millennials… if they don’t openly push socialism – April 14, 2020
No, the dollar will only strengthen post-corona, as usual: it’s a crisis, after all – April 16, 2020
Same 2008 QE playbook, but the Eurozone will kick off Western chaos not the US – April 18, 2020
We’re giving up our civil liberties. Fine, but to which type of state? – April 20, 2020
Coronavirus – Macron’s savior. A ‘united Europe’ – France’s murderer – April 22, 2020
The same 12-year itch: Will banks loan down QE money this time? – April 26, 2020
The end of globalisation won’t be televised, despite the hopes of the Western 99% (2/2) – April 27, 2020
What would it take for proponents to say: ‘The Great Lockdown was wrong’? – April 28, 2020
ZeroHedge, a response to Mr. Littlejohn & the future of dollar dominance – April 30, 2020
Given Western history, is it the ‘Great Segregation’ and not the ‘Great Lockdown’? – May 2, 2020
The Western 1% colluded to start WWI – is the Great Lockdown also a conspiracy? – May 4, 2020
May 17: The date the Great Lockdown must end or Everything Bubble 2 pops – May 6, 2020
Reading Piketty: Does corona delay the Greens’ fake-leftist, sure-to-fail victory? – May 8, 2020
Picturing the media campaign needed to get the US back to work – May 11, 2020
Scarce jobs + revenue desperation = sure Western stagflation post-corona – May 13, 2020
France’s nurses march – are they now deplorable Michiganders to fake-leftists? – May 15, 2020
Why haven’t we called it ‘QE 5’ yet? And why we must call it ‘QE 2.1’ instead – May 16, 2020
‘Take your stinking paws off me, you damned, dirty public servant!’ That’s Orwell? – May 17, 2021
The Great Lockdown: The political apex of US single Moms & Western matriarchy? May 21, 2021
I was wrong on corona – by not pushing for a US Cultural Revolution immediately – May 25, 2021
August 1: when the unemployment runs out and a new era of US labor battles begin – May 28, 2021
Corona proving the loser of the Cold War was both the USSR & the USA – May 30, 2021
Rebellions across the US: Why worry? Just ask Dr. Fauci to tell us what to do – June 2, 2021
Protesting, corona-conscience, a good dole: the US is doing things it can’t & it’s chaos – June 3, 2021
Why do Westerners assume all African-Americans are leftists? – June 5, 2020
The US as Sal’s Pizzeria: When to ‘Do The Right Thing’ is looting – June 6, 2020
The problem with the various ‘Fiat is all the problem!’ (FIATP) crowds – June 9, 2020
Politicisation of Great Lockdown result of ‘TINA’ economic ignorance & censorship – June 14, 2020
Trump’s only hope: buying re-election with populist jobless benefits – June, 16 2020
US national media is useless – so tell me the good local news sources? – July 4, 2020
Hamilton movie: central banker worship & proof the US has no left – July 8, 2020
News flash: Capitalism has no answer for 50 million jobless people – July 11, 2020
Naive Millennials: it’s the man (Trump) & not ‘The Man’ (the US system) – July 18, 2020
Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of the books ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’ and the NEW ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’.
As always, I feel Ramin is correct in his didactic argument about the vital need for healthy government. I am reminded of a conversation I had with an American women in Oregon many years ago. Being a typical western leftist she had the notion that liberation meant being free of all Government management and oversight. In her mind, by definition, government could never be more than the imposition of a structure of evil oppressive control. Very Oregon! I saw this as an extension of the false, supposedly Marxist, notion that in Socialism the State would just wither away to nothing. Utopian dreaming of the 19th Century variety. So I will never forget the look of absolute incredulity on her face when I, being a New Zealander, countered with the statement; “Government is natural.” She just could not process it.
How can it not be so? Our physical bodies are “governed” in their natural hierarchical organic state. Our consciousness is “governed” by our soul integrity, or needs to be. Families are governed by parents and then children grow secure and strong in healthy love. But it is of great value to the anarchist spirit of the bourgeois ruling class to have the masses convinced that government is inherently evil and an enemy of the people. However that is no more than an ideological construct designed to protect the capitalists from their fear of the masses using Government to circumscribe their own rapacious instincts. I stand with Ramin’s argument that a spiritually balanced socialism is the essential path to creating a politics and government that upholds the collective integrity of the people.
I sincerely appreciate and have absolute respect for Ramin.
I deeply appreciate his clearly well intentioned and honorable willingness to speak of his own legitimate and non-hatred based interpretations of ‘reality’.
I happen to have a different perspective. I feel and am someone who has a far more cynical analysis of our current cultural/societal/global state if affairs.
I live in America. King county which includes Seattle. I literally spent time every weekend within what became the Chaz/chop zone for five months, ending about a month after the plandemic became operational.
Peace my friend.
Mr. Bob Hope, how’s the golfing?
I hear you brother – it was the same for me and many others every Saturday with the yellow vests, and across a whole nation.
I truly do agree about a “plandemic”. After all these many months – is it possible to still be just a “hysteria”? Like the hula hoop?
The yellow vests were not thwarted in France by popular opinion any more than in Portland: reactionaries with huge resources were the cause in both. These are “planned epidemics of conspiracies”, indeed.
But this is something which is not the result of “government” at all, but of a same-old class war/capitalist war. John Q. Public, such as myself and a billion other civil servants – lol, we have no control over that 1%-er class. Only foaming neoliberals/libertarians could imagine that the bureaucratic class and the 1% class is the same thing, right?
No, this article is a hopeful article – not a plandemic article. There are many plandemic articles, tho I should write one too. It’s a hopeful article. Yellow vester class: American branch – keep hope alive! And, truly, there is hope, of course….
There is always even Bob Hope, because who had a longer Hollywood career than that guy?
Okay friend. I look forward to your thoughts regarding the plandemic.
I appreciate your courage and trust that you speak and share your legitimate and honorable interpretations of life.
Peace be with you.
And then you can explain to me how this pandemic could have possibly been better handled with less government?
By having a small but honest government. Hah!
My first oxymoron of the day!
A one man govt would have done better.
Just a conversation about personal responsibility would have done.
Have you not witnessed the politicization of the science?
The obfuscation of the facts?
The drive to lockdown despite cheap and available treatments?
Hundreds of thousands of deaths later and the average age at death stuck at or above life expectancy!
Does this not mean anything to anyone?
Is this the twilight zone?
It’s the same playbook as global warming for crying out loud.
Big government is in bed with big business.
That’s what you get with big government.
I don’t think anyone will be able to explain those excellent points you raise, without acknowledging that this was not a natural event.
Governments and media in the West have actually performed exactly to plan, by doing all that they can to make a “black death” crisis out of what seems to be nothing more, than a rebranded seasonal influenza. Whatever happened to flu this year?
What really needs to be looked at closely by informed commentators is the role played by the WHO and its close associate, the vaccine king himself, Bill Gates.
Covid-19 is not the flu rebranded.
It is agony. And you can keep catching it over and over again. And every time you recover, it leaves you a bit weaker than you were.
Covid-19 is absolutely rampant in Iran. From what I have experienced, and what I keep seeing around me, I do not believe that, technically speaking, this virus is something you recover from. Rather, it stays with you, like HIV.
You may think you have recovered, but then a little bit of strenuous physical activity will bring back all the symptoms.
Please, do not dismiss this disease as a joke, just because you have not had it.
The alarming phenomena you list above are, as near as I can determine, anecdotal and not supported by any reliable statistics. All but a tiny minority infected by this virus suffer mild or negligible symptoms, and do not suffer relapses (any more than with a normal flu, which gets weaker with recurrence) or lifelong maladies that they were not suffering from to begin with. A lot of shady actors have gone to a lot of trouble to spread and maximize fear of this virus: massive media campaigns, widespread censorship and deplatforming of supporters of inexpensive, off-patent treatments, a fraudulent study published (and retracted) in the Lancet and NEJM which was used as a basis for issuing guidelines to halt clinical trials in progress of certain drugs, and to prohibit their use, WHO and CDC guidelines that encourage reporting of deaths-with-SARS2 as deaths-from-Covid19. The disinfo campaign by our media and medical establishment have been dishonest and manipulative from the beginning – I think the alarmist anecdotes in your comment have their origin in that source.
I speak from personal experience.
You don’t know what you’re talking about.
The Saker has strict rules, so I won’t say what I really think you are up to. Suffice it to say, that Monte George Jr. seems to have a very good idea of what’s going on.
This conversation is getting personal and going off-topic. It is closed. Any further comments will go to trash. Mod.
Have you or anyone else who got ill tried high dose oral or preferably IV drip vitamin C? Or even better, its liposomal or lipospheric (oral) variant, or any other orthomolecular treatment? Has anyone really very ill tried stabilized allicin? Has any doctor or medical aid tried anything else than the standard ‘protocol’ forced upon them by BIG pharma? No, no and maybe a bit, in the form of hydroxychloroquine et azythromycine!
There are many other potential and even certain cures besides these three, and several of them combined are even more effective and curing the illnes even faster. Did you know that in the Wuhan area the Chinese government distributed over 50 tons of vitamin c, but nobody cared to let us, the general public, know about it and its importance.
Yes , anyone weak enough can catch it over and over again, we knew from the moment some awake doctors sequenced the virus and told us about this on the web. Its a chimeric virus with a corona base and bits of the SARS and AIDS virus inserted, all done in labs in the US until 2014/2015 and then, after having become illegal, continued in the (French-American) labs near Wuhan (with US taxpayer’s money and some financial help from filthy criminals like Billy Gates).
“HIV stays with you”, like Lyme’s disease, certainly when inside the brain, protected by the brain-blood barrier. “Not curable and not fit to fly” doctors told my bro-in-law and took his ATP pilot’s license. He took a cure of two weeks of Allimax, a product from the UK. This are capsules containing a tiny dose of pure stabilized allicin, a highly active ingredient of garlic that, when not stabilized, gets destroyed by our stomach acids.
Two months later he passed all medical tests with flying colors (pun not intended). Lyme had disappeared, totally. But there’s so much more. Read up on miracle cures by the doctors Frederick Klenner and Robert Cathcart, done with nothing more than vitamin c. You can find much about them on the web or in the books by Dr Thomas Levy, one of them with the title “Curing the incurable”. Read up and learn how to cure almost anything. Don’t trust Levy, or Klenner? Then look up the ‘Pauling Protocol’. Two Nobel prize Linus Pauling was probably one of the best bio-chemist the world has known, and he had one or two words to say about vitamin c as well. Other doctors have had almost equally incredible results with high dose vitamin d3, magnesium-chloride or sodiumbicarbonate, and the list is much longer.
So has small government failed? Yes. Has big government failed? Also. The Chinese with their use of vitamin c and other alternatives seemed to have done best, but could have done a much better job. When using more and other natural cures than just vitamin c they could have saved many more people using much less violence and with less limitations of freedom. Big pharma/Big money seems to rule also in that, is it still communist?, country.
So yes, I dismiss all of it as a frigging joke, exactly because I have not had it, and better than that, wouldn’t get ill even if they injected me with the virus.
The human immune system is incredibly powerful and helped man survive millions of years, but it can’t function well if you don’t give it what’s necessary to do so. Old German expression: Man ist was man isst.
But the most important matter is not the disease itself, but what this plandemic is being used for. There are definitely several different agendas at play. The future will tell us which ones but I’m not hopeful that any of it will bring any good.
To get my drift just watch the following video: https://youtu.be/2deFTjEDgGA
COVID19 won’t be the killer of neoliberalism, it will refine it to soar to new heights: watch Shoshana Zuboff’s explanations on “surveillance capitalism” to get an idea of where the journey goes. We are in even deeper shit than most people can fathom.
Exactly my idea! Thanks.
The majority of governments have reacted in the same way, pretending that the pandemic is real. To entertain the sanitary terror, the masks have been mandated when the flu epidemic was over and millions of doses of the future vaccine were ordered in advance. They have all betrayed their own people and demonstrated who is ruling over them. Most of them had already integrated in their legislation, since the previous H1N1 flu hoax and Tamiflu scam, the legal disposition to impose forced vaccination on their populations, in total disregard of the Nuremberg code. Even Switzerland, the fake model of democracy, is one of them. And already, those governments have granted the vaccine companies the legal immunity against the possible damages caused by the Covid vaccine on their populations. All covered with public money, the money of the future victims.
The Hydroxychloroquine story proves that the Globalists are ready to do everything, with the complicity of those corrupt governments, to allow no cure that could make their vaccine useless:
https://truthabouthcq.com/hcq-works/
I see the light! Thanks to the pandemic I will surrender all liberty to an all-powerful state which will protect me, feed me and pat me on the head once in a while. And if I’m not an obedient little comrade I’m sure there’s a cell
waiting for me – for my own good, of course.
Everybody is right.
The pandemic is real and causes real issues that last a lifetime for some, and no issues for others. So you’re both right.
The pandemic is real for those who value their liberties and freedoms, and real for those who value security above all else. You’re both right.
The pandemic is endemic and requires a different type of society that can deal with this kind of future.
What Covid has uncovered is that our society and humanity is ‘stuffed’ and that we’ve run out of ideas. Perhaps Covid is a stuxnet viral type malware and the only way to overcome it is to upgrade our ‘software’?
Regardless, it’s inevitable that our new overlords – AI with the new religion of Transhumanism – and the new technocracy are here to stay. The singularity is here. We no longer run the machine. The machine runs us.
We need to adapt, we need to upgrade our philosophies and we need to demand a seat at the table or we will be discarded like old technology. That much is true.
I have a slightly different view as I consider the seriousness of the virus in SE asia to be somewhat different to elsewhere due to the Buddist considerations of the older members of society. Stable nations have the nucleus of a strong family, a spritual moral order and an economic system based on fairness. I live in a village in this area and made a short video of what I consider the elements of my point of view. I do not know if it will endure yet in this area there have been no cases for months and children are at school and society is as normal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai1LJf_x37s&t=11s