All the power to international institutions?
Handling Covid-19, a global cacophony
by Olivier Delacrétaz,* Lausanne
(10 June 2021) Mr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the “World Health Organisation” (WHO), has appointed an ”independent panel of experts” to review the states’ actions against the pandemic. Their report “Covid 19: Let's make this the last pandemic” is clear: states had sucked.
Their preparation was inadequate, the means committed were insufficient, and the warning systems were slow and weak. It was a real cacophony, explained by the experts with the absence of a global political leadership.
On the institutional level, the report calls for the establishment of a "Global Health Threat Council" and a “Global Monitoring System” based on “full transparency”. In addition, it wants to “strengthen authority and funding of the WHO” and to set up an “international pandemic funding mechanism” capable of providing between 50 and 100 billion dollars at short notice. In other words, the WHO has proven itself incapable, so let's give it more power and more money! No question about whether it is not precisely its global nature that makes it so ineffective…
The declarations of the “independent panel” are modelled exactly on the ideas of Klaus Schwab, founder and moderator of the Davos Forum. In his 2020 book, “Covid-19: The Great Reset”, he explains that the pandemic is a wonderful opportunity to “reset” the world, i.e. to start again from scratch. He too believes that the lack of “global governance” has caused major damage. He too calls for the strengthening of the WHO, which he also says has failed completely.
With delusional confidence, these people are shuffling around hundreds of billions that they do not have, disposing of states and populations at their whim, reshaping them in no time, and subjecting them to the discretionary power of disposition of a future organization of which we know nothing. We are on the eve of a new world – let us not forget that Mr Schwab advocates transhumanism – of which they are the omniscient and omnipotent creators. In their eyes, politics is nothing but violence and contradictions; it must be replaced by the professional management of experts. Yes, let's replace the cacophony of national governments by the smooth and rational functioning of a world governance! Happiness is within reach.
These brains cultivate a totally disembodied vision of reality in their international ivory towers. With an immeasurable ease, they rebut the organic character of the human being. They hold for nothing his essential particularities, his deep roots in place, in time and in his social relations, his inner world, his personal memories and projects, his tangible freedoms. Blinded by their ideology, they distinguish only an undifferentiated human mass ready to be cast in the global mold.
Diverse cantonal policies to fight the pandemic have given rise, especially on television, to the same principled contradiction between reality, manifold and imperfect, and therefore “cacophonous”, and a non-existence [of a unity] being explicit, indivisible and perfect.
In other words, to avoid facing specific problems and their inevitable roughness, better evoke abstractly a change of level, from the cantons to the Confederation, from the Confederation to the European Union, from Europe to the WHO and other global organisms. Elsewhere, and as long as nothing happens there, there is the mythical place of perfection.
It does not matter that Mr Ghebreyesus, or Ms Chan before him, or their staffs have never shown any particular competence or independence. What matters is the anonymous and flawless apparatus of global governance – which will save us.
So why not adopt the same approach, propose the same all-powerful global institutions, demand the same total transparency, and impose the same enormous contributions to solve the problems of agriculture, hunger and malnutrition, pollution, access to digital technology, education, media, transport, energy or urban planning?
We can justifiably fear that other independent experts are about concocting a federation of heavily endowed global bodies to better manage all of humanity's problems.
We can also be assured that in parallel, all sorts of interest groups – political, economic, financial, ideological – are eager to take the lead in these power mechanisms without real leadership or control, thus equaling the announcement of a fantastic global cacophony.
Source: “La Nation” n° 2175 from 21 May 2021
(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)
| * Olivier Delacrétaz is a graphic designer, former president of the “Ligue vaudoise” and regular contributor to the Vaud newspaper “La Nation”. |