The line taken both by speakers at the WEF Davos virtual conference, and in its publicity beforehand, is that “The Great Reset” is the way to go forward, rather than a return to the previous normal, because the latter is what got us into this mess in the first place. That claim requires a little examination.
Rather than giving a full account of the parlous state of the world, these speakers have been focusing mainly on the COVID pandemic as the crisis which proves the failure of the old system. As far as any detail is given (which is not much), the emphasis seems to be on how much better things would have been if the situation had been managed in the cooperative and sustainable manner promised by “stakeholder capitalism.” As it was, nation states, and presumably shareholders solely interested in profit, worked against each other, resulting in all the deaths from the infection, together with the economic slump which is scarcely yet beginning to bite – or at least its effects have been ignored by a press only concerned with exactly what variant of virus or vaccine generated exactly what big numbers today.
I beg to differ. The last biggest pandemic, that of H3N2 Hong Kong Flu in 1968-9, was managed primarily at national level. Very few intensive care beds existed then, though in the days before increasing efficiency led to bed closures, there were still “fever hospitals” for those who became sick to be isolated from others. And since there was no technology to produce PCR test kits or vaccines or anti-virals, Big Pharma had little or no no contribution to make (only 9 million doses of an experimental US vaccine were produced), and shareholders were kept busy making money in other fields, such as putting a man on the Moon and supporting the arts.
As a result, most people barely noticed the pandemic, despite some disruption due to work absences and the wide age-distribution of mortality. It did not even dent the economy, although it killed over twice as many people worldwide as COVID-19 has, even given the often doubtful diagnostic criteria of the latter (for example, one study shows that around a third of the UK death certificates mentioning COVID, up to the autumn, did so as an associated condition, not a causal factor).
In passing, let me add that WEF voices and the UN, looking to decrease the amount of air travel in the world to stop it burning up, speak gloomily of tourism as the reason pandemics are now such a perennial threat. But there was far less air travel back in 1968, and in any case mainland China, the likely original source of Hong Kong Flu, was a closed country then. Yet the outbreak that began there in mid-July had spread worldwide by December. Viruses do that.
Contrast that with what has been the watchword of the response to COVID – globalism. For a start, the virus probably came from a virology laboratory funded not only by the Chinese government, but by Dr Fauci’s US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Canada and the European Union, at least. The expertise, or lack of it, was international.
The WHO, increasingly in recent years under the political umbrella of the UN, and under the influence of China and its major funders – individual governments, the Gates Foundation, and Big Pharma – also generated the kind of policy directives that had been missing in 1968-9. As we know, they delayed effective measures initially by parroting Chinese propaganda about the lack of human spread and the non-necessity of travel bans. Then they promulgated a series of pseudo-scientific policies on lockdowns, masks and the need for vaccines which mostly contradicted their existing pandemic plans, and which since have been frequently contradicted by other, less political and more scientific, voices in the WHO.
The actual abandonment of established pandemic measures in favour of disastrous lockdowns was triggered by the wildly pessimistic modelling of Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College Team, who not only held sway over British public health policy, but had strong links to the WHO, the EU, the Gates Foundation, and America’s NIH. Hence one department of one university was able to establish a global policy with non-peer-reviewed work. Thank the Lord, one or two countries such as Sweden ignored it, thus providing a small, local, control group to combat the monolithic narrative pushed by the globalised political and scientific communities.
Back in 2009, the hyped Avian Flu pseudo-pandemic and the Pandemrix scandal showed how an over-influential WHO, and the global pharmaceutical corporations, could corrupt the whole world’s disease management. Now, those same corrupt pathways have been facilitated by closer ties to totalitarian regimes like China, the loss of democratic accountability in western governments, the growth of corporate globalism, not least through the WEF, the decline of press, media and social media independence, and last but not least the increasing concentration of wealth and power in an elite class since that same elite caused a record-breaking world recession in 2008.
It does not need saying, really, that the people who gathered last week, virtually, at Davos to blame the old fragmented capitalist system for the pandemic were that same elite: the oligarchs, CEOs and bankers of the global corporations; the ambitious heads of governments and the ex-heads of governments with jobs on their boards; the UN and other global umbrella groups funded by them and headed by those who have come through the revolving doors; the celebrities judged to be ideological fellow-travellers and welcome at their junkets, etc, etc.
And their proposed solution? More of the same central control, in every area of life. The “stakeholders” of the “stakeholder capitalism,” which will plan and fund sustainable development and happiness for all, will actually be none other than those same heads of governments, elected (or pretended to be elected) from the same elite class. They are increasingly used to bypassing democratic institutions like Parliament in the UK, national governments in the EU Commission, and Congress in the US. These politicians know without having to ask us what is in our best interests, which happens always to be what the prevailing mood is at the exclusive International Conferences, where they all hob-nob and develop their group-think more by social-contagion and self-interest than by any real ideological commitment. And certainly not by democratic mandate.
That group-think, in fact, has a very strong component of distaste for the fascist ignorance of the unwashed masses outside, whose populist disorder, so local in its concerns, threatens the entire power-structure that has been so carefully build up by the rich and the powerful. Fortunately, the Plan includes measures to reduce both the disruptive liberties of those masses, and their numbers.
It’s perhaps becoming clearer that the Great Reset does not emerge from Davos as a formal policy endorsed by all the world’s leaders, establishing a World Government by some 2021 legal constitution. Such a move would, I’m sure they know, be as much of a fiasco as the various climate accords, because the bickering of special interests aims at observing the cosmetics rather than the letter. But perhaps it does not need to be such a move. Conferences like Davos function to get the elite thinking along the same lines, little by little.
So we will see individual leaders like Joe Biden, or Emile Macron, or Boris Johnson, (or Matt Hancock, God help us), abusing their powers only moderately more than they already do, by agreeing to international deals for which they were never elected. These deals will involve the global corporations with which they are already cosy, which have interests in every other country and capital bigger than many. Then they will be puffed by a news industry that is already little more than a mouthpiece for press releases from governments, companies and NGOs. And all the time, the veneer of world respectability will be maintained by the intergovernmental organisations run by appointees from small countries, politically dependant on their rich neighbours.
Just as individual governments justify their woeful COVID policies by pointing to the other countries that are doing the same, and to the WHO which advocated the policies (or a pick’n’mix selection of such policies), so your own prime minister will boldly go where everyone else is going – and will even believe he or she is doing good, even whilst doing well.
Their hope must be that an exhausted oi polloi will be so desperate, as the miserable months of bondage go by, that it will swallow the myth I’ve tried to debunk here – that dispersed power caused our present woes, rather than a centrally-controlled conglomerate of chaos.
Still, the bottom line is that in real life global unity inevitably means absolute power, and hence absolute corruption, for the biggest shark in the sea, whichever Antichrist that turns out to be. At least under the old system an individual shareholder had some real clout by choosing what she bought. That was the case until RobinHood and Wall Street stopped her doing so, anyway.
