It should now be obvious to anyone with even half a brain that we are not in fact facing a deadly global epidemic that threatens to wipe out millions upon millions of our fellow human beings.
The evidence is stacking up to show that the coronavirus is really little more than a flu bug which is overwhelmingly claiming the lives of elderly people, whose state of health was already fragile and could easily have been killed by other infections.
An article in the Financial Times (also reported here) reveals that specialists at Oxford University now think that half of the UK has already had the coronavirus without even knowing it!
Fewer than one in a thousand of those infected with Covid-19 become ill enough to need hospital treatment, say these scientists.
Even the UK government’s own website has lowered the risk status of the coronavirus and conceded that its mortality rate is “low”.
While the flood of mortalities in northern Italy sounded alarm bells everywhere, it now seems that particular factors may have been in play there – not least a way of compiling figures which listed under the coronavirus toll people who had died from other causes but with the virus in their bodies.
If I die of a heart attack and a post-mortem shows I also had athlete’s foot, this does not mean that it was the athlete’s foot that killed me.
If you want to check out dissident medical opinion on this question, have a look at this page on the Off Guardian site.
So if the threat from the coronavirus is not so great, why this reaction? Why is a large chunk of the world’s population under what is essentially house arrest? Why this end-of-the-world panic and fearmongering hysteria?
It is here that things get worrying. Very worrying. It is clear that there is a deliberate agenda to exploit this moment of shock, confusion and disorientation for other purposes.
Is it to justify a new version of the bankers’ bailout, the transfer of trillions of pounds of public money into the hands of big finance, the stacking up of yet more enormous public debts that can never be repaid?
Is it a Big Pharma manoeuvre to make huge profits by selling the magic potion of a vaccine to the whole world?
Is it a move designed to immobilise and disempower the population ahead of an economic melt-down, to get us used to martial law conditions?
Is it all of these at once?
One very interesting interpretation comes in this interview on the Activist Post website.
The suggestion is that this crisis is being used by a bunch of powerful financiers to deliberately crash and take over the economy of the US and then the world.
Is this the same network of disaster capitalists, of “disruption investors”, who have been exposed, by Cory Morningstar and others (see this page of links), as being behind the “climate capitalist” manipulation of the environmental movement?
Is this all part of the same war between two capitalist gangs, the old-style traditional variety and the new-tech Fourth Industrial Revolution crowd, led by Bill Gates and his chums, for control of the global economy?
I know that there are friends and comrades out there who are optimistic about the collapse of the current capitalist economy that may result from this unprecedented crisis.
The skies are clearer with fewer aircraft, the roads and cities are quiet, consumption has almost come to a halt. Governments are talking about “nationalising” industries to keep them going. Isn’t this the post-capitalist, even post-industrial world for which we have all been waiting?
I do not share this optimism.
Using public money to prop up failing businesses is not socialism, but a bailout paid from the public purse. The merger between corporations and the state is not the end of capitalism, but its self-reinvention as corporate fascism. (See this article on the orgrad website).
This lull in economic and industrial activity is merely temporary, a transitional phase.
The “new normal”, the brave new world into which we are heading – faster than anticipated, it now seems – is a world of AI, of “smart” technology, of the “internet of things”, of drones, of 5G, of surveillance, of microchip implants and so-called “biosecurity”.
It is still a capitalist world – its motivating force is a tiny minority’s insatiable greed for profit and power over the majority of humankind.
It is still an industrial world – all its technologies, devices and infrastructures, no matter how “clean” or “sustainable” they label themselves, rely on extraction of raw resources, on factories, on transport.
And, worse still, it is a fascist world, a world where every move we make is monitored and policed, a world where freedom is considered irresponsible, where solidarity is deemed unhygienic, where individuals are confined to isolation and reduced to helpless, cringing, dependence on their all-powerful jailors.
This is a nightmare world in which the total full-spectrum control of our lives by an arrogant, sociopathic ultrarich elite is imposed by all-pervasive lies and propaganda, by brutal force and by fear.
If we don’t want that world, we are going to have to stand up to them.
Leave a Reply