“After centuries of fattening the colonial bat, the Ebola-afflicted countries have almost no structural defenses against even the tiniest invaders.”
The World Health Organization is warning that the Ebola virus is now killing 70 percent of those infected in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, with new cases projected to reach 10,000 per week by December. There is nothing in place or in the plans of the “international community” that will prevent the excruciating death of tens of thousands before the year is out; the short term outcome is already written in the ghastly patterns of contagion.
No one knows what lies beyond the computable boundaries of this viral conflagration, but its origin is far from mysterious. The real vector of mass death that is stalking West Africa is not the fruit bat, but a global system of plunder that has rendered vast swaths of humanity hyper-vulnerable to the predations of micro-organisms and their fellow man.
Millions of Africans are among the pre-dead — marked for extermination through disease, hunger, war and the myriad other components of imperialism — the beast that, like some species of bats, can only survive by gorging on the blood of others, leaving its victims weak and pathogen-ridden. After centuries of fattening the colonial bat, the Ebola-afflicted countries have almost no structural defenses against even the tiniest invaders. Liberia and Guinea have only one doctor for every 100,000 citizens; Sierra Leone has two.
These statistics ensure that large numbers of Africans are condemned to early, painful deaths. The system guarantees it — NOT the three nations’ health care systems, which do not exist in any meaningful sense, but a global capitalist system that forces developing nations to eliminate public services or face economic strangulation and regime change. Doctors disappear, or are never trained, or drain their brains to foreign lands, or serve only the rich. Public health is a fiction, and epidemics are inevitable.