Covid-19 is now the 3rd largest mass casualty event in Australia in history, behind Spanish Flu, and the…

Covid-19 is now the 3rd largest mass casualty event in Australia in history, behind Spanish Flu, and the Scarlett Fever epidemic of 1875-76. We need to add the massacre of Aboriginal Australians during colonisation, currently estimated at over 10,000. A 🧵on what this means. /1 https://t.co/qwzSZHWonE

There are only two other events that have killed more Australians, World War 1 and 2 (about 100,000 all up). The top 8 mass casualty events at home were all caused by infectious disease. And Covid-19 is still killing, so will likely still live up to @ToshiAkima…/2

…prediction of Australia’s greatest ever mass casualty event, at home. There are a few things to take from this, I think. Firstly, infectious disease is our greatest killer, with daylight second, for mass casualty events. (If we look at some of the research on chronic…/3

…infection, it may also be our greatest killer overall, with some theorising chronic infection is the still largely invisible cause of many if not most of our chronic diseases.) But I wanted to go back to the Aboriginal massacres, and WW1 and 2. I think Covid fits there. /4

Those are what I call colonial or imperial deaths. The result of imperial expansion and colonisation of new territory. Easy to see for WW1 and 2, where Australians were cannon fodder for the Empire. And also for Aboriginal massacres, the obvious expansion of same Empire. /5

Why does Covid fit in this group? Covid is the outcome of a new form of imperial expansion, that of the idea of the Economy, globally. What some call ‘globalisation’. Not limited to any one country, it’s a form of expansion driven by wealthy groups rather than nations. /6

I’ve Tweeted a lot about how the ‘Economy’ is actually a fiction, deliberately constructed by these wealthy groups to bypass traditional politics. There are probably at least 10 references to “The Economy” in public discussion now globally, for every mention of a “society”. /7

People use the term in the way they used to say ‘society’, the substitution is as good as complete. But we can add some history to this to go even deeper I think. Because only once in modern history have societies flirted with the idea of a ‘public’. Of a society. /8

In the late 19th and throughout the 20th centuries, for the first time since ancient times, we described our societies as all of us, as a ‘public’. Prior to that, there were kings (mostly), lords, and a descending hierarchy from there. /9

Most of those big wars at the end of the 19th and in the first half of the 20th century were wars of these old monarchical societies. Empire building, expansionism. Empires have emperors, kings etc. Thus the slaughter, the astronomical../10

…casualties in these wars. Soldiers were subjects of these empires, and in all of history, literally expendable cannon fodder. There was no public, no sense of mutual obligation of all for all. The unwashed at the bottom of the hierarchy were there to serve those higher up. /11

You can see the true function of the Economy here. It’s a modern branding for that old feudal society. It’s the way those who still support that sort of society are able to maintain it in some way, under cover of modern language and equations. Not an analogy, watch every…/12 https://t.co/tGqjBZCc5S

…justification for the lack of consideration of the modern poor, that we could help them, but we can’t ‘afford’ to, the Economy can’t support that largesse. As if society was a dispensing machine, and we’re out of coins. For about 150 years the institutions we set up to…/13

…maintain the ‘public’, our government departments, schools, health systems, welfare systems etc., oversaw the daily balancing of things between *all* members of the public. But then the old feudal folk introduced their neoliberal, libertarian Trojan Horse, the Economy. /14

For the past 50 years, that movement has been progressively stripping away that institutional organisation that created and maintained the ‘public’ as a thing. Replacing it with the old feudal hierarchies, in modern clothes. That’s what populism is, that stripping. /15

Selling people new Kings and Queens, Thatchers and Trumps. And here we are, back at Covid. You may be somebody who looks on in disbelief as this lethal virus is allowed to infect entire populations, maiming and killing at grand scale, with nary a whimper of objection. /16

But in feudal society, that would be expected. Peasants are expendable, there is no idea of a ‘public’ with inter-related dependencies. Peasants exist to serve. That’s what we’re seeing, the institutions who managed all other pandemics in the past 150 years, with equal…/17

…concern for every member of society, have been sidelined. Deliberately. The peasants can now ‘live with Covid’ in the way they lived with (and died with) the Black Death. It’s a reversion to that earlier feudal form, and again not analogously. Literally. In Australia we…/18

…even saw the transition between these two forms, in real time. The pandemic began with our institutional apparatus reining in our economic leaders, imposing traditional public health procedures in the 20th century way. But by the second year, they were mostly swept aside. /19

That’s why Covid is like WW1 and WW2, and Aboriginal massacres. And not like Spanish Flu, or measles epidemics of the 20th century. They’re the infection of peasants, not the public, the letting it rip of feudal times. The cannon fodder. The mass deaths, because there is…/20

…no public. Only total contempt for your fellow human would countenance these sorts of massive death tolls, in such short times, and the lack of concern for preventing sickness, injury and death. To keep the ‘Economy’ moving. /end