[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
“If trouble comes when you least expect it, then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.”
- Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Writing anything about COVID-19 at this moment is a daunting task since the situation is evolving so rapidly, and in so many different locations. Information contained in this piece could be thoroughly outpaced by transformative events by the time it reaches publication, or even by the time I finish up and click “save.” There is also a glut of information online right now, some of it reliable and fascinating, and some of it misleading and counterproductive. Everywhere there is a mixture of growing apprehension, clashing opinion, and outright confusion. If the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center’s interactive map is accurate, there are currently 284,566 cases of COVID-19 worldwide, a figure that is growing. The “true” number of infections, that includes asymptomatic carriers, will be much higher. Beginning on February 24th, an accelerating number of new transmissions emerged outside China, primarily in Italy which currently has over 47,021 cases. At time of writing, France and Germany are also experiencing rapid increases in affected persons, together totaling over 33,000 cases, and Spain is on the brink of a national lockdown with over 25,374. Almost every European country has now been affected, and COVID-19 is now spreading in the United States, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. How will it test the West?
Relations with China
Early speculation on COVID-19, especially in dissident circles, orbited conspiracy theories that the virus was engineered, and that it was either deployed by the United States or was an accidental leak from Wuhan’s Institute of Virology. In recent days, the former theory has been eagerly taken up by the Chinese themselves, with the added detail that COVID-19 may have been unleashed by visiting American soldiers during the Military World Games, which were staged in Wuhan in October 19-27, 2019. According to epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, in the course of a very interesting interview with Joe Rogan, it’s possible to date the origins of human COVID-19 through a process much like carbon dating, and scientists now have data suggesting COVID-19 became active in humans for the first time in mid-November 2019. Ron Unz has asked:
How would Americans react if 300 PRC officers had visited Chicago, and immediately afterwards, a deadly new plague broke out in that city, with a major risk of spreading throughout the country? Isn’t it also rather suspicious that Iran has been hit so hard? So the two countries in the world most subject to current American hostility just tend to be especially “unlucky.” It hit China just before Lunar New Year, the absolutely worst possible time, and the epicenter was Wuhan, a key transport hub. It really seems an *astonishing* coincidence that 300 US military servicemen had been visiting Wuhan just prior to the outbreak, at a peak of international tension.
Other than timing of course, there seems to be little or no evidence that this was a bioweapon attack. Most obviously, one would assume that any attempted bioweapon attack by the United States on China would be much more covert than what has been suggested (a deliberate release by a very public group of soldiers). Also, while we know that SARS-like viruses based on bat coronavirus can be developed in the lab, the genome of COVID-19 has also been examined countless times with the result that there are now over 300 papers on MedRXiv concerning the structure, nature, and origins of the virus. None of these papers have highlighted anything suggesting an artificial origin of any aspect of COVID-19.
Conspiracy theories on the origins of COVID-19 are of course a very convenient and useful tool for the Chinese government, because they deflect attention from the fact the outbreak can easily be attributed to bad government, and to Communism itself. I find the idea that the virus originated in a Wuhan “wild food” market to be utterly compelling (see this documentary by 60 Minutes Australia, and this short piece by Vox), and this has direct consequences for perceptions of Chinese Communism. The consumption of “exotic” foods is itself a legacy of the Great Chinese Famine 1959–1961, after which the government permitted private farming but failed to prevent the monopoly by big companies of the rearing of conventional livestock. The peasantry, priced out of the market, resorted in large numbers to the farming of wild animals, especially, in the initial stages, the farming of turtles. Since this curbed starvation to some extent, the government backed these initiatives, and then in 1988 made the encouragement of domestication and breeding of wildlife an explicit aspect of law. Wildlife farming became an industry overnight. Bears, snakes, rodents, lizards, and bats began to be mass-produced for human consumption, and sold in mass markets in many of the country’s largest cities. In these markets, multiple species, alive and dead, are stacked in cages on top of one another, with the animals soaked in cocktails of urine and excrement—each cage a petri dish for the development new diseases, especially respiratory diseases, with the potential to jump to humans from myriad mammals. Together with its failure to take decisive preventative action in January 2020, and absent conspiracy theory speculation, the origin tale of COVID-19 is ultimately an indictment of Chinese politics and culture.
How that indictment will impact relations between the West and China remains to be seen. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace have speculated that while mutual suspicion between the Chinese and the United States will remain high, the coronavirus outbreak will have no meaningful impact on trade between the two countries, and may in fact help de-escalate some prior economic tensions and involve the suspension of tariffs. In the longer term, however, COVID-19 has accelerated discussion about the need to become more independent from China in the production of goods. Several multinational corporations with supply chains based in China, having already considered diversifying their supply chains because of the U.S.-China trade war, are now likely to further their plans. Apple, for example, intends to move some manufacturing of its products (including AirPods and Apple Watches) to Taiwan due to the coronavirus. In Washington, members of Congress have used the outbreak to call for scaling back U.S. reliance on China, especially for prescription drugs, medical supplies, and other critical resources. Since Europe (Germany in particular) is the world’s largest manufacturer of drugs and medicines, we are likely to see a gradual decoupling of the United States from Chinese production, and a greater integration of European-American trade. Brexit Britain, until recently seen by the Chinese as having great potential for a lucrative trade and investment deal, may now present more of a cold house than previously thought. The EU, already resistant to increased Chinese economic influence, is also likely to dig its heels even deeper in the face of Chinese approaches. Some of the lasting challenges of COVID-19 will be how the West can distance itself from economic dependence on Chinese manufacturing, what impact this will have in both the shorter and longer term, and how the Chinese will respond.
Migrant Pressures
The first European outbreaks of COVID-19 fatefully coincided with an aggressive two-week operation by Turkey on its border with Greece, involving the movement of thousands of Syrian and African migrants. Beginning in late February, the Turkish government announced it would no longer stop migrants trying to reach Europe, and then drove thousands to the Greek border, live-streaming the process to encourage more to follow. The move was widely understood as an attempt to force European support for Turkey’s military campaign in northern Syria, and also as an attempt to extort more money from the EU. Although the effort now appears to have concluded with Turkey backtracking in the face of Greek resilience, Europe continues to have this metaphorical human “pistol” pressed to the side of its head.
COVID-19 is going to aggravate the broader migrant problem. Already the clamor is growing that migrant camps on Europe’s borders should be evacuated on health grounds, with the migrants permitted to enter Europe. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) have argued that unhygienic and cramped living conditions mean COVID-19 can spread very fast, and that social distancing and hand washing are more difficult. While Europe bans mass gatherings, it’s been said that people in these camps have nowhere to go. Even within European countries, the outbreak has been associated with calls for amnesties and the opening of migrant detention centers. In the UK, lawyers and campaigners have called for hundreds immigration centers detainees to be released “because of fears they will contract coronavirus while locked up.”
The problem with such calls is that they all appear to present COVID-19 as a deadly plague slaughtering all in its path, rather than as something that afflicts the most seriously ill among the old and infirm. As is well known, the average age of Europe’s would-be migrants, particularly those from Syria, is somewhere around the late 20s. Given the known progression of COVID-19 in people in this age category, calls to permit mass influxes of masses of migrants purely because of the outbreak is tantamount to calling for open borders because potential immigrants might otherwise catch the common cold. Such calls are likely to ride the crest of a media-induced wave of panic, however, and the resolve of the West to resist further migrant flows will indeed be tested by twisted forms of moral blackmail in the weeks and months to come.
Life and Death under Liberalism
As stated in my review of Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), we live in a decaying society that is in terror of death, and pathologically so. This pathology is rooted in mistaken beliefs that our civilization is dying from, or could imminently die from, disease epidemics, climate catastrophes etc., in the midst of willful and ignorant abdication of a future (via self-hate and industrialized abortion) in favor of mass immigration, consumerism, and instant gratification. Just as one has to confront death in order to truly live (or to become “authentic” in Heidegger’s philosophy), our society is in constant flight from death and thus inevitably collapses into inauthentic decay. COVID-19, while not as lethal as media coverage would suggest, is a reminder of our mortality and human fragility and will necessarily have a jarring effect on a Western liberalism that’s become increasingly distant from the confrontation with death.
Life under liberal finance capitalism is largely one of illusion, in which the prospect of real death is pushed far into the distance, both psychologically and culturally. Postmodern Western liberal culture is largely one of perpetual adolescence, in which the primary virtues are acting according to one’s individual will, identifying oneself in a hyper-individualistic manner, and expressing these identities via conspicuous consumption and behavior. We do not “live towards” Death, with a sense of purpose and a feeling that we are part of a much grander civilizational trajectory. We do not understand that Death has shaped our historical path, and that it hangs over us in ways that should direct our actions in the present.
COVID-19, regardless of current confusion over its true mortality rate, is a corrective to illusions that “progressive” Man has overcome Nature and can shape the world according to the human image, and without consequences. Certainly throughout my own lifetime, I’ve grown accustomed to assertions that life expectancy will continue to increase, and that there will be an endless supply of innovations and social projects that will make the mechanics of life easier and more productive. One increasingly expects that one will live a long life, mostly in very good health. Such a sense of security can breed all kinds of arrogance and fantasies, including the recent perverse luxury of the delusion that one can simply decide to be this or that gender. This new virus, however, presents the possibility, both in itself and its inevitable heirs, that Death is much closer than we ever thought, and that for all our technological advancement and self-congratulation, Nature need only tweak one molecule, so small our naked eyes could never perceive it, and the grave opens before us. The Age of Fantasy is confronted with the ultimate reality.
How the West responds to this realization will be a further cultural challenge. We have grown equally accustomed to the idea that we have “advanced” morally as a society, and that we have overcome some of the more “brutish” aspects of human existence that we perceive in the past. But in a world of apparently increasing plenty, such notions can be hard to test. It’s always easy for a man with a full stomach to condemn the actions of the starving. The conceit of the full-bellied West that it has overcome and surpassed itself and its past will now be tested. I, of course, arise from a political and philosophical tradition that insists there is no shame in the past. I see little or no place for morality in the struggle for survival. And I also see the cracks already forming in the Western conceit. This society that is against “hate” and prides itself on “coming together” is already struggling to stop people rioting over toilet paper and bottled water. If civil order breaks down, will the proud feminists be seeking their own resources, or hoping for a strong man to protect them? If the death toll does rise dramatically, and if curfews and lockdowns are imposed and intensified, I ask: How well will your beloved multicultural societies respond? If resources become scarce and tensions rise, who will you trust? These tests are coming.
The whole issue and capacity of closing down borders, monitoring exit and entry is intriguing in demonstrating that human ecology management - border control - is possible.
Furthermore, the issue of viral contagion being immediately destructive, brings into awareness and discussion the hazard and potential long term destruction of introducing different species of people into a human ecology. It assists in cultivating benign rhetoric.
We might refer back to the issue of Typhoid Mary accusing the health department of NYC of discriminating against her because she was Irish.
No, dear, it’s not arbitrary discrimination and blind prejudice. It’s not because you are Irish. On the contrary, our human ecology and the nuances of its management cannot accommodate this introduction.
Amren’s Jared Taylor comes to a similar conclusion which he relates in this communique:
The Green New Deal resolution that was introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives in February hit a wall in the Senate, where it was called unrealistic and unaffordable. In a Washington Post article titled “The Green New Deal Sets Us Up for Failure. We Need a Better Approach,” former Colorado governor and Democratic presidential candidate John Hickenlooper framed the problem like this:
The resolution sets unachievable goals. We do not yet have the technology needed to reach “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions” in 10 years. That’s why many wind and solar companies don’t support it. There is no clean substitute for jet fuel. Electric vehicles are growing quickly, yet are still in their infancy. Manufacturing industries such as steel and chemicals, which account for almost as much carbon emissions as transportation, are even harder to decarbonize.
Amid this technological innovation, we need to ensure that energy is not only clean but also affordable. Millions of Americans struggle with “energy poverty.” Too often, low-income Americans must choose between paying for medicine and having their heat shut off. …
If climate change policy becomes synonymous in the U.S. psyche with higher utility bills, rising taxes and lost jobs, we will have missed our shot. …
The problem may be that a transition to 100% renewables is the wrong target. Reversing climate change need not mean emptying our pockets and tightening our belts. It is possible to sequester carbon and restore our collapsing ecosystem using the financial resources we already have, and doing it while at the same time improving the quality of our food, water, air and general health.
The Larger Problem – and the Solution – Is in the Soil
Contrary to popular belief, the biggest environmental polluters are not big fossil fuel companies. They are big agribusiness and factory farming, with six powerful food industry giants – Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Dean Foods, Dow AgroSciences, Tyson and Monsanto (now merged with Bayer) – playing a major role. Oil-dependent farming, industrial livestock operations, the clearing of carbon-storing fields and forests, the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and the combustion of fuel to process and distribute food are estimated to be responsible for as much as one-half of human-caused pollution. Climate change, while partly a consequence of the excessive relocation of carbon and other elements from the earth into the atmosphere, is more fundamentally just one symptom of overall ecosystem distress from centuries of over-tilling, over-grazing, over-burning, over-hunting, over-fishing and deforestation.
Poland – Krasiczyn Castle in southeast Poland, near the city of Przemyśl, hosted some 350 young Hungarians and Poles from 26-30 August for the second edition of a new annual event: the Polish-Hungarian School of Leaders,organised in the form of a summer university. The event is obviously of some importance in the eyes of Hungary and Poland’s current leaders,as in addition to the main instigator of this event, Marek Kuchciński, until recently speaker of the Sejm (replaced at the beginning of August after he was criticised for having family members fly with him many times on a government plane), two deputy parliamentary speakers took part in the first day of discussions: Ryszard Terlecki of the Polish Sejm and János Latorcai of the Hungarian National Assembly.
The main organiser of the event is the Wacław Felczak Institute of Polish–Hungarian Cooperation, a Polish institution established by an act of parliament of 8 February 2018, a year after the creation of its Hungarian sister organisation, the Wacław Felczak Foundation. Felczak was a researcher on Polish-Hungarian relations, who during the Second World War organised a secret courier service leading through Budapest between the Polish Home Army (AK) and the Polish government-in-exile based in London.
Relations between the two countries have been close and almost always friendly for centuries, with a long tradition of mutual support in difficult times. But since Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party (PiS) came to power in Poland in the autumn of 2015, and since Kaczyński and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán declared that Europe needed a cultural counter-revolution during their meeting at the 2016 Krynica Economic Forum, attacks from Brussels against both Central European capitals have prompted them to reinforce their cooperation and bolster their region’s integration in order to counterbalance a Franco-German duet whose dominance in the EU is bound to become even more oppressive for smaller countries after Brexit.
If relations between the two Central European countries are already so good, why then organise such summer universities? Professor Maciej Szymanowski, director of the Felczak Institute, explains: “We have just conducted an opinion survey which shows that nearly 90% of Hungarians want their country to have good relations with Poland, and well over 50% want those relations to become even closer. On the other hand, in particular among the younger generation, we can observe that awareness ofthe realities of contemporary Poland is declining. And I am afraid it is much the same thing the other way around. The goal of our summer university is precisely to raise awareness about Polish-Hungarian relations, mutual knowledge about Poland and Hungary, and about the challenges both countries are facing now and are going to face in the 21st century.”
So who are the young people invited to participate at the Polish-Hungarian school of leaders? They are “people who, in spite of their young age, are already active in their surroundings, in universities, in clubs, in local government and in their communities, in editorial teams, and so on,” Szymanowski says. “Many of these people will probably soon have to shoulder some responsibility for their country, for Poland or Hungary.”
The special relationship between Hungary and Poland has been central to the revival of regional cooperation since Law and Justice (PiS) won the Polish elections in 2015. Poland’s ruling party and Hungary’s Fidesz have much in common. As was stated in Krasiczyn during a discussion panel with Kuchciński, Terlecki and Latorcai, because they have preserved a sense of their identity deeply rooted in Christianity, 30 years after the fall of communism the nations of Central Europe are the ones which can divert Western Europe from its current self-annihilating course.
During a recent speech, Hungary’s nationalist-populist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán attacked the idea that replacement migration should be used to solve the demographic problems that many Western countries face.
Orbán’s speech was delivered at Budapest’s 3rd Demographic Summit that was held on the 5th and 6th of this month. During the speech, Orbán emphasized that the most important problem currently facing Europe is its population decline, Hungary’s 888 online newspaper reports.
“Why is this the case? It’s most certainly not because of some sickness of Christian civilization – after all, the number of Christians are rising all around the world. This is a sickness of Europe in general,” Orbán said.
For the Hungarian Prime Minister, immigration must never be regarded as a solution to demographic problems.
“We must never accept population exchange,” Orbán declared.
Orbán also noted that his government was currently working towards a strong policy which prioritizes the family and incentivizes having children.
Without families and children, the national community will disappear, he explained, “and if a nation disappears, something irreplaceable will disappear from the world,” reports Hungary Today.
According to Orbán, the future of a nation and people can only be secured if the nation’s families are guaranteed better financial opportunities to have children as opposed to not having children
“We win only if we can build a system where those who bear children live significantly better than if they hadn’t started a family,” Orbán continued.
This is the way by which the Hungarian government is pursuing its pro-family policy.
Orbán also criticized the “meaningless” so-called green argument that Europeans should stop having kids to save the earth, saying that this kind of talk should be completely dismissed.
Hungarian PM Viktor Orban - Photo Credits: MTI