Sanitary Totalitarianism

It is fascinating to watch how, in a pandemic, Western democracies are rapidly turning into closed totalitarian societies based on widespread observation, the curtailment of civil rights and freedoms, and an increasingly harsh system of repression.

In Italy, green passports have been introduced, which directly close the sanitary profile of a person – the name of the vaccination, its regularity, indications of the main bodily processes – temperature, pulse, blood pressure, etc. – with access to certain social opportunities and political rights. In Italy, this has caused horror not only among populists, extreme non-nationalists, and anti-vaccinators but also among some systemic leftist philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben and Massimo Cacciari.

Agamben has long been dealing with the problem of “bare life”, when the pressure of the political system reaches the very biology of man, penetrates his body, and seeks to control it at the biochemical level. A person in the ultimate dictatorship turns precisely into a biological object, determined by a set of sanitary indicators. Real totalitarianism seeks to control not the mind, but the body. This is “naked life” when a person is equated with a set of biological indices. This, according to Agamben, is the end of man and the triumph of the most disgusting political systems imaginable. In his writings, Agamben stressed in every possible way that the most avant-garde and perfect example of “naked life” was the situation of prisoners of Nazi concentration camps. The prisoners in them were not considered human at all.

And now, who devoted his whole life to criticizing the inhuman criminal biopolitics of the Nazis, describing its structures both on the part of the executioners and on the part of the victims, Agamben faced exactly the same thing today, but not in a concentration camp, but in a liberal-democratic society. He was horrified to recognize in the measures of the Italian government Draghi, who, alas, was supported by the broken left and right populists – Di Maio from “5 Stars” and Salvini from the “League”, all signs of the most radical and inhuman biopolitical dictatorship.

Much the same thing as in Italy is happening in another European country that is considered a showcase of democracy, in France. There, the Macron government decided on the mandatory vaccination of a very wide range of professions and introduced a system of sanitary passes. These passes, like green passports in Italy, must contain digitized data on all bio-sanitary indicators of a person. In addition to what is most directly related to covid-19, taking into account a variety of strains and varieties, other sanitary and hygienic information will also be included in the passes.

So the human body is placed in a total system of observation, control, reconciliation, accounting, and the corresponding restrictions that can be encountered, for example, when entering the subway, if you forgot to take a medicine in the morning. The carriage doors will not open for you. Science fiction, skeptics will say. Today, yes, tomorrow is a common occurrence.

More recently, Macron assured the French that there would never be sanitary passes. Today he introduced them, and his party voted for them as one.

As Agamben described in his works devoted to “Bare life”, from sanitary control to political repression is just a stone’s throw away. The epidemic in France became a pretext for banning actions of political opposition to Macron – a wide nationwide movement of “yellow vests”, which began even before the pandemic, was constantly growing, and now, under the pretext of coronavirus, it was banned.

This is how European democracies, one after another, discover that sanitary dictatorship and pandemic Nazism are very convenient forms of government. Where democracy involves debate, discussion, agreement, and compromise, ambulance sirens and gas-masked police can greatly simplify both decision-making and implementation. Sanitary fascism turns out to be profitable, cheap, and effective.

The price for the convenience of the elites is the establishment of a concentration camp freak show everywhere, invading not even private life, but the biological human body. The sensors penetrate into bodies that become transparent – naked for the totality of electronic medical control.

If these trends continue, and they are likely to continue since the pandemic does not see the end or the edge, then we will have only one choice: which concentration camp to choose – national, where our organisms will be included in the system of total supervision of a sovereign state, or into a globalist network operating over the head of national administrations. Is it possible to choose something other than “naked life” in a national or global prison? In my opinion, no. Nothing else remains for us. What do you think?