The peril and the promise of the pandemic

COVID-19 has fed the right-wing and nationalism espousing the politics of paranoia, stoking fear against foreigners. There has been well documented outbreaks of xenophobia. It may be a symptom of the pandemic which may well endure as the virus dissipates.

Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán declared “There is a logical connection between the two [migration and coronavirus] as both spread with movement.” While Trump  plays the same blame game calling the disease the “Chinese virus” 

But Trump’s been here before. On the campaign trail in 2015, he was asserting that “ tremendous infectious disease is pouring across the border” because of migrants crossing the Mexican border.

 Right-wing protesters, including militia members brandishing firearms, have begun taking to the streets to urge the end of the stay-at-home restrictions.

In Brazil, right populist Jair Bolsonaro has painted himself as a protector of the poor. “We cannot harm the neediest – they have no way of staying at home for very long without going out to seek their sustenance.” In India, Hindu nationalists have been touting cow urine as a cure for Covid-19 and accusing Muslims of spreading COVID-19 through their mosques.

Indian author and political commentator, Arundhati Roy, is one of many who recognises both the peril and the promise of the moment. 

"I think what has happened is COVID-19 has exposed things about India that all of us knew," Roy said. "We are suffering, not just from COVID, but from a crisis of hatred, from a crisis of hunger." She accused the Indian government of exploiting the coronavirus outbreak to inflame tensions between Hindus and Muslims. She said that this alleged strategy on the part of the Hindu nationalist government would "dovetail with this illness to create something which the world should really keep its eyes on." 

She went as far to say that: "The situation is approaching genocidal" explaining that "The whole of the organization, the RSS to which Modi belongs, which is the mother ship of the BJP, has long said that India should be a Hindu nation. Its ideologues have likened the Muslims of India to the Jews of Germany. And if you look at the way in which they are using COVID, it was very much like typhus was used against the Jews to get ghettoize them, to stigmatize them."

She further explained, “…coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality’, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”

It is now necessary to use best practice and to wisely apply science and technology to survive. It is time to  contemplate a social change. It is time for socialism.