By Denys Springer
The title of this article may very well alert some to think that they are the target or in the firing line. However, let me assure those concerned that I am looking at politics on a global scale because COVID-19 is a global pandemic.
Many individuals in politics throughout the world participate with good- intentions. Along the way, some are convinced to follow the few rotten-ones with influence within the party structure with the ways and means to convert a few. Failure to join the wolf-pack is detrimental to advancement, and working outside of the pack is implausible.
A classical example of this was when Rome was allowed to burn under Nero and that was not the original intention. Nero and his cohorts wanted to build a new modern Rome but to achieve his dreams and power he had to allow Rome to burn and rejoiced, regardless of the number of lives that was lost. However, this was his undoing.
Because of what we are now enduring I came across a quote by Lyndon Johnson in Kenneth Hudson book, “The Language of Politics” where Johnson was speaking about his great society which he saw as “a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and to reflect, not feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. It is a place where man can renew contact with nature”.
Extrapolating something out of his great society, I concluded that in our present situation, we should be thinking of feeding ourselves especially the little children and the poor among us and therefore food security should be at the head of government’s priority and not tourism at this juncture.
Moreover, the thought of workers having to remain in the hotel “onclave” away from their family just to look after the hotel guest is unacceptable. This, in my view, is a foolhardy and buffoonery.
In contrast to the above, I reviewed the writings of Thomas Hobbes, “The Leviathan” where he writes, “when a man is destitute of food or other things necessary for his life and cannot preserve himself any other way but by some fact against the law as if in a great famine he take the food by force or stealth which he cannot obtain for money nor charity, or in defense of his life snatch away another man’s sword – he is totally excused for the reason next before alleged”.
Bluntly put, destitution can easily turn an individual into a violent and aggressive thief.
We are now placed in that situation because the coronavirus which started in Wuhan, China, could have been avoided and the above would not have become a reality. What we saw at the embryonic stage in the form of the World Health Organization (WHO) and America attempting to enter Wuhan, was interrupted by the Chinese authorities claim that things are under control – has snowballed into a blatant lie.
This was later aided and abetted by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general for reasons of his own accepted the Chinese fairytale. Taiwan had suspected that something was amidst, and unable to trust China with the experience of SARS immediately closed its borders. Taiwan began implementing onboard quarantine of direct flights from Wuhan on January 2, 2020, established a response team, and activated the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC).
Minister of Health and Welfare, Dr Chen Shih-chung, Republic of China (Taiwan) said: “If it is indeed WHO’s mission to ensure the highest attainable standard of health for every human being, then WHO needs Taiwan just as Taiwan needs WHO. Yet, Taiwan has long been excluded from the WHO due to political considerations. This has been regrettable given all that Taiwan could share with the world thanks to its renowned public health experience, health system, NHI, and ability to perform rapid testing as well as research and manufacture vaccines and drugs against COVID-19.”
However, WHO director-general Tedros was bamboozled by China’s skullduggery was quick to acknowledge that China had the situation under control, a shining example to the world. New information from China proved most believers were fooled, affirming China’s totalitarian, deceptive, and dishonest state of play, cannot be trusted.
What is now clear in my mind is that the corrupt political order must now be of the past, hastened by COVID-19. The political directorate must remember the words of John Dunn where he affirms that “no man is an island” and that we “never know for whom the bell tolls”.
