Anyone who regularly reads this column will know that from time to time I've been forecasting a war. It seemed to be the logical outcome to all the madness and the rise of the Right, a group not renowned for being peaceful, caring types. However, over the last few months, the chances of war seem to have receded; not necessarily disappeared, just pushed back into the cold area of war rather than the blisteringly hot deadly version.
The thing is the world hasn't improved - regardless of what you might hear from the Union Jack flying geeza down the pub - it is still growing in divisions, inequality and is no longer a very safe place to be and that could be what a lot of the powerful world leaders want...
It's a long game. One that might benefit the children or grandchildren of your Johnsons and Rees-Moggs, but for the rest of us it will seem like the 2010s were the last good years any of us ever had. That long game, as I said, no longer involves war - it's just too complicated and there are far too many variables in wars; they're difficult to control and today's modern Right, like to control things.
What we do have is a growing worldwide population; a continuation of people living in specific places, increasing that problem exponentially. It has always been that the ultimate outcome of a war has been mass population decrease, but without wars how do you do that? How can you regulate society and its numbers?
How about spreading a virus - controlled - throughout the world, that will essentially kill off as many old, infirm and chronically ill people as possible with no one really taking the blame for it, even if we can blindly point the finger at the Chinese...
That appears to be what the Coronavirus or Covid-19 seems to be doing. From humble beginnings in Wuhan to full scale emergencies in Iran, Italy, cruise ships and isolated places that seemingly have had no contact with infected people or areas, this latest virus appears to spreading across the world like some apocalyptic novel by Stephen King...
Ask yourself a question: how many of you have seen a film or TV series or read a book about a plague? I should think there are a few of us. What is the underlying lesson that is steadfastly ignored? Make sure your quarantines are just that and make sure your plague stays in one place and not allowed to move all over the world. With Ebola, restrictions were so high that the few people allowed out of infected Africa were literally wrapped in plastic and kept in isolation wards, so isolated, that the experts treating the infected were literally boiled to ensure they were sterilized. The thing about Ebola is it doesn't discriminate - old, young, well or unwell, if you get Ebola then there's a pretty good chance you'll be dead or very ill for a long time with consequences to your long term health. With the coronavirus, it appears that the healthier you are the less chance you have of contracting it; so that makes me an obvious statistic if it continues to run rampant across the world killing more and more people.
Why then, for example, has the UK government been flying people out of China and stuffing them in a not-very isolated building on the Wirral (quite close to Liverpool, a constant thorn in the side of most Tory regimes)? I mean, if you had plague would you be housing the infected in a 'containment' unit as close to a large populated area or would you be saying to these people, the country it started is best placed to look after you, sorry, but the risk to everyone else is too great?
Yes, that sounds heartless, especially if you know someone who might be affected, but the UK government allowed Coventry to be obliterated during WW2 to ensure the Nazis didn't realise we'd broken their codes. The war might have gone a much different way had we defended Coventry and allowed the Germans to develop another code that we couldn't break...
The thing about disease is we know it mutates; it changes and develops in a way that confounds scientists and doctors; so the logical thing is NOT to pack loads of Brits on a plane, fly them home and then stick them on a coach and ship them to a place near a load of unaffected people. If that happened in a film, you'd be screaming at the screen saying 'don't be so fucking stupid!'
Now, I'm not suggesting this is a massive conspiracy perpetrated by the leaders of the world's biggest regimes, but we live in an age where a huge amount of us believe any old shit that's put in the papers or on TV. We live in an age where a failed supermodel can say her kid got autism from a vaccine so a huge amount of people would rather believe her than 99.99% of all health practitioners. We live in an age where people believe the moon landings were faked, despite all the thousands of people who worked on them never once letting slip they were paid or were threatened with their lives if they revealed the truth. The problem with any conspiracy theory is a) people want to believe them because they're either too stupid or lazy to research it themselves or b) once you start to question the logistics of one you realise that it's more about your personal belief than actual science fact.
Take flat earthers for starters. Personally, I think flat earthers are just people who want NASA to offer them a free trip into space. I know a flat earther and boy is she beyond barking mad...
But... spreading a virus around the world is actually less of a conspiracy theory and more of a 'look out of your window' kind of thing. It doesn't need hundreds and thousands of people to keep a secret; it involves one or two people working in a lab in a place like China or Kazakhstan, with access to all manner of nasty things. In a world where we have an awful lot of borderline psychopaths simply wandering the streets, what odds that one of these 'well, he seemed perfectly normal' people could actually just literally drop a bombshell in the form of bacteria?
Every day the coronavirus appears to be killing off more people, infecting new areas and, if the press is anything to go by - and they're usually not - it's now appearing in isolated places and could well be mutating, the way the flu has a habit of doing. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 killed between 20 and 50 million people worldwide... Just think about that: 20 to 50 million. The population of the UK is only 66 million and the Spanish flu hit the planet when the population of the entire world was less than 2 billion; we're close to 8 billion now...
Personally, if I had my way I'd shut all of our borders and stop people from coming in - not in a Brextremist kind of way, more in a let's protect our citizens until someone comes up with a vaccine way. Films might often be far-fetched nonsense, but in general they do moralise about the incompetence of mankind in situations such as this; it appears that we are indeed more stupid than we're portrayed in films.
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