Truth and Lies in the Time of COVID-19
These days of the COVID-19 global crisis, I’m sure you’ve often felt being lied to.
Tens of millions of Filipinos know the feeling. Fudged updates on COVID-19 stats, denials of corruption and treason in high places, trolls actively spreading outright deceits on social media, even a blackout on the true state of President Duterte’s health—this utterly bad state of the flow of information was even compounded by the closure of ABS-CBN, a major Philippine broadcast network that’s one of Southeast Asia’s biggest media outfits, highlighting the Philippine government’s ongoing attack on press freedom.
Lies and deceits pervade across the globe, in fact. Social media has been riding roughshod with most active gatekeeping across the board in all the major platforms under the current W.H.O.-declared global pandemic. In the guise of stamping out misinformation and disinformation, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube rightfully took down what may be deemed alt-right and fascistic accounts and posts. But these digital behemoths sadly went far beyond that. Hand in hand with prime search engines like Google, they manipulated search and feed algorithms to extremely marginalize accounts and posts of alternative media outfits dutifully reporting on anomalies and trends that do not go along with the establishment narrative and agenda. Victims include independent media as Truthout.org, Mint Press News, Global Research, Information Clearing House, Whatreallyhappened.com, Popular Resistance, Telesur, and RT (Russia Today); authors like Mark Crispin Miller, Mark Taliano, Dr V.A. Shiva Ayyudarai and Pepe Escobar; and numerous alternative health websites.
The result? Humanity is bamboozled with far more Sturm und Drang signifying nothing; to paraphrase the American rock musician Jackson Browne, the more you watch, read and listen, the less you know.
But history doesn’t provide problems without the solutions. Notwithstanding unprecedented establishment efforts to hijack the flow of information, forces are surely emerging and persevering to rise above the din of deceptions. When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Eonomic Crisis, a newly-released compendium of COVID-19-related essays from Clarity Press and edited by feisty former U.S. congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, is one major effort from what can be called a broad global COVID-19 Truth, Freedom and Health Movement.
Book’s editor a truthseeking veteran
The book’s editor is no stranger to truthseeking. As a Democrat member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia in 2002, McKinney dared call early for a complete investigation into the terrorist attacks of 9/11 of 2001 on U.S. soil, including whether then President George W. Bush and other U.S. officials got advance warnings of the terrorist acts and failed to prevent them. Hers was a solitary voice in the U.S. Congress calling for the inquiry. She raised the call just less than 7 months after 9/11 when the American and global publics were still held in thrall by the government’s official conspiracy theory that Osama bin Laden and 19 Muslim hijackers of al-Qaeda were solely behind the attacks. For being a forthright truthseeker, McKinney was widely pilloried and ridiculed in mainstream U.S. media by government apologists. She would later be a victim of bipartisan fraud to steal her 6th successive term in office.
That obviously has not stopped her from her activist advocacy for human rights, racial equality, and global peace. She would be the Green Party Candidate for U.S. President in 2008, and be editor of three hard-hitting books, including When China Sneezes.
Eerie parallels between COVID-19 and 9/11
Likewise, the 9/11 truth movement she advocated then has since surpassed much ridicule, with groups like the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth credibly exposing the anomalous demolition of WTC7, the third New York tower that fell on 9/11 in similar fashion as the Twin Towers but was not hit by any of the hijacked planes.
To be honest about it, the emergence of COVID-19 this year has compelling, if eerie parallels to 9/11 of 2001. Both were unprecedented events that have impacted the entire world and caught the global public by surprise. Both have produced an unexpectedly large number of casualties. Both ushered in global economic downturns. Both events served as pretexts to impose repressive measures attacking broadly-accepted civil liberties. Both became opportunities for well-entrenched global economic interests to make superprofit bonanzas. And both watershed events have raised serious questions pointing to likely outstanding anomalies and—yes—real conspiracies that humanity deserves to know the answers to.
Image below: Cynthia McKinney (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
At the book’s outset, McKinney warns the reader “to buckle your seatbelt, because by the time you’ve completed these pages, your outlook on health, wealth, and global governance won’t be the same.”
And on this, the book does not disappoint. McKinney has successfully culled contributions from resource persons delving deeply into various dimensions of the current global health and politico-economic crisis.
SARS-CoV-2’s biodefense lab origins?
Part 1 immediately takes us to the jugular as Jeff J. Brown, curator of the Bioweapon Truth Commission Global Online Library, examines the COVID-19 disease itself and the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes it, in an easy-to-understand approach. He makes a solid contribution to a long-overdue comprehensive inquiry into the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus by sharing fiercely-suppressed scientific studies that reveal the virus has curious features that could not have been the result of natural “evolution”. Yes, the virus is far more likely to have originated in a “biodefense” (the establishment’s Orwellian term for biowarfare) lab.
Notwithstanding the emerging fact-based conclusion that the virus causing COVID-19 was a likely result of a “gain-of-function” biolab op, Brown notes however that this new coronavirus disease doesn’t deserve the pandemic hype, observing the long-trending COVID-19 mortality rate is much lower than that of, say, pneumonia. This trend holds until now in fact: out of a total of 34,656,000 COVID-19 cases all over the world as of October 3, deaths from the disease number 1,028,800. That’s a 2.97% mortality rate, lower than pneumonia’s 5% to 10%, and a far cry from the 10% mortality rate from the (misnamed) Spanish flu of World War I vintage, to which COVID-19 has been curiously but most unfittingly compared at the get-go of the current health crisis.
The hidden story of China’s defeat of COVID-19
Part 2 begins with China-based professor and retired businessman Larry Romanoff explaining the overwhelming victorious Chinese response to the COVID-19 outbreak in detail not widely shared with the rest of the world. The unique social setup of the country lends surprising muscle to how China licked COVID-19, from a public health system given primacy by government to overwhelming national solidarity shown by the Chinese people to lift each other up in times of adversity. Romanoff doesn’t hide the fact mistakes were made in the process, but we all see now the incontrovertible proof of the pudding. Despite being dubbed the epicenter of COVID-19 and pilloried in kneejerk fashion by no less than Donald Trump and his allies in and out of the U.S. that SARS-CoV-2 is a “China virus”, China now stands tall when we’re talking COVID-19. It’s one of a select number of countries certified to have successfully overcome the disease, along with Cuba, Vietnam, Thailand and, yes, that part of China called Taiwan. No new cases have been reported in China for weeks now. Contrast that with Trumpland USA, now the eminent leader in COVID-19 infections, no thanks to a health system that surprisingly unraveled in prompt fashion as deeply broken.
After Romanoff, well-detailed on-the-ground honest accounts on what happened in China at the height of the COVID-19 outbreak are shared by a Chinese citizen and a Nigerian expat, who both chose to be anonymous.
COVID-19’s dark economic side
Part 3 proceeds to the economic dimension of the COVID-19 crisis. Economist Jack Rasmus lays down a bleak prognosis for the U.S. economy ravaged by the coronavirus. The simultaneous crises in health, employment, rent and real estate, childcare, and education spell “an extended, weak and unstable economic recovery—not to be confused with a temporary ‘rebound’ over the summer—that will take years to unfold”, as he describes it.
Economist Michael Hudson shares Rasmus’ take on things getting really bad for the U.S. economy—or more exactly, for the American people, as Hudson reveals that once again, as in 2008, the plutocrat and bankster cronies of the political class will be “saved” by multibillion-dollar bonanza giveaways, to the horrific detriment of Main Street. Hudson argues that a fundamental root of the economic woes plaguing the U.S. is its abandonment of the Levitical model of periodic debt forgiveness and cancellation—the Jubilee tradition found in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible.
Geopolitical analyst Peter Koenig dares shine a bright light on a likely nefarious side to the current crisis. He cites the 2010 Rockefeller Report uncannily spelling out
a program that starts in 2020 with a corona pandemic. It would start in China and in no time, it would engulf the entire globe. That initial phase is called ‘The Lockstep Scenario.’
He estimates the “purported” pandemic will devastate vast swathes of the global economy to give rise to a monstrous “New or One World Order” featuring fully-digitized human lives. This not-too-far digitalized future was fortuitously foreseen by Agenda ID2020, a pet project of vaccine “philanthropist” and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. A quite similar scenario was the central theme of the Event 201 simulation held October 2019 in New York, sponsored by Gates’ foundation, the Johns Hopkins Institute for Health, and the World Economic Forum plutocrats’ club. W.H.O., World Bank, UNICEF, the U.S. and the Chinese CDCs (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) were among Event 201’s stellar participants.
And just a month after Event 201, voila!, the widely-known first reports of a new coronavirus disease struck Wuhan in China.
Koenig would proceed to highlight the positive things going for rising world power China, like its putting unique primacy to public banking, and “the Chinese philosophy of nonaggression, of diplomacy to resolve conflicts and of promoting peaceful economic coexistence and development around the globe” as he touts China’s project to develop an “Economy of Peace”. One wonders though how long-running Chinese efforts to ape the U.S. in building a global network of its own military bases—many located far beyond China’s borders—chimes in with these announced intentions.
COVID-19 and the Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC)
Professor William Robinson takes a step further than both Rasmus and Koenig in the bleak part of their prognoses for the future. He writes on how the transnational capitalist class (TCC) ruling the world is fully aware that the global economy “is a ticking time bomb” that just needed “something to light the fuse (and t)hat came in the form of the coronavirus.” This same ruling class is now making use of the current world crisis to push a plan to further “consolidate a global police state” leveling up the repressive measures taken by countries in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 of 2001, explaining thus:
Global police state refers to three interrelated developments: 1) militarized accumulation, as a means of accumulating capital in the face of stagnation; 2) systems of mass social control and repression to contain the oppressed; and 3) the increasing move towards political systems that can be characterized as twenty-first century fascism and even as totalitarian.
Robinson issues a rallying cry at the end of his piece:
The COVID-19 pandemic marks a before-and-after turning point. We have entered into a period of mounting chaos in the world capitalist system. Short of revolution, we must struggle now to prevent our rulers from turning the crisis and its aftermath into an opportunity for them to resuscitate and deepen the neoliberal order once the dust settles. Our struggle is to push for something along the lines of a global Green New Deal as an interim program while seeking an accumulation of forces for more radical system change. Left and progressive forces must position themselves now to beat back the threat of war and the global police state and to push the coming upheavals in a direction that empowers the global working and popular classes.
Wicked worldwide web of biowarfare
Part 4 of the book finds journalist Whitney Webb rightfully focusing on a fiercely-hidden dimension of the current COVID-19 crisis: the diabolical global biowarfare industry and its horrific history. And then some.
Webb tracked down a vital trail of early disinformation which oh-so-quickly pointed to the Chinese government as being behind COVID-19. That disinfo trail leads to the C.I.A.-trusted Radio Free Asia as well as the Washington Times, among others. She then unveils a wicked worldwide web of bioweaponry overtly and covertly funded by the U.S. Pentagon under various programs prominently featuring U.S.-funded high-security “biodefense” labs at the border of China and Russia, the ubiquitous USAMRIID facility at Fort Detrick in Maryland, U.S. universities, the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, all the way to Big Pharma companies in the thick of the race to produce the first COVID-19 vaccine.
Webb connects these dots to the notorious “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” September 2000 manifesto of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) signed by prominent neoconservatives which openly promoted advanced forms of biowarfare “targeting” specific genotypes to take this abhorrent field of science “from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.”
Bridgewater and COVID-19 as economic warfare
Engineer Claudio Peretti bridges the link between biowarfare and economic warfare. He echoes other contributors’ assertions on the urgency to conduct a deep inquiry on how COVID-19 came about and the disease’s likely entanglement with existing biodefense projects.
Peretti’s piece is vital in the COVID-19 investigation for sharing how Bridgewater, a top global hedge fund, may have had most intimate foreknowledge of COVID-19. You see, it was reported in November 2019 that Bridgewater made an unprecedented $1.5-billion options bet that the global economy would suffer a spectacular crash on March 2020.
I don’t know about you, but making a billion-dollar bet in November 2019 on a world crash in four months is certifiably crazy. But Bridgewater’s gamble proved prescient. Too uncomfortably prescient in fact, as virtually no one had an inkling COVID-19 would so drastically disrupt the world economy at that exact month early this year. Drawing on this most anomalous economic act, Peretti points to a far more sinister and malevolent virus than SARS-CoV-2, what he calls the “Finanz-virus”.
Eugenics and hybrid warfare at the heart of COVID-19
The book’s editor, Cynthia McKinney, explores in her own contribution the likely place of eugenics—defined here as “the belief in and the practice of selectively breeding (and sterilizing) human beings for the purpose of creating a ‘Master Race’”—as well as of hybrid warfare—which encompasses employing all overt and covert war technologies short of conventional and nuclear warfare—at the center of the COVID-19 global maelstrom. She lists instructive flashpoints in biowarfare’s long sordid history and cites its use by world powers even when international conventions have explicitly banned it. As one of so many material contributions she raised towards a serious inquiry into COVID-19, McKinney points to a mysterious August 2019 shutdown by the U.S. CDC of the supposedly ultra-safe USAMRIID biolab at Fort Detrick for failing to keep an up-to-date log of all toxins on hand and to ‘implement and maintain containment procedures sufficient to contain select (read: highly dangerous) agents or toxins’. Ominously, Fort Detrick has quietly reopened since.
Biowarfare vs humanity
Part 5 begins with writer Gary D. Barnett focusing on the U.S. as far and away the country with the largest resources deployed for illegal biological and chemical warfare until now. These biowarfare operations have not only targeted foreign countries and their wide swathes of innocent civilian populations. Barnett lists historical incidents of reprehensible biowarfare experimentation victimizing not only U.S. soldiers and employees of the military-industrial complex but even ordinary American civilians.
(We don’t need to plumb too deep in history, in fact. Amid the current COVID-19 crisis last August, U.S. authorities unleashed 750 million genetically modified mosquitoes in Florida without Floridians’ consent.)
Barnett ends with a stirring conclusion:
The insanity of bioweapon research, development, and use largely driven by the U.S., threatens not only every American, but puts everyone on earth at risk of sickness, suffering, and death. Due to these risks all of us are also subject to the prospect of abject slavery. The ongoing agenda of the ruling class is power and control of the entire planet, and bio-warfare against humanity is the tool envisaged to accomplish it.
Fascist dystopia post-COVID-19
Political commentator Helen Buyniski presses on with an encyclopedic citation of measures and events across the globe that point to a clear fascist and corporatist agenda by those at the commanding heights of power justifying lockdown impositions a la medical and economic martial law. Indeed, a real-life dystopian future inimical to humanity firms up the whole picture. She cites the key role of Blackrock, history’s biggest trillion-dollar asset manager, as appointed overseer of what will be the biggest-ever consolidation of wealth of history’s obscenely richest plutocrats amid unparalleled economic devastation across the continents.
Buyniski warns in the end:
Those who lived through 9/11 [of 2001] and saw the destruction it wrought upon the U.S.’ national character can see it happening again on an international scale. It is our duty to warn the world and avert that outcome. One country falling under the thrall of a totalitarian technocratic police state is a tragedy; the entire world falling under an authoritarian global government is a nightmare from which humanity might never wake up.
Rethinking human rights after COVID-19
Amid all the gloom and doom, retired U.N. official Alfred de Zayas rounds out the book with optimism. He boldly recommends a “World Conference on Post-Covid Recovery”. This proposed conference would have as one prime agenda discarding the current “obsolete and artificial division of human rights” that has long perpetuated “a world order that much too often appears to allow injustice” and replacing it with a
functional paradigm that would consider rights in the light of their function within a coherent system—not of competing rights and aspirations, but of interrelated, mutually reinforcing rights which should be applied in their interdependence and understood in the context of a coordinated strategy to serve the ultimate goal of achieving human dignity in all of its manifestations.
Throughout the book, an urgency permeates impelling the reader to do something about what’s happening under the current COVID-19 global crisis. As it should be: Nowhere after World War 2 has humanity been witness to a truly global offensive against truth, health, well-being and freedom for humankind as now.
The further consolidation of 21st-century Global Fascism depicted throughout this collection of thought-provoking essays is a serious matter all denizens of the earth ought to reckon. For presenting us a veritable antidote to widespread misinformation and disinformation, this must-read of a book, its publisher, its editor and contributors deserve its readers’ bountiful gratitude.
“The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast,” rock poet laureate Bob Dylan once sung. We all have a lot of unmasking, unraveling, unlearning, undoing and unshackling ahead.
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JOEL P. GARDUCE is a Filipino political and cultural researcher and activist. His previous articles have been published in the online sites of Bulatlat, Ibon Foundation, and Global Research, and have been translated in a number of languages. He previously wrote a column for a newspaper in central Philippines. He was a president of the alumni association of the Philippines’ premier high school, the Philippine Science High School (PSHS), had spoken at international conferences, was a director for the Concerned Artists of the Philippines (CAP), and was a national officer in the early 1980s of the League of Filipino Students (LFS). He sings bass for the People’s Chorale time and again.
*** This article has been archived for your research. The original version from Global Research can be found here ***
