by P. SAINATH
A major problem in this Covid crisis is not about how soon we can return to normal. For hundreds of millions of poor Indians, the ‘normal’ was the problem. And the new normal is often the old normal on steroids
Bloodletting was a common medical treatment for nearly 3,000 years.
It developed around an idea, originating with Hippocrates and later wildly popular in Europe of the Middle Ages: that an imbalance of the four humours of the body – blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile – caused illness. Around 500 years after Hippocrates, Galen declared blood to be the most important humour. These and other ideas driven by surgical experimentation and, often, superstition, led to bleeding the body, ridding it of bad blood, if you like, to save the patient.
Leeches were used for bloodletting, including the medicinal leech Hirudo medicinalis . We will never know how many people lost their lives across 3,000 years to this treatment, how many humans turned corpses, bled to death by the medico-ideological delusions of their doctors. We do know that King Charles II of England had some 24 ounces of blood taken from him before he died. George Washington’s three doctors drained him of copious amounts of blood (on his own request) to cure him of a throat infection – he died soon after.
Covid-19 has given us a brilliant, thorough autopsy of neoliberalism, indeed of capitalism itself. The corpse is on the table, in glaring light, every vein, artery, organ and bone staring us in the face. You can see all the leeches – privatisation, corporate globalism, extreme concentration of wealth, levels of inequality unseen in living memory. The bloodletting approach to social and economic ills that has seen societies drain working people of the basics of decent and dignified human existence.
The 3,000-year-old medical practice reached its peak in Europe in the 19th century. Its discrediting came only with the late 19th and 20th centuries – but the doctrine and practice are still dominant in the disciplines of economics, philosophy, business and society.
Some of the most powerful social and economic doctors around the corpse before us, analyse it much the way doctors in say, medieval Europe, did. As the late Alexander Cockburn, founder editor of Counterpunch , once said, when the Middle Ages medicos lost their patient, they probably shook their heads sadly and said: “We didn’t bleed him enough.” Precisely as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have whined for decades that the horrific damage of their shock and awe treatment, of sometimes near-genocidal structural adjustment – was not because their ‘reforms’ went too far, but because their reforms, alas, did not go far enough, indeed were not allowed to, by the rowdy and great unwashed.
Inequality, the ideologically insane argued, was not such a dreadful thing. It promoted competitiveness and individual initiative. And we needed more of those.
Inequality is now central to any debate we have on the future of humanity. The rulers know this.
For over 20 years now, they’ve been savaging the suggestion that inequality has anything to do with humanity’s problems. Early this millennium, the Brookings Institute warned against this debilitating discussion on inequality. Less than 90 days before Covid-19 swept the world, The Economist magazine, neoliberalism’s Oracle of Delphi, read the chicken entrails before it and ran a bitter cover story:
Inequality Illusions: Why wealth and income gaps are not what they appear
Could turn out the most famous last words since Tarzan’s – “who greased the grapevine?”
It then goes on to blast the numbers relating to income and wealth, attempts to discredit the sources of those numbers; says these ridiculous beliefs persist “even in the world of polarisation, fake news and social media.”
Covid-19 has given us an authentic autopsy, debunking the witch doctors of neoliberalism – yet their thinking dominates, the corporate media, who are busy finding ways not to link the destruction of the past three months in any way to capitalism.
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