Leading liberal democracies have turned out to be catastrophically unprepared for a pandemic – much as they were not prepared for the current epidemic of violence and other challenges.
Today, after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, we can draw the initial conclusions. The main one is that Western countries happened to be the least prepared for a cataclysm of this kind. I wouldn’t want to draw parallels with either totalitarian China or Vietnam, or the authoritarian regimes of Russia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, or even Japan or South Korea, because we are talking here about completely different cultural codes. But let’s compare the situation in the democratic countries of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, as well as in Israel.
As a starting point, I have picked countries (or administrative units) that have an equal number of people.
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So, at the middle of June in Sweden (10 million people) there were more than 53,000 infected and 5,000 dead. In Belgium (11 million people) – 60,000 infected/about 10,000 dead. In the Netherlands (more than 17 million people) – about 50,000 infected and 6,000 dead. In the stronghold of the Socialists – New York state (19 million people): more than 400,000 infected and 31,000 (!) dead. In New Jersey (9 million people) – 170,000 infected/almost 13,000 dead.
Now let’s compare. In exhausted-by-crisis Greece (11 million people, as in Belgium) – 3,000 infected and fewer than 200 dead. In post-Soviet Hungary and the Czech Republic (10 million people, as in Sweden): respectively – 4,000 infected/about 560 dead and 10,000 infected/300 dead. In poor Romania (about 20 million people – equal to the population of the New York state and the Netherlands): 22,500 infected and about 1,500 dead. In Israel (more than 9 million people), with its strategic challenges: 19,5000 infected/300 dead. In poor Cyprus, where the population is 1 million, the number of dead is 6.5 times less than in prosperous Luxembourg, where the population is 600,000 (18 versus 110).
Here we see a striking phenomenon: in the rich, wealthy states of Western Europe (with only rare exceptions) and leading states of the USA, the situation is much worse than in relatively poor Eastern Europe and in Israel.
Any attempt to find some circumstantial reason for this would be artificial. The Czech Republic has no warmer climate than Belgium. Greece is no more isolated than Sweden. Israelis are far less disciplined than the people of New Jersey or the Netherlands. The epidemic had a chance to come to Hungary much faster than to the UK islands.
The reason is a different one. While Eastern Europe, Greece, Cyprus and Israel were solving real problems, Western democracies were focused on fictional problems. Having created a world of romantic illusions and utopias brought to life by “progressive” quasi-Marxists professors, they lived in it. The resources of Cyprus, Bulgaria, and Croatia are incomparably more limited and modest, but these countries use them quite rationally. And while the Western world, in a state of relaxed complacency, cherished their beautiful nonsense, these countries acted and saved their own people.
How did it go in the countries of liberal democracy? Belgium is a brilliant example.
According to Drieu Godefridi (Coronavirus: Belgian Carnage), by 2015 Belgium had a “strategic reserve” of 63 million protective face-masks! Then the government of Prime Minister Charles Michel (today’s European Council President) decided to destroy them, as Belgium had to use the storage facilities to accommodate migrants.
But this is not the end of it. Instead of closing the borders, the Belgian government allowed their citizens to travel to pandemic-affected Northern Italy for carnivals. Returning through the two largest Belgian airports – Brussels South (Charleroi) and Brussels (Zaventem) – people didn’t undergo any checks. In early March, when a state of emergency was already declared in Eastern Europe, Greece, and Israel, “the government of Prime Minister Sophie Wilmès saw no problem with Belgians attending mass gatherings, such as the Salon Batibouw (real estate fair), the Foire du Livre (book fair), and of course, the International Women’s Day rally on March 8.”
Because “there were no masks … the government decided to announce that no masks were needed.” The country remained without masks, without tests, without any reasonable survival strategy. And then “the Belgian government took … its worst decision since 1945: people infected by the virus in nursing homes had to remain in nursing homes. … People dying alone in their rooms…”
Liberal democracies showed an unbelievable carelessness, bordering on both idiocy and inhumanity. The news from Northern Italy sounded like the worst apocalyptic scenarios; however, festivals continued in Spain and Boris Johnson assured British citizens they had nothing to fear. At the same time, training for a pandemic in the UK had not been conducted for many years, stocks of personal protective equipment (PPE) for health workers were not replenished, and many of them were past expiration dates. Moreover, before the end of February, Britain sent hundreds of thousands of PPE to China.
Liberal media and the expert community around the world praised the “Swedish model” for developing “herd immunity.” The “Swedish model” failed. This was first announced by Swedish physician and virologist Annika Linde: “This was like a dream that we could protect the elderly, with very little basis in reality.” Following her lead, Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell assumed it too.
With the result that, at the end of May, The Guardian noted that “Sweden had the highest per capita death rate in the world.”
In the US, the “paroxysms of liberalism” surpassed the most unbridled imagination. In the midst of the pandemic doctors were asked not to wear masks, so as to not “scare” staff members and patients. According to The New-York Times, “Many hospitals bar doctors and other staff members from wearing protective masks in public areas.”
Would the scale of the pandemic be surprising after this?
The West ended up being fatally unprepared for the pandemic, although there had already being formidable warnings as “bird flu,” “swine flu,” SARS, Ebola, and Zika. It is fatally unprepared in the same way with any other threats. Here, people are used to seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. Chaos in the Arab world? It’s an “Arab spring.” Militant Islamism? Oh, it’s a reaction to imperialism and colonialism. Muslim terror? Sure, it’s the result of social injustice. Masses of aggressive migrants flooding Europe? Those people were in danger! Those like Trump, Salvini, and Marine le Pen who tried to confront such misfortunes were subjected to defamation.
The West was preoccupied with fictional problems: global warming, gender equality, homosexual marriages, fights against racism, sexism, and male chauvinism, the salvation of reproductive-age migrants seeking carefree lives. Political identity has become the modern pseudo-religion.
Swedish Interior Minister Mikael Damberg said migrant robbers had peed on an 18-year-old boy “because they feel hopelessness”. ITV Presenter Alastair Stewart, 67, was forced to step down because of quoting the ‘angry ape’ from Shakespeare’s ‘Measure for Measure’ – he was called a racist by black Twitter user Martin Shapland. In Sweden and Germany, elderly residents were kicked out of their apartments to make room for Muslim migrants. Forbes encouraged women to travel to Pakistan alone. The Council of the District of Columbia renamed Columbus Day into Indigenous Peoples Day. Diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, Greta Thunberg was turned into a modern prophet, and enlightened intellectuals were discussing the suggestion of a Swedish scientist to eat humans in order to combat climate change. The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, plans to invest €260 billion for a ‘Green Deal’ before 2030, and at same time tens of thousands of Europeans are rotting alive from COVID-19 in locked houses.
The “black violence epidemic” in the US was predictable. BLM, Nation of Islam, and Antifa were only waiting for an excuse to start the bacchanal of violence. Instead of rebuffing them, the Western world kneels – in the literal sense of the word – and resignedly allows them to overthrow the symbols of its civilization. The American elite raised a monster, and now the monster is devouring the country from the inside.
The riot epidemic spread to Western Europe, and leftist slogans heat up pogroms and fires. Not just prestigious boutiques and restaurants are burned down. The states and the very idea of democracy are burned down. The world of “Dead White European Males” is being burned down before our very eyes. Doesn’t matter! Even more rights to ignorant plebs! Even more migrants! Even more of the cult of perversions! Even more integration policies of “jihadists” and ISIS militants! More demolished DWEM monuments! The Western world is falling into the abyss, believing that it will soon fly like a bird to a happy future.
This is the world divorced from the reality. This is the world where people are deprived not only of common sense, but even of the basic instinct of self-preservation. This is the world of the end of liberal democracy.
Yes, democracy has a future. But it will be Victor Orban’s democracy – democracy based on Judeo-Christian civilization, an ethnically homogeneous community, and national identity. It will be democracy without outrage and distortions of pseudo-liberalism, leftist theories, unbridled pacifism, and the tyranny of self-torture.
“We have replaced a shipwrecked liberal democracy with a 21st-century Christian democracy, which guarantees people’s freedom, security,” Orban said two years ago. And today it is obvious that this type of democracy is much more viable.
Such democracy can protect itself: shut itself off from hordes of barbarians, prevent cultural self-destruction and Islamization, and – even being relatively poor – defend its people. To the contrary, meanwhile, no wealth will save those, who destroy tens of millions of masks to settle crowds of rapists, or carry out experiments on their own people.
