Written by Alastair Crooke through the Strategic Culture Foundation,
Professor of American History USA At John Hopkins University, Mike Vlahos, in a series of short interviews with John Batchelor, he tells us how The coronavirus has become a hotbed, pushing different leaders in the United States. USA Take existential positions on how to treat this virus. Several distinct American states insisting on following directly polarized paths: compulsory "refuge" (the American term for distancing) against economic openness; States against the federal government; Blue against red; Others against GOP; "Authoritarianism" versus Leave to Do and American Traditional Liberties – and Now, Internal State, Blue-Red Conflicts (ie Ventura County vs. California Governor, on the burning issue of open or closed beaches) ; and even counties against states.
Vlahos points out that the battlefield, thanks to the virus, has become existential. It is no longer blue / red, just a handmade rhetorical pomp: it is embodied; it's organic meat; it is cut into meat, even when the future of the virus is unknown. In fact, the stranger deepens the fears. The choice: "food on the table" in a reopening of the economy (even at the real risk of the return of these "doctors of death"), or play safely, passively, with the & # 39; remoteness. The collective psyche is divided; passions are rising; Arms bloom and militias march past. It is not theater: their fervor is rooted in everyday life: masks or not; social or not; work or not
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"The American constitutional order is cracking before our eyes: that we have bypassed the constitutional crisis during the last quarter of a century, this is not a guarantee: (because) each new test is even more bitterly contested and even less resolved ", Vlahos Explain:
"Today, two irreconcilable visions of American life believe that they can only last if they have complete order," said Vlahos. "However, ours has been a shared constitutional order … The only push towards this goal, especially now by Democrats in the Blue State, has damaged our constitutional order and is laying the groundwork for a large-scale crackdown on legitimacy"
The executive, who initially claimed exclusive authority over Covid's practice, backed away from the governors who claimed (and rightly so) that they enjoy joint sovereignty with the federal government. The blue and red governors, both, have completely crossed the targets, but both are blatantly exercising their respective sovereignty.
Meanwhile, Trump rides the two horses: He supports the libertarian rebels of the second amendment, while establishing a fully authoritarian and federalized bailout economy at the top of which he will chair: having completed their coup by merging the Treasury and the Fed, as a single printing works (dollar), and at the top of a cascading cornucopia of cornucopia.
Today, there are two irreconcilable visions of American life. After 1992, the two parties alternated presidents every eight years. However, with each subsequent administration, the political environment became even more wicked and divided. Now there is no relationship between the parties: except as sworn enemies, Vlahos watch.
On the one hand, we have "unionists," who expect public deference to the judgments and authority of the elite technocracy (who 39 be it financial or medical), and on the other hand, a tradition of state sovereignty, dating back to 1871 (the Articles of Confederation), which do not defer to the federal authorities , but who disdain them. Hence the culture of the militia (often armed), ready to fight "the Federals" for their "freedoms".
The latter touches a deep entanglement of excitement: the age-old struggle against the tentacles of the British imperial octopus to secure America's "freedoms". Therefore, the blockade and the terrible predictions of the medical world which require an economic closure, feel like "another agenda" (the octopus agenda), a back door, by which the globalists can complete their project (imagined) to feudalize to a people who would otherwise be free. One consequence of this is that after the virus, the shutdown and the epidemiologists will be widely blamed for the impending depression, and the risky bubbles of the economy that were already inflated before the virus was forgotten.
Vlahos is a bit shy about whether, or how, a reconciliation of these distant parts can occur. The new yorker thought In the same vein: "The pandemic has dangerously deepened divisions across the United States, a nation that has already been divided in recent years by race, class, religion and politics talking about garbage. The concept of "one nation, indivisible" seems increasingly difficult to realize, even unreachable, in these scary days of deadly pathogens, increasing unemployment and food shortage. For many, the future looks so uncertain. The same is true for survival, a privilege taken as a virtual right by most Americans thanks to economic and medical achievements since the Second World War. "
In this context of "cracked nation", the American army. USA He posted eye-catching posters, calling for national unity and the use of face masks. (They can see each other here) And they all have a remarkably nostalgic style of World War II: "It’s also a war of women"; "Fight against the spread of coronavirus"y "Let's all fight" (When a GI launches forward, in attack mode, its brilliant bayonet corrects itself).
Ok, ok, today everyone uses the military meme. This is not the point. Ask the historian, Professor Vlahos. He will tell you that the highlight is that the American Civil War never really ended, and is still there, latent, today, except …
Except … during the FDR mandate, when the United States fought World War II, that's the point. It was only then that the United States was a unitary state: "one nation, undivided". In other words, when he was fighting a war. So how do you reconcile the divided psyche of the United States? How to win re-election? Well … blame China. Hot or cold? Who knows? It will be a long and tense month until November.
At some level, China's target could be seen as a defensive narrative reversal tactic, blaming any mismanagement of the spread of coronaviruses in the United States. USA It will inevitably be exploited at the electoral level. But on another level, the danger is that The White House and the Pentagon seem to be turning to justify the rhetoric.
. In this election year, someone should be blamed (this is the usual practice in politics), but in doing so, we are quickly heading towards the unknown.
What we suspect is that it risks turning into a "war" of system fragility. This is China, these are not small fry. Nassim Taleb points out that it is easy to detect the fragility of the system: fragility (and its opposite) can almost always be detected, using a simple test of asymmetry: everything that is maintained by a sudden change (or shock), it is resistant; The reverse is fragile. Washington, according to its own liberal market parameters, believes that the Chinese economy is extremely fragile. However, we do know that China has been long preparation for this moment (expected).
Will China be the most fragile? Both undoubtedly have weaknesses in their economies; And yet, is not a political system that "cracks before our eyes" an obvious fragility? Will a sudden "crash" divide you into several parts? Or will the escalation against China trigger another FDR "moment" of healing for your divided psyche? China, for its part, benefits from a certain popular experience of solidarity and regulation. The party remains a formidable "machine", covering all areas of life. Is this not a sign of resilience? Many unknowns
Europeans will have no call to brag about these cracks in the United States. USA, because they have theirs. Did the 2016 presidential elections herald the increase in state sovereignty in the United States? 2016 and Brexit did not foreshadow the "populism" of today in Europe? Will the virus bring these "broken" European visions into an open assault on an EU "octopus" who is no longer facing Covid-19?
In the United States, the virus has created ancient and irreconcilable differences in the nature of the state and the nature of power in the aftermath of its civil war. European thought, between the two world wars, fell into the relativism, nihilism and melancholic existentialism of an Albert Camus. He has also witnessed massive and bloodstained government intrusions into all facets of civil society, with the rise of National Socialism, Trotskyism and Stalinism. Consequently, Europe is today immobilized with its own (apparently) irreconcilable polarities, but it does not have the means to lean inward, towards a transcendent framework which can make these conflicts intelligible and allow them to be overcome.
The attempt to develop an impersonal philosophical standard for judging has failed, precisely because the attempt to liberate the ethics of history, with an emphasis on personal autonomy, hampers all answers to questions: for whose justice; by what rationality; whose narrative we must decide.
So the story of the Coronavirus in the West, is also the story of the story of Nassim Taleb about this strange event and this "sudden shock", revealing our hidden fragility of presuming that life is safe and predictable. Modern man is taken after Prometheus: Prometheus is famous for having earned man his liberation from "the tyranny of the gods". However, what Prometheus has done is to teach man to consider himself autonomous; do not consider anything sacred; "hurt wounds in the divine environment"; relegate nature to many raw materials; view technology as the greatest success; to explore the deepest secrets of nature and feel free to play with fire.
WB Yeats once said, "God save me from the thoughts that men only think in the mind. If thought were only a mental matter, man would be a windowless monad, a monstrosity linked to the ego. "Yes. Just as the opposite poles never unite at their own level, a higher" third "is always required, through which the two parts of the psyche, artificially at war, can be united in synthesis. And since Nature derives from both the unconscious and the conscious, perhaps the unexpected intrusion of Nature, which emphasizes our human precariousness and the reality shock that constitutes life, may be able to 39; unite the cut spheres.
Ted Hughes, the famous Shakespearean poet and student, tells his own story escape the arid intellectual anomie at the academy through The Burnt Fox, in which he remembers struggling as a student at Cambridge University with a tutorial essay. Desperately abandoning the task at two in the morning, the young Ted goes to bed and dreams that he is visited by a strange figure, half man and half fox, "just out of an oven" and in a terrible agony for the burns that cover his body from head to toe. This enigmatic creature moves towards the desk and places its paw on the sheets where Hughes desperately tries to compose an essay, leaving a bloody imprint and saying:
"Stop it, they destroy us". Hughes awakens a sadder, wiser man.
And with the advent of the Coronavirus, maybe it is the burnt fox that ends up laughing?