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2021 was the 12 months of political management, or extra importantly, lack of it, and an invite to mirror on the social penalties of management failures. I feel for many people, it was the 12 months that felt like when time slows down when you are witnessing an accident occur – two seconds that really feel like two minutes – or on this case, twelve months that really feel like a decade of closings, openings, lockdowns, mandates, curfews, hoarding and devastation.
On this 12 months, through which tens of millions of individuals misplaced every little thing, we’re reminded that the aim of management goes past telling individuals what to do. We’re prompted to contemplate – within the spirit of not too long ago departed thinker bell hooks – how governance that has no love for the individuals it oversees is weak to tyranny and failure.
Because the finish of World Struggle II, the dominant pondering in political science was that we have been all caught in a battle for concepts, that ideology was a very powerful factor to debate and that every little thing would circulation from that. Communism versus capitalism was the factor, by no means thoughts the violence that proponents of each ideologies inflicted all all over the world within the identify of ideology.
Capitalist governments assassinated communist leaders in poor nations and funded shadow wars whereas ignoring the management vacuums they created, whereas communist governments sponsored unending conflicts whereas discounting their human value.
From the so-called Third World, we watched as all sides went to precisely the identical excessive as the opposite, usually in our nations, however tried to reassure us that once they enacted violence on us, it was out of affection and when the opposite aspect did it, it was out of greed and hatred.
There was solely restricted engagement with the ethical claims that the varied leaders made: what mattered was that they sang from the proper ideological hymnbook.
2021 has reminded us that governance guided solely by ideology with none concern for ethical outcomes is a harmful and lethal entice. World wide, nations of varied political persuasion are making a mockery of the declare that ideology could be an correct predictor of how a rustic will carry out in the midst of a disaster.
The primary problem is in fact the COVID-19 pandemic, crashing into its third 12 months and inflicting unprecedented upheaval and devastation. On the time of writing there have been 280 million circumstances reported worldwide and as much as 5.4 million deaths – i.e. the equal of a rustic the scale of Slovakia being worn out.
With the Omicron variant, nations like France and america are reporting their highest variety of circumstances for the reason that starting of the pandemic, regardless of having vaccines in abundance. On the identical time, there’s a actual anxiousness in nations which have been denied entry to vaccines by the complicity of the world’s wealthiest nations that that is the wave that can break by their meagre defences and the cycle of lockdowns and journey bans they’ve been relying on.
However it isn’t simply COVID-19 that has revealed the paucity of ethical management on this planet. The worldwide refugee and migrant disaster continues, with an growing variety of individuals on the transfer everywhere in the world due to battle, financial collapse and local weather change.
The return of the Taliban in Afghanistan left a whole lot of hundreds of Afghans scrambling for an exit, the overwhelming majority ending up in neighbouring nations like Pakistan and Iran with out a plan besides to keep away from the reprisals which have since been enacted towards these thought of to have collaborated with the US occupation. In Myanmar, minorities persecuted by the junta are arriving in Bangladesh and Thailand by the a whole lot, whereas the gradual collapse of a number of Central American nations into political uncertainty and gang violence continues to ship caravans in direction of the US-Mexico border.
The Mediterranean Sea stays a watery grave for hundreds of individuals denied secure routes to asylum or migration whereas the English Channel and the Belarussian-Polish border have became new fronts the place European nations can play politics with the lives of weak individuals. Uighur individuals are nonetheless languishing in detention camps in China and the warfare in Yemen rages on, pushed by Gulf nations and fought with weapons manufactured within the West.
2021 was additionally the 12 months that the local weather disaster hinted on the scale of devastation that’s knocking at our doorways. Flood waters rushed by and destroyed cities and cities in nations as far aside as Germany, the Philippines, Australia, Indonesia and Brazil. Unprecedented rainfall everywhere in the world surged rivers that had quietly run their course for a whole lot of years and so they instantly burst their banks.
In 2021, temperatures within the Arctic peaked, whereas scientists warned that Antarctica’s Doomsday Glacier threatens to break down within the subsequent three years and will increase sea ranges by greater than half a metre (about 20 inches), damning coastal cities like New York, Mumbai, and Mombasa. And but, the UN Local weather Convention held in Glasgow culminated in a mealy-mouthed assertion and a heartbroken convention chair softly weeping on the podium on account of the failure.
2021 is an invite to rethink ideology because the be all and finish all for measuring how governments carry out, inviting us as a substitute to guage them by what they do and never simply what they are saying. The capitalism of america has didn’t ship a significant response to the COVID-19 pandemic; it has secured a glut of vaccines however failed in establishing a functioning COVID-19 testing system or retaining medical workers, as docs and nurses depart the occupation for lack of assist.
In the meantime tiny communist Cuba has developed its personal vaccine, totally inoculated 85 % of its inhabitants and saved a low mortality price of 0.9 % in comparison with the US’s 1.6 %.
Canada, usually vaunted for example of democracy and progress has been one of many worst offenders with reference to hoarding vaccines and taking discriminatory political motion, together with racist bans towards Southern African nations for flagging the emergence of the brand new pressure.
Russia is spoiling for a warfare in Ukraine even whereas the COVID-19 dying price within the nation hovers at round 2.9 %.
Against this, the management of Prime Minister Jacinda Adern in New Zealand continues to set a brand new world commonplace for what governance past rhetoric and ideological competitors ought to seem like – offering for individuals, sustaining open traces of communication between authorities and the ruled, responding swiftly to rising challenges.
All of those contradictions and extra are an invite to assume past ideology as a simplistic body of reference. 2021 has reminded us that there’s an vacancy behind the simplistic “us-versus-them” narratives that presently dominate political pondering and observe. These are approaches to politics which might be centred on competitors reasonably than cooperation, and jingoistic nationalism that privileges the political survival of the few over the collective well-being of the numerous.
Within the spirit of bell hooks, whose premature dying has robbed the world of a scholar who created a framework of occupied with politics and society rooted in values like love, 2021 was the 12 months {that a} tiny virus invited us to recollect why we enter society within the first place – to ensure that we’re all higher off and to not pursue empty ideological triumphs on the expense of others. Political leaders ought to take heed if 2022 is to be any higher.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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