We are victims of a new Stockholm syndrome. We find ourselves having to trust the very governments we have come to distrust more and more over the years. We are forced to turn to the same politicians and apparatchiks who have systematically stripped away our livelihoods, the value of our life’s savings, our liberties, our rights and our self-esteem for years. We are made to take our eyes off the jackboot grinding down our necks by a poison-tipped dagger at our hearts.
Perhaps it is time to draw a deep breath and reflect on the extraordinary changes being thrust upon our lives by this virus crisis.
The fear factor has been drummed up with methodical hysteria by Western mainstream media. And by extension, the media in the rest the world which has little originality when it comes to reporting on global issues. This is not to ignore the lethality of the virus, nor the havoc it is wreaking around the world. But it must be asked, who is benefiting from it? What comes after?
It does not matter at this stage whether the virus was engineered or if it is a natural mutation. Conflicting views, even medical opinions, are flying fast and furious. We are not equipped to judge them. We lack the facts and knowledge. More to the point, we are too busy stocking up and locking down. Yet, not being able to understand the origins of the threat should not deter us from thinking about the consequences of the unprecedented measures to fight it. For ourselves, our communities, our nations, our world – the only world that there is.
Ahead of the present crisis, their 12-year orgy of economic and political excess had stretched to a breaking point. Free markets for commodities to stocks to currencies to species existed only in name. Just as democracy was brought to many people who did not ask for it at the expense of their blood, command and control systems were brought to everyone at the expense of their livelihoods and economic security. The only difference was a swift end by a bullet in the head or death by a thousand cuts.
An out of control parasite ultimately self-destructs by draining the last drop of blood from its host. This was pretty much the situation at the beginning of this year. The latest Oxfam report Time to Care (see box below) sets out how extreme economic and social injustice has become. So much so that there was little left for the parasite class to extract from the general citizenry without a violent reaction. What better way to get out of the ‘life-threatening’ situation than to create a real parasite – or take advantage of one – to tranquilize the masses with fear, put them in chains and enter a final feeding frenzy?
Whoever did this to us did it deliberately. Whether they created the virus or pounced on it as a timely opportunity we may never know. It is safe to assume though the cabal of the unprincipled of the world will not flinch at the ‘collateral damage’ by way of a few hundred thousand, even a few million deaths. The populous countries will absorb it in their stride. The ones that are used to making other populations pay for their greed will make them absorb it. No government today has a claim on morality worth a dime. No matter what their political ideology. Scratch the surface with a fingernail, they are all beholden to their moneyed vampires.
This virus will pass. Hopefully before our stocks of essentials reserves are used up. The locks on the new chains around our necks may not open that easily. The keys to many are already being thrown away. We are being herded across the last mile into a brazenly neofeudal social order. An order their lordships will defend to the last drop of their serfs’ blood. As they always have.
The only way this can end is a collapse of the entire financial house of cards. And with it the attempt to hijack whole populations into economic slavery, social dehumanization and political impotency. To enforce upon them the voicelessness of hopelessness. The common people will be hurt along with the crooks. But they have less to lose because they have so little already. The elite do not fear mere ruination. They are terrified of retribution. The reckoning from a revolt of the peasants. Heads rolled, literally, when this happened in the not so distant past.
The world has gone without a revolution for 75 years since World War II ended. We have not been kept wanting for sensational political power struggles, economic upheavals, regime changes and lesser wars. None of it amounts to an uprooting of the social order in any country. They were all coups between factions of the global ruling class. It is only when a ruling class in its entirety is overthrown by the ruled it is called a revolution. This latest coordinated coup is meant to stop one.
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K V Ramani is an economist and retired UN staff, disillusioned equally with the corruption of economics as a profession and the impotence of the UN in preventing the supreme crime of war.
