A few months ago, the world was a conglomerate of passive states run by incompetent parliaments who were slow in taking any lasting decision, argued forever, and struggled to stay awake during meetings. Yet, this did not seem to matter to the average individual. Until a few days ago when all this changed, people were free to move, to work and to fly. They could be in any part of the world they wished to go. I loved that freedom. I had countless days where I'd wake up in the morning not knowing where I'd end up that very evening: Malta? London? Paris? Berlin? Vienna? Leipzig? Aarhus? They were all a few hours away. I could reach any of them in most days with just 100 Euro, if I'd wake up early in the morning to book my flight.
I'd hear people complain that the middle seat in Ryanair wasn't comfortable enough or be annoyed when trains were late or the airport was a few hours away from the desired destination. But we all had that freedom to be anywhere, do anything, be anything. We had the freedom to be wherever we wanted to be -- to cross borders in the name of love, work, fun and life.
In the name of the coronavirus, a cold that sometimes leads to viral pneumonia and becomes deadly, in the space of a few weeks, the free world has slipped into strict military rule. One by one, hours apart, countries did away with democracy and brought in military rule. New laws were passed overnight, and, in a few days, we, people who used to be free, find ourselves jailed in our own houses -- like common criminals.
The phone that makes me feel at home in London, Tel Aviv or Abu Dhabi -- the phone I used to beat the locals with in finding food or getting rides on uber is now about to be used to jail me. Like the rest of my family and all my friends, I am under house arrest, as if I had committed a crime. There is a two week jail sentence for crossing borders that I'd normally cross many times a week.
Under wartime legislation, the governments have found new power -- the power to be heroes and save keep the people too busy with their own lives to hold them responsible for setting and not achieving impossible targets as Greta Thunberg put it, "fairy tales of eternal economic growth".
The military rule is in. The dictators may find it hard to relinquish their newfound power and go back to inefficient decision making algorithms. Trump may not like to go back to not being impeached. Putin will never want to step down. Xi might want to take over the world. The war is raging and the gun have not yet been brought out. Will there be guns? Will they be brought out? While I hope a war where the world is split on a piece of napkin yet again like it was in the 1940s is still unlikely, I fear this more than any virus.
Will there be a way out? will we be/are we too weak and to scared for any form of defence? We are all locked-in after all.
A group of people want to establish in the court of law that China is responsible for this pandemic. That China should pay. It is conceivable that a judge might rule against China and the newly found war powers brought in to make America Great and extend wartime dictatorship beyond this epidemic.
A group of people want to establish in the court of law that China is responsible for this pandemic. That China should pay. It is conceivable that a judge might rule against China and the newly found war powers brought in to make America Great and extend wartime dictatorship beyond this epidemic.
America is no longer the world's strongest and largest economy. They do, however, have the largest and strongest guns. In the current state of emergency, the guns are easier to fire. If the guns are brought in the game, there's nothing to challenge American supremacy. War would be a way to keep America Great. For a short while, as empires fall only from within.
Without military escalation, America could look quite bad. They managed the pandemic way worse than China. In front of the virus, their democracy is inferior to China's dictatorship. The Chinese claim to have stopped it and are free, while the Americans may fail -- e.g., if the virus is kept back by quarantine and, as soon as quarantine is lifted, it comes back, keeping us forever prisoners into our own homes.
When the French revolution came about, people could go to England and find shelter. After the iron curtain split Europe, people would find ways to go past it and be free. Now, it's unclear where freedom is. Before the escape route was clear if challenging to get to.
Sure, a brief quarantine will lower death rates and help medical systems cope. But will it end? and what will happen next?
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