Paul Schreyer: Pandemie-Planspiele – Vorbereitung einer neuen Ära?

Good afternoon, my name is Paul Schreyer. I am a freelance journalist, author and co-editor of Multipolar magazine and today I want to talk about a current topic regarding the Corona pandemic. The title of the conference is "Pandemic Simulation Exercises: Preparing for a New Era?" However, I don't want to talk about the current situation, the current coronavirus crisis, but about what happened before and about many interesting things that happened then. Keyword: pandemic simulation exercises. The situation we are experiencing now, the fear of a virus and then very strong restrictions on freedom based on that. Precisely this situation has been tested very often and very intensively in various simulation exercises in recent years.

This is not speculation. This is well demonstrated, it is well documented and I would like to present the documents to you here today. Yes, the second part of the title "Preparing for a new era?" Many people have the impression that now with this crisis a new era begins, a new time and that this is not a good era, but an era in which democracy is being dismantled, in which democracy is being dismantled, damaged, destroyed. freedoms and with In this conference I would like to want to contribute and help perhaps broaden the vision a little and also gain a more historical perspective.

I will be brief, I will say a few words about the index that I want to talk about today. So I will start with the fight against terrorism back in the 1990s, then I will present several simulation exercises and then I will get to the closed passage scenario, a very interesting scenario from the year 2010. And then again I will present some more recent simulation exercises that had place during the Trump presidency and then we come to the last topic, these are the events in the stock markets in September 2019. In my opinion, this is a very interesting point, a very important point, which I have not yet included in my book that I have written on this topic.

That is, for those of you who have already read my book: this point may contain information that may also be new to you. Yes, a new era is dawning. What era has come to an end, what era do we look back to? This is, of course, the Cold War era, which actually ended in 1990. What kind of era was that to briefly recall? So, of course, this was a confrontation between two major power blocs: the Soviet Union on the one hand, the United States on the other, and more generally the West and the Eastern bloc pitted against each other.

Both were heavily armed with nuclear weapons. and they threatened each other with total destruction. That was the world situation between 1945 and 1990. That situation was characterized by great fear, great uncertainty and great oppression. Many people feared that a nuclear war would break out. That was very real. Humanity has been close to the outbreak of nuclear war several times. In 1962, during the missile crisis, also in the 1980s, very dangerous situations occurred in which only with great luck such a nuclear war could be avoided or, with luck, it would not have broken out. That's how it should be said today.

Basically, if you put that in a broader historical context, this Cold War was a totally crazy time. The threat was so great and so existential, that this era came to an end in 1990, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall. A deep sigh of relief was felt all over the world: the Soviet Union collapsed, there was glasnost and perestroika. It all started in the 1980s, in the second half of the 1980s, when reforms were introduced in the Eastern Bloc, which gave people there more freedom. And this feeling of greater freedom, this feeling of a sigh of relief, of an end to fear, of pressure on people, that was in fact the feeling of living since 1990, internationally, not in all parts of the world, of course, but in many places, especially in the Eastern bloc, but also in the world as a whole, one could say yes.

But that moment did not bring joy everywhere. There were also influential groups and groups that had big problems with it, for example the army and the entire defense complex. Because for them, of course, in this situation, the enemy separated. They no longer had an enemy. The Soviet Union collapsed and how could such enormous military expenditures be justified at that time? So here in the photo there is an American aircraft carrier, yes, if you can say that, the symbol par excellence of the security state, of the military apparatus, of the exercise of power throughout the world that precedes it. . . because these weapons systems are necessary to exercise power anywhere in the world.

How could you justify this from then on? And I found a beautiful quote from exactly that time, from 1991, by Colin Powell. At the time he was the United States' top military officer and, therefore, also the president's top military advisor. Later he became Minister of Foreign Affairs. And he said in a newspaper interview in 1991, in a slightly sarcastic tone, but he meant it: "I'm running out of demons, I'm running out of villains, the only thing I have left is Castro and Kim II Sung." "And Castro was the president of Cuba at that time and Kim Il Sung was the president of North Korea.

So some of the few communist states left in the world, but of course for the US they couldn't pass as serious enemies. These countries were too insignificant and militarily too weak for that. So how could the United States seriously say: "We need a strong military" after 1990? How could they? And it was precisely in this context, precisely with this issue, which began the fight against terrorism in the 1990s. It was truly a turning point in history. This is also personally symbolized by the transition from President Bush, the eldest, to President Clinton. Bush pictured left He is still a representative of the Cold War, a true cold warrior who was head of the CIA in the 1970s.

And this transition from Bush to Clinton has also created a lot of hope. So Clinton was a symbol of hope. He was not considered a hawk at all, he was considered a modern and cosmopolitan person. He took office in January 1993. And just a few weeks later there was a major terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. At that time, the Twin Towers were still standing. This is the era before Nine-Eleven and this bomb attack in the underground parking lot of the World Trade Center (here is a photo from February 1993) was at the time the largest terrorist attack in the history of the United States. 700 people were injured, the underground car park was completely destroyed, the intention was to demolish the towers, which was not finally achieved until 2001.

It is said that the Islamists are behind this attack, this bombing. Immediately thereafter, the following year, President Clinton released a national security strategy. At first glance this is not so unusual. In fact, almost all presidents do this, giving instructions on where they want to set their priorities. And I want to quote something briefly because it's interesting. Clinton said: "The Cold War may be over, but the need for American leadership abroad remains as strong as ever. It is important to me to create a new public consensus to maintain our active engagement abroad." It's a bit of code language.

That is why we know that active participation abroad means nothing more than military operations or wars abroad. That's a nice word to describe it. But what's interesting is that Clinton is saying here that we need to create a consensus or he wants to create a public consensus that we can continue to deploy our military anywhere in the world. That is, at that time there was no such consensus. As I said, there was a lot of discussion at the time. People said, "We want a peace dividend now." That was the key word. We want all the money that has been spent on weapons for decades to come to us now.

We want to build our own economy. Our society must benefit from this and this defense budget must be reduced. And it also decreased in the 1990s because public pressure was so great. That was in 1994. Now we come to the next year 1995, March 1995. And that's a photo of Joe Biden. He now he is the president of the United States. Even then he had an important role. 25 years ago he was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. And here he introduced a bill, this is this photo in the Senate. And this law was supposed to give the president more powers in the event of a major terrorist attack.

And also more powers for the government in general. And this bill met with very strong opposition at the time. If you look at the press archives, as I have, of how this was discussed at the time, you can see that very influential civil rights groups immediately took to the barricades and said this was going too far. "We don't want special powers for the president, for the government. Everything must be controlled democratically. We don't want this law." Great resistance. A few weeks later, in April 1995, another major terrorist attack occurred against the Oklahoma government building. And this attack was also, at the time, and this was all before Nine Eleven, the largest and deadliest terrorist attack in American history.

This attack killed 170 people and injured approximately 1,000. You can see that the damage is enormous. A car bomb with two tons of explosives, enormous damage. And public awareness of terrorism skyrocketed with this attack. And it stayed there for a long time. This attack on the building in Oklahoma was really a milestone, a turning point, a very decisive moment because the issue of terrorism, the threat of terrorism, which was new, was perceived very differently, much more seriously. Yes, and then against this wave, I would say, against this wave of terrorist threat, yes, you could say that one more vote was proposed.

This is a newspaper article from 1997. It was not written by journalists, but by politicians, specifically former CIA Director James Woolsey and a senior Pentagon official. And the title of the article is how to defend yourself from the enemy in the shadows. And the first sentence of the article refers directly to the main attacks I just mentioned. The destruction of the government building in Oklahoma City and the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York are said to have shocked Americans, but here's the big point: These tragedies would have been even worse if they had involved nuclear, biological, and nuclear weapons. or chemicals.

Weapons were used. And as the article progresses, the authors argue that this threat of chemical and biological weapons in the hands of terrorists would be very real, would be a very serious danger, and would require a great deal of effort to protect against. This article is just one example of this media campaign. During this time many things of this type were published in this direction. Let me give you another example, also from the same year. Then-Defense Secretary William Cohen said at a news conference that chemical and biological weapons are likely part of future wars and are high on the agenda.

And with this statement he justifies the need to invest an additional billion dollars in the defense budget over the next five years. It is clear that from the beginning it involved a lot of money, very large budgets, which were thus justified. And William Cohen also had a notable press performance that year, you could say. He appeared on morning television. So now not in some way on the Pentagon stage, but entirely on a show where you don't face politics as often. He was on breakfast television, holding a packet of sugar in front of the camera. And he said: "If Saddam Hussein were to spray a package of anthrax, the same amount as this package of sugar, the causative agent of the infectious disease anthrax, on a city like Washington, at least half the population would be dead." and they will probably die in five days." So the breakfast TV presenters were speechless.

And this TV report made a big impression on the press because this example was very drastic. And it is very clear that this statement cannot be described in a simple way. other than as a blatant example of scaremongering. This is blatantly terrifying. People are convinced that their lives are in imminent danger. Yes, that was the mood that intensified in the second half of the 1990s. On the one hand: the threat of a new danger is explained and discussed. On the other hand, exactly this danger exists: there are currently people engaged in the production of these weapons, which is very interesting.

I didn't know about it before either, I found it here as part of my research. In 1997, several highly controversial weapons projects were promoted in the United States. The CIA had a project called Clear Vision. Then a bacterial bomb was developed. The DIA, the Pentagon's military intelligence agency, had a Jefferson project. A genetically modified variant of anthrax was developed as a biological weapon. And this investigation was carried out completely in secret. There was no parliamentary control or anything like that. Nobody knew at that timemoment. It was made public in a New York Times article in September 2001. And then the Pentagon called a press conference and said this was a purely defensive investigation, which of course is kind of nonsense, if you build a weapon biological, this is not defensive research.

During this time, this man, Colonel Robert Kadlec, an expert in biological weapons, also influences. He was a U.S. biological weapons inspector in the Iraq War in 1991 and, as I said, one of America's top biological weapons specialists. In a strategy note, in an internal Pentagon strategy document, he wrote about this topic in 1998. This is a very notable quote that my colleague Dirk Pohlmann brought to my attention and is actually very important. Now I will read it briefly: "If biological weapons are used under cover of a local or natural epidemic, their use can be credibly denied. The potential to cause serious economic losses and therefore political instability, combined with the ability to deny credibly its use exceeds the capabilities of any other known weapon.

That is the year 1998 and the context in which these phrases are placed in the note is that of Robert Kadlec warning that the enemies of the United States using such weapons could precisely use that context. But if you read the note carefully, you'll notice that the phrase, which can be credibly denied, appears over and over again in several places. And that does make your ears perk up a little. During this time it was founded an institution that continues to play an important role in this issue today, today called the Center for Health Security and located at Johns Hopkins University.

And you may have heard the name before. In the context of the coronavirus crisis, this institution played an important role, because from the beginning, since spring 2020, all coronavirus figures have been collected there, presented on a dashboard and used in the media around the world. This institute was founded in 1998 with another name, Center for Civil Biodefense Strategies, that is, for civil bioprotection studies. That's why it still had a military accent, then there was more emphasis on health in the presentation to the outside world, but in reality it was about the same thing. And this center has organized some very important and essential simulation exercises on this topic.

Exercises, disaster drills that I would like to analyze in more depth below. It started in 1999, so the institute had only been around for a year, and it was founded with money from a multimillion-dollar foundation, the Sloan Foundation, money from the former head of General Motors. He is long dead, but the administrators of his foundation have invested many millions in bioterrorism simulation exercises. And there was a first conference in '99. That was a very big event. Hundreds of participants from ten countries gathered in Arlington, just outside the capital, for a national symposium on public health and responses to bioterrorism.

How do you deal with an attack somewhere? What can you do there? How should we coordinate? And in the context of this conference, it's February 1999, the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies is here again in collaboration with the Department of Health and various scientific associations. An exercise of this type took place for the first time within the framework of this important conference. An exercise in which it was proven that terrorists spread a smallpox pathogen in the US and that a smallpox epidemic broke out in the US with a large number of victims. And how can you respond to it?

We should imagine the simulation as follows: people sit around a conference table for a few hours and play roles. They perform various state functions and then talk to each other because in a crisis they have to talk to each other, just like in real life they would have a conference call to coordinate responses. Then you play in these types of conferences. Who says that? Who should decide what? Where do conflicts arise? Where do the problems arise? In the final report of this exercise we find the following sentences: How far can the police go to keep patients in quarantine?

We need consensus on how to handle vaccines. Should martial law have been imposed? And we have to control the message that is sent to the public. And how can we control this message? All of these issues were discussed in 1999 and are issues that, of course, remind us a lot of the present. Also speaking at the symposium was Richard Clarke, then a senior counterterrorism adviser to the United States government who had been in office for just a year. And he said, "For the first time, the Department of Health is part of the national security apparatus of the United States." So they really went down the path of turning these health problems into military problems.

The same year, 1999, the Pentagon continued research on biological weapons. There was the so-called Bacchus project. An anthrax factory was built in the Nevada desert. And the goal has been this: the Pentagon has told its staff that this department should do this: “Develop a small anthrax plant, but only with materials that are freely available in commerce.” So you have. . . and it worked after a few months. That only came to light a few years later. The Pentagon developed this anthrax production with commercially available materials, so you could, if you think about it, carry out an attack like that yourself and then say, "But the terrorists did that because all the components are freely available in the stores and This is very dangerous." So this potential, this ability was developed at that time.

That took place at a military base in Nevada. This is now the entire military base. Nuclear weapons testing was carried out there. And in the years 90, this research on biological weapons was carried out there, far from civilization, I would say. Well, it continued in rapid steps. In the year 2000, the second major symposium of the same organizer was held, also on this topic. The only difference is that they didn't prove a smallpox outbreak, but a plague outbreak, but again bioterrorism. So these documents that I'm showing you now... This is an original website from the year 2000. You can still find it on the Internet Archive, and the The quotes that I show you are all open documents that you can find on the Internet.

These are not secrets. No whistleblower or anything else posted that. All this is open material. Let me quote a few words from the archives of this exercise from the year 2000. They say: “The sight of an armed military presence in American cities provokes protests against the restriction of civil liberties. The question is how and to what extent we enforce these things. How much force is used to keep people at home?" These are the topics that were specifically discussed by the high-ranking participants in these exercises, as mentioned twenty years ago. As many will remember, there was also a very important presidential election . in the United States at that time.

President Bush, the youngest, took office in January 2001. Here, to his right, Dick Cheney, his vice president who had great influence in this administration. And just a few months after these two gentlemen took office. The third major bioterrorist exercise was already carried out. In a very short time. This was called "Dark Winter". Another exercise against smallpox. And this colorful page is also an original website of this center of the year 2001. Back then, websites seemed "A little more colorful, a little more cluttered. This actually comes from the original Internet archive. It also immediately states who the money is coming from, sponsored by the Alfred Sloan Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

This is done very openly. Yes, and this exercise became professional. The previous exercises took place in hotels, only in the meeting room. This exercise took place at a military base. Andrews Air Force Base is a large military base just outside the gates of the capital, Washington, so this takes everything up a notch. Dark Winter also gives it a Hollywood movie feel. So, you could say that there is almost marketing for this whole topic, which is effective for the audience; Everything has also been made public. This was also written about at the time. Now, this was not done in dark rooms.

You have to be clear about that. This is actually intended for the public. Let's see who really participated. This also comes from the original exercise documents. And if you look at these names a little, or if you do a little research into American politics of this period, many names will look familiar to you. They are very influential people. For example, we have the . . . The role of CIA director was played by James Woolsey. However, a few years before he was director of the CIA. Or if we look, the governor of Oklahoma, the state that suffered this terrible attack, we had before, Frank Keating.

He was actually the governor of Oklahoma at the time of the exercise. So now it wasn't just about playing, it was actually him. Likewise, the rest of the positions are also occupied by very high-ranking people. You can really say that a state of emergency at the highest level has been rehearsed here. Now they were no longer a middle manager of the authorities. This was a very high level at which these matters were discussed. What is also striking when looking at this practical material is the role of the press. Since there were people from the press present in these exercises, within the framework of the simulation exercises, they played along.

And not small journalists either, but nationally renowned journalists. For example, here we find Judith Miller of the New York Times, a well-known journalist for this important newspaper. Television reporters from the big networks NBC and CBS were also present. This is also a photo of the exercise itself and they actually held a fake press conference. This is how the politicians played, now we have this state of emergency. Now there's a smallpox drill, uh, now there's a smallpox attack in America. And then the journalists give a press conference and ask questions. Politicians are already practicing how the press will react and what they will say next.

This was also practiced, very extensively and at a very high level. Well, so lessons were learned. This is now part of such an exercise. That's what you really do for it. And the results were such that they said we were poorly prepared for the attack with biological weapons, we did not have enough vaccines. And brutal restrictions on citizens are probably the only tool available if there are still not enough vaccines. That is why we have to limit civil liberties. Now we are in the year 2001. Here we have Robert Kadlec again, the same one we had before, who wrote this strategy document for the Pentagon and said that a biological weapon could also be used in the shadow of a real epidemic and that then it could be do it credibly. . deny.

And this Robert Kadlec is participating in the exercise here as a biological weapons expert. This recording, which you see here, is a television report from a fictitious news channel. Imagine, people are sitting there, making these environments, there is a big television screen and fictional messages are shown there, but these are specially pre-produced. And then expert Robert Kadlec comes along and says, "The problem is that we don't have enough vaccines, and this means it could be a very dark winter in the United States." It could be a very dark winter in the United States. And that is also the title of the exercise "Dark Winter".

And if we look now at what happened to Robert Kadlec, he is now one of the most important advisors to the US government during the coronavirus crisis in 2020. Here, in the center of the lectern, next to him is Mike Pence, Trump's vice president, and meanwhile Biden has been declared president of the US, and just days after the major US television networks declared him president, he said that the United States is threatened by "a very dark winter." So the same words, exactly the same words. This can now be considered a coincidence. Of course, I can't prove that this is related to exercise, but it is very likely that this language was also taken from these old draft plans.

At least it sounds the same. Let's go back to 2001. The exercise said: “Americans can no longer take for granted basic civil rights like freedom of assembly and freedom of movement.” Yes, that was the third exercise on this topic in a very short time. That was very much in the public eye, and in just a few months, we're now in June 2001, then we move to September, there's the 9/11 attacks, and the whole issue of terrorism has gone up a notch, now really completely. is present before the global audience, the threat of terrorism is the issue that has guided and shaped the entire political debate for years.

September 2001, then October 2001, a month later letters about anthrax appear; Letters containing this fine white anthrax powder are sent to these two politicians, Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. Tom Daschle was Senate Majority Leader at the time and Patrick Leahy was chairman of the Judiciary Committee. These two politicians hadso something in common regarding the legislative changes that would be adopted after September 11, 2001, the keyword "Patriot Act", that is, restrictions on civil rights, expansion of government power, expansion of powers of the services secrets. All these legislative measures, which were being prepared at that time, were rejected by them. They came down on the side of civil rights and said we couldn't allow this expansion to happen so widely.

We have to discuss this on a case by case basis, we have to weigh it carefully. And it was in this situation that these two received anthrax letters, the sender of which remains to this day. It is debatable, it must be said. At first it was said that this came from Bin Laden, from Al-Qaeda, from Iraq, none of that could be proven. In the end, the letters were said to have come from a scientist confused in his own American bioweapons research, and that couldn't be proven either. There are many different stories going around. In fact, these attacks have not yet been resolved to this day.

But the fact is that after these two politicians received these letters, these threatening letters, it must be made clear again that if you send a letter with poisonous powder to a politician like that, it is clear that you are not killing the politician. , because politicians do not open their mail themselves, but, of course, they have employees who do so. I mean, whoever did that, he didn't want to kill him, because then he would have found other means, but he wanted to threaten him, he wanted to give him a sign: "There is a red line here." In any case, whoever the author of these letters is, these two politicians would be threatened and scared.

And whatever their attitude is about it, I don't know, but the fact is that, immediately after receiving those letters, they gave up the resistance and the laws were passed that way. These anthrax letters were given as the reason for something very interesting. Shortly after, in November 2001, a new international organization was founded at the initiative of the US government. It was called the Global Health Security Initiative and the reason given was that it was said that those anthrax letters, which everyone was talking about at the time, could strike anywhere and that any government was really threatened. Iraq, Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden could send this poisonous powder, extremely poisonous, to any of them.

Now we must unite internationally, all states, and work together against this. So this initiative was founded. The participating countries are symbolized by the following flags: Canada, the European Union, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Great Britain, the USA and, as technical advisor, also the WHO, founded in November 2001. This group is, in fact, the G8, that is, the most influential industrialized countries of the West, was complemented by Mexico and the European Union as additional actors. From then on, they met periodically at a very high level, either with the countries' own Health Ministers or with very high-ranking deputies from them, and discussed this issue of bioterrorism and coordinated with each other.

Just one year later another very important step was taken. In 2002 it was discovered that there were great similarities in emergency planning for bioterrorism and for an influenza pandemic. This means that since 2002 people have always rehearsed and prepared for both, so a terrorist attack was no longer necessarily a necessary danger. It has been said that such a virus can spread easily and is just as dangerous; we must also prepare for it. This whole topic of preparation for a pandemic, in English “Pandemic Preparedness”, began in 2002 through this international institution. A technical working group on the flu pandemic was subsequently created, led by the United States and England.

And then the exercises began that were no longer just in the United States, but were coordinated internationally. The first of these exercises was in 2003, the Global Mercury exercise. This is a graph of the practice jobs, I got it from the RKI website and you can see the participants in this graph. So here are the direct “players” European Commission, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Great Britain, United States, WHO, Canada, these are the players, and above is a director and a trial planner, who write the script. I have written for the exercise and they are playing below. Then their compatriot Germany was represented by the RKI.

This was a very extensive exercise that lasted several days. Hundreds of people participated and practiced over and over again. During this period there were a whole series of exercises of this type. The Atlantic Storm exercises were very important in 2005. Here, at the center of the lectern is Madeleine Albright, former US Secretary of State. She played the role of president in this exercise. In the documentation for this exercise we can read: How should national leaders determine border closures or quarantines? If traffic restriction measures are taken, how long should they be maintained? How would they coordinate internationally? And how would the decision to eliminate them be made?

Basically, in this exercise exactly these types of issues, which are now being debated all over the world in 2020, have already been debated very seriously and at a very high level. Let me show you who participated, including two politicians from France and Germany. Bernard Kouchner on the left, Werner Hoyer on the right. Bernard Kouchner, former French Minister of Health, later became Minister of Foreign Affairs, that is, a member of the government, and at the time of the exercise he was mentioned as the next candidate for the position of Director of the WHO , so at that time he was very important person in this field.

To the right of him, yes, and he plays the role of the French president. To the right of him is Werner Hoyer, FDP politician, who was State Secretary for Foreign Affairs and played the role of German Chancellor. They sat around a table from all these countries and played. And these were people who really had governmental responsibility. Werner Hoyer said after the exercise: "For someone who has worked for many years in security and defence, this was quite a surprising and impressive exercise. I think this kind of thing is only known to a very small minority of politicians in Europe." , I have already presented some of these exercises to you.

Maybe you recognize the parallels, maybe you recognize the pattern of what it is about. I'll do a quick summary. Of course, what was it about? Of course, it was a health emergency, it was about questions of decision-making, of powers, of who decides what, of who has a say. But it's not just about these things. It was also about a state of emergency, the abolition of fundamental rights, mass vaccination and authoritarian politics, without the participation of parliaments. Those were also the things that all of these exercises were about, and I find that very notable, because logically it's not necessarily necessary.

If we rehearse a pandemic or a terrorist attack and the responses to them, we do not automatically have to rehearse a suspension of fundamental rights. That's not automatically part of it. But it was done in such a way that an observer might get the impression that all these exercises may also have been camouflage to test a political emergency and jokingly practice how to actually act when something like this happens. At least that's my personal impression. Yes, the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 soon hit, and the issue of pandemic exercises took a back seat on the international stage.

In 2009, when the financial crisis hit the global economy, the Mexican flu pandemic came into play, I say loosely. And in the spring of 2009, when the swine flu story was just beginning and no one really knew what was going to happen, this gentleman spoke out about it. That's Jacques Atalli, maybe not everyone knows him. But he is very famous in France. He is a presidential advisor, he was for a long time an important advisor to President François Mitterrand. He prepared the G8 meetings for Mitterrand as a so-called sherpa, that is, someone who was close to power for a long time, a mastermind of the elites in France and also someone who, for example, as I learned from the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, the current President, Emanuel Macron, helped achieve this breakthrough.

He says of himself that he discovered Macron. And that's also relatively credible considering how well-connected Jacques Attali is with French elites. In early 2009, in a press intervention, which can still be found today, on the topic of the Mexican flu, he said: "History teaches us that humanity only evolves significantly when it is truly afraid that an incipient pandemic could trigger one of those structuring fears. Then we can lay the foundation for a real world government much faster than if it had been possible solely for economic reasons." I don't even want to comment on this. These are simply his statements from that time.

I find it very remarkable. Usually these types of statements are labeled as conspiracy theories, but this is real. This is a real statement from a very influential man and he said it in 2009. At the same time, a year later, in 2010, a study was published in the United States that also goes somewhat in this direction. The so-called Lock Step scenario is part of this study. I want to introduce it to you briefly, so you know a little about what it is about. The study itself is this. It is called "Scenarios for the future of technology and international development." It sounds a bit boring, a bureaucratic title, nothing spectacular, so you don't expect to hear great news at first glance.

The study was developed with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, the logo is below. The Rockefeller Foundation is one of the most powerful and richest foundations in the world. The name comes from the founder. David Rockefeller was actually the richest man in the world 100 years ago. The foundation still has great influence today in many areas. And this 2010 study basically took the strategic exercise to a whole new level. They no longer said, one way or another, what will happen if this happens, if that happens, but they developed four global future scenarios, in which directions the world could develop in the coming years, in general, and defined four directions. .

And one of these possibilities, described there, is simply to look a little outside the box, as they say in management circles, to look a little beyond the end of your nose. One of these directions was called "Lock Step", and Lock Step means even step. And in this scenario, written ten years ago, the following happens. Then, a flu pandemic spreads around the world and causes global panic. China is becoming the poster child for panic with its restrictive approach. The use of masks is becoming mandatory around the world. Authoritarian control is being exercised that will continue even after the pandemic ends.

Citizens voluntarily give up their freedom. And widespread resistance only emerges after more than a decade. That is the scenario of 2010. And it is very strange to read this now in 2020. And that is the reality we are currently living. When one reads the study, he says that the goal is to start a new strategic debate among policymakers. We don't know, or I don't know, who spoke to whom about this scenario at that time. It cannot be said in what circles it circulated, I have no information about it, but it exists. The study is available and was funded with money from a very rich foundation.

Therefore, it can be assumed that the study has already been read by some influential people. Yes, this issue of emergency and pandemic exercise has gained new momentum from 2017. What was 2017? There was a new president in the United States, Donald Trump, and I put it in context because that context seems very plausible to me. So in January 2017 Trump is inaugurated, here is a photo of the Oval Office in the White House, in the center the president's desk, on the left Barack Obama, the outgoing president shows Donald Trump the Oval Office for the first time . Yes, and everyone will remember, there was a real shock in the media around the world.

Trump is president, how is that possible? Nobody predicted it. Everyone thought it was impossible that something like this could happen, that an outsider with such rude statements, who doesn't care at all what the mainstream says. So the fact that such a person became president sent shock waves around the world. There are large international conferences held every year, Davos in January, the Munich Security Conference in February, and in this year 2017, nothing was discussed at those conferences other than the new American president. What does this mean for the world system, for world trade, for the financial system, for international diplomacy?

Can it even continue like this? At the Munich Security Conference in February 2017, John McCain appeared and said, “I refuse to accept the demise of our world order.” John McCain was still alive at the time; After all, he was one of America's military hawks and hardliners withgreat influence on international diplomacy, and his speech received great applause at this conference, where every year soldiers and diplomats from the Western world, at the NATO meeting, and if we look again at the documents, if we look at the articles from this moment of the conference, it is clear that there really was a lot at stake at that moment.

And in these elite circles there was great concern about whether NATO could continue to exist in this form, whether it would disintegrate, or whether Trump... . . or everything would fail, and it was in this context that this phrase was uttered. McCain says, "I reject the collapse of our world order," and receives great applause from his colleagues in the Western world. The next day, at the same conference, Bill Gates appears, also giving a speech, and says: "We are ignoring the link between health protection and international security at our own peril." And he says: "A biological weapons attack is coming, it's just a matter of time.

We have to be prepared for it. We must prepare for epidemics like the army prepares for war." And immediately afterward he starts again with these international exercises on pandemics. The exercise event begins again. Now we are in 2017. In May 2017 there will be a meeting of the G20 health ministers for the first time in history. The G20 is made up of the 20 richest and most powerful industrialized countries in the world, so China, India, Brazil and all European industrialized countries also participate. First of all, the Ministers of Health met here specifically to confront and prepare for this threat of bioterrorism, this pandemic danger.

And there was a big pandemic exercise in Berlin in May 2017. We see here in the front row all the Health Ministers Here Hermann Gröhe, then predecessor of the German Health Minister Jens Spahn, next to him his colleagues from China, the United States, Brazil , Canada and Australia. Everyone sits next to each other and a pandemic scenario plays out on the screen in front of them. What happens when a new virus spreads and what can we do together? The virus was not called SARS then, but MARS "Mountain Associated Respiratory Syndrome", so it is now a fictional virus that, according to the script, apparently came from the mountains.

Yes, and if you look at this, if you look at this image again, then maybe it will also become a little clear why today, in the crisis, all countries, or most countries, are working in a very coordinated way and in all parts the same. It happens: Yes, because all these officials received the same contributions before the crisis and received the same recipes, which must then be applied. They are already in sync throughout this entire exercise. At least that's how it's presented. We are still in 2017, now we are in August 2017, and Hermann Gröhe, the Minister of Health, this month presents an advisory council, an international advisory council, which will advise German health policy in view of the global situation. . . .

So Germany is supposed to implement a global health policy, lead it. . . and these gentlemen and ladies must advise the government on this matter. Of course, the person in the middle immediately stands out, we all know him. Christian Drosten is therefore a member of this advisory body. To the left of him is Llona Kickbusch, an academic from Germany, who has also done a lot of research on the topic of pandemic risk, etc., and who has played a role at the WHO. Then there is Jörg Hacker, the former president of the RKI, here is a lady from Africa, WHO regional director for Africa.

But, in my opinion, the two gentlemen of the extreme left and the extreme right are decisive, because, if you look closely, they play in a completely different division. We have Jeremy Farrar from Welcome Trust on the left. It is a British foundation that has more than 25 billion dollars. It is an incredibly influential foundation of health policy. So, in terms of money, they are more influential than the Rockefeller Foundation, than George Soros' foundation. So they have more money and the trust has an excellent network in international health policy. On the far right is Christopher Elias of the Gates Foundation, and the Gates Foundation is even bigger.

They do not have 25 billion, they have 50 billion and are even better connected and therefore play a leading role in international global health policy, one can say without exaggeration. These two gentlemen have been advisors to the German government since 2017 at a table with Christian Drosten and the Minister of Health. Maybe you should have heard this before. Okay, let's move on to next year. In 2018 there will be another major exercise in the United States on bioterrorism. This time it is not an international exercise. At this conference table in Washington are people representing the National Security Council. So, people, politicians, officials, important people in high places.

They pretend that they are now the National Security Council and there is a bioterrorist attack that they have to respond to. Seen from different perspectives, this is very interesting. We see here in the middle a video from a TV station, and this is a pre-programmed TV show, and the two women talking to each other are very well-known TV presenters in the US. If this were in Germany, it would be like if Sandra Maischberger and Maybrit Illner were talking about a bioterrorist attack and the people there responded. They have tried to make it as realistic as possible.

Let the people sitting at the table really feel: this is already a reality. A lot of effort has been put into this. Well, this exercise was about a fictional high-ranking elitist sect that developed a nasty virus in a biological laboratory in Zurich, which it then circulated around the world, causing a pandemic. And the goal of this sect would have been to reduce the world's population, so it is a very diabolical goal. That has been the scenario of this Clado Also from the right-wing party, Tom Daschle, as we mentioned before, one of the recipients of the anthrax letters.

Meanwhile, he worked as a lobbyist for healthcare companies and here he simply participated in the exercise. To his left is Tara O'Toole, a biosafety expert who has written many scripts for these exercises. For example, she wrote the script for the "Dark Winter" exercise mentioned above. After all, she's at the table too. She later played an important role in the government and yes, she is actually a key figure in this whole picture. Now that we are very close to the present, and before I talk to you about the last exercise, "Event 2-0-1" in October 2019, I want to touch on a completely different topic because I think it belongs in that context.

In the context of the question: Why did this whole coronavirus pandemic start in January 2020? Of course, you can say: Well, the virus emerged then, if we go by the official explanation, and then it just ran its course. It just happened so willed by fate. Now, if it is assumed that this did not happen in such a fateful way, but was orchestrated by some quarters as a game of thought, then it may not be uninteresting to realize what happened in September 2019. Then there was a very big tremor in the stock markets. I had heard almost nothing about it.

I had only noticed it in passing as a small report, but I did not follow it up and only now, at this conference, did I examine it more closely, as I said at the beginning. I haven't included this topic in my book yet either. To give you an idea of ​​what really happened, I will only show you a brief newspaper report that summarizes it very well. This is an article from the newspaper "Die Zeit". It was published in October 2019 and says: "Short circuit in the financial system. The US Federal Reserve wants to use billions of dollars to prevent a total collapse of the money market.

How critical is the situation?" Let me read the most important information from the article here so you understand what was going on. The crisis came immediately. There was a threat that the banks would run out of money. Central bankers pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the money market to stave off the worst. This all sounds like the height of the global financial crisis eleven years ago, but it actually describes the Monday of the penultimate week, September 2019. At that time, a significant part of the global financial system was on the brink of collapse, and the public He didn't notice almost any of it.

On the night of September 17, a certain interest rate, the interest rate applied to banks that want to lend short-term, shot up without warning. Normally banks receive cash at an interest rate of about two percent, but suddenly cash there costs ten percent. The last time Fed bankers had to intervene in the repo market, which is what this financial area is called, was after the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers in 2008. The bankruptcy of the investment bank at that time caused a emergency in that part. of the financial system, which almost led to the collapse of the world economy.

I found it very interesting, I still find it very interesting and I tried to check it out. To see the numbers I went to the website of the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, and there you will find the following graph. For those who are not very familiar with finances and numbers: do not be alarmed! This graph is not magical or as complicated as it seems at first glance. Let me try to explain it to you briefly. The graph shows the balance sheet, that is, the total balance sheet of the central bank. It could be translated like this: The graph shows how much money the Federal Reserve has invested in the US economy.

So: how many government bonds will you buy? How many corporate bonds do you buy too? That means the Federal Reserve is creating money and putting it into the market to compensate for the fact that banks are no longer lending money to each other because they have lost trust. So that's what happens. You could also call this, somewhat simplistically, a feverish curve for the US economy. Of course. Let's start on the left. In 2008, before the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve had total assets of about $1 trillion, or $1 trillion. That number doubled in just a few weeks in the fall of 2008.

Yes, why did it double? Because the banks had stopped lending to each other. Trust was gone, and that is the point at which the central bank has to intervene, otherwise the system will collapse, otherwise it will happen. Interestingly, this has not been reduced, but the level has remained the same in the years to come. This increased in 2010/2011, '12, '13, '14 and increased further. And then there was a plateau phase from 2015 to the end of 2017, with a very high plateau phase, 4 trillion, that is, 4 times the pre-crisis value. And if you look at it now from today's distance, you will see that this bubble was huge.

And it is clear that such a large bubble cannot be maintained forever. At some point you will have to deflate it or the bubble will burst. And that is exactly what the Federal Reserve tried to do at the end of 2017. It has decided to slowly, deliberately and steadily deflate this bubble, sell assets and thus take money out of the system. And that was fine for two years, from late 2017 to late 2019, and we'll focus on that. There you see again how continually, month after month, the central bank has tried to deflate the bubble and the markets have followed suit.

Investors accepted that and in September 2019 something happened. I don't know what, I can't tell you, but the fact is that confidence in that financial market, in the repo market, collapsed in September 2019. And that meant that the central bank had to completely change course. He had to completely reverse what he had been doing for two years. He had to go shopping again. That was a shock to this bank and you see this increase here. It has nothing to do with Corona. We are in January 2020. This is the rise in the shadow of Corona in March. But this here, October, November, December 2019, has nothing to do with the Corona crisis.

But it is the same movement that only got stronger later. Now we agree on this. . . Oh no, first I want to show you a report from January 2020, that is, even before Corona became the main topic in the media, starting from January 16. Norbert Häring, a journalist for the Handelsblatt, wrote an article about this increase and in it he writes: "The Federal Reserve justified its intervention - unconvincingly - with a temporal miscalculation of its own. It should in no way be concluded that the banks have already They don't trust each other. The alleged miscalculation seems quite persistent.

Four months later, the emergency loans are still in place, still in rampant amounts, and their end is in sight. The Federal Reserve does not reveal the names of the recipients of the loans. "Perhaps the central bank-driven financial market boom is in its final stages before collapse." Let me put this in a broader temporal context. I looked up a graph of the Federal Reserve's total assets, not just ten years out, but hundred years out. After all, this bank has been around for so long - this is this curve. There you can see to what extent the Federal Reserve participates in the economyUnited States.

And we see that the financial crisis is here in 2008. The last time there was such a magnitude was in the Great Depression of 1930. Values ​​until World War II slowly declined after World War II. At this level, at this severity, we find ourselves with the financial crisis of 2008 and also with the crisis that broke out again in September 2019. That is the dimension in which we find ourselves from a financial and political perspective. In October 2019, the following exercise was carried out: Event 2-0-1. This is the place, the hotel where that exercise was carried out. This is a luxury hotelManhattan on Fifth Avenue that we see here.

This is Central Park up there. And if you walk a little further down the street, a few blocks away is Trump Tower. This is the most expensive street in Manhattan. And this hotel was inaugurated in 1930 in the middle of the economic crisis with money from the big Wall Street banks, and the architecture of this top floor is based on the chapel of the castle of Versailles, that is, on this baroque splendor of Louis XIV. Because the Wall Street bankers who financed this also wanted to live in this splendor and also saw themselves on this level. Yes, the hotel still exists, and it was there, right there in New York, that this exercise took place.

Two O One event, where a coronavirus pandemic was effectively rehearsed. Let me briefly tell you who is sitting here at the table, so you can get an idea of ​​the people who were rehearsing here. This is the moderator of the Center, formerly Security. Next to him is Christopher Elias, who we talked about earlier. He is from the Gates Foundation and has now been an advisor to the Federal Government, as we have heard before. To the right of him sits the director of the American Center for Epidemic Control. This person is the head of China's epidemic control agency.

They also participated in this exercise. This person is the vice president of Johnson & Johnson, the world's largest pharmaceutical company by market value. This is the former vice president of the CIA, she was also on this panel. And the gentleman in front is the president of the Edelman public relations agency. That is the largest public relations agency in the world. During this conference, this exercise, as I said, of a coronavirus pandemic was rehearsed, also for public relations purposes. The documentation says: "Governments will need to work with media companies to research and develop more advanced approaches to combating disinformation.

This requires developing the capacity to flood the media with fast, accurate and consistent information. Media companies, for their part On the other hand, they must ensure that official messages are prioritized and that false reports are suppressed, including through technology." And that is basically what is happening now. Here is another photo from this conference. We see the organizers here. This is the director of the Center for Health Security, Anita Cicero. She is a lawyer. Before working at this institute, she worked for a large law firm as a pharmaceutical lobbyist. She was in charge of 300 lawyers and among her interlocutors were They met members of the European Commission and politicians from the US Senate, whom she was able to familiarize with the interests of the pharmaceutical industry before becoming deputy director of this center and helping to organize these types of companies. of exercises.

What I find very interesting is the presentation in the upper left part of the photo, where you can see how this crisis that developed fictitiously is visualized. So you can see a graph here, the number of cases, how they are developing. You can see which countries are affected to what extent, how stock prices are developing and, at the same time, how many deaths are expected in the coming months. That is exactly the type of presentations that we are receiving in the Corona crisis through Johns Hopkins University, which did this exercise, and that this institution also presents to us in all media.

Exactly this type of graphical representation of the figures, that is exactly our reality now and the proposed limitations of social networks and so on and that YouTube, Google and big companies have to intervene in such a restrictive way. What was planned here in advance is now also a reality at this moment, and I think that all this information together is an important background for forming an opinion about what is really happening here at this moment. Yes, thank you for your attention.