“Last year, ‘Asian values’ became the one-stop explanation for the success of countries such as China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Vietnam in controlling the virus. The west, many insisted, had paid for its individualist ethos by having populations refuse to obey the authorities, fail to wear masks or observe lockdowns.

Except that it has not quite turned out like that. … Tokyo is in its fourth lockdown and Covid cases are still rising sharply. … Less than a third of the population has been vaccinated and only a minority trust Covid vaccines. The only other nation so sceptical of vaccines is another east Asian country, South Korea. … All this puts a dent in the claim that Asian countries are particularly trusting of authority and exhibit a herd-like obedience.

Meanwhile, in Britain, 96% trust Covid vaccines. The supposedly highly individualist population has throughout the pandemic desired more restrictions than the government imposed. … Such attitudes are not peculiar to Britain. At the beginning of the pandemic, most European nations were highly supportive of lockdowns and other restrictions on personal freedoms, much to the surprise of the authorities. Trust in vaccines has increased in most European nations, including in France where, for historical reasons, there has been greater hesitancy. …

Far from there being a simple east/west divide, the global picture is messy in terms of attitudes, policy and outcomes. East Asian countries have disappointingly low vaccination rates, but the numbers of Covid deaths also remain low. Britain has a very high proportion of vaccinated people, but the numbers of deaths are very high …

This messiness reflects the fact that both responses to Covid-19 and the outcomes are the products of many factors. One reason many east Asian states were initially better prepared for Covid was their recent experience of similar diseases, especially Sars. …

Much of this complexity gets ignored in the drive to look for simple categories through which to view people and events and for simple divisions with which to explain the world. Many cultural developments in east Asian countries, from Seoul’s club scene to Japanese subcultures, belie the ‘conformist’ tag. Or consider that in comparing China and Taiwan the fact that one is authoritarian and the other democratic matters more than the fact that both have Confucian traditions. Ignoring that distinction allows many to portray authoritarianism as Confucianism. Nor is Confucianism the only philosophy in east Asian countries – it is simply the one with which western observers are most familiar.

Similarly, the idea that one can simply distil ‘western values‘ into individualism is as misleading as imagining that ‘eastern values’ are synonymous with conformity. …

Perhaps the most depressing consequence of the east/west myth is the belief that one can have only one or the other: that one can either be socially minded or believe in individual freedoms. The fallout from this kind of zero-sum thinking has been the distortion of ideas both of freedom and of social-mindedness. On the one hand, ideas of freedom and rights have been increasingly associated with the right and trivialised. When the refusal to wear a mask becomes seen as a heroic celebration of individualism, there is something deeply confused about the notion. Meanwhile, many sections of the left seem to have forgotten the importance of freedom to those who least possess it and have come to view community-mindedness as the imposition of greater restrictions.

There are clearly cultural differences between nations, but to frame such differences in terms of ‘east v west’ is to ignore the reality. If the pandemic has revealed anything about values, it is that east and west are still struggling to work through the relationship between individualism and community-mindedness.”

aus: Kenan Malik: Can Covid death rates be reduced to a clash of values? It’s not so simple. The Guardian Online, 8.8.21, im Internet.

Abb.: Nguyen Tran Nam: We never fell, 2010, Nha San Collective, Vietnam, im Internet.

08/21

“There is a simple reason why Boris Johnson and European leaders failed to find common ground over Brexit at last week’s G7 summit. They are not even talking about the same thing.

For the British prime minister, Brexit is a matter of national character that cannot be described in legal documents. For continental politicians, legal texts contain the true meaning of a project that only exists in the real world as a set of rules to be implemented. To Johnson, the withdrawal agreement was a single-use tool for levering himself out of a tight spot. For Brussels, it is the chamber into which Britain levered itself.

That difference will continue to cause friction because it is not a misunderstanding. Johnson knows that legal arguments over the Northern Ireland protocol favour the European position. He chooses not to care. To concede on the principle that any part of the UK is subject to European regulatory standards – the compromise he signed to avoid a land border on the island of Ireland – would be to admit that a portion of sovereignty was conceded in the negotiations.

That would be a stain on his self-image as the man who made a clean break from Brussels. He finds confrontation more appealing, not least because he expects it to achieve more than compliance. Whether that is true depends on how you define achievement.

Johnson’s calculation doesn’t prioritise peace in Northern Ireland. … If Northern Ireland is on fire, any insistence from Brussels on maximum implementation of rules on sausage imports will look callous and disproportionate. …

That technique will not do much for Britain’s reputation abroad, but Johnson’s mind rarely strays far from his domestic audience, to whom he will explain that everything is the EU’s fault. His party and most of the media will endorse that interpretation, as it always has done. …

When Johnson’s critics say he must be held accountable for Brexit, they use that word to mean the process and cost of severing ties with Britain’s neighbours and losing frictionless access to their markets. That is the remainer definition, even when used by people who accept there is no remain cause left to fight. When Tories say “Brexit” they mean it in the wider sense of a cultural revolution, sustained by belief and national pride. …  The project’s goals are too abstract to be attainable in any economically useful sense – there are no new jobs in the sovereignty-manufacturing sector – so momentum is maintained by always reimagining and refighting the old enemy. …

This is the long tail of Brexitism – a political mode that has its genesis in the referendum but has evolved into something much wider. Its defining feature is the flight from complex reality to symbols and fantasy. …

Theresa May was broken by the attempt to divert the frothing stream of leaver demands down narrow channels of responsible statecraft. Her successor declared such restraint unnecessary, and then appeared to prove the point by getting a Brexit deal done. The trick was to sign the treaty without intending to honour it.

All who serve in the current cabinet have signed up to the Johnsonian code of conduct that makes evidence and truth subordinate to the performance of boosterism. … Real-world government is a sequence of arguments over what is available on current budgets and, if more cash is needed, who will pay. …

Brexit is not really a destination but a state of mind. It is not something that government can do, but a way of deferring all the things government should be doing but would rather not contemplate. …”

aus:  Rafael Behr: British politics is still drunk on Brexit spirit, and Boris Johnson won’t call time. The Guardian Online, 16.06.2021, im Internet

06/21

“Part of the English disease is our readiness to ascribe our national disasters to questions of personal character. But the vanities of posh men and their habit of dragging us into catastrophe have much deeper roots. They centre on an ancient system that trains a narrow caste of people to run our affairs, but also ensures they have almost none of the attributes actually required.”

aus: John Harris: Britain’s overgrown Eton schoolboys have turned the country into their playground. The Guardian online, 2.5.21, im Internet.

05/21

“Once, authoritarian states were symbolised by the Soviet Union, which was seen as lumbering, clumsy and sclerotic. Now, the model is China, which is nimble, strategic and fast. ‘The question is,’ said Biden, ‘in a democracy that’s such a genius as ours, can you get consensus in the timeframe that can compete with autocracy?'”

aus: Richard McGregor: Biden and Xi talk of a clash of civilisations. But the real shared goal is dominance. The Guardian online, 2.5.21, im Internet.

05/21

“… de schijnbaar objectieve wereld van de universitaire rankings. Steevast staan de Britten en de Amerikanen erin op kop. … Vreemd, want mochten de Amerikanen superieur intelligent zijn, dan hadden ze Donald Trump niet tot president verkozen.”

aus: Rik Torfs: Waarom ik een lokale tripel niet zou willen missen. Knack, 29.11.17

02/21

“‘I always wanted successes in the near term, and with experience I’ve come to the conclusion that real successes need 25 years,’ he says. ‘Take a country like Ukraine: it had a number of revolutions, and they each failed, and now you had a free and fair election,’ he says …

In the 2004 Ukrainian election, exit polls conducted by a Soros foundation showed a very different result to the official count, and Viktor Yanukovych, who had ‘won’ the first vote, was forced to concede. He came back to power in 2010, before being toppled amid violent clashes in 2014.

These revolutions, Soros says, were inevitable but not sufficient. ‘Dictators, if they are successful, always go too far, because there are no checks and balances to stop them… The point comes where people who have been cowed into obedience rebel, and there’s a revolution. Revolutions generally don’t succeed. You need to develop institutions, which is what open societies are all about.’ In the past, Putin has blamed Soros for sparking unrest – something he denies, but in a qualified manner that would hardly reassure the Russian president. ‘It was the people of the country who rebelled,’ he says. ‘And I enabled them to do it by various steps that the foundations took, like reliable exit polls.’ It is this approach that has so exercised his critics: few authoritarians would feel threatened by the distribution of mosquito nets or emergency food supplies; but the funding of critical media, legal aid NGOs and minority rights advocacy groups is a different matter.”

aus: George Soros: ‘Brexit hurts both sides – my money was used to educate the British public’ Interviewed durch Shaun Walker, The Guardian online, 2.11.19, im Internet

Abb.: Mounir Fatmi: The lost springs, 2011, im Internet.

 

11/20

“Boring, reassuring, normal – these are Biden’s great strengths. But he needs to be careful. They could also be his great weaknesses.

That’s because any return to ‘normal’ would be disastrous for America.

Normal led to Trump. Normal led to the coronavirus.

Normal is four decades of stagnant wages and widening inequality when almost all economic gains went to the top. Normal is 40 years of shredded safety nets, and the most expensive but least adequate healthcare system in the modern world.

Normal is also growing corruption of politics by big money – an economic system rigged by and for the wealthy.

Normal is worsening police brutality.

Normal is climate change now verging on catastrophe.

Normal is a GOP that for years has been actively suppressing minority votes and embracing white supremacists. Normal is a Democratic party that for years has been abandoning the working class.”

aus: Robert B Reich: Beware going ‘back to normal’ thoughts – normal gave us Trump. Guardian online, 29.11.20, im Internet.

11/20

“Brexit is the outcome of a civil war within capitalism. …

There are two dominant forms of capitalist enterprise. … Housetrained capitalism … benefits from stability, predictability and the regulations that exclude dirtier and rougher competitors. It can coexist with a tame and feeble form of democracy. …

Warlord capitalism. … They fetishise something they call ‘liberty‘, which turns out to mean total freedom for plutocrats, at society’s expense.

In unguarded moments, the warlords and their supporters go all the way. Hayek, for example, on a visit to Pinochet’s Chile, said he preferred a ‘liberal dictatorship’ to ‘a democratic government devoid of liberalism‘. Peter Thiel, the cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, confessed: ‘I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.’ …

Brexit … threatens to destroy the market advantage for businesses that play by the rules. … The Confederation of British Industry warned that leaving Europe would cause a major economic shock. In response to these concerns, Johnson … made a remark that might previously have seemed unthinkable, coming from the mouth of a senior Conservative, ‘fuck business’. …

Understood in this light, Brexit is scarcely about the UK at all. … By far the biggest individual donors to the Brexit party are Christopher Harborne, who is based in Thailand, and Jeremy Hosking, who has businesses listed in Dublin and Delaware. The newspaper owners who went to such lengths to make Brexit happen are domiciled offshore. For people like Rupert Murdoch, … turning Chile or Indonesia into a giant free port is one thing. The UK is a much bigger prize.

None of this is what we were told we were voting for. I see Nigel Farage and similar blowhards as little more than smoke bombs, creating a camouflaging cloud of xenophobia and culture wars. The persistent trick of modern politics – that appears to fool us repeatedly – is to disguise economic and political interests as cultural movements. Throughout this saga, the media has reported the smokescreen, not the manoeuvres. …

Brexit … is likely to harm the lives and freedoms of millions of people in the UK. But it’s not about us. We are just caught in the crossfire of capitalism’s civil war.”

aus: George Monbiot: Brexit stems from a civil war in capitalism – we are all just collateral damage. The Guardian online, 24.11.20, im Internet

11/20

“Competition, however, though an excellent thing, is always for others. Arrangements between companies which restrict competition are hailed by their authors as triumphs of enterprise. Practices which foster consumer loyalty at the expense of competition are defended by their beneficiaries in the name of liberty. And foreign competition is always unfair competition, particularly when it happens to succeed.”

aus: A.R.Bridbur: Historians and the open society.  London/Boston: Routledge 1972, S.144.

11/20

“If Donald Trump could build a city from scratch, it would have a casino and a golf course and all the cheeseburgers you could eat. The city’s residents would be old, with money to spend and nothing but free time. The workers would be poor, foreign, and always on the clock. They would literally live beneath you. There would be doctors, but not very many, and there would be cops, sort of, but who exactly they were there to protect and serve would remain ambiguous. There would be no proper government to speak of. The city and its services would be run by a corporation, and you would sign away your rights to a billionaire in his 70s with a tan and bad hair, in exchange for a promise of a good time—art auctions, live music, waterfalls of champagne. The city would pay no taxes but avail itself of the services funded by those who do.

It would look, in other words, a lot like the Carnival Corporation’s 18-story, 952-foot-long Diamond Princess as it entered Yokohama Bay in early February after a voyage through Southeast Asia for the Chinese New Year. …

The cruise ship outbreak was the American pandemic in miniature; the virus fed off the inequities and deficiencies of health, labor, and housing systems. Cruise ships … are like … what a society looks like when its leaders cut the ‘social’ out of the social contract.”

aus: Tim Murphy: The Cruise Industry Is Donald Trump Personified – Decadent, exploitative, and totally full of shit. Mother Jones, 17.6.20, im Internet.

06/20