The well-grounded medical need for quarantines found an echo in the ideological pressure to establish clear borders and to quarantine enemies that pose a threat to our identity.
But maybe another – and much more beneficial – ideological virus will spread and hopefully infect us: the virus of thinking about an alternate society, a society beyond nation-state, a society that actualizes itself in the forms of global solidarity and cooperation.
Speculation is often heard today that the coronavirus may lead to the fall of communist rule in China, in the same way that (as Gorbachev himself admitted) the Chernobyl catastrophe was the event which triggered the end of the Soviet communism. But there is a paradox here: the coronavirus will also compel us to re-invent communism based on trust in the people and in science.
In the final scene of Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Kill Bill 2,’ Beatrix disables the evil Bill and strikes him with the “Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique” – the most deadly blow in all of martial arts. The move consists of a combination of five strikes with one’s fingertips to five different pressure points on the target’s body. After the target walks away and has taken five steps, their heart explodes in their body and they fall to the ground.
This attack is part of martial arts mythology and is not possible in real hand-to-hand combat. But, back to the film, after Beatrix does it, Bill calmly makes his peace with her, takes five steps and dies…
