Many people in the West have been praising China for their response to the latest pandemic. Even if they haven’t explicitly called for Chinese-style lockdowns, the model for response has been Chinese – the general trend is to claim that stricter quarantines are more responsible than the alternatives. As some other commentators, including Slavoj Zizek, have noticed, this new crisis has legitimated strong centralised state control and the surrender of individual and sometimes national sovereignty. To him, this is an opportunity to push the message of communism.
This storm has been brewing for some time. While China may accurately be accused of covering up the disease and facilitating its spread, ignorance, denial and coverups of our own have propelled the West into a miasma of disease, not of a biological nature, but a spiritual one, which has crippled the moral immune system of the whole civilisation. By attempting to erase the awkward features of Western society resistant to the teleology of “progress”, Western authorities have mutilated their body politic to conform to their dysmorphic pathology. Like a chronic HIV patient, this final disease may fell it.
The narrative frame on coronavirus has been determined by China. From now on, all mainstream discourse on the virus will favour centralisation, state intervention, wealth redistribution, and elite-driven information control. What we are observing is the final passing of the hegemonic crown from West to East, a memetic viral coronation.
The Golden Year
In 1989, the most poetic moment in the history of humanity occurred. The Berlin Wall fell, and within little more than a breath, the greatest living conductor, Leonard Bernstein, gathered the most virtuosic Classical musicians from every civilised nation on earth, and held a concert. In this concert, they performed for the first time, Beethoven’s 9th symphony as it was meant to be heard, with a full orchestra, and adult- and children’s choirs. “Authorised by the spirit of the moment”, Bernstein changed the lyrics of Schilling’s great poem, Ode to Joy. Ordinarily, the staid and ossified world of Western Classical music would never dream of editing a masterpiece. But in this case, it could be no other way. Schiller’s Ode to Joy became an Ode to Freedom, and Beethoven, the most passionate revolutionary artistic genius the West has ever seen, saw his greatest dream realised. Every promise of French Revolutionary ideal had been realised, and German idealism had been completed. Fukuyama declared it, and everyone felt it – the world was free.
The people of Eastern Europe did not have to fight a war – they simply walked out onto the streets and watched their Communist masters give up the game. In this wave of love and brotherhood, wherein all hatred was dissolved and a cry of heart-shredding joy was heard around the world, a conservative politician in the neocolonial outpost of South Africa picked up the phone. It was Moscow – the Soviet Union would no longer be supporting the ANC. Within a month, this man removed every apartheid law, and set free all political prisoners, paving the way for the first truly democratic elections in the country, and the ascendance of Nelson Mandela to the Union Buildings.
To hear the rattling of the earth’s crust as the chorus cried Freiheit! is to hear the highest artistic achievement of the west usher in the promised utopia. No more tyranny! No more racism! The war that began against revolutionary nationalism in the Balkans in 1914 finally saw the defeat of both forms of modern revolutionary nationalism in Europe as Russian Communism collapsed, 45 years after German Socialism. The last holdout of colonial white supremacy had handed power to the natives on a silver platter. Nothing left but to welcome those out in the cold into the warm bosom of Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!
But it was not to be.
And if you look at this moment with cynicism, jaded by the hubris, chaos, degeneration and cruelty of the past 30 years, you fail to see its perfect, tragic beauty. If you can watch this masterpiece without weeping like a child, you may weep yet. Because the defeat of liberalism did not just defeat liberalism, it toppled its rubble over the buried the remnants of Christian civilisation. No celebration in the history of man has been so justified, and yet so thoroughly and utterly misguided. The liberal West was drunk on victory. And just like a drunk at the peak of the party, the sickness set in quickly. While none of this is news to anyone reading it, the litany of degradation is worth the ride.
Somalia proved an unprecedented failure as the best crack troops in the world were ambushed and picked off by illiterate peasants with 50 year old weapons. The Balkans descended into chaos and blood feuds, and the hope for unity melted into a cacophony of blood, metal and turbofolk under NATO bombs. The Europeans, as if to defy this prophecy, embarked on building their own Yugoslavia in Brussels, spreading the disease of centralised control and cultural homogenisation across the continent like a waterboard for Western civilisation. Russia’s economy fell into freefall as state assets were flogged like they were on fire. One man took half the ashes, and donned the crown worn by Ivan the Terrible and Joseph Stalin before him – the gangster king of reformative discipline.
Those great friends of freedom, the mujahideen, turned their guns on the Great Satan, and embassies burned, trade centres smouldered and collapsed. The liberties which had defined English civilisation since 1215 were snuffed out in an instant, as Orwellian mass surveillance, indefinite detention without trial and extraordinary rendition became standard practice in the free world. Britain abolished hereditary peerage, praised a fornicating narcissist over her jilted royal husband, and installed a semi-Trotskyist, semi-American judicial body to overrule parliamentary supremacy for the first time in centuries. Devolution forever sealed the fate of the Kingdom to ever looser unity, changing Scotland from a poor provincial nation into a belligerent overrepresented leech. Westminster surrendered to murderous gangsters in Northern Ireland, and America threw itself into one of the longest and most expensive conflicts in living memory, paving the way for the birth of ISIS and the eventual humiliating retreat from Kabul that all empires eventually face. Countless artefacts and artworks were wiped from the face of the earth as neocon foot soldiers, looters, vandals and Islamist barbarians tore apart the cradle of civilisation.
Mass immigration was introduced to seal the permanent decline of Western conservatism by offering handouts to the wretched of the earth in exchange for participating in the great permanent slow-motion revolution to undo the shackles of history by voting Left. Borders were as past-tense as Bantustans; what does nationalism even mean, maaan? No matter what resulted from these changes, the Western elite soldiered on, doubling down at every turn, to affirm their own beliefs in the promise of 1989. Education taught Western children to hate their inheritance, abandon their religion, their identity and their self-esteem, and descended into ever more wild spirals of libertine intoxication, as every sexual taboo was lifted, and the open flaunting of the sexualisation of children became no more sensational than blasphemy against Christianity, which is now not so much tolerated as mandated.
The ecstatic moment of fulfillment spanning the cusp of the final decade of the last millennium, gave way to a lazy decade of stupor in a postcoital glow. But rising up to couple with the rest of the world proved less than satisfactory, and saw rebuff lead to rape, and remorse lead to self-destruction. As the wokeness festering in the wet markets of academy broke loose upon managerial-class society in the last decade, its fruits have been born as a fragile vulnerability to hostile outsiders, and China and its useful idiots abroad have weaponised accusations of racism to defend and eliminate criticism of Chinese malice and incompetence.
And the Communist Party has been watching, popcorn butter dripping from its dimpled chin.
A Crown of Stainless Steel
China had its own 1989 moment, the precise counterpoint to Russia’s gasp for air. As thousands of students marched into Tiananmen Square to demand what Europe did, Deng Xiaoping ordered them put to death. The streets ran with blood and human viscera mixed with the tattered remnants of liberal placards and shattered statuettes of Liberty. China is a vast factory of human suffering, oppression and misery, with growing pockets of the upwardly mobile happy to ignore the possibility that joining the wrong exercise fad could get you butchered in a secret prison to feed the black market in medical tourism. The vast totalitarian architecture which became ever-more refined and consolidated since the brief rupture 30 years ago, has begun to project itself outwards, consolidating narrative hegemony over the discourse surrounding the new pandemic, to the point that even the New York Times has climbed on the bandwagon.
China’s was the single worst reaction to a medical pandemic in history – they pretended it wasn’t happening until it was too late, and then kidnapped and killed anyone who said it was. But it hardly matters to them; official records of casualties were kept low by labeling the cause of death as “viral pneumonia”. This repeated the response to MERS and SARS before it. Once it was too severe to ignore, they just cremated the excess bodies to keep the numbers down, and imprisoned millions of people in their homes by welding their doors shut with aluminium bars. Anyone who breached protocol was disappeared to be cannibalised into medical surplus.
China, despite having caused this very problem due to their atrocious lack of hygeine standards (breeding the perfect virus in an environment which included keeping live animal cages above fresh butchered meat, and never washing their hands), was praised for their swift response, because we wouldn’t want to be racist, now would we? It is easy to forget how well Vietnam, Korea, Japan and Taiwan reacted, because their response lacked the drama of a state crackdown, though their responses were more effective. Taiwan (a Chinese people) was among the first outside China to see the infection. They receive among the highest rate of Chinese overseas travel, and yet their response was so swift that their rate of infection is as low as some of the most recent hosts to the Wuhan Fairy.
The Communist-led WHO and the pro-Chinese commentators therein have pushed for an uncritical stance towards the peculiar nature of the outbreak. Google has covered up China-negative search results – a quick search for terms like “manipulation” “crematoria” or “hidden deaths” gets very little unless you use Bing or DuckDuckGo. This is not an explicit plan, but it is the result of one – the recent practice of prioritising “authoritative” sources of news in Google search results, ostensibly as a means to counteract “disinformation”. In practice, a means to solidify the dominance of left and centre-left publications over alternatives, and dampening criticism of favoured political candidates. The fight against “radicalisation” has empowered faceless corporate drones to audit the stream of information on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, though the true extent of this effect may only be discovered once the current hostile takeover of Twitter is concluded. That said, Sundar Pichai has been perfectly happy to aid China in constructing surveillance and control software, but refuses “on principle” to assist the US intelligence services.
This is happening against the backdrop of a global pivot away from the United States and European Union. Serbia has sworn fealty to the Chinese emperor. South Africa is pursuing military cooperation and taking loans from China. The whole of “based” Eastern Europe has too – buying into the Belt-and-Road initiative like old-fashioned African kleptocrats. Even the Pope is perfectly comfortable helping China to make the church friendlier to CCP interests, and has found time to praise the communist response to the virus. Meanwhile, we have twiddled our thumbs and chuckled, eyes glued to the big red bastard, while we should have been focusing on their more competent neighbours.
The result has been a narrative ecosystem in which the winners will be those who called for the more drastic response. And China knows how to capitalise on that.
Competing for Bronze
It is known to those who read the Classics that plagues are a punishment for weakness in leadership. Listening to dissident rightists praise Trump is extremely cringe-inducing. Completing German Idealism? Don’t make me laugh. Africa has completed German Idealism; the new black nationalist ideology of Fallism is a veritable cocktail of Hegelians: Fanon and Biko, Marx, Mao and an obscured shadow of Marcuse. The Enlightenment-era ideals of the modern world only exist as zombies, plagues of oikophobic antinomianism, third-world ethno-nationalism or skin-masks to be worn by the nihilistic, totalitarian pragmatists of the East. Progress is consensus, and the conservatives in the West cheer themselves for winning a temporary compromise against it.
In the long twilight of Western civilisation, mourned only by the outcasts, the permanent foragers of dark corners, the young right wingers believe that they have seen their Napoleon, whether in the form of Trump or another buffoonish figure, because these men have been bold enough to childishly stick their tongues out at liberal orthodoxy. But it is only empty rhetoric. Trump has engaged in no significant institutional reform whatsoever, and Boris and Cummings have no capacity to perceive the necessity of moral order, and so their superficial refurbishments will fall under the wheels of progress as the woke school curriculum digs self-hatred and depravity ever deeper into the psyche of the British consciousness, until a future Left coalition torches the whole facade in an orgy of redistribution and punitive ideological conformity (Boris can at least be said to have a grip on how to handle the EU, but that is where my praise ends).
The economic policies of Trump and Johnson are further to the left than any of their predecessors, and by attempting to outflank their opponents in terms of defences of LGBT acceptance, internationalist liberalism and welfare profligacy, they have cemented a more radical version of Blairism into the national political architecture. Call it accidental containment. While the right looks to them for validation, they fail to realise that these regimes are both the last hope they have, and the worst champions they have had yet. It is weakness and desperation in the face of ever more consolidation of left-wing progressive hegemony.
Defences of Boris Johnson from the right are a colossal farce. Both of these men are more to the left that their predecessors except in one respect – they pretend not to be. For all the neoreactionary talk about the leftward arc of history, they don’t seem to remember the details of their own sources. Curtis Yarvin wrote that the right wing does no more than press pause on progress, and that progressives howl with outrage at this, moving the overton window to the left every electoral cycle. How true.
Clumsy, boorish “trigger the libs” rhetoric aside, Trump’s policies are rather mundane and unambitious, with one or two exceptions (cutting funding for abortion-friendly organisations, demanding quality federal architecture). His campaign made the modest proposal that the borders were good, and we ought to shore them up. The wall is a comical idea, but it has its uses in areas where smugglers can escape police by stepping across an invisible line. His immigration control is otherwise identical to Obama’s. But when it is done by a conservative, it has a different flavour, and suddenly becomes unpalatable, leading to howls of declamation and comparisons with Auschwitz. What was centre-left policy in Germany ten years ago is now only the policy of a party derided as neo-Nazis. No longer having the stomach for the stern necessities of border security, the left has demanded an end to border control in totalis. The very idea that Britain have any restriction on immigration was greeted as if it were the emerging creed of a new Hitler, and agitprop theatre now represents the lives of British Muslims as if they are mere minutes from Kristallnacht.
Equality, victimhood and the libertinism are now concepts of moral consensus. Nobody among the lettered classes believes the state has any right to impinge on your right to self-mutilation, self-intoxication or self-degradation, but they certainly have the right to intervene to “make society more fair”. The right wing cry victim, playing catch-up with the moral discourse of the left, in which conflicts are resolved by cutting down tall poppies. Bloody corporations! Bloody billionaires! Everybody now agrees that a little wealth distribution is a good thing. Hell, the very idea of tightening the state budget even in times of crisis has been branded anathema to humanity – the dread name of austerity serving as a ratchet toward ever greater expenditure.
And as the ordinary people outside the Left grow ever more dissatisfied with the erosion of their societies (from which they are pleasantly distracted by public health bulletins for the time being), the elite grow ever more afraid, and thus ever more attracted to authoritarian narratives and norms. They, after all, know best what to do. And this is the perfect opportunity to show them.
Winning A Pewter Trophy
The West, by moving after China, with its endless capacity to spin news in its favour, has fallen victim to a dichotomous discursive frame. In times of crisis, intelligence- or competence-signalling wins over virtue signalling, except where the two overlap. On every turn in the road to post-viral normalcy, the comparison will be to the dramatic, steely decisiveness of the Chinese. As a consequence, defences of more measured policies (or more indecisive ones) have fallen flat.
Britain has failed to grit its teeth through the “herd immunity” theory it claimed to espouse. The Dutch, who mimicked this approach only to ratchet up quarantine measures anyway, have shown themselves to be utterly directionless. Trump has fully exposed his blasé incompetence in such an unambiguous way that even his own supporters cannot defend him. The failure of any of these right-wing leaders to declare or assert any sort of positive vision for society, any sort of new moral authority, has consolidated the left, not defeated it. And the half-hearted response to the current pandemic is severely harming the only thing they could promise which distinguished them from the opposition – the ethos of getting shit done, otherwise known as intelligence-signalling, over empty virtue-signalling.
While responsible hygiene standards can be created through little more than encouraging a proportionate concern, quarantine is an appealing solution in communities of low social trust. America is case in point – the blasé attitude of its youth to the infection can be seen in the vox-pops collected at spring break – they just want to have fun and don’t care about the consequences. This is the spirit of the 60s, etched into the soul of its grandchildren. The modern West, as it has institutionalised anti-authoritarianism, anti-traditionalism, anti-nativism and encouraged mass immigration and ethnolinguistic diversity, has seen a precipitous fall in social trust and prosocial behaviour. In the antinomian swamps of progressive America, typhus, tuberculosis, AIDS and bubonic plague fester and pulsate through the vagrant undergrowth of a decaying society. The response, government-sponsored housing, cements welfarism as a universal categorical imperative.
In public policy circles, a crisis or a time of dramatic events is seen as a “policy macrowindow”, in which previously challenged reforms can be pushed through, and authority redefined and asserted. For half a decade now, the establishment has been pushing for a narrowing of authority in which no alternative sources of information are to be trusted – the war on “disinformation” or “fake news”. From a science perspective, this is absolutely necessary, and scientists (the great unquestionable wizards of our time), unless they have experience of marginalisation for heterodox views, will zealously defend this narrative. The small media oligarchy at the top parrots the official position, either of the state or the UN, and if the UN is more progressive and state-centric, the government is criticised for failing to mimic this supposed authority. The pandemic is sealing in this system of authority – do what you are told, and you will be saved. Unless it’s a conservative saying so.
Italy and France are case-in-point – while the sensible option is to perform temporary area quarantines, test people, and segregate the infected, total quarantine with house curfew is being proposed as the “logical” next step – an imitation of China. This serves two functions. Firstly, to solidify the authority of the liberal authorities over critical and dissident forces. It is no coincidence that it is these centrist-led countries facing massive crises of legitimacy where the authoritarian response is most popular. In Italy, Matteo Salvini has been precipitously gaining ground over the establishment. France is apparently hoping to solidify Macron’s self-image as a responsible high authority disciplining the belligerent and stupid people who won’t get with the times. Those gilets jaunes cannot simply be pacified with lollipops.
Secondly, it is to justify an expansion of the state’s role as caretaker. The centre and the left have lept on this narrative crowbar to call for a massive increase in wealth redistribution and state control of “disinformation”, all of which drags us further down the slope of the Sarlacc pit. In typical fashion, theirs is framed as a modest proposal, “that we treat people as human beings”. They have established their standard for human nature so thoroughly, that the alternative proposals to treat human beings as anything but weak and blameless children in need of a fresh teat are represented as frightening and radical.
Ironically, while some lefties gesticulate towards Camus, who called for a popular, nongovernmental response based on respect for sensible norms, voluntarism and cooperation instead of the wild, aggressive pneumatic grip of state security, they nevertheless prefer firmer responses to ones that rely on spontaneous order through propaganda-driven voluntary civic discipline, individual leadership-by-example and public cooperation. But to the left, the state is the community, so long as they are the state.
Much of this is inevitable. Studying society at university is there to prepare one for work in major corporations or state bureaucracy. And since the former is deemed immoral under progressive orthodoxy, the aspiration is overwhelmingly towards the latter. Politics also tends to focus attention on state agency, and consequently, almost all thinking is focused on what the government can do to fix the problem, and the answer to such a question is never in favour of minimum necessary intervention. And nowhere has the government more power to settle affairs to their satisfaction than in China.
Putting the Rat back into Rationalism
It is known to Christians that plague is a punishment for a sinful society. The West is a synthesis of this warning and the Classic Greek caution about foolish leadership, which should make us, the most sinful and headless of societies, victims of eternal plague. Westerners have no idea what a revolution looks like, because they have lived in a slow-boiling pot for a century. In South Africa, we watched a transition from the West of the 1950s to the West of the 2000s in under a decade, as our political system was eclipsed by a combination of Marxism, liberal nihilism and black nationalism. Every young South African can speak to an older generation which remembers a world utterly dominated by the ethics and eschatology of Christianity, where abortion was not just illegal, but unspeakable. Premarital sex was a sin, blasphemy was never tolerated, and rock and roll was edgy enough to be banned.
Now nothing is taboo. We watch the total dissolution of all sexual morality, the disappearance of lawful conduct, and the hopeless inevitable slide into a post-civilisational abyss where running water and electricity threaten to become a memory, and marauding gangs press local businesses into protection rackets. Children and young adults learn that white people never achieved anything but theft, rape and forgery, all their heritage is evil and must be erased or condemned, and racial discrimination against minorities pervades every institution in the land while equality is trumpeted from the ramparts.
In South Africa, where the AIDS infection rate is higher than almost anywhere else in the world, those who failed to observe Christian virtue, or even the modern liberal compromise of condoms and monogamy, will be vulnerable to a scourge that will eclipse our already prolific blight of tuberculosis. The hybrid sexual norms of a polygamous society under rapidly-urbanised liberal modernity mean a reluctance to practice abstinence, chastity, consent or monogamy in any form. AIDS in southern Africa is largely the result of polygamous-patriarchal norms – promiscuity, multiple partners, and right-to-sex (rape). And most hiv+ people I have met are proud to boast they have sex without condoms.
What a viral epidemic might look like in conditions of immunocompromised shack-dwellers amid an already-overrun medical system is impossible to calculate. Though one can easily imagine some minority celebration, picturing a new Black Death, cutting away the figures of the unemployed, and restructuring society through a massive, nature-driven purge. Realistically, it will result in further seizures of power by the state, as they embark on the new project of nationalisation, the narrative continually dictated from the EFF, as the ANC plays catch-up with their junior firebrand “opposition”.
When South Africa is visited by this new plague, two things can be predicted categorically. First, the state will try to copy China. Second, they will fail. We have millions living in cramped and unhygienic conditions, who simply cannot be individually quarantined. We have massive wealth inequality, which will lead to hoarding and arbitrage. Market collapse will result in food shortages – our staple crop, white maize, relies on harvests which are insured as whole regions; shortage in the availability of capital may prove deadly, and I cannot imagine the state subsidising white farmers under any circumstances. We have broken port infrastructure, which means foreign supplies will not arrive in time without a dramatic foreign-assisted airlift (who might come to our aid, I wonder? And how shall we repay them?). We have no competent security infrastructure capable of controlling the people, but plenty of experience in terrorising them. The shock that a series of dramatic, opportunistic reforms (like the proposed seizure of the medical sector) may pose in this context are hard to gauge, but may well tear the country apart. What a conflagration in my country will entail for global narratives, shaped as it will necessarily be, along racial lines, can only be left to darkest speculation.
The Silver Bullet
A pandemic is a punishment to the West and to Africa because we still value human life. But in China, human life is mere currency. If the currency is defaced, it must be liquidated and pulped to patch up notes still in circulation. As their narrative of strong and uncompromising leadership takes hold, the West is left floundering in all public fora, and African leaders, in their fine tradition, start to enviously eye the weapons of the powerful. Coronavirus thus marks the passing of Western dominance in the world to a new hegemon, one with no morality or consideration for human life.
But this loss highlights the nature of our failure. Those who save and exhibit frugality, and those who have raised respectful youth, those who practice good hygiene and exercise, those who abstain from drugs, drink and smoke, those who practice monogamy, will be safer from this disease. Lasting out a quarantine will require planning and aforethought. As the economic impact becomes more visible, those with harder and more reliable assets will survive, and those printing money to maintain welfare systems will hit a wall. Countries with the unwieldy hangover debt left over from 2008 will sink wild-eyed into the sea, and the Euro will be under greater-than-ever strain, as the inability of southern Europe to adjust their monetary policy incentivises a split with Brussels.
Comically, the cure is something so incredibly simple it can be found at the local drug store for pennies – quinine. But that will certainly open itself to wild market speculation and rise beyond the reach of the ordinary man in a low-income country once its usefulness becomes widespread and officially recognised fact. Getting hold of toilet paper will be nothing on the rush on tonic water. Sip your G&T while you can.
PS – I was completely wrong about hydroxychloroquine. Who could have foreseen that the Trump derangement syndrome was so advanced that a 10c antiviral medication with decades of established effectiveness against a broad range of viruses, and coronaviruses in particular, could be treated as snake oil by every global news publication? Thankfully, it has consistently been generally referred to as hydroxychloroquine, and saved us from a stampede on the supermarket’s supplies of tonic water.
As for South Africa, I could have never foreseen the stupidity of the current reaction. Thankfully, whatever nightmare awaits us as the economy crashes will take several months to break on our shores.
The Eccentric Flock 