Charles Elias Chartouni/Authoritarianism, Pandemics and Post-Truth Politics/الأنظمة السلطوية، الوباءات وسياسات الكذب المؤسسي

Authoritarianism, Pandemics and Post-Truth Politics
Charles Elias Chartouni/April 04/2020
الأنظمة السلطوية، الوباءات وسياسات الكذب المؤسسي
شارل الياس شرتوني/04 نيسان/2020

Authoritarian regimes underpinned by totalitarian imaginaries have no other way to relate to the rest of the world but through the dissemination of conspiracy theories and post-factual framing of events, statistics and epidemiological facts. The rife of post-factual versions of the Coronavirus originating causes have nothing to do with epidemiological heuristics, topological data analysis and collected medical evidence, they are mere ideological inferences, manufactured and manipulated data, whose role is to generate and nurture an anxiety-ridden environment, promote uncertainty and undermine the legitimacy of democratic governments bound by transparency, factual evidence and accountability. The governmental rhetorics of China, Iran and Russia fall inevitably under this rubric, not only as hedging strategies designed to conceal the ugly facts of their public health care failures and dysfunctional medical institutions and policies, but as inherent parts of their ideological narratives and tapestry of official lies elevated unto mantras and unquestionable credos.

The devastations of the successive SARS, H1N1, H5N8, Swine Flu ( 2003, 2015, 2020, …. ) pandemics were always hidden under a heap of lies regarding their sources, trajectories, and number of victims, while the official scripts were prolific on blame externalization ( USA, Western Research Institutes, and sundry conspiracy theories piloted by the Freemasonry, Zionism and their satellites… ). The rationale behind the institutional hedging rhetorics is self exculpatory and self redeeming to justify and account for the recurrence of epidemiological outbreaks, evade responsibility, prevent the questioning of governance and perpetuate a spurious legitimacy. It’s quite interesting to observe the co-occurrence between the glaring statistical discrepancies displayed by the Chinese government and the true ratios of mortality in Wuhan and the Hubei province, the relationships between the Iranian health care system breakdowns and the cyclical epidemic outbursts, and the state of structural unpreparedness of the Russian medical system challenged by the Coronavirus tantrum.

The Coronavirus pandemic crisis has clearly demonstrated the correlation between intellectual transparency and the ability to tackle pandemic crises in due time, control their lethal effects and promote the notions of democratic accountability and reformed governance. The axiomatic correlation established between political freedom and the effective dealing with famine outbreaks, was quite established by Amartya Sen, and holds in the case of authoritarian countries whose politics of official dissembling account for their repeated epidemiological failures, tragic humanitarian fallouts and the creation of worldwide pandemics. China’s responsibility in this consolidated course of contemporary pandemics is no hazard, it’s the outcome of the ruptured nexus between economic growth, ecological predicates and public policy framing, intellectual and civic liberties. Authoritarian regimes and their totalitarian subtexts have proven, over time, their incompatibility with sustainable reforms of governance, environmental concerns and responsible public health care policies. The consecutive ravages of Covid are nothing new, they are the continuation of a well established template of dysfunctional governance, freedom deficit and working civics in countries where the notions of governance impugn the very foundation of democracy: the moral and intellectual autonomy of an effective citizenry. Pandemics and famines do not occur in countries where political incumbents are responsive to their citizens needs and demands, and accountable before real democratic constituencies.