Milena Rampoldi, ProMosaik, 2/1/2022
Translated by Lena Bloch
On the
subject of coronavirus and the relationship between medicine and
totalitarianism, I spoke with Prof. Michael Schneider (born 1943). Schneider is
a writer and committed socialist, known among other things to this day from his
time in the student movement, as the author of “Neurose und Klassenkampf”
[“Neurosis and Class Struggle”. Engl. ‘Neurosis and Civilization : a Marxist/freudian
Synthesis’, Seabury Press 1976] and as the founder of the first Socialist Street
Theater in West Berlin. He stands out for his sharp criticism of the status
quo, and thus also by criticism of the prevailing “covid-variants” narrative,
which contains many elements that are not only political but also neurotic. But
it changed and became somewhat different. Power today is different. And
totalitarianism today is different.
In this Covid era, the connection between medicine, power and totalitarianism escapes the minds of so many, why is that?
The fact that the connection between medicine, power, and totalitarianism escapes the minds of so many is primarily because of the very nature of this new narrative, which is highly sophisticated and effective in its mass-psychological impact: That Sars-Cov-2 is a killer virus threatening all humanity, against which “we are at war,” as the French president proclaimed in April 2020.
In times of war and crisis, there is almost always seems to be a unity of purpose between the State and the citizens. In the permanent “war against Corona” and its ever-new “dangerous variants,” things are now similar to Orwell's ‘1984,’ where people are constantly mobilized and incited into fictitious wars against new enemies that no one ever gets to see. Even more sophisticated, indeed of almost sadistic genius (in the sense of psychological warfare) is the narrative (concocted by U.S. intelligence agencies and think tanks) of an invisible, treacherous enemy who can strike anytime, anywhere, and who can lurk inside any of us, inside your neighbor, your work colleague, even inside your dearest relatives, and even more so inside yourself.
Particularly insidious is the postulate of the “asymptomatically sick person" who, as a “super-spreader", endangers everyone else, fueling the suspicion of everyone against everyone and leading to a complete reversal of the presumption of innocence: In the fight against the invisible enemy, all people are not potentially healthy, but potentially sick. Every person is a suspected case that has not yet been checked and is a potential danger and must prove his or her innocence by means of rapid tests or vaccinations. If he/she fails to do so, removal and restrictions are permissible self-defense measures of society.
This narrative is new and so successful not least because it takes into its service above all collective ideals such as solidarity, responsibility towards fellow human beings, etc., which are dear to the left in particular. That is why its treacherous nature is not recognized by most leftists, social democrats and left-wing socialists, especially since they have just now, in the covid crisis, become the victims of their faith in the State: The fact that, after thirty years of neoliberal privatization and austerity policies (also and especially in the health sector), the hitherto weak State is now suddenly taking the reins and, as it seems, making the health of its citizens the top maxim of its actions, is seen by them as proof of the regained ethical dimension of politics. But why should the otherwise unscrupulous ruling elites have had suddenly decided to stop the global profit machine in the face of a pathogen that almost exclusively affects the "unproductive," the over-80s?
How different is power in these times from power in the traditional sense?
Unlike traditional dictatorships and totalitarian systems, most of which are or were organized along nation-states’ lines (which by no means precluded alliances between them - think of the fascist Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan) and which eliminated their political opponents or deported them into camps, this time we are dealing with a transnational biopolitical seizure of power that “begins at the level of global governance and cuts deeply into the sovereignty of the individual,” as Kees van der Pijl, professor of international relations at the University of Sussex, has pointed out in his brilliant study, ‘States of Emergency: Keeping the Global Population in Check’ (Clarity Press 2021). “The imposition of a State of Emergency in virtually the entire world was first and foremost a political move, demonstrably long in the making and coordinated in a series of transnational think tanks and supranational organizations such as the WHO and the World Bank. On their advice and explicit instructions, governments have put their populations in a stranglehold. After all, what is at stake is the survival of the existing social order, which has been run down socially, economically and environmentally.”
However, the program being implemented in the slipstream of the "pandemic," the so-called “Great Reset” (as the programmatic paper by Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret reads) has nothing to do with health. Rather, it is about maintaining the power of the oligarchy, the transnational ruling class centered around a new power bloc of intelligence agencies, IT giants and media conglomerates.
