Former President of Macedonia, Mr. Ivanov: US National Intelligence Council Predicted in 2004 that “A PANDEMIC COULD STOP GLOBALIZATION”
Op-Ed for KASAM By
Former President of Macedonia, Mr. Gjorge Ivanov
There are events and crises that can be predicted and those that cannot. Covid-19 belongs to the first ones. Anyone who doesn’t believe this, is either not well informed, has read wrong books or has not seen the right movies.
From all that we can hear so far, especially from politicians and doctors, it is true that this is a new type of virus and that the exact date of the outbreak could been foreseen. But there is no denial that the experts in the field for a longer period have warned that such apandemic could break out at almost any moment.
One of the most watched movies in the first months of 2020, of course, is Steven Soderberg’s Contagion. Although its premiere was in January 2011, and then it did not attract much attention, today the film looks more like a documentary than as a fiction.
The screenwriter of the movie, Scott Z. Burns, recently said he had spent several months researching the infectious diseases, and the film crew consulted with US experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. According to Scott, all the experts he spoke to, more than a decade ago, claimed that it was not a question of whether there would be a new epidemic, but when it would happen. That’s why the movie accurately predicted the pandemic, but also something else. It predicted that the epidemic would cause a wave of mistrust, panic, selfishness and confusion. According to Scott, he predicted that the world would not know how to react and that the infection would spread faster than expected. It predicted that those with strong immune systems would ignore the ones with such weak system. According to him, it was predicted so accurately that some fans accused him of being part of the Illuminatti.
As it is predicted in the movies, it is the same with the books. During the quarantine, several books that describe, predict, and warn could be read as mandatory
Let’s just mention the novels “Death in Venice” by Thomas Mann, “Decameron” by Giovanni Boccaccio, “Love in the time of Cholera” by Gabriel Garcia Márquez and especially “Plague” by Albert Camus and “Rabies” by Borislav Pekić.
Although no historical parallels can be drawn with the previous epidemics, or as Tocqueville said, “the old pictures we force into new frames always look out of place,” one can learn something about what is to come.
As an example, let’s take the last paragraph of Pekić’s novel Rabies:
“Because I know, like Camus, that what the merry crowd didn’t know, and what can be found in the books – That the plague bacillus never dies or vanishes entirely, that it can remain dormant for dozens of years in furniture or clothing, that it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs, and old papers and that perhaps the day will come when, for the instruction or misfortune, the plague will rouse its rats and send them to die in some well-contented city.
” The question that imposes itself: what the competent institutions and international organizations did, when they already knew that such pandemic would happen. Were SARS, MERS, Ebola, and other epidemics, not a warning enough for what might happen?
Pandemics are basically predictable because they are a regular occurrence in the human history. Viruses are part of the nature (or at least until recently), just as pandemics are
(or were) natural phenomena. You cannot oppose them individually, but only as a society that is capable of effective mobilizations of its resources.
US National Intelligence Council Prediction
In 2004, the US National Intelligence Council released a document Mapping the global future. 2020 Project. 1 It states: “The process of globalization, powerful as it is, could be substantially slowed or even stopped. Short of a major global conflict, which we regard as improbable, another large-scale development that we believe could stop globalization would be a pandemic… Such a pandemic in megacities of the developing world with poor health- care systems—in SubSaharan Africa, China, India, Bangladesh or Pakistan—would be devastating and could spread rapidly throughout the world. Globalization would be endangered.” 2
In an article published on April 3, 2020, in the Wall Street Journal, “The Coronavirus Pandemic Will Forever Alter the World Order,” Henry Kissinger confirms the predictions from the 2004 document. According to him, the Coronavirus has caused a collapse of the world economy, i.e. globalization. Kissinger seeks to uphold the principles of the world’s liberal order, stressing that the United States must insist on security, order, economic well-being and justice… The world’s democracies need to defend and sustain their Enlightenment values.
The ones who are well acquainted with the current state of international relations immediately understood Kissinger’s messages and responded directly or indirectly. In many of their texts, analyzes, predictions, they indicated that it is very well known, what is the tool and what is the purpose during this pandemic.
For example, one of the most well-informed on the current situation, Brazilian journalist and analyst Pepe Escobar, has immediately responded to Kissinger. Pointing out that Kissinger’s fear is predictable and the questions are absolutely legitimate: whether the political and social cataclysm of the global economic crisis is arguably a larger catastrophe than the Covid-19 itself.
But one of the few who read the hidden message and understood the greater fear of Kissinger and the global elite, is of course, former British diplomat Alistair Crook. Without mentioning Kissinger at all, he replies to him most directly: “The western economy was already in ‘critical state’ as a result of the 2008 global financial crisis, and has triggered cascading in other sectors, such as in Emerging Markets… The flaws and weakness of the ‘Open Society’ stand naked: Open borders, open airways, open off-shoring of labor costs, open exports of dollar credits, and free trade, has set up the West for a collapse.”
Crook is direct and brutal about Kissinger’s request to defend and uphold enlightenment values: “The Enlightenment model has revealed itself as a grand ‘pretence’, cloaking its ugly, predatory, dark underside. But here, there is a problem. Covid-19’s exposure of the flaws to the Open Society equally demands an answer to the question of what – and where – is the alternative? Well, the answer is plain in economic terms: “We’re going back to basics: You know – everything old is new again”.
According to Crook, the future after the pandemic is predictable: “We are likely to see a return to hard borders; more control of immigration; greater self-sufficiency in terms of domestically-produced component parts (i.e. less off-shoring); more emphasis on self-sustaining agriculture; less dependency on export markets; more reliance on tariffs; and a return to the real economy… This means that it will not be possible for the West simply to step out of the Covid-19 crisis, into some ‘waiting’ alternative paradigm (however much the situation warrants it). The world faces the prospect of a profound shift: a return to a natural – which is to say, a self-sufficient – economy. That shift is the very opposite of globalization… At bottom, this contagion exposes – beyond the economic fragilities – the failure of the Enlightenment project… Politically the societies of advanced Western modernity are oligarchies disguised as liberal democracies”.
What can be concluded and what lessons can be learned from the pandemic caused by Covid-19.
We live in a time when we are witnessing the end of one utopia, the sunset of the modernist and enlightenment project. The sunset of the culture of the modern West. A topic written by many forgotten and disputed authors. For many of them, the Enlightenment is the starting point in the long decline of the Western thought, practice, and imagination. The Covid-19 is just a powerful catalyst for already started processes, especially at the end of the illusion that we can control Nature, that we can manage it. Now everyone is shocked by the (unexpected for them) revenge of Nature. In fact, the virus only deepens and intensifies existing trends. We are witnessing the destruction of one world that reveals to us the new or the long-forgotten worlds. Those who preceded this world and those who are yet to come. According to Crook, nostalgia for the past is transformed into fruitful nostalgia for the future. Those who are left without hope, without work, without means could easily turn against those, who are in better position or profiting from Covid-19. When such people become desperate, unsatisfied, and angry, disintegration processes begin, that is the breakdown of the societies. It is a well-known psychology that works in the periods of the changes of the eras. Otherwise, as the Colombian philosopher and intellectual Nicolás Gómez Dávila observed: “The modern world will not be punished. It is the punishment.” Therefore, no matter how much the global elite and its spokesman Kissinger want to preserve such a world (and globalization), it is unlikely to be possible. They would take over and change everything, so that all would remain the same. Their world, which for a long time has neglected the complexity of the nature and the forces of the world around us, now shaken by Covid-19, cracks and bursts on its edges, changing the dominant paradigm. One era is dying so a new one can be born.
