Professor Kees van der Pijl discusses his new book which explains how the virus crisis is a fraud and cover for political seizure of power. The medical emergency is just a pretext for digital identity passport systems. He discusses the players behind this ruling oligarchy whose concentration is unprecedented in history. Elites are using a strategy of tension to subjugate an otherwise unruly global populace which has been on the verge of 1848-style revolution. The medical phase of the coup can turn toward war (e.g. Russia) as another means of consolidating rule. The ruling class believes they have a small window of time to cement their power on the heels of the historic AI revolution. He explains the mechanisms by which the oligarchy is able to impose worldwide regulatory processes on entire continents and how China is cooperating in this ‘ultra-imperialism’ with the West. He’s optimistic that the political project that is Covid can’t go on for much longer, will fall apart, and that they do not yet possess the technology required to roll out a total digital control system. A core group of society is also increasingly rejecting their insane vision of the future.
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Websites
States of Emergency (BOOK) https://www.claritypress.com/product/states-of-emergency-keeping-the-global-population-in-check
Flight MH17, Ukraine and the New Cold War (BOOK) https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526131096
Twitter https://twitter.com/KeesvdPijl1
TRANSCRIPT
Geopolitics & Empire:
The Geopolitics & Empire podcast is joined by Dutch political economist, Dr. Kees van der Pijl. He taught at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Sussex. He is the author of numerous books, but today we’ll be talking about his new absolutely must-read book, States OF Emergency: Keeping the Global Population in Check. Welcome Kees. How is the state of emergency going over there in the Netherlands?
Kees van der Pijl:
Well, it’s pretty bleak. And you may have seen that I dedicated the book to the young, because in my view, the children and the student age are really bearing the brunt of this. Because for somebody of my age, I now find that two years is nothing. Entirely speaking for myself and my wife, for us it was an interesting time, politically interesting and so on, but if I see what happens to my children+ and to all the children here and to students, we’re looking at a drama, because for them, two years is a lifetime if you’re developing. So in that sense, I’m really very gloomy, and of course we are subject now to the rollout of an EU project of a digital identity, and that’s what it’s all about. The whole medical thing is just a pretext to get us used to taking vaccinations.
Everything is in a very incomplete state, so it will probably end in a disaster and chaos anyway, but that in itself is not a promising prospect. Now, Holland is unrecognizable, I would say, except if you compare it to the second world war and the occupation in which the Dutch population already gave a taste of a very peculiar attitude which can only be compared with some Eastern European countries. For instance, we… Well, I wasn’t there of course, but the generation of my parents and grandparents, they basically let the Jews of Holland being abducted, never to return, whereas the rest of Western Europe on average had a better attitude, hiding people to a greater degree. It happened here in Holland as well, but anyway, that’s the comparison that keeps popping up.
This is the first time since the second world war that we had a curfew, that we had a lockdown, that we had police brutality to a degree not seen in this country in my whole lifetime. And everything is being denied, and I’m not telling you anything that you didn’t know already, but it’s grim. And it’s not grim for me because I’m sitting here and functioning, but it’s grim for the children. I just heard today that neither of my small grandchildren want to go to school any longer because they have to wear masks in the corridor, and kids get nervous of that because they don’t know why that would be.
Geopolitics & Empire:
Yeah. Yeah. I agree with you as well. And I feel the exact same way, the fear is not for myself, but for the youth and my children. I can deal with these things. I’ve lived a good enough life until now, so I don’t care about myself. And I also think it’s a fair comparison what you bring up. I’ve been saying this from the beginning. And I was in Central Asia in 2020, and I actually had planned to move back to Europe to my homeland of Croatia, but as soon as I discovered what was really going on behind the state of emergency, in early 2020, I decided to flee back to Latin America where I thought we would have more freedoms for a bit longer, which has been proving to be the case so far. And I think it’s-
Kees van der Pijl:
In Mexico, huh?
Geopolitics & Empire:
Yeah, in Mexico. They just activated also vaccine certificates here a week ago, so it’s a battle. 500 people have filed an injunction against the governor because it’s anti-constitutional. But also your comparison with World War II, there’s a Croatian MEP who recently-
Kees van der Pijl:
I saw him.
Geopolitics & Empire:
Yeah. He yelled at Macron and von der Leyen, and comparing what is happening now to the Nazi occupation, so you’re not alone. But let’s get through your book. There’s so much here. I highly recommend this book. I think it’s on sale actually at Clarity Press, 40% off, people can go there now. But there’s so much information in it, and it’s hard to pick a place to start, but you [inaudible 00:05:01] that the ruling oligarchy has seized on the virus outbreak, having manufactured it essentially to declare a state of emergency in order to put the breaks on the IT revolution from ushering in a democratic transformation, like the printing press did in the middle ages. You talk about an internationalized global state dominated by international capital which has been preparing for economic collapse and 1848 style revolutions. You also call this oligarchy the intelligence IT media block. So maybe to start, people will always ask, who are they, and how would you describe this ruling oligarchy?
Kees van der Pijl:
Well, the first thing from a theoretical viewpoint is that you should never fix it as an existing entity which doesn’t change. The title of my doctoral dissertation somewhere decades and decades ago had class formation, and I think when you think of a ruling class and any other class in society, you always should think of class formation that is within society like a magnetic field. There occurs a certain sense of direction in a particular way. When you mentioned this triangle that I sketch in the book, the intelligence services, IT giants and the media, they constitute a core that leads this process of class formation in the current period. That will be my thesis.
And of course that doesn’t exhaust the other components or fractions of a ruling class. They also must become involved in that process of class formation, because they can’t take time enough off and wait for better times or whatever. So even the banks who are now being disciplined in my view have to be on board and want to be on board. The pharmaceutical companies join the process because, almost unexpectedly for them at least in the longer view, they become very important. If you think back of the war on terror, for instance, the pharmaceutical industry of course was somewhere at the end of the line, they had no particular role to play.
Suddenly, they found themselves in the forefront, because the medical pretext for the whole politics of fear that is being rolled out now is of a different kind. So in that sense, class transformation takes a different turn. You always have to compare it to the war on terror, because that was basically at an international level at least the first time that a comprehensive politics of fear was rolled out, some people say, to deal with the Seattle explosion, with the sudden explosion against the extreme free trade that was in the works.
There are many other elements that enter into that, but in that case, you still had a different… Well, not necessarily a triangle, but you had a different block of forces leading the process of transformation, and this has now switched to the triangle that I just described and that I explain in the book, which is pretty self-evident. Of course if it’s an IT revolution, then the revolutionaries must include the people who created this IT world, which is basically a state-driven invention process which was then privatized after 1990, because after 1990, capital no longer tolerated any sort of public constraint imposed on it. So in that sense, after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in the state socialist episode, everything has to be privatized by the logic of the system, and it’s that process which created the oligarchy in its present form.
But we shouldn’t forget that, even in the crisis itself, so in the crisis of the COVID circus, the oligarchy is condensing to an almost unbelievable degree. I’ve heard things like a billion a day that’s being earned extra by Elon Musk and Amazon boss and Gates and so on, but that’s the anecdotal side of it. But it’s an oligarchy in an unprecedented sense. At no point in history, except in ancient empires for instance, has there been a ruling group which is so small compared to the rest of society. And the whole middle class, people like myself, the sort of pity [bijoux 00:10:24] academics and so on, they’re being expropriated.
You feel that your savings are going and… I mean, I’m not wailing here about my material position, but just to indicate that even classes that would normally be considered as political supports for the upper ruling class are being sacrificed to its enrichment, which is not a matter of ill will on the part of the top people, it’s simply how the system operates. Concentration of centralization is the name of the game, and that’s what’s happening now, except it’s going into overdrive, in extreme and absurd forms, and that also tells you that this process can’t go on for much longer.
Geopolitics & Empire:
Yeah. And speaking of the inflation and such, we can also feel it here in Mexico. I feel it-
Kees van der Pijl:
I guess so. Yeah.
Geopolitics & Empire:
… As well. It’s truly global across the board. And you also mentioned some of the people that all of us are familiar with in your book, such as the Bilderberg Group, The Trilateral Commission, now in other manifestation the World Economic Forum. All of these groups were also mentioned by my recent guest and my former professor, Alfred de Zayas, UN special reporter. He briefly mentions them in his book, Building a Just World Order. Also from Clarity Press. But you mentioned the financial crisis. We have the 2008 global financial crisis where there was this huge discontent of the masses manifesting itself. We’ve had the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Yellow Vests, Brexit, Trump, and so on, and all of a sudden magically the UN declares a pandemic.
And on my podcast, one of my missions has always been to kind of filter through the nonsense and kind of get to the point. I hate beating around the bush. And you do a great job with your book. You conclude that the virus crisis is a fraud, it’s a cover for political seizure of power. I don’t want to spend so much time on the medical aspects, because most of the people listening to this are familiar with it, they should get your book and look at those details. We know the masks don’t work and the PCR tests are fraudulent. So I want to dig deeper behind this political seizure of power and why it’s the case.
You say that there is no proportionality between the actual medical emergency and the measures applied, that decades ago, the elite foresaw the end of this economic system which would result in 1848 style revolutions and general popular revolt. You write that the IT revolution has given them the ability to evade a physical war against the population via the alternative of permanent surveillance and information warfare. This panopticon is the model for our form of late capitalism, the surveillance society organized and operated by the IT industry. So basically you see as the main driver of this COVID state of emergency the threats of a new 1848, so can you kind of tell us what’s really going on here?
Kees van der Pijl:
Well, basically you can go back to the war on terror, but before that, I would always think of the 1970s in Italy and other European countries where you had terror scares, and not just scares, but real atrocities. And as always, the Italians have been very good in political analysis. Why that is, I don’t have an immediate explanation. But in Italy… I have several books by Italians about the 1970s strategy of tension, which was the US, German, Israeli policy of preventing communists from becoming part of the governing coalition or the governing bloc in Italy, and they succeeded in not only preventing that, the so-called historic compromise between Christian democracy and communism, but they also discovered something which is again in operation today, and that is that politics of fear leads a population that basically is fed up with the people it’s being governed by to actually draw closer to that government.
Because basically the government tells the population, you may hate us as much as you like, but the only people who can protect you against bombs is us, so you better join us. And you can transpose that straight to the present situation. Again, the governments, but now all over the world, practically speaking, are saying to the population, maybe you hate us, maybe you’re deeply dissatisfied about inequalities that you’re victimized by, but the only people who can protect you against this terrible virus is us and the medical authorities, and that’s a lesson of political science. It was really discovered in the 1970s, as far as I can see, and it evolved in several European countries. In Germany, you had your own terror episode, and with the war on terror, it became universalized.
So United States took the lead in this whole process. And we’re now living through another episode of politics of fear, but at the same time, we shouldn’t accept or we shouldn’t think that the medical phase that we’re now in, which is a pretext for the seizure of power, should therefor always remain a psychological war against the population. What is happening today on the border with Russia in Ukraine may well be an option. I mean, again, these options are also objective. There’s not some Dr. Evil who’s sitting somewhere with his little pussycat in his lap directing it all. I mean, these are processes which have a dynamic of their own, and which therefore produce contradictions in the sense that the forces that are associated with what [inaudible 00:17:17] calls the [biopolitical 00:17:19] complex may not like at all what is happening on the Ukrainian, Russian border, but of course the arms industries will press in that direction, irrespective of the longer term, broader class interest, or the entire ruling [inaudible 00:17:38] in the west.
And that’s contradictory, because it may well be that an open fight on the Ukrainian, Russian border might lead to a complete unraveling of the whole COVID process, but you can also interpret it as a systemic transition which maintains the idea of a politics of fear, except it switches it to a different terrain, it will therefore entail restructuring of the leading groups. No longer the media and the IT giants, first of all, but mainly… Well, they will be related to them, but then more in the defense field. I’m just mentioning it to indicate that once you allow an unstable situation to develop, the instability itself takes over to an extent that prevents any conspiratorial policy on the part of the ruling class from really reaching its goals.
So we are already seeing that the medical pretax is coming apart. We are seeing that… At least that’s my claim, that the technical ability to inject all sort of nano beacons into people is completely immature. I mean, that doesn’t exist. I mean, it’s amazing what I’ve seen on film myself what is already contained in these so-called vaccines, but even, so it’s not a hermetic system yet able to be imposed on the population as a whole. Large parts of the population gets salt water injected, simply because they need control groups in the same population that they are injecting with the very dangerous substances. So the point is that the politics of fear is itself a crisis phenomenon that is open-ended, it’s unclear where it will end, but we can say that every separate chapter of the politics of fear, whether it was terrorism, or Putin is coming, or the virus, et cetera, also has its own internal contradictions which prevent it from reaching a logical conclusion.
Look at what came out of the war on terror. Was terror defeated? No, of course not. The middle east was thrown into chaos, and even far more than just the middle east, because as far as China, Central Asia, you name it, all these areas are now in a deep, deep crisis, and sometimes I think under the present system they won’t come out of it any longer. Well, you will be in a better position to explain what’s happening in Latin America, but I can’t imagine that their future is bright in the current circumstances, because once your economic system is failing… And that’s the [inaudible 00:21:12] below the whole thing. They must keep the machine rolling. And once your economic system is failing… And it failed definitively in 2008, although it took another decade before that became fully clear to all concerned, then anything can happen every day. And yet the old system produced, for instance, an over-armament of the world to such a degree that you only have to strike a match here or there, and you have full scale, highly-destructive type of war that, with nuclear weapons around, can end anywhere.
Geopolitics & Empire:
You mentioned the medical dictatorship basically, and I often think of all of the people around me, let’s say the masses, and they really haven’t a clue, they think they’re still in a democracy, but you discuss the biosecurity state, biopoliticxs, biosafety, which you also describe having a religious element, this is what they’re trying to put us into. Some also relate it technocracy. You cite Catherine Austin Fitts in describing epidemics as having become the medical variant of false flag operations, which is what I have been saying since the beginning describing COVID as. Could you tell us a little bit more of what is this biopoliticxs, biosecurity state that they want to put us into?
Kees van der Pijl:
Yeah. Well, humanity is at a crossroads. One of, we may assume the last book by James Lovelock, the famous natural scientist and inventor who became famous with his Gaia hypothesis of the self-sustaining earth, earth as a quasi, a natural body which reacts as an organism. He wrote a final book which is called NOVACENE. And by NOVACENE, he means a sort of ultimate Pleistocene or the Holocene, a geophysical era in which humanity is tied to artificial intelligence. And he says, basically, if we can avoid a comet crashing into the earth or a nuclear war, we can project hundreds of years or more of human existence, continuing with the help of artificial intelligence, and even colonizing large parts of the universe. Now, it’s that sort of idea which was also propounded by others that has somehow captivated some of the leading lights of the capitalist class, like Eric Schmidt of Google and certain futuristic thinkers.
And they have assumed that with technology progressing so fast and artificial intelligence progressing so fast… For instance, my book was translated also by a machine translation into German and French. And these are both languages that I can read well, and I really read it with open mouth. What a quality translation that was, just from a computer. And that’s entirely based on artificial intelligence, because it relies on the highlights of world literature in these various languages, and it does that all in a split second. Now, that that didn’t exist at this level of quality five years ago, and now it’s for free. So artificial intelligence developed very fast, and some of these strategies of the ruling class who are really strategists of the ruling class in the sense that they think for it… Mind you that in every epoch of history, the ruling clause was a pretty stupid bunch.
They were good at what they were supposed to do, whether it was managing [inaudible 00:25:37] for exported crops or whatever to big industry, or now banking, or you name it, but they’re not very smart in the sense of understanding what historical conjuncture is that they’re operating in, what the challenges are that they have to face. So every epoch of history has a ruling class in the sense that a class that’s forming, et cetera, but one part of the formation of such a ruling class or ruling bloc is the presence of so-called organic intellectuals. In the old Roman days, the Patricians also apparently were a pretty stupid bunch, but they had Caesar who thought for them, who spoke for them. Locke spoke for the English liberals in the 17th century. And in the same way, these people like Eric Schmidt of Google and Ray Kurzweil and all these other people conceive of themselves also as leading thinkers.
They call themselves thinkers, and they think for the larger mass of… Even for the oligarchy. Not all of the oligarchs are equally adroit at maneuvering politically in a situation that they’re facing now, so they rely on these people. And in the current situation, a number of thinkers in that sense, so organic intellectuals of the information revolution have thought that we are already entering the era where artificial intelligence can take over, and they have realized that for the ruling class, this is a unique moment that will not recur if you don’t grasp it now. So you will have to deploy the whole AI infrastructure, develop it very fast, and make sure that before people begin to realize that you might be able to do most fantastic things, things that realize humanity in a much deeper sense and open up fantastic vistas of human development…
Of course I’m overdoing it a little bit. Before that can happen, we must make sure that people walk in step and that there’s no uncontrollable thing like the Arab Spring, for instance, which still had to be repressed by a recurrence of dictatorship by wars and NATO intervention, you name it. And that’s the more historical, philosophical background of what we are experiencing now. There was an urgency to intervene in a historic process. Some of the people thought of themselves as being able to understand the consequences of what was at stake and what was possible, the only problem is that they came up with solutions which are technically not yet feasible, but most importantly, which are unacceptable to parts of society that are too large, too independent-minded, too resilient to submit. And I can see that in Europe very clearly that at least let’s say 20 to 40% of the population of every European country is not inclined to follow any such futuristic project if it is based on a complete denial of fundamental rights and freedoms that people were used to.
In China and certain other Asian countries, more is possible in disrespect, because people were used for generations of not going too far in questioning the legitimacy of power, but here in Europe, there’s… Well, even in a country like my own here in Holland, I said some nasty things first, but basically one of the good sides of the Dutch is that they are very disobedient people. So ultimately, they won’t obey. Even the people who now were tricked into having the vaccination are now coming around and saying, well, we now are being asked to do a booster shot, and we don’t want to become a target for pharmaceutical industry. These are ideas now that are beginning to brew among the silent majority that at first was willing to submit to government dictates.
Geopolitics & Empire:
Yeah. You’re book gives me hope in the sense you’re saying that all of this technology hasn’t quite yet come together to do what they really want to do, so that’s hopeful. And you also write about the IT revolution and how it essentially comes from the military, DARPA, Pentagon, pretty much everything we use today, hardware and software. I mean, I was surprised you pointed out how even LCD screens that we’re using right now and touch screens are products of military research. Nobody thinks about this, and they’ve taken all of their little gadgets and software for granted, and they view this technology as benign, but really we’re dealing with weapon systems, and it seems these systems are now being targeted at us by the ruling oligarchy.
Something interesting you also talk about are politics, how the left and right lines have blurred, the oligarchy has broadened the center and situated itself there, that there’s little difference today between Democrat, Republican, except that perhaps the democratic party, at least in the US, seems to be currently the defacto home of the oligarchy, and you say the target of state power is the progressive movement. I personally also see a hard attack on conservatives with this de-platforming. They’re canceling people’s bank accounts, putting them on no fly lists and so on. Could you speak about how the elites have kind of reorganized power and party lines? And this is a global trend in many countries.
Kees van der Pijl:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, again, we shouldn’t think of the elites here as a force which is able to direct this like a film director. I mean, the fact that the left has been incorporated into the broad center is basically something that has been autonomously achieved by the formerly left forces, so by the groups that emerged from the industrial labor movement, which has remained without an answer to the relocation of actual industry to Asia or wherever. So I live in a country which has been de-industrialized. France is being de-industrialized. You can’t believe it. This was one of the industrial world leaders, and now there’s less and less any meaningful work being done there in that respect.
So the left lost its base, but in self-reflecting on that process and adjusting their view of how a society could be transformed to a more just, what I would call socialist society, but based on the information revolution, no longer on the industrial revolution, they didn’t do that. They simply let the process go, and they basically were corrupted by the political process itself. I always think that just as capitalism will disappear as an economic system, along with it will disappear the political parliamentary representative system operated by professional politicians whose mandates are renewed by elections and so on.
So that illustrates that the ruling class didn’t have to do anything to get the left to forget about its own history and its prospects and whatever, they did that themselves. It was largely part of unreflected objective processes of the industrialization, and not doing anything about it, not thinking about it, what does this mean for us, what does it mean for us as a political tradition, how do we rejuvenate our stake in the whole process of social development? Now, the center was always the center, it’s still the center, of course, except that it moved to the right. And by right, I mean authoritarian politics, inequality politics, destroying the environment, not so much by CO2 or something, but by say of pollution, cutting trees.
Our energy sources are now basically trees cut from North America, from Russia, from the Baltic countries, et cetera. Every day, enormous ships arrive here in Amsterdam and Rotterdam with [inaudible 00:35:45] which contain not just the trees, but also all the life that was happening in between these trees, so to speak. And these ecological disasters are going on all as part of the unraveling of a functioning economic system. But I think… Well, I’ve lost where we were now.
Geopolitics & Empire:
Yeah. I was just going to say that other guests of mine have echoed as well the same sentiments where you mentioned, when capitalism goes, I guess it’s going, democracy will go as well, and that we’re entering into a period of… Well, it’s still yet to be defined, but authoritarian period where there isn’t democracy, technocracy, biopoliticxs, or maybe a more optimistic future that’s up to us to fight for.
There’s a fascinating tidbit in your book about how “shortly after taking office, Kofi Annan signed an agreement with the World Economic Forum in Davos, linking the UN Secretariat to an electronic communication system welcome that put him and his staff in direct contact with a number of government leaders and with the directors of the World Bank and other international financial institutions, and that effectively the UN system became subordinated to the Western Bloc and transnational corporations.”
And you describe what I call COVID1984 as a global project of which the individual states are mostly the relays and [inaudible 00:37:30] commander, Klaus Schwab, as I call him, as the secretary of the project or a series of overlapping projects. It’s pretty mind-boggling the coordination that they have at the global scale to carry out what they’ve been carrying out over the last two years, trying to impose their wills upon virtually all nation states. And we’ve seen different states here in Mexico from the local level, because our president, AMLO, at least from the federal level, it has not been possible to implement a lot of these policies, but they’ve gone to mayors and governors, gotten to them somehow, and one state has tried to implement these biosecurity policies and has failed, another has tried, and they’ve been having some success, and it’s just this back and forth, two steps forward, one step back. Could you comment a bit about the mechanisms of how they’re able to do this globally, what they’ve done so far?
Kees van der Pijl:
Yeah. Well, you mentioned Kofi Annan and the UN, don’t forget that this was already in the 1980s. So the attack on the UN system has the potential grid on which an alternative world economy might have been built, occurred under Thatcher and Reagan. So there’s a permanent struggle going on on the international level in which the forces of internationalization and international organization are battling over whether they will articulate the aspirations of large parts of the world population, or whether they will impose authority on that population. So in that sense, the mechanism and global class struggle, if you call it like that, already dates back to the Reagan and Thatcher revolution. Neoliberalism was a flight forward out of the class compromises of the post-war period, and in the process made the capitalist system into a world system, but also it made it much more fragile and dependent on any interruption of long product change, on sources of raw materials and so on and so forth.
So in one respect, the COVID scenario, which can be traced back to somewhere around 2000 when the first training exercises were being held about by bioterrorism, although nothing in the way of bioterrorism had ever happened, and as far as I know, didn’t happen since then either, except that we’re now of course experiencing a bioterrorist episode in which governments are deeply involved, but although on the one hand the bioterrorism scenario from 2000 looks fantastically prepared on the one hand, and on the other unique, because there was nothing like it in previous decades, many episodes like for instance the attack on the United Nations already show that the struggle to gain hold, to gain control of the levers of world government, of global governance had already been initiated in the 1980s and ’90s and so on.
And even the attack on state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union can be understood as in light of the streamlining of the lines of communication between certain centers, and here Bilderberg and Trilateral Commission and the Group of Thirty and so on and so forth are important, not as the seats of Dr. Evil, but as coordination centers, as nerve centers where a lot of ideas about how to go forward come together and are being negotiated among different interests involved, given articulate expression also by these organic intellectuals. People are invited to come and speak at Bilderberg, and also the Bilderberg Group itself and the Trilateral Commission operate, and the World Economic Forum even far more, in a more sophisticated and more expressly developed way, they themselves operate as collective organic intellectuals.
They are think tanks in which ideas are being produced. I mean, I’ve been 50 years in academia, and if you promise not to tell anyone, most of the people that I met were really stupid, whereas compare normal people that I meet, I hardly ever meet stupid people. But in academia, you meet many of them, and yet the ruling class has at its disposal an apparatus so vast that even the stupidity of so many academics is turned into a process of accumulation of extremely sophisticated thought. And it’s a very instructive experience actually, because you would be amazed where these smart thoughts and these deep insights come from if you ever meet one of the people who are deeply involved in the prestigious institutions. I won’t mention my own experiences here, but they are really interesting in that respect.
There are very few… Anyway, let me put it this way. The ideas that a ruling class have to try and impose worldwide regulatory processes, so policies that will work to streamline and to discipline entire continents go back decades, and they have behind them a vast collection of entire libraries of insights and empirical results of how people react to this, how people react to that. In my book, I gave, for instance, the example of this French sociologist of health, Patrick Zylberman, who studied how people experience lockdowns. And if you just read that book, you understand this is a goldmine for anyone who wants to impose a lockdown, because it’s all there.
And it turns out that it indeed worked out broadly along the lines that he predicted on the basis of the SARS one episode in 2003. The one uncertainty that all ruling class projects stumble on is the willingness of a population to be disciplined by such a project, and that justifies my remark just now that academics are often stupid, whereas normal people often, because they rely much more on their intuition and on the sense of is this a right thing to happen or not, rather than on abstruse theories and intellectual fashions-
Geopolitics & Empire:
Yeah, I would confirm that. Because I’ve worked in education as an adjunct professor, and it’s exactly as you describe. And you also mentioned in your book how the urbanites, the urban intellectual elites are kind of like the workforce for the oligarchy, which explains why they are primarily the ones who are buying the official narrative, while the working class is much more skeptical of the narrative. I can’t believe how so many people are buying into the narrative, but that’s what you touch on in the book.
Kees van der Pijl:
Yeah. But don’t forget that when we still had an industrial working class, which was broadly committed to socialist ideals, et cetera, these ideological convictions didn’t arise from inside the people themselves. I mean, they simply listened to their leaders who gave them a plausible story about where we might be heading, why it would be good for us, and so on and so forth. Today if our ministers or parliamentarians are meeting in the [inaudible 00:46:56], there are demonstrators who shout at them that they are Satanists or that they are pedophiles and so on and so forth, and there are a few actually, but if in the 1920s or ’30s or the late 19th century people wouldn’t have had organizations guiding their thinking in a progressive direction, they would also have been shouting all kind of abuse without precisely knowing why they were using these terms and so on and so forth.
So what we’re seeing now in the anomie in the loss of political orientation among so many people, and that in turn makes them vulnerable to government policies like politics of fear in the name of a virus, that their organizations have disappeared. They no longer function as a vanguard or support institutions to give people a sense of what sort of world they are living in, and what might be in it for them in terms of improvement of their faith and a better future for their kids and you name it.
Geopolitics & Empire:
Yeah. And I would just mention as well… I forgot to mention, you talked about how academics are not so smart. And one of the reasons that I started this podcast many years ago was because, while I was working at university, there were a few of my colleagues willing to talk about these subjects that I’m passionate about. And so I’m just like, you know what, I’m going to start a podcast and talk to intellectuals such as yourself, and it grew. And I also wanted to mention that you have a really long section on the book that’s very valuable on the biowarfare aspect.
I was going to mention that you actually referenced multiple times the interview that I did with Francis Boyle back in January of 2020, and also you identify… It gives a lot of detail of the backstory of the 20 years of these pandemic simulations, and you identify the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board which was formed in 2019. And in 2020, I read that document, so people should go check that out. You talk about the Rockefeller [inaudible 00:49:15] agenda. And I remember in March of 2020, I had been interviewed by the popular channel Spiro Skouras, who has since-
Kees van der Pijl:
Yeah, yeah. I’ve seen it. Yeah.
Geopolitics & Empire:
Yeah. He’s since been de-platformed unfortunately multiple times over and placed into a virtual ghetto. He didn’t feel comfortable. I guess he doesn’t do interviews for now anymore, but he asked me back in March of 2020 what was my assessment of what was going on, and I said that it was about global governance, world government, and that they wanted to create algocracy, to rule us by algorithms. And you write about that in your book, that many are seeking to have COVID-19 serve the political interests of a global governance project.
One of the biggest questions we all have… And you touch on it in the book, is that one of the most uncertain factors in the COVID crisis is the relationship between the west, the US in particular and China. You talk about how both Russia and China have submitted to global governance through their membership in the UN and its organizations, and what has occurred is, the internationalization of the state where sovereignty has transferred to the international level from which policy is handed back down to national governments. And then you discuss would China really accept to settle for participating with the west in an ultra-imperialism when the west is evidently declining and plagued by disintegration.
On the one hand, you say the answer is yes, namely the issue of establishing an authoritarian state in which the formerly liberal homelands of capitalism adapt to the Chinese model by simultaneous coups where you leave the inequality untouched, but then we also have a situation where the US, it’s between war, as you mentioned earlier, and cooperative ultra-imperialism. So both options for me are horrific, because also with the latter, the whole world would kind of become edged towards totalitarianism. Could you try to kind of tell us about this US, China relationship in this state of emergency?
Kees van der Pijl:
Well, the more I think about it, the more I think we tend to look at China still too much through the communist lens, to think that… I have many old friends from my own communist party days who still don’t want to hear anything bad about China. They think it’s all Cold War invective, et cetera, but if you look at the chronology of how this crisis came about, and you then reflect back on the number of instances of labor unrest in China itself, many people think of China as a sort of Japanese super factory where everybody’s happily running around in clean coveralls and so on, but that’s not true. There’s a constant process, again, of class formation in the sense that the new working class is being formed from people who will come straight from the land. That process is still not exhausted.
And it’s a general known fact of sociology that the first generation of workers is always the most radical, because they’re not used to the rhythms of long working days and forms of obedience that they were unused to. And if you then look at the statistics of labor incidents in China, that runs into the thousands each year. So for the Chinese ruling class with its president for life now at its head, if the communist party in China convenes, there’s this long endless line of black limousines bringing the billionaires that are a member of the party to the conference hall, but for the Chinese ruling class, the threat of the 1848 that I borrow from [inaudible 00:53:42] as a sort of vision of danger in the near future, for the Chinese ruling class, that’s something very close to home.
They’re not a sort of industrial superpower, smiling at the labor unrest and the resistance against inequality in the west, they themselves are challenged by popular unrest. And it’s the same in Vietnam, it’s the same in Indonesia, which is also under a slightly different system operating this sort of runaway intensive industrialization, destroying its entire natural habitats and so on and so forth. So China in that sense is a very important player in the internationalization of the state, much more so than Russia. Also we should realize that a country as vast as China, or Russia, or India is never a single entity.
I mean, these in themselves are complexes of social forces boiling with difference of interest, with all kinds of struggles and so on. So the people who are… You mentioned this Global Preparedness Monitoring Board. The Chinese… What is he? Head of the Chinese Medical Association, [Dr. Gao 00:55:14], who is there, doesn’t speak for China as a whole. There will be large and powerful groups in China itself. I read the books of [inaudible 00:55:28], a bit of an outsider, Chinese intellectual, very interesting book about the history of China, the history of Chinese thought, et cetera, and he emphasizes that what we see as popular uprisings, like in 1989, [inaudible 00:55:46] uprising were also…
Of course they’re not something else, but were also struggles within the ruling elite in China between groups that wanted to go for a full neoliberal makeover of China, and groups that wanted to retain veto, or at least substantial power for the state class or the class that isn’t on top because of its private property, but that is on top on account of its hold of the state operators, which is something that you see in Iran, that you see in Russia, and that of course has a long prehistory to it. I call that a contender state, a state which from the top down tries to replicate what a more powerful liberal west has already achieved at that point.
And today, China and Russia still retain many characteristics of that contender state model, although at the same time, as you said, they are also part of the internationalized state. I mean, in the Global Preparedness, et cetera, Board, there was also the Russian minister of health, people who have closely looked at, for instance, interlocking directories among corporations and who really know who is on that board, and rather than just drawing the lines and counting them, very often say, but if you take this or that man or woman, and you forget that he was never there, that sort of thing.
And it might well be that in the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board… For instance, the Russian minister of health hardly played a role, for instance. That would be my personal hypothesis before I hear from somebody who really knows about it, whether that was true or not. But in that light, you have to look at these things. The impetus for a round of disciplining of the world population comes from the west. But China is another major force in the process. And if you look at the chronology, you might even say that they had a more urgent need now to already start the process. But that is something that I simply don’t have the knowledge to judge, but I wouldn’t be surprised if… As I say, after the meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2020, Tedros of the World Health Organization traveled to China, first of all.
Now that was not for medical reasons, there were 10 cases or something, but simply to confer on the basis of what he had been listening to at the Davos meeting, to confer with China what would their position be. And then you got the Wuhan lockdown. Now, every veterinarian will tell you that there’s no point in lockdowns to get to a zero COVID situation, because animals also store this virus, they allow it to reproduce. So you would have to kill all the cats and the dogs. And actually, they inoculated the animals in the London zoo. Have you seen that?
Geopolitics & Empire:
No. With COVID?
Kees van der Pijl:
Images of lions and a rhino and a kangaroo all being inoculated with Pfizer and Moderna serums. In itself, a correct step if you want to get at zero COVID, but that’s simply impossible. Anyway, you can root out Smallpox, but you can’t root out a respiratory virus. They’re everywhere and everywhere. And actually, you are in a much better health if you are constantly exposed to them, because then your immune system remains in top shape, whereas now what we’re seeing here in Holland and I guess everywhere else is that, because of the distancing and the mouth caps and so on, there are nastier forms of flu and some very serious…
Geopolitics & Empire:
They tell us natural immunity doesn’t exist, but this kind of makes me think, I think you cite Orwell’s 1984 in your book where Orwell writes, in the past, ruling groups of all countries did fight against one another. In our own day, they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is to keep the structure of society intact. For me, that seems like what’s happening now. And you beg the question, are we witnessing the consolidation of a universal oligarchic collectivism, as Orwell used the term, a truce between ruling classes holding their own populations captive in the nominal state of war. So is that what you think could be going on?
Kees van der Pijl:
Well, certainly what they’re trying. Because while you’re saying this, I become more optimistic in the sense that I almost have to laugh, because I realize it doesn’t stand a chance. A year ago, it did, but now… Don’t forget that one thing I mentioned in the book is that, in January, 2021, the Financial Times on its front page reported that the Edelman PR firm, which was closely involved in the preparation of the pandemic as a political project, came to the conclusion that the project to create a shock that everybody would have been paralyzed by, and then be inoculated and so on and so forth, that chance had passed and that the project had failed. Now, if a company like that which is so deeply involved in the whole process of setting it up, of writing the scenario, so to speak… They really were a major force.
If they come to the conclusion after almost a year it has failed, we should feel optimistic. That doesn’t mean that what is happening now to children and to young people, but also to old people dying in complete solitude with their partners somewhere standing outside in the car park, that as a human tragedy, that doesn’t happen now on a scale we haven’t seen before, except in destructive wars like the Eastern Front and second world war. So that is happening, and we can’t undo that, but the project as such is doomed to fail. And what is being repeated here over and over again, and what German lawyer, Reiner Fuellmich, with his committee is preparing, is a tribunal to call all the politicians and all those who were somehow involved in this gigantic fraud, to call and to let them be responsible for what they did and to call it to justice.
Geopolitics & Empire:
You mentioned the contender states of Russia and China, and we’re seeing now this insane escalation in Ukraine, do you think… As you said, maybe the political COVID project is failing. Maybe they try as a diversion, or maybe… I feel like we’re in the 1920s, 1930s. Well, you referenced World War I scenario, as well as the 1930s again, this rise of authoritarianism, economic collapse. Do you think that the west could push for a war with Russia and China?
Kees van der Pijl:
Well, however mad they may be, a war in the present… I mean, the Orwell statement that wars are no longer between states, but against a population could also be a bit reassuring, because then you could say, well, we might as well win that war and not let them. But of course it’s still possible that simply out of an accident in a highly tense situation you might get a larger conflict, and once one of the parties in a major central war is losing, they will resort to their nuclear weapons, and then of course we’re all doomed. So in that sense, it’s important to watch and to read defense journals and see to what extent top military figures are either taking the threat of nuclear annihilation serious, or are belittling it.
And in the 1980s, for instance, you had such a situation in which the Reagan team thought that if you just dug deep enough a hole in the ground, you might survive a nuclear attack, that sort of thing. And that led the nuclear winter report to show that the earth would become a dead place, irrespective of the actual explosion. So apart from top military men and the occasional woman becoming really crazy, they would understand that we should never do more than a proxy war. Ukraine is a very complex… I actually wrote a book about the new Cold War in Ukraine in 2018, so I’m a bit familiar with the situation. And it’s a failed state, and that in itself is a very dangerous situation, because…
Well, it would drift away from our topic if we go into that, but it’s possible that there would be a proxy war with Ukrainians on the one side and the people in the [inaudible 01:06:27] on the other hand, but what I suspect is that… Already in the book that I wrote in 2018, I mentioned that there would be a resurgence of the not really pro-Russian population, but the population that’s oriented towards Russia language and culture and everything, internet, and it would seem now that people have become so desperate in Ukraine because of the ongoing impoverishment and the rapaciousness of the oligarchs there that they are willing to give a pro-Russian politician a chance again.
And that will then in the west be construed as a seizure of power by Russian agents and so on and so forth that [inaudible 01:07:19] serious situation. But the basic point is this, [inaudible 01:07:24] in the west, so a ruling class in the west and the governing class and so on can no longer govern through an equitable social contract with the population. They have to maintain themselves by politics of fear to really drive people with their backs against the wall.
That can be environmental disasters, that can be a war situation, et cetera, but that’s an objective [inaudible 01:07:51]. What it will be depends not on you or me, or even a genius who can foretell these things, but on the objective strength of the different forces and some coincidences here and there. But the politics of fear is a given, so the fight for democracy would always have to focus on discovering the origins of the politics of fear, exposing the forms it takes, exposing the lies that are woven around all kinds of policies that actually aim for something completely different, basically for the subjection of all the people, and then try and aim for something beyond the current economic system that we have.
But that’s not so easy, because don’t forget that even in the days of industrial socialism, the actual ideas that were available prior to the taking of power were minimal. There were very few book-length exposes of what a socialist society would look like, and now there’s nothing. There are a lot of activities.
I’m active here in Holland as well as a speaker in this anti-COVID measures movement, and every time I get somewhere, I’m amazed to see the level of preparation that people have already in terms of setting up alternative education, schools to have alternative food supply chains based on local farming, do your own farming, that sort of thing. Now that’s not the same as having an alternative society ready, but it indicates and it works as a school to shape people’s understanding of their own capacity to contribute meaningfully to society, and that at some point might become a critical factor in social change. But inevitably, it will be different in different countries.
Geopolitics & Empire:
Yeah. You kind of answered my final question of what do we do, and as you said, getting involved… And we’re seeing an explosion in the homeschooling and the building of these parallel economies, parallel structures, which could lead to a more positive future. Is there any final thought then you wish to leave us with?
Kees van der Pijl:
Well, as you said, I just gave it. Well, I think the most important thing is that we keep our brains working, we get as much exposure of interesting ideas on all sides as we can, and that people like yourself keep interviewing as many people you think have some ideas about where we should be going as you can. Thank you very much for it.
Geopolitics & Empire:
And you are on Twitter. I would encourage people to find you there. Is that the best place to follow you, and how can people best support your work or get your new book?
Kees van der Pijl:
Well, they should get the book in all modesty. It’s doing very well here in Holland and in Germany where it was first… And now it will come out in Polish at the end of this month, and in Russian at the end of this month, and also I’m now negotiating with a publisher in France. My view is that if the whole COVID circus collapses… And it will this year, or next year at the latest, then the sort of book that I wrote will be very useful to answer the question, why did it happen in the first place? And that should be enlightening.
It’s not an adventure story about how this all came about, but it’s a reconstruction by accident almost written in the process that it was imposed itself. So I was lucky with this book. Sometimes things fall in place just in a nice way that you feel it could. And it’s also good that I’m out of academia, because when I would’ve still been in academia, the footnotes section would have been twice as long just to show that I really know what I’m talking about, but as now, the emphasis was really on the account of what happened, and then the necessary references.
Geopolitics & Empire:
Yeah. There’s a lot of censorship at university. And also, this could be a future warning to help us understand so we stop this in it’s tracks if they try to pull something like this again. For listeners, you know that I do not that often say this about my guests and their books, but I really mean it, and I do really mean that you have to get Kees book. I received a free review copy from Clarity Press, but still I went out and I bought the book. And so please support great work like this. Professor van der Pijl, thank you for being on Geopolitics & Empire.
Kees van der Pijl:
Thank you very much.
Geopolitics & Empire:
I hope you enjoyed this Geopolitics & Empire podcast interview. The website is geopoliticsandempire.com, and I encourage you to sign up for the free email list through which you can receive an update of every new podcast, as well as a long list of key news headlines once a week. We’re being heavily censored. YouTube and has deleted some of our videos, and we currently have one strike. Patreon has terminated our account. Facebook has restricted our page, and Reddit has been deleting posts. Our favorite social media channels are Telegram and Twitter. The best places to watch the podcast beyond YouTube are on Odysee, BitChute and Brighteon. The best places to listen to the podcast are on SoundCloud, Apple, Spotify, Google, or on any other podcast app. To help keep this podcast alive, leave a review on Apple Podcasts and wherever else, subscribe to all our platforms and leave a donation, if possible, via SubscribeStar, PayPal, Bitcoin, or Ethereum. You can also find us on MeWe, Minds, Gab, Flote, VK, LinkedIn and Instagram. Thanks for listening.
About Kees Van Der Pijl
Kees van der Pijl (1947) taught at the University of Amsterdam and was professor at the University of Sussex, UK, from 2000. He made his name with The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (1984, reprint 2012) and was awarded the 2008 Deutscher Prize for Nomads, Empires, State, Vol. I of a trilogy on Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy (2007-2014). He also wrote novels and edited a number of works, most recently The Militarization of the European Union (2021). His previous monograph, Flight MH17, Ukraine and the New Cold War (2018) has been translated into four other languages.
*Podcast intro music is from the song “The Queens Jig” by “Musicke & Mirth” from their album “Music for Two Lyra Viols”: http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon)
