States of Emergency: Keeping the Global Population in Check

INTRODUCTION

Society as we know it—global capitalism with its home base in the West—has entered a revolutionary crisis. After years of preparation, the ruling oligarchy, which today exercises power across the globe, has seized on the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the respiratory disease attributed to it, Covid-19, to declare a global state of emergency in early 2020. This seizure of power is intended to prevent the Information Technology revolution (hereafter: IT revolution), the impact of which can be compared to that of the coming of the printing press at the end of the Middle Ages, from ushering in a democratic transformation.

In 2008 the capitalist speculation machine unleashed twenty years earlier came to a crashing halt. The casino was reopened after a short time with mainly water damage, or so it seemed; yet in the meantime, unprecedented unrest has arisen among the global population. Unlike the eve of World War I, the mass discontent this time has no clear-cut political orientation, as the IT revolution did not bring forth, as the Industrial Revolution had done, an organized revolutionary force such as the socialist labor movement, drawing its power from an industrial working class. With the decline of industrial production in the West, and concomitantly of unions, the unrest that arose after 2008 went in all directions—the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, the Yellow Vests in France, and so on. Strikes, riots and anti-government demonstrations, as well as mass migration and drug abuse since then have broken all existing records—until the World Health Organization proclaimed the Covid outbreak a pandemic. Governments across the globe swiftly followed by imposing states of emergency, which paradoxically were then tightened as the virus subsided and henceforth followed an obviously political calendar.

This book aims to address and dispel the psychosis of fear into which the world has been plunged. In the process of research and writing, I found that the ‘pandemic’ is not a simple, one-off fraud, or a grand scheme cooked up by Klaus Schwab, the oracle of Davos, and obediently executed by national governments. Rather, it is a complex, historical crisis, giving rise to a seizure of power by the global ruling class that has been initiated from different starting positions. Much about the Covid ‘pandemic’ is still shrouded in mystery. It seems certain that the virus did escape from a laboratory, but from which one, we do not know. What we can conclude is that the official account of what is happening around us is patently untrue and that it will therefore eventually collapse. The timescale on which this will come about should not be underestimated, as the mainstream media constitutes a key part of the complex of forces that have seized power in this process; its deception and propaganda regarding major historical events have become routine since the 1990s.

What matters is that the Covid seizure of power, even more comprehensively than previous states of emergency in the name of terrorism, is working to prevent a democratic transition to a society beyond capitalism. The revolutionary crisis that has become acute resides in the fact that governments have now taken their populations hostage and cannot or dare not release them. This is another reason why the entire effort at suppression is doomed to end in failure. Too much has been set in motion too early, too disjointedly, and the contradictions between the different interests and institutions, only apparently all in agreement, are bound to turn into overt conflict.

The book is organized as follows. In the first chapter, I begin by presenting the key facts about the pandemic that make it clear that what we are dealing with is not a medical, but a political emergency. What is happening before our eyes is a step-by-step transition of Western liberalism to an authoritarian state and social structure, all in the name of ‘the virus.’ What effectively mirrors a state of war proclaimed in the spring of 2020, in reality is meant to safeguard the existing order. As George Orwell pointed out in his prophetic 1984, all modern wars primarily serve that purpose. Yet in the West the state of emergency has antecedents different from those of the so-called contender states such as China. The latter’s societies in a sense live under a permanent state of emergency, albeit with more positive returns, given the recognized achievement of China in lifting millions out of poverty and creating a burgeoning middle class. Hence, the way in which the population not only undergoes repression but responds to it differs too. In a country like China, people have been used to the limits of political involvement for generations. In the liberal tradition on the other hand, draconic measures are needed that can only be compared to psychological warfare and mental torture as the wealth gap becomes a chasm and social conditions tank.

Chapter 2 addresses the question of why this process was initiated if there is no real medical emergency. The comparison with the First and Second World Wars is pertinent here. Once again, there has been a rising tide of popular unrest bordering on insurrection in certain regions and countries. In the Middle East and in countries such as India, Chile and France, movements that were able to overthrow governments or had actually done so, had burst onto the scene, instilling fear in the ruling classes the world over. With the Covid state of emergency, the popular movement, in all its diversity, has been frozen for the time being. The specific social structure of North America, Australasia, and Europe so far has worked to facilitate this quasi-normalization. On the one hand we have a cosmopolitan cadre that works for the oligarchy and is concentrated in the big cities. It shares the urban space with a growing immigrant population mainly there to serve it. Facing it is a marginalized domestic population that has become largely redundant. In this complex configuration of forces a political stalemate has crystallized in which the labels ‘left’ and ‘right’ are losing their cogency, but which retains a revolutionary potential, nevertheless. The chapter also details the shadow structures of repression that had accompanied the prior era of class compromise. These have now come out into the open, as governments adopt counterinsurgency methods to deal with the growing resistance to the Covid emergency shutdowns.

Chapter 3 analyzes the Covid crisis as a seizure of power to force a ‘new normal’ on society. All exercise of power in liberal capitalism rests on a social contract bolstered by accompanying ideology, a comprehensive concept of control that substitutes for the aggregating role previously played by religion, the nation or civilization. This time the ruling class has chosen not to wait for a ‘new normal’ to arise organically from the process of class formation, as occurred after World War II and again in the 70s. Capitalism can no longer engender a rational class compromise and instead has begun to rule through worst case scenarios. The new power bloc that emerged from the intelligence needs of the U.S. national security state, much of it privatized as IT monopolies and sprawling (multi-) media conglomerates, has imposed the Covid scenario from above by an external shock meant to create a surveillance society. Finance had profited from IT innovations but after the 2008 crash, the riskiest forms of speculation were reined in by restructuring and aggregating financial control in the form of ‘passive index funds’ such as BlackRock. Whether the Covid crisis was seized on to forestall an impending financial collapse, or to prevent the populist U.S. president, Donald Trump, from being reelected, or both, cannot be determined with certainty. Nationalist populism, which seeks to overcome the political crisis of Western democracy by mobilizing discontent against the privileged urban cadre and against immigrants presents itself as a revolutionary force, much like fascist movements did in the 1930s. Yet in current conditions, the mainstream in the oligarchy does not seem to need this diversionary force for the time being.

Chapter 4 demonstrates that a pandemic, real or imagined, has become an ideal cover for establishing a surveillance society without resorting to overt violence. After the fear of terrorism eroded, the presumed threat of ‘Putin,’ the specter of climate change, and other worst-case scenarios proved unable to mobilize society to the same degree. The outbreak of an unknown infectious disease instead has proven to be a highly effective new installment of the politics of fear on which government legitimacy in the West relies after the disintegration of class compromise and the collapse of Soviet state socialism. At the turn of the century, SARS-1, bird flu and, in the aftermath of the financial collapse, the Mexican or swine flu panic of 2009 showed what was politically possible with a virus alert even though those epidemics were not widespread enough to allow the imposition of a state of emergency. Yet the evaluation of the lockdowns in China and Canada at the time of SARS-1 showed that citizens are willing to undergo such a radical intervention as a test of their citizenship, even of their patriotism. In 2010 the Rockefeller Foundation came up with a detailed scenario for an imaginary pandemic that would permit mass repression. In the years that followed, the script for an integral shutdown of society was worked out in detail. Here the Gates Foundation of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the exponent par excellence of the IT power bloc, served as the switchboard by which the virus scenario was passed on to the WHO, national governments, and the actual biopolitical complex, discussed more extensively in Chapter 6.

One of the most uncertain factors in the Covid crisis is the relationship between the West, and the United States in particular, and China. Chapter 5 shows that the U.S. has established a comprehensive biological warfare research and development infrastructure targeting Russia and China, with black Africa as an additional testing ground. But paradoxically, the U.S. also was in close cooperation with China in the field of microbiological research, even though China is a contender for power which, in the IT domain for instance, was treated as an adversary. In the course of 2019, U.S.-Chinese cooperation on biodefense too went awry, with Canada involved as well. That ‘the virus’ has escaped from a laboratory where viruses undergo gain-of-function to make them more dangerous seems certain, but whether this was the laboratory in Wuhan to which U.S. research had been subcontracted, or Fort Detrick in Maryland, is uncertain. The chapter concludes with the observation that despite the transformation of the liberal West to the authoritarian Chinese model (though undoubtedly still controlled by its present elites and geared to protecting their interests), it is unlikely, in light of the rapid shifts in the balance of power, that this will also lead to a stable, ‘ultra-imperialist’ truce in their mutual relations.

Chapter 6 discusses the pandemic as disaster capitalism, Naomi Klein’s term for the economic opportunities for business created by major catastrophes. In this case, the opportunities are for the biopolitical complex, especially the pharmaceutical industry, the biotech sector, the Gates Foundation, and medical schools and research centers such as that at Johns Hopkins University. The internationalization of state policy, with individual governments implementing guidelines set at the global level, provided the channels through which the intelligence-IT-media bloc, joining forces with the biopolitical complex, were able to push through the imposition of the Covid state of emergency. Throughout the course of 2019, we see how a series of planning meetings not only prepared for a possible virus outbreak but in particular focused on the ‘infodemic’ of dissenting opinions, highlighting the political thrust of the presumed medical emergency.

The closing Chapter 7 examines the possibilities of the IT revolution for a different course, one aimed at radical democracy and digital planning. What is special about the IT revolution is that, for the first time in history, the contradiction between individual freedom and collective social and ecological security has the technology allowing it, in principle, to be overcome. The ruling class of the capitalist West is aware of this potential and wants to nip it in the bud, beginning with the massive clampdown on social media. The ruling classes of non-Western countries are also interested in IT restriction and surveillance, if they have not already taken important steps themselves towards instituting it. While planning, like (state) socialism, today suffers from a bad reputation after the stagnation and collapse of the Soviet command economy, all major corporations use digital logistical systems. This chapter addresses how, in Soviet times, remarkable initiatives were taken to implement such a digital planning system on a national scale, although due to bureaucratic conservatism and lack of democracy this ran aground. Again in Chile, a comparable experiment was cut short by the Pinochet coup. This time it is different. The world has been forced into a revolutionary situation by the oligarchy and now faces the choice to submit or opt for a viable alternative that would entail the dispossession of the billionaire owners of what Marx called ‘the social brain.’ In the process a broad, politically heterogeneous movement for freedom will emerge that will restore and renew democracy whilst exploiting the possibilities of the IT revolution for a viable human future—or perish.

1.

THE COVID CRISIS AS A STATE OF SIEGE

Following the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration that the respiratory infection caused by the corona virus SARS-CoV-2 (hereafter, SARS-2) was a pandemic on 11 March 2020, a state of emergency was introduced practically across the globe. It is perceived by many in our part of the world as the most serious breach of fundamental rights and civil liberties they have ever experienced, comparable only to a state of war. Everything now indicates that if it were up to those in power, the state of emergency would acquire a permanent character. When mortality rates fell after a few months, governments switched to counting cases, now termed ‘infections,’ on the basis of positive PCR tests, which are expressly not suited for that purpose. Thus, the mass psychosis induced in the spring of 2020 was maintained.

This chapter begins with a brief overview of the grounds on which it can be established with a high degree of certainty that the Covid crisis is a fraud, serving as cover for a political seizure of power. I then discuss what is the equivalent of a state of war being imposed on the global population and its implications. For that purpose, I distinguish between three types of a state of emergency, which have merged into each other in the current situation: the original state of emergency in liberal democracies; the permanent one existing in so-called contender states opposing the hegemonic West; and the global state of emergency which the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, derived from what he labeled bio-politics in the 1970s. We conclude with a comparison between the current psychological warfare offensive against the population, aimed at paralyzing all forms of resistance, and mental torture.

A RESPIRATORY DISEASE OR A POLITICAL AGENDA?

Several months of intensive consultations had preceded the WHO’s declaration of the pandemic on 11 March. Although suspicious cases of a similar illness had been evident in the preceding period in other countries, the first three cases of Covid-19 were officially reported in the city of Wuhan on 27 December 2019, two weeks before some 400 million Chinese were about to travel to their families to celebrate the Chinese New Year. On 23 January, two hours after midnight, the authorities in Wuhan announced that at 10:00 the next morning a complete lockdown would enter into force for the city of 11 million. By that time, hundreds of thousands, if not several millions of residents had already fled in panic to avoid the quarantine. Meanwhile those gathered for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, from 20 to 24 January, in the presence of the Director-General of the WHO, the Ethiopian, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, discussed how to respond to this event. Tedros flew to China afterwards to discuss matters with President Xi Jinping on 28 January. Two days later, the WHO declared a ‘Public Health Emergency of International Concern,’ whilst its chief praised the Chinese lockdown as an unprecedented but decisive step. Another five weeks later, the world health organization officially declared a pandemic; at the time, according to WHO, there were an estimated 118,000 cases of Covid-19 in 114 countries, with 4,291 recorded deaths. ¹

Meanwhile, images of the Chinese metropolis that looked like it had been abandoned by its last inhabitant, had been circulated by the media around the world. ‘Wuhan was an unforgettable spectacle that had a major impact on the Western psyche,’ Patrick Henningsen commented. ‘When the corona virus hit the European and North American shores, the public was already conditioned to expect a Chinese-style response from their own governments. Not surprisingly, this was exactly what they got and in fact it was what they demanded.’² Amid apocalyptic expert predictions in the media that we were facing an unprecedented disaster that could only be averted by the most draconic means, governments fell over each other to heed the call to arms and introduce drastic measures.

The media, especially the talk shows on TV, assumed the role of propaganda channels right from the start, excluding any dissenting voices. Parliaments too fell in line without a murmur. However, when the peak passed and the ‘pandemic’ turned out to be much less deadly than predicted, the restrictive measures remained in force, despite the tremendous damage they had already caused economically and socially, especially to mental health. At this writing, lockdowns and the easing of restrictions seem likely to follow a wack-a-mole pattern, as the media resound with announcements of new and even more threatening variants to back up the call for vax-passes in one country after another.

Initially, the lockdowns were justified by reference to limited hospital capacity, without mentioning that decades of neoliberal austerity had reduced the ability to handle a health emergency. In China, new hospitals were being erected at breakneck speed, but in the rest of the world steps to upgrade the battered medical infrastructure were few and far between. There were a few countries which refused to heed the imposition of the global state of emergency, such as Tanzania or Belarus, which would suffer no substantially different rates of infection and mortality compared to their neighbors. Belarus was offered $940 million by the World Bank if it imposed lockdowns and a curfew but declined the offer.³ The president of Tanzania, John Magufuli, who had ridiculed the epidemic by having plant and animal tissue tested ‘for Covid’ and with several samples found positive, died in early 2021 at the age of 61, as did his Burundi counterpart, who also had declared the virus to be nothing extraordinary.⁴

Within the EU, Sweden followed a course that was clearly different from the rest. According to David Klooz, a Canadian health officer with more than 30 years of experience, it was one of the few countries to have a fact-based Covid policy. In mid-June 2020, after the peak in hospital admissions and mortality in both Sweden and the locked-down Netherlands had passed, 6,057 Dutch people had been registered as Covid deaths, 0.035 percent of the population; in Sweden, 4,866; 0.048 percent. 9.6 percent of the Swedish cases died; in The Netherlands, 12.5 percent. Across the age groups, the picture was practically the same: one-third of the deceased were over 90, one-third were between 80 and 89, one-fifth to a quarter in their seventies, and 6 to 8 percent in their sixties.⁵ Although Covid-19 is not a flu (the origin of the virus in a bio-warfare laboratory will be discussed later), it has a similar casualty profile in terms of age groups: mainly older people with poor health and/or underlying diseases. As early as March 2020, in relatively hard-hit Italy, for example, half of the deaths attributed to the virus suffered from three other serious illnesses; one-quarter from two, and the remaining quarter from one. Only 0.8 percent of those who died appeared in good health.⁶

The WHO initially assumed a mortality factor (the percentage of people infected and dying from it) of 3.4 percent, but at the beginning of October 2020 this was scaled down to 0.14 percent; the deaths attributed to Covid had then just passed one million worldwide (in the great flu wave of 1968–69, there were one and a half million victims), while the number of infections was estimated at one-tenth of the world’s population. Even Klaus Schwab, founder and animator of the World Economic Forum and author of The Great Reset, a blueprint for the ‘new normal’ that should take shape after the ‘pandemic,’ wrote in that book that so far (July 2020) Covid is ‘one of the least deadly pandemics the world has experience[d] over the last 2000 years’ (by comparison, HIV-AIDS has killed some 30 million people since the outbreak in the early 1980s).⁷ At the beginning of June it had in fact become clear that the SARS-2 virus had passed its peak. The head of the San Raffaele hospital in Milan, in the initially hard-hit region of Lombardy, stated that the virus no longer existed in a clinical sense and that his country should return to normal conditions as soon as possible. The former director of the immunology institute at the University of Bern, Stadler, said the same. The prime minister of Norway, Erna Solberg, in late May 2020 even apologized on TV for the lockdown, which according to her had only been introduced on the basis of ‘worst case scenarios’ wrongly taken for granted.⁸

So why continue with the socially and economically disruptive ‘measures’?

THE SWITCH TO TESTING AND ‘INFECTIONS’

The answer to this came after the summer, when death rates had fallen further. Now, government health institutes such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the United States, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) in Germany, and their equivalents in other countries, switched to counting people ‘tested positive’ for SARS-2. These were then referred to as ‘infections’ with the suggestion that, even when no symptoms were in evidence, they themselves could cause new infections. In order to maintain the impression of rising numbers even as the ‘pandemic’ subsided, the figures were consistently published without mentioning the number of tests administered or any other reference to put them in context.

The test in question, PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction), is intended to multiply molecules for microbiological research. After amplifying the sample 30 times, the researcher already has a billion molecules, in which traces of genetic material may indicate, in this case, a (residual) corona virus. Adding more cycles makes the test meaningless. The inventor of the test, Dr. Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it in 1993, stated several times before his death in 2019 that a PCR test of viral RNA residues (nucleic acid in a single helix such as SARS-2) cannot be used for a medical diagnosis; what will be found depends entirely on the choice of the so-called primer.⁹ In April 2020, The Lancet published a letter pointing out that viral RNA can be detected long after an infection. The immune system may deal with a virus in different ways, but afterwards allows the viral RNA to exist for weeks, for example 6 to 8 weeks in measles.¹⁰ In short, a positive PCR test does not mean contamination, let alone infectivity.

Nevertheless, the German virologist, Prof. Christian Drosten, published a PCR test for SARS-2 (then still largely unknown) in the journal Eurosurveillance in January 2020. Drosten had already described such a test for SARS-1 in 2003 and successfully marketed it through a Hamburg biotechnology company. In the same year he was awarded a doctorate and although his doctoral thesis remained untraceable until 2020 and he became a professor without the usual exam (Habilitation), his fame grew, and he was finally appointed chief virologist at the Berlin Charité hospital.¹¹ The article in Eurosurveillance (the organ in which the spread of infectious diseases is reported so that prevention and control measures may be taken) was co-signed by authors from nine European countries. It turned out to have been accepted without peer review and to contain a series of errors. The Dutch microbiologist, Dr. Pieter Borger, wrote to the authors, to the journal, and to the responsible EU institution, and when no satisfactory response was forthcoming, submitted a detailed request for retraction with 10 other experts. This was duly subjected to peer review and rejected in January 2021. Borger had raised his criticism already in the spring, but it fell on deaf ears in the media, and he was eventually also removed from LinkedIn.¹²

Meanwhile the PCR test was in use everywhere for Covid detection. The test requires three genes for evidence of a virus, but from September, in several countries the number of cycles was raised to 35 and above, and the required number of genes reduced to two or even one, making the results meaningless. Now the alarm was sounded about a ‘second wave,’ no longer based on deaths or illnesses, but on rising numbers of positive tests (‘infections’). In July 2020, even the New York Times conceded that 85 to 90 percent of those tested positive that month on the basis of 40 PCR cycles would have been negative for 30.¹³ Why it took the WHO until January 2021 to admonish users of the PCR test to follow the directions for use and consider the test as complementary to actual diagnosis, must be left for insiders to explain.¹⁴

In the meantime, measures spread across the globe in the name of the supposedly raging ‘pandemic,’ whilst authoritarian controls proliferated, and basic rights were suspended one after another. Closure of schools and universities, obligatory wearing of face masks, social distancing, even curfews and in some countries, a prohibition to leave one’s home, were being introduced. The ensuing social disaster, of which elderly residents of care homes, children, young people, young parents, and of course, entrepreneurs including self-employed workers, are the primary victims, was not based on a medical emergency. It results from manipulation and an information war, which the authorities are waging against their populations. This war is covered with unflinching support by the mainstream media, whilst Internet platforms are applying censorship to remove all possible information about the availability of an effective existing medication (Hydroxychrloroquine or Ivermectin) and about the dangers of vaccination with hastily developed gene therapies, to all of which I come back in Chapter 6.

On the basis of the foregoing, we may conclude that there is no proportionality whatsoever between the actual medical emergency and measures that in Europe recall the Nazi occupation, in the United States, the years of McCarthyism, and so on. The Covid condition, certainly after the summer of 2020, appears to be eminently manageable in every way. Nonetheless, politicians and media claim that there continues to be an exceptional danger. So something else is going on.

THE STATE OF WAR IN PEACETIME

One of the many relevant insights in George Orwell’s novel 1984 is that in contemporary society, war is no longer primarily directed against a foreign enemy. The best-known aspect of this rightly world-famous book is the permanent surveillance via TV screens (‘Big Brother is watching you’). Yet the protagonist of 1984, Winston Smith, still manages to read a scientific study criticizing the society he lives in. This fictitious study is by one Emmanuel Goldstein, the alter ego of the Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky (real name, Bronstein). Like the earlier Animal Farm, 1984 was inspired by the corruption of the Russian Revolution under Stalin’s dictatorship. Trotsky was eventually murdered in exile in Mexico by a Soviet agent. In 1984 he is the model of the Enemy of the People, the target of orchestrated popular anger in the daily ‘Two Minutes Hatred,’ a bit like that in the West directed against ‘Putin’ in our time.

War, Smith reads in Bronstein/Goldstein’s fictional Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, is pure deception in the present day. ‘It is now a purely internal matter.’ And the text continues:

In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word war therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist.¹⁵

It is often overlooked that the First and Second World Wars were also to a large extent counterrevolutionary episodes in this sense. The First World War worked to interrupt a process of ongoing democratization: the German ruling class, having noticed events in Russia in 1905, feared the socialist workers’ movement in spite of Bismarck’s prior success in nationalizing it to a large degree; the British rulers feared an uprising in Ireland, the great European empires feared the nationalities within their borders, etc. The Russian Revolution did occur after three years of bloodshed, but the democratic political culture was irreparably damaged. Fascism and National Socialism, but also Stalinism in the Soviet Union, cannot be understood without the bloodbath of 1914–18. The Second World War turned into an even more cruel, ruthless massacre. Once again, the need to ‘keep the structure of society intact’ was at the forefront, although once again even greater social explosions ensued after the end of hostilities.¹⁶

The socialism that threatened the ruling classes of the first half of the twentieth century grew out of the Industrial Revolution and the war against it was mechanical, aimed at the physical extermination of the masses, once overseas settlement no longer provided an escape hatch due to mounting rivalries. Today we live in the age of the IT revolution, and both the democratic challenge and the answer to it have moved into the realm of information, the prevailing thought patterns and the general state of mind of the subjects. In the West, especially since the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the authority of governments no longer rests on a real social contract but on a politics of fear, and following the attacks of 11 September 2001 (‘9/11’), that too has become permanent and the transition to ‘a war waged by every ruling group against its own subjects’ irreversible. The revelations by Edward Snowden about the global eavesdropping practices by the Five Eyes, the signal intelligence agencies of the English-speaking West led by the National Security Agency of the U.S., have also revealed that there is no longer any doubt either about 1984’s other key message: Big Brother Is Watching You.

That the war serves other purposes than ‘victory’ was underlined in an article in the Washington Post on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of