‘It’ had well and truly arrived by March, insidiously working its way into our lives like an unwanted guest who slips through the door unbeknownst. Editorially we were looking at the big picture, assessing the implications of what we used to call ‘the coronavirus’ – before becoming COVID-19 on February 11th – through political, legal and cultural lenses; as well as assessing the direct health impact.
An important contribution came from Duncan Mclean a senior researcher with the Research Unit on Humanitarian Stakes and Practices, Médecins Sans Frontières Switzerland. He looked back on the history of infectious disease outbreaks and how these can bring out the very worst prejudices, a phenomenon he described as the ‘medical scapegoat.’
[I]f sickness has historically been portrayed as a punishment for sin, socially excluded groups and minorities have proven most vulnerable. Whether linked to mortality or fear of the unknown, context is key to understanding the long history of how those on the margins of society have been scapegoated.
Moreover, in light of the introduction of special powers in the wake of the pandemic in Ireland, barrister and lecturer Alice Harrison examined how in Ireland infringements on civil liberties, such as the removal of jury trials in response to perceived threats to the state, have tended to ‘seep’ into ordinary usage.
Protecting civil liberties, such as the right to jury trial, may seem less important as long as extraordinary powers are not abused. However, the existence of special powers poses the ongoing risk that they may be exploited by unscrupulous, or even tyrannical, politicians or agents of the state.
Dr Samuel McManus was, however, able to see a ‘silver lining’ to the crisis:
If there is a silver lining to this crisis it is the revelation of how connected we are to each other, in ways we have almost forgotten. We are a species with special concerns. We cannot afford to operate alone as individuals; to do so is to threaten us all. This realisation is putting into stark relief the way we have organised our societies over the past few decades.
He averted to the importance of the state delivering public healthcare, as opposed to profit-driven private institutions:
Some private health care clinics in Dublin are now putting up signs saying they will not accept patients with respiratory symptoms, directing them towards their G.P’s. This is in one way understandable as a means of limiting transmission, but while the public service is taking extra measures to distribute information and organise the response, these private clinics are under no compulsion to do so.
Frank Armstrong also assessed Ireland’s early response to the pandemic, pointing to inherent weaknesses, and other factors likely to mitigate the worst effects:
The pandemic has hit Ireland during a period of political instability after a February general election yielded an indecisive result, with Leo Varadkar’s government no longer commanding a Dáil majority. Notwithstanding the challenge of installing a new cabinet under emergency conditions, it sets a dangerous precedent for a caretaker government to be in power for a prolonged period.
Fans of music and poetry were delighted by the release that month of a first single ‘Murder Most Foul’ from Bob Dylan’s new album Rough and Rowdy Ways. It offered a pleasant distraction from the unfolding global pandemic, although it contained a stark message according to David Langwallner
Dylan has released a new seventeen minute-long song, ostensibly about the murder of John F. Kennedy, but which is also a travelogue through American cultural history, with Prince Hamlet and the great, deranged 1960s American DJ, Wolfman Jack, as our guide.
Also, Musician of the Month Judith Ring revealed how she transforms everyday ‘noise’ into music, while exploring the sonic possibilities of different timbres; and Brian Dillon discussed the ideas behind his new solo project The Line. His debut album Matter had been released by Bad Soup Records in February.
You might think of the film ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’ as some dated artifact, featuring Dub-a-lin in da rare auld times. But many of the cultural assumptions revealed in the film, and which later went towards hindering the film’s reception, are still very much alive in today’s Ireland. The sacred cows may have changed, but the overall cultural relationship with those things deemed sacred is still strikingly similar.
Image William Murphy
On a similar theme, David Langwallner called for A Renewed Deal:
It is clear that we require a Renewed Deal, bringing Keynesian stabilisation measures, including support for small businesses, social safety nets and the shutting down of corporate tax avoidance. The E.U. must desist from imposing austerity under the guise of the Growth and Stability Pact, and reinforce regulatory protection of labour rights and the environment, resisting the lobbying of giant corporations. Courts in Ireland should also recognise a basic human right to housing, including prohibition against arbitrary eviction, as well as healthcare. So let us organise a petition then for an umbrella organisation to bring a Renewed Deal to the world.
Coverage of the region in the Western media tends to refer to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and ‘the Kurds’ interchangeably. This reinforces a reductive narrative of the SDF as being comprised of fearless but naive nationalists, apparently content to sacrifice themselves in the pursuit of a Kurdish statehood aligned to U.S. interests in the region.
Image: Alexis Daloumis
Even further afield in Indonesia, the Hectic Fish was discovering the dubious pleasures of ex-pat life on the island:
f I end up in prison again, I will enjoy it as much as I did twenty years ago. There is justice at the end of shadows. And there is poetry behind bars. It is bad, but you are worse.
Another anonymous writer The Man in the Black Pyjamas was bemoaning the impact of the housing crisis on the young people of his generation living in Dublin in ‘Gone’:
“The country’s changed,” my friend said as we sat in our small, dawn-lit kitchen at half-five in the morning having toast and tea. A month later the landlord raised our rent by 30%, and four years on now we’re all gone from Dublin. Me and my friends, and probably most of the people out drinking in the sun that day. We celebrated equality and left a day or a month or a year later. Off to London or South America or Asia or the Middle East or back down the country or onto friends’ couches or back in with our parents or into homelessness. I wish I could go back to those days, but it’s all gone now: that Dublin, those people, that hope.
We also had Sarah Hamilton discussing the challenges for aspiring female writers in an interview with Sarah Savitt of Vertigo who said:
Don’t get too carried away, wasting time on followers and trying to build up clout. You need to know the ecosystem. Spend your time instead learning about how to get an agent, which publishers would suit you, reading work related to them. Follow the submission guidelines that are listed on an agent/publisher’s page. It gives you a better running. Most importantly, keep writing. After all this time, it still really is about the words.
Finally, the third hard copy edition of Cassandra Voices was launched at the end of March, and featured the introduction by Frank Armstrong,
That new edition contained a memorable essay by Irish human rights campaigner, educator, film-maker and therapist, Caoimhe Butterly on the theme of Displacement:
I knew that I should be there, in whatever capacity was useful – to witness, accompany and respond, to platform and archive journeys that were defined by such profound and often overwhelming displacement, external and internal.
Fear plays a major role in influencing the decisions we make and the actions we engage in. Research has shown that there are sound evolutionary reasons for this. The selection pressures from these types of danger have resulted in domain-specificity in the reactivity of the fear system, meaning that the system has evolved special sensitivity toward such dangers. However, ‘not all human fearsare instinctual and hardwired—we need to learn what to be afraid of.’[i] While this capacity is critical in helping humans deal with the different environments in which they find themselves and which present different sources of ‘danger’, it can also be abused by those seeking to advance their own interests at our expense.
Harnessing Fear in the name of ‘Sales’
The power of fear has long been recognised as a potential source of profit by the business world. Preying on anxieties and ‘creating’ new ones when required to suit their needs, marketing departments have managed to exploit human fears to successfully boost client sales. As Kali Halloway writes: ‘Listerine’s 1920s ads turned bad breath from a fairly common minor flaw into halitosis, a condition that made you into a social pariah, sexless and alone,’ – leading to an increase in sales in just seven years from $115,000 to over $8 million. ‘In the 1930s, Lysol – a product we now know should be kept as far from genitalia as possible – was marketed as a douche (and more covertly, as feminine birth control), in ads that basically told women no one would ever love them with their awful natural-smelling vaginas.’[ii]
Indeed, even the threat posed by pandemics have provided grist to the mill for opportunistic marketing teams, keen to leverage the fear generated in their diffusion. According to Barry Shafe, the former head of Cussons product development and man behind the launch of Carex in the UK during the SARS epidemic, ‘background noise of pandemic fear was all that was needed to drive consumers to antibacterial soap.’ There was no need to even emphasise the element of fear in their advertising for the project as ‘real fear sells better than invented fear.’[iii]
While the manipulation of the public’s purchasing choices through exploiting the evolutionary programmed and adapted prism of the human ‘fear emotion’, is at the very least questionable, it is only the tip of the iceberg in this respect.
Ad extracted from a scanned copy of the pulp magazine Weird Tales from 1950,
Fear and Hatred in Times of Plague
In times of plague and pestilence, fear is an omnipresent companion. This fear all too frequently translates into a desire to find someone to blame for the danger with which we are faced. The greater the threat to people’s safety and the less control they can exercise over it, the greater the risk that blame for their dilemma will be ascribed to an ‘outside’ group, generally those who are not members of one’s community or nation, no matter how transparently illogical the reasoning.
As Dr. Jonathan Quick writes:
We are all afraid of death. We respond to the fear of epidemic disease by wanting to blame someone else. Anytime a threat arises, we want to blame the “other,” those not like “us.” At the outbreak of the 1918 Spanish flu, Americans blamed “the Hun”. AIDS was blamed on gay men.[iv]
During the Black Death, which struck Europe in the mid-14th century, there was widespread fear and panic as this unknown disease wreaked havoc throughout Europe. Although communities around Europe often turned upon those seen as outsiders, particularly other nationalities, the Jewish community became the primary focus of this fear. This resulted in horrific instances such as the massacres of Jewish people in Frankfurt and Brussels and the extermination of the Jewish populations in Narbonne and Carcassonne.[v]
Representation of a massacre of the Jews in 1349 Antiquitates Flandriae (Royal Library of Belgium manuscript 1376/77).
‘Fake News’
The predilection to blame outsiders, the ‘other’ for the spread of infectious diseases, is further aggravated by the propagation and dissemination of false rumours. The author Maryn McKenna, who researched this phenomenon during the Ebola crisis came up with a term for this, ‘Ebolanoia’. Tracking public response to Ebola in the U.S., McKenna related how individuals and businesses that had been incorrectly identified as having been exposed to Ebola suffered as a result.
False rumors caused a small, long-standing, family-owned bridal shop in Ohio to close. Rumors forced healthy school personnel and students in North Carolina and Texas who had visited West Africa to stay out of school, even though they were thousands of miles from the nearest Ebola outbreak. Misinformation fomented harassment of African-born students as well as other acts of fear and discrimination.[vi]
The anti-Chinese messages currently being circulated in the mainstream media and through social media are generally linked by their proponents to a desire to hold China as accountable for both the spread and deadly impact of Covid-19. While some of these inferences have been less direct, casting suspicion and opprobrium on China and the Chinese people by association, others have given free rein to their racist impulses, such as the French newspaper that proudly displayed the headline ‘Yellow Alert’.[vii]
Dubious as these assertions are in the first place, they are made even worse by the conflation of ordinary Chinese people with the purported misdeeds of China, which has led to serious racist incidents and discrimination against Chinese people around the world. Furthermore, it behoves us to remember that the racist slandering of Chinese people is not occurring in an historical vacuum. It, in fact, stands on the shoulders on a substantial corpus of anti-Chinese racism that has been present for well over a hundred years.
‘Yellow Peril’
The likelihood that a specific outside group – ethnic, religious, etc – will be stigmatised and discriminated against, as well as the severity of the reaction, will be influenced by the history of how these people have been regarded in the past.
As a child growing up, I remember hearing the phrase ‘yellow peril’. I had no idea what this term meant or referred to apart from the fact that it in some way indicated a potential threat. However, like so many phrases that slipped into everyday usage, divorced from their original context, the phrase ‘yellow peril’ has an insidious and disturbing history. As Vince Cable, former leader of the Liberal Democrats, writes:
In the early years of the 20th century there was a deep fear among western societies, expressed both in politics and popular writing, that they were in danger of being overwhelmed by the Chinese: the “Yellow Peril”. Children’s comics were full of the exploits of the evil Dr Fu Manchu, a Bond-type villain bent on world domination. Even serious writers such as Jack London perpetuated the myth. In 1911, the British Home Office circulated material which warned of a “vast and compulsive armageddon to decide who is to be a master of the world; the white or yellow men”.[viii]
Anti-Chinese violence in Britain and the ‘Empire’
19th and early 20th century society in Britain overtly displayed its anti-Chinese sentiments. Racist depictions of Chinese were widespread in the media and this had a knock-on effect, impacting how they were dealt with by the judicial system and in other areas of daily life.[ix] Anti-Chinese feeling even led to acts of violent aggression against the Chinese community. Discussing the current racist violence against the Chinese in Britain, Suresh Grover of The Monitoring Groupexplains, ‘[T]he experience of racism against the Chinese community is not a new feature in British society” with “reports of race riots targeting Chinese businesses and laundries as early as 1919.’[x]
This racist attitude towards Chinese people was rife throughout the ‘Empire’. Schools were segregated in Victoria during the latter part of the 19th and early 20th century[xi] and in British Columbia Chinese Canadians were subject to social, economic and political segregation.[xii] According to OmiSoore Dryden the James Robinson Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies in the Dalhousie University Faculty of Medicine:
Anti-Chinese racism has a long history in Canada — the Chinese head tax, the Exclusion Act, just to name two. Chinese people were often referred to as the “Yellow Peril” — a plague, something that would bring destruction to white people and colonial Canada.[xiii]
These racist incidents and stereotyping of Chinese was based on a sentiment of ‘white’ superiority over other races that justified a discriminatory treatment of these people. This feeling of racial superiority is perfectly captured in the following quotation from Edmund Barton, the first prime minister of Australia, when discussing the Immigration Restriction Bill in 1901:
There is no racial equality. There is basic inequality. These races are, in comparison with white races … unequal and inferior. The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman. There is deep-set difference, and we see no prospect and no promise of its ever being effaced. Nothing in this world can put these two races upon an equality. Nothing we can do by cultivation, by refinement, or by anything else will make some races equal to others.
Anti-Chinese Violence and Segregation in 19th and 20th century U.S.
An 1886 advertisement for ‘Magic Washer’ detergent: ‘The Chinese Must Go’.
It was racist stereotypes such as these that led to widespread discrimination and segregation of Chinese people, particularly in predominantly ‘Anglo-Saxon’ countries. In the U.S. for example there were many instances of white people violently assaulting Chinese communities. In 1885, 150 armed white miners forcibly expulsed Chinese immigrations out of Rock Springs (Wyoming), murdering 28 people and burning the homes and businesses of members of the Chinese community. This massacre went unpunished. This incident, however, was only one of many. As Brayden Goyette writes, in the 1870s and 1880s, there were 153 anti-Chinese riots that broke out in the American West.[xiv] According to the historian James Mohr:
…in Honolulu, doctors, colonial administrators, and the general US colonial population lamented the outbreak of bubonic plague in 1900 because it prompted fears that the city would become associated with Asia, where plague was then present… Ultimately, the public health authorities burned contaminated buildings, but fires spread beyond their control and consumed most of Chinatown in flames. Similar anti-Chinese responses occurred in San Francisco during the plague epidemic of 1900–04, when Chinese-specific quarantines were enacted.[xv]
The insecure environment within which the Chinese found themselves led to a process of self-segregation by the Chinese to safeguard their communities and families. As John Kuo Wei Tchen, chair of public history and humanities at Rutgers University and co-founder of the Museum of Chinese in America in New York explains, ‘[T]he Chinatowns we know today — in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles — are really the consequence of the exclusion laws, which created the conditions, between racism and the law itself, for segregated, isolated Chinatowns.’[xvi]
The continuing plague of Anti-Chinese Racism
According to Suresh Grover, the 2001 Foot and Mouth crisis, saw a distinct increase in racist incidents against the Chinese community ‘due to the unsubstantiated smear that the disease had spread from a Chinese restaurant using illegally imported meat.’[xvii]
A 2009 review on the racism experienced by Chinese people, conducted by the University of Hull and The Monitoring Group (TMG), concluded that the Chinese community was subjected to significant level of anti-Chinese racism in Britain:
The UK Chinese people are subject to substantial levels of racist abuse, assault and hostility. The types of racist abuse suffered by the UK’s Chinese people range from racist name-calling to damage to property and businesses, arson, and physical attacks sometimes involving hospitalisation and murder.[xviii]
This racism can be quite insidious and permeate virtually every area of daily life, even where one might least expect it. Writing about the racism experienced by Chinese people, the actress Elizabet Chan describes how on her first role, ‘the Bafta-winning director chuckled to everyone on set that I’d trained in kung fu,’ and how in her field ‘any character who speaks in some kind of dodgy east Asian accent is considered hilarious.’[xix]
The racism that continues to permeate is inappropriately nourished by the racist tropes of our past. As Sophie Couchman, a curator at the Chinese Museum in Victoria state, states,
It is disappointing that the same language is still used, certain words we used in the 19th century to talk about Chinese immigration – ‘influx’ and ‘swamped’ – and it’s all these sort of monsoonal words.
Covid-19 and upsurge in anti-Chinese racism
The current Covid-19 crisis has seen a dramatic rise in racist assaults on Chinese people globally as a result of their stigmatisation on traditional as well as newer social media. A major contributing factor in this rise has been the reckless use of derogatory references to China by elected politicians. The most egregious example of this is of course the U.S. president, Donald Trump, who on numerous occasions referred to ‘coronavirus’ as the ‘Chinese virus’.[xx]
Trump has NO empathy or compassion.
This is what he looks like during an EPIC crisis that is #COVID19
In the U.K., there have been numerous incidents of violence perpetrated against Chinese people as well as other East Asian people mis-identified by their assailants as being of Chinese origin. Reported incidents include,
confirmed reports of incidents of serious assaults against Chinese students by large groups of white youth …abuse in supermarkets and Chinese owned Take-away businesses, racist graffiti on shop windows and physical violence on the streets or around international student hostels… a Japanese person … greeted as Chinese and then deliberately urinated upon … the attack on the young man from Singapore who was beaten up in February by youths who punched him in the face before shouting out ‘coronavirus’ .. on Oxford Street, one of the busiest streets in the world.[xxi]
Ireland has not been immune to this reaction on the part of its citizens, as was evident in the racist attack on a Chinese restaurant in Galway.[xxii] The anti-Chinese reaction, provoked by Covid-19 has also been widespread in Asia, where restaurants in South Korea displayed ‘No Chinese allowed’ signs in the early stages of the pandemic, Twitter users in Japan initiated the hashtag #ChineseDontComeToJapan trend and over 125,000 people in Singapore, added their names to a petition urging their government to prevent Chinese nationals from entering the city-state.[xxiii]
Promotion of anti-Chinese racism
The perfect storm of victimising the ‘other’, arises the ‘desire’ to blame the other for one’s predicament is seized upon by ideologues to promote their objectives or, in the case of political, business and religious leaders to cover up their own inadequate or misdirected efforts to tackle the threat. The willingness of prominent politicians with large constituencies of ‘followers’, to promote a ‘Blame China’ narrative has contributed significantly to the upsurge in the targeting of the UK’s Chinese and South East Asian communities.[xxiv]
There are two principal reasons why political and other major economic and social figures in the Global North are seizing upon this opportunity to stigmatize China.
At the broader level, the emergence of China, particularly in terms of its’ economic and technical expansion, has created unease and anxiety amongst many in both the US and Europe, as they fear their position of economic and political dominance is being threatened. As the journalist Patrick Cockburnobserves while:
Many politically palatable reasons… will be advanced in the coming months… the real charge against China is one of effectiveness. It has shown itself more competent than other powerful states in dealing with two world crises: the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic of 2019-20.[xxv]
A secondary and, in the case of leaders such as Trump who have completely mishandled the Covid-19 crisis, more immediate goal is to indict, criminalise and convict China in the court of public opinion, thus distracting from their own ineptitude in a desperate effort to revitalise their political prospects. Now, rather than being seen as the principal architects of the disastrous response to Covid-19 which has resulted in many thousands of death, political leaders in Covid-19 ravaged countries can depict themselves as righteous defenders of their nation’s security and safety against the new ‘yellow peril’.
Fudging Statistics
One of the major excuses for the political onslaught against China has been the alleged fudging of statistics on the number of fatalities and case incidents in Wuhan and how this may have impacted upon the measures the U.S. and Europe implemented to tackle the virus.[xxvi] The thesis appears to be that if more cases and more deaths had been reported early on by the Chinese authorities, this would have conveyed the seriousness of the threat to the political leaders in the U.S. and Europe. The authorities in these countries would then have taken the threat of Covid-19 more seriously and ensured appropriate measures were in place to minimise its impact on their countries and citizens.
Covid-19 was a new virus and therefore required a certain amount of time to be identified and its exact nature determined. It is more than possible that the number of fatalities and cases was greater in China than recorded and that its virulence was therefore underestimated initially. It is also likely that at the earlier stages many cases were not identified and that it was circulating earlier and more widely than initially thought. We have seen in the past week or so, reports emerging from several countries including, inter alia, France and the U.S, that cases were present well in advance of earlier estimations.[xxvii]Ireland probably also had cases prior to initially believed, as this coronavirus might actually have reached Irish shores as early as last year.[xxviii]
It is clear that if there was a significant excedent of cases and fatalities above those initially communicated by China to the international community that this could be argued to have made the new virus appear less threatening that it actually was. However, the reports on the level of fatalities and cases received by the international community were the same for all. Yet, despite this, countries such as Viet Nam, Singapore, South Korea, New Zealand, Cuba, and several others were able to introduce measures to effectively minimise the spread and impact of this coronavirus, others failed miserably.
A case in point is that of Viet Nam. In Viet Nam, as of May 7th, there were only 288 confirmed cases with no reported fatalities.[xxix] This low incidence of cases has been achieved despite the fact that Viet Nam has a population of over 90 million, shares a lengthy border with China, has a relatively weak health sector, compared to wealthier countries, and the inability to carry out widespread testing as was the case in South Korea. Critical to the success of Viet Nam in tackling Covid-19 has been the stringent and effective measures imposed by the authorities there, a united political will and the social discipline and unity of the Vietnamese people along with building on the lessons learned from dealing with previous epidemics.[xxx]
This would appear to indicate that irrespective of the validity of the charges against China with respect to their transmission of the number of cases and fatalities, the information provided by China was sufficient for appropriate prevention and containment measures to be implemented.
International Fudging?
Fellipe Lopes/Cassandra Voices
Furthermore, there is reason to doubt much of the figures that have been reported internationally on both fatalities and incidence of cases.
Ireland has encountered several difficulties in providing reliable and up-to-date statistics on Covid-19 in Ireland and adjustments have already had to be made to previously supplied totals. Ireland has also had issues with respect to delays in testing[xxxi] resulting in late updating of coronavirus figures, false negatives[xxxii] and the tragic case of an 89-year-old man who died of the virus before even receiving his results[xxxiii], which would appear to confirm the belief that we will see more amendments to the current totals further down the road. The accuracy of the numbers provided of people infected has also been criticised by members of the health service involved in treating patients directly.[xxxiv]
There are serious grounds on which to question the figures that the United Kingdom has reported. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) in the UK estimated that the actual number of deaths in England and Wales up to April 17, and registered to April 25 were some 23,000, some 6,375 higher than the figures by NHS England and Public Health Wales collectively, which were only documenting hospital deaths.[xxxv] However, on the 28th of April, the day before the UK started to include non-hospital Covid-19 related deaths, the Health Ministry announced the total deaths for the UK were 21,092 in hospital settings, still less than the number provided by the ONS for 11 days earlier and which only covered England and Wales[xxxvi]. The Financial Times in a report, which generated significant attention, estimated that, in fact, the actual death total in the UK would be over twice the figure reported.[xxxvii]
A further issue arises in trying to engage in international comparison of available statistics, in particular the fatality rate per confirmed cases. As it currently stands on May 7th, the number of confirmed cases in Ireland amounts to 22,385, with a reported mortality total of 1,403.[xxxviii] This is a mortality rate of just under 6.3 % relative to the number of confirmed cases. In the U.K., the total confirmed cases on the same day was 215,858, with 29,958 deaths recorded. This equates to a mortality rate of 13.9% of the identified cases. While allowance needs to be made for the fact that countries are at different stage of the Covid-19 curve, this can hardly fully explain the dramatic differences in these statistics.
Cooperation and Respect
As Patrick Cockburn writes, the approach of the Trump administration in promoting a form of cold war against China is highly irresponsible given the need at this time for a ‘global medical and economic response… to counter a virus that has spread from Tajikistan to the upper Amazon and can only be suppressed or contained by international action.’[xxxix]
It is not only in tackling Covid-19 now that such cooperation is essential. If we are to ensure the global protection of humanity, of all people wherever they may live, we need to establish an international framework through which we can all contribute to the future protection of our species, in an atmosphere of mutual respect free from discrimination and racist slurs.
As OmiSoore Dryden remarks,
…racist stereotype causes harm, not only to Chinese people and to Asian people, but to all of us. Viruses are not caused by a specific people. Gay people and African people did not create HIV. Chinese people did not create SARS or COVID-19. These types of racist stereotypes are diversionary tactics that do nothing to stop the spread of viruses.[xl]
The Way Forward?
Writing in 2004, Christopher Duncan, a zoologist and Susan Scott, a social historian, noted that since 1970, some 34 years, [A]t least 30 previously unknown infectious diseases for which there is no fully effective treatment have appeared… more than are known to have emerged in the preceding 3,000 years.”[xli]
The zoologist Peter Daszak, president of the New York – based EcoHealth Alliance, has researched coronaviruses and inter-species transmission of viruses in China. In 2013, he suggested that given the ability of coronaviruses to rapidly move between species, that it would be advisable to made an investment of about $1.5bn. which he estimated would enable the discovery of ‘all the viruses in mammals.’ This would permit the development of the required vaccines and test kids to successful cope with and stop the first stage of new infection disease emergences.[xlii]
If Daszak’s advice had been heeded when it was made back in 2013, it is quite possible that we might have been able to effectively stop Covid-19 at source or at least severely impede its progress, thus buying time for the implementation of the required measures to eradicate its threat. Of course, hindsight is a wonderful thing but while we can’t turn back the hands of time, we need to prepare for the future and other potential viruses. The past 20 years have seen the emergence of a growing number of infectious diseases– SARS, MERs, Zika… It is therefore imperative we come together as an international community and pool our cumulative resources to formulate policies and put in place measures to protect ourselves from future potential threats. The stigmatisation and abusive racialisation of nations or people has no place in this process and we must reject it absolutely.
Final Thought
As Prabir Purkayaashta writes, [T]he Covid-19 pandemic is only uncovering the deeper fissures that are already existing, and widening existing fault lines in the world.[xliii] We need to be vigilant to this, particularly the appalling legacy of anti-Chinese racism at this time, though we should also remember that the colonial empires of the European nations as well as the expropriation of U.S, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and other lands from indigenous peoples were based upon an all pervasive racist ideology that also targeted many other peoples.
I would just like to conclude with what a quotation from Melanie Coates which it eloquently summarises our current situation as well as how the current pandemic of anti-Chinese racism should be tackled.
In this torrent of fear and anxiety, we cannot afford to isolate people even more through stigma and xenophobia; we each have a responsibility to support each other and advocate for a better society. Those with the loudest voice—the government and media—must speak out to condemn these actions. They have a duty to educate the public, protect the vulnerable, and hold people accountable for prejudice and discrimination. By staying silent we let xenophobic narratives—specifically, anti-Asian sentiment—and racist attacks damage our society, the repercussions of which will likely persist beyond the pandemic.[xliv]
[iv] Dr. Jonathan D. Quick, The End of Epidemics: The Looming Threat to Humanity and How to Stop it, Scribe Publications, Brunswick (Victoria) Australia / London U.K., p. 18
[v] Sean Martin, The Black Death, 2007, Pocket Essentials Harpenden (Herts), p. 75
[xviii] COLE, Bankole, ADAMSON, Sue, CRAIG, Gary, HUSSAIN, Basharat, SMITH, Luana, LAW, Ian, LAU, Carmen, CHAN, Chak-Kwan and CHEUNG, Tom, Hidden from public view: racism against UK Chinese (Technical Report), Hull University and The Monitoring Group, 2009, http://shura.shu.ac.uk/10529/1/Cole_Hidden_From_Public_View_-_English.pdf
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has seen a deluge of misleading advice, false rumours, and coordinated attempts to contravene expert advice. Over the years, it’s become popular to collectively refer to this as fake news.
This was a term that gained traction throughout the 2016 Presidential Election in the United States, and has become a popular buzzword ever since. It was even the Collin’s Dictionary Word of the Year in 2017,[1] highlighting its impact in the cultural zeitgeist. While this phenomenon is not new, the current incarnation carries a significant digital difference. Technology can foster the spread of false stories with unprecedented speed and efficiency.
This was demonstrated during the Irish referendum to repeal the 8th amendment. Researchers out of UCC showed that when people were given both true and fabricated stories about events in the run up to the referendum, participants, from both sides, recollected false stories, particularly about the other side.[2]
More recently, the discussion in Ireland has begun to probe the role of digital platforms in perpetuating the dangerous spread of ill-founded claims. It appears that in the time preceding each government announcement about COVID-19, instant messaging apps are flooded with false, misleading, and potentially harmful whispers.
As these concerns grow, so too do calls for legal intervention. While this is necessary, and likely, important details must be hammered out in relation to risks associated with the delicate task of regulation in this area. In many cases, harmful false information does not affect everyone equally.
In particular for elderly and vulnerable groups, the accuracy of medical information and advice can genuinely be a matter of life and death. This must also be considered when looking at how far-right campaigns attempt to weaponise digital platforms to lay the blame of COVID-19 against immigrants.
At the moment, numerous claims with misleading and xenophobic undertones have characterised the social media landscape, with Chinese citizens being disproportionately targeted with abuse online.
In light of this, an important detail is emerging. Misinformation can be weaponised to target groups that are already marginalised. This must be acknowledged as regulatory solutions to misinformation continue to develop. While law could have a critical role in curtailing future misinfodemics online, marginalised voices must be protected within these efforts. Within this protection, the potential for social media to platform underrepresented voices must be considered.
The Importance of Digital Activism in Democracy
The objective of combating misinformation must not be viewed in isolation. While much more needs to be done in order to preserve the accuracy of information and news online, the Internet’s democratic potential must not be undermined. Much of this potential is grounded in creating areas of unprecedented accessibility, where diverse and pluralistic voices can be amplified. This can be seen through the expansion of digital activism.
Public opinion now widely regards the role of digital platforms as a valuable vehicle for initiating social change. In America, a 2018 study demonstrated that 69% of citizens feel that social media platforms are critical in ‘getting politicians to pay attention to issues’, while 67% felt that they are important for ‘creating sustained movements for social change.’[3] As well as enlarging the scope for democratic deliberation and participation, social media has facilitated new open forums for activism, while eroding previously robust structural barriers and allowing citizens to more directly amplify issues of public interest.
In recent years, digital platforms have fueled numerous activist movements addressing racial and gender based societal problems. Two flagship social movements have showcased the potential for digital platforms to be a generative environment for social change. The Black Lives Matter movement brought attention to systemic racial injustices, while #MeToo drew global eyes to a wide spectrum of sexual harassment.
While these two movements had separate social motives, both were operationalised by digital platforms that helped to consolidate harmonised messages, and mobilise international solidarity.
The 2013 shooting of Trayvon Martin sparked a hashtag that drew attention to events involving unjust treatment and persecution by law enforcement and the criminal justice system. With further shootings by police in 2014, protests led to civil unrest, spurring use of the hashtag that galvanised a number of international ‘chapters’ adopting the same slogan.
In doing so, social media platforms were instrumental in spawning an umbrella activist movement. After the 2014 shooting of 18 year old Michael Brown, the hashtag resurfaced. In the three weeks after this incident, #BlackLivesMatter appeared on social media approximately 58,747 times every day. When the judicial decision not to indict the police officer responsible for Brown’s death was issued on November 25th 2014, the hashtag was used 172,772 times.
Within the following three weeks after this decision, the hashtag appeared 1.7 million times across popular digital platforms. Through its ability to focus attention on specific incidents and wider related social problems, the #BlackLivesMatter demonstrated the role of social media as a powerful mechanism for broaching politically sensitive but socially prescient topics.
Digital platforms have also facilitated impactful discourses surrounding gender based violence and harassment. Originating with accusations levelled at high profile figures in 2017, #MeToo gained viral traction in late 2017, leading to a variety of related stories shared by both celebrities and ordinary users who recounted instances of harassment.
Many of these users would not have had their stories heard in the days before more accessible platforms that give users access to an audience. In this way, technology and surrounding digital architectures, have revolutionised discussions surrounding stigmatised issues. The hashtag #MeToo has been used tens of millions of times since the initial 2017 tweet from actress Alyssa Milano which prompted women to report their experiences.[4]
The benefit of ‘hashtag activism’ to foster a social movement around a cohesive message can be seen through its ability to hold power to account. Public pressure on foot of the hashtag and related discussions bred numerous consequences.
In spite of particular focus in America and the English-speaking world, the #MeToo gained significant international traction, aided by social media’s ability to transcend border. By fostering environments where victims of sexual harassment and abuse could report and publicise personal anecdotes that reinforce the movement’s broader message, it encouraged exposure of personal and often relatable stories. This shows that social media can act as a machine for creating empathy.
Instances such as #MeToo also forced a discussion to question and challenge existing structural flaws in how harassment was dealt with upon receipt of complaints. This exposed unacceptable standards and worrying loopholes, and did so under a universal and recognisable framing. In this way, social media can carry important social capital, especially to those who need it most.
This is a point that should be threaded through legal discussions that broach intervention on foot of misinformation concerns. As a policy objective, misinformation must be minimised, while also striving to maintain and expand the internet’s democratic capabilities.
The Backfire of Censorship as a Response to Misinformation
In light of social media’s role as a vehicle for social activism, legal responses to the problem of misinformation online must be delicately handled. If regulatory intervention in this area is based on an obsession with cancelling out anything other than mainstream voices, this could have harmful consequences for digital activism.
Globally, recent examples can demonstrate how this manifests. In Hungary, recent legislative developments for Prime Minister Viktor Orban to ‘rule by decree’ involve criminal sanctions for spreading false or ‘distorted’ information. These sanctions can match, and even exceed punishments for defamation and slander under Hungary’s criminal code.
Hungary is turning into the EU’s first fully fledged autocracy, critics have warned, after its prime minister assumed the indefinite power to rule by decree and protests grew against a nationalist curriculum imposed upon schools https://t.co/Un3c8gAppk
— The Times and Sunday Times (@thetimes) April 2, 2020
In India, misinformation led to a confused exodus of migrant workers in light of rumours over lockdown restrictions. Many of these migrant workers were desperately attempting to leave their place of work to return home, in fear of being restricted from leaving during a prolonged lockdown. This underscores the reality that misinformation can harm the most vulnerable, and already marginalised.
In response, the Supreme Court issued advice to the central government, noting how potentially harmful the spread of ‘fake news’ online can be. The Court was correct in identifying the problem, but provided worrying commentary in issuing solutions. It was ultimately advised that media outlets are prohibited from publishing information ‘without first ascertaining the true factual position.’ The factual position needed to be verified by the government.
This is a problematic solution when recognising the need for governments to be held accountable. It is especially troubling during a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. If the government becomes a self-appointed arbiter of truth, what happens when that same government is faced with information that is true, but that is also unfavourable?
Social media has a unique role to play in bolstering movements that expose injustices, mistreatment, and neglect of marginalised and disaffected groups. Unfortunately, it is also a space where misinformation thrives.
This presents a future quagmire, if and when more serious regulatory measures are initiated to respond to this infodemic. These are difficult interests to reconcile. However, the adoption of a holistic approach, grounded in human rights, can help to disentangle this problem, and offer proportionate solutions.
How Should Irish Legal Responses Proceed?
The current Irish legal framework has been characterised by numerous encouraging developments in response to this issue, often correctly seen as an electoral problem. More broadly, a major legal issue has been the growing pains of political advertising law in the digital age, Regulation of political and issue based advertising has not been fully applied to digital advertisements and appears outdated when considering the growing sophistication of the technological capabilities.
2018 saw the ‘Interdepartmental Group’ on the Irish ‘Electoral Process and Disinformation.’ This report ascertained that while the risk posed to Ireland’s electoral process was ‘relatively low’, online developments exposed glaring vulnerabilities. In particular, threats of potential ‘cyber attacks’ and ‘the spread of disinformation online’ were identified as ‘substantial risks.’[6]
This was followed by The International Grand Committee on Disinformation and ‘Fake News’, which convened in Dublin on November 7th 2019. This was a promising development, and recognised the need for a holistic approach to this problem. Signatories from eight countries agreed to advance measures to curb the spread of disinformation, while also acknowledging the need for fundamental rights to be protected.
The question of how this delicate balance can be achieved is one that requires a lengthy discussion. Viewing the problem of misinformation currently, it appears as though regulation should intercede quickly and heavily. However, it would be far better to take a step back and develop long term and human rights-proofed solutions.
Adopting a human rights approach, within initial stages, carries two valuable benefits. First, it can ground discussions in a thorough recognition of the scope of rights and civil liberties that need to be protected whilst combating misleading and harmful information online. The right to non-discrimination, the right to free speech, and the right to free and fair elections all need to be taken into account. This is a balancing act that can be achieved when using human rights as a guide.
In terms of how to achieve this balance, human rights can again inform this discussion. Principles such as proportionality and the well-established need for legal intervention with free expression to be ‘necessary in a democratic society’, provide highly useful guidance. This is guidance that is extremely important considering the tendency for governments to use extreme events to usher in draconian legal measures.
Some of the most invasive and harmful legislation has been rushed in on the back of a crisis. As seen with the introduction of the Patriot Act after 9/11, the time of emergency is often not an ideal time to craft laws that protects civil liberties. This must be taken into account when figuring out how to intervene to stem the flow of false claims online.
Human Rights Central
The immediate crisis demonstrates that vulnerable groups are among the most immediate victims of the misinfodemic that has accompanied COVID-19. Accordingly, robust steps need to be taken to debunk and mitigate the spread of rumours and falsities that identify marginalised targets in future events such as these.
Going forward however, this problem must be seen more broadly. A crucial step that the legislators must take is to ensure that human rights are central to forming responses to misinformation. When considering how activist voices and social movements can be protected while advancing solutions, comprehensive and routine consultation with human rights groups is needed.
Civil society and non-profit organisations must be engaged to inform Irish law makers in how to construct effective prevention of misinformation, but insulate digital activism from censorship. Hopefully, the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic can kick start this complex but critical legal discussion.
[1] Collins Dictionary Announces “Fake News” as the 2017 Word of the Year’ (Collins 2017) <https://www.collinsdictionary.com/woty>.
[2] Gillian Murphy, (2019) False Memories for Fake News During Ireland’s Abortion Referendum. Psychological Science, 30(10), 1449–1459.
[3] Dan Whitehead, ‘You deserve the coronavirus’: Chinese people in UK abused over outbreak <https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-chinese-people-face-abuse-in-the-street-over-outbreak-11931779>
[4] Monica Anderson, Activism in the Social Media (Pew Research 2018) < https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/07/11/activism-in-the-social-media-age/ >
[5] Anke Wonneberger, Iina R. Hellsten & Sandra H. J. Jacobs (2020) Hashtag activism and the configuration of counterpublics: Dutch animal welfare debates on Twitter, Information, Communication & Society < https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080%2F1369118X.2020.1720770&area=0000000000000001>
[6] Emanuella Grinberg, ‘What #Ferguson stands for besides Michael Brown and Darren Wilson’ (CNN, November 19, 2014)
[7] Monica Anderson and Skye Toor, ‘How social media users have discussed sexual harassment since #MeToo went viral’ (Pew Research 2018)
[8] How Social Media Users Have Discussed Sexual Harrassment Since Metoo Went Viral (Pew Research 2018) <https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/10/11/how-social-media-users-have-discussed-sexual-harassment-since-metoo-went-viral/>
[9] Colm Quinn, Hungary’s Orban Given Power to Rule by Decree With No End Date,’ <https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/31/hungarys-orban-given-power-to-rule-by-decree-with-no-end-date/>
[10] Supreme Court Asks Government To Curb Fake News On Virus, Set Up Portal Within 24 Hours For Real Time Information, Bloomberg Quint (31 Mar 2020) <https://www.bloombergquint.com/coronavirus-outbreak/sc-asks-centre-to-curb-fake-news-on-coronavirus-set-up-portal-within-24-hours-for-real-time-info>
[11] Online Advertising and Social Media (Transparency) Bill 2017 Part 1, 2.
[12] Overview- Regulation of Transparency of Online Political Advertising in Ireland, Department of the Taoiseach (14 Feb 2019) <https://www.gov.ie/en/policy-information/7a3a7b-overview-regulation-of-transparency-of-online-political-advertising-/> Last accessed 11 Oct 2019
[13] In particular when the European Court of Human Rights assesses interferences with free expression, a key question the Court asks is whehter the interference was necessary in a democratic society, and predicated on a pressing social need [https://www.echr.coe.int/LibraryDocs/DG2/HRFILES/DG2-EN-HRFILES-18(2007).pdf]
In December 1899 Honolulu-based physicians attributed two deaths to bubonic plague, and a local paper duly announced that the ‘scourge of the Orient’ had arrived.[i] Within months a first plague fatality was reported in continental U.S. as Chinese-American Chick Gin (Wing Chung Ging or Wong Chut King depending on the transliteration) succumbed to the disease in San Francisco. The cause of death was based on a classic plague symptom of swelling around the groin, but was disputed even after rudimentary bacterial analysis. Regardless, political and health authorities were already taking actions that resonate today.
Fearing the economic impact of a dreaded disease, the state governor denied the existence of plague altogether, accusing his own health officials of propagating rumours and ‘injurious opinions’ detrimental to the ‘great and healthful city.’[ii] Conversely, successive quarantines had already been imposed on San Francisco’s Chinatown, excluding non-Asian homes and businesses despite their proximity. Enforced by barbed wire and a heavy police presence, the blockade led to dwindling food supplies and a steep rise in costs. An experimental vaccine with severe side effects, developed in 1897 by bacteriologist Waldemar Haffkine, was made obligatory for any Chinese (and Japanese) wanting to leave the city.
In 1900, Honolulu’s Chinatown was set on fire to in a misdirected effort to control Bubonic plague.
Unsurprisingly, the turn-of-the-century scapegoating of East Asians in California did not occur in a vacuum. Anti-Chinese prejudice had already been formalized in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, banning their immigration for undermining the ‘dignity and wage scale of American workers.’[iii] There were, likewise, widespread perceptions of the Chinese as carriers of disease. If Europeans had been imperilled by the ‘barbaric hordes of Asia’, germs represented ‘a peaceful invasion more dangerous than a warlike attack.’[iv] And while dogma of the day suggested limited danger to the West due to advances in health and civilization, extreme measures might be necessary with plague. In such cases Russia’s ‘heroic methods’ in its Chinese colonies were helpfully referenced, as firing squads for the infected ‘saved trouble and other people’s lives.’[v]
An 1886 advertisement for ‘Magic Washer’ detergent: ‘The Chinese Must Go’.
Old Wine, New Bottle
Associating disease with marginalized groups, minorities and others has hardly been an exclusively American experience. And by today’s standards, persecution over illness is not necessarily as crude, but neither can toxic discourse or indeed violence be excluded. The arrival of a new coronavirus in December 2019 is a case in point. The linking of its presumed place of origin in Wuhan with East Asians generally, and Chinese in particular, did not take long to manifest itself as multiple accounts of discrimination emerged. In Western countries this played on traditional racial tropes such as sordid animal markets and uncleanliness. Reflecting an entirely different experience, namely apprehension over Chinese influence, regional reaction was also alarmist. Both say as much about perceptions of mainland China as of the disease itself.
There is no shortage of recent examples that demonstrate medical scapegoating around a novel or poorly understood disease. In 2010, the lynching of voodoo priests in Haiti originated with rumours of pout kolera (magic cholera powder) deliberately poisoning the water supply. The choice of target was partially reflected in the complex history of voodoo practitioners and the Haitian State. At times associated with resistance to foreign occupation, at others integrated into the personality cults of Haiti’s twentieth century dictatorships, notably that of ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier. Confusion over the origins of the cholera epidemic ‘fed on feelings of insecurity and fear’, in turn fuelling stigmatization and violence.[vi] More sustained anger eventually shifted towards the unwitting culprits, negligent United Nations peacekeepers that had contaminated the Artibonite river with cholera-infected faeces.
Vodou ceremony, Jacmel, Haiti, 2002. Image: ‘Doron’.
A corollary of medical scapegoating is fear and misinformation. Fundamental weaknesses in the Pakistani health sector, combined with accusations of a fake Hepatitis B campaign orchestrated to locate and kill Osama Bin Laden, has reinforced suspicions of polio vaccinations. With rumours of polio vaccines being either harmful or simply a front for intelligence gathering, health workers have since borne the brunt of attacks by armed groups.[vii] Misunderstandings and distortions around Ebola, both in West Africa in 2014 and more recently in the Democratic Republic of Congo have led directly to the deaths of medical staff. In the latter case, mistrust over the response is rampant, provoked in part by ‘community resentment’ over the focus on Ebola while ignoring underlying problems in the country.[viii]
The targeting of health workers as somehow responsible for bringing illness into a community, and thus the cause or at least the visible manifestation of a terrifying epidemic, is an extreme example of the need to apportion blame. But if sickness has historically been portrayed as a punishment for sin, socially excluded groups and minorities have proven most vulnerable. Whether linked to mortality or fear of the unknown, context is key to understanding the long history of how those on the margins of society have been scapegoated. Much as nineteenth century descriptions of Chinese immigrants as ‘walking time bombs of infection’ cannot be separated from pervasive Sinophobia, the frequent panic associated with novel or misunderstood illness has tended to reinforce pre-existing stereotypes.[ix]
From Tragedy to Farce
The fate of Chick Gin aside, apportioning individual responsibility for epidemics is unusual in that it is difficult to prove. ‘Typhoid Mary’ is likely the most infamous example as she came to be seen as ‘synonymous with the health menace posed by the foreign-born.’[x] An Irish immigrant cook, Mary Mallon was a so-called healthy carrier of typhoid bacteria, unintentionally instigating outbreaks amongst her wealthy employers in New York until she was eventually tracked down in 1906. Vilified in the papers as a ‘walking typhoid fever factory’ or a ‘human culture tube’,[xi] Mallon would end her days in forced isolation.
‘Typhoid’ Mary Mallon in hospital.
On a more grandiose scale, Canadian air steward Gaëtan Dugas was posthumously declared ‘Patient Zero’, accused of intentionally infecting his partners with HIV and provoking the spread of AIDS in North America.[xii] Although later disproved, the fear and exclusion of the five ‘H’s – homosexuals, heroin addicts, haemophiliacs, hookers and Haitians – remained commonplace in the 1980s.
Much like the five ‘H’s, easier to trace is the scapegoating of entire groups, the archetypal example almost certainly being the pogroms and massacres inflicted on European Jews during the Black Death. Rumours of an ‘anti-Christian international conspiracy’ fit snugly with long-standing antisemitism, particularly when mortality rates among Jews were seen as inexplicably low (the fact that sensible hygiene laws laid out in the book of Leviticus had been employed was entirely ignored). Initially directed at medieval lepers and vagrants, Jews came to be accused of poisoning wells, eventually resulting in the extermination of entire communities.[xiii] Six hundred years later hygiene control of typhus, a lice-borne pathogen, became an element of Nazi propaganda intended to justify the mass murder of human carriers during the Holocaust.[xiv]
Representation of a massacre of the Jews in 1349 Antiquitates Flandriae (Royal Library of Belgium).
The transatlantic journey of yellow fever holds particular irony in the history of racial stereotyping over disease. The mosquito-borne virus’s first documented appearance in the New World was in 1647 Barbados. Even if thoroughly misunderstood at the time, much like malaria there was an assumption that black Africans were immune to the disease, all the more so as white Europeans were so highly susceptible (in reality this was largely due to early exposure during childhood). This immunity in turn became one of the justifications on which the Atlantic slave system was built. Brutal conditions on the sugar plantations and corresponding high mortality rates ensured continued new arrivals, often with the same immunity, all the while reinforcing the original racial stereotype. It was only as slavery was gradually abolished in the nineteenth century, a period coinciding with multiple outbreaks of yellow fever in the American South, that former slaves were themselves accused of spreading the disease.[xv]
Skibbereen, west Cork, in 1847 by James Mahony.
Cholera likewise has a special place in the history of medical scapegoating and became highly politicized. Despite having long circulated locally on the Indian subcontinent, it only emerged on the global stage in the early nineteenth century, an appearance closely intertwined with colonial trade policies. As the bacteria must be ingested through contaminated water or food, the poorest and most deprived urban areas proved most vulnerable. And given the profile of its victims, the spread of cholera inevitably took on class connotations that shifted smoothly towards immigrants, even as disease transmission came to be better understood. The Irish migratory experience was strongly marked by outbreaks of cholera, with higher mortality rates used as ‘corroboration that they were carriers of the disease’ rather than a reflection of widespread discrimination and impoverishment.[xvi]
The link between poverty and disease was particularly apparent with venereal disease, more specifically syphilis (and gonorrhoea with which it was often confused). Referred to at times as the ‘secret plague’ given the strong underreporting, symptoms had been recognizable since the late fifteenth century. And while there had long been a feminized connotation as per responsibility, hence the expression ‘one night with Venus and a lifetime with Mercury’, apportioning syphilitic blame took on far more sinister connotations through the later association with underprivileged women. Various incarnations of the Contagious Diseases Act in 1860s Britain essentially allowed the arrest and forced treatment of prostitutes in an attempt to limit venereal disease in the military, and subsequently the broader population.[xvii]
The emergence of syphilis also provoked an unusual example of xenophobic scapegoating, essentially a bizarre etymological battle that took on global proportions. As the disease spread throughout Europe and beyond, rivals were duly named responsible. For the French it was the Neapolitan disease, the Italians vice versa; the Russians blamed the Poles; the Dutch turned towards the Spanish; in Japan it emerged as the ‘Chinese ulcer’; while the Turks were less discerning, simply referring to the Christian disease.[xviii] The 1918 influenza pandemic likewise went through multiple national incarnations before settling on the familiar Spanish flu, a reference to the neutral country that first reported the disease. Both examples border on the farcical and if there are lessons to be learned, at least as far as 1918 is concerned, it is rather the impact of censorship and misinformation in controlling a pandemic.[xix]
Lessons Unlearned
Being reminded of past madness has a purpose, especially as we have a nasty habit of repeating our errors. Our understandable fear of disease sadly has often revealed our basest instincts, further stigmatizing the most vulnerable and endangering the health of all. Barbaric reflexes are never far from the surface. The emergence of a new pandemic has provoked ugly reactions very much reminiscent of the past, and counterproductive to controlling both the disease and the corresponding panic. While there are no rules to the patterns of hate linked to epidemics, just as increased social cohesiveness is also a potential consequence, the choice of scapegoating targets is not random. Facile demonization of the ‘foreign’ remains a perpetual risk, and disease a convenient pretext.
As for Chick Gin, he was merely the first of many plague fatalities in 1900 San Francisco. Over the next eight years at least one-hundred-and-seventy-two others would perish, both Chinese and non-Chinese.
[ix] Quote taken from testimony to Congress in 1876 over the state of Chinese immigration, Mary Roberts Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, Arno Press: New York, 1969 (original 1909), p. 106.
[xi] ‘Woman ‘Typhoid Factory’ Held a Prisoner’, The Evening World, New York, 1 April 1907.
[xii] Charlie Campbell, Scapegoat: A History of Blaming Other People, Duckworth Overlook: London, 2011, p. 161.
[xiii] John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An intimate History of the Black Death, Harper: London, 2006, pp. 232, 248.
[xiv] Samuel K. Cohn, Pandemics: Waves of Disease, Waves of Hate from the Plague of Athens to A.I.D.S., Historical journal (Cambridge, England), 2012 November 1; 85(230): 535-555.
[xv] Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism, Yale University Press: London, 1999, pp. 245-246.
[xvi] Philip Alcabes, Dread: How Fear and Fantasy have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to Avian Flu, Public Affairs: New York, 2009, pp. 74-75, 77.
Another anonymous writer The Man in the Black Pyjamas was bemoaning the impact of the housing crisis on the young people of his generation living in Dublin in ‘Gone’:
