Have we brewed a whirlwind?
Paul
Craig Roberts
Dear
friends, it is March and time for my quarterly call for your donations. I
am here for you as long as you want me. PCR
In the United States and throughout the
Western World there is public distrust of public authorities and distrust among
the public of one another. Public authorities who do not like
“conspiracy theories” do a lot to generate them.
We can see the public’s distrust of public
authorities in the negligent response to the coronavirus. The
refusal of public authorities to stop incoming flights from infected countries
has brought the dangerous virus into the Western World where inaction has so
far prevailed.
Many
virologists and other experts have criticized the inaction for seriously
endangering the public. I recently posted some of the expert
statements made to public health authorities. See:
The
refusals of public officials to take protective steps partly reside in
ideological positions. In
Europe it is the European Union’s commitment to open borders and one Europe. Closing
the borders goes against the ideology that nationalism is the problem.
In other
instances, Canada for example, the Prime Minister apparently considers it
“racist” to protect Canadians from incoming flights from Iran. See: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/03/02/we-cannot-protect-ourselves-because-travel-bans-are-racist/ .
The
public sees inaction, disbelieves the feeble reasons given, and takes action to
exhaust supplies of protective gear, storable foods, and everything else that
disappears in a panic.
As the
inaction of public authorities is not understandable, all sorts of explanations
arise. For
example: The Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institute for
Health (NIH) want the virus to spread, because the result will be bigger
budgets; the
pharmaceutical companies (Big-Pharma) want the virus to spread, because it will
bring them profits in mandatory vaccination whether it prevents or aids the
spread of the virus; governments
want the virus to spread, because it allows them to impose martial law and
abolish civil liberties; elites are using the virus to reduce the
world population; governments
are using the virus to reduce the strain of the elderly on health care systems
and save money. You
can add to this list on your own.
One consequence of distrust of public
authorities is lack of public cooperation in whatever response effort public
authorities eventually mount. Another consequence is that this lack of
public cooperation justifies more coercion by government in order to deal with
the threat. Remember
all of the violations of Constitutional protections made by the George W. Bush
and Obama regimes in responst to 9/11 and the “terrorist threat.” A big
difference is that then there was no pandemic.
Distrust
among the public of one another has been fomented by decades of feminist
attacks on men and by decades of attacks on white people as “racists.” These
attacks have been institutionalized in the educational system. They
have been useful to feminist and “racial minorities” for advancement. But
they have atomized the population. Where there was once community, no
matter how unequal, there is the lack of community.
The
“sexist” and “racist” offences are more taught than felt and are reaching the
point of absurdity. Every
day someone finds a slur in a word that has been part of the language for
centuries before the presence in the population of racial minorities. These
manufactured “offences” are used to excoriate men and to fire them from jobs
and deny them professional careers.
Guillaume Durocher points out that
community is also being destroyed by the decline in national community. The
core entities that produced national communities or countries are being flooded
out by incoming multitudes of immigrants from different cultures and value
systems. Many on the left show open contempt for nationhood and national
solidarity. Durocher
explains the collapse of national community here: https://www.unz.com/gdurocher/towards-expat-nationalism/
Now assaulting a fragmenting Western
World comes a pandemic whose consequences cannot be known. Is
there enough leadership to overcome the long-inflicted damages and to pull the
people together and to reestablish community? With the Democrats politically
weaponizing the coronavirus against President Trump, it does not seem so.