In the following short article written in 2009, Jacques Attali, a French political theorist, outlined much of what we appear to be witnessing today — an attempted globalist revolution achieved through a health emergency.
Originally published in the French publication L’Expresso, the article was cited by Carlo Freccero, an Italian media expert and former director of Italy’s state broadcaster Rai2, in a Jan. 12 interview with the Catholic Italian daily, La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana.
Freccero noted that Attali, a former special adviser to the late French President François Mitterrand and founder of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, was “aware of the importance of health practices in the political organisation of the state.”
Attali, he added, predicted how a pandemic could be exploited to bring about a centuries-long utopian ideal, a one-world government achieved, one might add, not through love but through fear.
Freccero further explained that, as is being witnessed today, the “right to health is replaced by an obligation to health in the name of the collective good.” This call to public health, he continued, “allows for the establishment of a form of authoritarian regime which doesn’t permit contradiction and which, if not cloaked in good intentions, would generate violent dissent.”
Moving Forward Through Fear
By Jacques Attali
May 6, 2009
A major pandemic would raise awareness of the need for altruism, at least in self-serving terms.
History teaches us that humanity only evolves significantly when it is truly afraid: it then first sets up defence mechanisms; sometimes intolerable (scapegoats and totalitarianisms); sometimes futile (distraction); sometimes effective (treatments, if necessary discarding all previous moral principles). Then, once the crisis is over, it transforms these mechanisms to make them compatible with individual freedom and to make them part of a democratic health policy.
The [H1N1 swine flu] pandemic that is beginning could trigger one of these structuring fears.
If it is no more serious than the two previous scares of the last fifteen years linked to a risk of pandemic (the mad cow crisis in Great Britain and the bird flu crisis in China), it will first of all have significant economic consequences (fall in air travel, fall in tourism and the price of oil); it will cost about 2 million dollars per infected person and will cause stock markets to fall by about 15%; its impact will be very short-lived (during the bird flu episode, China’s growth rate fell only in the second quarter of 2003, only to explode in the third quarter); it will also have organisational consequences (again in 2003, stringent police measures were taken throughout Asia; the World Health Organisation set up global alert procedures; and some countries, particularly France and Japan, stockpiled considerable amounts of medication and masks).
If the epidemic is a little more serious, which is possible since it is transmissible by humans, it will have truly global consequences: economic (models suggest it could lead to a loss of 3 trillion dollars, or a 5% drop in world GDP) and political (because of the risks of contagion, the countries of the North will have an interest in ensuring that those of the South do not become ill, and they will have to ensure that the poorest have access to the medicines currently stockpiled only for the richest); a major pandemic will then bring out, better than any humanitarian or ecological discourse, the awareness of the need for altruism, at least in self-serving terms.
And even if, as we must obviously hope, this crisis is not very serious, we must not forget, as with the [2008-2009] economic crisis, to learn from it so that before the next one — which is inevitable — prevention and control mechanisms are put in place, as well as logistical processes for the equitable distribution of medicines and vaccines. This will require the establishment of a global police force, global stockpiling and, therefore, global taxation. We will then come to the point, much more quickly than would have been possible on economic grounds alone, of putting in place the foundations of a true world government. In fact, it was through the hospital that the establishment of a real state began in France in the seventeenth century.
In the meantime, we could at least hope for the implementation of a genuine European policy on the subject. But here again, as on so many other subjects, Brussels is silent.
Translated from the original French (emphases mine).
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