'A COVID Genocide In The Americas?'
'A COVID Genocide in the Americas?' By Federico Finchelstein, Jason Stanley, Project Syndicate, Jan. 18, 2021.
-- Just as political leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro have forced a reckoning about the historical persistence of fascist politics, so have their disastrous responses to the COVID-19 pandemic renewed the relevance of the concept of genocide. How else are we to come to grips with so many culpably avoidable deaths? --
NEW YORK – Many commentators seeking to understand Donald Trump and Trumpism have found clarity in historically resonant concepts such as fascism. And yet, the most damning element of that historical parallel, the phenomenon of genocide, has yet to feature prominently in the US public discussion. In this respect, the United States has lagged behind Brazil, where Gilmar Mendes, a judge on Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court, warned last July that Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s craven response to COVID-19 might make his government culpable in genocide against Indigenous people.
With the US COVID-19 death toll now having exceeded 400,000, it may be time for the American mainstream to acknowledge Trumpism’s own genocidal potential. As in Brazil, Indigenous communities in the US have suffered disproportionately from the pandemic, leading the scholar Nick Estes to compare the Trump administration’s response to the original genocide against Native Americans. We share Estes’s concerns. The administration’s consistent prioritization of political considerations over public health increased the risk to black and Indigenous communities in culpably foreseeable ways.
- Health staff treat patients with COVID-19 at the Gilberto Novaes Field Hospital, Manaus, Brazil. May 28.
After all, we have known since last April that the virus was having a greater impact on African-American, Latinx, and Indigenous communities. Yet since then, Trump and his fellow Republicans have openly encouraged anti-lockdown protests face-mask mandates. Owing to a reckless disregard for public health at the highest levels, the US and Brazil are the world leaders in cumulative COVID-19 deaths. This is no accident, considering that Bolsonaro has explicitly replicated Trump’s political strategy. Like fascist leaders of the past, both men deny any and all responsibility for the deaths their actions have caused.
Both regularly distort reality and present themselves as redeemers of “the people.” Not surprisingly, Bolsonaro is among the few national leaders who have affirmed Trump’s lies about the US election being “stolen.”
Bolsonaro has also blithely dismissed the COVID-19 death toll, asking, “Who did I kill?” To be sure, genocide is notoriously difficult to define. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, focused narrowly on the targeting of racial and ethnic groups; to avoid a veto from the Soviet Union, political groups were excluded. But this expedient exception should not constrain one’s moral evaluation of a regime’s actions. When narrowly political decisions are the basis for policies that eventuate in mass death, a reckoning is in order. Trumpism and Bolsonarismo sustain themselves through propaganda and political interference in independent institutions (including the US Centers for Disease Control).
The result is an endless stream of lies and conspiracy theories that have undermined mechanisms for holding those in power accountable. This approach has already had catastrophic implications for minority populations.
The question is whether these governments’ policies of disinformation and willful neglect can also be described as criminal...
Read More, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-bolsonaro-covid-genocide-politically-motivated-neglect-by-federico-finchelstein-and-jason-stanley-2021-01
_____________
- NPR, 'Coronavirus Crisis Gets Even Worse In Brazilian Amazon City of Manaus,' Jan. 22, 2021.
https://www.npr.org/2021/01/22/959567446/coronavirus-crisis-gets-even-worse-in-brazilian-amazon-city-of-manaus
_____________
= new reply since forum marked as read
but the target wasn't Indigenous people here in the US... at least not totally... it was old people. Social Security recipients.
don't forget there were republican politicians coming right out and telling the old people that they should be willing to die to keep the economy strong.
plus a modern day Dr. Mengele with this number 1 asshole of 2020
Brazil... that wouldn't surprise in the least
