John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN ANTI-EMPIRE
“Belarus’s Lukashenko Warns Global Elites Using COVID-19 to Reshape World Order”
He may here or there say something agreeable, but Alexander Lukashenko is not an agreeable man.
Quite the opposite, he is an authoritarian, as we know from numerous examples.
Note: some Americans are handling government disease-prevention measures very badly, and with extreme attitudes, as we see from citing a man like Lukashenko and in the comment and response below.
__________________
Response to a comment, saying, “Authoritarian? The governor of my state has closed almost every business, and if you walk into Wal-Mart (open because they sell groceries), you have to tell them what you are going to buy, to determine if it is deemed essential. I’d vote for Lukashenko to replace him, if I could.”
Please, keep some perspective.
Telling an employee what you are going to buy in the store far more closely resembles what everyone routinely tells border authorities when entering a country than anything remotely like genuine authoritarianism.
_____________________
Quarantines were common in America in the first part of the twentieth century.
A sign was fixed to the front door of a house or business, quite routinely.
It stated the period that the premises would be under quarantine with no one allowed to enter or leave, as two weeks or a month, depending on the nature of the disease.
Those were diseases whose transmission and effects were well understood.
Transmission of the coronavirus is still not completely understood. I see new suggestions and theories regularly.
Some viruses are transmitted only by bodily fluids, as by sneezing or coughing. Others are airborne. Some can be transmitted from a surface, with active infection times varying greatly from hours to days.
When this disease first appeared in China, we knew virtually nothing about its transmission, but we knew it affected a large number of people in a short time, and it killed a good many.
The Chinese government, a very cautious institution, took it deadly seriously once it understood what was happening. They took extreme measures, and they stopped the spread of the disease in a densely populated country.
I find this set of events very interesting. It is a revolutionary thing that has happened - for society, for governments, and for America’s position in the world.
America has not only been shown to be completely unprepared, despite all its arrogance and braggadocio and wealth, once the political pressure was on, it showed itself as a criminal actor – everything from stealing other countries’ medical supplies (from both allies like France and opponents like Cuba) to denying relief to hard-hit societies like Iran and Venezuela – along with a stream of sickening lies from Trump and Pompeo.
The complete idiocy and ineffectiveness of organizations like NATO has been embarrassingly revealed. It has carried on as usual with nonsense like expanding its membership to meaningless micro-states looking for handouts and prestige (thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union) and has not used its vast resources to help anyone.
China and Russia and even little Cuba have shown everyone a willingness to help, to give real help while Trump just keeps making inappropriate remarks and doing little.
The world will not soon forget America’s wretched performance. It will be seeking new international ways to protect from such events, and I think they can only be global in nature.
Better early warning systems, better coordination, establishing best practices, and more. New measures to secure international trade in a badly damaged world economy. New avenues of international cooperation, and the United States is not going to be viewed as the leader in any of it.
There is going to be a new set of norms when this is all over, and I believe that, here as elsewhere, Trump’s malign influence will only have speeded the arrival of what he and the rest of the American establishment most dread, the end of American hegemony and the emergence of the a multi-polar word.
