CORONAVIRUS: OFF TO WAR

As reported in last week’s Trends Journal, we detailed how, across the globe and throughout the mainstream media, COVID-19 is referred to as a war against the people, thus giving political leaders the emergency powers to call out the troops.
In the United States, for example, President Trump has called the fight against COVID-19 “Our big war.”
Last Friday, the president instructed Defense Secretary Mark Esper to be ready for a major call-up of the National Guard and the Reserves stating, “This will allow us to mobilize medical disaster emergency response personnel to help wage our battle against the virus.”
Also last Friday, Air Force General John Hyten, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the military was doing its own analysis as well as looking at infection data.
This past weekend, the U.S. military put “liaisons” in all 50 states and called up over 11,000 active Air and Army National Guards. Two specific National Guard contingency operations, never before used in the country’s history, have been approved: CONPLAN 3400, which targets “homeland defense,” and CONPLAN 3500, which supports “civil authorities.”
To protect the homeland during the pandemic, the U.S. Northern Command has sent control teams to the Cheyenne Mountain complex in Colorado, which is used for monitoring nuclear attacks and other major threats. The command explained these steps were being taken to ensure no foreign enemy attacks the U.S. as it focuses its energy on fighting the coronavirus threat.
Americans’ View of Quarantines: “What, Me Worry?”
The majority of American citizens in the “Land of the Free” quietly accept the shutdown of schools, businesses, and way of life as necessary to fight the coronavirus war, even as political leaders impose and the mainstream media cheerleads further restrictive measures “from sea to shining sea.”
According to a 25 March poll conducted by Morning Consult/Politico, about 75 percent of Americans are in favor of a national quarantine.
There are dissenting voices with strong backgrounds in government, technology, medicine, and science, however, who are speaking out against the Military/Intelligence/Surveillance State measures:

  • Edward Snowden, the whistleblower, who as a CIA employee in 2013, exposed National Security Agency (NSA) secret surveillance programs: “We must not permit a public health crisis to be used as an excuse to suspend civil liberties that are constitutionally protected. For example, government must not detain Americans indefinitely without trial or use technology for illegal tracking and surveillance.”
  • Simon Chandler, London-based journalist who focuses on the effects of technology on society: “From a technological perspective, the coronavirus pandemic is one massive testbed for surveillance capitalism. More specifically, it’s a testbed for new, much more large-scale forms of surveillance. Already, governments in Italy, Germany, Austria, China, South Korea and Taiwanhave begun analyzing smartphone data so as to determine to what extent populations are really locking themselves down at home. Meanwhile, governments in the UK and the US are very close to rolling out similar surveillance measures, all in the effort to ensure that policies of mass behavior modification are successful.”
  • Piers Robinson, Co-Director, Organization for Propaganda Studies and Professor/Chair in Politics, Society and Political Journalism at the University of Sheffield: “Political actors are fully aware that these conditions of fear and panic provide a critical opportunity that can be exploited in order to pursue political, economic and societal objectives. It is very likely, however, that the dangers posed by the potential exploitation of Corona for broader political, economic and societal objectives latter far outweigh the immediate threat to life and health from the virus.”

In the state of Washington, Governor Jay Inslee’s “Stay Home, Stay Heathy” order has a nice, folksy name for what includes the expansion of citizen surveillance. In the city of Bellevue, across the lake from Seattle, police are giving people a mobile app for reporting any fellow residents seen in large social gatherings.
Last Friday, Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo ordered National Guard troops to join state and local police forces in house-to-house searches and traffic monitoring to identify and force quarantine on anyone who came in from New York state (New York by far has the most reported cases of coronavirus).
Governor Raimondo expanded the order the following day to include forced quarantine for anyone travelling into Rhode Island from any other state. Guardsmen were positioned at the airport, Amtrak stations, and bus stops. Penalties will be up to $500 and 90 days in jail.
In Florida, where “Spring Break” used to be Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello carousing merrily on a beach without a care in the world, now revelers need to worry about their actions being monitored. The tech company X-Mode secretly collected location data on students who came to Florida for spring break, sent the data into a mapping platform, and monitored the students’ whereabouts as they left for home.
The company also has been monitoring people travelling out of New York City, the current epicenter of coronavirus infections in America.
Global Surveillance
The monitoring of citizens as a way to combat coronavirus is spreading across the entire globe. Slovakia, which had no deaths from the virus, approved a law that permits the government to monitor any citizen infected with the coronavirus.
Justice Minister Maria Kolikova, insisting that although the decree was beyond what would be acceptable under the law, said, “Of course we realize that [these proposals] are in violation of basic rights and freedoms. But this is justified when there is appropriate purpose.”
Similar laws have been passed in Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan.
Aleksandar Vuci, the President of Serbia, confirmed his government was tracking all people with Italian phone numbers.
A report last Wednesday in The Guardian revealed that mobile phone tracking by national governments has been ongoing to combat COVID-19 in the U.S., India, Iran, Israel, and Poland. The report also states the mobile phone industry has been looking into putting together a worldwide data-sharing system for monitoring people anywhere in the world to help defeat the virus.
On 23 March, Cindy Cohn, a civil liberties attorney and Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, warned, “We already see calls from companies seeking to cash in on this crisis for unchecked face surveillance, social media monitoring, and other efforts far beyond what medicine or epidemiology require.”
TRENDPOST: Just as there have been no strong peace movements in America since the Vietnam War – when young boys were drafted to go fight and die in another of America’s wars based on lies – there are no significant protests to war-like measures being forced upon the public by politicians in the U.S.
 And, around the world, politicians continue to push for more government control of individual rights, more surveillance, and increased military/police show of force. Among the general public, there is broad acceptance to “follow their leaders” in the battle to fight the COVID-19 War, while those who resist government actions are blackballed from the media and dismissed as ill-informed. 
To the contrary, as evidenced by the polls and as reported in last week’s Trends Journal, in nations across the globe, as nations clamp down on freedom, put troops on the streets, and impose martial law, the vast majority of citizens march to government orders and relinquish their rights in the name of fighting the COVID-19 WAR.
TREND FORECAST: As Gerald Celente has long stated, “When all else fails, they take you to war.”
Gerald Celente forecasts that as economies implode and civil unrest explodes in nations across the globe, political leaders will divert attention away from economic catastrophes by ramping up wars against other nations.
Already conditioned to accept military authority in fighting the COVID-19 WAR, citizens will follow their dictates, relinquish rights, and support their government’s march to war.

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