Chi-Com Wuhan Corona Virus Crisis

Amir Taheri: Dealing with Coronavirus Reveals Cultural Differences…….


 

The world should be imitating the Israeli response to the crisis…

 

Today, we have a whole toolbox of means needed to deal with economic and trade problems. The problem is that the toolbox is designed to deal with probabilities while the virus shows that the improbable, if only theoretically possible, may force itself into the global agenda. The system is based on presumed certainties while the never-mentioned reality of human existence is uncertainty.
Carl Schmidt argued that the task of the state is to deal with exceptions because the countless quotidian ordinary acts that sustain human existence are normally and routinely carried out by citizens. The coronavirus, like recent recessions, however, shows that the modern state is more geared to regulating, not say tinkering with, the ordinary than dealing with the exceptional.
In the end, maybe, there is a metaphysical entity that keeps our fragile global system going on the edge of the precipice.

 

The different ways in which those nations dealt with the challenge sheds light on their respective political systems and cultural environments.

 

In China, the initial reflex was to brush everything under the carpet by denying the outbreak of the virus. The culture of secrecy, turned into a cult since 1949, regards information as a precious weapon that cannot be made available to the public at large. If knowledge is power, it is only natural that the revolutionary regime should have a monopoly on it. Thus, it took the central authorities in Beijing weeks before they decided to admit the existence of the epidemic and, having blamed the local authorities for negligence, seized control of the response.

 

Sharing the Chinese regime’s penchant for secrecy, the Islamic Republic in Iran also tried to hush up things. However, the Iranian attempt was not as effective as China’s and news of the outbreak was known to a majority of Iranians within weeks. The reason is that, unlike China, the Islamic Republic is a faction-ridden ramshackle Third World despotism often in only nominal control of society.

 

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