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<h1><font class="titre_pp">Health Crimes</font> <br>
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<td colspan="3" align="center"> <font class="auteur"> <a
href="http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/biographie.asp?ref_aut=7364&lg_pp=en">Spyros
Manouselis Σπύρος Μανουσέλης</a> </font> <br>
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Translated by <b> <a
href="http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/biographie.asp?ref_aut=2277&lg_pp=en">Eve
Harguindey</a> </b> </font> </td>
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<p style="font-size: 18px; margin-left: 40px; margin-right: 40px;
font-style: italic;">All health practices against the pandemic
to date, this set of biomedical measures and practices designed
to protect human societies against the new infectious agent,
were not based on rigorous knowledge and research, but on
widespread propaganda about a "war" against an invisible enemy,
summed up in terrorist slogans broadcast daily by the media,
such as "Stay home" during the first phase of the pandemic and
"Stay safe" during the second phase.</p>
<p>During the current pandemic (but probably afterwards) it has
become clear that citizens no longer have the natural right to
health that they enjoyed until yesterday, and that they are
therefore legally obliged to ensure public health by all means
and thus to contribute to global "biosecurity", i.e. to respect
a series of measures and new biomedical practices that are
supposed to ensure the protection of human societies against any
biological threat.</p>
<p>In reality, as we shall see, biosafety was invented to give an
illusion of security through artificial health protection, which
only results in gradually depriving human beings of their social
life, relying exclusively on the biomedical guarantee of their
survival. Do the most recent public and individual health
protection practices adopted to combat the new coronavirus
justify the prospect of universal "biosafety"?</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"> <img
src="https://www.efsyn.gr/sites/default/files/images/2020/06/84-covid-metra.jpg"
alt="" width="600" height="313"></p>
<p style="font-size: 18px; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(107, 34,
11);" align="justify">When "health" is imposed on us as a
biopolitical imperative</p>
<p>From the beginning of April to the end of May, more than half
of the world's population was placed under house arrest to limit
the spread of the new coronavirus. Of course, this is neither
the first nor the last time in human history that certain
populations have been forced to confine themselves to protect
themselves from a deadly epidemic.</p>
<p>What is most astounding about the current Covid-19 pandemic is
the speed at which it has spread across the globe, and the fact
that about 3.9 billion people were quarantined almost
simultaneously. This automatically makes this pandemic an
unprecedented psychological and anthropological experience.</p>
<p>It is indeed a completely new historical event, whose
consequences, both psychological at the individual level and
social at the collective level, have not yet been studied,
although they have affected and still affect almost everyone.
The upheaval in the daily social life of so many people, without
being able to predict the end, is most certainly creating fear,
anxiety, depressive syndromes, and other traumas not yet
visible.</p>
<p>In more recent history, similar but localized phenomena of
social containment due to a viral epidemic have been studied in
the case of SARS in China and Canada, and the Ebola epidemic in
some African countries. Similarly, the psychological
consequences of the lockdown of human beings under extreme
conditions have been studied in cosmonauts orbiting the Earth.</p>
<p>However, the case of cosmonauts, although extreme, is
nonetheless the result of a conscious decision taken freely. It
is a carefully prepared lockdown experiment, with consequences
and end date known in advance, which nevertheless remains
traumatic for the cosmonauts.</p>
<p>What is the attitude of people terrified of the new
coronavirus, faced with the "health" need to radically disrupt
their daily activities and postpone the satisfaction of some of
their basic biological and social needs indefinitely? Some are
eager to return to their normal pre-viral lives, while most
approach their return to their former lives with a mixture of
fear, anxiety or even panic as long as the coronavirus
circulates freely.</p>
<p>However, avoiding social and physical contact with our friends
and loved ones, never shaking hands and kissing them is contrary
to our propensity as social animals, while prolonged deprivation
of physical contact and intimate relationships with others is
considered a major cause of psychosomatic disorders and
depression in most people.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"> <img
src="https://www.efsyn.gr/sites/default/files/images/2020/06/84-covid-metra_0.jpg"
alt="" width="604" height="213"></p>
<p style="font-size: 18px; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(107, 34,
11);" align="justify">Lockdown for reasons of... health</p>
<p>Indeed, numerous psychological studies - both before and during
the pandemic - confirm that prolonged confinement and forced
loneliness are the most common problems of modern humans,
manifesting themselves in permanent feelings of anxiety, intense
discomfort and depression that affect their physical and mental
health.</p>
<p> If to these pre-existing psychological problems, which are
widespread in modern societies, one adds, on the one hand, the
constant and ubiquitous threat of infection by the new
coronavirus and, on the other hand, the economic effects of
prolonged quarantine, then feelings of intense anxiety and
persistent insecurity intensify and have a devastating effect on
the health and life expectancy of people, especially those
belonging to the most vulnerable groups (the elderly, the sick).</p>
<p>It is an unbearable state of chronic anxiety which, despite the
decrease in the number of cases and mortality due to the
pandemic, creates in hypochondriac individuals a paranoid
reaction of permanent repression of their desire to leave home,
return to work and meet friends, who are automatically
classified as threatening "carriers" responsible for the
transmission of the coronavirus.</p>
<p>In this way, however, interpersonal relationships are shaped
and regulated by a culture of "universal suspicion". This, as we
know, by the suffocating and therefore unnatural rules it
imposes, creates only inhuman and dehumanizing relationships.</p>
<p>A typical example of this are the new dematerialized - i.e.
exclusively virtual - contacts and relationships on the Internet
which, during the last pandemic, doubled because they offered a
safe substitute for real but potentially infectious
relationships between people confined to their homes.</p>
<p>This may be a temporary "solution" to our inherent need for
communication and social contact, but in the long term it may
lead to many problems - particularly for young Internet users -
such as confusing the real with the virtual, and gradually
diminishing their vital need for face-to-face physical relations
and communication. Thus, in the aftermath of the pandemic, there
is a serious risk that many people will "choose" to remain
isolated at home, "living" exclusively in the reassuring but
virtual reality offered by the Internet.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"> <img
src="https://www.efsyn.gr/sites/default/files/images/2020/06/84-planitis-maska.jpg"
alt="" width="600" height="424"></p>
<p style="font-size: 18px; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(107, 34,
11);" align="justify"><b>“Healthy living” as terrorism </b></p>
<p>It is enough to be attentive to the daily declarations of
governments, the forecasts of terrorist attacks and the plans of
international financial organisations for the years to come, to
realise that what is at stake today is not the salvation of
people from the coronavirus, but the panoptic and totalitarian
management, through recurrent health crises, not only of the
physical health but also of the socio-economic and psychological
life of a plethoric human population.</p>
<p>This is a new planetary hygiene that is creating social,
economic and humanitarian problems that are already visibly very
acute, and of which no one can guarantee that it will be less
destructive to human life than the current coronavirus pandemic.
For it should now be clear that the disaster now affecting us is
not purely viral in nature, but is, to a very large extent ...
caused by man.</p>
<p>Thus, during the period of the pandemic, but also afterwards,
citizens no longer automatically have the full right to health
safety but are also obliged by law to take care of public health
and biosecurity. The term biosecurity describes a range of new
biomedical measures and practices designed to protect societies
from any infectious agent and biological threat.</p>
<p>A typical example of these mass "biosecurity" terrorist
strategies is the recent global quarantine, which has turned the
right to health of every individual into an obligation to
protect themselves and others from the threat of infection.</p>
<p>Needless to say, the extreme health practices that have been
practised to date in the name of biosecurity are not based on
rigorous scientific knowledge and research, but on the
widespread propaganda of "war" against an invisible enemy (the
new virus), which is most effectively summed up in the terrorist
slogans "Stay home" of the first phase and "Stay safe" of the
second phase of the pandemic, which are broadcast daily in the
media.</p>
<p>To the new biopolitical practices of bl”aming individuals and,
at the same time, of massive marginalization of the most "at
risk" human groups, practices that have been widely accepted as
supposed to guarantee the security and protection of people, we
must oppose our active solidarity with the victims of Covid-19
and resist by all means this manifest attempt to dehumanize our
lives in the name of an unrealistic biosecurity.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"> <img
src="https://www.efsyn.gr/sites/default/files/images/2020/06/84-zombie.jpg"
alt="" width="600" height="318"></p>
<p style="font-size: 18px; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(107, 34,
11);" align="justify">“Biosecurity” scenarios in a zombie
society</p>
<p>According to the dominant political discourse, most people have
shown great restraint and discipline in the face of the new
pandemic and have behaved with a "high sense of responsibility"
to society. For those who, like the author of this article, are
not convinced by this "flattering" assessment, the widespread
acceptance and unanimous application of very unusual health
safety rules against coronavirus is a very serious problem.</p>
<p>This problem is not essentially scientific but above all
biopolitical, in the sense that it concretely affects the forms
of social management of the health and life of the entire
present population.</p>
<p>The impressive readiness and speed with which most people have
been willing to sacrifice their personal social needs and their
deepest biological predispositions to protect their health
should rather be attributed to the global misinformation and
health terror generated around the immediate mortal danger and
perhaps the uncontrolled spread of the new epidemic to
themselves and their loved ones.</p>
<p>In this sense, the dominant problem for those who decide to
confront and manage this pandemic is to achieve the greatest
possible "biosecurity".</p>
<p style="font-size: 18px; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(107, 34,
11);" align="justify"><b>“Biosecurity” as health terrorism</b></p>
<p>The first explicit formulation of the concept of "biosafety" as
a central policy option to manage citizens' health in order to
arbitrarily guarantee immunity against certain dangerous
infectious diseases can be found in French historian Patrick
Zylberman's book ‘Tempêtes microbiennes’ (Microbial Storms)
(Gallimard, 2013)l</p>
<p> In this important book, unfortunately not translated into
Greek, Zylberman, following the method of the archaeology of
concepts of his professor Michel Foucault, reconstructs in
detail and in a very convincing way the most recent version,
historically, of the concept of “health safety” as a dominant
tool, which is elaborated and exercised, according to the
historical circumstances, through two alternative but
complementary scenarios: the best possible scenario and the
worst possible scenario for the implementation and management of
a health crisis.</p>
<p>As everything shows, in the current pandemic is applied exactly
what Patrick Zylberman described seven years ago: it is the
worst possible scenario that applies to the global health
crisis.</p>
<p>If the most inhumane and dehumanizing biosafety scenario is
indeed implemented to manage the current viral crisis, then we
are entitled to doubt the near future of human relations. After
all, by definition, incorporeal and impersonal biosafety is only
suitable for zombie societies. But we'll say more about this in
our next article.</p>
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