Pride goes before destruction, or so an old biblical proverb goes.
Covid-19 is starting to look like United States Chernobyl. Chernobyl was the nuclear power plant that exploded in the Soviet Union. Such a display of incompetence by the Russia political elite and revisionists in power that the mass of people lost complete trust in the Communist Party, the Soviet Union and Socialism.
Gorbachev, who would be the most reviled leader in Russia were it not for Yeltsin, was later to remark of Chernobyl “even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later.”
Upon the outbreak in China, which is a country of 1.4 billion people who live in closer proximity to each other than the average American, China went to war against the virus. This war included mass testing, mass isolation, lockdowns of millions of people, quarantines.
“Lockdowns, bans on gatherings, basic quarantines, testing, hand-washing, this is not enough,” Huiyao Wang, a senior adviser to China’s government, told USA TODAY in a phone interview from Beijing. “You need to isolate people on an enormous scale, in stadiums, big exhibition halls, wherever you can. It seems extreme. It works.
” ‘No one left behind’ was the slogan in Wuhan,” he said. “No one.”(USA Today,This is what China did to beat coronavirus. Experts say America couldn’t handle it, April 1 2020)
When Covid-19 first hit China a slew of Western publications cheered gleefully for this being “Chinas Chernobyl” a lot of us in the West with an ounce of humanity cringed at the opportunistic vultures like the Diplomat, The Guardian, Forbes and CNBC.
Yet when the virus steam rolled Italy and it was apparent that what was happening in China was “coming West”.
The sheer incompetence combined with the lack of universal healthcare has seen the United States now become the epicentre of the pandemic.
As Trump calls for people to “get back to work” alongside the billionaires calling for people to get back to work the American people can see the dimensions of class warfare at work.
The former CEO of Wells Fargo summed it up best:
“We’ll gradually bring those people back and see what happens. Some of them will get sick, some may even die, I don’t know.”(Newsweek, Ex-Wells Fargo CEO Says People Should Return to Work If Coronavirus Is Under Control: ‘Some May Even Die, I Don’t Know’, March 3 2020)