Coronavirus: About the economy of hypocrisy
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| Christof Wackernagel 19/04/2020 |
“Life is the greatest good” – has never sounded so unanimously from everyone’s lips, and it has never sounded as hollow as it did these days.
Tradotto da Milena Rampoldi
The timeless and global validity of this value forbids any questioning, no matter how many questions arise.
What threatens to come up is a situation where a physician must decide which of two human beings can live because he has only one breathing apparatus at disposal [1] and may have to − in effect — sentence other people to death allows no contradictions − however many contradictions arise.
Especially when the question of the appropriateness of measures is out of the question in view of the choice between life and death. On the contrary, especially when the life of the elderly has become so important that emergency laws are enacted, the likes of which have not been seen in Germany since the days of the National Socialist dictatorship. Particularly when the awareness of the “value of life as the highest good” has become established worldwide and even in countries where the number of infections is much lower, even more drastic restrictions of public life are enforced than in our country, the question is all the more urgent why this course of action applies only to the threat of Covid-19.
Ten thousand times more people, especially children, die every day from horrific agony from diarrhoea or typhoid caused by infected drinking water.
A global effort, such as the one currently taking place because of Corona, could give the two thirds of humanity, about 5 billion people, access to clean drinking water that they do not have at the moment.[2] Such a global effort would not be as socially or financially as complex as the one currently being carried out because of Corona.
The German Federal government and all parties represented in the German Bundestag (Parliament), warning of “millions of deaths” these days, explicitly rejected such an immediate clean water project and referred to the UN Millennium Development Goals in 2030, planning the provision of drinking water for everyone by then.
How many millions of people will be killed by poisoned water by then cannot be approximated by means of estimations.
The access to drinking water for all people on this planet, made possible by the international community, would be child’s play in comparison with measures for controlling Covid-19. Although this access could save the lives of incomparably more people, especially children, even the thought of it is washed away in a population that flushes away their excrements with drinking water, cannot be put into effect to some extent, and all opinion-forming German media expressly refuse to even put the idea up for discussion.
Emergency laws are enacted to avoid a situation where a physician may have to pronounce a death sentence on one of two of his patients.
However, no one even thinks of doing anything, let alone joining forces all around the world, as it is the case for Corona, so that tens of thousands of death sentences are not actually carried out every day – and for the same reason, namely, by failing to provide assistance.
In African hospitals, people are not connected to life-saving devices because they cannot pay for them, even if the available number suffices.
However, nobody ever thought of declaring an emergency.
Nobody publicly expresses sympathy with the physicians who have to watch the sick people entrusted to them die.
Which human being has the right to enjoy the timeless, worldwide value of “life is the greatest good” and when and why is it enjoyable?
How is the difference defined?
And how is it justified?
How is it compatible with the generally accepted moral standards of politics and society?
Four thousand people die every year on German motorways. As many as in a veritable civil war.
The heads of many victims of this daily street battle are torn off, and among the survivors are countless people made paraplegic.
About half become innocent victims of the accidents because the ones who caused them drove unreasonably and irresponsibly.
The people’s “unreasonableness and irresponsibility” is indicated as the reason for the imposing “social distancing” to prevent corona infections and further victims.
The logical consequence of the transfer of this consideration, this attitude to the victims of irrationality and irresponsibility in car traffic, would consist of a ban of private car traffic; and since it is not an infection, but it refers to a permanent condition, the car traffic ban should be applied immediately and permanently.
Are 4,000 statistically certain deaths worth less than 4,000 potential ones?
Do they not require an even greater effort because we know that we could prevent them?
Are the other ways of transport today to meet individual needs?
What about the legal addictions to tobacco and alcohol whose death rates worldwide far exceed the millions expected by Corona?
Why not ban tobacco advertising, instead of providing it with images that are supposed to deter smoking − but do not. This in turn shows the irresponsibility and ruthlessness with which social distancing is now justified.
Why do we not at least ban alcohol and tobacco advertising?
According to the WHO, all over the world the “salt industry” kills millions of people with heartbeat or stroke – why are there no limits, even though the deaths it causes are proven?
Because nobody part from the survivors themselves would benefit from overcoming tobacco, alcohol or salt addiction!
What should we then think of the concept of “life as the greatest good”?
Is it really exaggerated to call it “dictatorship of profit”?
Countless children die of simple diseases due to their weakened immune systems because their mums were told that powdered milk is better than breast milk.
If we apply the Corona criteria to Nestlé, the company would be charged with genocide in The Hague.
Would there be any further conclusions to be drawn if one takes the current sensitivity to the elementary human right to life seriously?
Are there any other issues under which this high standard begins to crumble?
Are there further contradictions lurking in secret that in order to be resolved require that we abolish old ways of thinking?
Or do just drown our straightforward thinking in crocodile tears?
“Life is the greatest good”:
the magic spell for a totalitarian seizure of power, the magic word to take the remaining money out of the pockets of those who have nothing, the magic formula to make profits amounting to billions.
Footnotes
[1] what the lot could or should decide
