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| Image: New Scientist |
The
COVID-19 pandemic is a common threat to all humankind. Much has been said about
the need to put politics aside to unite against it. If only. For in this world
of our making, COVID-19 is extremely political and is becoming the gateway for
something far deadlier.
The
pandemic was not unpredictable. Warnings and precedents have been there for
years. It has only done its damage because of the political and cultural
failure of all countries to build and protect strong public healthcare systems;
to prepare even when they knew COVID-19 was coming; to tell the truth about it;
to mount an informed and effective response; to cooperate with one another against
a challenge to them all; and most fundamentally, to value real people, with real
lives, over abstract totems like “the nation” and “the economy”.
But the
problem goes beyond failing at a pandemic. The problem is one of power. It is
of how human societies, for years, even decades, have been handing their power
to those who could not care less about human death and suffering; and that
these Trolls, as we might call them, are finding in this virus a springboard to
launch their abuse of humankind to unstoppable heights.
The
Trolls take many forms. Authoritarians, nationalists, gender-policers, and the
cultists of the market all stand among them. There are many well-trod roads to
Trolldom, often from opposing directions, but two characteristics bring them
together:
a) The belief that life should serve power,
rather than power serve life;b) The subordination of all things, even truth itself, to the pursuit of that power.
The
sum of the Trolls’ threat far exceeds, and will long outlast, that of COVID-19.
This is not to trivialise the death and agony the virus wreaks as we speak. But
COVID-19 will pass, as even the deadliest pandemics in history did. By
then it will have killed hundreds of thousands of people. The Trolls, for their part, killed hundreds of millions
in the twentieth century alone. They will do so again if we allow them to claim
the twenty-first. And by that point they will have compromised our response to
the challenges of climate change, making their threat, unlike the virus’s,
existential.
