Our leaders
are terrified. Not of the virus – of us
By Jonathan Cook
March 27, 2020
"Information
Clearing House"
- You can almost
smell the fear-laden sweat oozing from the pores of
television broadcasts and social media posts as it
finally dawns on our political and media
establishments what the coronavirus actually means.
And I am not talking about the threat posed to our
health.
A worldview
that has crowded out all other thinking for nearly
two generations is coming crashing down. It has no
answers to our current predicament. There is a kind
of tragic karma to the fact that so many major
countries – meaning major economies – are today run
by the very men least equipped ideologically,
emotionally and spiritually to deal with the virus.
That
is being starkly exposed everywhere in the west, but
the UK is a particularly revealing case study.
Dragging their heels
It emerged
at the weekend that Dominic Cummings, the
ideological powerhouse behind Britain’s buffoonish
prime minister Boris Johnson, was pivotal in
delaying the UK government’s response to the
coronavirus – effectively driving Britain on to the
Italian (bad) path of contagion rather than the
South Korean (good) one.
According to
media reports at
the weekend, Cummings initially stalled government
action, arguing of the coming plague that “if that
means some pensioners die, too bad”. That approach
explains the dragging of heels for many days, and
then days more of dither that is only now coming to
a resolution.
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