Belarus’s President Warns Global Elites Using COVID-19 Crisis to Try to Reshape World Order
Belarus has been one of the few nations in the northern hemisphere to resist introducing nation-wide quarantines and other large-scale restrictions in its battle with the new coronavirus, instead preferring a targeted response.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has expressed concerns over how powerful nations and interests may try to use the coronavirus pandemic to reshape the world to their own advantage.
“I once asked the question: is this pandemic, this coronavirus, a man-made phenomenon? I don’t know the answer yet, but I have my suspicions. Are politicians and others using this situation for their own purposes? You and I both know the answer to that question. You already see how it is used today…Doesn’t it seem to you that the powerful forces of the world would like to remake the world, without a ‘war’ (Emmanuel Macron has already called it a war), through this so-called ‘corona-psychosis’, or ‘info-demic’? Many people are asking: ‘what will happen after the pandemic?’” Lukashenko said, speaking to Mir TV in an interview airing Friday.
https://sputniknews.com/europe/20200...e-world-order/
Why this crisis is a turning point in historyhttps://www.newstatesman.com/america...-point-history
The era of peak globalisation is over. For those of us not on the front line, clearing the mind and thinking how to live in an altered world is the task at hand.
[på svenska: vi har passerat peak värdegrund]
With all its talk of freedom and choice, liberalism was in practice the experiment of dissolving traditional sources of social cohesion and political legitimacy and replacing them with the promise of rising material living standards. This experiment has now run its course. Suppressing the virus necessitates an economic shutdown that can only be temporary, but when the economy restarts, it will be in a world where governments act to curb the global market.
[...]
If the EU survives, it may be as something like the Holy Roman empire in its later years, a phantom that lingers on for generations while power is exercised elsewhere. Vitally necessary decisions are already being taken by nation states. Since the political centre is no longer a leading force and with much of the left wedded to the failed European project, many governments will be dominated by the far right.
[...]
In his seminal Plagues and Peoples the Chicago historian William H McNeill wrote:
It is always possible that some hitherto obscure parasitic organism may escape its accustomed ecological niche and expose the dense human populations that have become so conspicuous a feature of the Earth to some fresh and perchance devastating mortality.
It is not yet known how Covid-19 escaped its niche, though there is a suspicion that Wuhan’s “wet markets”, where wildlife is sold, may have played a role. In 1976, when McNeill’s book was first published, the destruction of the habitats of exotic species was nowhere near as far gone as it is today. As globalisation has advanced, so has the risk of infectious diseases spreading. The Spanish Flu of 1918-20 became a global pandemic in a world without mass air transportation. Commenting on how plagues have been understood by historians, McNeill observed: “For them as for others, occasional disastrous outbreaks of infectious disease remained sudden and unpredictable interruptions of the norm, essentially beyond historical explanation.” Many later studies have come to similar conclusions.
Yet the notion persists that pandemics are blips rather than an integral part of history. Lying behind this is the belief that humans are no longer part of the natural world and can create an autonomous ecosystem, separate from the rest of the biosphere. Covid-19 is telling them they cannot. It is only by using science that we can defend ourselves against this pestilence. Mass antibody tests and a vaccine will be crucial. But permanent changes in how we live will have to be made if we are to be less vulnerable in future.
The texture of everyday life is already altered. A sense of fragility is everywhere. It is not only society that feels shaky. So does the human position in the world. Viral images reveal human absence in different ways. Wild boars are roaming in the towns of northern Italy, while in Lopburi in Thailand gangs of monkeys no longer fed by tourists are fighting in the streets. Inhuman beauty and a fierce struggle for life have sprung up in cities emptied by the virus.
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