The global spread of the Coronavirus pandemic has been fundamentally associated with the nation of China. To be more specific however, it is the Middle Kingdom’s governing apparatus as it is dominated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that is ultimately deserving of that nefarious association.
While racists in many countries have directed much of their anger over the Coronavirus at Chinese people as individuals and in general, it is the CCP’s heedlessness, self-denial, and willful obfuscation and equivocation that should bear the blame for what the pathogen is doing to populations around the world.
And yet, those who have studied the history of modern political systems should not be surprised by the Chinese government’s criminally-negligent response. We are talking about a highly-repressive, one-party government that has emasculated any semblance of human rights and jailed and killed thousands upon thousands of its citizens going back to the Tiananmen massacre in 1989 and well beyond that.
The concept of truth has fared no better under the party’s scathing glare. As Hannah Arendt said about other authoritarian regimes of the past in her momentous 1951 book “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the CCP suffice it to say, not only has the power of physical compulsion, but also the ability to “turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.”
With its malicious lies, neurotic whitewashing, and duplicitous historical revisionism, the CCP, in its efforts to contain the Coronavirus both quantitatively and qualitatively, has been exposed for the reprehensible institution that it is. In mitigating the worst effects of the Coronavirus outbreak, the CCP searched for excuses and expediency rather than hard-headed scientific explanations and moral accountability.
The Coronavirus has now infected much of the civilized world—needlessly so. Had the Chinese Communist Party not ignored the early warnings of its medical experts about the potential of a major viral outbreak and then proceed to suppress the extent of it in the city of Wuhan where it is widely-believed to have originated, the likelihood of containing the Coronavirus before it could expand outside China’s borders would have been greater.
But by the time the authorities in Beijing were compelled to face the harsh reality of the situation, it was too late to prevent the virus’s expansion beyond Wuhan and the surrounding Hubei province. The rest is now history on a cataclysmic scale as medical experts the world over desperately seek effective solutions to stop the Coronavirus.
Which all brings us back to the Chinese Communist Party and its exponential miscarriage of crisis management. How Beijing has so unconscionably handled the virus outbreak can be read in a wider geopolitical context. The context I speak of entails the fissures that have taken in place in democracies over the last ten years or so. In the face of political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 proposition that liberal democracy was by far the most beneficial socio, economic, and political path forward for mankind, the focus of expectations has since shifted towards the bursting of globalization’s and democracy’s bubble in several countries.
At this moment in history we find liberal democracies on their heels, most disturbingly in the most liberal and tolerant of them all, the United States of America. Democracy’s waning star has been forced to give a great deal of ground to autocracies---or to use the more euphemistic term for these not wholly repressive regimes, “illiberal”---as societies discover that tyranny and the discourse of amoral power were never dead and buried but are very much alive and kicking.
The onset of the Coronavirus pandemic has only exacerbated liberal democracy’s gradual fragmentation as rule and order take precedence in many places over collective and personal freedoms. In Hungary for example, President Viktor Orban has taken advantage of the pandemic to legitimize the Hungarian parliament granting him the power to rule by decree. The pre-Corona crisis Orban had already been cast as one of those illiberal leaders who are slowly but surely monopolizing political power in their nation.
Another example of potential political opportunism in regards to the pandemic can be found in the Philippines where President Rodrigo Duterte has been given emergency powers to fight the Coronavirus. It’s a move fraught with risk as it evokes painful memories of martial law under the former president Ferdinand Marcos. It was Marcos’s very similar claim to the necessity of executive emergency powers in 1972 that opened the door to what would be a twenty-year dictatorship rife with debilitating corruption and malignant authoritarianism.
It has been a signature of Duterte’s 30-year political career to exhibit anti-democratic tendencies. So one would be prudent to not take Duterte’s word that he would not contemplate abusing any emergency powers for his own political benefit.
Some say in hindsight that Francis Fukuyama may have gotten somewhat ahead of himself in his analysis about the indispensability of liberal democracy for post-Cold War homo sapiens. But in any case he was correct to seize upon the historical moment of Soviet Communism’s fall to champion how undeniably salutary liberal democracy is for the world.
That is to say, liberal democracy with all its imperfections, still does a great deal more good than harm for the greatest number of people, more so than any other socio-political form and ideology has in the past and present, and probably in the future.
When democratic ideals and practices are asphyxiated as they are in China, the collective welfare, individual human rights, the idea of good and responsible governance, and general apprehensions in favor of the truth all suffer as a result. As the world is finding out ever so tragically in the time of the Coronavirus, no good can come of such a state of affairs.
ALLEN GABORRO
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