A good novel can begin in the middle with the story and slowly uncover the back story and grip the reader to continue reading to the end even if the book is a sprawling tome with multiple sub-plots. To discuss the 2020 Covid horror has to begin in the middle.
In starting with the actually existing structure of industrial global civilization in 2020 the novelist could tell family stories of rich and powerful people and not so rich and powerful people. Could tell the story of Globalism from the end of WW1 to Covid insanity by moving through the institutions. Could cleverly weave like Tolstoy multiple narratives and present truth through human actors and frozen conflicts, discuss national governments and Transnational agreements between ostensibly opposed states. Perhaps a love story starts the story and perhaps a network of men without love or human emotions is the frame the love unfolds against.
A courageous female doctor who is Chinese say who loses her license for healing the sick with herbs and Acupuncture. Her husband a survivor of Topaz internment due to his Japanese ancestry an attorney disbarred for fighting for her reinstatement.
I have tried my hand at it. I am sometimes a fiction writer. Science Fiction of the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, and a bit of the 80’s I read extensively and since these writers read earlier writers I did as well. In fact by 1980 at age 23 I delighted in 12 boxes of pulp SF magazines I had accumulated from flea markets. Most were in bad shape. Covers only sometimes really were intact but I did not care. I owned gold. By 1987 and my move to SF I had only two or three pulp boxes remaining and some of the better stories by then had been republished. Next to a ruined car in the garage I rented they stayed until poverty forced me to surrender garage and ditch car I sought to repair.
Fast forward to 9/11 when listening to the radio I get coverage live of the Auto-Golpe-I knew immediately the story was fake-and suddenly Dystopian SF comes to life.
Fast forward to 2019 and China and Covid. I did think in 2019 that a lab leak of a biological weapon was killing people. I was confused though that planes presumably filled with the infected were flying everywhere. One of my favorite SF books was based on this scenario. The Earth Abides. Planes spread a virus and the world died in two weeks. The narrator survived because bitten by a snake he was isolated in the wild and the venom gave him protection. I live five blocks from Chinatown. By 2020 no one was sick. No Covid deaths Indeed the CDC says an adult male resident of Santa Clara county tested positive for the new coronavirus. He has been self-isolating since he returned from a trip to Wuhan on Jan. 24, officials say.
In early March 2020, an elderly man died in Placer County.
Health officials ruled the Rocklin resident’s death to be a result of COVID-19 — the disease caused by a novel coronavirus that, to this point, had appeared in a handful of cases up and down the West Coast.
The man, in his 70s with preexisting medical conditions, had been on a cruise ship that left from San Francisco, made four stops in Mexico, and returned in mid-February.
The death prompted Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare a state of emergency to allow the state to respond faster to health worker needs. Less than two weeks later, schools across the state would shutter and, shortly after that, California entered the first of several stay-at-home orders.
No one sick in SF though. Why? The novelist here moves narrative to governments and experts.
To maintain the fiction governments resort to fiction. The virus is fiction. No one knows except government experts. Governors look at the bottom line not science and obey experts. Above both governments and experts are non-governmental entities calling the shots.
Fast Forward to November 2022. We can resume commerce masked and gloved and VACCINATED. No other treatment is permitted. Captured medical boards and medical institutions punish and strip licenses from disobedient doctors who heal the sick.
Indeed laws are passed insisting any narrative of healing or any narrative promulgated by a doctor other than agreed upon by captured medical entities is misinformation and punishable not yet by death but by professional death. The vaccines for a bogus virus are killing and yet many employers mandate them-to include government forcing employees.
And now the Atlantic proposes an amnesty for the criminals but no Truth and Reconciliation process prior. Emily Oster, a proponent of lockdowns, a professor suggests “ Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward," she continues.
Except, they weren't “in the dark” about Covid. There were numerous sources pointing out the actual science that ran contrary to the mandate claims, and they were deliberately silenced by a vast media campaign. Evidence suggests that media platforms worked in tandem with Big Tech, the CDC and the Biden Administration. It was not a simple matter of overreaction, there was collusion to remove all counter-information.
This in turn created such a terrified hypnotic frenzy that people found themselves clinging to big government as it imposed and manufactured the crisis.
For example, Ramussen reported in January 2022 that Democratic voters supported the following Covid policy ideas (my annotations in bold, Rasmussen in normal text):
Fines for the unvaccinated: Fifty-eight percent (58%) of voters would oppose a proposal for federal or state governments to fine Americans who choose not to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
House arrest: Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Democratic voters would favor a government policy requiring that citizens remain confined to their homes at all times, except for emergencies, if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
Imprisonment for questioning the vaccine: Nearly half (48%) of Democratic voters think federal and state governments should be able to fine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications.
Forced quarantine: Forty-five percent (45%) of Democrats would favor governments requiring citizens to temporarily live in designated facilities or locations if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
Stripping people of their children: Twenty-nine percent (29%) of Democratic voters would support temporarily removing parents’ custody of their children if parents refuse to take the COVID-19 vaccine. That’s much more than twice the level of support in the rest of the electorate – seven percent (7%) of Republicans and 11% of unaffiliated voters – for such a policy.
Starting in the mid-1960s, Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce (1910–1989) became an outspoken critic of what he called the “technological” or “affluent” society that had developed in the West after the Second World War. Against the great majority of his contemporaries, Del Noce thought that, in spite of its democratic institutions and its professed liberalism, this new society did not mark a sharp break with the totalitarian tendencies that had emerged in the course of modernity, and that in fact “the widespread notion that the age of totalitarianisms ended with Hitlerism and Stalinism is completely mistaken.”1
According to Del Noce, the telltale sign of totalitarianism, which he had observed firsthand as a young man in the 1930s and 40s, is the “negation of the universality of reason, so that any form of opposition to established power . . . supposedly does not express rational concerns but conceals interests of class (according to Communism) or race (according to Nazism).” In other words, totalitarian systems monopolize power by affirming that rationality itself is political. They claim that their ideological narrative coincides with rational discourse and thereby exclude a priori all forms of criticism. In the 1960s, Del Noce recognized a reappearance of this phenomenon in the tendency by the advocates of the sexual revolution to deny the rationality of their opponents by attributing their stances to moral or psychological conditions such as “repressed psychology,” “bigotry,” “hatred,” “prejudice,” “animus,” etc. Del Noce observed that the politicization of reason was now being conducted in the name of the human sciences that had gained new prestige since the end of the war: psychology, anthropology, sociology, and psychoanalysis. This latter, in vulgarized form, underpinned the program of sexual liberation, viewed as a “struggle against repression” and the “breaking of taboos.” Del Noce argued that this trend was just one manifestation of a broader and deeper phenomenon: a new, nameless, “quiet” “totalitarianism of technical activity, [in which] all human activity is interpreted as finalized to transformation and possession.” Whereas older totalitarianisms politicized reason on the basis of a philosophy of history (Communism) or a mythical racial narrative (Nazism), the new one does so through the ideological invocation of “science” in a very broad sense. The result is, nonetheless, a “subordination of culture to politics,” which to Del Noce is precisely the defining characteristic of totalitarian societies, and is also perfectly compatible with the preservation of the formalities of democracy. His argument is interesting and deserves to be elucidated.
https://www.communio-icr.com/articles/view/augusto-del-noce-on-the-new-totalitarianism