Sometimes History Rhymes

Took the liberty of changing a single word ("war") from a paragraph found in Paul Johnson's Modern Times to the word "pandemic" and also changed the date. But the meaning remains eerily the same:

Thus the war Pandemic demonstrated both the impressive speed with which the modern state could expand itself and the inexhaustible appetite which it thereupon developed both for the destruction of its enemies and for the exercise of despotic power over its own Citizens. As the war Pandemic ended, there were plenty of sensible men who understood the gravity of these developments. But could the clock be turned back to where it had stood in July 1914 March 2020? Indeed did anyone wish to turn it back?