US, WASHINGTON (ORDO NEWS) — Coronavirus provokes anti-globalist paranoia, but true globalism is falling apart. It is a mistake to believe most conspiracy theories, but it is also a mistake to assume that they have nothing to do with reality.
Some theories are simply insane emancipations or deliberate misinformation. But others exaggerate and misinterpret important trends, instead of denying them, or offer incredible explanations for secrets that nevertheless remain inexplicable, writes American political analyst Ross Douth in The New York Times.
This is true not only in the era of trump, but also in any other. There are probably no aliens among us, but we continue to receive new evidence that the UFO phenomenon is real.
Keynon is a fantasy landscape, but the fact that powerful sexual predators have connections with presidents, popes, and princes is a tough truth after Jeffrey Epstein.
Sometimes, however, conspiracy theories survive a reality that once supported them, increasing their popularity just as the real world makes their worries inappropriate. And something like this could happen right now with conspiratorial thinking about the so-called New World Order. On the one hand, coronavirus causes a surge of paranoia about the New World Order (NWO paranoia) and a new fear of elite bondages who seek to rule the world. But at the same time, the real new world order, the dream of global integration and transnational governance are breaking up before our eyes.
The phrase “New World Order” about the conspiracy was copied by conspirators from the optimistic rhetoric of George W. Bush, and since then paranoia and facts have always existed symbiotically. Fantasy hung over totalitarian control, descending black helicopters and the secret conspiracies of the Bilderberg Club. But this was facilitated by various undeniable realities – the growth of transnational institutions, the sheer power of global class superiority, the often undemocratic expansion of the European Union, and the growth of digital surveillance connecting China and the United States. Now the theory is gaining a new life thanks to the response to coronavirus, which is used as an excuse for some one-way capture – with Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci, who act as potential organizers, “testing and tracking” as a constant monitoring scheme.
These fears span the entire political spectrum, but since the global class tends to be secular and hostile to the traditional religion, the fears of one world government have long been especially strong (and seasoned with anxiety from the end of time) among conservative Christians. And at the moment, with the closure of churches, such fears even reached the Catholic hierarchy, where at least two cardinals signed a statement written by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano – a whistle-blower against concealment of sexual abuse, who has become traditionalist rudely – describing coronavirus isolation as a possible “prelude to the implementation of world government beyond any control.”
But unlike the 1990s or 2000s, when the paranoia of the New World Order exaggerated real events and trends, at the moment, reality is the opposite of what they fear. Instead of leading to some kind of globalization, the rule of the coronavirus destroys internationalism wherever you look.
This virus showed that global organizations are either weak or politically compromised, in the case of the World Health Organization, or have nothing to do with the United Nations. The virus has restored or tightened borders, prevented migration, transferred power from international to national and from national to local. And this led to the resumption of rivalry between the great powers, and to the impending trans-Pacific cold war. Yes, some forms of testing and tracking can increase surveillance power in the technology industry. But in all other respects, the trends and institutions that provoke the new world order are likely to arise as a result of this crisis, which has been destroyed, discredited, or finally weakened.
The same counterargument applies to the narrower, less apocalyptic assumption that the pandemic is an expression of the late stage of liberal cosmopolitanism, the liberal technocrat’s obsession with physical health and state control. (My friends RR Reno from First Things and Daniel McCarthy of Modern Age suggested options for this argument).
In fact, late-stage liberalism is obsessed with health and state supervision for personal liberation, pleasure, tourism, and commerce. Thus, the period of blocking and closed borders is not the apotheosis of liberal cosmopolitanism, but its temporary denial. (And it is no coincidence that the most consciously secular and cosmopolitan of the Western countries, Sweden, keeps the bars open and instead seeks mass immunity).
This temporary denial does not mean that the liberal order is about to give way to a new post-liberal era, just as the weakness of the WHO or the EU does not mean that globalism, ideological and institutional, will simply disappear. But in the post-pandemic era, both liberalism and globalism may seem more like zombie ideologies, ghosts of a more ambitious and utopian past, than dominant forces that can inspire either hope or fear. And those who are currently afraid of them, down to paranoia and conspiracy, can understand that they took convulsions for real power, and the bitter twilight of the era of globalism for the dawn of a new world order.
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