By Pepe Escobar – crossposted with Strategic Culture Foundation
Italian master thinker Giorgio Agamben has been on the – controversial – forefront examining what new paradigm may be emerging out of our current pandemic distress.
He recently called attention to an extraordinary book published seven years ago that already laid it all out.
In Tempetes Microbiennes, Patrick Zylberman, a professor of History of Health in Paris, detailed the complex process through which health security, so far at the margins of political strategies, was sneaking into center stage in the early 2000s. The WHO had already set the precedent in 2005, warning about “50 million deaths” around the world caused by the incoming swine flu. In the worst-case scenario projected for a pandemic, Zylberman predicted that “sanitary terror” would be used as an instrument of governance.
That worst-case scenario has been revamped as we speak. The notion of a generalized obligatory confinement is not warranted by any medical justification, or leading epidemiological research, when it comes to fighting a pandemic. Still, that was enshrined as the hegemonic policy – with the inevitable corollary of countless masses plunged into unemployment. All that based on failed, delirious mathematical models of the Imperial College kind, imposed by powerful pressure groups ranging from the World Economic Forum (WEF) to the Munich Security Conference.
Enter Dr. Richard Hatchett, a former member of the National Security Council during the first Bush Jr. administration, who was already recommending obligatory confinement of the whole population way back in 2001. Hatchett now directs the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), a very powerful entity coordinating global vaccine investment, and very cozy with Big Pharma. CEPI happens to be a brainchild of the WEF in conjunction with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Crucially, Hatchett regards the fight against Covid-19 as a “war”. The terminology – adopted by everyone from President Trump to President Macron – gives away the game. It harks back to – what else – the global war on terror (GWOT), as solemnly announced in September 2001 by Donald “Known Unknowns” Rumsfeld himself.
Rumsfeld, crucially, had been the chairman of biotech giant Gilead. After 9/11, at the Pentagon, he got busy aiming to blur the distinction between civilians and the military when it came to GWOT. That’s when “generalized obligatory confinement” was conceptualized, with Hatchett among the key players.
As much as this was a militarized Big Pharma spin-off concept, it had nothing to do with public health. What mattered was the militarization of American society to be adopted in response to bioterror – at the time automatically attributed to a squalid, tech-deprived al-Qaeda.
The current version of this project – we are at “war” and every civilian must stay at home – takes the form of what Alexander Dugin has defined as a medical-military dictatorship.
Hatchett is very much part of the group, alongside ubiquitous Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), very close to WHO, WEF and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Robert Redfield, director of the U.S. chapter of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Further applications inbuilt in the project will include all-around digital surveillance, sold as health monitoring. Already implemented in the current narrative is the non-stop demonization of China, “guilty” of all things Covid-19-related. That is inherited from another tried and tested war game – the Red Dawn scheme.
Show me your fragility
Agamben did square the circle: it’s not that citizens across the West have the right to health safety; now they are juridically forced (italics mine) to be healthy. That, in a nutshell, is what biosecurity is all about.
So no wonder biosecurity is an ultra-efficient governance paradigm. Citizens had it administered down their throats with no political debate whatsoever. And the enforcement, writes Agamben, kills “any political activity and any social relation as the maximum example of civic participation.”
What we are already experiencing is social distancing as a political model (italics mine) – with a digital matrix replacing human interaction, which by definition from now on will be regarded as fundamentally suspicious and politically “contagious”.
Agamben has to be appalled by this “concept for the destiny of human society that in many aspects seems to have borrowed from religions in decline the apocalyptic idea of the end of the world”. Economics had already replaced politics – as in everything subjected to the diktats of financial capitalism. Now the economy is being absorbed by “the new biosecurity paradigm to which every other imperative must be sacrificed.”
How to fight against it? Conceptual weaponry is available, such as the courses on biopolitics taught by Michel Foucault at the College de France between 1972 and 1984. They may now be consulted via a decentralized platform set up by a collective which delightfully describes itself as “the crayfish”, who “advance laterally”: a concept that does justice to great rhizomatic master Gilles Deleuze.
Nassim Taleb’s concept of Antifragile is also quite helpful. As he explains, “Antifragile is the antidote to Black Swans.” Well, Covid-19 was a Black Swan of sorts: after all deciding elites knew something like it was inevitably coming – even as lowly Western politicians, especially, were caught totally unprepared.
Antifragile contends that because of fear (very much in evidence now) or a “thirst for order” (natural to any political power) “some human systems, by disrupting the invisible or not so visible logic of things, tend to be exposed to harm from Black Swans and almost never get any benefit. You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.”
The conclusion is that “in the black swan world, optimization isn’t possible. The best you can achieve is a reduction in fragility and greater robustness.”
There’s no evidence, so far, that a “reduction in fragility” in the current world-system will necessarily lead towards “greater robustness.” The system has never proved to be so fragile. What we do have is plenty of indications that the system collapse is being refitted, at breakneck speed, as digital neo-feudalism.
Lost in a biopolitical quarantine
Byung-Chul Han, the South Korean philosopher who teaches in Berlin, has attempted to lay it all out. The problem is he’s too much of a hostage of an idealized vision of Western liberalism.
Byung-Chul Han is correct when he notes that Asia fought Covid-19 with rigor and discipline inconceivable in the West – something that I have followed closely. But then he evokes the Chinese social credit system to mount an attack on China’s society of digital discipline. The system unquestionably allows for biopolitical surveillance. But it’s all about nuance.
The social credit system is like the formula “socialism with Chinese characteristics”; a hybrid that is effective only when responding to China’s complex specificities.
The maze of facial recognition surveillance cameras; the absence of restriction to data exchanged between internet providers and the central power; the QR code that tells whether you’re “red” or “green” in terms of infection; all these instruments were applied – successfully – in China to the benefit of public health.
Byung-Chul Han is forced to admit that does not take place only in China; South Korea – a Western-style democracy – is even considering that people in quarantine should wear a digital bracelet. If we talk about the different Asian models used to fight Covid-19, nuance is the norm.
The Asian-wide collectivist spirit and discipline – especially in Confucianist-influenced societies – works irrespective of the political system. At least Byung-Chul Han admits, “all these Asian particularities are systemic advantages to contain the epidemic.”
The point is not that Asian disciplinary society should be seen as a model for the West. We already live in a digital global Panopticum (where’s Foucault when we need him?) Social network vigilance – and censorship – deployed by the Silicon Valley behemoths has already been internalized. All our data as citizens is trafficked and instantly marketized for private profit. So yes; digital neo-feudalism was already in effect even before Covid-19.
Call it surveillance turbo-neoliberalism. Where there’s no inbuilt “freedom”, and it’s all accomplished by voluntary servitude.
Biopolitical surveillance is just a further layer, the last frontier, because now, as Foucault taught us, this paradigm controls our own bodies. “Liberalism” has been reduced to road kill a long time ago. The point is not that China may be the model for the West. The point is we may have been set up for an endless biopolitical quarantine without even noticing it.
Some of us have noticed it, we are regarded as conspiracy nutters. The majority are rushing to embrace it with screams of keep us safe. I’ve passed comments on social that it seems the old and vulnerable appear to have been all but ignored as their death rates soar, no one is interested as long as they feel safe. I mentioned to my wife that “the new normal” seems to be a conditioning catchphrase for a coming change that is planned, then when she was watching her foreign language TV even they were saying “new normal” in English.
Government of any construct is always a tyranny-in-the-making.Technology makes them more powerful and intrusive than ever.
Generally, ideology powers them to take any Liberty from citizens. Now, very specifically, all kinds of surveillance, monitoring and mobility control gives them powerful tools to micromanage citizens.
Ultimately, they will use robots to add another layer of control. We see the. beginnings with the use of drones.
Just as most developed nations are resisting the unipolar control of the USA in international affairs, most people who have a developed sense of personal freedom and need to be unfettered from restrictions by the control freaks in governments will rebel and resist the government that tries to install draconian rules.
We see this everywhere in the US, France, and some other countries.
People are generally fed up with government in most cases. This pandemic shows how utterly incompetent nearly all of them are. Most have done more damage than good.
I believe that unfettered religious zealotry was about to explode upon the world but fortunately for us all Bill went insane and locked down even these would-be inquisitor-like zealots.
Billy boy must be human after all, or daft.
So, as a practical matter: what is one to do about it? All I see is zombies around me.
They got away with 911 and they just keep pushing.
God willing I’m going to quietly vote with my feet.
World famous anthropologist and gopher psychologist Dr.Weldone-Gridpipethin G.G. (Belmont & Santa Anna) regarding Gopher President Elroy Trump from his paper ‘The President’s Many Corona19 Thoughts’ delivered to the AFSCME sanitary workers conference (SWC) Deeper Western Burrows 2020. 12.30am: Toughen up,.. Princess.’
@T1 Having a government who is still considering anything beside the official narrative regarding 9/11, conspiracy lunacy, marks it automatically and for all eternity as a criminal entity which with absolute certainty will not serve the people at large !!
It also follows that only total morons or totally corrupt can compose those governments in question. It follows from observation there cannot be many sane governments on this planet.
Severe and repeated lying regarding the control of a State, inevitably will lead to catastrophic consequences, and when done on a permanent basis to the certain destruction of the State.
Thus one doesn’t need to be a prophet, to say the West with certainty will go to hell, the only question still open is only how many will return from it.
Nice to see Nassim Nicholas Taleb part of Pepe’s repertoire! Just to clarify though: Taleb does not believe this pandemic is a Back Swan event…
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-pandemic-isnt-a-black-swan-but-a-portent-of-a-more-fragile-global-system
Also his whole idea of being “Antifragile” is having reduncies. He claims that global supply chains, just-in-time delivery, ultra lean corporations are all extremely fragile.
Taleb claims that the ultimate “antifragile” (i.e. robust) system is Mother Nature . He gives the example that humans have two eyes, two kidneys, two lungs. He also stresses that in order to be more “antifragile” we need to be more self sufficient, more localism less globalism.
Quite correct. But capitalism would require just one eye, lung or kidney. After all it’s more cost effective.
Well yes but then it all depends on the socio-economic class and nationality…
Bill Gates will figure that out for us, don’t worry.
Congratulations Serbian Girl. You have been quicker than me in pointing out that Taleb did not consider the coronavirus pandemic a ‘Black Swan event’, but on the very contrary.
But it is worth quoting from the article from the ‘New Yorker’:
“Nassim Nicholas Taleb is “irritated,” he told Bloomberg Television on March 31st, whenever the coronavirus pandemic is referred to as a “black swan,” the term he coined for an unpredictable, rare, catastrophic event, in his best-selling 2007 book of that title. “The Black Swan” was meant to explain why, in a networked world, we need to change business practices and social norms—not, as he recently told me, to provide “a cliché for any bad thing that surprises us.” Besides, the pandemic was wholly predictable—he, like Bill Gates, Laurie Garrett, and others, had predicted it—a white swan if ever there was one. “We issued our warning that, effectively, you should kill it in the egg,” Taleb told Bloomberg. Governments “did not want to spend pennies in January; now they are going to spend trillions.
The warning that he referred to appeared in a January 26th paper that he co-authored with Joseph Norman and Yaneer Bar-Yam, when the virus was still mainly confined to China. The paper cautions that, owing to “increased connectivity,” the spread will be “nonlinear”—two key contributors to Taleb’s anxiety. For statisticians, “nonlinearity” describes events very much like a pandemic: an output disproportionate to known inputs (the structure and growth of pathogens, say), owing to both unknown and unknowable inputs (their incubation periods in humans, or random mutations), or eccentric interaction among various inputs (wet markets and airplane travel), or exponential growth (from networked human contact), or all three…”.
Dr Buttar reveals – gates etc, wrong pandemic numbers, secret agenda
https://www.kla.tv/en Motto: Open the eyes, open the mind
Dr. Rashid A. Buttar, author of the international bestseller “The 9 Steps To Keep The Doctor Away”
reports in an exclusive interview about plans that were devised as early as 1981 for a future pandemic.
Against all laws and restrictions, research was done on a virus which through manipulation was to be
damaging and resistent. He adresses the depopulation agenda via vaccines, also the censoring of
important voices on COVID-19, his experiences as a military doctor, lies from the gulf war, and more.
“https://www.kla.tv/en Motto: Open the eyes, open the mind” included the video
has been removed. I found the same video – but without the article.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yK3uXjp_hQ — You have to look at it quickly.
This video to me at least, raises more questions than answers. It is self contradictory. The Doctor says it is a chimera, artificially created. Maybe so. Russia which is under hybrid warfare attack by the US, says all evidence points to a natural origin, not manmade. So is Russia deliberately falsifying the facts?
The Doctor then says that this artificial virus is meant to be ‘enhanced’ or more virulent and dangerous, but then he says that there are far fewer deaths than the media says.
So is the virus more or less dangerous? He says, yes, both.
Then we have China, which declared ‘a people’s war’ against the virus. China is also under attack by the US. But if the virus is really a hoax and not dangerous, why did China react so strongly, and now, why has China opened up after containing it?
Point being, there is lots of contradictory information, and the Doctor’s emotional yet self contradictory statements only left me more confused and skeptical.
The link published at 1:17 am works again.
It’s nice to see a Jewish doctor blowing the whistle as well and paying the price unfortunately:
Censored Dr. Kaufman: “They Want To Genetically Modify Us With COVID-19 Vaccine” – Loses his Job and Willing to go to Jail to Resist
https://healthimpactnews.com/2020/censored-dr-kaufman-they-want-to-genetically-modify-us-with-covid-19-vaccine-loses-his-job-and-willing-to-go-to-jail-to-resist/
@gerry Most enlightening, many thanks for that link ! The whole thing is therefore a fraud !
Please read and read again. Fundamental to understand what is happening around the world, around us. This is by US.
Please read and read again. Foundamental to understand what is happening around the world, around us. This is by US.