DISCUSSION Here is an historical pandemic less than 100 years ago that killed some 50-100 million people, more than in the preceding war ... though war helped the spread and meant that the population was stressed. One might see Ebola as the natural consequence of the war on terror in some ways. Ebola breaks out in the very region that included the poster country (Sierra Leone) for intervention that kick-started the whole liberal internationalist operation. This meant pacification by intervention but also the forced arrival of market economics and ever-rapid urbalisation. A very post-modern war creates the conditions (in part) for a very curious disease that is not as simple as influenza and will probably kill many less but cause much more disruption to a more finely tuned international community. In a cultural situation where 3,000 killed in a single raid (9/11) creates more despair, dislocation, anxiety and cultural neurosis for longer (a decade and a half already) than the 40,000 who were killed in just one massive Allied bombing raid on Hamburg, the deaths of 5-12 million (the bet I would out on it at Ladbrokes if there is not more concerted action) would have proportionately more hysterical and culturally dislocating effects than the 50-100million of 1918. If just 500,000 of these were in the West and outside Africa, the cultural shock would be immense. Our entire culture has become narcissistically feminised (not a slur on women but a way of contrasting forms of behaviour that have been described neatly in these ways) where the obsession with security means that few are either resilient or capable of some sense of despairing necessary sacrifice that actually halt or defeats and evil. The health care sector has some of the last of these resilient and sacrificing creatures and it is they who seem to be going down first, possibly losing us some of the best of our own as war in 1914 lost us some of the best of that generation. Once that front line collapses, it could be a cultural rout. Why? Because we exist in a culture that is obsessed with evading death - hence the idiocies of transhumanist ideology. One cohort in particular will go into paroxysms of panic, those baby boomers who assumed they would live forever and that they were entitled or had rights to the good life. The poor West Africans simply cannot think in this way.
Posted on: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 21:06:37 +0000
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