I just wish the term ‘pseudo-left’ would be used instead of ‘Left’. Those who support the autocrats and fascists against the people struggling for democracy can never be regarded as on the left, no matter how they might self-identify.
The Left’s advocacy for ‘multipolarity’ against a US-led unipolar order has, in effect, defended authoritarianism across the world. The Left must reflect on how its language enables such regimes.
Multipolarity is the compass orienting the Left’s understanding of international relations. All streams of the Left in India and globally have for long advocated for a multipolar world as opposed to a unipolar one dominated by the imperialist USA.
At the same time, multipolarity has become the keystone of the shared language of global fascisms and authoritarianisms. It is a rallying cry for despots, that serves to dress up their war on democracy as a war on imperialism. The deployment of multipolarity to disguise and legitimise despotism is immeasurably enabled by the ringing endorsement by the global Left of multipolarity as a welcome expression of anti-imperialist democratisation of international relations.
By framing its response to political confrontations within or between nation states as a zero-sum option between endorsing multipolarity or unipolarity, the Left perpetuates a fiction that even at its best, was always misleading and inaccurate. But this fiction is positively dangerous today, serving solely as a narrative and dramatic device to cast fascists and authoritarians in flattering roles.
The unfortunate consequences of the Left’s commitment to a value-free multipolarity are illustrated very starkly in the case of its response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The global and the Indian Left have legitimised and amplified (to varying degrees) Russian fascist discourse, by defending the invasion as a multipolar challenge to US-led unipolar imperialism.
The freedom to be fascist
On 30 September, while announcing the illegal annexation of four Ukrainian provinces, Russian President Vladimir Putin spelt out what multipolarity and democracy meant in his ideological framework. He defined multipolarity as freedom from the attempts by Western elites to establish their own ‘degraded’ values of democracy and human rights as universal values; values ‘alien’ to the vast majority of people in the West and elsewhere.
Putin’s rhetorical ploy was to declare that the concepts of a rules-based order, democracy, and justice are nothing more than ideological and imperialist impositions by the West, serving merely as pretexts to violate the sovereignty of other nations.
As Putin played to the justifiable outrage at the long list of crimes by Western countries – including colonialism, imperialism, invasions, occupations, genocides, and coups – it was easy to forget that his was not a speech demanding justice and reparations and an end to these crimes. In fact, by asserting the self-evident fact that the Western governments did not have “any moral right to weigh in, or even utter a word about democracy,” Putin skilfully cut people out of the equation.
People of the colonised nations are the ones who fought and continue to fight for freedom. People of the imperialist nations come on the streets to demand democracy and justice, and protest racism, wars, invasions, occupations committed by their own governments. But Putin was not supporting these people.
…[B]y asserting the self-evident fact that the Western governments did not have “any moral right to weigh in, or even utter a word about democracy”, Putin skilfully cuts people out of the equation.
Rather, Putin has signalled “like-minded” forces all over the world — far-right, white-supremacist, racist, anti-feminist, homophobic and transphobic political movements — to support the invasion, as part of a project advantageous to them all: of overturning the “unipolar hegemony” of universal values of democracy and human rights and “to gain true freedom, a historical perspective.”
Putin uses a “historical perspective” of his own choice to support a supremacist version of a Russian “country-civilisation” where laws dehumanise LGBT persons and where references to historical events are criminalised in the name of “strengthening (Russia’s) sovereignty.” He asserts Russia’s freedom to deny and defy the democratic norms and international laws defined “universally” by bodies like the United Nations. The project of “Eurasian integration,” which Putin projects as a multipolar challenge to the “imperialist” EU and western unipolarity, can be properly understood only as a part of his explicitly anti-democratic ideological and political project. (It is another matter that the aspect of competition between the US and Russia as Big Powers, is complicated here by the shared political project represented by Trump in the US and Putin in Russia.
A common language
The language of ‘multipolarity’ and ‘anti-imperialism’ also finds resonance in Chinese hyper-nationalist totalitarianism.
A joint statement by Putin and Xi in February, shortly before Russia invaded Ukraine, stated their shared rejection of universally accepted standards of democracy and human rights, in favour of culturally relativist definitions of these terms: “A nation can choose such forms and methods of implementing democracy that would best suit its […] traditions and unique cultural characteristics […] It is only up to the people of the country to decide whether their State is a democratic one.” These ideas were explicitly credited by the statement to “the efforts taken by the Russian side to establish a just multipolar system of international relations.”
For Xi, the “’universal values’ of freedom, democracy, and human rights were used to cause the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the drastic changes in Eastern Europe, the ‘colour revolution,’ and the ‘Arab Springs’, all caused by the intervention of the US and the West.” Any people’s movement that demands widely accepted human rights and democracy, is treated as an inherently illegitimate imperialist colour revolution.
The demand for a democracy meeting universal standards, raised by protesters in the China-wide movement against repression in the name of “Zero-Covid”, is significant in light of the culturally relativist standards favoured by the government of China. A White Paper in 2021, on “China’s Approach to Democracy, Freedom and Human Rights” defined human rights as “happiness” thanks to welfare and benefits, not as protections from unbridled government power. It conspicuously omits the right to question the government, dissent, or organise freely.
Defining “China-specific” democracy as “good governance” and human rights as “happiness” allows Xi to justify the suppression of the Uyghur Muslims. His claim is that concentration camps to “re-educate” these minorities and remould their practice of Islam so that it is “Chinese in orientation”, has provided “good governance” and greater “happiness”.
Even amongst the Hindu-supremacist leadership in India, there are strong echoes of the fascist and authoritarian discourse of a “multipolar world” – where civilisational powers will rise again to reassert their old imperialist glory, and the hegemony of liberal democracy will give way for right-wing nationalism.
Mohan Bhagwat, head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, said admiringly that “in a multipolar world” that challenges the US, “China has now risen. It is not bothered about what the world thinks about it. It is pursuing its goal… (returning to the) expansionism of its past emperors.” Likewise, “In the multipolar world now, Russia is also playing its game. It is trying to progress by suppressing the West.”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi too has repeatedly attacked human rights defenders as anti-Indian even as he declares India is the “mother of democracy.” This is made possible by viewing India’s democracy not through a “western” lens but as part of its “civilisational ethos.”A note circulated by the government links India’s democracy with “Hindu culture and civilisation,” “Hindu political theory”, “Hindu state”, and traditional (and often regressive) caste councils that enforce caste and gender hierarchies.
Such ideas also reflect attempts to incorporate Hindu-supremacists into a global network of far-right and authoritarian forces. The Russian fascist ideologue Aleksandr Dugin (much like Putin) states that “Multipolarity […] advocates a return to the civilizational foundations of each non-western civilization (and a rejection of) liberal democracy and human rights ideology.”
Modi has repeatedly attacked human rights defenders as anti-Indian while declaring that India is the “mother of democracy”, and India’s democracy must been viewed not through a “western” lens but as part of its “civilisational ethos.”
The influence goes both ways. Dugin favours the caste hierarchy as a social model (Dugin 2012). Directly incorporating the brahminical Manusmriti’s values with international fascism, Dugin sees “the present order of things”, represented by “human rights, anti-hierarchy, and political correctness” as “Kali Yuga”: a calamity which brings with it the blending of castes (a miscegenation which in turn is brought about by women’s freedom, also a calamitous aspect of Kali Yuga) and the dismantling of hierarchy. He has described Modi’s electoral success as representing a victory for “multipolarity”, a welcome assertion of “Indian values,” and a defeat for the hegemony of “liberal democracy and human rights ideology.”
Yet the Left continues to use “multipolarity” without betraying the slightest awareness of how fascists and authoritarians couch their own aims in the same language.
Where left meets right
Putin’s language of “multipolarity” is meant to resonate with the global Left. Its comforting familiarity seems to prevent the Left – which always did an excellent job laying bare the lies underpinning the “saving democracy” claims of US imperialist warmongers – from applying the same critical lens to Putin’s anti-colonial and anti-imperialist rhetoric.
It is odd that the Left has made the language of polarity its own. The discourse of polarity belongs to the Realist school in international relations. Realism sees the global order in terms of the competition between the foreign policy objectives, assumed to reflect objective ‘national interests’, of a handful of ‘poles’ – Big Powers or aspiring Big Powers. Realism is fundamentally incompatible with the Marxist view which is premised on the understanding that ‘national interest’, far from being an objective and value-neutral fact, is defined subjectively by the “political (and therefore moral) character of the leadership strata that shapes and makes foreign policy decisions” (Vanaik 2006).
The CPI [ML] welcomes the rise of non-western Big Powers even if they are internally fascist or authoritarian, because it believes that these powers offer a multipolar challenge to US unipolarity.
For instance, Vijay Prashad, one of the most prominent enthusiasts and advocates on the global Left for multipolarity, approvingly observes that “Russia and China are seeking sovereignty, not global power.” He does not mention how these powers interpret sovereignty as freedom from accountability to universal standards of democracy, human rights, and equality.
A recent essay by Communist Party of India Marxist-Leninist (CPI [ML]) General Secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya presents similar problems as it explains the party’s decision to balance solidarity with Ukraine with its preference for multipolarity and its national priority of resisting fascism in India. (Disclosure: I had been a CPI [ML] activist for three decades and a member of its Politbureau till I left the party earlier this year, due to differences that came to a head in the wake of the party’s lukewarm solidarity for Ukraine.)
Bhattacharya’s formulation is that “Regardless of the internal character of competing global powers, a multipolar world is certainly more advantageous to progressive forces and movements worldwide in their quest for reversal of neoliberal policies, social transformation and political advance.” To restate, the CPI [ML] welcomes the rise of non-western Big Powers even if they are internally fascist or authoritarian, because it believes that these powers offer a multipolar challenge to US unipolarity.
Such a Left formulation offers no resistance at all to the fascist/authoritarian projects which describe themselves as champions of anti-imperialist “multipolarity”. In fact it offers them a cloak of legitimacy.
Bhattacharya perceives whole-hearted support for Ukrainian resistance as difficult to reconcile with the “national priority” of “fighting fascism in India.” The understanding that the Left’s duties of international solidarity must defer to its perceived ‘national priority’, is a case of Marxist internationalism being muddied by Realist ‘national interest’, applied this time not only to nation states but to the national Left parties themselves.
But how is unstinting solidarity with Ukraine against a fascist invasion at odds with fighting fascism in India? Bhattacharya’s reasoning is forced, roundabout, and oblique. He takes a puzzling detour into the need for communist movements to beware of the dangers of “prioritizing the international at the expense of the national situation.” Bhattacharya inaccurately 1 attributes the Communist Party of India’s 1942 mistake of remaining aloof from the Quit India movement to its having prioritised its international commitment to the defeat of fascism in World War II, over its national commitment to overthrowing colonialism by Britain, which was then an ally in the war against fascism.
The only plausible purpose of this detour seems to be to make an analogy with the Indian Left’s current predicament vis a vis the invasion of Ukraine. Since the Narendra Modi regime’s primary foreign policy alliance is with the US-led West, it is suggested, the fight against Modi’s fascism would be weakened if Russia, a ‘multipolar’ rival of the US, was routed by the Ukrainian resistance.
Tyrannical regimes construe support for people resisting them, as support for foreign/imperialist “interference” in the “sovereignty” of those regimes.
This convoluted calculus obscures the simple fact: a defeat for Putin’s fascist invasion in Ukraine would embolden those fighting to defeat Modi’s fascism in India. Likewise, a victory for people resisting Xi’s majoritarian tyranny would inspire those resisting Modi’s majoritarian tyranny in India.
In the words of Martin Luther King Jr, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” We weaken our own democratic struggles when we choose to view the struggles of others through a distorting campist lens. Ours is not a zero-sum choice between unipolarity versus multipolarity. In every situation, our choices are clear: we can either support the resistance and survival of the oppressed – or we can worry about the survival of the oppressor.
When the Left takes upon itself a ‘duty’ to support the survival of ‘multipolar’ regimes (in Russia, China, and for some on the Left, even Iran), it fails in its actual duty to support people fighting to survive genocide by these regimes. Any benefit the US might get from its material or military support to such struggles, is outweighed by far by the benefit of survival for people who would otherwise face genocide. We would do well to recall that US material and military support to the USSR in World War II played a part in the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Tyrannical regimes construe support for people resisting them, as support for foreign or imperialist ‘interference’ in the ‘sovereignty’ of those regimes. When we on the Left do the same, we serve as enablers and apologists for those tyrannies. Those in life-or-death struggles need us to respect their autonomy and sovereignty to decide what kind of moral/material/military support to demand/accept/reject. The moral compass of the global and Indian Left needs an urgent reset, so that it can correct its disastrous course that finds it on speaking the same language as tyrants.
Kavita Krishnan is a Marxist feminist activist and author.
This article was last updated on December 23, 2022
The India Forum welcomes your comments on this article for the Forum/Letters section. Write to: editor@theindiaforum.in
References
Dugin, Aleksandr. The Fourth Political Theory. London: Arktos 2012.
Vanaik, Achin. “National Interest: A Flawed Notion”. Economic and Political Weekly 41 (49). 9 Dec 2006.
This is an excellent statement but I wish the term ‘pseudo-left’ had been used instead of ‘left’ for those who effectively side with Putin fascism and Russian aggression against the Ukrainian resistance. The conclusion is spot on: Any call for peace that does not include the demand for Russian withdrawal from Ukrainian territories is disingenuous.
Friday, 17 February 2023 / Russian Socialist Movement (emigration branch)
For a year now, Vladimir Putin’s regime has been killing Ukrainians, sending hundreds of thousands of Russians to their deaths, and threatening the world with nuclear weapons in the name of the insane goal of restoring its empire.
For us Russians who oppose Putin’s aggression and dictatorship, it has been a year of horror and shame over the war crimes committed daily in our name.
On the one-year anniversary of this war, we call all those who yearn for peace to turn out for demonstrations and rallies against Putin’s invasion.
Unfortunately, not all the “peace” rallies taking place next weekend will be actions of solidarity with Ukraine. A large part of the left in the West does not understand the nature of this war and advocates compromise with Putinism.
We have written this statement to help our comrades abroad understand the situation and take the right stand.
A counterrevolutionary war
Some Western writers attribute the war to causes like the collapse of the USSR, the “contradictory history of the Ukrainian nation’s creation,” and geopolitical confrontation between nuclear powers.
Without denying the importance of these factors, we are surprised that these lists overlook the most important and obvious reason for what is happening: the Putin regime’s desire to suppress democratic protest movements throughout the former Soviet Union and in Russia itself.
The 2014 seizure of Crimea and hostilities in the Donbas were a response by the Kremlin to the “revolution of dignity” in Ukraine, which overthrew the corrupt pro-Russian administration of Viktor Yanukovych, as well as to Russians’ mass demonstrations for fair elections in 2011–12 (known as the Bolotnaya Square protests).
Annexing the Crimean Peninsula was a domestic policy win for Putin. He successfully used revanchist, anti-Western, and traditionalist rhetoric (as well as political persecution) to expand his social base, isolate the opposition, and turn the Maidan into a bogeyman with which to frighten the population.
But the popularity boost that followed the annexation was short-lived. The late 2010s saw economic stagnation, an unpopular pension reform, and high-profile anti-corruption revelations by Alexei Navalny’s team that dragged Putin’s ratings back down, especially among young people.
Protests swept the country, and the ruling United Russia party suffered a series of painful defeats in regional elections.
This context has driven the Kremlin to place all its bets on conserving the regime. The 2020 constitutional referendum (which required rigging unprecedented even by Russian standards) effectively made Putin a ruler for life. Under the pretext of containing the COVID-19 pandemic, protest gatherings were finally banned. An attempt was made to poison extra-parliamentary opposition leader Alexei Navalny, which he miraculously survived.
The popular uprising of summer 2020 in Belarus confirmed the Russian elite’s belief that the
“collective West” is waging a “hybrid war” against Russia, attacking it and its satellites with “color revolutions.”
Of course, such claims are nothing more than a conspiracy theory. Social and political discontent in Russia has been growing due to record social inequality, poverty, corruption, rollbacks of civil liberties, and the obvious futility of the Russian model of capitalism, which is based on a parasitic fossil-fuel oligarchy appropriating natural resource rents.
If there’s one thing we can blame the “collective West” for, it’s its longstanding pandering to Putinism, including on the Ukrainian issue. For decades, European and American elites have sought to do “business as usual” with Putin’s Russia, which has allowed a dictatorship to emerge, redistribute wealth upwards, and conduct foreign policy with complete impunity.
Conceding to Putin will not lead to peace
Invading Ukraine was an attempt by Putin to repeat his 2014 Crimean triumph—by securing a speedy victory, rallying Russian society around the flag with revanchist slogans, finally crushing the opposition, and establishing himself as hegemon in the post-Soviet space (which Putin’s imperialism views as part of “historical Russia”).
Ukrainians’ heroic resistance thwarted these plans, turning the “short, victorious war” of the Kremlin’s dreams into a protracted conflict that has worn down Russia’s economy and busted the myth of its army’s invincibility. Backed into a corner, Moscow is threatening the world with its nuclear weapons while simultaneously urging Ukraine and the West to negotiate.
Moscow’s rhetoric is parroted by certain European and American leftists who oppose supplying arms to Ukraine (to “save lives” and prevent a nuclear apocalypse). But Russia is not willing to withdraw from the territories it has captured, a condition that Kyiv and 93% of Ukrainians consider non-negotiable. Must Ukraine instead sacrifice its sovereignty in order to appease the aggressor, a policy that has very dark precedents in European history?
Saving lives?
So is it true that Ukraine’s defeat, an inevitability if Western aid is withdrawn, will help prevent more casualties? Even if we accept the non-obvious (from a socialist perspective) logic that saving lives is more important than fighting tyranny and aggression, we believe that this is not the case.
As we know, Vladimir Putin has laid claim to the entire territory of Ukraine, asserting that Ukrainians and Russians are “one nation” and that Ukrainian statehood is a historical mistake. In this context, a ceasefire would merely give the Kremlin time to rebuild its military capacity for a new assault, including by forcing yet more Russians (mostly poor and ethnic minority) into the army.
If Ukraine continues to resist the invasion even without arms supplies, it will lead to innumerable casualties among Ukrainian soldiers and civilians. And terror, the horrific remains of which we saw in Bucha and elsewhere, is what awaits any the new territories seized by Russia.
Multipolar imperialism
When Putin speaks about getting rid of American hegemony in the world and even about “anticolonialism” (!), he is not referring to the creation of a more egalitarian world order.
Putin’s “multipolar world” is a world where democracy and human rights are no longer considered universal values, and so-called “great powers” have free rein in their respective geopolitical spheres of influence.
This essentially means restoring the system of international relations that existed in the runup to World Wars I and II.
This “brave old world” would be a wonderful place for dictators, corrupt officials, and the far right.
But it would be hell for workers, ethnic minorities, women, LGBT people, small nations, and all liberation movements.
A victory for Putin in Ukraine would not restore the pre-war status quo, it would set a deadly precedent giving “great powers” the right to wars of aggression and nuclear brinkmanship. It would be a prologue to new military and political catastrophes.
What would a victory in Ukraine for Putinism lead to?
A Putin victory would mean not only the subjugation of Ukraine, but also the bending of all post-Soviet countries to the Kremlin’s will.
Within Russia, a victory for the regime would preserve a system defined by the security and fossilfuel oligarchy’s rule over other social classes (above all the working class) and the plundering of natural resources at the expense of technological and social development.
In contrast, the defeat of Putinism in Ukraine would likely lend momentum to movements for democratic change in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and other former Soviet countries, as well as in Russia itself.
It would be overly optimistic to claim that defeat in war automatically leads to revolution. But Russian history is replete with examples of military setbacks abroad that have led to major change at home—including the abolition of serfdom, the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, and Perestroika in the 1980s.
Russian socialists have no use for a “victory” for Putin and his oligarch cronies. We call on all those who truly desire peace and still believe in dialogue with the Russian government to demand that it withdraw its troops from Ukrainian territories. Any call for peace that does not include this demand is disingenuous.
End the war! Stand in solidarity against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Nothing to add. Watch it all. Only some excerpts from the end are below.
Update: I could not find proper translation of Zelensky’s speech to Ukraine Parliament of December 28 when I posted excerpts from New Year’s speech below. Above link explains even more clearly than below that Ukraine is leading the global democratic revolution as well as the war against fascism – and knows it.
We are all one family.
One Ukraine.
This is the year when Ukraine changed the world.
And the world discovered Ukraine.
We were told to surrender.
We chose a counterattack!
We were told to make concessions and compromises.
We are joining the European Union and NATO.
The world heard Ukraine.
European Parliament, Bundestag, the UK Parliament, Knesset, the US Congress.
The world felt Ukraine.
Ukraine in the media.
In the hearts of people.
At the top of Google search.
The world saw Ukraine.
On the main squares in Toronto, New York, London, Warsaw, Florence, Sydney and other cities.
Ukraiinians surprise.
Ukrainians are applauded.
Ukrainians are inspired.
Is there anything that can scare us?
No.
Is there anyone who can stop us?
No.
Because we are all together.
It is what we are fighting for.
One for each other.
The best salute for us is at the warehouses of the occupiers.
The best gift is the numbers in the report of the General Staff.
We do not know for sure what the new year 2023 will bring us.
But ready for anything.
New achievements?
We will be happy.
New hits?
We will be steadfast.
Continuation of the fight?
We will fight.
And when we win, we will hug.
Dear Ukrainians!
A few minutes remain until the New Year!
I want to wish us all one thing – victory.
And that’s the main thing.
One wish for all Ukrainians.
Let this be the year of return.
The return of our people.
Soldiers – to their families.
Prisoners – to their homes.
Immigrants – to their Ukraine.
Return of our lands and the temporarily occupied will become forever free.
Return to normal life.
To happy moments without curfew.
To earthly joys without air alerts.
The return of what has been stolen from us.
The childhood of our children, the peaceful old age of our parents.
So that grandchildren come to visit their grandparents during the holidays.
To eat watermelons in Kherson and the cherry in Melitopol.
So that our cities are free.
Our friends are faithful.
And so that our main figure and main success appeared in reports near the figure of 100,000 destroyed enemies, thousands of units of destroyed Russian equipment – it is 603,628 square kilometers.
The area of independent Ukraine, as it was since 1991.
This official explanation from twitter speaks for itself and needs no comment.
Overview
On January 8, 2021, President Donald J. Trump tweeted:
“The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
Shortly thereafter, the President tweeted:
“To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
Due to the ongoing tensions in the United States, and an uptick in the global conversation in regards to the people who violently stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, these two Tweets must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence, as well as in the context of the pattern of behavior from this account in recent weeks. After assessing the language in these Tweets against our Glorification of Violence policy, we have determined that these Tweets are in violation of the Glorification of Violence Policy and the user @realDonaldTrump should be immediately permanently suspended from the service.
Assessment
We assessed the two Tweets referenced above under our Glorification of Violence policy, which aims to prevent the glorification of violence that could inspire others to replicate violent acts and determined that they were highly likely to encourage and inspire people to replicate the criminal acts that took place at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
This determination is based on a number of factors, including:
President Trump’s statement that he will not be attending the Inauguration is being received by a number of his supporters as further confirmation that the election was not legitimate and is seen as him disavowing his previous claim made via two Tweets (1, 2) by his Deputy Chief of Staff, Dan Scavino, that there would be an “orderly transition” on January 20th.
The second Tweet may also serve as encouragement to those potentially considering violent acts that the Inauguration would be a “safe” target, as he will not be attending.
The use of the words “American Patriots” to describe some of his supporters is also being interpreted as support for those committing violent acts at the US Capitol.
The mention of his supporters having a “GIANT VOICE long into the future” and that “They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” is being interpreted as further indication that President Trump does not plan to facilitate an “orderly transition” and instead that he plans to continue to support, empower, and shield those who believe he won the election.
Plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off-Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021.
As such, our determination is that the two Tweets above are likely to inspire others to replicate the violent acts that took place on January 6, 2021, and that there are multiple indicators that they are being received and understood as encouragement to do so.
If that had been written as a parody it would have been unconvincing.
But its real.
Of course Trump announced that his own platform will be rolled out shortly.
But Google took a more serious step. It won’t distribute apps for other platforms unless they meet its requirements for enforcing “better moderation”. (In Australia they would have said “safety”).
Since they have a near monopoly with semi-locked phones it could actually take a few days of email forwarding for most people who care to learn how to download and install apps from other sources such as those listed here:
The resilience of the networks behind those sites was massively hardened during the explosion of scientific collaboration bypassing commercial publishers resulting from covid-19.
Now of course Google, NSA et al are thoroughly aware of and indeed contributors to all of that.
It would certainly be possible to shut everything down in an emergency. What’s missing is the ability to just make peoople disappear. That is far simpler, quicker and more effective. No actual fascist regime tries to impose such breathtaking levels of censorship as that being announced without being able to rely on just locking people up.
Meanwhile the main effect is just to drive people into narrower circles that can be more easily monitored – eg if they end up imagining that the Tor encrypted networks funded by the US Navy are some sort of way to avoid US government surveillance.
But the side effect is far more important.
Raising the general level of paranoia is certainly “likely to inspire others to replicate the violent acts that took place on January 6, 2021”.
Suppressing that is likely to inspire some actual “domestic terrorism”.
Is that the aim?
Possibly for some. But my guess is the corporate liberals have just lost the plot.
Some Republicans really are stupid enough to imagine they could survive the primaries in two years by prohibiting Trump from running for public office.
If just 17 GOP Senators join the Democrats in impeaching Trump in order to impose that penalty, we would be in quite an extraordinary situation. Not worth analysing unless it actually happens. I have no way to guess whether there are that many who are that desperate and stupid.
But it is certainly plausible that there will be enough Democrats to start the impeachment process. They already did “the Russia thing” and they already impeached Trump once. What harm would they see in helping to intensify the fight that Trump has already unleashed in the opposing party?
So everything possible is being done to increase the relevance, support and enthusiasm of a large mass based right wing party with both a substantial Congressional representation and a militant extra-Parliamentary wing.
Moreover the complete desertion of basic democratic principles by Trump’s opponents forces others to unite with Trumpists on the simple issue of whether we want to be told what we are allowed to think and say by corproate liberals (who Trump calls the “radical socialist, Marxist left”).
I honestly cannot guess what the people at Twitter who signed themselves “Your official source for what’s happening” think will now happen.
My guess is it will be a lot easier to get along with the Trumpists in a united front than with that lot.
The title of this post in the covid-19 series here is from a pamphlet by Lenin at the end of October 1917. Lenin begins with the words “Famine is Approaching”:
We are not in that situation nor anything like it. But there is an impending catastrophe which has been thoroughly documented by the “Imperial College Covid-19 response team” in a series of technical reports:
The current absurd floundering will not result in famine. But it could result in more avoidable deaths from Covid-19 than the total deaths from the “Spanish Flu” which killed more people than the “Geat War” that immediately preceded it – the “War to End All Wars”.
This is very likely in countries ruled by Kleptocracies like many in Africa. But already the failure to prepare is killing large numbers in Italy, with Spain and France close behind and London less than three weeks behind Italy on the same trajectory. Lots of people will also die unnecessarily in countries that are modern industrial democracies with blithering idiots in charge of pretending the owners care about the people.
The potential catastrophe we face is much smaller than the consequences of famine. A Case Fatality Rate of 6% or so instead of less than 1% that could have been achieved if quarantine arrangements were prepared to spread out the peak case load. Say half a million avoidable deaths in the UK, 2 or 3 million in the USA, less than a hundred thousand or so in Australia. Nowhere near as bad as famine…
Most of the deaths will be the result of hospital Intensive Care Units so overwhelmed they cannot provide life saving treatment for the most severe case numbers beyond available capacity.
Figure 3 of this recent authoritative announcement has a clearly labelled graph on “flattening the curve”:
Figure 3 Flattening the Curve – Avoidable DEATHS not prevented
Instead of just the usual horizontal line showing “Health System Capacity” lower than an early high peak and just above a slower spread out peak it adds a label for the very large shaded region above that line for the high peak and the smaller region still above that line, for spreading out.
The label is “Unmet Need”.
That is clear enough. A sharper version, more easily understood and acted on would be:
“Avoidable DEATHS not prevented”.
But even the milder version is omitted from more recent authoritative announcements.
Australia is on roughly the same trajectory as London, Italy and the United States. “Community Transmission” is already well under way in NSW and Queensland and has just got started in Victoria. It makes sense for the other States and Territories to close their borders to buy some more time just as it made sense internationally.
But it won’t be enough.
Update: If this sounds alarmist check out today’s Australian on what others far more qualified to express an opinion are saying:
Infectious disease modellers say the current round of restrictions would quarter the number of likely infections at the peak of the epidemic, but even with those social distancing measures in place, unless further measures were taken, Australia could still hit a peak of 125,000 infections a day — a level that would overwhelm the nation’s intensive care units.
…
Cases of COVID-19 are currently doubling every four days in Australia and heading towards a trajectory of a three-day doubling. If the epidemic were allowed to continue in this manner, University of Melbourne epidemiologist Tony Blakely said infections could climb to as many as 500,000 a day within weeks.
Under that scenario, the reproductive number of the virus is 2.5 — meaning every person infected with the virus would pass it to 2½ others. Social distancing measures are likely to reduce the reproductive number, known as R0.
Professor Blakely has modelled the impact of social distancing measures and predicts the moves to close pubs, clubs, restaurants and sporting facilities could reduce the R0 to 1.2 by the end of May. That would see the epidemic peak at about 125,000 infections a day in late May, with 60 per cent of the population infected.
Based on modelling completed by epidemiologists from Imperial College London, and adapting their model to Australia, Professor Blakely predicts that by the epidemic’s end, 165,000 people, or 0.84 per cent of cases, would require intensive care, assuming 60 per cent of people of all ages were infected.
Medium Term
Below on “How to Combat It” is mainly about short term measures. Days and weeks of “Impending Catastrophe”.
Fortunately longer term measures are already under way as explained at the end
Scientists and “nerds” are already pushing aside the barriers to effective cooperation from “Intellectual Property” far more rapidly than the rest of society is moving to push aside other forms of private property in the means of production.
The Enlightenment “Republic of Letters” is emerging again in a modern form with rapid mobilization forcing changes in public health policy as documented in earlier articles of this series:
For those who think they already understand and could not even bother to read the links in those posts there are already some excellent animated videos to explain the basics eg:
Why the actual numbers are much larger and growing faster than the statistics catching up:
Estimating actual COVID 19 cases (novel corona virus infections) in an area based on deaths
Some visualizations that are steps towards “Explorable Explanations” with sliders and other widgets to get a “feel” for what is happening and what can be changed can be found here:
It also makes sense to immediately commandeer hotels as well as private hospitals for conversion into Emergency Hospitals and use entirely separate hospital buildings for covid-19 rather than attempting infection control within the same hospital buildings as wards for other patients. No doubt that will all be done along with many other things to raise capacity.
For those interested in the measures for rapidly expanding healthcare capacity a thorough current account of covid-19 for Emergency Medecine Critical Care professionals is here:
Only the first section is likely to be of wider interest to other health workers. I think that first section is adequately summarized for a wider general audience in the public information campaigns now based on accurate advice from Centers for Disease Control etc. Note that the discussion of precautions against possible airborne transmission in above link is only relevant for those actually treating infectious patients.
No doubt surgeons no longer doing elective surgery will be taught how to do intubation procedures to provide ventilation for the vastly increased numbers of severe cases with viral pneumonia including many with further complications such as bacterial pneumonia, even though most of the teaching will be on the job assisting. Inferior split ventilators will be used and supplies will be ramped up.
Supply Chains
Naturally the main focus of the media has been on shopping. The newspapers are printed on the back of ads for shopping and the broadcast news is squeezed between ads for shopping both online and on air.
My view is that the shopping shambles is not of major signifcance and will be sorted out without major impact. Even if 80% of the workforce have mild to moderate illness lasting 2 to 3 weeks over the same relatively short period and there is disruption generally, essential services can be maintained. Most workers are employed to not do anything useful, let alone essential. Workers from large sectors shutting down now can be fairly rapidly mobilised as (unskilled and bewildered) assistants in essential areas while training on the job.
That is what I expect to happen when the blithering idiots in charge notice that funding businesses to continue trading while insolvent does not actually achieve much in the long term for a shutdown that reduces their turnover to near zero. Even the sheer idiocy of disrupting all credit arrangements by not enforcing payment terms so that deliveries will only be for cash will not be catastrophic in itself although the financial system may be fragile enough to come up with a related catastrophe.
Some fumbling and blunders are inevitable. The supply chains for groceries and pharmaceuticals will recover from panic buying without those stuff ups in emergency management causing many unnecessary deaths. The shortage of face masks and alcoholic sanitizers was avoidable but not necessarily catastrophic.
Impending Catastrophe
So what is the “Impending Catastrophe” if the Medium term is looking good, healthcare capacity can be rapidly expanded and supply chain hiccups are not especially catastrophic? Simply this.
There is no reasonable prospect of increasing the capacity of Intensive Care Units rapidly enough for a pandemic that will accelerate to double the case load every 2-3 days. A week after hospitals reach full capacity they will be dealing with a case load more than four times capacity. A fortnight later, more than 16 times. This is happening now in Italy. London is about 3 weeks behind Italy and Australia and the USA not much further behind, all on much the same trajectory that leads to catastrophe.
What cannot be fixed quickly enough for the first peak is the supply of mechanical ventilators etc for Intensive Care Units. Vastly accelerated scale up still cannot possibly keep pace as countries are now entering the period of doubled demand every 2-3 days:
Clin Infect Dis. 2015 May 1; 60(Suppl 1): S52–S57. Published online 2015 Apr 10. doi: 10.1093/cid/civ089 Estimates of the Demand for Mechanical Ventilation in the United States During an Influenza Pandemic Martin I. Meltzer,1 Anita Patel,2 Adebola Ajao,3 Scott V. Nystrom,4 and Lisa M. Koonin5 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4603361/
The impending catastrophe is lack of preparations for serious quarantine.
Given a shortage of Intensive Care Units and no vaccine, such measures are the ONLY way to prevent or reduce catastrophe.
Quarantine
The measures for people outside the health system to focus on are for “flattening the curve”. Spreading out the infection directly reduces the death rate by directly reducing the number of people with severe cases who cannot be treated when they all arrive at hospital Intensive Care Units at once and equipment is available for only a fraction of those who need it.
That is not something achieved by telling people to stay at home doing nothing. It requires actually building and organizing things.
We need to actively build and organize QUARANTINE facilities. This is not just passive “social distancing”.
The whole point of the “containment” phase of tracking new arrivals for a short period of “self-isolation” and closely tracking the contacts of anybody infected was only to buy time before “Community Transmission” began. Containment merely keeps the numbers of new infections “contained” at a smaller rate to delay the “local transmission” that will inevitably eventually grow at a much larger exponential rate until “herd immunity” is achieved with effective vaccination (expected 12-18 months away). Some cases were bound to get through and eventually result in enough people infected from unknown local contacts that the origin of most new infections is “the community” rather than some tracked or untracked individual cases seeded from outside. Then the pace accelerates from doubling each week to doubling each 2-3 days as in Italy and others that are near the first peak.
The World Health Organization, WHO, has recommended “test, test, test” because the surprise at the Italian hospital system being overwhelmed showed the pandemic was being fought blindfolded. Containment through border control and isolation cannot work when you do not know who to isolate from whom. It was known since late January that most people infected had only mild symtoms or none (with estimates of 86% of cases not reported in the statistics that media have been relentlessly staring at).
Even with an adequate supply of test kits there has to be somewhere to put people who test positive for the couple of weeks or so until most of them recover. Instead they are being told to stay at home and infect the rest of their household who are now (belatedly) being told to also stay at home. That will reduce the acceleration more than if they were told to just keep going out. But three very urgent measures were obviously necessary then.
Their necessity should have been announced loud and clear while rolling out implementation as fast as possible after announcement. So far not even the necessity has been announced. Here is my view of the three most urgent measures that are critically urgent now:
How to Combat It
1. Quarantine Hospitals for the mildly and moderately ill
Also separate facilities for unconfirmed suspected likely cases (eg travellers from areas with more community transmission to those with less).
I don’t know what the correct term is for what I have called “Quarantine Hospital”. People who don’t live by themselves should obviously not be told to just stay at home and infect their household while they wait to see if they are actually infected or while recovering. Nor should they occupy full hospital beds needed for people more severely ill.
The rest of their household can be told to just stay home for a couple of weeks to see if they are already infected or not, but anyone infected should be immediately separated from people who are not known to have been infected. That is blindingly obvious whether they need additonal medical treatment or not and whether any treatment they need is available or not. Any country not doing this is not seriously trying to flatten the curve.
“Quarantine Hospital” sounds better than “Quarantine barracks” but just somewhere to stay and be fed with some nursing staff is all it takes to seriously spread out a peak. It will require an enormous effort but it can be done using space that must be shut down anyway, emergency furnishings and staff from businesses that must be shut down anyway.
Commandeering hotels etc is for full emergency hospitals, not for the larger numbers of beds needed in Quarantine Field Hospitals. Lots of office space unused with people working from home and entertainment venues shut down must be converted to emergency accommodation. The kitchen facilities are available from the cafes and restaurants being shut down. The beds and bedding are available from households in proportion to the numbers moved out of households that will need those beds, and the staff are available from the huge numbers of small businesses trading while insolvent as well as from those already laid off. So far as I can see that has not even been planned, let alone started.
2. Quarantine Accommodation for the vulnerable
Older people and people with various severe health probems are especially vulnerable to being part of the less than 1% who might die before a vaccine is available or part of the additional 5% or so that are killed by government incompetence as a result of intensive care not being available for them when the hospitals are overwhelmed. No doubt local communities will get organized to help those who need help while staying isolated in their own homes but there are others staying in households with less vulnerable people equally susceptible to infection.
“Tough” restrictions on visits to aged care institutions are obviously ludicrous. These can only be intended as justification for very soon saying people had an opportunity to make their last visits immediately before an essential full shutdown until proper procedures for safe visits fully separated by glass barriers etc can be organized.
But vulnerable people currently living in households with others must also be offered accommodation separated from the rest of the susceptible population until the peak has passed and sufficient intensive care facilities are available. That will be hard for many. Many may refuse and many may die. But doing nothing to make viable separate accommodation available is criminal. That seems to be the current “plan”.
Neighborhood support groups are starting to be formed spontaneously through social media:
It is important to keep them entirely separate (although overlapping with) closed small “affinity” groups of households with children discussed in item 3 below.
3. Quarantine Separation of children
Obviously schools will have to be shut at some point except for children of households working in healthcare and other essential activities. Meanwhile schools are vitally important community organizing centers for households with children.
The shutdown won’t just be for a couple of weeks. It will end up lasting for many months.
while still open, and even after closing, schools should be organizing children into small groups, much smaller than class sizes, that will be allowed to interact with each other within school and after the shutdown and prohibited from doing so between groups.
This obviously needs to be coordinated with parents because all the households with children in whatever group any child continues to interact with will tend to get infected together. It will be especially difficult for households with children in different age groups and different schools but every household with children must be assigned to a particular group of households it is permitted (not required) to socially interact with. The kids are not going to just stay at home with their parents for six months, let alone eighteen months! Humans evolved in Hominid bands of a couple of dozen, not as isolated nuclear families.
Hopefully if we move really fast the necessary interaction can be online in Virtual Reality but we don’t know how well that will work, for how long or how quickly. It still ought to be based on non-overlapping groups that should be organized now by schools.
These separate child based groups are likely to continue to mix with and infect each other and must accept that their own group of households will or may end up having the larger risk of earlier infection corresponding to an enlarged single household. They must be confined to small numbers of households who trust each other to maintain isolation from the rest of the world to the same extent as the individual households.
Households with older and more vulnerable people are a major complication as self-isolation within a household is unlikely to be effective for long.
Six months is a rather optimistic estimate of how long this crisis will last. It could “conceivably” be as short as 6 months if all goes perfectly but that is not the period to plan for now. Avoiding overwhelmed hospitals requires dragging things out longer, until an effective vaccine gives “herd” immunity or effective anti-viral drugs reduce the death rate. Even if it could theoretically be even shorter than six months most serious estimates are for 12-18 months of on and off waves.
But even Italy where the hospital overload is currently greatest has only had 0.1% of the population as “cases”.
South Korea has a very long way to go before herd immunity and there is nothing in the lower numbers of new cases after the first peak or the success in dealing with that first peak to suggest that there won’t be many further peaks:
Likewise for Singapore, another success being hailed as though it were not just success with the first peak.
I don’t know whether anybody has solid evidence of whether and how it may be possible to stop transmission between househods via their children during an extended shutdown. As far as I can make out there is just empty hoping that for some unexplained reason it won’t happen. This mainly takes the form of highlighting the distraction that children have much less severe symptoms (which actually enhances their role as disease vectors).
Current Plans
Compared to Australia and the USA the UK is a model of serious but still unsuccessful efforts to explain public health policy to the public via journalists in a joint effort by the PM, the Chief Science Officer and the Chief Medical Oficer.
It is worth spending the time on these two long videos less than 5 days apart to understand how rapidly the situation is changing and how uncomprehending the journalists covering the “issue” are.
Coronavirus: Boris Johnson holds press conference after Cobra meeting 308,797 views – Streamed live on Mar 12, 2020 – starts at 23’30” of 1:10’57”
Coronavirus: Boris Johnson sets out “drastic action” BBC 292,849 views – Streamed live (Mar 16, 2020)
The pandemic model that now forms the basis for planning in the UK expects multiple waves of infection each time “social distancing” is relaxed after successfully suppressing the peak rates to reduce case loads to hospital capacities. This is in Report 9 from the Imperial College team:
A shorter Australian attempt at explaining the model to a journalist is this video from the ABC’s Dr Norman Swan on 17 March. (I watched it after having written the rest of this article). In many ways it is better than the UK and Australian official explanations but he still ends up distracted by issues of case tracking from the “Containment” phase rather than the current accelerating exponential growth on entering the “Community Transmission” phase. He simply does not get the fact that spreading out the peak necessarily reduces total deaths from unavailable intensive health care units and instead claims that a spread out peak could still have the same total deaths.
“Explorable Explanations” with widgets for people to actually manipulate the paramaters of the models themselves are really essential instead of literally hand-waving – with or without a background graph:
If any of these people trying to explain had access to such Explorables they would be using them on TV. Instead they are waving their hands.
The primary mechanism for transmission during a long shutdown might well be the overlap between different groups of children from different groups of households interacting to transmit the virus between their otherwise separated groups of households. It will certainly occur with younger children still at school.
Similar transmission will occur from the essential workforce in different workplaces also transmitting between different households, but stringent “social distancing” controls at work can reduce that far more effectively than among younger school children. Likewise smaller households without children will get infected more slowly than extended groups of households whose children infect each other.
Tests
School closure timing and arrangements is the hardest issue to grapple with and the least data is available as to transmission rates through these channels. Currently there have been no adequate systematic random samples of the population generally as test kits are only available for more urgent needs such as border control during the containment period and testing health workers.
In particular there is no blood testing yet to measure the immune system responses of people who have already had the virus without symptoms. Such testing is hoped for soon and could be a game changer for enabling decisions on the optimal timing for imposing and lifting isolation restrictions before and after hospitals are overloaded. It could also shed a lot more light on the transmission between children and between adults and children. At present decisions on how to time for less overloading of peak capacity in successive waves are being taken blindfolded.
The separation of groups of children and their households necessarily involves the widest participation in community decision making and implementation and the most discussion to come up with ideas right now. Explorable explanations with widgets are needed urgently for this.
All UK schools closed last week, very shortly after official announcements that the best “science” showed that overall effects of closing schools could be negative because of:
Large effect on essential workforce diverted back into parenting and child-minding, especially from already overloaded health system. (Private schools closed earlier but essential workforce is generally lower paid with a high proportion depending on schools for childcare while working in health system).
Likelihood that traditional reliance on grandparents to assist will result in more rapid infection of the most vulnerable.
Unlikelihood that school students will remain socially distanced from each other while away from school, short, medium and long term.
Previous announcements were correct. So is the new decision.
What follows from the correctness of the two opposite decisions of our dearly beloved leaders both 5 days earlier and 5 days later is that urgent mitigation measures can and should be taken for all 3 issues. Others can contribute more to discussion of those measures so I won’t attempt it in this article.
All I can say on it is that school closures will happen soon whether desirable or not.
Here is some confusing advice from USA of the same sort that will dominate discussion here:
In addition to the advice only now being widely disseminated by authoritative public health information campaigns, households with both children and older and more vulnerable people should carefully consider stronger advice from people who have been campaigning for full social isolation to be implemented sooner.
They cannot be considered “authoritative” but I will be carefully studying the technical background necessary to be able to understand both.
Epidemiology for the Uninitiated
Lots of people, like me, will need to acquire some basic epidemiological concepts to understand what the models are about. Studying this is very good practice for understanding the economics of the capitalist business cycle. (The Explorable Explanations will be more accessible for most people both for pandemics and for the business cycle).
If the serious critics are right there won’t be another peak in China and Italy after full social isolation measures are enforced. If the mainstream epidemiological view is correct (as opposed to the government waffle about 6 months) there will be successive waves over 18 months or so until a vaccine is effective, possibly ameliorated by anti-viral drugs. This is because “social distancing” restrictions end up becoming intolerable and therefore ineffective and get relaxed because they cannot be maintained for long when new cases decline to near zero after dealing with each peak in the overloading of ICUs and consequent deaths from unavailable medical treatment. Transmission can be expected to resume gradually and then again suddenly as long as there are large reservoirs of people still susceptible. There will still be large reservoirs susceptible to infection after the first peak overloading the hospitals is shutdown by emergency isolation measures just as there was for the first peak.
The business press is already editorializing about not “over reacting” and the importance of quickly getting people back to work for them. Their views will eventually prevail while the owners are still in charge. Here’s a couple of the Wall Street Journal’s editorials urging that more people be killed quickly to save money:
They can rely on help from lots of people who think correct ideas fall from the sky or are inherent in their minds as “just common sense” and are simply not interested in studying the knowledge acquired from social practice and from it alone. The three kinds of social practice include class struggle, the struggle for production and scientific experiment. This is not a good time to be glued to the business channels and ignoring the political class struggle and the struggle for production being waged by workers in the relevant sciences.
Simply assuming the first peak will be the last is as helpful as the Wall Street Journal’s editorials.
The kind of mathematical modeling that is done to help inform public health policy for dealing with this pandemic is closely related to the sort that is needed for understanding the capitalist cycle and the transition from capitalism. So studying the pandemic is not a diversion from other priorities.
The modern form of the “Republic of Letters” is very much based on the communist mode of production and distribution already widespread in the Open Culture (eg Wikipedia) and Open Science offspring of the Free and Open Source Software movement. Such intellectual activity was not enough to produce the Enlightenment, let alone the bourgeois democratic revolution against Feudalism. Nevertheless it was a very important precursor.
Wikipedia has an impressive portal showing the current extent of collaborative effort:
The “pirate” backbone for disseminating scientific and other knowledge from “Library Genesis” and “Sci-Hub” is being hardened against attack and is openly confronting the crisis:
The main scientific publishers have accepted demands to make all covid-19 research immediately open access (they were being bypassed anyway by pre-prints on community archive sites and by Sci-Hub).
Activists have organized collections of relevant non-current background material. Major Big Tech companies have co-opted the US government to neatly classify what is “Open Access” and what needs to be extracted from behind paywalls and disseminated by activists:
The 34,000 GPUs mentioned in that article are a drop in the ocean compared to what mobilizing the gamer PCs can deliver.
So anti-viral drugs and vaccines will arrive a lot quicker than usual, as will saner public health policy.
Even before governments started using their powers to commandeer manufacturing resources for ventilators and other hospital supplies, people started organizing to just do it:
As already mentioned, the Emergency Medecine Critical Care professionals took care well in advance to prepare training materials for their reinforcements before they are overwhelmed:
Unfortunately Library Genesis does not have the only book in that list with the word “Intubation” in the title, nor any others in english that look relevant:
The Airway Cam Guide to Intubation and Practical Emergency Airway Management 1st Edition, Richard M. Levitan
Presumably anything relevant wih a doi can be obtained via Sci-Hub or this can rapidly and easily be arranged by the relevant professionals if necessary. Activists are working now to make the relevant materials freely available for people who will find themselves on the front lines along with other health workers quite soon.
Anyway, people are moving way faster than governments.
A new world is being born from the ashes of the old.
Update: Today’s Australian (Tuesday 2020-03-24) also has confirmation from Singapore PM that further waves are expected. I did not notice it last night:
“We are under no illusions that the problem is over at all,” he says.
“If I made an analogy, it is not that the tide has turned, it is that we put the dykes up. We are watching very carefully to see where water may leak in, and if you take your eyes off it for a moment, suddenly I have an outbreak, like what happened in South Korea, and I will be in a perilous situation. It can happen to us at any time.
“Australia is grappling with the same problem. The countries around us in Southeast Asia are also facing the problem. It (the outbreak) is going to catch fire in many countries and is going to take a long time to burn out.”
…
“I would not say we have successfully prevented it,” Lee says carefully. “I think I would say so far we have reasonably successfully hindered the transmission.”
The key, Lee explains, is checking out all the people any infected person may have unwittingly infected before diagnosis.
“We work very hard to contact-trace,” he says. “Who are the people you have met within the last two weeks, where have you been, what have you done, who may have been exposed to you?
“We make every effort to trace those people down as well and put the immediate contacts either on notice or in quarantine, depending on whether they have symptoms. It is very labour-intensive. We have 300-plus cases now, but we have contact-traced several thousand people already, at least.
“It is labour-intensive but it is helpful in preventing a single case from becoming many hundreds of cases, if you catch it in time.”
…
“Looking at the behaviour of the disease and the way it is jumping from country to country, you can push it down within a country, but it has not disappeared worldwide,” he says.
“I think this is going to be with us for quite some time.”
…
“Their population is not immune to it yet, in very large numbers. Because even if a million Chinese have got the virus so far, that still leaves almost 1.4 billion people who have not yet, and are still, in immunological terms, naive and at risk.
“So, what you can hope for is that you control the spread of the disease, you hold the position, and hope and pray that the scientists come up with either a treatment or a vaccine within a year or two — and in time for us to exit this without the doomsday scenario, namely that the disease goes through the whole population, and then eventually we have herd immunity. Either it is going to leave you with huge casualties, or it is going to take forever to lock down.
“I think it is an enormous economic cost, and a human cost too.”
Note: Like South Korea the proportion of the population that remains susceptible to infection in the next wave is even higher than in China where one province, Hubei did have an initially uncontrolled outbreak so are substantial proportion of that province now does have at least short term immunity so there is a fair chance the next wave there will be smaller.
The proportion still fully susceptible in Singapore and South Korea is as close to 100% as makes no difference. So whether the next outbreak is smaller or larger depends largeely on how effectively long term “social distancing” can be maintained until a vaccine. The initial success was “containment” using tracking and quarantine. When actual “Community Transmission” develops rigorous quarantine becomes far more important as then tracking merely confirms that most of the new cases were infected from “the community” rather than from a specific known contact who can be promptly isolated.
Unlike any other statements I have seen from national governments Singapore is clearly stating what the media and pretty well everyone who thinks they don’t need to know more, does not yet understand.
But it still needs “Explorable Explanations” of the model for even a small minority to not be surprised when subsequent waves happen.
[Tried to add this update as a comment but will have to figure that out later]
This is currently my only means of communication. After concluding that my phone could have been stolen (incomprehensibly while I was sleeping and with no other sign of intrusion) I took a half empty tram to the city and bought a $89 Telstra Slim Plus as the quickest way to keep in touch, try to find it if has mysteriously hidden itself and turned off regular alarm times and as spare phone for emergencies so I won’t have to deal with Telecos while sick even if it does turn up.
Convinced that Telstra would have a nightmarish registration system online I proceeded to the nearby Telstra shop cnr Bourke and Swanston with my phone and driver’s licence to have it activated while I wait and asked for the form. Told there was no problem but also no form and a “consultant” would assist. Some time later while reading the papers, at 13:39 I was told (without asking) “won’t be long now”. At 14:07 a “consultant” quickly and efficiently established that I simply wanted the phone activated without going online and went off with the phone and driver’s licence.
At 14:23 she returned and told me the phone was “activated” presenting me with the used SIM card container showing the mobile number and a message on the screen inviting me to send a text message. I returned to base to attempt catching my previous phone in hiding by tempting it to make a noise anywhere near me when I call or text it from the new phone. But first I entered a couple of phone numbers in the contact book to get back in touch. On calling each of them I got the message “this number cannot be reached at present from this service” or something equally uninformative.
So at 16:47 I gave up and texted “Hi” to my new number and duly received the message at the only number that CAN be reached with my “activated” phone. So I then had to go through exactly the procedure the “consultant” had spent 15″ pretending to do. But first I had to go online by turning on mobile data and clicking the link for “Activation”. That ensures that purchaser’s of new Telstra phones will set “mobile data” on so they can be billed for more than just making calls. Then I entered a 13 digit SIM card number from the cardboard container after carefully analysing the two different 13 digit barcodes and correctly identifying that the one with ON at the end must be the right one since the N is just to maximize confusion and is not a digit.
The purpose of this is presumably in the hope that I would have thrown away the cardboard SIM card number as completely useless since the SIM was already in the phone and registered to Telstra.
So much for Telstra. Now comes the government surveillance. I knew what to expect and had therefore taken my driver’s licence on the tram trip. Naturally everybody is required to continuously notify the three closest teleco antennas of where they are at all times when their phone battery has not been removed from the phone and this needs to be linked with other surveillance IDs such as driving licence. So I entered the name, address and date of birth shown on my driving licence.
This was completely unacceptable. I was further required to choose between “Mr”, “Miss”, “Mrs” or “Ms”, none of which is on my driver’s licence, compelled to retype the address omitting the “c/o” in front and compelled to provide an email address. Then had to choose between “Prepaid Max” and “Long Life”. There is a 47 page booklet “Telstra Pre-paid Welcome Guide” which I may consult later.
I knew I would have to provide a working email address since the online form would send a verification message and would not activate the phone without me answering it. This is a standard convenient way of handling the common problem of people needing to reset passwords etc after forgetting them and is particularly convenienent for correlating online activity with movement and phone calls as well as for Teleco spam. So I gave them my working gmail address and was told I would get a confirmation email in 4 hours. GOTCHA!
So a completely pointless 4 hour delay was imposed in which I could not search for my missing phone or make other calls. It isn’t even like the banks adding days of delay between accepting cash and adding it to an account because they keep the interest on the “float”. Nor does it serve any government surveillance purpose I can think of quickly (though perhaps others have given it more thought). Seems to just be Telecos being as irritating as possible. Perhaps as further punishment for using a pre-paid account instead of getting a “Customer ID” and linking in all financial transactions for surveillance.
Anyway, off I went to the park to finish reading the papers, honestly thinking that I would just be able to click on the email link without further hassles. OF COURSE NOT.
Google told me “Account Action Is Required” and then at 19:56 “Your password was changed 14 hours ago”. Same on both Tablet and Laptop. So either Google changed it or my phone WAS stolen. No problem, Google had kept insisting that I provide them with a phone number for verifying changed passwords, which is convenient both for solving that problem of verification when unable to access email and for ensuring that email addresses and phone numbers are tied together in both directions for surveillance. So I did.
AND NOW I AM REALLY STUCK. Since Google can only reset the password when verified from my old phone and the thief has the phone, Telstra won’t activate the new phone. I assume I will now have to call Telstra at some functioning number hidden towards the end of the 47 page booklet and then sort things out with Google later. First a good nights sleep.
Meanwhile, in case my access to this WordPress blog disappears I could start using another WordPress blog on the same account at:
“It’s time to become a revolutionary hero!” Tang thought, evoking the heroic tales from her textbooks of communist martyrs who were killed in the civil war, or by the invading Japanese.
The iconic image of a heroic rebel blocking a tank in Tiananmen Square 30 years ago is inspirational to any people, anywhere, fighting oppression. The identity of that person, and what became of him, are unknown. In that sense, he is ‘nobody’.
Of course, an individual can’t overthrow tyranny but, as history shows, you need masses of people with courage and willingness to make sacrifices under certain circumstances.
I came across this cartoon at the facebook page of Rose Tang, a veteran of Tiananmen Square. Her reminiscences of the event are worth reading.
‘Nobody can change anything’ – ‘nothing changes’ – are catch-cries of conservatism. The preference for stability, even under conditions akin to fascism, is also a hallmark of the pseudo-left. It is a particularly obnoxious attitude when those expressing it do not live under such conditions but the under the more preferable situation of bourgeois democracy.
We are indeed all nobody. Together, as nobodies, we can win the world!
Where there is repression, there is resistance – Mao.
‘Qiu disappeared April 29.
‘State security agents seized him that day from Beijing’s outskirts, his classmates say. Qiu’s offense? He was the leader of the Marxist student association at the elite Peking University, a communist of conscience who defied the Communist Party of China.
‘Over the past eight months, China’s ruling party has gone to extraordinary lengths to shut down the small club of students at the country’s top university. Peking University’s young Marxists drew the government’s ire after they campaigned for workers’ rights and openly criticized social inequality and corruption in China.
‘That alone was provocative. In recent years, China’s leaders have been highly sensitive to rumblings of labor unrest as the sputtering economy lays bare the divides between rich and poor — fissures that were formed, and mostly overlooked, during decades of white-hot growth’.
* * * *
June 4th marks the 30th anniversary of the day on which troops entered Tiananmen Square and opened fire upon protestors. It was an outcome of the restoration of capitalism in China, the victory of the ‘capitalist roaders’ within the Communist Party that Mao had warned against and led struggle against.
The idea that things can turn into their opposite is a very challenging one, but it is true.
The violent repression at Tiananmen Square is proof that the Communist Party was no longer revolutionary, no longer socialist but a case of ‘capitalism without democracy’.
The assassination of Syrian democratic revolutionaries Raed Fares and Hammoud al-Jneid in Kafr Nabl was very bad and sad news. Raed was an icon of the people’s uprising, especially in Kafr Nabl, from where he ran an alternative anti-regime, anti-Daesh, radio station called ‘Radio Fresh‘.
I followed Raed Fares on facebook over the years. Images of his satirical cartoons and political banners went viral. They had a distinct style and could be savage in their mocking of the regime and of the west’s failure to effectively support the revolutionaries.
There’s a lot of muck on social media but also great stuff, like the photos of Raed’s cartoons and banners, usually held up by groups of men in Kafr Nabl.
I’m republishing below a letter seeking support for Radio Fresh, to allow it to keep going.
Also, I’ve been gathering images of some of Raed’s work and share them here, after the letter below. My favourite is the one linking the Syrian uprising to the bigger picture of democratic revolution beyond Syria.
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Dear friends,
I am still reeling from the news of Raed Fares’s assassination on Friday. The heartbreak and collective grief so many Syrians and people around the world share at his loss are almost unbearable. But with every hour that passes it becomes more obvious what we need to do. We need to keep his work alive, we need to keep Radio Fresh on the air and power the work of the hundreds of journalists and activists he trained.
As a prominent civil society leader and media activist, Raed knew his life was in imminent danger, especially in his last weeks. His work was always very dangerous and he knew that both the Syrian regime and Al-Qaeda’s thugs wanted him dead. However he was determined to stay in his hometown of Kafranbel and continue his work. Fearing he might be assassinated, he gave instructions to his loyal students about how to continue what he had built. Radio Fresh would continue. The United Revolutionary Bureaus he set up would continue.
I’ve had many conversations over the last couple of days with Raed’s kids and his team. No one is giving up. Everyone wants to continue what Raed started — he made it clear that that’s what he would’ve wanted.
Raed launched a campaign to fund Radio Fresh three months before his death when international aid was cut to the project. His family and colleagues have called on us to do everything we can to continue the campaign, fund his work and keep Raed’s dream of independent radio alive.
Radio Fresh is an independent radio station in northwest Syria that resists both Assad and extremist groups. Raed considered Radio Fresh an essential service to the community – its brave reporters discussed local issues, investigated cases of injustice, and held authorities to account. They even warned the community of incoming airstrikes.
When he survived his first assassination attempt by an armed group in Idlib in January 2016, Raed posted this to Facebook:
“Freedom is an idea, and an idea cannot die
Fresh is an idea, and an idea cannot die
Ideas cannot die, people die, and we will stay here so the pain goes away
Oh my homeland, of sacrifices
I cannot thank enough those who stood in solidarity, and letters cannot do justice to my emotions, all I can say is: You are the Revolution, and the Revolution saved its children”
Let’s put our support now behind the hundreds of journalists and activists trained by Raed and let’s help continue their critical work. The extremists will not defeat his indomitable will.
Raed’s death is huge loss to humanity, to everyone everywhere who believes in freedom, democracy and equal rights for all. The only way to honour him is to continue his incredible work.
C21st Left 