Covid-19 'Power Grabs' Are Playing Out Just as I Feared … and Warned -The iPINIONS Journal

When Covid-19 began spreading, democratic countries began granting their leaders authoritarian powers to fight it. But I’ve been sounding the alarm about those powers from the outset.

Here, for example, is what I wrote in “Coronavirus: The Worldwide Lockdown” on March 14:

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Governments from the Americas to Asia are declaring states of emergency. This gives them wartime-like powers (to try) to stop the spread of coronavirus – by any means necessary. …

It could mean permanent bans on freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of the press, and other democratic freedoms. So beware the side effects of this coronavirus.

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I feared democratic leaders were getting a taste of power they would find too addictive to give up. Yet far more prominent political thinkers seemed oblivious to this creeping addiction.

Henry Kissinger chimed in belatedly with “The Coronavirus Will Forever Alter the World Order” for The Wall Street Journal on April 3. He, of course, is the éminence grise of geopolitics and, with apologies to E.F. Hutton, when Kissinger talks, people listen.

This is why I was so dismayed when he subsumed this addiction into inexorable geopolitical dynamics that started nearly 50 years ago. It seems all that matters to him is how countries, not people, fare once these dynamics result in either

a unipolar power shift from the United States to China; or
a bipolar redux with a superpower United States leading the West and a superpower China (now instead of the Soviet Union) leading the East, where the order of the day would be doing business with China, not proselytizing democratic values like civil liberties and human rights.

The latter (b) is Kissinger’s preferred outcome. Luckily for him, it’s inevitable. This, not least because, try as it might to buy friends and influence nations, China will never enjoy the goodwill the United States did as deus ex machina after WWII.

Recall that the United States played a leading role not just in building a new world order through the UN, NATO, and other alphabet organizations, but also in rebuilding Europe, Japan, and other war-ravaged countries with initiatives like its famous Marshall Plan. This role led inexorably to its reign as the world’s sole superpower after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Of course, it hardly helps China’s attempt to play a supplanting role that every country is now branding it the pariah nation that unleashed this coronavirus on the world. Resentment is bound to abound for generations.

Apropos of which, it’s just as well that Kissinger is primarily concerned about how Covid-19 will affect “spheres of influence” among the world’s major powers. Mind you, after midwifing “The Opening of China,” he has always nurtured a forgiving view even of its Tiananmen-degree of misbehavior.

This is why one can deduce that President Trump’s dictatorial claim of having “total authority” to do whatever he wants didn’t bother Kissinger one bit. More ominously, though, one can infer that President Xi ordering a Tiananmen-like crackdown on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protesters wouldn’t either.

By contrast, I am concerned about how Covid-19 is giving leaders of major powers (and other countries) a seemingly legitimate reason to exert authoritarian rule over their people. The Economist may not have Kissinger’s influence, but it’s noteworthy that it is now echoing this alarm I sounded.

Only that explains the cover title of its current edition, “Your country needs me – A pandemic of power grabs.” The lead report in this edition includes the following:

Rulers everywhere have realised that now is the perfect time to do outrageous things, safe in the knowledge that the rest of the world will barely notice. …

Judging by what has already been reported, power grabbers on every continent are exploiting covid-19 to entrench themselves. But with journalists and human-rights activists unable to venture out, nobody knows whether the unreported abuses are worse. How many dissidents have been jailed for ‘violating quarantine rules’?

(The Economist, April 23, 2020)

No doubt Chinese rulers are putting a decidedly authoritarian twist on the capitalist maxim: never let a crisis go to waste. Except that, thanks to daring citizen journalists in Hong Kong, we know they’re exploiting this worldwide lockdown to do outrageous things like this:

More than a dozen leading pro-democracy activists and former lawmakers in Hong Kong were arrested on Saturday in connection with the protests that raged in the city last year, the biggest roundup of prominent opposition figures in recent memory.

The arrests signaled a broader crackdown on the antigovernment movement that roiled the semiautonomous city last year, one of the most significant challenges to Communist Party rule in decades.

(The New York Times, April 18, 2020)

Therefore, it’s not that “the rest of the world will barely notice” these power grabs. To the contrary, even I saw them coming a mile away. The problem is that the rest of the world has been too preoccupied with the follies of their own battles in this war against Covid-19.

I say follies because the rest of us seem too preoccupied these days guffawing at “military” blunders. And they are endless. But I’ll cite just three laughingstocks who seem to be colluding to divert media attention from democrats-cum-autocrats in this context:

President Trump of the United States suggesting that injecting our bodies with disinfectants like Lysol might prove the best way to defeat this invisible enemy. And don’t get me started on his malapropisms – like repeatedly referring to life-saving ventilators as generators. Granted, a South African politician one-upped him by referring to them as vibrators. Apropos of which …
President Ramaphosa of South Africa preparing for battle by wearing his mask over his eyes instead of his nose and mouth.
President Bolsonaro of Brazil dismissing the pandemic as “just a bit of a cold.” Never mind that his country has more cases of Covid-19 infections and deaths than any other country in Latin America: more than 45,000 and 2,900, respectively. People in other countries take to the streets at an appointed hour these days to cheer healthcare workers for saving so many lives. People in Brazil do so to jeer the “Bolsonaro virus” for proving more hazardous to their health than the coronavirus. Incidentally, this reputed “Trump of the Tropics” is so determined to emulate the follies of his namesake, he orchestrated the resignations of his country’s top law enforcement officer (just as Trump did with FBI director James Comey) and justice minister (just as Trump did with attorney general Jeff Sessions).

In any event, given the pandemic of buffoonery afoot, any wannabe autocrat would be forgiven for feeling emboldened. Except that the premise The Economist asserts is wrong.

No ruler needed Covid-19 as a cover to do outrageous things. Because wannabe autocrats have been using the viruses of Trumpism and Brexit to do such things with impunity for years.

Evidently, Covid-19 has erased from The Economist’s memory the dictatorial antics of democrats-cum-autocrats like Erdogan of Turkey, Orban of Hungary, and Duterte of the Philippines. But its researchers are welcome to my “Archives,” where they’ll find numerous commentaries on such power grabs, including recent, pre-Covid-19 ones like

“The Week Trump Kissed Up to Saudi Arabia, Kissed Off Europe, and French Kissed the Philippines,” May 30 2017;
“Trump Framing FBI, Appeasing Russia. Treasonous?” February 1, 2018;
“Thanks to EU, Turkey Ratifies Erdogan’s Dictatorial Rule,” June 28, 2018; and
“Actually, Neo-Nazis in Sweden Have Nothing on Neo-Nazis Across Europe [especially in Orban’s Hungary],” September 12, 2018.

Still I wonder why it has taken The Economist and so many progressive pundits so long to sound this alarm.

Here, for example, is the banner headline the London Daily Mail gave former Labour Leader and current CEO of the International Rescue Committee David Miliband to sound his in Saturday’s edition:

This isn’t just a fight against coronavirus, it’s also a battle for the future of democracy.

Yeah, thanks David. But, never mind the fight against coronavirus, what are you doing to rescue democracy?

[Note: Apropos of the virus of Trumpism, the world spent the past three years bemoaning (and guffawing at) the way President Trump was destroying political norms like a bull in a china shop. But all he destroyed pales into insignificance compared to the way Covid-19 is now destroying social, cultural, economic, personal, political, and other norms.]