Pathogenesis: A History Of The World In Eight Plagues, by Jonathan Kennedy

This is a book that could have been so good, but ended up being so bad largely because of the author and his problems. With a Marxist perspective that glories in the power of the state (and puffs up China’s government, making it seem as if they had a correct response to Covid as well as public health in general), and takes China’s fake statistics as if they have any legitimacy whatsoever, this author demonstrates his cluelessness. This is added when one examines the author’s combination of a bogus evolutionary biological perspective as well as a leftist political mindset that manages to get everything it analyzes dreadfully wrong, whether he is talking about religion, politics, or science, a toxic brew of touching the third rail that the author manages to stumble into, trying to think of himself as a scientific historian of the first order. On the one hand, the author emphasizes the way that epidemics have had a decisive element in world history, but on the other, the author fails to recognize that his praise of bacteria and viruses and their historical impact very much could be (and is viewed in the Bible very clearly as) a sign of divine favor or disfavor against certain cultures or certain ways of living. The author’s anti-white bias also makes this book deeply offensive and demonstrative of the problems of when leftists manage to beclown themselves and engage in double standards as the only form of standards that they have at all.

What is almost as notable as the problems that the author has in terms of what he says are what he doesn’t say. He seems to have no understanding of the insights of intelligent design when it comes to dysteleology, by which it would appear that viruses and bacteria are harmful and deadly to the extent that they are damaged, which would indicate that the best way of trying to deal with such harmful bacteria may be through seeking to restore the fitness of cells that are broken so that they no longer become cancerous or no longer causes disease. How can we fix broken cells that spread their brokenness and sickness to others rather than seeking to kill and destroy the broken, only leading themselves to break themselves more to avoid the antibiotics that we have created? This is a worthy if difficult challenge that the author knows nothing about. It is less credible, though, that the author does not know about the reasons why Covid vaccines were made so quickly (a relaxation of liability and other regulations) or about the high problem of negative side effects of vaccines that the author fails to address while giving flattering praise to the creators of covid vaccines at the end of the book. Some balance would have been appreciated, and if we know the author is horribly imbalanced when he praises the anti-white riots instigated by evil Marxist groups like Black Lives Matter and when it comes to covid vaccination and its negative aspects, what else is the author biased about in less obvious ways? The author has no credibility because of his bias, and that keeps this book from being the sort of insightful guide to the importance of pathogens that the author thinks (wrongly) that he has written. As a proud member of the petite bourgeoisie, this book is a hit job, pure and simple, from beginning to end.

In terms of its contents, this book has eight chapters that are first chronologically and then topically arranged and that ultimately contradict the main point of the author because of his desire to score leftist political points. The book begins and spends most of its time talking about pathogens but ends discussing non-communicable diseases as being disease of poverty (8) and then emphasizing how it is the response of people to their conditions that leads to disease, but failing to advocate for more personal responsibility, only for more state intervention and higher taxes. Before this, the author talks about paleolithic plagues (1), in a large speculative fashion. This is followed by a discussion of neolithic plagues (2) that helped to pave the way for the modern development of European demography (with an anti-white reference to European racial origins thrown in as a slur). This is followed by a discussion of ancient plagues (3), which includes a fair amount of speculation as well as an attempt at using germs and the response to them to make a case for biological determinism. The author then discusses medieval (4) and colonial plagues (5), making points about European vulnerability to African plagues that are directly contradicted by the response to Europeans’ ability to partly overcome it through medicines like quinine. The author then examines revolutionary plagues (6) and industrial plagues (7), showing a marked bias for Haitian revolutionaries (though not criticizing them for the mess they made of their country after independence) and a consistent hostility towards petit bourgeoisie who wanted low taxes. Taxes should be lowered to keep this author out of a job, alas, as any tax money that goes to the clown who wrote this book is money wasted without any good result.