Violence is never a solution
By Alejandro A. Tagliavini *
I honestly hope that this is my last column about the coronavirus because it does not deserve more attention, nor do I want to follow the terror journalism that counts corpses as if it were a macabre football game. I wonder if they will continue counting until they exceed the 2017 mark of up to 650,000 deaths in the world –32,000 in Argentina– from influenza, according to the Maoist WHO.
By the way, according to these same Maoist bureaucrats «every year tobacco kills 8 million people» and yet, where quarantine was imposed, the sale of cigarettes was never prohibited because it is considered «essential activity», essential to kill. ..
To conclude, then, this macabre saga I will emphasize what should have been the first topic to consider: violence. From the Greek philosophers we know that it is immoral contrary to the nature of the cosmos and, in particular, of man and therefore can only destroy. «Whenever outside of beings there is a cause that forces them to execute what is contrary to their nature or their will, it is said that … they do by force what they do … This will be … the definition of violence… «, wrote Aristotle.
Thus, according to Thomas Aquinas «Violence is directly opposed to the voluntary as well as the natural, since it is common to the voluntary and the natural that one and the other come from an intrinsic principle, and the violent emanates from an extrinsic principle». And therefore, Etienne Gilson wrote in 1989 that for Aquinate «The natural and the violent exclude themselves… reciprocally».
Violence can never have a natural, positive result, no matter what time or situation we are referring to, nor does it matter how serious and urgent the problem to be treated is. The examples are endless, but the most symptomatic is the fall of the most powerful tyranny in history, the Soviet one – which killed, with Stalin alone, at least 30 million people – which was resolved without violence, with the help of Juan Pablo II that came from that world.
Today «China has won World War III without a single shot,» said Evo Morales. Incredible but real, China won a violent war – like any war – but without firing a shot because it convinced the governments of the world to violate their own peoples, their countries.
If the first two wars were framed by the rivalry of the dominant powers, the coronavirus «war» is written amid a new dispute for planetary leadership. Now in the first two the US assumed the «moral» leadership as «champion of freedom», in addition to holding military supremacy, but today has renounced that leadership while the Red Dragon convinces much of public opinion of his «good will».
The Chinese Communist Party achieved that governments violently, with their police power, impose their authoritarian prescription for quarantines, destroying the global economy, while China recovers more quickly because its repression of the markets – quarantines – was less extended, therefore , destroyed less.
In fact, the global economy (GDP) would fall this year -6%, that of the USA -8.1%, that of the Eurozone -8.7%, that of Japan -4.7% and China would grow, little but it would grow in the end, 0.5%. To top it off, some governments plan to endure the quarantines again. As the prominent economist Gustavo Lazzari says, «In the gulags they gave you a break and then they locked you up again.»
* Senior Advisor at The Cedar Portfolio and Member of the Advisory Council of the Center on Global Prosperity, de Oakland, California
Alejandro A. Tagliavini 
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