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2021 was a year of lack of political leadership, or more importantly, a lack of it, and an invitation to reflect on the social consequences of pure leadership. I think for many of us it was a year that felt like slowing down while an accident was happening — two seconds, like two minutes — or, in this case, twelve months, closing, opening. , blockades, orders, border limits, hoarding and disaster.
We remember that this year, when millions of people lost everything, the goal of leadership goes beyond telling people what to do. It leads us to reflect, in the spirit of the bell hooks of recently extinct philosophers, on how governance that has no love for the people it oversees can be wounded in the face of tyranny and failure.
Since the end of World War II, the prevailing view in political science has been that we were all stuck in the struggle for ideas, that ideology was the most important thing to discuss and that everything would arise from it. It was a matter of communism versus capitalism, no matter what violence the proponents of both ideologies inflicted on the world in the name of ideology.
Capitalist governments assassinated communist leaders in poor countries and financed shadow wars by ignoring the leadership gaps they created, and while communist governments backed endless conflicts by discounting the human cost.
Since the so-called Third World, we have seen each side go to the same end of the other, often in our own countries, but we have tried to calm it down when it was out of love and violence for the other. he left, out of greed and hatred.
There was a limited commitment to the moral claims made by different leaders: what mattered was to sing from the right ideological anthem.
2021 reminds us that ideology-driven governance alone is a dangerous and deadly trap without any concern for moral results. Countries around the world are mocking various political persuasions to claim that it can be accurate to predict how a country will behave in the midst of an ideological crisis.
The main challenge, of course, is the COVID-19 pandemic, which has fallen in its third year and caused unprecedented incidents and disasters. At the time of writing, 280 million cases had been reported worldwide and up to 5.4 million deaths, the equivalent of a country the size of Slovakia.
With the Omicron variant, countries like France and the United States have been receiving the most cases since the pandemic began, despite the large number of vaccines. At the same time, there is real anxiety in countries that have been denied access to vaccines through the complicity of the richest nations in the world, a wave that will break their weak defenses and the cycle of blockades and travel bans. according to.
But it’s not just COVID-19 that has revealed a lack of moral leadership in the world. The global refugee and migrant crisis continues, and more and more people are moving around the world as a result of conflict, economic collapse and climate change.
The Taliban’s return to Afghanistan left hundreds of thousands of Afghans trying to leave, and a vast majority ended up in neighboring countries like Pakistan and Iran without a plan, except to avoid retaliation against those who have collaborated since. US occupation. In Myanmar, hundreds of persecuted junta minorities are reaching hundreds in Bangladesh and Thailand, and the slow collapse of several Central American nations continues to send caravans of political uncertainty and group violence to the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Mediterranean Sea remains a watery grave for thousands of people denied safe access to asylum or migration, while the English Channel and the Belarus-Poland border have become new fronts, with the lives of vulnerable European countries who can make politics. The Uyghur people are still being held in detention camps in China and the war in Yemen continues, driven by the Gulf countries and fought with weapons manufactured in the West.
2021 was also the year in which the climate crisis hit the doorstep of the catastrophe. The floods destroyed towns and cities in countries as far away as Germany, the Philippines, Australia, Indonesia and Brazil. Unprecedented rains around the world that had been calm for hundreds of years had risen in rivers and suddenly erupted on the shore.
In 2021, Arctic temperatures peaked, with scientists warning that the Antarctic Doomsday Glacier is in danger of collapsing over the next three years and could raise sea levels by more than half a meter (about 20 inches), denying coastal cities like New York, Mumbai. and Mombasa. And yet he ended up crying softly on the podium at the United Nations Climate Conference held in Glasgown at an oral statement and in a heart-broken conference chair.
2021 is an invitation to rethink ideology and measure how governments work to end everything, they invite us to judge them by what they do and not just what they say. U.S. capitalism has not responded significantly to the COVID-19 pandemic; He has received numerous vaccines, but has failed to maintain a COVID-19 testing system or to maintain a medical staff due to a lack of support from doctors and nurses.
Meanwhile, the small communist Cuba has developed its own vaccine, completely inoculated 85 percent of its population, and maintained a low death rate of 0.9 percent compared to 1.6 percent in the United States.
Canada, often hailed as an example of democracy and progress, has been one of the biggest offenders of vaccination and discriminatory political action, including a racist ban on South African countries, for denouncing the emergence of new tension.
Russia is waging a war in Ukraine, although the country’s COVID-19 death rate is about 2.9 percent.
In contrast, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Adern’s leadership continues to set a new global standard for governance beyond rhetoric and ideological competition: providing people, maintaining open lines of communication between government and the governed, responding quickly. emerging challenges.
All these contradictions and more are an invitation to think beyond ideology as a simplistic frame of reference. 2021 reminds us that there is a gap behind the simplistic narratives of “us-against-them” that are now prevalent in political thought and practice. They are approaches to politics that focus on competition rather than cooperation, and jingoistic nationalism, which prioritizes the political survival of the few over the collective well-being of the many.
In the spirit of Bell Hooks, his premature death that stole the world of a scholar who created a framework of thought and politics rooted in values like love, 2021 was the year he invited us to remember why a small virus enters our society. first, to ensure that we are all better off and not to achieve mere ideological victories at the expense of others. Political leaders should consider whether 2022 will be better.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial attitude of Al Jazeera.
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