(CN) — Politicization of disease has a long, depressing history in what we know today as the Western World. For centuries, it was a series of attacks against Jews — already segregated and ghettoized, forced into a job (money-lending) that the dominant Christian and Muslim populations claimed to abhor — which made it easier, when plague struck, to kill, sack and deport the residents of the ghettoes.
While Jews, so far, have escaped this fate during the Covid-19 pandemic, politicians around the world with medieval mindsets have employed the same tactics — with a twist, or several twists.
One goal of this series is to show how disease has been politicized since the Black Death, the worst pandemic in history, which arrived in Europe by 1347 after killing uncounted thousands in Asia.
A second goal will be to show how today’s vicious and increasingly hallucinatory politicization of Covid-19 reflects the pogroms of the past — again, with a twist. When the citizens of medieval Europe sacked and burned Jewish ghettoes during the Black Death, claiming that Jews were “poisoning the wells,” the Christians had no idea what caused the plague, or who carried it — what the vectors were.
Today we know. But the pattern is the same: Donald Trump blames China; China retorts, “We’ve controlled it better than you did;” Trump blames New York and California; Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro says it’s no problem at all; India’s Narendra Modi “opens up” his country to appeal to his relatively wealthy voters, despite the mounting and undercounted death toll.
The third goal will be to examine whether today’s politicization of disease differs from the previous ones, and if so, in what ways.
The conclusion we will state in advance: Pre-scientific societies, cloaked in ignorance, flailing about for a way to deal with plague, resorted to execration and violence against “socially distant” groups. And though we do not yet understand all the ins and outs of Covid-19, we — modern humanity — have fallen into the same execrable habits: Blame outsiders — the people and governments we already despise. Attack, defame, and loot if you can.
The Courthouse News database already contains more than 100 lawsuits about Covid-19 scams: phony virus tests, bogus vaccines, counterfeit masks, telephone fraud, internet fraud. Even televangelist Jim Bakker has been accused of peddling a phony cure, by the attorney general of Arkansas.
Seen from the awful heights of science today, the residents of 14th century Strasbourg, Basel and Frankfurt may be excused — perhaps — for resorting to mass terror in a time of mass fear.
But what excuse can government leaders make today for spending so much time politicizing a lethal disease, rather than devoting all their efforts to trying to limit its spread, seeking a cure, and spending money on the science needed for it, rather than on propaganda?
There is no excuse for this.
In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has claimed more than 500,000 lives and continues to stalk the world, it is worse than sad — it is a comment upon humanity — that so many so-called leaders, in so many countries — above all in Brazil, the United States, India, Russia and China — try to use a global catastrophe for small-minded, partisan political advantage that hurts their own people.
Plague Politics in Europe
Courthouse News outlined a history of plagues in a previous series.
This series will focus on how Western societies and governments have weaponized diseases and politicized them.
We begin with the Black Death, the worst pandemic in history, which killed one-third to one-half of the people of Europe. Most accounts peg its arrival in Europe at October 1347, when ships fleeing plague in the Crimea — or perhaps merely merchant ships — arrived in Messina, Sicily.