REVIEW: “States of Emergency”

Edward Curtin

Edward Curtin reviews “States of Emergency: Keeping the Global Populations in Check” by Kees van der Pijl.

This book is a brilliant and comprehensive analysis of the Covid-19 crisis and the worldwide states of siege instituted under its cover.

Reading it, one cannot help but shake one’s head in outrage at the long-planned nature of the wealthy global elite’s seizure of power under the guise of a germ emergency and the revolutionary crisis it has created.

I say this not only because I am predisposed to the author’s thesis, but because he buttresses his argument with overwhelming documentation that is meticulously sourced and noted. 

This is a work of genuine scholarship of the highest order, and to read it closely and with an open mind one can’t help but be convinced of its essential truth.

Kees van der Pijl, the author of The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class and the winner of the 2008 Deutscher Prize for Nomads, Empires, States: Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy, introduces his study with these words [my emphasis]:

The psychological shock of the proclamation of a pandemic, like the purpose behind torture, is intended to induce acceptance of a ‘new normal’ and to turn off critical judgment. This state of mind is achieved by withholding information about what is really going on, through the extremely one-sided information by politicians and mainstream media. Divergent views by often highly qualified experts are not mentioned or are dismissed as ‘conspiracy theories.’ This can be compared to the sensory deprivation in psychological torture. . . .We are dealing with a biopolitical  seizure of power, initiated at the level of global governance and reaching deep into the sovereignty of the individual, a seizure that involves a  whole range of forms of violence. 

The reason van der Pijl’s analysis is so powerful is because he clearly sees the historical context for the Covid crisis, how it is linked to issues of geo/economic-politics going back thirty-five years or more, culminating in the 2008 economic crash that ended years of capitalist speculation. 

Then when President Barack Obama, serving as the front man for the big speculators, banks, and shadow banks, bailed out those entities and created a new financial order, popular revolts, such as those which were brewing on the eve of the New Deal in the 1930s, broke out around the world in the ensuing years and had to be subdued.  “Strikes, riots, and antigovernment demonstrations have broken existing records in every category during this period [since 2008].”

The elites knew that such revolts of an uncontrollable world population had to be kept under control, and that the growing numbers approaching 8 billion people had also to be culled. But van der Pijl’s subtitle, while intimating both with its double-entendre, leads him to focus on the former that he deems “much more important.”

While popular unrest and rage have been more or less suppressed since 2020 with the Covid crisis effectively used to put down its latest signs of eruption and to replace it with a permanent sense of anxiety, fear and trembling was first introduced on a massive scale with the attacks of September 11, 2001, the connected insider anthrax attacks, the Patriot Act, and emergency propaganda measures used to fuel the war on terror that has no end.

This terrorizing of the world has taken multiple forms with an ongoing series of U.S. wars on other countries – Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc., not to mention the proxy wars – supported by massive digital propaganda meant to take populations hostage to the lies.

Van der Pijl cogently shows how the Covid crisis fear campaign’s official account is untrue; how it is a political and not a medical emergency; and that it will collapse, as it has, at least temporarily, but how its deeper purpose is to create a  permanent authoritarian, surveillance social order controlled by transnational elites through global digital IDs, etc.

This “new normal” relies on the corporate mass media to do the dissemination of the propaganda of fear and lies, and so he correctly emphasizes the central importance of the IT revolution and the single complex triangle of intelligence services-IT-media, which are in essence one entity.

The information warfare of mind control of the ruling class is fundamental, as he writes:

This is the core around which the ruling class in the West began to regroup after 2008 and which is now waging the information war against the global population by means of the Covid state of emergency.

He sees the elites’ seizure of power as an effort to foreclose a democratic transformation through the Information Technology (IT) revolution that he compares to the invention of the printing press in the 15^th century, which as such could potentially serve as a liberating force. 

However, he also views IT, digitization, and the Internet from its inception as fundamental to the elites’ repressive control.  This double-edged perspective (about which I will return later) raises important questions.

But the body of the book is devoted to all the ways the intelligence-IT-media triangle has conducted its information warfare campaign based on techniques developed years ago in CIA counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam – Operation Phoenix – and its Strategy of Tension operations in Italy and Europe in the 1970s, and Lebanon and Central America in the 1980s.

He shows how these operations, stretching back so many decades, are connected to events today, greatly enhanced by the digital devices – particularly the cell phone.

He shows how Barack Obama’s 2012 initiation of aggressive global cyber operations – Total Information Awareness – whose details Edward Snowden made public, expanded the war against the population through cyber pacification techniques.

He tells the reader how the methods of such warfare that were used in Afghanistan and Iraq were brought home with the return of JSOC commander Stanley McChrystal, who just so happens to head an advisory group, the McChrystal Group, that plays a pivotal role in the Covid crisis by allegedly countering disinformation and promoting the government’s version of Covid truth.

He reminds readers about McChrystal’s journalist enemy, Michael Hastings, who after writing an article about McChrystal that led to his recall from Afghanistan and firing, would just so happen to be killed when his Mercedes was “hacked and detonated by remote control in a collision” in Los Angeles a few years later.

Van der Pijl shows how it just so happened that the new digital technologies were privatized in the defense and intelligence areas to form “Private-Public Partnerships” and how the World Economic Forum (WEF) hosted the UN’s 2030 Vision with all its multivarious connections to the imposition of the Covid crisis from above.

He draws the connections between the WEF, Bill Gates, US intelligence, vaccines, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Carnegie institutions, journalists on the CIA’s payroll, In-Q-Tel (the CIA’s venture capital arm), Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos, Black Rock, and so many other individuals and groups with the goal of establishing The Great Reset when the elites will try to exert total electronic control over people’s lives through a digital world economy, artificial intelligence, etc.

He details the US/Nazi connections going back to WWII and the US biological weapons research and warfare targeting China and Russia, including the bio-laboratories in Ukraine.  He tells us how:

This goes back to a 2005 agreement between the Pentagon and Ukraine’s Ministry of Health. It prohibits the Kiev government from disclosing sensitive information about the program; Ukraine is required to hand over the dangerous pathogens produced there to the U.S. Department of Defense for further biological research. . . . One of the Pentagon’s laboratories is located in Kharkov where at least 20 Ukrainian soldiers succumbed to a flu-like virus within two days in 2016…In 2014 there was an outbreak in Moscow of a new, highly virulent variant of the Cholera agent Vibrio Cholera, related to the species identified in Ukraine.

He connects Anthony Fauci, the director of EcoHealth Alliance Dr. Peter Daszak, Christian Drosen of PCR notoriety, Fort Detrick, Wuhan, the World Military Games held in Wuhan between 18-27 October 2019, etc.

He explains how the Covid pandemic and lockdowns are a form of disaster capitalism that is a global project whose tentacles stretch extensively from the Gates Foundation to the Poynter Institute to the McChrystal Group to Philip Zelikow to the pharmaceutical companies and their “vaccine” push and propaganda to DARPA … to… to… 

He writes:

It appears again and again that behind both the biopolitical and the IT-media power blocs lies the strategy of the American national security complex. . . One of the most alarming aspects of the transition from mechanical to psychological warfare against the population is that the authorities have now set their sights on the human genetic code as well.

In seven densely packed chapters, van der Pijl weaves and documents a vast tapestry of devious conspiratorial forces behind the states of emergency aimed at world control.  Reading them and following his sources, one would have to be brain dead to not realize that what is now happening throughout the world is not an accident or the result of things just happening but is a long planned operation conducted by very sophisticated forces interconnected in the group he calls the “intelligence-IT-triangle” that is waging mind control warfare to disguise the truth about their deadly bio/germ-weapons, their military wars around the world, and their economic assault on regular people.

It is a world war conducted on multiple fronts whose goal is elite control, the extinguishing of democracy, and the reduction of human being to appendages of the mega-machine.

But I would be remiss if I didn’t say that I think his conclusion may be too optimistic.  For even though he argues that the Information Technology revolution is central to elite propaganda and control, he believes IT – this “social brain” – holds revolutionary democratic potential if it can be liberated from elite dominance.

I don’t see how this can happen, though I wish he were right.  A decentralized, democratic internet seems like a pipe dream to me.  A dream not unlike that of so many others who have assumed technology’s beneficence and inevitability even when they sense its insidious, destructive capabilities.

He is right to say that ”everything revolves around the one universal currency, information,” and that digital infrastructure is now at the center of social organization.  This is beyond dispute. 

However, those intelligence/military/IT forces that created and control the internet and digital technologies will not voluntarily cede control.  They will wage information war with it, censor it, de-platform people and sites, etc.  I believe this technology is intrinsically anti-democratic.  Nevertheless,  his concluding chapter on this issue is very important for broaching this dilemma and getting people to debate it.

This book should be read by anyone who cares about our world. It is brilliant and extremely timely.

Edward Curtin is an independent writer whose work has appeared widely over many years. His website is edwardcurtin.com and his new book is Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies.

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