The coronavirus has infected over 1.3 million people in the world and forced the rest to seek shelter in self-isolation, although there remains a disturbingly large number of people like the refugees in Greece or the migrant laborers in India who cannot afford to do so in a world where self-isolation is a privilege. The world is now experiencing an unprecedented lockdown which has affected not only the way we live, but also our economy and infrastructure.
People around the world can be found saying that the very way in which they live has changed under self-isolation. As for the first time the world’s millennial generation finds itself isolated in its home, there has been an increase in the proliferation of memes circulated on social media on how to survive the lockdown. In fact, the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 has led to a wave of memes on living in lockdown, many of which carry a political meaning.
Emily Apter, a Comparativist at NYU, says that memes have an antidepressant function. She writes that “memes are salves for solitary souls. They are community-builders, connecting solo agents to social networks and political causes”. By working through recognition and repetition, memes create a community between viewers and readers who understand and ‘like’ a meme. It is like being on the inside of a joke. Apter observes that a political critique is initiated by memes and hence calls them “omnipresent warriors”.
The Indian philosopher Shaj Mohan states that memes are “explosive in their circulation, creating no regularity other than their own circulation”. This insight is interesting when we examine the circulation of memes with a black background which say “Dear World, How is the Lockdown? Sincerely, Gaza” or “Dear World, How is the Lockdown? Sincerely, Kashmir”.
In this meme, a political critique is coded in an imagistic language of memes which the millennials understand. The meme has become a vehicle for the circulation of a political critique of the lockdown and how the lockdown has now come full circle. Both Kashmir and Gaza have been in lockdown like conditions for years. For Kashmir it was particularly since the abrogation of Article 370 in India which abolished Kashmir’s special status last summer, and for Gaza is has been 13 years since Israel instituted the blockade of Gaza in 2007. By coding their critique of the lockdown in the language of humor, satire and memes, Kashmiris and Palestinians have ensured that their critique can circulate and be understood.
Hence, memes are being used for a pedagogical intervention. They intend to educate the millennial audience how difficult it is to live under lockdown. Millennials have been joking that their grandparents saved the world by fighting in wars, while they are saving the world by lying on their couches.
Now, the Kashmiri and Palestinian memes joke that for the first time, the world is experiencing what they experienced. This is why Emily Apter calls memes the “cryptocurrency of micropolitics”. She means that memes are coded in a certain way to enable an understanding of a political situation.
It was tragicomic when Omar Abdullah, former Chief Minister of the State of Jammu and Kashmir, tweeted that perhaps he should start a blog on how to live in a 21-day lockdown as he had been imprisoned for 236 days in his house by the Indian Government since the abolition of Article 370.
His misery became something which Indian millennials could relate with, even though they joked that shortly after exiting a 236 day lockdown, Abdullah had to enter a 21-day lockdown imposed by the Indian Government on the entire nation because of COVID-19.
While internet in Kashmir remains restricted to the stone-age 2G, it is important to ask if millennials truly understand what Kashmir and Gaza have been experiencing indefinitely. While most millennials get 4G internet on their phones with a minimum speed of 10 mbps, can they truly imagine what it means to live without the internet to the extent that medical institutions and educational facilities suffer? Apter says that “mobilized as a comic medium, memes test the conceptual boundaries of existential belonging and political community and critically reboot the venerable tradition of political satire for an era of micropolitics”.
Memes could be considered ‘paradigmatic’ in the sense defined by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (PDF). A paradigm helps the viewer create an analogy between two situations which were previously uncompared. It creates a new way of seeing since it is an example which can be repeated. It is tempting to argue that memes can be paradigmatic because they make the previously unrelatable phenomenon of the Kashmir or Gaza lockdown intelligible.
However, memes actually show the limit of the comparison by showing the limits of empathy. While the average millennial has enough internet bandwidth to circulate memes during the lockdown and survive self-isolation, Kashmir and Gaza have been surviving with little or no internet services and a lockdown far worse than that the millennial is capable of imagining, let alone surviving.
The estimated population of Kashmir is 12 million and the population of Gaza is 1.8 million. For the first time, billions of people over the world are experiencing the harsh conditions of confinement, isolation, depleting rations and the ensuing depression and trauma that are routinely experienced by those in Kashmir and Gaza.
Memes actually show the limits of analogy because even though they ask the millennial to empathize with Gaza and Kashmir, they imply that the millennial perhaps cannot comprehend the difficulty of living under a political lockdown that goes on for years. Memes are interventionist—they help us draw parallels through their incessant circulation. However, memes are most insightful when they show the limit of the comparison that appears to be made: between a political lockdown imposed on the freedom of people occupied in Kashmir and Gaza, and the luxury of self-isolation that can be afforded by the millennial.
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-coronavirus-in-gaza-the-blockade-will-kill-palestinians-1.8744273
“For Us in the West, the Lockdown Is Meant to Save Lives. In Gaza It Will Kill Many”
By Neve Gordon, April 6/2020, Haaretz.
Prof. Neve Gordon teaches at the School of Law at Queen Mary University of London.
“When people started to share the Facebook post ‘Dear world: How is the lockdown? – Gaza,’ I felt uncomfortable. Though the posters sought to generate empathy for the 2 million Palestinians trapped in the Gaza Strip, the attempt to compare the closure that free citizens of the West are experiencing to the 13-year siege on the Strip is, at the very least, tasteless. Now that the virus has crossed the military checkpoints and 12 Palestinians have been diagnosed as infected, the distortion of this comparison is going to become tragically clear.
“Gaza residents will suffer not just from the natural complications the virus causes, but from the fact that the siege puts them at an extreme disadvantage in all three categories considered vital to battling the coronavirus epidemic: health services, social conditions that determine the level of health, and the ability to keep social distance from one another.
“Health services”
“Extensive information has been published over the past few weeks on the readiness of the world’s health systems and their influence on coronavirus mortality levels. Basing themselves on South Korea – which unlike Italy and Spain managed to gain considerable control over the spread of the virus – experts argue that testing is crucial to saving lives. But today in Gaza there are very few testing kits (around 200) and as of March 24, only 144 people had been tested.
“We also know that in some countries, people are dying because the hospitals can’t cope with the huge number of patients needing ventilators. Doctors in the United States and Israel are warning that the number of available ventilators – 52 and 40 per 100,000 people, respectively – is not sufficient. Meanwhile, in Gaza, there are three ventilators for every 100,000 people, a ratio that will prove to be a death sentence for many.
“Gaza has some 30 hospitals and major clinics that provide 1.3 beds for every 1,000 people. Israel has over twice the amount – 3.3 beds available for every 1,000 people – while in the EU the average is 5.4. The difference between Gaza and Israel, which has occupied the enclave for 40 years and continues to control its borders, is not just extremely grave, but also an expression of what Prof. Sara Roy of Harvard University has called ‘de-development’: the deliberate weakening of the economic and social capabilities of the Gaza population.
“The perspective gained from a narrow analysis of medical capabilities to fight the virus in a particular area is likely to be somewhat limited. One of the things that I stress in the course Human Rights and Public Health, which I teach as part of the global public health program at Queen Mary University of London, is that the conditions that a person is born into, raised in, lives in and works in are no less significant than the quality of the health system that he or she has access to.
“For example, to explain the gap between the infant mortality rate in Gaza (19.6 for every 1,000 births) and in Israel (2.6 per 1,000 births), or to understand why Israelis live on average 10 years longer than Gazans, one must examine not just the type of health services, but also the social conditions that determine the health level of a population.
“The blatant fact that 53 percent of the population (some 1.01 million people) – among them more than 400,000 children – subsist on an income that’s less than the international poverty line of $4.60 a day helps understand why the lives of Gazans are shorter. Extreme destitution and lack of food security means that most of the population can’t meet the minimum daily calorie intake required. Moreover, over 90 percent of Gaza’s water isn’t potable.
“So while the Israeli government stresses the importance of washing yours hands several times a day, Gaza residents are worried about the lack of drinking water. The fact that most Palestinians live hand to mouth makes it clear that the effect of the coronavirus on Gaza will be a thousand times more grave than for other countries.
“The ability to keep social distance”
“There is no option for isolation in Gaza. The history of epidemics shows that quarantine is one of the most effective ways to prevent a virus from spreading. But how can the 113,990 refugees living in the Jabalya refugee camp, which sits on 1.39 square kilometers of land, stay physically distant from one another?
“In the A-Shati camp, the population density is even greater: 85,628 refugees live on 0.51 square kilometers. The camp has only one clinic and one food distribution center for the entire population. In other words, in the eight Gaza refugee camps, the existing lifesaving systems – health services and food supply – will become dangerous bottlenecks, petri dishes for the lethal virus.
“The Hamas government is quite aware of the looming dangers, but it has limited options. Schools have been emptied and are serving as quarantine centers, with eight people housed in every classroom and bathrooms serving some 200 men and women. This method can be compared to stuffing prisoners into an isolation cell and hoping that they won’t infect each other.
“Every expert knows that prisons are viral habitats. When the outbreak began, Iran immediately released 70,000 prisoners, and other countries followed suit. But Gaza itself is a prison that is in very bad shape after years of blockade.
“Gaza’s Palestinians don’t have enough physical space to implement the distancing that public health experts are recommending, and their health system, which has been starved for decades, won’t be able to cope with what’s going to happen. Nor is it reasonable to expect other countries to offer assistance when the epidemic is raging within their own territories, and all of this is on top of a worsening global economic crisis.
“It isn’t clear how many Palestinians will die, but what is clear is that the lockdown we are experiencing and the one Gazans has been living under for years are totally different. For us, the lockdown is meant to save. In Gaza, the lockdown will kill.”
“The Hamas government is quite aware of the looming dangers, but it has limited options.” Misterioso
It can use the crisis to further its goals; according to its covenant, Article 5, par. 1:
“Its ultimate goal is Islam, the Prophet its model, the Quran its Constitution.”
@catalan
“People like mst and a whole host of other MW commenters have been repeating the same refrain about “Israel” not being around for much longer for well over 70yrs.”
You are so incredibly naive. Obviously, history is not your forte. The bottom line is that “Israel’s” “Special Relationship” with the U.S., a declining power, will inevitably end. In short, “Israel” is an ever increasing heavy millstone around America’s neck and no other country will take America’s place.
“Israel,” the expansionist, racist, illegal/brutal occupier and ethnic cleanser of the indigenous Palestinians has always been an historical anachronism, a huge geopolitical burden for the U.S. (i.e., creating justified enemies) and a leach on its taxpayers. Ever increasing financial aid is now at least $12 million per day for a total of about $134.7 billion since 1948, not including tax deductible contributions from American Zionist individuals and organizations. At the same time, as is screamingly obvious, rapidly growing numbers of Americans, young and old, including Jews, are becoming disgusted with and enraged at “Israel’s” well documented and accelerating crimes committed every day against the essentially defenseless Palestinians.
Between late 1947 and 1967, by means of military might, mass rape and several massacres, Zionist forces of foreign origin dispossessed and expelled about 1,250,000 Palestinians. Today, Palestinians comprise over 50% of the population between the River and the Sea and Jewish emigration is soaring while immigration is in the toilet.
As history attests, sooner or later, all nations act in their own best interests and the U.S. will not be an exception. Colonialist settler states always become an unmanageable burden. To cite just a few examples, France abandoned Algeria, Britain dumped Rhodesia, Italy said good bye to Libya and Ethiopia and Belgium ran away from the Congo. Inevitably, America will have no option other than to cut its losses and set “Israel” adrift.
The future of Israel:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/ex-mossad-chiefs-israel-dangerously-sick-under-netanyahus-leadership/
“Five former spymasters say PM eroding country’s core values, decry ‘pervasive’ culture of corruption under his tenure”
https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/upfront/2016/05/israel-mossad-efraim-halevy-upfront-160527134610649.html
“Last week, Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon resigned, warning the country had been taken over by “dangerous and extreme elements”. ”
Interview with Efraim Halevy, Mossad tough guy:
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/MAGAZINE-a-former-spy-chief-is-calling-on-israelis-to-revolt-1.5444271
“Hamas is holding on, and Israel will have to a difficult time contending with the next Palestinian uprising without arriving at a settlement with Hamas, [something that will require] the Israeli leadership to be willing to make concessions that it is not ready to make at present.” “