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New Pandemics, Old Politics. Alex de WaalЧитать онлайн книгу.

New Pandemics, Old Politics - Alex de Waal


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turmoil spread brings immediate political advantages. More common are those who pay enough attention to half-convince themselves of a simplified storyline, and then screen out contradictory information.

      In a crisis, political leaders don’t usually consult the people, because it’s complicated and takes time and they don’t know what questions to pose. For those who are genuinely committed to democracy, or to finding the best all-of-society way through the crisis, it’s a short-cut that they will come to regret. But the mistake is easily made because there’s no readily available template for a democratic pandemic response.

      We shouldn’t take the martial language too literally, and those who know it are well aware that it’s not a ‘real’ war. Scientists and public health experts see it as a way of validating their work, as an innocent cover story that appeals to a spirit of solidarity and selflessness and helps us cope with dangers and setbacks. Those are fair considerations, but the script has other consequences too. Policies are standardized and imposed by decree. The archetype is how the German imperial government defeated cholera in Hamburg, described at the end of chapter 2, and the American army’s conquest of yellow fever in Cuba, Panama, and the southern United States, described at the beginning of chapter 3. The way in which HIV and AIDS policies became part of an international security regime is examined in chapter 4, and in chapter 5 I will show some of the errors made by militarizing the response to Ebola. In America, the role of soldiers in ‘fighting’ diseases helps validate the apparently limitless expansion of the tasks given to the Pentagon – a definitional inflation that makes ‘war’ at once all-encompassing and meaningless.

      The ‘war on disease’ is also a script for conquest. The European version was born exactly at the zenith of colonial ambition and still carries that imperial DNA, as a project for dominion over the territories of the globe, its peoples and its microbes. Its language is male, white, and controlling. It promises mastery over nature, setting our bounds wider still and wider, making our mighty technologies mightier yet. This is perhaps its most insidious implication: a victory over a disease is a validation of a benevolent (for us) Anthropocene.

      The main topic of this book is the construction and reconstruction of the Euro-American ‘war on disease’ narrative. I chose three historical pandemics for this purpose. Cholera is the case in chapter 2. This is where Europe’s war on disease began two hundred years ago, as a handful of metaphors, images, and practices. Of these the most consequential was the concept of policing the contagious, inherited from the plague and applied to cholera. At that time, the idea of a ‘war’ that resembled a real war would have been fanciful. That changed, and by the end of the 19th century a firm storyline took shape. Its first element was the plan of campaign – an assemblage of instruments for social control, which we could distil into a slogan: lookout, cleanup, and lockdown. ‘Lookout’ was alertness for cases, especially sick travellers, and detecting the pathways of disease spread. ‘Cleanup’ was sanitation: personal cleanliness, fresh air, clean drinking water, draining stagnant water in which insects might breed, controlling vermin and disposing of sewage and rubbish. ‘Lockdown’ was quarantine, sequestration, isolation, and curfew – policing people and pathogens. The next operation in the war story was conquest and dominion: the project of exploring, naming, classifying, and controlling the entire surface of the planet and every living thing upon it, from microbes to human beings to forests. In short: imperial exploration, expansion, and subjugation. The final element was the technology for victory, when microbiologists began crafting ‘magic bullets’ that could hit those invisible enemies.

      The war on disease was refashioned after World War II, when international health campaigns against smallpox and polio registered huge gains. The successes were such that the medical academy was ready to declare victory over infectious diseases altogether. This was hubris. In chapter 4, I turn to a momentous setback with a surprising twist: HIV/AIDS. The story of the global response to this pandemic is inspiring – and also confounds the standard narrative. A coalition of people living with HIV/AIDS and a wider community of carers, physicians, and global health advocates pursued an agenda of health and human rights, which surpassed expectations on both counts. They sometimes used fighting language, but in the different sense of a struggle for liberation and emancipation. AIDS was exceptional, however. For other ‘emerging and re-emerging’ infectious diseases, the ‘war on disease’ was reinvented. This is the focus of chapter


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