Convulsions of Liberal Democracy

Leading liberal democracies have turned out to be catastrophically unprepared for a pandemic. Like they were not prepared for the epidemic of violence and other challenges …

Today, after the first wave of the pandemic, we can draw the first conclusions. And the main one is that Western countries happened to be the least prepared for a cataclysm of this kind. I wouldn’t want to draw parallels with either totalitarian China or Vietnam, or the authoritarian regimes of Russia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, or even Japan or South Korea, because we are talking here about completely different cultural codes. Let’s look at the situation in the democratic countries of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, as well as in Israel.

As a starting point I have picked countries (or administrative units) that have an equal number of people.

So, at the middle of June in Sweden (10 million people) there were more than 53 thousand infected and 5000 died. In Belgium (11 mln people) – 60 thousand infected / about 10 thousand died. In the Netherlands (more than 17 mln people) – about 50 thousand infected and 6 thousand dead. In the foothold of the Socialists – New York state (19 mln people): more than 400 thousand infected and 31 thousand (!) dead. In the New Jersey (9 mln people) – 170 thousand infected /almost 13 thousand dead.

Now let’s compare. In exhausted by crisis Greece (11 mln people, like in Belgium) – 3 thousand infected and less than 200 dead. In post-Soviet Hungary and the Czech Republic (10 mln people, like in Sweden) respectively – 4 thousand infected / about 560 dead and 10 thousand infected / 300 dead. In poor Romania (about 20 mln people – equal to the population of the New York state and the Netherlands) – 22.5 thousand infected and about 1500 dead. In Israel (more than 9 mln people) with its strategic challenges – 19.5 thousand infected/ 300 dead. In poor Cyprus, where the population is one million, the number of dead is 6.5 times less than in prosperous Luxembourg, where the population is 600 thousand (18 versus 110).

Here we see a striking phenomenon: in rich, wealthy states of Western Europe (with only rare exceptions) and leading states of the USA the situation is much worse than in relatively poor Eastern Europe and in Israel.

Any attempt to find some formal justification to this would be artificial. The Czech Republic has no warmer climate than Belgium. Greece is no more isolated than Sweden. Israelis are far less disciplined than people of New Jersey or Dutch. The epidemic had a chance to come to Hungary much faster than to UK islands.

The reason is different. While Eastern Europe, Greece, Cyprus and Israel were solving real problems, Western democracies were focused on fictive problems. Having created the world of romantic illusions and utopias brought to life by “progressive” quasi-Marxists professors, they lived in it. Resources of Cyprus, Bulgaria and Croatia are incomparably more limited and modest, but they use them quite rationally. And while the Western world, in a state of relaxed satiety, cherished their beautiful nonsense, these countries acted and saved their own people.

How did it go in countries of liberal democracy? Belgium is a brilliant example.

According to Drieu Godefridi (Coronavirus: Belgian Carnage), by 2015 Belgium had a “strategic reserve” of 63 million protective face-masks!. … The government of Prime Minister Charles Michel (today’s European Council President) decided to destroy them, as they had to use the storages to accommodate  migrants.

Still this is not the end. Instead of closing the borders, the Belgian government allowed their citizens to travel to pandemic-affected Northern Italy for carnivals. Returning through the two largest Belgian airports – Brussels South (Charleroi) and Brussels (Zaventem) – people didn’t undergo any checks. In early March, when a state of emergency was already declared in Eastern Europe, Greek and Israel, “the government of Prime Minister Sophie Wilmès saw no problem with Belgians attending mass gatherings, such as the Salon Batibouw (real estate fair), the Foire du Livre (book fair), and of course, the International Women’s Day rally on March 8”.

Because “there were no masks, so the government decided to announce that no masks were needed”. The country remained without masks, without tests, without any reasonable survival strategy. And then “the Belgian government took …its worst decision since 1945: people infected by the virus in nursing homes had to remain in nursing homes. … People dying alone in their rooms…”.

Liberal democracies showed an unbelievable carelessness, bordering with idiocy and inhumanity. The news from Northern Italy sounded like the worst apocalyptic scenarios, however festivals continued in Spain and Boris Johnson assured that their citizens had nothing to fear. At the same time, training for a pandemic in UK was not conducted for many years, stocks of personal protective equipment for health workers were not replenished, and many of them expired. Moreover, before the end of February, Britain sent hundreds of thousands of PPE to China.

Liberal media and the expert community around the world praised the “Swedish model” for developing “herd immunity”. The “Swedish model” failed. This was first announced by Swedish physician and virologist Annika Linde: “This was like a dream that we could protect the elderly, with very little basis in reality”. Following her, Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell assumed it too.

Already at the end of May, The Guardian noted that “Sweden had the highest per capita death rate in the world.”

In the US, the “paroxysms of liberalism” surpassed the most unbridled imagination. In the midst of the pandemic doctors were asked not to wear masks not to “scare” staff members and patients. According to The New-York Times, “Many hospitals bar doctors and other staff members from wearing protective masks in public areas”.

Would the epidemic scale be surprising after this?

The West ended up being fatally unprepared for the epidemic, although there had already being formidable warnings as “bird flu”, “swine flu”, SARS, Ebola, and Zika. It is fatally unprepared in the same way to any other threats. Here people are used to seeing the world in rose-coloured glasses. Chaos in the Arab world? This is the “Arab spring”. Militant Islamism? Oh, it’s a reaction to imperialism and colonialism. Muslim terror? Sure, it’s the result of social injustice. Masses of aggressive migrants flood Europe? Those people were in danger!

The West was preoccupied with fictive problems: global warming, gender equality, homosexual marriages, fight against racism, sexism and male chauvinism, salvation of sexually mature migrants seeking carefree lives. Political identity has become the modern pseudo-religion.

Swedish Interior Minister Mikael Damberg said migrant robbers had peed on 18-year-old boy “because they feel hopelessness”. ITV Presenter Alastair Stewart, 67, was forced to step down because of quoting the ‘angry ape’ from Shakespeare’s ‘Measure for Measure’ – he was called a racist by the black Twitter user Martin Shapland. In Sweden and Germany, elderly residents were kicked out of their apartments to make room for Muslim migrants. Forbes encouraged women to travel to Pakistan alone. The Council of District of Columbia renamed Columbus Day into Indigenous Peoples Day. Diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, Greta Tunborg was turned into a modern prophet, and enlightened intellectuals were discussing the suggestion of a Swedish scientist to eat humans in order to combat climate change. The President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen plans to invest 260 billion Euro for ‘Green Deal’ before 2030, and at same time tens of thousands of Europeans are rotting alive from COVID-19 in locked houses.

The murder of George Floyd was a terrible crime but the “black violence epidemic” in the US was predictable. BLM, Nation of Islam, Antifa were only waiting for an excuse to start the bacchanal of violence. Instead of rebuffing them, the Western world kneels – in the literal sense of the word – and resignedly allows to overthrow the symbols of its civilization. The American elite raised a monster, and now it is devouring the country from the inside. The riot epidemic spread to Western Europe, and leftist slogans heat up pogroms and fires. Not just prestigious boutiques and restaurants are burned down. The states and the very idea of democracy are burned down. The Western world is falling into the abyss, believing that it will soon fly like a bird to a happy future.

This is the world divorced from the reality. This is the world where people are deprived not only of common sense, but even of the basic instinct of self-preservation. This is the world of the end of liberal democracy.

Yes, Democracy has a future. But it will be Victor Orban’s democracy – the democracy based on Judeo-Christian civilization, an ethnically homogeneous community, and national identity. It will be the democracy without outrage and distortions of pseudo-liberalism, leftist theories, unbridled pacifism and the tyranny of self-torture. “We have replaced a shipwrecked liberal democracy with a 21st-century Christian democracy, which guarantees people’s freedom, security,” Orban said two years ago, and today it is obvious that such type of democracy is much more viable.

Such democracy can protect itself: shut itself from hordes of barbarians, prevent cultural self-destruction and Islamisation, and even being relatively poor, defend its people. And on the contrary, no wealth will save those, who destroy tens of millions of masks to settle crowds of rapists, or carry out experiments on their own people.