Kees van der Pijl
Prof Dr Political Sciences
Dr Kees van der Pijl (1947) studied Law and Political Science at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. He was a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam and from 2000, professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex, UK. He retired in 2012, having been Head of Department, director of the Centre for Global Political Economy, and Leverhulme Major Research Fellow. His books have appeared in Dutch, English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, and Russian, and include The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (1984, new edition 2012),Transnational Classes and International Relations (1998), and Global Rivalries from the Cold War to Iraq (2006). In 2008 he was awarded the Deutscher Memorial Prize for Nomads, Empires, States (2007, vol. I of Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy, vols. II and III in 2010 and 2014). He also edited several collections, most recently The Militarization of the European Union (2021). His latest book is States of Emergency. Keeping the Global Population in Check (2022), based on the Dutch original, Pandemie van de angst (2021) and translated into several languages. He is currently working on a book on the Ukraine conflict, an extended version of Flight MH17, Ukraine and the New Cold War (2018),. He resigned from his Sussex emeritus status in 2019 in protest over attempts to censor his views on the Israeli role in the 9/11 attacks, https://www.academia.edu/38701130/.
Following the policy recommendations of the World Health Organisation and various private planning bodies, governments around the world have used the passing of a virus to impose a global state of emergency. It fits into the politics of fear, by which Western governments have sought to replace previous social contracts based on class compromise since the 1990s. After mobilising the fear of terrorism and successive attempts to resurrect a post-Soviet threat by demonizing “Putin”, a health emergency proved an unexpected success in this respect. The virus in question in all probability emerged from so-called gain-of-function research in the US and elsewhere on US account, including China,. Since the underlying aim of the pandemic is to freeze the world population into submission, states of emergency will return on this or other pretexts. The ultimate goal is to exploit the information revolution to impose total control based on total information awareness, ideally intravenously, which may explain the disastrous, possibly genocidal strategy of inoculating the entire population with experimental drugs, babies included.
The crisis to which this is meant to be a response meanwhile is provoking resistance and the quest for a parallel society beyond the current oligarchic capitalism. It may well be that the Covid episode was the last gasp of US-centred global governance now that Russia has struck back against NATO in Ukraine and with the BRICS behind it, is laying the foundations for a multipolar world.