Good Friday by Ermes Dovico
GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

The continuous state of emergency is euthanising democracy

Overpopulation, climate, Covid-19: for seventy years now the Power that controls politics, the economy and the media has worked to install fear in the population by means of invented or overestimated phenomena. It’s paved the way for a continuous state of emergency allowing "enlightened elites" to force policies and restrictions on people’s freedom which, in state of normality, would be otherwise impossible.

Creation 29_10_2021 Italiano
Climate Emergency

"No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear". This statement by British philosopher Edmund Burke explains well why throughout history all those who have aspired to acquire power over others, have developed techniques to use fears. And this is true both for interpersonal relationships and for societies as a whole. From a political standpoint, the use of fear to strengthen power is obvious in dictatorships; but it is also a reality in democracies where the media are used to arouse fears in order to push social groups to move in desired directions. Let us consider what is happening right now on the eve of the International Climate Conference set to take place in Glasgow: catastrophic climate alarm bells are being sounded one after another to pressure governments into forging some kind of agreement.

Since the 1950s we have seen these fear tactics applied on a global scale, with a view to transcending national sovereignty: the rightful need for international cooperation, for collaboration between different countries to solve common problems, is ideologically pushed to support a concept of global governance in which an enlightened elite decides what the problems are and how to solve them. This is a lengthy process that is accompanied by the systematic erosion of democracy, because the democratic system is an obstacle to this project. Interesting in this regard is the Club of Rome Report signed in 1991 by Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider entitled "The First Global Revolution." We must keep in mind that the Club of Rome is precisely the expression of the globalist elites. So, regarding democratic systems we read in this report:

"Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely, sacrilegious though this may sound. As now practiced, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today's problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time (...) There is an increasingly evident contradiction between the urgency of making some decisions and the democratic procedure founded on various dialogues such as parliamentary debate, public debate and negotiations with trade unions or professional organisations. The obvious advantage of this procedure is its achievement of consensus; its disadvantage lies in the time it takes, especially at the international level (...) Time in these matters has acquired a deep ethical content. The costs of delay are monstrous in terms of human life and hardship as well as of resources. The slowness of decision in a democratic system is particularly damaging at the international level."

But how can public opinion be convinced of the need to transcend democracy? It is achieved precisely by means of fear. Politically speaking, this translates into living in a "state of emergency". As is well known, when there is a state of emergency, when the problem is serious and urgent, there’s no time to waste. Experts, technicians and scientists are needed who know what to do and do it quickly. In a state of emergency all our freedoms, all our rights are suspended. It is such a state of emergency that makes public opinion accept restrictive measures which otherwise would be unthinkable in a state of normality. The Green Pass, for example, is a measure that would be unacceptable if a large part of public opinion was not convinced that it was necessary to deal with the pandemic emergency.

But when a state of emergency is prolonged indefinitely, it becomes the norm and people become accustomed to surrendering their freedom to experts, who decide who and in what way they will be permitted to live.

Now, there are real emergencies. And these should not be denied. But here we are talking about created emergencies, of unreasonable fears being instilled in the population, using data that may be true but interpreted in such a way as to distort the perception of reality and in order to generate a state of fear, as well described by Michael Crichton in his novel titled  "State of Fear." Allow me to give an example: it is correct to say that in the last 150 years, the planet has experienced global warming but it is absolutely arbitrary and not proven, perhaps even false, to say that there has been rapid increase in temperatures, that it is without precedent and that it is caused by human activities.

We have been living in a situation of proclaimed global emergency for 70 years now. There are three main stages in this process.

It all began with the fear of overpopulation. It is no coincidence that in the 1950s the expression "demographic bomb" began to be used, because by playing with the word "bomb", it evoked the fear generated by the atomic explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and in the early 1950s by the Korean War when nuclear conflict almost became a reality. Population control slowly became an indispensable condition (conditio sine qua non) for international relations, obviously to the detriment of developing countries. I recall that the then U.S. President Bill Clinton, on the eve of the UN International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo in September 1994, sent a message to all U.S. embassies around the world to warn all governments that population control was a foreign policy priority for the United States. It was from that point on that population control programs were integrated into the work of the major UN agencies, which, in the meantime, had greatly expanded their power and financial assets. The strong pressure to consider overpopulation as a planetary emergency has meant that, within the framework of international cooperation, it has become legitimate, if not right, to impose the adoption of birth control policies on developing countries as a condition for their receiving humanitarian or development aid.

Then, beginning in the 1970s, a second emergency was imposed on the world: an environmental one, which over time focused on the issue of climate change. In reality, this climate emergency has not supplanted the overpopulation emergency, but it has been linked to it and even strengthened it, posing the environmental and climate problem as a further factor for the urgent need to reduce the global population. All this is well understood in the concept of "sustainable development", as codified in the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, otherwise known as the "Brundtland Commission," taking its name from former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland who chaired the commission. This Commission, ordered by the then UN Secretary General Perez de Cuellar in 1983, published its report in 1987 entitled "Our Common Future." The real novelty of this report consists in having established the link between population, development and environment. This is so in the sense that population growth is indicated as the cause of underdevelopment and environmental degradation. I herewith quote an important passage from the report's chapter on "Population and Human resources":

"Every year the number of human beings increases, but the amount of natural resources with which to sustain this population, to improve the quality of human lives, and to eliminate mass poverty remains finite. Present rates of population growth cannot continue. They already compromise many governments' abilities to provide education, health care and food security for people, much less their abilities to raise living standards. This gap between numbers and resources is all the more compelling because so much of the population growth is concentrated in low-income countries and ecologically disadvantaged regions."

I could go into the substance on each of these statements, offshoots of the neo-Malthusian ideology, and demonstrate their falsity. I could show that the exact opposite is true: namely,  that throughout human history development has been caused and not prevented by population growth, that resources have always been increasing and diversifying. Resources grow in a manner which is far more than proportional to the population. Yet, this is not the place for such proofs and demonstrations. Tonight, instead, it is interesting to note how the creation of a presumed state of emergency has pushed towards a global governance which, in turn, increasingly takes on the features of a global centralism.

In this regard, it is important to note the importance of the cycle of UN international conferences held between 1992 and 1996: from Rio de Janeiro on the Environment and Development (1992) to Vienna on Human Rights (1993); from Cairo on Population and Development (1994) to Copenhagen on Social Development (1995), from Beijing on Women (1995) to Istanbul on Habitat and Rome on Food (1996). On all such occasions, heads of state and government from all over the world signed action plans that, taken as a whole, sought to establish principles, watchwords, and political guidelines that would establish (sui generis) a "global Constitution." Hence, leaders sought the universal adoption of concepts such as "sustainable development," "reproductive health and rights," "gender policies," etc. And with all the concrete concepts and policies that tend to follow suit.

For example, one of the consequences of the principle of sustainable development, as applied to the alleged climate emergency, is the "ecological transition" which translates largely into "energy transition". This is a transition that already has - but above all will have - enormous economic and social costs. And these costs can be only justified by the declaration of a state of emergency. Hence, for this reason alone, they may become acceptable to a large swath of public opinion and can be readily imposed on the remainder of the population. The current process of "energy transition" in fact contradicts everything that has happened so far in history: for their survival and development, mankind has always sought more sources of energy at an ever lower costs. In the name of the climate emergency, instead we would like to reduce the amount of energy available and at ever higher costs. We can just imagine the consequences on society and especially for the most vulnerable peoples. Several Western governments are realizing the impossibility of continuing on this path if they want to save the economic and social achievements of their countries. Thus, they are asking for a delay in the time agreed, or via some other clause to safeguard their energy supplies. However, there is now a form of global governance, a sort of "collective government" which does not permit any sort of defection. Just look what happened to the Trump administration in America. On the other hand, if there is an emergency, everyone must play their part: if the building is burning down, nobody would put their individual needs before the collective need: no one would pretend to use the precious water needed to extinguish the fire by saying they need to take a shower. 

More recently we have seen another threat arise: the Covid-19 pandemic. It has triggered the latest global state of emergency.  I will not go into the details of related health issues, whether this pandemic is really indeed so catastrophic and whether perspectives that perceive the vaccine as the only way to contain the disease are correct or not. On the contrary: it is important to underscore the pandemic's political management and, once again, the push to achieve a global governance on the wave of continuously sounding alarm bells that have, in  turn, created an authentic state of fear among the population. In addition, and even more so than in the past, faced with a perceived imminent threat, public opinion in many Western countries has accepted and even invoked the suspension of personal freedoms and other democratic guarantees. They have surrendered themselves totally into the hands of a techno-scientific power which has, in effect, become the arbiter of our lives.

Curiously - and this is no coincidence - the health emergency has a lot to do with the climate emergency. This is especially true for two reasons: first of all, a narrative has emerged according to which the pandemic is the consequence of human activities disrupting nature (e.g. the destruction of forests and intensive farming). Hence, the pandemic and climate become two sides of the same coin. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres stated last April: "Mother Earth is clearly urging a call to action. Nature is suffering. Australian fires, heat records and the worst locust invasion in Kenya. Now we face COVID-19, a worldwide health pandemic linked to the health of our ecosystem". He then concluded: "Recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic is a chance to set the world on a cleaner, greener, more sustainable path."

Secondly, there is a convergence between the measures "imposed" by the pandemic and those invoked in the name of the environment and climate: lockdowns, curbs on freedom of movement, severe restrictions on air traffic, and a reduction in industrial activity. Such is the case nowadays  that many political parties are proposing that lockdowns be decreed not only as a curb on the pandemic but also for the protection of the environment and the climate.

All this is leading to the redesign of the entire world society by a financial and political elite able to condition and direct the action of individual governments. Consequently, today we are talking openly about a "Great Reset" or "new normal."

In conclusion, we must take note that there is an increasingly close relationship between politics, science and mass media in creating a perception of any state of emergency, which is then amplified to facilitate the realization of a global governance, which increasingly day by day reveals its true totalitarian face.