Reflections and Implications in the Time of Corona
Mufid Najm
The cosmic flood of the pandemic that has placed the world in intensive care returns us to the fundamental question about the reasons that led to humanity’s early existential awareness, as reflected in religious narratives and Eastern myths, marked by a tragic dimension that has always required a savior to rescue life and humanity on this earth from what humans have done to themselves and to their fellow beings. From the first blood shed by Cain to the Great Flood of Noah and Christ’s cry on the cross of his suffering, this tragic awareness remains entrenched in the self and the narrative, continuously reconstructing its chapters in one way or another, as if it were the offspring of the human story that refuses to part with its core, having claimed its heroism uncontested, both as killer and victim.
The question that recurs each time is: Why has this tragic existential awareness predated any other form of consciousness? Why have religions been unable to erase its traces, but instead have added more bloodshed to it through wars that have yet to cease, even among adherents of the same faith? Then came the modern era, proclaiming that life belongs to the strongest, reigniting wars for control over the world, transforming it into a testing ground for the limits of this power and its tyranny, armed with all kinds of modern destruction and killing.
The feeling of superiority of brute force did not end at the borders of weaker countries; it reached nature, which in turn became another victim in this catastrophic context, spiraling into a mad rush that even reached outer space and other planets, as if the world was no longer sufficient to satisfy their greed and perpetuate the power of force and dominance. Did the insidious pandemic seek to force the proponents of these insane policies back to earth and mock the illusion of power and the delusions of grandeur that envelop them, revealing how they have neglected humanity, leaving it to its bare fate in a society governed by the values of materialism and consumption? How many Noahs will we need to save us from this wild tendency toward nothingness, and how many Christs must we raise on the wood of the cross for the forgiveness of sins?
This is the most terrifying existential question that renews itself each time humanity finds itself powerless and defeated before the catastrophic results of what the emperors of war and wealth have inflicted on the world. Why then does the world tremble in terror at the imminent danger of this mysterious and vicious virus? Is it because this virus sought to test the limits of the power of the most economically, scientifically, and militarily potent countries, exposing how humanity has been cast aside in their societies, outside the concept of profitable investment for greedy and usurious capital, as manifested in the weakness of health policies and their failure to provide rescue means for the victims of this deadly pandemic? Meanwhile, Noah remains confined in laboratories and recovery rooms, racing against time to save what can be saved of human lives, while the greatest power in the world struggles to face this pandemic deluge so that the infernal machine of capital does not stop turning and lose its position in the hierarchy of global control. This has led the president sitting atop this blind hierarchy to incessantly present the world with laughable solutions that betray a moral bankruptcy, as this blind force of money and dominance, having grown accustomed to this behavior, has done in many places around the world, and prior to this, with the indigenous peoples of its own country, on whom it built its glory by erasing their existence with the same force.
It is paradoxical that this deadly pandemic, which has ravaged the most advanced and civilized nations, found no more to do in the land of Cain than what tyrants have done to their doomed peoples. Therefore, it did not attempt to test its power while contemplating our sad fates, left to the whims of tyrants.
How many times, then, must humanity reclaim the narrative, and how many times will we need such a cosmic storm to open our eyes to the vastness of the horror we live in, having left our fates at the mercy of the predatory emperors of capital, who have turned the world into a voracious consumer market and an unending battlefield for control and the accumulation of wealth, devoid of any moral restraint? The centers of wealth and capital now measure their profits by the hour, as if they were a mad counter racing against time. Thus, it was inevitable that the culture of consumption in these societies would replace the known ghetto, which modernity was founded upon, with a new ghetto: “Consume, therefore I exist.” The world has become like a runaway train, its brakes disabled, with no one caring for its fate or the fate of those inside it. Consequently, climate conferences have failed to articulate any policies to halt the dangerous deterioration of climate and nature, nor to create any opportunities for sustainable development in the impoverished countries that have been looted and continue to be after subjecting their peoples to paid and murderous rulers and igniting ceaseless wars within them, while the democracy that liberal societies once boasted of has turned into a game in the hands of capital and large corporations that now control the manufacture of public opinion. This has allowed a character obsessed with wealth and power, like Ronald Trump, to become president of the strongest nation in the world, continuing its frenzied rush to remain atop the throne of power and control over the destinies of the world.
In this cosmic maze in which the world finds itself trapped, something must be done to restore human solidarity after the solidarity among nations and capitalisms has vanished, each wanting to save itself, let the flood come afterwards. While some politicians and philosophers assert that the world post-Corona will not resemble the world before it, the ideas proposed by the poet Nuri Al-Jarrah in his article titled with a significant reference to Noah and the flood of the pandemic hold moral value beyond the context of the oppressive calculations of profit and loss of the great powers of domination, aiming to reclaim the initiative from writers, thinkers, and artists of all races, geographies, and cultures, so that we do not face another flood, with new names, akin to what humanity is currently confronting.
The victors of the two world wars celebrated on the ruins of many countries, along with the tens of millions of victims and disabled individuals and millions of raped women (five million women were raped in Germany alone by the Allied and Soviet armies), while the world was divided and spoils were distributed among those celebrating victory. Nothing has changed since Cain and Noah and the dreams of ancient and modern empires. Instead of rearranging the hierarchy of human values in international relations, an international system was established based on quotas and the authority of force, from the Security Council to the United Nations, the World Bank, and other systems of global control and domination. So what will change in the world if the brutal capitalism that will govern after the pandemic is either communist or capitalist? What will dominate the status of the victim, the human being, in a world that increasingly sees the barbarism of capital and attempts to control the world?
After the global war, what did the Marshall Plan do, for instance, other than develop European capitalisms to build new partnerships against the tide of communism and strengthen the influence and dominance of the United States over the capitalist bloc it created for this purpose, which remains under its financial, military, and political influence? What, then, is to be done? This is the pressing question before and after Corona. What is to be done to regain the initiative to build human solidarity among the good and conscientious elites in the face of the arrogance of power, wild capitalism, and the commodification of everything, including humanity? This is the test that requires a humanitarian stance affirming that this pandemic flood is but a result of another, more barbaric and dangerous flood threatening the future of humanity and life, which must not continue to control the fates of humanity, especially since there is another battle being waged on the sidelines of the battle with the pandemic—a battle among international power centers that seek to exploit the first battle to achieve victories over each other without any regard for the catastrophic effects of this pandemic on humanity and life in the world, after it has been revealed that capital investments even in the scientific and medical fields are present in societies that believed their lives were secured against risks.
A Writer from Syria Residing in Berlin
