While the pandemic has brought some people together to confront a common foe, it has also exposed many divisions, and created others.
My own perspective on many things -- especially on questions of how social and political change does and doesn't happen, how communication does and doesn't happen; on how divisions in society may be understood, and how common ground can be found -- has been an evolving one.
It seems very useful to go back twenty years, before addressing the present day. I could go back further, but in terms of my own lived experience with these sorts of things, there's only 2001.
By "these things," I mean events so earth-shatteringly impactful that they change everything, and cause huge numbers of people in society to question all their assumptions and start over again.
There are many events in many societies that fit this description. They may be events that are local, geographically, or local to a particular segment of society. For example, for Chileans, the coup in Chile in 1973 was such an event. Not so much the case outside of Chile.
The spate of assassinations of prominent political figures in the 1960's in the US (the Kennedy brothers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Fred Hampton and many others) brought on a whole lot of questioning throughout society. This was all mostly before I was born, but at the same time, my childhood took place in the shadow of these assassinations.
I was born in 1967, so I pretty much wasn't paying attention to much of what was going on in the world around me until the 1980's. But certainly from the 1980's until 2019, although a lot happened during those years to make one wonder about a lot of things, there was one event that was a "before and after" event for pretty much all of US society during that time, and it occurred on September 11th, 2001.
Certain aspects of what took place at that time seem particularly relevant in the context of the current pandemic.
I don't know if it seems strange for younger people today to consider, but prior to 9/11, a huge percentage of US society had no idea where either Afghanistan or Iraq were. This was despite the fact that the CIA had spent decades working with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to violently overthrow the government there, despite the fact that Bill Clinton had bombed Afghanistan only a few years earlier, despite the fact that the US had bombed Iraq into the Stone Age ten years earlier, despite the fact that UN sanctions against Iraq had killed half a million Iraqi children, according to a UNICEF report released not long before. The memories of Americans are short and selective, an amnesiac normality aided and abetted by a very corporate-controlled political system and media landscape.
I was involved with the movement to lift the sanctions on Iraq, and one of those people protesting the various aforementioned invasions and bombings in the 1990's, and I was a regular consumer of a wide variety of mainstream and alternative news sources throughout the decade. I was involved with the global justice movement, whose focus was on economic policies of the IMF and the World Bank, and economic inequalities generally. And the environmental movement, with its focus on saving the last of the giant trees and opposing fossil fuel projects of various kinds. Iraq, Afghanistan, and US militarism in general were barely on the radar of these movements, and even less on the radar for most of society.
When the attacks occurred, skyscrapers were burning and collapsing, and thousands of people in the US were dying on a single dramatic day like that, a whole lot of people were suddenly spending all their waking hours trying to make sense of what seemed to them to be their newfound reality.
This took many forms, but basically involved everybody asking the most basic types of questions. Suddenly everyone was a political pundit with an opinion on international affairs, US foreign policy, and the role of religion in society (just like all our friends and neighbors today are amateur epidemiologists). From whatever vantage point they started with, everyone was wondering the same kinds of things. What just happened? Why did it happen? Who did it? Who facilitated it? Who is trying to use the event as an opportunity to further their political agendas, or to derail other agendas?
By my observation, the kinds of questions people asked and the conclusions they came to depended a lot on where they were at politically prior to 9/11. For some people -- like especially for those already in the evangelical Christian orbit, or involved with Republican Party politics, 9/11 was proof of the evils of Islam, and folks signed up for military service right away, ready to fight the dirty jihadis. For others, such as those with a background in the peace movement, this was the chickens of US foreign policy coming home to roost, and one more reason to end US imperialism -- to save the lives of New Yorkers, along with Iraqis and Afghans and so many others.
But for the many people not involved with or at least thinking actively about US foreign policy and Middle Eastern geopolitics, as well as for those who were, there were still a wide variety of other factors to consider and conclusions to draw.
Many people asked the most fundamental of questions: did this really happen? That is, can I believe the basic facts being presented? Is it true that planes were hijacked by members of a terrorist organization called Al-Qaeda, who then flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, in the process killing thousands of people and destroying two skyscrapers, plus a third building in lower Manhattan as well?
For those of us who knew the recent history of the CIA training the Mujahideen along with the Pakistani secret police, the billions of dollars a year that went into that effort for such a long time, and the kinds of terrorist organizations the CIA and the ISI were funding and otherwise maintaining, and of course for those who were aware of Al-Qaeda's less successful effort at taking down one of those buildings in 1993, the idea of what had just happened, while shocking, was not altogether off the radar of possibility.
But it sure was off the radar for a lot of folks. And either way, people who wondered whether government officials and media collaborators were somehow making up this whole story had a lot of reason to be suspicious. Twenty years ago, there were a lot more people older than me around, and loads of still middle-aged folks who had vivid memories of the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964. For those not aware, this was the entirely manufactured confrontation off the coast of Vietnam which was the justification for the US to declare war on the government of Vietnam, ultimately leading to the deaths of millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians, and tens of thousands of American soldiers.
Regardless of anyone's conclusions around the direct or indirect knowledge or involvement in 9/11 by US or other state actors, it was abundantly obvious to most anyone with any background on the left of things that the forces of empire in the US had every intention of using this cataclysmic event as an opportunity to further their imperial goals, such as those seen as left unfinished by then-President George Bush's father, the first President Bush, who had bombed Iraq before his son did, and before Bill Clinton did.
A very large number of people in US society, and around the world, were actively opposed to the invasions, the chemical warfare, the prison torture, the hooded extraditions. At the same time, the ranks of those opposed to US imperialism were composed of all sorts of different people, and it would be fair to say that one of the main fault lines, one of the biggest issues creating a toxic fissure within the movement, was the question of believing or not believe what had become known as "the official narrative" of 9/11. This meant different things to different people, but to many it was a question of whether 9/11 was "an inside job" or not. (And the answer in terms of where one falls on this question partly has to do with how we define the term "inside job," thus the quotes.)
And wherever anyone's beliefs fell on the spectrum of possibilities in terms of who knew what and who did what, the fears that many people had about the future tended to revolve around the same things:
Would the empire-builders dominant in both ruling parties in the years immediately following 9/11 now have their way, militarily occupy Muslim countries, and set off a cycle of war and terrorist attacks and refugee crises around the world like never seen before? Would millions of innocent people, especially in Muslim countries, now be paying the price for the actions of these 19 men (or whoever was responsible for the planings on that day)? Would the military-industrial complex in the US now expand and become even bigger and more hegemonic? Would the rights of people within the US and around the world be even more threatened by growing surveillance states, on the basis of protecting the public from terrorist attacks? Would some semblance of democracy survive all of this?
Having been previously involved with many different aspects of the American left prior to 9/11 I can say with great confidence that much of the movement against war and militarism and the police state that sprang up in the weeks and months following 9/11 was not composed of people who had been recently involved with the left. As with most social movements, so many of the participants of this one had never been to a protest before. Others had, but not since the Sixties.
From my personal involvement with this new (at that time) movement, it was made up of people who had voted for both major parties, and many who had never voted at all. It included a lot of people who had no involvement with activism of any kind, but suddenly felt compelled by events to get involved, because they felt it mattered so much now. And it also involved no small number of people who already had a left orientation. Especially folks who were already long ago convinced that the CIA had a role in the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, and that the US military fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Fast forward to the present period, beginning in March, 2020, and for the first time since 9/11, so many of the same dynamics have been repeating. The difference now has been that it's all wider, deeper, and completely global.
First with the discovery of the virus, and then with the first bouts of lockdowns and contact tracing efforts, later with the advent of the vaccines, then with the various vaccine mandates and vaccine passes of one sort or another, and yet again with everything changing all of a sudden as a result of the Delta variant and now Omicron, each new dramatic development has given rise to equally dramatic responses among certain sectors of society, pretty much around the world.
From my vantage point, the reactions some people have had at the various stages of pandemic developments thus far have varied a lot depending on the country people are from. I speak as one who tours mainly in a dozen or so countries, so I have a lot of familiarity with people in a number of places, though far from everywhere. Where there is widespread trust in the government, particularly in the public health sector, such as in Denmark, there seemed to be a widespread uniformity in the response of the vast majority to the temporary vaccine pass system that was implemented there, and other such restrictions, some of which have since been lifted, since they worked.
In the US, Germany, France, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium and other countries, there has been much more discontent. While it is clear in all these cases that the rightwing politicians and rightwing media are a big part of fostering sentiment against vaccines and vaccine mandates, it's also clear that the reason such sentiments are stronger in certain countries than they are in others has a lot to do with how much distrust in government there is in a society.
And the distrust is well-earned. Memories are short, but not so short that everyone has forgotten the deceptive way the US, UK and others were taken to war in Iraq in both 1991 and 2003, with the lies about the plugs being pulled on the incubators in Kuwait, and the many more lies in preparation for the next round of bombing and subsequent occupation, about the weapons of mass destruction that never existed. General Colin Powell lied 31 times in a row at the UN, if I recall.
Those who were consuming the media of the day will recall that both the pro-Democrat and pro-Republican press -- that is, the entirety of the corporate and "public" media -- were fawning over themselves in patriotic worship of the president and his visionary leadership in the face of the terrorist threat. And now that a pandemic threatened the health of everyone, should the same people be condemned for distrusting the same media and the same politicians who spent so much of the recent past lying to them? Obviously, it doesn't work that way for many people, and they can't make that disconnect.
The more scientifically-oriented among us might wish those who don't believe in getting vaccinated or wearing masks, etc., who distrust the US or the British authorities' advice might take the same advice coming from pretty much every other public health department from every country, state, county, city, or other such entity around the planet, from Cameroon to Cuba to Canada to Cambodia.
But even if people accept the idea of getting vaccinated and such, it may indeed be another matter entirely to expect people to have faith in their respective governments that the amount of information involved with things like contact tracing is something they want to entrust to their local secret police.
A lot of people in the world have both recent and very negative memories of times when the authorities were so interested in the details of peoples' lives and movements. It should be no surprise at all that vaccine hesitancy is highest in some of the most disenfranchised parts of many societies -- not necessarily because of a lack of access, in the particular instance of Covid-19, but because of a distrust of the authorities born out of history, whether we're talking about Black folks in Alabama or former subjects of the Stasi in eastern Germany or people on the streets of occupied West Belfast.
The ranks of those who are more concerned about a looming police state than they are concerned about the pandemic includes a lot of folks who have no background on the right, by my abundant direct observation in multiple countries. (And before going on tour and seeing so many people in the real world, it was already clear from lots of online interactions that this was the case.)
Unfortunately, just as real as the diversity within the ranks of those who we may describe as vaccine hesitant, or lockdown hesitant, or mandate hesitant, are those many people among the ranks of my fellow leftists who seem to spend much of their waking hours condemning this lot as fascists.
Hearing the anti-lockdown activists on the streets of London and Brussels talk about freedom, and use provocative terms like "vaccine apartheid" and "vaccine fascism," while spreading the idea that maybe the vaccine is worse than the virus, it's easy to get angry and denunciatory, but it's also worse than useless.
Not only do the denunciations not change hearts or minds, they help solidify what is either a nascent or real relationship between belief in a growing variety of conspiracies and association with the political right, and they sever potential connections between the left and these people with legitimate concerns when it comes to the balance between rights and obligations -- concerns that have also been drummed into them at school and through a myriad of other ways their entire lives, in places like North America and Europe.
I'm not suggesting that the arguments of the anti-mandate crowd are correct, or that the rights of the individual trump our collective obligations to society. But I am suggesting that when we're talking to, talking about, writing to, or writing about the anti-mandate crowd, we can stop calling them fascists, or inferring that most of them are members of the far right. Because a whole lot of the time, it's pretty evident they're not.
You could shout, "misguided libertarian!", but it doesn't have the same ring to it. Maybe just not shouting would be better.
I'm one of many anti-vax leftists.
ReplyDelete