So many good people are working to provide hope to others in this pandemic, to tell good stories among the death and disruption, to identify the opportunities for just social change that this crisis may offer in a post-COVID-19 promised land. Even as the pandemic exacerbates existing or creates new inequalities, many cite the supposed collapse of ideological divisions between political opponents as evidence of a potential ‘healing’ of these ills and the political polarisation that has so marked Western democracies in recent years.

I envy the hopeful because I cannot join them.  Deciding which people are more valuable, who deserves medical treatment, who lives and dies in the face of this pandemic, as many bureaucrats, politicians, and medical professionals have done, has little to do with ideological divisions. Instead, it has a lot more to do with the now much-celebrated ideological commonality.

There is no wonder in conservative governments adopting emergency economic and social measures in response the pandemic that border on state socialism. They are just doing, like those before them, the core business of government, regardless of its political stripe ­– power.

It is well known that in the many wars of the twentieth century, very different governments adopted very similar extreme policies to secure control over the economy and society that sometimes helped, but mostly damaged the people it ruled. What is less well know is how although these policies may have ended with the war (some bad ones did not), the thinking behind them continued to inform later governments’ policymaking after the wars were over: about who was valuable to society, who was a burden, and how far government could shape the lives and, indeed, the souls of the people under their control. In some places this thinking changed after it had exploded into the mass of violence of the 1930s and 1940s, but in others less so.

There is a lot to think about in this vague note. But now, I’m thinking out loud only about something specific and perhaps only loosely tied to the above, about how poorly valued the elderly have become in some Western societies. I think about them dying alone in poorly staffed and resourced care facilities, themselves a result of the long strain of thinking of the elderly as burdens to be managed.

It is this thinking, I sense, that makes improving their lives so difficult, despite serious and well-meaning attempts to do so. Some may wonder if this thinking informed the moderate initial response from some governments to the virus earlier in the year, when it seemed the virus killed mostly the elderly. They might further wonder if people understood this thinking at some unspoken level and, perhaps, accepted it as an inevitability.

In this sense, COVID-19 may be a great truth teller and maker, in that it tells us about what and who our society really values, and encourages us to embrace valuable people ever more tightly as we let go of the burdensome.

Dr Filip Slaveski is a DECRA Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute. He is a historian of the Soviet period with further specialisations in German and Eastern European 20th century history. He has particular interests in the intersectional histories of violence, occupation, and famine. He received his PhD in History from the University of Melbourne and taught Russian and Soviet History there for a number of years. Much of his research is based on declassified Soviet archival sources relevant to his major interests of Soviet occupations in post-war Eastern Europe, particularly in Germany, and the post-war reconstruction of the Soviet Union itself.

This article is part of a series of COVID-19-related analysis and opinion articles from ADI researchers.