The Savagery of Pandemic Salvation
2/28/03 ended 1,090 days of operating under special powers in California
The question – which has troubled Agamben – is: “How can it happen that an entire country, without realizing it, collapses ethically and politically because it has been confronted with a disease?” Extending his argument in earlier pieces, Agamben insists that the threshold between humanity and barbarism has been crossed. Firstly, people are allowed to die alone and cremated without funerals. The denial of funerals is unprecedented. Secondly, lockdowns have restricted freedom of movement to an unprecedented extent. They have also suspended “bonds of friendship and love”. All of this is done based on risks – not things which are known. These risks cannot be known or limited. And Agamben thinks it is long-lasting – both because the state intends to continue “social distancing” after the lockdown, and because present trauma will not be easily erased. Agamben argues that this was able to happen because of the artificial split between bodily life and emotional/cultural life. This split is encouraged by modern medicine. It is now being extended beyond its “proper” sphere. He also criticises the failures of the church to stand up to barbarism and the legal system to constrain executive power.
The lie reigns, and there is no citizenship for the truth. You have experienced this in recent years seeing with what brazenness the mainstream has delivered propaganda on behalf of the pandemic narrative, censuring every discordant voice; and today those who are not in agreement with the System are not only derided and discredited but are even criminalized, pointed out as public enemies, and passed off as madmen on whom compulsory health treatment should be imposed. These are the means that every totalitarian regime has used to deal with political and religious adversaries. Everything is repeating itself, right before our eyes, in a much more subtle and slimy way. Conversely, those who bow down to the tyranny and offer it their fidelity are publicly praised, seen on all the television programs, and pointed out as an authoritative reference.
“We live in a nightmare of falsehoods, and there are few who are sufficiently awake and aware to see things as they are. Our first duty is to clear away illusions and recover a sense of reality. If war should come, it will do so on account of our delusions, for which our hag-ridden conscience attempts to find moral excuses. To recover a sense of reality is to recover the truth about ourselves and the world in which we live, and thereby to gain the power of keeping this world from flying asunder.” 1949 Berdyaev
As early as 1882, in his Second Discourse on Dostoevsky, Soloviev foresaw - and condemned - the sterility and cruelty of the collectivist tyranny which a few years later would oppress Russia and mankind. "The world must not be saved by recourse to force," Soloviev said. "One could imagine men toiling together toward some great end to which they would submit all of their own individual activity; but if this end is imposed on them, if it represents for them something fated and oppressive... then, even if this unity were to embrace all of mankind, universal brotherhood would not be the result, but only a giant anthill." This "anthill" was later constructed through the obtuse and cruel ideology of Lenin and Stalin.
In his final work, The Three Dialogues and the Story of the Antichrist(finished on Easter Sunday 1900), one is struck by how clearly Soloviev foresaw that the 20th century would be "the epoch of great wars, civil strife and revolutions." All this, he said, would prepare the way for the disappearance of "the old structure of separate nations" and "almost everywhere the remains of the ancient monarchical institutions would disappear." This would pave the way for a "United States of Europe."
Christopher Dawson shared some of Marx’s concerns concern that in the bourgeois world the urbanized proletariat, toiling endlessly for the nouveau lords of capitalistic commerce, is cut off from the duties of distributive justice, which their aristocratic and feudal forbears either executed or at the very least praised with their lips. As Dawson explains, the bourgeois spirit “turns the peasant into a minder of machines and the yeoman into a shopkeeper, until ultimately rural life becomes impossible and the very face of nature is changed by the destruction of the countryside and the pollution of the earth and the air and the waters.” But Dawson’s displeasure with the bourgeois mind reaches beyond mere Marxist anxieties over the ascendancy of alienation, the gluttonous destruction of the earth, and the exploitation of many who inhabit it—substantive as these crises may sometimes be. For the Catholic historian, the highest spiritual matters are at stake: “there is a fundamental disharmony between bourgeois and Christian civilization and between the mind of the bourgeois and the mind of Christ.”
I leave the last thought with Agamben. https://bluelabyrinths.com/2023/01/16/giorgio-agamben-atomic-warfare-and-the-end-of-humanity/
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