As the Wuhan virus swept the world, much attention was drawn to Dean Koontz’s 1981 Novel, The Eyes of Darkness, which focuses on a man-made virus breaking loose from none other than Wuhan.
Koontz himself has downplayed his alleged prophetic powers, stating that it was mere happenstance that he arbitrarily chose Wuhan as the site of the outbreak, all those years ago. In fact, a far more telling and significant literary prophecy predates Koontz by forty years.
Biblical prophets were not so much predictors of the future as moral teachers uttering timeless warnings. In that sense, Albert Camus is the prophet of the Xi plague.
Less well known than his novel The Plague, Albert Camus’ play The State of Siege is as stark a warning about what is happening to the world in concurrence with COVID-19 as Orwell’s 1984 is a red flag to the depredations of Cultural Marxism.
Set [like The Plague] in a port town densely enmeshed in international trade, this time the plague that invades the city is portrayed not as a metaphysical affliction but as a governmental one, providing the means by which a dictatorial regime demonstrates the efficiency of total control.
In keeping with Arendt’s observation of “the banality of evil”, the dictatorial regime of the play are bland functionaries, not unlike the bureaucrats and politicians running our COVID-19 responses. But, like all authoritarians, they are passionately dedicated to the maintenance of their own power.
Far from compromising that power, the disease allows the full deployment of the regime’s inner logic. Once a state of siege is declared — for “the charitable succour of those infected with disease” — every citizen is constantly monitored from a sinister observation post, ration points are allocated for good and bad behaviour and it becomes mandatory to carry a “certificate of existence” that must be frequently renewed.
The regime’s aim, however, is not to sow indiscriminate terror. It is to justify its rule by showing that only a regime operating on the principle that “you need a permit to do anything whatsoever” can save the people from the horror of infected death.
All of that should be grimly familiar to everyone from London to New York to Auckland, locked-down, isolated, confined and ‘socially distanced’.
Even more frighteningly familiar is the regime’s determination to control the very words of their citizens.
At the heart of its strategy is the destruction of all meaningful communication[…]so as to be certain that its lapses will not be publicised, the regime decrees that “words are carriers of infection”.
‘Hate speech’. ‘Microaggression’. ‘Words can wound’. ‘Words can kill’. These are all the catch-phrases of the wannabe dictators for whom the Xi plague is becoming such a handy pretext to cement their absolute control over what we say.
Coming when democracy is on the defensive, today’s plague confronts the world once again with the choice Camus starkly identified: between the approach of Dr Rieux and Joseph Grand, which relies on reason to conquer disease, as Australia, for all its incidental missteps, has sought to do, and the pharaonic brutality of Xi Jinping and his henchmen.
The Xi plague will kill tens, if not hundreds of thousands, across the globe. It is dealing mortal blows to our economies and to the futures of generations.
It must not be allowed to be used as a knife in the heart of free speech.
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