(COMMON DREAMS)
By Kwei Quartey
In the wake of a Dallas hospital’s decision to release a Liberian patient with Ebola into the community—who later died of the disease after returning to the hospital—a fierce debate has erupted over how to deal with the potential for an outbreak in the United States.
One idea is to bar people from Ebola-affected regions from entering this country. This embodies a type of moral panic, a phenomenon defined by Stanley Cohen, author of Folk Devils and Moral Panics, as anything “defined as a threat to societal values and interests.”
Although the West African Ebola sufferers are the current “folk devils,” moral panic is nothing new.
Several examples exist in history, including everything from the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 to the anti-Semitic politics of the Nazis. In 1938, Hitler said, “If we do not take steps to preserve the purity of blood, the Jew will destroy civilisation by poisoning us all.”
And modern democracies are hardly immune. In 1988, The Daily Star in the United Kingdom wrote in an editorial: “Surely if the human race is under threat, it is entirely reasonable to segregate AIDS victims—otherwise the whole of mankind could be engulfed. … The truth is that promiscuous homosexuals are by far the biggest spawning ground for AIDS.”
The elements of moral panic are well reflected in the current Ebola scare …
