Dear Editor,
The global COVID-19 pandemic is the moral, social, cultural, religious, economic, health, political and financial crisis of our times and will be with us for quite a while. Today, we are in a life and death battle with the disease. The facts are startling. There is a global lockdown of economies. Life, as we know it, has fundamentally changed.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forever changed the global political, social and economic orders. It has also raised serious questions about the established models of sustainable economic development. New questions about the “limits to growth” in a world of increasing population growth and diminishing natural resources are again being discussed. Fossil fuels have driven growth. Fossil fuels have also become our environmental nemesis.
Rampant and unmitigated capitalism has led to the destruction of Mother Earth. Climate change is the next pandemic. Greed has distorted global human values and has promoted racism and religious fundamentalism. Politically, the world has drifted towards nationalism versus multilateralism. The new “America First” philosophy has triggered reactions from China and Russia, among others. The lack of help to Italy as it struggled with its COVID-19 crisis, illustrated that even neighbours bound by common goals, focused on themselves, first.
Rampant capitalism has also encouraged political fundamentalism, despotic authoritarianism under the guise of democracy. More so, rampant and unmitigated capitalism has resulted in the global economic pandemic of stark inequality.
COVID-19 has revealed global fault lines. As Arundhati Roy in her brilliant Financial Times article has stated: ‘The pandemic is a portal’ …
“We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it”.
Meanwhile in Guyana, a colonially designed an inherited winner-take-all electoral system has revealed the deep racial fault lines that permanently exist. The threat of racial domination on facebook has forever changed the lives of Guyanese.
The intellectually and emotionally barren in Guyana seem to be convinced that electoral superiority is democracy. Their intellects are too barren to understand “winner take-all electoral systems” are inherently anti-human rights and pernicious.
A winner-take-all system that promotes racism goes completely against the 30 Human Rights of the Universal Declara-tion of Human Rights (UNDHR) agreed upon by over 200 countries. Whereas the UNDHR is clearly defined, democracy isn’t. Are democracy and racism compatible? I rather think not.
In Guyana today, we hear the constant chant about “fighting for democracy”. What nonsense. This theoretical fight is about “domination”. Racial domination.
Dr. Kean Gibson correctly said that “racism is itself a political system, a particular power structure of formal and informal rule, socioeconomic privilege, and norms for the differential distribution of material wealth and opportunities, benefits and burdens, rights and duties”.
We in Guyana, like everywhere else on the planet, live by a “social contract”. Today, in Guyana, the primary deformity in our social contract lies in a winner-take-all constitution that imposes a ruling “ethnic minority”. The essence of this deformity is that we have been brain washed to believe that democracy means the ‘rule of the majority.’ But what is democracy? And why have we been so brainwashed to believe that majority rights are more important than minority rights in a democracy?
India is the largest so-called democracy but Prime Minister Modi’s authoritarian beliefs, behaviour and indifference to the plight of millions of Muslims show the folly of calling democracy a fair system. And India has a caste system of inbuilt inequality. More than 165 million Dalits in India are condemned to a lifetime of abuse simply because of their caste. Is this democracy?
If democracy is so good, then let people of similar religions, races and cultures, rule themselves. Isn’t this what rule “by the people and of the people” mean.
This is a time to reflect on a new global order.
This is a time for Guyanese to wake up to the reality that it is better to find solutions that benefit all, or to find separate ways for each ethnic group.
Racism or racial domination in a society of two large minorities will lead to a pandemic of resistance.
Social distancing is now a “new normal”.
Separation or mutual accommodation. Both are forms of social distancing.
COVID-19 is a great equalizer and a reset of the global economies. And more importantly, an opportunity to change our ruthless capitalist economic models which nurture, promote and reward “Economies of Death”. The New Global World Order should create “Economies of Life” (see São Paulo Statement: International Finan-cial Transformation for the Economy of Life, World Council of Churches, 2012)
Mahatma Gandhi said that seven things will destroy Mankind: (1) Wealth Without Work; (2) Pleasure Without Conscience; (3) Knowledge Without Character; (4) Commerce (Business) Without Morality (Ethics); (5) Science Without Humanity; (6) Religion Without Sacrifice; and (7) Politics Without Principle. Each of these seven “deadly sins” has to do with social and political conditions. And the antidote of each of these “deadly sins” is an explicit external standard or something that is based on natural principles and laws, not on social values.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, there were several warnings. Climate Change was one of them.
Even Artificial Intelligence and some say 5G.
Prof Stephen Hawking, one of Britain’s pre-eminent scientists warned the world about Artificial Intelligence. On a BBC interview, he stated that “efforts to create thinking machines pose a threat to our very existence. The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”
Yet, we were speeding with insatiable capitalist surge into this global madness in the name of “profits” for the greedy few.
COVID-19 will rebalance the earth, our values and our economic models. It will hopefully bring back our common “humanity”.
Perhaps, the COVID-19 crisis is a dry run, to the emotionally deaf and blind, to an even more disastrous world, a world of climate disasters as we madly rush to the 3 degree Celsius precipice of man-made natural and unnatural disasters.
Perhaps, it is also a dry run for Guyana. Wake up or suffer the consequences.
Yours faithfully,
Eric Phillips