By YANI ROXAS
Bulatlat.com
After waking and dreaming with thoughts of “stay at home, wash your hands, stay away from others” I can now speak these words like a robot. But then you’ll never get off of thinking are we heading for the end time with prolonged quarantines and number of infections spiking. Even if China appears to lead the pack of nations in recovery, beating the US to a pulp, who knows what the new “imported”
infections will bring to China.
So I turn to the internet like the others, and I see the same stories. More pictures of gloom than glee. Local stations on radio and TV offer me little comfort. How do we get out of this pandemic that is turning our lives upside down? Medical experts said it will take 18 months to develop a vaccine, though more for it to become deployable. In the meantime, I find myself being ushered into a “new normal”.
What was it that Henry Kissinger, former US Secretary of State and National Security Adviser both under the Nixon and Ford administrations, said recently in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that really caught my eye. He said: “ The reality is the world will never be the same after the coronavirus… The U.S. must protect its citizens from disease while starting the urgent work of planning for a new epoch (emphasis mine).” From the view of this known globalist the COVID-19 pandemic is going to forever alter the world order.
Kissinger is currently critical of the US, and yes of Trump (who sticks to America First and refuses to lead a global response against the pandemic), and countries across the globe who only think of their own survival and have closed their doors to each other. He also said that after the COVID-19 pandemic these country’s institutions will be deemed as failures for not overcoming obstacles that are unprecedented in magnitude and global scope.
And what would this probably mean to Kissinger? The upheaval wrought by Covid 19 would push nations to completely surrender to globalization, tear down their walls, weaken their protective barriers, and bring them down to their knees. Whether it’s a pandemic virus or a climate change crisis nation- states would now be deemed incapable of responding to global disasters. Hence, a new world order is deemed inevitable. According to some observers, If not the US, China could emerge as its leader.
Other globalists have echoed Kissinger’s view, though more directly. The United Nations Secetary General Antonio Guterres had remarked that the global response to the corona virus is a global government capable of setting up and coordinating a global economy that would remove tariffs and impediments to trade. If this is not imperialism at its apex, I don’t know what is.
What would this mean to ordinary mortals like me? Already the protocols and the restrictions engendered by Covid-19 are giving me a taste of what it’s like to be under a new order in the age of 5G and the internet.
Multiply this a million times over to millions of individuals all over the world and the effects are staggering.
First is the social isolation. Welcome to work from home. Telecommuting sounds pretty nice when you can spend more time with family, eat at home, no traffic. But look at how much your company saves, and profits, when you work at home. Overhead expenses and benefits are reduced, and your work may have term limit. . Plus the fact that your world has gotten smaller and human interactions have become even more limited except for those faces and emoticons on your screen. Also the mantra of “stay at home”, and curfews, and fear of authorities could make us so used to not leaving our homes, even beyond Covid-19. Sounds like population control is succeeding.
Second is the curtailment of rights, and I can go on a long list. Your home is your sanctuary but a spy through your gadget is carried in every nook and corner of your home. There is absolutely no privacy in your phones or your internet but you can’t live without it specially during this time. Under a police state the danger to your person and security is even ten times over. Look at how the Duterte government wields its emergency powers – shoot violators, arrest purveyors of “fake news”, jail legitimate dissenters, etc. Contract tracing and mass testing have also become convenient covers for a mass surveillance system. Under this guise Google is collaborating with the Duterte government by providing the latter with $5 million worth of credits for the use of its apps. If authoritarianism can give you shivers down your spine in your own country, how much more for totalitarianism on a world scale.
Third is health and the economy. Even if we beat Covid-19, more pandemics and disasters are said to be coming, and the world would still be in panic. Hence it is deemed easier to sell to us the idea of a global public health system to the joy of big pharamaceutical companies and related transnational industries.
Health, among other things and given our experience with Covid-19, had been used as a unifying cause for all nations to come together to tweak, restructure, realign, or worse, shutdown their economies. However calls of “we are all in this” could no longer be just limited to health but to other industries as well, as globalists rally the world for its own design and purpose. And where would that leave us as a nation when our own needs no longer define our local economies. The cry of the poor is as clear as day — “Mamamatay kami sa gutom, hindi sa Covid!”
This pandemic upheaval may last for years, coming at its trail economic and political repercussions. But a new world order, I am not buying. For our sake and that of the next generations, we should keep our autonomy as individuals and, as a people, guard our nation’s self-determination.
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