Covid Conundrums
This is a set of papers and opinion pieces I wrote during the pandemic. I posted these on Facebook and Medium. One was edited for Arena journal. Like other people on the left I found it upsetting to see various friends embracing an anti-vax position. One friend from my time in Newcastle had a compromised immune system, she was convinced that a flu vaccine had really knocked her about. She did not want to risk the Covid vaccine. She was angry that she was under pressure to get vaccinated and ended up posting a lot of disinformation. Eventually she started re-posting memes that were right out of the far-right playbook, portraying the vaccinated as ‘sheeple’. She informed us that we were seeing the end of democracy. Another friend told me that the lockdowns were causing serious stress to single mothers. Their sanity was more important than the risks to older people. I did not take this personally and we are still friends. I went to a recent talk to anarchists, given by an Aboriginal activist. He was talking about the way that parts of the Indigenous community had taken up an anti-vax alliance with the far right. The left had deserted Indigenous people during the pandemic and the vaccuum had created a field day for the far right. At the time, I was aware of the difficulties anarchists were having working out a position on the state response to covid. Their de facto behaviour suggested they supported the lockdowns. All the usual rallies vanished, people were massively careful about visiting their friends and followed the guidelines and rules put out by the health department. But it seemed inconsistent with an anarchist position to actually support the lockdowns. I ended up thinking that this conundrum was worth looking into. Is there a more useful analysis of the state than that typically given by anarchists? As these papers show, the permaculture movement was split on this issue in ways that may do permanent damage. Taking up a populist analysis of current global politics, some permaculture people were talking the same talk as the far right. I felt strongly that these views deserved a considered and thoughtful answer and had several goes at this.