Photo: CFP

 
News in America is never just about the news. As with everything else in the Greatest Country on Earth, news - or what goes by that name - is political. It is a key element of bourgeois propaganda, a means of controlling the masses.

And few masses are easier to control than Americans. Both because the US education system is designed to crush independent thinking (no wonder that a disproportionate number of successful people in America are immigrants who've received their basic education outside the US), and also because the US propaganda system ensures that the brainwashed benefit from their brainwashing. 

Even the slightest desire Americans might harbor to change their pitiful circumstances is crushed without mercy. So they have no choice but to slog through life, coping somehow with the utter nihilism induced by rampant crime and a degenerate pop culture. By the time an American enters the workforce, shame combines with debt to reduce him to a life worse than a liberal - an existence of near-complete impotence, outmatched only by the cocksure illusion that he lives in a democracy where his voice is heard. 

Infectious tragicomedy

Into this disease of destitution stepped the novel coronavirus in 2019. As usual, the first step of America's "independent" media was to ignore it. When that couldn't be done, and more and more people kept getting sick, the next step was to treat it just as the flu. They tried to marshal evidence in support of their claims, parading experts - qualified or otherwise. In the early months of 2020, expert after expert appeared on US television claiming that there is nothing to worry about, and that China is overreacting to this new mysterious disease (and yet, also apparently not doing enough to stop its "spread" abroad). 

Then, when reality finally started to hit, it became clear that bourgeois democracies were utterly incapable of handling a crisis on this scale. US democracy values profits more than people. When both America's "elected" rulers and its actual rulers (corporations) realized that pandemic-control measures would seriously hit corporate profits, all life-saving measures were largely suspended. The life of the stock market was more important. Meanwhile, morgues continued to overflow. 

Of course it's not that the US could fight COVID even if it wanted to. Being a superpower in economic terms or for fighting wars (and losing them) is one thing, being a superpower in saving people's lives is quite another. This inability to perform its most basic duty, combined with the danger of declining profits, led the regime to finally give up. It was just human life after all. If the regime can do so little to prevent the entirely preventable deaths of children from gun violence in schools, it is hardly about to start caring for a mere disease, especially one from which non-white people die disproportionately. 

By October 2020, Trump's Chief of Staff simply declared, "We're not going to control the pandemic."

The deaths of millions, or just statistics?

And so it continued. The virus kept slaughtering Americans, and their media kept distracting them with bait, especially about China: the virus was created in a Chinese lab, China deliberately spread the virus to the world (or that China was incompetent or corrupt in letting it slip out, depending on which Western propagandist you asked), China is lying about its COVID figures, China is hiding its true death toll, Chinese vaccines don't work (but China is also engaging in "vaccine diplomacy"), China is hoarding masks and other equipment (but is also engaging in "mask diplomacy") … The propaganda was as self-contradictory as it was relentless.

And as with most Western propaganda, this was not some well thought-out strategy. The idea was to throw anything to the wall and see what sticks. When one narrative failed to gain traction, it was quickly abandoned for a new one. The lab-leak theory was a particularly desperate attempt. The accusation was so blatant, that the West's propaganda machine failed even to garner their paid experts (beyond the usual suspects) to support it, and it subsequently did a complete U-turn. Once the narrative was out, Western propagandists were confused and unable to control it. First they called it a "conspiracy theory" and rubbished it. Then they started supporting it. And then one day, the whole plot was just abandoned - there was no lab leak. 

Pandemic? What pandemic?

Today, America has moved on. Its leader Joe Biden claimed last month that the pandemic is over in the US. Sixteen Americans were dead from the same pandemic by the time he finished his hour-long interview. 

The US has forgotten about the virus, but the virus has not forgotten about the US. It is the coronavirus' favorite country, providing it with ready and willing hosts. The feeling is mutual. 

About 400 Americans continue dying every day due to COVID-19. As usual with US statistics, there is wide disagreement over the numbers and mistrust of official figures. Yet, even with the common caveats, more than 8,000 deaths a month seems to elicit little or no protest by now from the population, which is simply tired of protesting to a regime that has abandoned them to their fate - and to the virus. They simply do what they can. 

And the media has found better stories to occupy Americans with. The war in Ukraine, the "threat to democracy" from Putin, the danger of nuclear war, the future of Europe, China's "increasing authoritarianism," or who's dating whom in Hollywood. 

More people died in the US in the last three weeks than in China since the beginning of the pandemic. Fewer people have died in the whole of China than in an average US town. While the western media is obsessed with China's "obsession with zero COVID," it ignores the deluge of deaths at home. It's almost as if, to their respective governments, the death of one Chinese is a tragedy, while that of a million Americans, just statistics. 

The author is an Indian commentator who writes about China, India, the US and global issues