Storming of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 (TapTheForwardAssist/Wikimedia Commons)
By Diana Johnstone
**in Paris**Special to Consortium News
What happened in the Capitol on Jan. 6 was not surprising. It could have been avoided. It could have been prevented if the Democratic Establishment which held onto keys of power throughout Trump’s mandate had truly wanted a smooth presidential transition. For months prior to the election, the elite Transition Integrity Project was spreading the alarm, loudly echoed by liberal media, that Trump would lose and refuse to acknowledge his loss.
There was a simple, obvious way to avoid such a drama. In an article for Consortium News last August, I suggested how this could be done.
“It seems to me that if the Democratic establishment gave priority to a peaceful election and transition, against the possibility that Trump might reject the results, the smart and reasonable thing to do would be to reassure him on the two counts which they suggest might incite him to balk: postal vote fraud accusations and the threat of criminal charges against him. […]
As for postal balloting, it should be conceivable that Trump’s misgivings are justified. […] In an age when anyone can photocopy any document, when mails are slow and when there are many ways in which ballots might be destroyed, such misgivings are not far-fetched. […]
For the sake of domestic peace, why not try to find a compromise? Kamala Harris has introduced legislation to generalize postal balloting. Why not, instead, extend polling time, opening polls not only on the second Tuesday in November but on the preceding Saturday and Sunday? This would provide time to allow voters afraid of Covid-19 to keep distances from each other, as they do when they go to the supermarket. It would reduce the number of absentee ballots, the time needed for counting and above all the suspicions attached to postal voting. But the more wary Trump is of postal voting, the more Democrats insist on making it universal.
It becomes clearer and clearer that hatred of Trump has reached such a pitch, that for the Democratic establishment and its hangers-on, defeating Trump at the polls is not enough. They are practically inciting him to contest the election. Then they can have something more exciting and decisive: a genuine regime change.”
So indeed what we got was something more exciting. Not exactly regime change, because we are seeing instead a powerful reaffirmation of the regime that was really still there during Trump’s largely deformed four-year term. The haste with which his aides and allies desert him in his last hour makes this clear. He was always a president without a team, operating on hunches, rhetoric and advice from his son-in-law and a few insiders who were really outsiders.
But what we are getting is indeed exciting: an alleged “insurrection” supposedly incited by Trump to “steal the election” (which it had absolutely no way of doing). The scenes of disorder have been instantly exploited to plunge him and his followers into an abyss of ignominy, if not criminal proceedings and imprisonment.
More Like Otpor
Otpor graffiti in Belgrade, 2001. (Wikimedia Commons)
What happened on Jan. 6 was not an insurrection. Anyone wanting to know what an insurrection is should look up the U.S.-sponsored armed uprising that overthrew duly elected Chilean President Salvador Allende on Sept. 11, 1973. The Capitol disturbance was more like what happened when U.S.-trained “Otpor” militants broke into the Serbian parliament in the midst of that country’s 2000 presidential election and set fire to ballot boxes.
Or check out a particularly pertinent insurrection when truly violent demonstrators took over the Ukrainian Parliament in 2014 and overthrew the government, an event hailed by then U.S. Vice President Joe Biden as a great victory for democracy. Then there was the Hillary-endorsed coup in Honduras, the almost successful attempt to overthrow democracy in Bolivia, the U.S.-backed Guaido farce in Venezuela, etc., etc., etc.
No, an insurrection is not when a large crowd of people who feel their candidate has been cheated vent their indignation by managing to break into “their” parliament with no purpose in mind. Most of the intruders milled about taking selfies with no clear idea what to do next. By world standards, the “violence” on Jan. 6 was very mild indeed, the only gun violence being the fatal shooting of an unarmed Trump enthusiast, Ashli Babbitt, who could easily have been pushed back from her adventurous attempt to climb over a barricade.
The intrusion was so far from carrying out a pro-Trump plan that it had the opposite effect. The immediate political result of the eruption of the undisciplined crowd was to prevent Republican Senators who were so inclined from presenting their arguments against the legitimacy of the November vote. If anything, the action worked in the favor of President-elect Biden.
One might think that in his moment of victory, a true statesman would demonstrate the qualities it takes to lead a nation by offering to bring all people together as fellow Americans. He did quite the opposite.
The very next day after the Capitol happening, in his small fiscal haven home state of Delaware, Biden raged against his opponents as a terrorist mob, no less.
“They weren’t protestors,” he proclaimed. “Don’t dare call them protesters. They were a riotous mob. Insurrectionists. Domestic terrorists. It’s that basic. It’s that simple.”
Trump, said Biden, “has unleashed an all-out assault on our institutions of democracy from the outset, and yesterday was but the culmination of that unrelenting attack.” Trump had poisoned the political environment by using “language that autocrats and dictators use all over the world to hold on to power.”
Biden’s own language certainly sounded less like a magnanimous winner uniting his people than like that used by autocrats and dictators to hold onto power. Trump was trying to “deny the will of the American people,” he said, much as Trump said of him. The whole problem was that “the will of the American people” was far from unanimous.
The Authoritarian Center
So even before his inauguration, President-elect Biden has given us a bitter taste of days ahead. There is to be no sacred unity, but deepened division between The Good (woke liberals), the Bad (Russians and other enemies of Our Democracy) and the Ugly Americans, to be labeled Domestic Terrorists, White Supremacists and fascists.
The authoritarian center, ranging from opportunistic Republicans to The Squad, can rally around the necessary purge of Domestic Terrorists, silencing their communications and getting them properly fired from their jobs.
The Establishment has long been determined to crush Trump. But there is talk of “purging” all his followers as well. Biden is already speaking like a War President, calling for measures to combat the internal enemy such as accompany major wars.
The oligarchic nature of the American War Party is revealed by the haste with which privately owned social media enterprises silence dissent – even the still acting President of the United States. Indeed, who really rules the United States? Is the president only an agent of economic powers whose role is to serve their interests? And the trouble with Trump is that he had not been picked for the job.
Trump managed to appeal to millions of discontented Americans without offering any coherent practical program to replace the War Party with policies capable of transforming the nation into a haven of peace and prosperity. His confusion mirrored the ideological confusion of a population scandalously undereducated in history and political ideas. The illusion that Trump was the leader dissident Americans needed cost Ashli Babbit her life and led thousands of Trump voters into what amounts to a trap. Trump himself was led into the trap.
A completely different approach to politics is needed to restore democracy to America. All appeals to identities and ideologies can only deepen the confusion and divisions, because they prevent people from understanding each other.
The Biden administration appears intent on strengthening such confusion and divisions precisely by recourse to identities and ideologies. I firmly believe that only a scrupulously rational, open-minded, factual and pragmatic approach to clearly defined practical problems could bring peace to the United States, a peace that could favor peace in the world.
From outside the melee, it is easy to define the serious issues that should dominate political debate in the United States. But instead of that, we hear a torrential exchange of insults. The establishment elite cannot stoop to exchange viewpoints with populists denounced as deplorable, racist, misogynist, white supremacist, fascist and now even “terrorist.”
The populists’ unfocused denunciation of the elite describes Wall Street Democrats as “socialists” and veers off into accusations of genocidal vaccination campaigns, occult pedophile rites and Satanism. Instead of anything resembling a clear political division, America is increasingly split by blind, burning mutual hatred.
What American political life needs is not more censorship, but the self-censorship of reason. That is very far away.
Diana Johnstone lives in Paris. Her latest book is Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher and is also the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. Her lates book is Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton. The memoirs of Diana Johnstone’s father Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness, was published by Clarity Press, with her commentary. She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr .
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
[](http://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=DIANA JOHNSTONE: The Great Pretext … for Dystopia&url=https://consortiumnews.com/2020/11/24/diana-johnstone-the-great-pretext-for-dystopia/ "Share to Twitter")[](http://reddit.com/submit?url=https://consortiumnews.com/2020/11/24/diana-johnstone-the-great-pretext-for-dystopia/&title=DIANA JOHNSTONE: The Great Pretext … for Dystopia "Share to Reddit")[](http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=https://consortiumnews.com/2020/11/24/diana-johnstone-the-great-pretext-for-dystopia/&title=DIANA JOHNSTONE: The Great Pretext … for Dystopia "Share to StumbleUpon")
In their World Economic Forum treatise Covid-19: The Great Reset, economists Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret bring us the voice of would-be Global Governance.
Viewing the virtual-reality film “Collisions” at a session of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 2016. (World Economic Forum, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
By Diana Johnstone
**in Paris**Special to Consortium News
By titling their recently published World Economic Forum treatise Covid-19: The Great Reset, the authors link the pandemic to their futuristic proposals in ways bound to be met with a chorus of “Aha!”s. In the current atmosphere of confusion and distrust, the glee with which economists Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret greet the pandemic as harbinger of their proposed socioeconomic upheaval suggests that if Covid-19 hadn’t come along by accident, they would have created it (had they been able).
In fact, World Economic Forum founder Schwab was already energetically hyping the Great Reset, using climate change as the triggering crisis, before the latest coronavirus outbreak provided him with an even more immediate pretext for touting his plans to remake the world.
The authors start right in by proclaiming that “the world as we knew it in the early months of 2020 is no more,” that radical changes will shape a “new normal.” We ourselves will be transformed. “Many of our beliefs and assumptions about what the world could or should look like will be shattered in the process.”
Throughout the book, the authors seem to gloat over the presumed effects of widespread “fear” of the virus, which is supposed to condition people to desire the radical changes they envisage. They employ technocratic psychobabble to announce that the pandemic is already transforming the human mentality to conform to the new reality they consider inevitable.
“Our lingering and possibly lasting fear of being infected with a virus … will thus speed the relentless march of automation…” Really?
“The pandemic may increase our anxiety about sitting in an enclosed space with complete strangers, and many people may decide that staying home to watch the latest movie or opera is the wisest option.”
“There are other first round effects that are much easier to anticipate. Cleanliness is one of them. The pandemic will certainly heighten our focus on hygiene. A new obsession with cleanliness will particularly entail the creation of new forms of packaging. We will be encouraged not to touch the products we buy. Simple pleasures like smelling a melon or squeezing a fruit will be frowned upon and may even become a thing of the past.”
This is the voice of would-be Global Governance. From on high, experts decide what the masses ought to want, and twist the alleged popular wishes to fit the profit-making schemes they are peddling. Their schemes center on digital innovation, massive automation using “artificial intelligence,” finally even “improving” human beings by endowing them artificially with some of the attributes of robots: such as problem-solving devoid of ethical distractions.
Engineer-economist Klaus Schwab, born in Ravensburg, Germany, in 1938, founded his World Economic Forum in 1971, attracting massive sponsorship from international corporations. It meets once a year in Davos, Switzerland – last time in January 2020 and next year in May, delayed because of Covid-19.
Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman, World Economic Forum, on Jan. 21, 2015. (World Economic Forum, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
A Powerful Lobby
What is it, exactly? I would describe the WEF as a combination capitalist consulting firm and gigantic lobby. The futuristic predictions are designed to guide investors into profitable areas in what Schwab calls “the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)” and then, as the areas are defined, to put pressure on governments to support such investments by way of subsidies, tax breaks, procurements, regulations and legislation. In short, the WEF is the lobby for new technologies, digital everything, artificial intelligence, transhumanism.
It is powerful today because it is operating in an environment of State Capitalism, where the role of the State (especially in the United States, less so in Europe) has been largely reduced to responding positively to the demands of such lobbies, especially the financial sector. Immunized by campaign donations from the obscure wishes of ordinary people, most of today’s politicians practically need the guidance of lobbies such as the WEF to tell them what to do.
In the 20th century, notably in the New Deal, the government was under pressure from conflicting interests. The economic success of the armaments industry during World War II gave birth to a Military-Industrial Complex, which has become a permanent structural factor in the U.S. economy.
It is the dominant role of the MIC and its resulting lobbies that have definitively transformed the nation into State Capitalism rather than a Republic.
The proof of this transformation is the unanimity with which Congress never balks at approving grotesquely inflated military budgets. The MIC has spawned media and Think Tanks which ceaselessly indoctrinate the public in the existential need to keep pouring the nation’s wealth into weapons of war. Insofar as voters do not agree, they can find no means of political expression with elections monopolized by two pro-MIC parties.
The WEF can be seen as analogous to the MIC. It intends to engage governments and opinion manufacturers in the promotion of a “4IR” which will dominate the civilian economy and civilian life itself.
The pandemic is a temporary pretext; the need to “protect the environment” will be the more sustainable pretext. Just as the MIC is presented as absolutely necessary to “protect our freedoms,” the 4IR will be hailed as absolutely necessary to “save the environment” – and in both cases, many of the measures advocated will have the opposite effect.
Public street art on 6th Street in Austin, Texas, depicting the impact of Covid-19 closings. (Leah Rodgers, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
So far, the techno-tyranny of Schwab’s 4IR has not quite won its place in U.S. State Capitalism. But its prospects are looking good. Silicon Valley contributed heavily to the Joe Biden campaign, and Biden hastened to appoint its moguls to his transition team.
But the real danger of all power going to the Reset lies not with what is there, but with what is not there: any serious political opposition.
Can Democracy Be Restored?
The Great Reset has a boulevard open to it for the simple reason that there is nothing in its way. No widespread awareness of the issues, no effective popular political organization, nothing. Schwab’s dystopia is frightening simply for that reason.
The 2020 presidential election has just illustrated the almost total depoliticization of the American people. That may sound odd considering the violent partisan emotions displayed. But it was all much ado about nothing.
There were no real issues debated, no serious political questions raised either about war or about the directions of future economic development. The vicious quarrels were about persons, not policy. Bumbling Trump was accused of being “Hitler,” and Wall Street-beholden Democrat warhawks were described by Trumpists as “socialists.” Lies, insults and confusion prevailed.
A revival of democracy could stem from organized, concentrated study of the issues raised by the Davos planners, in order to arouse an informed public opinion to evaluate which technical innovations are socially acceptable and which are not.
Cries of alarm from the margins will not influence the intellectual relationship of forces. What is needed is for people to get together everywhere to study the issues and develop well-reasoned opinions on goals and methods of future development.
Unless faced with informed and precise critiques, Silicon Valley and its corporate and financial allies will simply proceed in doing whatever they imagine they can do, whatever the social effects.
Serious evaluation should draw distinctions between potentially beneficial and unwelcome innovations, to prevent popular notions from being used to gain acceptance of every “technological advance,” however ominous.
Redefining Issues
The political distinctions between left and right, between Republican and Democrat, have grown more impassioned just as they reveal themselves to be incoherent, distorted and irrelevant, based more on ideological bias than on facts. New and more fruitful political alignments could be built through confrontation with specific concrete issues.
We could take the proposals of the Great Reset one by one and examine them in both pragmatic and ethical terms.
(Bob Mical, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
No. 1 – Thanks to the pandemic, there has been a great increase in the use of teleconferences, using Skype, Zoom or other new platforms. The WEF welcomes this as a trend. Is it bad for that reason? To be fair, this innovation is positive in enabling many people to attend conferences without the expense, trouble and environmental cost of air travel. It has the negative side of preventing direct human contact. This is a simple issue, where positive points seem to prevail.
No. 2 – Should higher education go online, with professors giving courses to students via internet? This is a vastly more complicated question, which should be thoroughly discussed by educational institutions themselves and the communities they serve, weighing the pros and cons, remembering that those who provide the technology want to sell it, and care little about the value of human contact in education – not only human contact between student and professor, but often life-determining contacts between students themselves. Online courses may benefit geographically isolated students, but breaking up the educational community would be a major step toward the destruction of human community altogether.
No. 3 – Health and “well-being”. Here is where the discussion should heat up considerably. According to Schwab and Malleret: “Three industries in particular will flourish (in the aggregate) in the post-pandemic era: big tech, health and wellness.” For the Davos planners, the three merge.
Those who think that well-being is largely self-generated, dependent on attitudes, activity and lifestyle choices, miss the point. “The combination of AI [artificial intelligence], the IoT [internet of things] and sensors and wearable technology will produce new insights into personal well-being. They will model how we are and feel […] precise information on our carbon footprints, our impact on biodiversity, on the toxicity of all the ingredients we consume and the environments or spatial contexts in which we evolve will generate significant progress in terms of our awareness of collective and individual well-being.”
Question: do we really want or need all this cybernetic narcissism? Can’t we just enjoy life by helping a friend, stroking a cat, reading a book, listening to Bach or watching a sunset? We better make up our minds before they make over our minds.
User being monitored in a biometrics lab. (Grish068, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
No. 4 – Food. In order not to spoil my healthy appetite, I’ll skip over this. The tech wizards would like to phase out farmers, with all their dirty soil and animals, and industrially manufacture enhanced artificial foods created in nice clean labs – out of what exactly?
The Central Issue: Homo Faber
No. 5 – What about human work?
“In all likelihood, the recession induced by the pandemic will trigger a sharp increase in labor-substitution, meaning that physical labor will be replaced by robots and ‘intelligent’ machines, which will in turn provoke lasting and structural changes in the labor market.”
This replacement has already been underway for decades. Along with outsourcing and immigration, it has already weakened the collective power of labor. But clearly, the tech industries are poised to go much, much further and faster in throwing humans out of work.
The Covid-19 crisis and social distancing have “suddenly accelerated this process of innovation and technological change. Chatbots, which often use the same voice recognition technology behind Amazon’s Alexa, and other software that can replace tasks normally performed by human employees, are being rapidly introduced. These innovations provoked by necessity (i.e. sanitary measures) will soon result in hundreds of thousands, and potentially millions, of job losses.”
Cutting labor costs has long been the guiding motive of these innovations, along with the internal dynamic of technology industry to “do whatever it can do.” Then socially beneficial pretexts are devised in justification. Like this:
“As consumers may prefer automated services to face-to-face interactions for some time to come, what is currently happening with call centers will inevitably occur in other sectors as well.”
“Consumers may prefer…”! Everyone I know complains of the exasperation of trying to reach the bank or insurance company to explain an emergency, and instead to be confronted with a dead voice and a choice of irrelevant numbers to click. Perhaps I am underestimating the degree of hostility toward our fellow humans that now pervades society, but my impression is that there is a vast unexpressed public demand for LESS automated services and MORE contact with real persons who can think outside the algorithm and can actually UNDERSTAND the problem, not simply cough up preprogrammed fixes.
“Corporate agility in the Fourth Industrial Revolution” session held in Tianjin,China, September 2018. (World Economic Forum, Faruk Pinjo, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
There is a potential movement out there. But we hear nothing of it, being persuaded by our media that the greatest problem facing people in their daily lives is to hear someone exhibit confusion over someone else’s confused gender.
In this, I maintain, consumer demand would merge with the desperate need of able-minded human beings to earn a living. The technocrats earn theirs handsomely by eliminating the means to earn a living of other people.
Here is one of their great ideas. “In cities as varied as Hangzhou, Washington DC and Tel Aviv, efforts are under way to move from pilot programs to large-scale operations capable of putting an army of delivery robots on the road and in the air.” What a great alternative to paying human deliverers a living wage!
And incidentally, a guy riding a delivery bicycle is using renewable energy. But all those robots and drones? Batteries, batteries and more batteries, made of what materials, coming from where and manufactured how? By more robots? Where is the energy coming from to replace not only fossil fuels, but also human physical effort?
At the last Davos meeting, Israeli intellectual Yuval Harari issued a dire warning that:
“Whereas in the past, humans had to struggle against exploitation, in the twenty-first century the really big struggle will be against irrelevance… Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new ‘useless class’ – not from the viewpoint of their friends and family, but useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system. And this useless class will be separated by an ever-growing gap from the ever more powerful elite.”
No. 5 – And the military. Our capitalist prophets of doom foresee the semi-collapse of civil aviation and the aeronautical industry as people all decide to stay home glued to their screens. But not to worry!
“This makes the defense aerospace sector an exception and a relatively safe haven.” For capital investment, that is. Instead of vacations on sunny beaches, we can look forward to space wars. It may happen sooner rather than later, because, as the Brookings Institution concludes in a 2018 report on “How artificial intelligence is transforming the world,” everything is going faster, including war:
“The big data analytics associated with AI will profoundly affect intelligence analysis, as massive amounts of data are sifted in near real time … thereby providing commanders and their staffs a level of intelligence analysis and productivity heretofore unseen. Command and control will similarly be affected as human commanders delegate certain routine, and in special circumstances, key decisions to AI platforms, reducing dramatically the time associated with the decision and subsequent action.”
So, no danger that some soft-hearted officer will hesitate to start World War III because of a sentimental attachment to humanity. When the AI platform sees an opportunity, go for it!
“In the end, warfare is a time competitive process, where the side able to decide the fastest and move most quickly to execution will generally prevail. Indeed, artificially intelligent intelligence systems, tied to AI-assisted command and control systems, can move decision support and decision-making to a speed vastly superior to the speeds of the traditional means of waging war. So fast will be this process especially if coupled to automatic decisions to launch artificially intelligent autonomous weapons systems capable of lethal outcomes, that a new term has been coined specifically to embrace the speed at which war will be waged: hyperwar.”
Americans have a choice. Either continue to quarrel over trivialities or wake up, really wake up, to the reality being planned and do something about it.
The future is shaped by investment choices. Not by naughty speech, not even by elections, but by investment choices. For the people to regain power, they must reassert their command over how and for what purposes capital is invested.
And if private capital balks, it must be socialized. This is the only revolution – and it is also the only conservatism, the only way to conserve decent human life. It is what real politics is about.
Diana Johnstone lives in Paris. Her latest book is Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher and is also the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. Her lates book is Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton. The memoirs of Diana Johnstone’s father Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness, was published by Clarity Press, with her commentary. She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr .
As time goes on in close confinement, even people bound by love may start to find each other unbearable. On a larger scale, in this crazy mass confinement, people brought together by a common rejection of the lies of our criminal rulers may find themselves at each other’s throats because of conflicting interpretations of why who is doing what.
This is happening on alternative media – especially in Germany. It seems that many anti-conformist political analysts believe that the Coronavirus crisis is a fake, perpetrated by media and governments for sinister reasons. They are actually calling for protest demonstrations against confinement.
I can’t help seeing this as an obsession of certain dissidents to prove to themselves that they are good “anti-authoritarian” Germans who would never have bowed to Nazism. But is this assertion of individual freedom appropriate in the midst of a public health crisis?
The Limits of Power
Very clever people naturally want to find motives behind whatever happens. At one time such people might have been theologians, who explained the extremely mysterious ways in which God carries out His cosmic plan. A flood, a plague, an earthquake? There had to be a reason for it, a motivation in human terms. The All-Powerful was punishing his sinful flock and reminding them of who was boss.
Mammon. (Wikipedia)
Today, quite a number of alternative media commentators are ready to believe in the absolute power not of God but of Mammon, of the powers of Wall Street and its partners in politics, the media and the military. In this view, nothing major happens that hasn’t been planned by earthly powers for their own selfish interest.
Mammon is wrecking the economy so a few oligarchs will own everything. Or else Mammon created the hoax Coronavirus 19 in order to lock us all up and deprive us of what little is left of our freedom. Or finally Mammon is using a virus in order to have a pretext to vaccinate us all with secret substances and turn us all into zombies.
Is this credible? In one sense, it is. We know that Mammon is unscrupulous, morally capable of all crimes. But things do happen that Mammon did not plan, such as earthquakes, floods and plagues. Dislike of our ruling class combined with dislike of being locked up leads to the equation: They are simply using this (fake) crisis in order to lock us up!
But what for? To whom is there any advantage in locking down the population? For the pleasure of telling themselves, “Aha, we’ve got them where we want them, all stuck at home!” Is this intended to suppress popular revolt? What popular revolt? Why repress people who aren’t doing anything that needs to be repressed?
What is the use of locking up a population – and I think especially of the United States – that is disunited, disorganized, profoundly confused by generations of ideological indoctrination telling them that their country is “the best” in every way, and thus unable to formulate coherent demands on a system that exploits them ruthlessly? Do you need to lock up your faithful Labrador so he won’t bite you?
If anything, the trauma of this situation might actually awaken a somnolent population to the vital need for basic transformation of society. The notion that this lockdown threatens to be permanent is totally unrealistic, against all evidence from previous lockdowns. On the contrary, prolonged confinement is most likely to lead to explosions. The question is, can these explosions be constructive.
On a wall in Paris: “You will not confine our anger.”
Blinded by Hubris
Rather than deploring the all-powerful nature of Mammon, it would be more constructive to look for the flaws in his armor, for his weaknesses, for the ways he can be massively discredited, denounced and defeated.
Mammon is blinded by its own hubris, often stupid, incompetent, dumbed down by getting away with so much so easily. Take a look at Mike Pompeo or Mike Pence – are these all-powerful geniuses? No, they are semi-morons who have been able to crawl up a corrupt system contemptuous of truth, virtue or intelligence – like the rest of the gangsters in power in a system devoid of any ethical or intellectual standards.
The power of creatures like that is merely the reflection of the abdication of social responsibility by whole populations whose disinterest in politics has allowed the scum to rise to the top.
The lockdown decreed by our Western governments reveals helplessness rather than power. They did not rush to lock us down. The lockdown is disastrous for the economy which is their prime concern. They hesitated and did so only when they had to do something and were ill-equipped to do anything else. They saw that China had done so with good results. But smart Asian governments did even more, deploying masks, tests and treatments Western governments did not possess.
Western governments called for confinement when experts explained the exponential curves to them. They didn’t know what else to do. There is at least enough sense of social responsibility left in our societies to oblige governments to take the basic, classic quarantine methods usual during pandemics.
Of course, in every crisis some are well placed to take advantage of disaster. The vultures didn’t cause the cattle to die so they could eat the carrion. But they will gobble it up when it’s there. Wall Street financial powers could quickly get Congresspeople to vote laws to bail them out while small businesses sink and working people are plunged into despair.
But in the long run, without the small businesses, without the workers now being deprived of income to spend, without normal economic activity, Wall Street itself will have no one to bleed, nothing to exploit. It makes absolutely no sense to believe that dominant economic powers sought this ruinous crisis for some mysterious benefit to themselves.
In the European Union, creditor countries like Germany and the Netherlands refuse to let the European Central Bank issue “Coronabonds” to finance economic recovery of hard-hit countries like Italy and Spain. That means those countries will have to borrow from the private financial system, at high interest rates leading to bankruptcy.
That sounds like a boon to international finance, which, however, will find itself holding an infinite amount of unpayable debt. And the European Union may split apart as a result – not in the interests of any of these powerful masters of Mammon.
Public Health Is Not an Individual Choice
In the West, “human rights”, are conceived in terms of the “rights” of the individual, or of a minority, to go against what we call “the regime” when speaking of countries other than our own. The United States uses the absolute value of “human rights” as a pretext to impose its will through sanctions and bombing on nations that reject its global domination. The defiance of authority is celebrated as resistance, without necessarily examining the details.
However, virtually all key aspects of any civilized society go contrary to the absolutism of individual rights. Every civilized society has some sort of legal system, some basic rules that everyone is expected to follow. Most civilized societies have a public education and (except for the United States) a public health insurance system designed to benefit the whole population. These elements of civilization include constraints on individual freedom.
The benefits to each individual of living in a civilized society make these constraints acceptable to just about everybody. The health of the individual depends on the health of the community, which is why everyone in most Western countries accepts a single payer health insurance system. The only exception is the United States, where the egocentricities of Ayn Rand are widely read as serious thought.
Mammon and His Slave. (Wikimedia Commons)
The arrival of a plague or an epidemic suddenly calls for totally abnormal, extremely unpleasant constraints, such as quarantines. This is a case where the freedom of the individual is sacrificed for the general good: the individual is confined not merely for his own good but for the good of his community and indeed of all humanity.
The paradox of our highly technological societies is that the greater the impossibility of the general public (all of us) to understand crucial functions and issues, the more we depend on experts and authorities, and the more we distrust those experts and authorities and suspect them of using their position to advance secret agendas. There is thus a sort of built-in paranoia in our societies where the power of invisible forces becomes constantly more inscrutable.
This paradox operates forcefully on issues of medicine and public health, all the more in that the authorities themselves are frequently divided in their opinions. In Germany especially, where the crisis has been relatively mild, one can hear a doctor claiming that fear of Covid-19 is artificially created and that nature should be allowed to take its course, since healthy people will be spared and the few who die would have died anyway.
Stay Home and Take a Pill
This opinion is readily accepted by those who suspect every government measure of being an arbitrary assault on personal liberties. But it is hardly a majority opinion in the world medical profession.
Personally, I’ve been there. I’ve seen this virus in action. This is not simply a bad cold, or a seasonal flu. Yes, there are light cases, but there are fatal ones as well. It does not just kill off superfluous elderly people that some commentators seem satisfied to get rid of.
Still, it is quite reasonable to question the usefulness of confinement alone. Here in France, authorities turned to confinement with some delay, only because the illness was spreading and they had nothing else to do about it.
There were no masks; a factory in Brittany that provided the domestic market with masks and other medical equipment had been bought up a while back by Honeywell and closed down. This is an aspect of the deindustrialization of France, based on the assumption that we in the West can live from our brains, our ideas, our startups, while actual things are made for low wages in poor countries.
So there were no masks and no immediate capacity to make them. There was also a shortage of ventilators, even of hospital beds – in fact there was no ability to deal with the epidemic other than to tell people to stay at home and prescribe paracetamol.
Surely there are better ways to deal with it, and one inevitable explosion after confinement will be an outpouring of criticism of the way the government has handled the crisis and demands for drastic improvements in the public health system.
The argument that “oh well, even more people die of ordinary flu, or cancer, or something else” is not valid because this illness comes in addition to all the others that are anticipated: it pushes already largely saturated health facilities over the top, into collapse.
In Italy, Covid-19 has killed off a hundred medical doctors in just over a month. They would not have “died anyway, of something else” without the epidemic.
In France, in normal times, dial the emergency service SAMU 15 and usually a team is there within minutes. During the Covid-19 crisis, you could dial 15 and wait an hour or more for an answer, whatever your health crisis might be, and help might never come.
The main purpose of the quarantine is to reduce the pression on overburdened systems. Without the confinement, the overload would have been even worse. This crisis is exposing the inadequacy of existing facilities and the crucial need for major programs to strengthen public health systems.
Irrational Fear of Vaccination
Jonas Salk’s vaccine wiped out polio in the United States, and he didn’t patent it. (Wikimedia Commons)
Mass vaccination has always been the surest way to wipe out deadly diseases. It is also an instance where individual freedoms need be sacrificed to the general good. It is deeply disturbing that many intelligent people are more afraid of the vaccine that may be developed to combat this virus than they are of the virus itself.
One objection is that profit-oriented Big Pharma takes advantage of every illness to make money. But the answer is not to reject pharmaceuticals. The main problem with Big Pharma is unleashed neoliberal capitalism in the United States, combined with the absence of a government-run single payer health insurance, which allows pharmaceutical companies to charge outrageous prices for their products, as well as to focus on production of the most profitable rather than the most generally useful medication.
The answer to this is not to give up medication but to demand greater public supervision and price control.
Finally, the pharmaceutical industry should be considered a public utility rather than a business and nationalized so that revenue can be used to finance research rather than to pay dividends to Big Finance.
The prospects are different from one country to another. Achieving social control in the United States looks practically impossible because of the overwhelming belief that “free enterprise” is the only way to do things. In France, which has positive experience of a mixed economy, it could be politically possible to nationalize pharmaceutical companies – if France were not under the domination of the European Union and, less directly, the United States, which is always prepared to do what it can to block socialist measures anywhere in the world.
No Longer the Center
But the West is no longer the center of the world. The Covid-19 crisis has demonstrated the rising capabilities and more human attitudes of East Asia. There will be vaccines developed in China, in Russia, in other countries outside the NATO sphere. Their achievements will break the monopoly of Western “Big Pharma.”
In Europe, and notably in France, Italy and Spain, the total disillusion with the European Union is strengthening the trend toward return of national sovereignty. And sovereign nations, able to respond to their people’s demands can be able to break away from the dictates of Big Finance in order to renew democracy in more appropriate forms.
In France, labor unions and progressives are demanding better protection of the population, starting with all those essential service workers, in hospitals and grocery stores, bus drivers, deliverymen, all those who are increasingly appreciated by their confined compatriots and who need to reap the benefits of their public service.
Yellow Vests protest, March 7, 2020 in Paris before lockdown. (Joe Lauria)
Perhaps because of the long tradition of social struggle in France, including the Yellow Vest movement which is not dead but only on hold, one can be sure that after confinement there will be an explosion of demands to abandon the fantasies of neoliberal globalism and build a system where the welfare of the people comes first.
In contrast, in the context of the corona virus crisis in Germany, someone supposedly “on the left” has initiated a petition calling on persons over 75 to declare that if they are sick, they renounce medical treatment, in order to give preference to younger people. This is a new twist of identity politics, of classifying people by groups, and a step toward revival of the worst eugenics of Nazism.
Which is civilized and which is barbaric: insisting on a system that gives equal care to all, or deciding that the elderly be sacrificed for the others? What is this but a suggestion to resort to human sacrifice to please Mammon?
For Civilization
Sounding the alarm about how horrible our ruling class is gets us nowhere unless we have an idea of a real alternative – not just “resisting” but proposing and fighting for something different and better.
Let’s start with a most concrete practical issue and work from there: vaccination. Like other aspects of public health, this is an issue of collective welfare rather than individual rights. It is an element not of “resistance to oppression” but of the construction of civilization.
The coronavirus has not illustrated the need to get rid of vaccines – on grounds that “they” want to use them against us – but on the contrary, of the need to make sure that vaccines are developed under proper supervision for the public welfare and not as a means for Big Pharma to make bigger dividends for BlackRock.
So the problem with vaccines is not vaccination but American capitalism that has gotten completely out of hand. Once upon time, the Food and Drug Administration was a reliable monitor of pharmaceutical innovations. In recent decades, such control agencies have increasingly been taken over by the companies they are supposed to control and transformed into rubber stamps.
Alarms are also raised about the alleged role of billionaires like Bill Gates whose philanthropic institutions are suspected of manipulating vaccines for hidden nefarious purposes.
The remedy is not to flee medication and vaccination, but to dismantle these overgrown dictatorial powers and build a society that can properly be called civilized because it is balanced between collective and individual welfare. Of course, to say what should be done is very far from knowing how to do it. But without an idea of what should be done, there will not even be any effort to figure out how.
A Mixed Economy
In the United States, it would be necessary to accept the fact that certain essential activities must be considered public services. This requires a wave of reforms equivalent to a revolution, not as prescribed by Marxist revolutionaries to situations that no longer exist. Pharmaceuticals and hospitals are public services and must be socially controlled. Internet has become a public service.
How should that be treated? Innovators who used free market mechanisms to gain virtual monopoly control of their sector should be invited to choose which of their mansions to retain as residence as they are retired to the role of advisor, while their disproportionate accumulated earnings should become part of the public treasury.
What I am advocating is not a “communist revolution,” certainly not for the United States. I am advocating a mixed economy, which can take various forms, from France in the 1960s to China today. The commanding heights of the economy should be under social control, to ensure that major investment has social purpose.
The forms of this control can vary. In the United States, the first task of the commanding heights should be to shift investment away from insanely wasteful military production to domestic infrastructure and measures to integrate all citizens into a genuinely civilized society. Such a mixed economy creates a favorable environment for the proliferation of small independent enterprises free to innovate.
Free from fear of illness and homelessness allows more real freedom than the polarized lottery that passes for capitalism in the United States today. Such a project of civilization should win support from decent and lucid people in all classes of society.
I am perfectly aware that the United States today is ideologically light years away from such a sensible project. But developments are underway in other countries to meet the threat of Big Pharma and meddling American billionaires. The word that sums up these developments is “multipolarization.”
This is the slogan launched by Vladimir Putin in 2007. It drove Western champions of unipolar globalization into a frenzy from which they are far from having recovered – witness the insanely provocative “Defender Europe 20” military games practicing nuclear war right up to the Russian border, stalled temporarily by Covid-19.
The United States and its European satellites are in effect waging war against the Free World – that is, countries free of U.S. domination, in order to perpetuate an imaginary global regime along the lines of neoliberalism: rule of finance approved by manipulated elections.
Nevertheless, unipolar globalization is in the process of disintegration. All the slander against China cannot change the facts. While U.S. propagandists blast their rising rival, most of the world sees that China handled the epidemic with more professional know-how than the West. The United States control of international agencies is being threatened by growing Chinese influence – in particular, the World Health Organization.
This is the greatest threat to Big Pharma: a multipolar world. Bill Gates and U.S. pharmaceutical companies will have no monopoly of vaccine development to combat Covid-19. A dramatic shift from neoliberal globalization to multipolar national sovereignty will restore genuine competition – not only in production of vaccines but in social organization.
Let Western countries look to their own problems and find solutions. Let other countries develop according to models that suit their history, philosophy and popular demands. It is obvious that the vaunted U.S. “free market democracy” is not a model that should be imposed on every country on earth, nor even on the United States itself.
Mixed economies can take various forms. Some could evolve toward something that could be called socialism, others not. Let every small country be as independent as Iceland. Let the world explore different paths. Let a hundred flowers bloom!