As the executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, recently observed: “The health crisis will inevitably subside, but autocratic governments’ dangerous expansion of power may be one of the pandemic’s most enduring legacies.” Roth provides a frightening list of authoritarian measures being deployed in dozens of countries, including restrictions on media organizations and dissidents, a state of emergency in Hungary that allows Viktor Orbán to “imprison for up to five years any journalist who disseminates news that is deemed ‘false,’” and increased digital surveillance in Russia and China. “As occurred after September 11, 2001,” Roth writes, “it may be difficult to put the surveillance genie back in the bottle after the crisis fades.” He also worries about other “long-lasting restrictions on civil liberties” brought about by COVID-19.
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Capitalists… have indulged in the fantasy of the end of the state, especially in the neoliberal version of an economy free of political constraints. This peculiar fiction grew pronounced in the millenarian hallucination of an “end of history,” which preached that the epochal change of 1989 had ushered in a Kantian era of perpetual peace. Global capitalism was supposed to erase borders, replacing national solidarities with abstract universalism. Genuine conflicts were predicted to dissolve into rules-based competition, while existential threats would dissipate in a thoroughly benign cosmos. After all, with the fall of Communism, all enemies had disappeared, which made states obsolete.
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