My weekly train journey to acquire groceries has been some of the worst times of the past year and a half. Being chronically ill during this plague has fully tested my ability to refrain from kicking people in the junk. No masks, half-masking, window-shutting, constant personal space invasions with bodies and cigarette smoke (as if tobacco were sterilizing your gross-ass spittle you are now trying to float my way) – half the population of France (and the rest of the world, judging by everyone else’s reports) seemingly wants me, and everyone with a weak immune system, dead.
When I first moved to France, I kept being told about the strong sense of civic duty among the French. Just months after, when Covid-19 hit, I was assured how much more contentious and community-minded the French were than other countries and that things would go well. (Their anti-vaxx population should have already been an argument against this, but who am I to argue? I’ve never lived here before and was happy to take in more experienced views.) Within the first month of the pandemic, those extolling solidarity virtues of the French went quiet, realizing their ideas of what French people were like were perhaps severely outdated or even just wrong from the outset.
France, like most countries during this hellscape of time, has protected the wealthy and demanded human sacrifice from the rest and tried to market it as a normal thing that humans should do. The general population of the world has been drowning in a new wave of capitalist/fascist propaganda, and both systems rely heavily on your compliance with eugenics. Capitalism is the most effective eugenics tool that fascism has ever gotten its hands on. Capitalism is a eugenics machine fueled by flesh and excreting toxic waste.
Now with birth rates in a number of countries are currently declining, the news has become a boon to white supremacists who are always trying to push the “white genocide” conspiracy in the US (the birthplace of eugenics ideology) but not just the US. It’s everywhere. There’s a French version, too. The reality is that people who don’t want to have children are more and more empowered to have control over their bodies while people who would like to have children also must choose not to because they cannot afford the immense cost of having a child or cannot see a future for them because boomers destroyed the entire Earth. But you won’t see any right-wingers offering any help with those issues.
There is no white genocide, but there is a Black genocide, Native genocides, Trans genocide, and plenty of others including a climate genocide. The economic-induced genocide in the US is easy to see with the lack of healthcare, food deserts, and other various hallmarks of a country attempting to kill off their poor. Yes, there are white people who are targeted with genocide due to their inclusion in any number of targeted groups, but these issues will always affect non-white communities first and more heavily. Poor, sick, or other non-aryan-ideal breeding stock whites are a happy casualty of tactics meant to cull society of what white supremacists deem undesirable.
The Covid-19 pandemic was/is such a gift to eugenicists; a golden opportunity to rid the world of people they see as less than. Look how we have already condemned whole countries of non-white people to suffer. Governments told us that poor people had to risk their lives to keep the monied safe, warm, and fed, and that old and chronically ill people were an acceptable casualty to our way of life (hellscape capitalism).
Eugenics isn’t something only out-and-proud Nazis push by yelling at rallies. It’s an ideology that blends and bleeds into a lot of things. Just the other day it was used in the New York Times to tell us we should stop being friends with ill or fat people to improve our lives. The author of that NYT piece isn’t just being a jerk by being ableist, fatphobic, or thinking poor people are icky – she is promoting the idea that her skinny, white, presumably healthy self is better than those who are not, and that her life will further improve by the removal of those less than her. This isn’t a cute oopsie from an accidental mean girl. This is harmful propaganda, and it is meant to make you think dehumanizing and hurting others is a normal, acceptable, and moral way to act.
People targeted by eugenicists have always known they were hated. Some know it by who is killed by the police, some by who is allowed to run for public office, and others by who is allowed to have a family. Covid-19 put people’s beliefs quite literally in our faces with our masks or lack thereof, and so instead of just knowing some people want us dead we can just see them clearly broadcasting themselves in public. Knowing it feels shitty. Seeing it, putting actual faces to ideologies of death on a daily (or however often you leave the house) basis pushes it from shitty to overwhelming and a whole swath of people have been very overwhelmed this past year and a half.
If/when we come to some sort of end to the Covid-19 pandemic (your privileged ass getting your arm jabbed is not the end of this), I don’t know how much reconciliation with strangers can be expected. Am I no longer going to want to beat the shit out people on the train, or am I just going to be consumed with wondering who around me deserves the beating when the masks are gone?
