The power of writing is that the dialogue is not only held with the contemporaries. Writing can reach future generations, too. Great poet Mak says: “when nobody listens, write”. How will we reflect on events of 2020-21 in about 5 or 10 years? How will we explain our indifference, silence and retreat? What will we say to our children?
Back to the pre-Christmas days of 2019, I wrote a short text about the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and our careless joy of unselective deployment of this technology that might irreversibly change social fabrics like never before in history of humankind. Under the title “Future filled with empty choices – Tomorrow (n)ever AI-ies” the text soon after appeared in the Brussels-based New Europe and from there was taken to different outlets all over. Good old pre-Corona times.
Particularly dark and accusatory but, as it will soon turn out, accurate was a part about silence. It deserves a full-length quotation here:
“Aegean theater of Ancient Greece was a place of astonishing revelations and intellectual excellence – a remarkable density and proximity, not surpassed up to our age. All we know about science, philosophy, sports, arts, culture and entertainment, stars and earth has been postulated, explored and examined then and there. Simply, it was a time and place of triumph of human consciousness, pure reasoning and sparkling thought. However, neither Euclid, Anaximander, Heraclites, Hippocrates (both of Chios, and of Cos), Socrates, Archimedes, Ptolemy, Democritus, Plato, Pythagoras, Diogenes, Aristotle, Empedocles, Conon, Eratosthenes nor any of dozens of other brilliant ancient Greek minds did ever refer by a word, by a single sentence to something which was their everyday life, something they saw literally on every corner along their entire lives. It was an immoral, unjust, notoriously brutal and oppressive slavery system that powered the Antique state. (Slaves have not been even attributed as humans, but rather as the ‘phonic tools/tools able to speak’.) This myopia, this absence of critical reference on the obvious and omnipresent is a historic message – highly disturbing, self-telling and quite a warning for the present day.”
And, now back to future of ‘20s.
Metapolitics of Health
Preamble of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Constitution, 1948
For months, many argue that our Covid (C-19) response is a planetary fiasco, whose size is yet to surface with its mounting disproportionate and enduring secondary effects, causing tremendous socio-economic, demographic and cross-generational, political and psychosomatic contractions and convulsions. However, worse than our response was and still is our silence about it.
It is an established fact that the quintessence of Nazism was not Hitler and the circle of darkness around him. It was rather a commonly shared ‘banality of crime’ atmosphere: Benevolent acceptance of ordinary village people living next to Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Dachau that the nation must be ‘purified’ …
The day when questioning stops and silent acceptance (especially among the well informed, well mobilised and educated ones) becomes a ‘new normal’ is a day when fascism walks in a big time. Of course, today we have a diagnosis for it: manufacturing consent through choice architecture. It is done via fear-imprisoned and media infantilised (returned to the pre-Oedipal phase) psychology of the de-socialised and alienated, an atomised one.
There is no political or economic crisis. There is neither the energy crisis, nor health, nor environmental crisis. Every crisis is just a deficit of cognitive mind that comes to the very same; a moral crisis. — Ecological Globalistan, Political Terroristan, the author
Did we really forget basic teaching of our history: Every time when the power was unchecked, it degenerated into the obscure brutality; ritualising its force with a stamp on or under our skin to visualise and immortalise the twilight of reason?
So, our C-19 response and its widespread synchronicity (of measures and its timing) illustrates – the argument goes – nothing else but a social pathology of hostage crisis: the non-transparent concentration of power, and our overall democracy recession – further bolstering the management of apathy via surveillance and social control systems. All that as lasting consequences of cutbacks, environmental holocaust, deintellectualisation, liberticide, privatisation (or PPP-ization) of key intergovernmental and vital national institutions, ill-aimed globalisation as well as of the fixation on overly allopathic, mandated (not a repurposed, but usually novel expensive and inadequately tested) drugs-centred healthcare, and lack of public data commons. Public health or private wealth? Pandemic or plundermic …
Urban communities of developed countries are especially hit hard. Within these groups, the vulnerable categories like pre- and early- school children, and elderly suffer the most. People there wonder if they are (aggressively) coerced to participate in something they fear from the beginning is a lie. No wonder that the trust in and support to governmental and intergovernmental institutions is rapidly deteriorating.
Ever larger number of citizens do not see the mainstream media (or pop culture celebrities) at service for the population, but as a cartel that follows a special interest. Dialogue and opinion is discouraged and silenced, if not, even sanctioned. It is of course energetically dismissed with the ‘conspiracy theory’ label – which is nothing else but a desperate attempt to trivialise legitimate concerns of society about apparent anomalies in the events or actions of state and non-state actors. Suppression has never halted searching; it rather boomeranged by bringing collapse to the centre following general distrust. Big media should visit these history chapters, too.
Moreover, our western, ‘modern’ medicine (which increasingly becomes set of believes instead of being constantly challenged resultant of empirical evidences) still falls short of consensus on a fundamental question: Is illness contracted (from outside) or created (conditions within our body). Hence, the faith in western medicine is in a free fall. Compromised generational contract and thinning social consensus are challenging our fabrics like never before in recorded history. People wonder, is the world today led by leaders or influencers/imposers.
The first real stress-test since the end of the WWII, the United Nations (UN) clearly did not pass. Many feel deeply disappointed with and disfranchised by the universal organisation and its global Agencies for their steady self-marginalisation (and reduction onto self-seeking entities).[1] Is our cohesion irreversibly destroyed?
Early lockdowns of mid-March 2020 – often introduced through emotional blackmail, were justified by a need to flatten the curve of the ‘sudden’ virus (harmfulness, mortality and transmissibility) impact, since there were not enough hospital beds. In the meantime, the lockdowns were extended and widened, curves not arguably altered. Still, for the past 20 months, there is hardly any new hospital built in the EU although the non-essential medical services, at most cases, were suspended.[2] Neither there was nor is any massive investment into general health prevention. The only visible infrastructure growth is in 5/6G network expansion.
Following a simple ratio that the one’s state of health is genetic expression of life-style choices made, it is no surprise that there are also growing speculations if the lockdown – as the most notorious expression of monofocal perspective and rejection to any scientifically contested, debate-based integrated judgment – is invasion or protection:
Whether the aim is a herd-immunity or herd loyalty (and to it related growing, yet still unrefuted, rumours that the eventual ‘unsafe, unneeded and ineffective’ C-19 vaccine (or genoccine) might contain biohacking nano-properties which establish backdoor interface via extensively set 5/6G, besides viral interference and transduction as standard side-effects in the clinical trials ever since 2002)?
And, if is there any back-to-normal exit from the crisis, or this disaster ‘turned into planetary terror, through global coup d’état’ will be exploited to further something already pre-designed (with a fear, not as a side-effect, but rather as a tool manufactured to gain control). Simply, is all that more related to the biotronics and demographics (IoT and Internet of Bodies) – ‘epsteinisation en masse’, than to health and economics or any common social purpose?Undeniably, nature of politics also changed: Political parties – main agents of political life of any society – have amorphized from giant membership organisation to fundraising machines. Thus, Le Monde Diplomatique – while examining the possible merger between tech/pharma oligopoly and political monopoly – claimed from a very beginning of this crisis that: “Political decisions have been central in shaping this tragedy — from the destruction of animal habitats, to the asymmetric funding of medical research, to the management of the crisis itself. They will also determine the world into which we emerge into after the worst is over.”
Over the past 30 years, every critical juncture had a similar epilogue: pardon and enhancement for the capital, a burden and suppression for the labour. The C-19 is no exception to it: Ever since early lockdowns of March 2020, the capital flows unhindered while the labour, ideas and humans are under the house arrest.[3] The XXI century frontline is the right to health (incl. body integrity and informed consent) and labour, privacy and other fundamental human rights and liberties. (LMD, IV20)
Is the political, economic or moral triumph of the West still possible past this crisis?
Every crisis since Westphalia until the so-called financial crisis of 2008-09, political West exited in (what was seen as) moral triumph. What is in front of us? If the world is flat, will it become one big pharma Banana Republic – as many fear?
Earth provides enough to satisfy everyone’s needs, but not for a single man’s greed
The rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity, and fall with the declension, of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin. — The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
Still to be precise, the WHO- decreed virus pandemic brought nothing truly new to the already overheated conduct of, and increasingly binarized, world affairs. It only amplified and accelerated what was present for quite some time – a rift between alienated power centres, each on its side of Pacific, and the rest. No wonder that the work on and dispatch of the C-19 -related injection (vaccine) is more an arms race than it is a collaborative humanity plan. Look at its geography and conditionalities.
Would all this be – in its epilogue – about the expansion of (the 4th industrial revolution caused) techno-totalitarian model of government as an alternative to liberal democracy (from one-party democracy to one-party autocracy)? Devolutionary singularisation into techno-feudalism as the highest stage of capitalism? Is now a time to return to the nation-state, a great moment for all dictators-in-waiting to finally build a cult of personality? Hence, will our democracy be electro-magnetised and vaccinated for a greater good (or greedier ‘god’)? Is the decolonisation (and deprivatisation) of global health a failed attempt?[4] Will we (ever) be allowed to exit the year of 2020?[5]
Turning human body into an (purposely unoptimized) operative system that needs constant updates and antivirus programs is a dangerous thought. The entire scientific community considers the attempt to mandate the experimental biological agent of unchecked reproductive toxicity and other side effects (while calling it the C-19 vaccine) as very troubling. Having these calls chiefly advocated and aggressively promoted by the handful of self-interest driven private companies – all accompanied with a contradictory and confusing governmental stance which is siding up with the industry it was supposed to regulate – is highly disturbing.[6] No surprise that ever-larger societal segments perceive it as liberticidal warfare, not an enhancing welfare. The world that for over a century portrayed itself as Kantian is rapidly turning into a dark Hobbesian (immuno-apartheid) place. Is now anarchy just one step away?[7]
One is certain, confronting the long-term interests of stakeholders with the short-term interests of shareholders, the private sector from both sides of Atlantic exercises disproportionate power in the technological share (infrastructure and data). It also largely benefits from the massive public research funds – especially in the fields such as bioinformatics, AI, nanorobotics, or geophysics engineering – while in return paying dismal, negotiable tax if any at all.[8]
Far too often it comes with the nondisclosure agreements, liability outsourcing/ protections and other unilaterally beneficial legal instruments as well as with the close ties between the private sector, intelligence agencies and media.[9]
The same applies to a big Pharma which – through pornography of (decontextualized) numbers over the widening fields of misery – increasingly dictates a non-preventive, monofocal approach to medicine and research, and controls reporting about it – not always in the name of our public health.
Does it provide for a new level of global centrality? Not at all.
The above represents the largest underreported (or ignored) threat to our democracy and future societal conduct.
Every colonization in our past was abrupt and chaotic, wild and shortsighted, and was dangerously confrontational. It happened in every known space – land, see/water, space, outer space, and finally cyber space. Difference between 18th century cowboy settler and the 20th century intercontinental ballistic missiles originators was not in intention (territory grab) but on the magnitude of impact for human life. Only massive regulatory effort saved mankind from global annihilation, of course after centuries of mutual (low-tech) destructions.
Now, as it seems, the attempt to colonize the sixth space is well on the way: Human body by nano-informational and biotronic means. (To a large extend it builds up on a previous massive privacy intrusion that the colonization of cyberspace has planetarily brought.) To ban the sixth space penetration all together – as it was a case with the arms race in outer space – or not, is still question of debate, but a need to regulate it decisively is beyond any doubt. It should go hand in hand with sanctioning of social weaponization of vaccine or similar one-solution-for-all medication.
Clearly, bioinformatics (including the synthetic biology and data-to-genes sequestration for data storage or data mining purpose) – as much as the geoengineering itself – is a dual-use technology. Past its formative age (with a digital infrastructure near completion), it has today a huge weaponization potential for at home and abroad, be it for state or non-state actors.
Consequently and urgently, this necessitates a comprehensive legislation which builds up on the Universal Charter of Human Rights and Nuremberg Code, and rests on its effective enforcement (with the monitoring of compliance mechanisms as set for the IAEA, OPCW, RC-BTWC and the Nagoya protocol),[10] nationally and internationality, and for all actors.[11]
Threat of Otherness: Criminalisation of (different) opinion
All state authority is derived from the people (XX 2) … All Germans shall have the right to resist any person seeking to abolish this constitutional order, if no other remedy is available. (XX 4) — Civil disobedience as the Constitutional Right[12]
By many accounts, 2020-21 – time of astonishing synchronicity, when distancing became social[13] – will be remembered as the worst period in living memory (since 1939). Some would say; C-19 stopped history, as it locked down our dialogues and atrophied political instincts of masses. All this with too many cases of arbitrary censorship streaming almost in a form of neuro-linguistic programming from the privately owned social platforms. Still, 2020-21 only quarantined and halted us, while in fact it accelerated history. This especially refers to the ‘Old Continent’.
People have the right to know what those in power are doing, especially in times of crisis. Therefore, Europe’s eldest and the most comprehensive multilateral mechanism – Council of Europe, promulgated Convention on Access to Official Documents more than ten years ago in Tromsø, Norway (entering in force on 01 December 2020). This Charter is the first binding international legal instrument to recognise a general right of access to official documents held by public authorities.[14]
As this author noted back in spring 2020: “It is amply clear from the C-19 event that the right to health is an issue for all. The search for a reliable cure for pandemics control is not a matter of private business, but of fundamental individual rights situated on higher levels of sociableness, as embedded in the UN and EU Charters, and being obligatory for each of the UN Specialized Agencies or EU bodies to comply with. (Not a fear-based manufactured giving-in, but the right for informed consent as an inseparable segment of the constitutionally endorsed right to health.)
Even if the vaccine becomes the agreed or preferred option, it must be made available patent-free for all, and locally manufactured. However, binarization of debate onto a pro-and-con vaccine represents a dangerous reductionism and waste of planetary energy critically needed for a holistic and novel approach. There is no silver bullet for the European or world problems. Consequently, there is no solution in one-directional medical research in response to any pandemic, and in a single-blended (or centrally manufactured, hastily introduced) and mandated experimental medication for all. This especially refers to the genoccine.[15] (Dogma is based on a blind belief; science necessitates constant multidimensional exploration. Science, especially a medical one, holds no single or absolute truth: The closest it can get is to the least wrong answer – which must be contested constantly, literally every single day.)”
Proportionality of our (current and future) responses in Europe is another key issue. Hence, what presents itself as an imperative is the universal participation through intergovernmental mechanisms and popular control to it. That rule applies for at home and for abroad, as the Union has to comply with (and set example to) it urgently.
Growing particularisms in Brussels quarters, where (on taxpayers’ money and public trust), it is more and more the particular – be it individual, regional, national, lobby-groups driven – interest that prevails over the solid all-European project of our common presence purpose and future.[16] Europe or EU Rope?
Past the Brexit, the Union has to be extra cautious about its chronic democracy-deficit, apparatchik alienation of Brussels,[17] as well as the brewing concerns that the EU without UK becomes yet another greater Germany.[18]
Prison of Nations – The Capitulation Treaties’ Facilitator
The difference between tyranny and democracy is plain to see: When the government knows everything about you, that’s tyranny. When you know everything about the government, that is democracy. — The EU Parliamentary debates, 2020-21
The 2-year (March 2020 – December 2021) score of the Union is highly disturbing:[19]
It repeatedly failed to defend human rights – as its founding principle. On contrary, many of its decisions compromised core liberties and freedoms, and it directly contributed to furthering the speed and severity of unprecedented deterioration of constitutional rights and fundamental freedoms;[20]
Alarming lack of transparency in its actings and decision-making;
Absence of any initiative to spark and enhance thorough, all-stakeholders democratic debates on the ongoing crisis and it ways out;
Turning a deaf ear to arbitrary movement restrictions imposed by narrow circles of executive branch in numerous occasions in number of MS;
Turning a blind eye to excessive use of police force against peaceful citizenry on streets in numerous occasions in number of MS;
Indifference and inaction on the suppression of media freedoms within and beyond the Block, while ignoring the increase in arbitrary censorship conducted by the foreign non-state and/or local state actors;The EU did not protect general public health of its citizenry. On contrary, many of its decisions or inactions contributed to further deterioration of a long-term conditions of population of all generations especially children and youth; [21]For almost two years of the looming crisis, the Union neither organised, nor called upon or participated at any international symposia on the C-19 crisis (health or any other aspect). However, at the same time Brussels very aggressively pushes for the experimental single solution for all as well as for the dubious digital Health Travel document. (Same EU Preliminaries already nicknamed the Union: ‘Facilitator of the self-inflicting Capitulation Treaties’);Long neglected demographic-renewal of the EU is further compromised. Fertility measured by the RR (Replacement Ratio) is of all-time low, while the post-C-19 en mass sterility is acute but yet undiscussed. Scale of deindustrialisation of the Union coupled with its accelerating depopulation is close to the point of no-return. (Many start wondering if the EU is the Community for Progress or Prison of Nations);Union did not stop fragmentation of the Block. On contrary, its accelatered and widened inter-regional rifts between (or even within) different member states;The EU did not improve its standing within the wider European neighbourhood;The Commission President comments against the fundaments of the Human Rights regimes (mandates and the Nurnberg code) irreparably undermine both standing of the Union, and the trust in German non-revisionism;On each of the above, the Commission, Parliament and the rest of Brussels apparatus remains in denial – which triggers further loss of international credibility, tax-payers confidence and domestic support, and drifts the unionistic Project into irrelevance.[22]
After all, the truth is plain to see; countries with the highly (deregulated and) privatised health sector are the C-19 worst offs (eg. USA) – as measured by the fatalities, overall socio-economic cost (incl. the long-term health prospects, or redistribution and inequalities), damage to the social consensus (safety and security), and the speed of recovery. Countries of the centralised health sector which resides strictly in public hands and is under popular control did and are still making it far better. Those among them that keep high respect for individual rights, liberties and freedoms (eg. Sweden) are by far the best achievers.
How the issues of health will be balanced with the human rights – as these two are not excluding but are complementing each other – is the fundamental issue for the future.
Additionally, how (geno and pheno) data are generated, stored and governed, and ultimately used will be the second defining issue of global public health (and planetary support to or conflict over it) in the coming decades. That very much includes a dubious imposition of exclusionary digital bio surveillance grid that some circles advocate as a presumptive recommendation to restore ‘normalcy’.
Opting for (corporate) interests over (societal) values or vice versa, will answer us the question about the model we will get in near future: authoritarian or democratic.
All in all, the two-year score is highly disturbing;
The health threat is not eliminated, on contrary it became multifaceted and severer, while
the human rights are standing closer to those in 1848 than to a 21st century.If we follow the best of science, the brightest in the western thought, we easily come to German classic philosophy. Striking there is a Hegelian notion that our history is nothing else but the advancement in acquiring the human freedoms (“history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom”). If so, than our (western) history was not stopped with Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ essay of 1990s, but has been intercepted in March 2020.
Nowadays, not only the socio-economic one, but every aspect of Western vitality is also vanishing rapidly, making the prospect of triumph of its model (or its demographic relevance) less likely with every passing day. Hight time to accuse the silence?
Beyond the disputes about possible initial intentionality (allegedly inspired by the sectarian, class, demographic, environmental or any other drive), let us close this text by displaying the probable epilogue: An ever-larger number of military strategists see (unfolding of) the C-19 event as a (techno-)biological warfare.
Here comes the powerful reminder that history gives us: decisions to go to war were never based on facts but on perceptions.[23] Therefore, make no mistake; the end game to any further continuation or escalation (of attempt to singularise the biological, chemo-electric and digital, and to centrally control it) is the nuclear holocaust which none of us will escape.
Post Scriptum:
Reducing the human integrity on a bodily space (and freely harvestable biodata) to which (an early capitalism territorial raw grab) business model should apply – is truly diabolic idea. Moreover, it is a suicidal idea – a last outcry before the ultimate self-destruction. (Imperialism, as the highest stage of capitalism, manifests through the Nazification of question of space. As always, an expansion over the limits of physics and society and their natural laws leads to a fast contraction and ultimate death).
Thus, invading human body on the same principle as the colonization of the west followed the age of so-called Grand Discoveries. (Interestingly, then in XV century – almost as now in XXI – Chinese were the first to explore and circumvent, while the western peripheries of than global civilization only brutally followed and accelerated.)
Finally, misappropriating and monetizing this newly acquired space in the absence of expanding anywhere else: Treating human health like a business model and invading unconsented humans through the hijacked medicine. (Actually, what we consider as ‘medicine’ is also a political construct. There is a western medicine – which we falsely label as ‘medicine’. But, over half of this planet follows the Vedic, Chinese, Shaman, and several other traditional medicines in their approach to life health and nature.)
But to extend the context:
History of (what we, humans, describe as) technology is a story about primordial (survival-driven) fear far too often turned into a long line of violence towards all organic and inorganic systems on our planet. Too many times our technological breakthroughs were linked to destruction (with violence against nature and societies as means to introduce it), instead of being coupled with or supportive to creation. Otherwise, our millenniums-long technological march would have brought us to the Gates of Triumph in self-realisation of entire human race.
If historically our technological advancements (by its motive and method of introduction) only managed to accelerate frequency and severity of (disharmony and) alienating aggression on this planet, while repeatedly falling short to bring about everlasting self-realization of humans – than this anthropotechnic is based on confrontation (coercive introduction) and not on cooperation (support and inclusion).
Then both, its intensity and direction – corrosive, polarizing, disruptive and reductionistic; must be thoroughly re-examined.
No wonder that our technology (or to say: ‘’technology’) is seen by many as the developmental dead end. Cosmos means balance/perfect order, chaos is absence of it.[24]
Our choice is hard but simple. As simple as never before.