STEPHEN LENDMAN | Clarion India
WHAT a post-COVID-19 world will look like will best be known in hindsight. Some clues:
The manufactured 2008-09 financial crisis enabled powerful interests to consolidate to greater size and influence.
It facilitated an enormous transfer of wealth from ordinary people in the US and other Western nations to privileged interests.
Force-fed austerity followed in these countries at a time when economic stimulus and putting money in the pockets of ordinary people were needed.
Was the decade-ago financial crisis a prelude for what’s now unfolding?
Was it relatively minor in harm to ordinary people compared to today’s dual public health/economic crisis and what lies ahead that won’t likely abate easily or soon?
Will it change the Western or entire world ahead? Henry Kissinger, aged-96, thinks so.
He headlined a Wall Street Journal op-ed: “The Coronavirus Pandemic Will Forever Alter the World Order,” saying:
“The US must protect its citizens from disease while starting the urgent work of planning for a new epoch.”
As national security advisor and secretary of state during the Nixon/Ford years, Kissinger’s criminality was and remains breathtaking.
Like other past and current members of the US imperial state, he remains unaccountable for a lengthy laundry list of high crimes too grievous to ignore.
Slowed at age-96, he’s still influential, advising Republicans Dems alike on geopolitical issues with new world order unfairness in mind.
He earlier and likely still advocates culling the world population of useless eaters, once saying:
“Depopulation should be the highest priority of US foreign policy towards the Third World.”
He called for making involuntary mass sterilizations and birth control a prerequisite for US aid to these countries, wanting hundreds of millions of people eliminated — including by withholding food aid to nations that don’t control their population growth.
In 1974, his classified National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 200 called for a global depopulation “plan of action” to prevent unwanted people from using raw materials and other resources wanted for profit-making so get rid of them.
His scheme was similar to Nazi Germany’s aim to eliminate “inferior” people to preserve the “Aryan master race.”
The scheme is defined in the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Along with aggression, it’s the highest of high crimes.
Without public action to stop it, the type post-COVID-19 world Kissinger envisions will be more unsafe and unfit to live in than existing conditions today.
He defied reality saying the Trump regime “has done a solid job in avoiding immediate catastrophe” — ignoring its failure to prepare for a known danger to society that could happen anytime and did this year.
Nor has his regime provided health-related and financial aid to states, local communities, and the US public nationwide in amounts needed — largely leaving them on their own to cope at a time of unprecedented national crisis.
Like earlier public health crises, this one will pass. Of greatest concern is likely “political and economic upheaval” to be left in the wake of what’s now ongoing.
Governments and monied interests are self-serving at the expense of the general welfare.
There’s great risk ahead that ordinary people in the West will lose fundamental human, civil, and social rights on the phony pretext of protecting and preserving national security — along with stiffer neoliberalism to continue transferring enormous amounts of wealth to privileged interests.
Kissinger’s “liberal world order” is the problem to be overcome, not the solution to what’s going on.
“The world’s democracies (and) their enlightenment values” he cites don’t exist.
The world order he envisions ahead should terrify everyone everywhere.
He favors ruler/serf societies with US-dominated NATO enforcing things, endless wars, controlling the public mind, silencing dissent, and eliminating nonbelievers.
His ideal world for privileged interests is dystopian hell for the vast majority of ordinary people everywhere.