Conspiracy Theories, Denial, and the Coronavirus
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Taking the specific example of (as it was then) yugoslavia, an environment of freshly perpetual division (stoked in those times mainly by radio and TV) was what started the bloodshed.
I know refugees whose conspiracy theory is that that division had been helped by outside forces. I think they're optimists, and Solzhenitsyn called it more accurately:
> “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."
It takes a special kind of elitism to assume a conclusion from an unposed argument as a premise for an opinion piece likening public policy disagreements to genocide, all the while with no sense of irony hand-wringing about partisan media outlets and institutional decay.
People like this author are exactly why the tenor of our national discourse has gone off the rails into crazy territory. Well-traveled, well-educated and blinded by their own arrogance.
To give an easy to disprove example if someone claims that the very existence police brutality is a conspiracy theory from criminals and their apologists and is denying the existence of criminals it would be trivial to list a long list of police brutality cases and just listing the definition of "excessive force" doesn't deny the existence of criminals.
1. Genocide occurred
2. Serbs created cultural trope around genocide denialism (bad)
3. American response to coronavirus is like 2
The article presents a very thoughtful analysis of an atrocity that occurred followed by a collective denial, but it falls completely short in presenting a parallel to American culture / current events (point 3). This is where the feedback loop comes into play.
The author asserts that our pandemic response is similar to a genocide, but he doesn’t establish _how_, which would actually be the most crucial detail if this were a good-faith argument and not an emotional appeal wrapped as intellect porn. Without establishing _how_, it is left to the reader to fill in the details. What exactly about the situation in America is like genocide in Bosnia? In order to do piece this together, the reader must assume the conclusion (3) as a premise and work backwards.
The piece falls entirely flat because it starts as a passionate and well-presented takedown of consensus reality underpinned by mass denialism, and ends with a metaphor that can only hold true if the reader adopts a particular consensus reality. It’s left as a challenge to the reader to fill in a reality that supports the author’s comparison to genocide. Our virtue is at stake because we all agree that genocide is bad. But that’s not a real argument.
I don't see where "elitism" comes in here. When you are wrong, you are wrong.
As Henriquez inadvertently makes clear, he doesn't need to address the facts. He can simply say that his course of events is just as valid as that of the "elites", with their "evidence" and "facts". He can (and does) dress it up with bullshit wordy adjectives, and he can (and does) make it somehow not even about the facts, not even about reality, but instead about some kind of weird fucked up culture war. You'll note he doesn't mention facts even once; the very idea of evidence isn't present. Those who deal in fact, the people he rails against, are powerless when people ascribe zero weight to those facts.
1. Does the coronavirus pandemic exist? Yes.
2. Has it killed a lot of people? Obviously.
My point is that how we respond to that threat is a public policy debate. The author of this piece doesn’t make his position clear or offer evidence either, instead he simply compares disagreement with his preferred consensus to a genocide and related coverup, all the while drawing parallels to “some kind of weird fucked up culture war” (as you put it) and vaguely posing the “how did we even come to this” drama trope.
“disagreement == genocide”; statements like that are how we’ve come to this and why we face the institutional decay the author decries.
TFA is arguing in bad faith pure and simple. That’s why facts aren’t relevant here, not to be confused with facts don’t matter. Facts matter, but you don’t argue with [not an argument].
I don't think the article says that, but people have been using the word in relation to covid elsewhere.
I've recently reacted to someone else using the word with a vague feeling of discomfort, wondering why people are so eager to talk like that.
But then, like practically the next day, I had a visceral reaction to something in the news, and I felt like "this is why people are talking about genocide" because then the events were giving me the same sense of fear and dislocation that extreme rhetoric was previously.
The events that made me react that way were how the (white male) governor of Georgia was suing Atlanta whose (black female) mayor recently got covid. Trying to prevent health precautions from being enforced.
It's like, sure it's hyperbole in some sense, but I suddenly understand the reaching for something that expresses the enormity[1] of the situation, and the maddening incomprehensibility of why people are acting in this way.
And on top of that are the "little green men" in Portland, and I wonder where are all the right wing anti-government paranoiacs these days?
[1]I am not using this to mean enormousness, see https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enormity
To answer, I wasn’t there, I don’t know but based on the information available I assume it _did_ happen.