What is going on with the World Health Organisation? In December 2021 it began to talk about a global pandemic treaty. And now an International Treaty on Pandemic Preparedness, Prevention and Response will be presented to the 77th World Health Assembly between May 27th and June 1st: that is, next week. In the Daily Sceptic David Bell has done good work in going through the articles of the draft treaty, and also noting that we should read the amendments to the International Health Regulations too. But I want to ask a broader question. Is this a world state through the back door?
No one spoke about a world state much — except dismissively — until the early 20th century. H.G. Wells was fond of the idea. It was a modish subject at around the time of the formation of the League of Nations and again around the time of the formation of the United Nations, though, interestingly, it was usually dismissed. In the last 30 years the question of a world state has returned, though the answer is usually still negative.
However, one of the fundamental laws of politics is, and has been ever since Thucydides — or Augustus — that a thing can be one thing and yet can be called another thing. Politics is, as everyone has known since before Socrates, a rhetorical art: and the art of rhetoric involves all manner of minimisations, exaggerations, substitutions, reversals, redescriptions.
So what has happened in the last 30 years is not that we have become enthusiasts for something called a world state, but that we have become enthusiasts for something that we by and large do not want to call a world state while hoping — consciously, unconsciously — that it will be a world state.
Consciously: here I refer to the hypocrites, who want a world state but know they should not say so.
Hellbound and Down 