Bart Magee Ph.D.

George Monbiot symbolizes what I will never understand about my fellow leftist intellectuals and COVID: why so many people on the left have adamantly refused to consider the economic and human devastation caused by the lockdown and still rigidly focus only on the deaths caused by COVID itself. Of course I understand the temptation to use COVID as the demonstrable proof that the conservative right and alt-right, from Johnson to Trump and Bolsonaro, was despicable - and these three and others were, no question. They appeared both unconcerned with the welfare of the wider public and irresponsible. It was fun and rewarding to bang on them. It was exhilarating to be morally right. Notwithstanding that this is a very short-sighted view, this is where the absurdity begins. Anders Tegnell is anything but an alt-right dogmatist. What he rightfully claimed from the start is that closing down society comes at a steep price and the consequences will be felt for a long time, which is why he would rather avoid it. Why many on the left, transported by their self-righteous momentum, chose to seize on him as the embodiment of evil and the target of their sarcasm, is not only misplaced but incomprehensible. Why people who claim to care for the public remain purposefully blind to the economic and social devastation visited upon the poor both in our Western societies and in developing countries by the lockdown is unfathomable to me. Why they have applauded the sudden exacerbation of economic inequality caused by the lockdown, which goes against every value ever carried by the left, is beyond me. Surely by now the temptation to gloat should have given way to horror at the assault on society by inflation, new poverty, domestic violence, loss in education, retarded children's development, degraded mental health, reverse of women's equality, reverse of development in the world, etc, etc, etc? In the comments to his post, @freddiesayers pointed out to George Monbiot that a more relevant statistics, surely, is overall excess mortality during COVID, which places Sweden practically as the lowest in the world. But no: Monbiot, and a number of left-wing intellectuals with him, refuses to this day to give up on the joy of moral virtue. It is morbidly fascinating to see him and others refuse, four years later, to take notice of the poverty caused by the lockdown which stares them in the face. Strange fate for the left... if we consider that they represent the left, which I don't anymore. They rather represent their own self-satisfaction.