The global pandemic and World War I: The ruling class decides for death

The pandemic is, as the WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North wrote in May 2020, a “trigger event,” analogous to the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, which set off a chain of events that culminated in the outbreak of a global cataclysm. “The assassination accelerated the historical process,” North explained, “but it acted upon preexisting and highly inflammable socioeconomic and political conditions. The same can be said of the pandemic.”

[wsws.org]

{As the conclusion of the second year of the pandemic approaches and as mass death continues seemingly without end, the analogy to World War I is being tragically and brutally substantiated. [wsws.org] }

{“You have a mission of sacrifice; here is a post of honour where they want to attack. Every day you will have casualties. … On the day they want to, they will massacre you to the last man, and it is your duty to fall.”}

What is it our brothers and sisters are falling for today!?! The indoctrination of capitalism which is a fallacy in reality itself, created a false narrative of democratic socialism. The indoctrinated are engulfed in an illusion. Within that illusion they have been divided further more into trivial tribes under the leaderships of the sort who suppress a genuine unity of people and nature for a socialist democracy. Spare me the rhetoric of we live in a republic. I can debunk its definition easily. When the ruling class owns and controls 90+% of all media and your politicians, our elections are bought and controlled, by no means is this a republic.

{The signal was given by Biden in July, when he announced that the US was “declaring our independence from a deadly virus… We can live our lives, our kids can go back to school, our economy is roaring back.”

“Independence” from the virus has not meant that infections and deaths would decline but rather that no significant effort would be made to stop death on a mass scale. The same policy has been implemented in Europe, and enormous pressure has been brought to bear on countries that had pursued an elimination strategy (including New Zealand and other countries in the Asia-Pacific) to reverse course. Lockdowns, contact tracing, testing and all other public health measures essential to controlling and eliminating the virus have been systematically abandoned.

The consequences were both predictable and catastrophic. The claim that the virus could be stopped through vaccination alone is exposed by the massive spike in new cases globally.}

Independence is lost in division, under confinement within their capitalism. When a people hold society as the utmost primary objective, they unite under the worse conditions to benefit the whole. Us and them diminishes greatly for us all. We're dying as separates stuck in a surreal illusion to benefit largely corporations. Don't just think virus and war here. We're dying and harmed in this manor throughout virtually every aspect of our society. Healthcare, medicines, food we eat, environmental issues they cause, military style policing, cancer causing products, water in many of our cities, just off the top of my head.

{In the United States, more than 1,000 people are dying every day. New cases are at 90,000 and rising. In Michigan, now the center of the pandemic in the US, more than 17,000 new cases were reported during the past two days, along with 280 deaths. New cases in Michigan are now higher than at any point in the entire pandemic, with a large percentage consisting of “breakthrough” infections of those who have been vaccinated.

The official death toll from COVID-19 in the US, currently at nearly 800,000, will likely surpass 1 million by the spring of 2020. Total deaths in 2021 are already more than the number of dead in 2020, with more than one month left in the year.}

Europe, your numbers are in there also and looking just as bleak if not worse.

{Most alarmingly, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) reported this week that child infections are again on the rise. There were 141,905 new pediatric COVID-19 cases for the week ending November 18, up from 122,000 the week prior. More than 150 children under the age of 18 are hospitalized every day, and the overall death toll among children has risen to 636.}

Guess what's missing from MSCM? News of any ruling class members child dying? Go on, give it to me if you have it.

{The homicidal, indeed criminal, outlook of the ruling class was articulated in an article published in The Atlantic yesterday by Juliette Kayyem, the former assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security under Obama and faculty chair of the Homeland Security program at Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Under the headline, “The Pandemic is Ending With a Whimper,” Kayyem acknowledges that more than 1,000 Americans are dying every day but insists that it is time to declare the war over and move on.

One might ask Ms. Kayyem precisely how many deaths does she and others who have a “higher tolerance” consider to be “an acceptable trade-off”? 10,000? 100,000? 1 million? What is the final calculus of her “subjective, political, nonscientific … value judgements”?}

{This is a monstrous policy, and those carrying it out and advocating for it are nothing less than politically criminal. How is driving students back to the classrooms and workers back to unsafe workplaces any different from sending soldiers out into an endless wave of artillery shells and machine gun fire? The outcome is the same.}

{A final comparison to World War I is perhaps the most important. The war was finally brought to an end through the intervention of the working class, culminating in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and a wave of revolutionary struggles throughout Europe. Similarly, a change in policy in response to the pandemic will not be realized outside of a massive social and political movement of the international working class to demand a strategy of global elimination.}