Unlike Recent Epidemics, Coronavirus Hitting Richer Countries Harder than Poorer Ones, Grechaninov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 11 -- A striking feature of the coronavirus pandemic is that, compared to other recent epidemics like Ebola and SARS, it has hit richer and more developed countries far harder than it has attacked poorer and less developed ones, a pattern that explains the media attention it has attracted but that itself begs for an explanation, Vladimir Grechaninov says.

            In a comment for the Marxist Forum-MSK portal, the Moscow observer suggests that this pattern may be more apparent than real because the poorer and less developed countries are certainly testing less and their authoritarian leaders have everything to gain by understating the spread of the virus (forum-msk.org/material/fpolitic/16376760.html).

            Those things may explain the difference in part, but “the difference is so striking that you can’t explain it by lies alone,” nor by the delay in taking action that characterizes some states as compared to others, Grechaninov says.

            Classical Marxists undoubtedly have “their own theory connected with the general crisis of capitalism” and the decay of “cursed imperialism in which everyone is everyone else’s enemy,” while “at the same time, with us everything is just the reverse … But here I am not a specialist,” the commentator says.

            Others are explaining the pandemic and the pattern it has taken by speaking of a heavenly Apocalypse. That may explain something, but it doesn’t explain everything given that “deeply religious Italy” is one of the places where the coronavirus has claimed the greatest number of victims.

            “Of course, this situation has opened the way for an unlimited number of the most exotic conspiratorial theories,” including that some individual or government is behind it and likely someone who has “a pathological hatred for the rich and successful” and “dreams of destroying them to the point that they will have to cope with the loss of their own population.”

            Grechaninov says that nothing else comes to mind just now “but that, it is possible, we will sometimes find out the truth. Only in the truth, I already long ago have not believed.”