31 Comments

The ability even to reasonably contemplate the plausibility of homicide-by-covid is a measure of the degradation our society has undergone as a result of the extreme economic inequality we have so far tolerated. "Our Malady" explores the same moral hazard. The scenario in the present post is truly horrifying, like "Our Malady." My first reaction to the post was, it can't be bad faith; maybe it's unconsciousness of motive, or perhaps simple confusion caused by ignorance or disinformation. But there's this: everyone--everyone without exception--knows that the frail elderly are at highest risk for death among the entire population. If you know anything at all about covid, you know that. So circumventing rules designed to protect a hospitalized elder cannot be an unconscious or innocent act. And it is not for the elder's benefit. It must be for yours. Yes, bad faith has to be examined. A society is in a very, very dark place if it enables weaponization of deadly disease against its most vulnerable members.

Expand full comment

Based on my experience hosting nine respectful conversations over a period of seven months with Covid-denying, Biden victory-denying and QAnon-believing individuals, it is absolutely impossible that they are as stupid and impervious to reality as they pretend to be. One in the mix used to negotiate international contracts for a Fortune 100 company, but says he believes that public health measures to protect against Covid are a fascist plot and Trump won. “The difficult thing about voter fraud is that it is hard to prove,” he said. The Qanon believer, a Masters level engineer, bragged about visiting her infirm father in an acute care setting in Florida, maskless.

While it will be difficult to prove scientifically that people want their parents dead for the money, I am intimately acquainted with that phenomenon and see no reason for surprise.

Thank you for seeing things clearly and unconventionally.

Expand full comment

Perhaps I believe too strongly in the inherent decency and compassion in most, even if not all people, to believe that there are family members deliberately exposing their elders to COVID to either end the cost of caring for them or inherit wealth. That just seems a bridge too far to me even for the cruelest among us. Nonetheless the actions of those who may have communicated the disease carelessly or even knowingly to an elderly family member is beyond tragic and irresponsible.

I ascribe this reckless disregard of essential public health measure to several factors that would mitigate such deaths if implemented widely. First among America’s biggest failures is our response, or rather lack of response to testing. The technology to develop rapid point of care tests is and has long been well understood. This was followed in many countries but not in the U.S. There should have been as dedicated an effort to develop these tests as to vaccines. The tests could and should have been widely available early in the pandemic. Clinical protocols for their use and wide distribution making them available free would have avoided tens if not hundreds of thousands of deaths. Certainly in the case of elder care facilities routine daily testing of all staff and visitors could have significantly mitigated risks.

Important also is greater thought to how should a country treat the issue of elder care including its cost is warranted. There is little thought given to this issue and potential solutions to both doing it with greater compassion and less cost collectively. We tend to see this as an individual cost issue rather than as a societal responsibility as is more common in other countries and cultures. This is irresponsible, lacks compassion, is less cost effective, and frankly dumb also. We could do much better and there are many instructive models from which to learn.

Americans lack of viewing issues at a societal level and attitude of touting self-reliance and individual responsibility as the answers to every problem is a societal flaw in our country and culture. Unfortunately, I see little attention to or awareness of this in most of my fellow citizens.

Expand full comment

It is truly odd that minutes before I checked my email to find your new post, Professor Snyder, I was reading “V-Day” from the collection of articles by Anna Politkovskaya called “A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya” (2003, pp. 107-112), which deals with this very subject: Old Russian men and women being left to die in Grozny, even though their young relatives knew what was happening to them. She talks about—among others—two old sisters, one of whom went mad after living in a basement for more than a year with little or nothing to eat, and then was taken by the other sister to a retirement home, where she died. “Would this tragic event have occurred if their brother and numerous nephews, who live in a southern Russian city not too far from Chechnya, had taken the sisters into their home at the beginning of the war? Of course not, but their family did not want to take them in. Although they knew what was going on in the Grozny retirement home, neither the brother nor the nephews came to Maria Sergeevna’s funeral, and now they are in no hurry to come and get the lonely Tamira Seergeevna. The healthy Russians don’t want the sick Russians, and although the stories of the Levchenkos and Baturintsevs are family tragedies, they are also a modern Russian national tragedy, thrown into bold relief by the war. ***Wherever cruelty is a norm of life, no one can expect compassion and mercy, not even the weakest*** [. . . ]. This is real fascism, like Hitler’s infamous idea of destroying and discarding the weak and sick as a ballast on the road toward a better future. It is a kind of state fascism ***that has successfully taken root in family relations [. . .] ***.” (p. 111) [my emphasis. I wish there were an italics function.]

Expand full comment

I have been unable to stop seeing the connection between the Holocaust and covid deaths, as people look away from the death of others to optimize their own comfort and prosperity. Refusing to wear a mask is no different from supporting policies that alienated then terminated Jewish people and political prisoners- it is putting your comfort above the lives of others. These people cannot know for certain whether covid exists- they have chosen that it doesn't exist *for them* and I thank you Professor for articulating why that is. It is the discarding of inconvenient and draining parts of society....... "well they had cancer so it's okay they died of covid...." when the cancer was caused by the toxins and pollutants of our society, and giving them covid was avoidable.

A book that may be relevant is Jason Stanley's 'How Propaganda Works.' The first five chapters laid out how "failures of equality of attainment lead to failures of equal respect by causing the false belief that those who control less of the resources are inferior (as well as loss of self-respect by the negatively privileged group)" (pg. 220)... "the beliefs that enable these moral harms are particularly democratically problematic, because such beliefs make antidemocratic demagoguery effective." Essentially, we tell ourselves stories that justify inequality and the abandoning of morality, and make us prone to undemocratic and immoral politics.

Thank you Professor Snyder for showing us how to be free people.

Expand full comment

Dr. Snyder is quite correct, the “stupidity” and misinformation explanations just do not make sense and give others an alibi for dangerous attitudes and actions. “Stupid” people who are misinformed should be correctable by education and compassionate discussion, but that simply is not the case here.

Motivations are complicated. Monetary greed certainly may be a motive for the Covid denial, anti-vax, pro death crowd, but I doubt it is primarily about attaining wealth of the elderly. I sense it is about avoiding the existential fears of being a mortal, radically contingent beings who could not continue to live without dependency upon a massive web of human relationships and their institutions for support.

To say that one does not need a mask or a vaccine to visit an elderly relative is greed for enhancing one’s own self image as an independent, “tough minded” rugged individualist, a characteristic American archetype, and a role Ronald Reagan acted to attain the white house. The health of the other becomes quite secondary to the protection and exaltation of the self. We have a Covid-19 pandemic complicated by a spreading, national epidemic of narcissism.

Existential terror is transformed into assorted grievance about abridged “freedoms” that are exploited by ambitious, nihilistic, and cynical politicians and media personalities. Using some of Erich Fromm’s work, this is the exaltation of “negative freedom” from external limits, which spirals downward into deeper cynicism and nihilism without the redemption of freedom to creatively participate as citizens. As such, negative freedom becomes destructive of any community solidarity that is the essence of patriotism as Dr. Snyder quite accurately states.

Expand full comment

I’m watching the youtube video “Timothy Snyder: The Holocaust as History and Warning” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfgQWc4q2Bo&list=WL&index=3&t=457s), and I stopped it about 11 minutes in because of one of Professor Snyder’s insights on the holocaust. I am going to quote the passage at length because of its relevance to this post.

“When eastern Europeans say the holocaust is a result of those incredibly orderly Germans and their administration, and their ability to manage all things at a micro level, what are eastern Europeans actually saying? They’re saying, ‘It wasn’t our fault. We just watched as those Germans like clockwork killed those people.’ And when Germans say, as they do, ‘All of those eastern Europeans were simply barbaric anti-Semites,’ what were they saying? They were saying, ‘Well we just moved into eastern Europe and, all of a sudden this savagery, this unpredictable pogrom broke out.’ [. . .] In other words, they were saying it was the eastern Europeans. [. . .] [T]hese ethnic stereotypes—and that’s what they are—are not harmless. They actually arise from the historical event. [. . .] Think of the case in eastern Europe, that the Jews indeed suffered during the holocaust, but because they were communists, [. . .] they did it to us first. They were communists and therefore they deserved a certain amount of what they got. That argument is not in any statistical sense true. But when eastern Europeans killed Jews for other reasons and communism became the alibi, ***then the alibi had to be true.*** [. . .] We don’t find it hard to kill, we don’t find it that hard to lie, ***but one thing we find it hard to do is to admit that we’re killing for a lie.*** In other words, if we can be brought to the situation where we kill, ***the reason that we give has to become true.***” [my emphases] There you have it, right there.

Expand full comment

Dr. Snyder, this is an extraordinary insight. I think this might also be why we are so ready to risk our children’s health. Children are expensive and inconvenient to the selfish accumulation of wealth. Really, in and fascistic society aren’t all the “weaker” populations deemed inconvenient? I wonder if you would say something about parallels to other times when certain segments of the population were determined to be unnecessary to the stated project of society.

Expand full comment

This is definitely an interesting take on the entire response from half the country on how we've responded to this pandemic. I know there have been reports of people (unmasked) intentionally coughing at those who ask them to put on a mask, and what has gone on with the Anchorage (AK) Assembly and their war with the Mayor over mask mandates would be a study to undertake by someone interested in an assessment of motivations.

Expand full comment

Yup, we are free in America to do almost anything we wish as long as we don't hurt anybody. We are not free to infect our family, friends and community with a deadly virus. So simple and yet misunderstood by these stupid ones. We must somehow get through to them that mandates, in this case, make America free to live healthy lives. Our culture has been built on individuality and it's time to build an other-directed society. One where we take care of each other for the common good of our nation.

Expand full comment

Survival of the fittest, or those a government or group in power deems fittest before they've even had a chance to do anything at all, is key to Nazism's takeover of the hearts and minds of too many Americans and too many people around the world. Who is "deserving," who contributes? Whoever isn't gets the ax. I've thought often since the Reagan and then Bush II years that in a Republican world I'd have been left on the hillside to die, metaphorically, as someone who because of depression just doesn't function well some of the time. But by most standards, I've been very successful, made significant contributions, fed the market as a consumer, etc., as people with mental health challenges often do, with help from medical professionals, company sick leave policies, caring friends, tolerant supervisors, of course, none of which would exist in Republican-World.

Expand full comment

Very dark and very plausible

Expand full comment
founding

Powerful! 🙏

Expand full comment

Sweden's Chief Epidemiologist, Dr Anders Tegnell, discouraged mask use during Covid-19 until the vaccination was about to be released in Spring 2021. He publicly stated there was "no proof" masks work," as if the entirety of MARS and SERS in Asia never existed (it does, and most in SEA wore masks daily years later), or as if Dr Tegnell himself didn't wear masks around novel disease (he does, he was the first to treat Ebola/Marburg in Sweden!). As if Swedish/English translation of Japanese/SEA medical literature were not available (it is)? He later said "We failed our" geriatric population in the first wave of infections... and when that was the only consequence, it begged the question of Tegnell perhaps being under agreement to passively reduce the OAP.

Expand full comment

In other ways I have been grateful for this site (as I've often expressed) but am sorry not to see here--and maybe I'm blind--the comment I submitted many months ago in response to this article about Covid19. Shortly after submitting the comment, I recall seeing it here because I returned to look for any responses to my response, which was heartfelt, carefully written imo and chimed with the TS article. If I somehow offended in a comment not intended to offend anyone, I would have appreciated correction rather than having the comment simply disappear.

I've not mentioned this disappearance before because, like many others, I've been occupied trying to do my bit to support the self-defense of Ukraine; moreover I hoped I was wrong, had missed something and would find my response along with any comments to it archived somewhere. Disappointed and confused.

Covid and its implications matter to me. US democracy matters to me. The safety and sovereignty of Ukraine matter to me. Shrug. ???

Expand full comment