Are We In A World War?

Is it possible that we are in a modern-style World War without realising it?

Prior to WW1

Pre-WWI there were new technologies, globalising, free-trade, a rules-based world economic system underpinned by the leading power of the day (and to its advantage), and a period of general peace among major countries. And the rise of a financial class, with great wealth and power. And huge inequality.

J D Rockefeller is a good example of how extremely wealthy individuals use that wealth to protect their income and power. Rockefeller's wealth soared as kerosene and gasoline grew in importance. 

Amazingly the electric carriage was invented in 1828. In 1888 the first real electric car was invented.  Electric battery-powered taxis became available at the end of the 19th century. Electric vehicles had a number of advantages over their early-1900s competitors. They did not have the vibration, smell, and noise associated with gasoline cars. They also did not require gear changes. The cars were also preferred because they did not require a manual effort to start; no need for a hand crank to start the engine. By the early 20th century electric cars had a potential range of some 100 km and were especially popular among well-heeled customers who used them as city cars, where their limited range proved to be even less of a disadvantage. Electric cars were often marketed as suitable vehicles for women drivers due to their ease of operation. 

So what happened? How is it that they are only now becoming a thing again?

In 1900 in the United States, 40 percent of automobiles were powered by steam, 38 percent by electricity (helped by homes having electricity), and 22 percent by gasoline, but the electric car soon went into decline, due mainly to relentless promotion of the gasoline car, where the real money was to be made, from powerful people like Rockefeller. 

Rockefeller was the richest person in the US, controlling 90% of all oil in the United States at his peak. Furthermore, Rockefeller gained enormous influence over the railroad industry which transported his oil around the country. Standard Oil was the first great business trust in the United States. 

The Supreme Court ruled in 1911 that Standard Oil must be dismantled for violation of federal antitrust laws. It was broken up into 34 separate entities, which included companies that became ExxonMobil, Chevron Corporation, and others—some of which still have the highest level of revenue in the world. Individual pieces of the company were worth more than the whole, as shares of these doubled and tripled in value in their early years; consequently, Rockefeller became the country's first billionaire, with a fortune worth nearly 2% of the national economy. Rockefeller was also the founder of the University of Chicago, whose 'Chicago boys' later on brought us neoliberalism.

Rockefeller spent much of the last 40 years of his life in retirement, defining the structure of modern philanthropy. His fortune was mainly used to create the modern systematic approach of targeted philanthropy through the creation of foundations that had a major effect on medicine, education, and scientific research. Like our modern-day Bill Gates, philanthropy fed back into Rockefeller's personal fortune, supporting business and medical philosophies that increased inequalities and his own personal power. And like Bill Gates (or at least his father) Rockefeller was an avid supporter of eugenics, the set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population, historically by excluding or eliminating people and groups judged to be inferior and promoting those judged to be superior. The WHO, whose largest donor is now set to be the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was found to have used the tetanus vaccine in Kenya to impose population growth control.

In WW1, the total number of military and civilian casualties in World War I, was around 40 million.

There were 20 million deaths and 21 million wounded. The total number of deaths includes

9.7 million military personnel and about 10 million civilians. Spanish flu in 1918 killed around 50 million. H1N1 (Spanish flu) was a coronavirus that had jumped from chickens to people, as is very often the case with coronaviruses. US military personnel were widely vaccinated (against typhus, smallpox and against a range of other ailments) and the vaccines contained chicken egg cells, and almost certainly chicken viruses. Spanish flu's first documented case was at a US military base in Kansas.

In fact influenza and pneumonia killed more American soldiers and sailors during the war than did enemy weapons, sickening at least 26% of the army, probably more like 40%. The war fostered disease by creating conditions in the trenches of France that enabled the influenza virus to evolve into a killer of global proportions, and soldiers moving around created new foci of contagion among a wider population that was at the time physically deteriorated. Chickens were also kept in horrible industrial-type conditions in order to feed the soldiers, a second relevant point given that coronaviruses typically come from other species, and as a result our immune system is not prepared for them. There was also an inability to separately identify the viral flu sufferers from bacterial pneumonia.

And now?

Modern globalisation has been spurred by some of the same forces that powered the pre-WWI epoch: new technologies, an open, free-trade, rules-based world economic system underpinned by the leading power of the day (with rules to its own advantage), and a period of general peace among major countries. And the rise of a financial class, with great wealth and power. And huge inequality which has returned to pre-World War I levels.

As before World War I, the great wave of globalisation has led to a surge in immigration, both as poor people flee their trashed countries and as large corporations actively encourage the influx of illegal immigrants, at the same time as they warn against it in the media. Large corporations love illegal immigrants, who are cheap and compliant workers, and simultaneously need to stigmatise the immigrant in order to keep them illegal and cheap, while making sure that the general population sees the immigrant as the source of their own personal stagnation or downright poverty and deprivation, rather than the economic order.

In addition to globalisation, technology, social changes and government policies have all been instrumental in determining who benefits and who loses out from global economic integration in past decades.

But globalisation has also hurt some less-skilled workers by exposing them to competition from places with lower wages and taxes, and less meaningful health, safety and environmental laws. In addition, globalisation allows for an easier political scapegoat: it’s easier for politicians to blame foreign countries or individuals for their troubles than technology or their own policies. Technology tends to make even previously skilled workers non-skilled, as witnessed by artificial intelligence, which is at this very moment making a large portion of the things we do susceptible to automation, and to hierarchical control from above, from a very few, extremely powerful number of individuals.

Prior to WW2

Everyone has heard of the 1929 Crash that brought in the Great Depression. Most people think that the hyper-inflation of the Wiemar Republic caused the resentment that in turn caused the rise of the Nazi Party and, ultimately, the Second World War. In fact it was the terms of the Versailles Treaty that imposed firstly a huge debt on Germany and then austerity towards the end of the 1930s in order for the 'creditors' to be paid that caused the German people to turn towards the populist message of Hitler. Which scapegoated immigrants, Jews, gypsies... the other.

85 million people died in the war, excluding those that died afterwards from related illnesses, homelessness, poverty...

And right now?

The CV-19 pandemic (or plandemic - as you wish) has left millions unemployed adding to those jobless or under-employed after the 2008 crash. The horrible Recession of 2008 and onwards, the one we were told we'd recovered from, although our jobs - if we had one - were precarious and depressing, never really went away and was showing signs of resurgence before the CV-19 crisis. 

During these strange and humiliating times full of rules on where you can go, whom you can see, face and hands coverings, biocidal unguents you must slather yourself with, strangers pointing infrared devices at you or sticking contaminated swabs deep into you, biocide drenched mats to walk over, ozone-poisoned offices and shared spaces, biometric tattoos and passports, digital money, isolation, queuing or walking where the arrows dictate, unrequested CV-19 messages on our phones/social networks/computers/TVs... we have belatedly seen that our governments have really huge power over everything we do and that the obscenely rich have great power over them. 

Many of those who are not happy about all of this are cannon fodder for new populist, unpleasant strongmen, who keep the shocks coming fast and furious, who turn our susceptible gaze towards the immigrants, again fleeing from the extreme poverty or war that our economic system imposes on their countries. Meanwhile our leaders elect are quickly looting the bank vault before they too, like their predecessor, have to skulk off in ignominy, unable or unwilling to deal with their hidden paymasters.

CV-19 (the pandemic or the response to an imagined pandemic - as you wish) has caused a wartime mentality, the "we're-all-in-it-together" feeling, the violent and illogical response of a significant portion of the public to those who are not wearing masks or not walking in the direction the arrows dictate. The same people who in other times would have willingly turned in all the Jews they could to the Gestapo. Along with the immigrant we have this even deadlier enemy, one that is invisible, has no measurable effect on you, that you don't know is inside you, and which makes you and everyone else a deadly threat to everyone else, without you knowing it.

664,000 have died from it, possibly at least, as it seems that less people are dying from other causes, suggesting that CV-19 is being used to group deaths from other causes. In any case, a number similar to a bad flu season (250,000-600,000, WHO). Many will die from having their elective surgery or other medical treatments postponed during these months. Some will do better, having not seen the doctor. Small children whose vaccination has been postponed will probably do much better. But depression caused by the lockdown and other measures will cause a significant reduction in life expectancy for many, with potentially soaring suicides and drug-related deaths, especially when the dire job situation becomes apparent. 

During all this the obscenely rich have become much, much richer. Jeff Bezos broke all records when he increased his fortune by $13 billion in one day. If that isn't the rentier economy that Adam Smith warned us against, I don't know what is! Bezos, like the old aristocracy that used to dine on peacocks' tongues, lives a life far distanced from normal mortals and will eat just about anything so long as its disgusting enough.

In any case, if this is a covert war it is working well as concerns making the rich richer, keeping us all looking the other way, and restructuring the world. But what about population reduction?

Whatever you think about CV-19 itself, you have to admit that no one is really dying from it at the moment. If you believe the official figures, which seem to include an awful lot of people who die having had a positive test result in the past at some point but not necessarily from CV-19, 4,000 people a day in a world of nearly 8 billion is not very many. As a practical consideration, were we all to live to a hundred, around 0.0027% of us would die every day. Currently 0.00007% are officially dying from coronavirus, so approximately 2% of deaths are due to this coronavirus, the rest are coronary artery disease, stroke, lower respiratory infections, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (emphysema, bronchitis), lung disease and cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's and dementia, diarrhoea, TB, road injury (in order)... In fact even this is not true: ALL the CV deaths had another underlying cause.

Note that road injury - a most preventable cause - kills twice as many per year as CV-19 has ever and, yet, no one is fretting about that. We stopped our economies for CV but never contemplated such a thing for road injury, which in 6 months kills as many as CV ever has.

Forget the asymptomatic CV-carriers. If they are carrying an illness which they can transmit and which is still not going to kill others, are they at all relevant? At its most virulent, CV has killed as many people as are murdered in a year in the world. Do we wish to lock up everyone because they may be a homicidal maniac?

You have to have a really blind faith in our deep state not to smell a rat of some sort, either grave conspiracy or plain old incompetence. Quickly forgotten are all the solemn speeches about China's lack of personal freedoms and democracy, as it becomes our model for how people should be ordered about.

China for 35 years, till 2015, had a 'one-child policy'. Those that were powerful or had money to bribe officials had more children, but those that depended on the state for welfare (as the unemployed, underemployed, furloughed, underpaid are) abandoned baby girls in huge numbers and bred pampered, lonely male children. Even in 2007 36% of the population was subjected to the policy, the rest having a series of exemptions. China now faces a serious demographic problems with the excess of lonely males who cannot marry, and old people facing a lonely old age.

It does seem that we are very shortly to be given the choice of never being able to go out, let alone travel, or accepting a vaccine that is largely untested, potentially lethal, probably useless against coronaviruses and unnecessary, as CV-19 is of late a non-story. Our collective immune system ALWAYS adapts to new viruses in time. 

Is the vaccine, as many suspect, a Trojan horse to further reduce our fertility? Our elites almost certainly do not vaccinate themselves or their children: witness Tony Blair's refusal to answer this question in parliament, Bill Gates' doctor's comments, Zuckerberg's rather too public filming of his children at the clinic, Australia's NSW premier pretending to be vaccinated while the cap was on the syringe - there are too many instances to enumerate. 

Hysteria was ramped up at the beginning with photos of coffins and the like. We never saw them in our own streets, although we did get to see nurses just about everywhere going through dance routines. Hysteria is now kept going - despite the dearth of even potential death suspects - with the contradictory narratives of asymptomatic illness (think about it); and - if you prefer - so few cases as to confer no herd immunity at the same time as hundreds of thousands of positive test results.

Will the new, largely untested vaccine get the second result of a WW done: population control? Vaccine trials are already being pushed in parts of Africa and Indian slums, although we are told that people there are NOT ill. After all, as The Guardian's headline shouts, "over half the people living in the slums of Mumbai have had the coronavirus", but way down we hear that "the survey results suggested asymptomatic infections were “likely to be a high proportion of all infections” and also indicated the virus death rate was likely to be “very low”."  (One also wonders why The Guardian puts "very low" in inverted commas.) Will the vaccine sterilise us, as previous others have provably done? Will it make us weaker and iller, when this coronavirus - and no doubt future ones - weeds out the old and infirm?

Is this our new war, one we're sleepwalking into again? Are millions about to be willingly culled or sterilised, and will these same millions oblige the rest to be unwillingly culled or sterilised? Is the world order being intentionally reconfigured so that a handful of billionaires can get still richer while the obsolete masses are quarantined or exterminated?

The Why's and the Wherefore's of What's Going On

The UK's epidemic expert Neil Ferguson has been drastically revising the coronavirus' mortality ever downwards, no longer the dramatic upper figure of half a million, but now more like 20,000. We have recently found out that the first mortal victim was in February, nearly two months ago, backing up Oxford University's research team that postulates that the number of infected is probably far higher than previously thought, maybe even half the population. Neil Ferguson also accepts that the total number of infected is far higher than he originally thought. This would make the current coronavirus more akin to seasonal flu, as all actual mortality data both in the UK and elsewhere has shown from the beginning. And, if so many have been infected, the CV-19's mortality is far, far lower than the screaming headlines have had us believe.

Two days ago, the OAP residence right next to my house, was found to have 69% of its inmates infected. No surprise there: the lockdown has deprived people of fresh air and has confined them inside in a perfect virus-breeding ground. The Spanish state has taken over the home, converting it into a "hospital" and installed general medical staff to tend to the inmates. All the people in the home are, by definition, old and very infirm. And, yet, no rushing of inmates to a proper hospital. Rather like you would expect if the CV-19 were simply seasonal flu.

The big question is, then, why are we being scared to death about the pandemic, if it is no different to any previous year over the last decade or more, and why are we living in a de facto totalitarian state as a result.

Quite obviously our throw-away, consumption-based world could not continue indefinitely. For all of us to live the American Dream (the one that far less that half of the US population lives), we would need more than seven planets. Our planet is on fire, almost irreversibly trashed, and capitalism cannot find a way out of the quandary, as central planning is anathema to the neoliberal creed. When the western economies crashed in the early 1970s, following the golden years of the 50s and 60s, capital was unleashed as the Ronald Reagan/Margaret Thatcher revolution allowed high-street banks to act like investment banks, permitting them to behave like casinos.

Corporations were given rights as "persons", more rights in fact than real people. When pressure on salaries and outsourcing of jobs to the lowest-paid and least-protected worker meant that people could no longer buy the products that capitalism needs us to buy, we were encouraged by cheap interest rates to borrow more and more, on the never-never. When that huge Ponzi scheme went tits-up, we were encouraged to keep on spending as goods got cheaper and cheaper. In the UK people change their mobile phone on average around every two years (without taking into account "burn phones", those that are used for days or weeks before being trashed). The improvements found in the new models are imperceptible for most buyers who simply do not have the necessary technical knowledge, but they get the new model anyway.

Huge pressure is put on countries like Bolivia (which has just suffered a coup and has the lithium that we need to keep all those battery-powered phones and cars running) or Venezuela (which has the largest world reserves of oil and which sets a bad example by being fairly democratic and by not being amenable to US expropriation, unlike head-chopping Saudi Arabia). Almost all the wars in the world - and the US is currently involved in some 134 war zones - are to do with fighting over scarce resources, whether water, lithium, gas, petrol, or rare earth elements. The rest are to do with stamping out the dangerous notion that looking after people, rather than corporations, is a good idea.

So things could not really go on as before. The planet is insufficient, there are so many of us and those that do not conform to being simple consumers are dying out or being exterminated.

In this New World Order, capitalism is once again bailed out, and unbelievable funds are right now being funnelled upwards to the very rich, as always perfectly on time, right after the bulk of bank bonuses had just been paid.

There is no debate on MSM about the hideous inequality in our societies, as all us little people face losing our jobs once the CV-19 scare has passed. We are already being told that China's relaxation of their quarantine rules has been problematic, I suppose so that we never imagine that we shall be able to take to the street and protest once this is over. This state of exception can be brought back at any time in the future.

The world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60 percent of the planet’s population. Do we really think they are worth it? You are not among them and you will never be! We have computer nerd Bill Gates, made hugely wealthy by mafia-style shenanigans (the original antitrust court case has to be seen to be believed for creepy non-collaboration and amnesia from Mr Gates). Do we really think he is now a health expert, specifically a benign, disinterested health expert? He is the largest single donor to the World Health Organisation and his philanthropy is making him much wealthier as people's health becomes increasingly medicalised. Forget Windows: Microsoft only makes up 20% of his wealth and his net worth is larger than that of 130 countries. His vision is totalitarian: in a recent Ted Talk, Gates says that "eventually what we’ll have to have is certificates of who’s a recovered person, who’s a vaccinated person" in order to be allowed to travel.

For the 1% to continue living life as they wish, jetting from one mansion to another in exotic locations, the climate crisis dictates that the 99% (all of us) are kept restrained in our unproductive, little lives, as infertile as possible now that AI can do almost all our jobs. Once the CV-19 has disappeared from our screens, we shall no doubt, almost all of us, have our working week reduced, which is a good and necessary thing. But, instead of this being decided upon by us ourselves, we are shortly to join a subclass where, so long as we keep quiet and do not bother the elite, we shall be allowed to carry on. As money is at this very moment funnelled upwards, no one asks us if we think that having an elite with so much money may well be incompatible with democracy.

We have all seen doctors on TV telling us this is a dangerous virus and that they are in a desperate situation fighting it (who does not love being interviewed on TV?). We do not, however, get shown the many other doctors and experts who have a very different point of view. We do not get reminded that many hospitals were overcrowded and overwhelmed long before the virus appeared, or that many hospitals and wards are actually empty as resources are directed to intensive care and Emergency and as elective surgery is postponed. We do not get reminded how many people die every day in normal times and that the overall death rate has NOT gone up with CV-19.

The remaining question is why governments everywhere are overreacting, although they are not all implementing the same measures, not by a long chalk. Most governments operate on political terms. The MP and Ministers are given their information by political advisers primarily (did you really think that ministers were experts in their fields as successive cabinet shuffles move them around?). Western democracy means that political parties are constantly seeking political power and to keep that power. There is a huge political risk, as Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have found out, in not taking measures when the MSM is ramping up the panic. It is politically far safer to do more or less the same as other nations, even if the model has been set by a country you have decried for years as totalitarian, unreliable and as a fragrant abuser of human rights (China). And, if it turns out that CV-19 is after all no different from seasonal flu, the MSM, who were the first to tell the lie, will keep quiet about it.

Governments are substituting the very real herd immunity of diseases for the equally real herd mentality of politicians.

There is another huge advantage for our short-termist western political parties, almost all of which serve the corporate state: the measures taken are truly totalitarian in nature, ensuring a compliant, conformist population with no opportunity for dissent.

Nature and The Police State

I notice today that The Guardian is suggesting we be encouraged to get out more on our bicycles, which would be without a doubt a good way to do a bit of exercise, enjoy some fresh air and maintain our distances from one another. I am not going to go into the very dubious claim that distances should even be maintained, as I have made my opinion clear enough in previous blogs that the medical case for this lock-down is not simply debatable but totally absent. There is a mass of well-documented evidence out there, the sort that has actual data and not merely screaming hysteria and panic.

There is also in The Guardian today the very sensible suggestion that we should deal with our horrendous anxiety - over our early, and forced, retirement, lack of job, money, you-name-it - as an opportunity to get in contact with Nature.

These two measures are not going to be of much use to most of us. In much of Europe, alas, we are currently banned from going out on our bikes, unless we can prove it is to go to work, in which case a packed tube or bus will do just as well. Likewise, in Spain you are not allowed to walk in the park, or stroll to the shops admiring the spring flowers, unless you can prove you are doing some serious shopping or that you are dashing to the tobacconists (yes, really).

Many people have no garden nor patio, no balcony even. We have over the last 40 years or so totally abolished the idea of a world to be shared in common or of a common goal for humanity. Some 300 years ago, capitalism enclosed what remained of common land and established the human goal as competitive, the accumulation of private wealth - some of which could be shared for a profit -, and public misery. The basic notion of being able to wander around, enjoy the spring flowers and nature in general, chat to other people - all of this is currently fanciful, subversive even.

In most societies poor people are known for having larger families, for a variety of reasons but one is that the children may well continue in the same vein of work, manual or otherwise, as their parents, and will not move far away from home in the future. It thus makes economic and affective sense to have children. Not so well known is the fact that the wealthy also have large families. Wealthy children will carry on the dynasty and have similar business interests. The middle classes on the other hand have low fertility as the cost in general of bringing up and educating children, and that of the childcare associated with working mothers, is prohibitively expensive.

At this moment, during the coronavirus lock-down, there are children from wealthy families playing in their gardens, many allowed the company of other children behind the gardens' high walls, and who will not be unduly affected by the stringent measures in force. School studies will be done in the morning, helped along by well-educated parents and the household's staff. In poor households, there will be no garden and no opportunity to leave the flat for weeks. Little studying will be done in the end. The middle class's children will study but not have much opportunity to play with other children or get outside bar a dreary wander around the patio or small garden.

Even if it were shown that the coronavirus was a significant risk to the old, beyond the risk that is posed by old age itself and accompanying illnesses, we could have put the elderly into quarantine, delivered their food, made sure that they had sufficient care and company, and done all of this at a minuscule fraction of the cost that crashing our economies has meant. The data shows conclusively that there is statistically no serious health risk to anyone who is not old or sick. The years and years of new austerity on the horizon should have been taken into account. Austerity that once again will negatively affect all but the very wealthy.

The 10 years of austerity in the UK after the 2008 crash caused 130,000 unnecessary deaths. Many of those who lose jobs, houses and their health, and all of the many who lose their lives, will never recover. Why was a small risk to very elderly or sick turned into a massive decline in living standards and, foreseeably, in life expectancy for everybody else?