How do you read a book that is provocative, if not reproachful, right from the title? He who is silent agrees is written in large letters on the small cover. The subtitle just squeezes in at the bottom edge About the state of our time. And how we want to live. Since most of the possibly numerous readers have so far belonged to the silent majority, one has to expect that they pick up the book with mixed feelings of being caught or with an impulse for self-defense.
You can do it with peace of mind, because as is so often the case, the actual content of the book is not the unfolding of the thesis that is emblazoned on the title. The subtitle is more apt: the political scientist Ulrike Guérot – she is known as a European advocate and has been heavily criticized as a critic of the Corona measures – formulates an interpretation of what has happened over the past two years, which the author repeatedly simply calls “the pandemic ” is called. The aim of the book is to set one’s own plausible interpretation of this event against the prevailing “pandemic narrative”, whereby this interpretation naturally includes a classification in a larger context, in an overall interpretation of the world, from which a utopia, a program ultimately emerges results for the future.
A great insidious plan
The core of Guérot’s narrative of the pandemic, which can be distilled from the passionately written essay, goes something like this: The pandemic and the subsequent pandemic policy look like a big, perfidious plan, or at least it looks like they do People who have long had a grand plan to use the pandemic for their nefarious purposes – but that is deceptive. It’s a little more complicated. Of course, Ulrike Guérot’s interpretation also includes people who have bad plans and seize opportunities to implement their plans – but that’s not the most important thing if you want to understand the apparent inevitability of what’s happening. The inevitability and consistency are rather due to the structure of the situation, which can be recognized in retrospect in what happened.
Unfortunately, this interesting analysis is not always clear because Guérot often uses a provocative vocabulary that pushes in a different direction. For example, she writes about the media development of the Corona discourse: “Since the switch to a discourse almost exclusively dedicated to Corona happened globally and almost simultaneously, one can probably speak of media synchronization, voluntarily of course, not at the push of a button.” Guérot probably knows that the word “Gleichschalt” puts the thinking on a track that leads in the direction of a planned dictatorship, i.e. creates the idea of a clique that plans and implements a media synchronicity. But that’s not what the author has in mind, and one wonders why she doesn’t keep her essay free of those allusions that keep popping up and from which one has to refrain as one reads.
Because what Guérot describes is not the working of a plan, but the effect of a social structure that had previously been established and which, with the spread of the virus, is now becoming clearly visible and has fatal consequences. In the case of the media discourse, she speaks of a “media outbidding competition, who had the most, the worst reports about Corona”, of a bored and sensationalized world that has been waiting for a world drama. She also speaks of a policy that could come into its own, that could “distribute masks or disinfectants, decide on vaccination strategies and much more, so finally take concrete action again”.
So if you don’t let yourself be distracted by the signal words, you will find enlightening approaches to interpreting how the pandemic was dealt with. The author wants to remind us that “even in Corona times… things are rarely as clear as they seem”. Sometimes you only find the now well-known multiplication table of pandemic measures criticism (e.g. “If simulation and reality do not match, that is rarely due to reality”), but there are always approaches that take a new look at Our time and current events allow, for example, “how much the whole MINT culture in the scientific community has led to theories and the ability to do theories being practically abolished through the sale of the humanities and social theories are now quickly dismissed as conspiracies”.
think through consequences
The process of transformation “as if by itself, but happened anyway” and could then immediately be exploited by power and capital interests. For thoughts of this kind, the book is worth reading. It is also worth exploring the consequences of this process with Guérot and what is happening right now, that we are in the process of “installing the digital surveillance systems for digital capitalism”.
This diagnosis is followed by a utopia, because Guérot finally wants to interpret the political reaction to Corona as a desperate “death struggle of a dying, dysfunctional, irrational, megalomaniac and auto-destructive machine”. Therefore, a time will soon come when “life can begin anew.” Reading this book is also worthwhile for the utopia that is developed in the finale of the essay.
He who is silent agrees Ulrike Guérot Westend 2022, 144 S., 12,99 €