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June 12, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — “Nothing will ever be the same again.” It was the mantra that we heard in many countries at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. It came with a warning that a “new normal” would replace the existing order. Easy travel, interpersonal relations, large gatherings, even things like shaking hands would have to give way to long-term social distancing, drastic rules, and surveillance. But these changes on the personal level are only a part of the picture. The World Economic Forum, together with Prince Charles of England and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), has launched an initiative revealingly dubbed “The Great Reset,” with the objective of “rebuilding” the world’s economic and social system in order to make it more “sustainable.”

The idea has received the full support of the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, former president of the Socialist International from 1999 to 2005.

Technically, a reset is a re-initialization: in the language of our digital era, it means erasing all hardware and data on a hard disk and formatting it anew in view of a fresh start. Transposed to human activity, a reset means a revolution: a deep transformation of all that is done, thought, or believed — making a clean break with the past.

For many decades, the World Economic Forum, founded by Prof Klaus Schwab in 1971, has been getting heads of state, billionaires, and heads of big business together yearly in order to reflect on economical and governance issues and work toward a common end: free global trade, common world rules to supersede national sovereign decisions, promoting nondiscrimination, “to transform economies and societies.”

For a long time, its yearly meetings in Davos were held discreetly, even secretively. This has slowly changed, as the WEForum’s objectives have become more mainstream: its main meetings, schedules, and list of participants are now available online even though it is widely said that many talks and decisions of the mighty take place after official hours.

But the 2021 edition promises to be quite different. While a physical meeting will be held in the Swiss skiing resort town of Davos as usual — and no one enters Davos at that time of year without an official invitation to the Forum — this time, there will be global online participation for a virtual forum including many “stakeholders” and young people who will be told they will have a determining voice for the world to come. Some would call that “group dynamics.”

Over the months running up to the January Davos meeting, “The Great Reset Dialogues” will prepare the event in an online series that promises to be well worth watching by those who want to know how the globalists of the World Economic Forum want to reshape the future. And, yes, they can be called “globalists” because that is how the Initiative’s present ambassadors are portraying themselves.

An example? Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. He said: “I consider this painful global pandemic to be a complex, adaptive challenge. In a connected and interdependent world, a complex and adaptive challenge cannot be solved by individual countries alone — it can only be addressed through … collective action and global cooperation.”

This fits in neatly with António Guterres’s wish that 10 percent of the Earth’s GDP be used internationally to respond to the economic and sanitary fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, with “global” solutions in view of “rebirthing” society.

Looking at WEForum’s Great Reset Initiative that grew out of the COVID Action Platform, it appears that most of the chips are already down. The “green economy,” “de-carbonizing,” “fighting inequalities,” “stakeholder capitalism,” and “sustainable development goals” (as in the U.N.’s “SDGs”) are the recurring terms in WEForum’s articles presenting the Initiative. None of these is new or original; in fact, the main thing that has modified the situation is the pandemic, which is being used as a driver for change. How? Through the global economic crash that accompanied it “thanks” to lockdown.

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As for the Reset itself, it was already being talked about before the Chinese coronavirus was moving out of Wuhan. On December 30, 2019, for instance, the Financial Times published a YouTube presentation under the title “Why capitalism needs to be reset in 2020.” Here the recurring theme is “stakeholder capitalism,” by which “a company’s approach to people, the planet, and innovation — including how it protects and applies the value added of its data — must figure more prominently in capital-allocation decisions” (as the WEForum site explains).

Presenting the Great Reset Initiative of which he is one of the main leaders, Prince Charles seemed quite pleased with the situation: “We have a golden opportunity to seize something good from this crisis. Its unprecedented shockwaves may well make people more receptive to big visions of change,” he said.

Key quotes from the virtual online meeting. during which World Economic Forum president Prof. Klaus Schwab, Prince Charles, and several others presented the Great Reset Initiative, included many such remarks.

Noting that “climate change” was a much greater danger than the coronavirus pandemic, Prince Charles hoped for a “green recovery”: “It’s an opportunity we’ve never had before and may never have again,” he said. Considering our planet almost as a person, he said: “Our activities have been damaging her immune system.”

Schwab called the present situation a “unique window of opportunity.” We must “build a new social contract,” he said. “We must change our mindsets” and our “lifestyles,” he also remarked.

Will this be a remake of the French Revolution that held, with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that man is born naturally good and corrupted by society, and that society must result from a “social contract” in which laws and moral norms are not the expression of divine law, but of the will of the majority? History has shown that revolutions built on that premise end in tyranny.

One of the major objectives of the “Great Reset” is “reducing inequalities,” which in everyday terms means “redistributing wealth.” This idea takes for granted that inequality is evil of itself. Speaking during the virtual Great Reset meeting, Guterres said the COVID-19 crisis should lead to a response to “unsustainable levels of inequality and the lawlessness of cyberspace.”

Carbon taxing and “renewable energy” are also high on the Great Reset agenda. Guterres quoted the need to “advance towards zero emissions” and implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the U.N. These SDGs, with their socialist mindset and eco-radicalism, advocate “for universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights,” U.N. jargon that includes contraception and abortion — not least because the human population is seen as nature’s and “biodiversity’s” main enemy.

The IMF’s managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, who grew up in Communist Bulgaria, promoted the same “green” approach. While the IMF is providing emergency assistance that is expected to run up to 100 billion dollars, with “170 countries” expected to have a smaller economy at the end of 2020 than they started out with at the beginning of the year, Georgieva stated:

We see a very massive injection of fiscal stimulus[.] … But it is paramount that this should lead to a greener, fairer, smarter world in the future.

In other words, financial assistance must be used and distributed in order to favor ecologically correct enterprises. She added that there must be “low carbon incentives,” taking “advantage of low oil prices” to add “a carbon price as an incentive.” “We need a Great Reset, not a great reversal,” she concluded.

Perhaps the most noteworthy speaker at the virtual launch of the Great Reset was Ma Jun, of (Communist) China’s Green Finance Committee. He is also special adviser to the governor of the Chinese Communist Party–controlled People’s Bank of China and was presented before his talk at the virtual launch of the Great Reset as an “NPC member.” “NPC” stands for the National People’s Congress, which in theory is the highest political authority in China, where, however, president Xi Jinping and the ruling Communist Party reign supreme.

Ma Jun insisted that the post-COVID recovery must be “greener than any of the previous recoveries,” through the financing of “green projects” that must be “higher than any time in history.”

Ma also said “Consumption stimulus needs to be green. Governments could make a list of green consumer goods and these should be given preference on list of consumer subsidies and coupons.”

Noting that migrant workers have lost jobs in China, he added: “Instead of paying them unemployment benefits, we should ask them to plant trees and pay them for that.”

As to “non green projects,” Ma Jun proclaimed, they should be subject to “new regulations” obliging them to meet “strict environmental standards” and be made to “release information” about their compliance “on a mandatory basis.”

Remember that these recommendations were being made by Ma Jun not for China alone (which is the world’s largest carbon-emitter, with new coal plants planned for building up to 2030), but for the whole world.

He was in fact echoing the wish of Bernard Looney, BP (formerly British Petroleum)’s CEO, who said earlier, “Any recovery stimulus should have green conditions attached.” This would mean allowing non-compliant businesses to die after having been badly wounded by lockdown.

Looney also admires China: “Chinese recovery could engine us out of the crisis,” he said.

Moving back to the World Economic Forum’s publications on the COVID-19 crisis and the proper way out of it, we must not forget that gender ideology is also part of the ecological-socialist package. In an op-ed by John Miller titled “Great Reset: Why LGBT+ inclusion is the secret to cities' post-pandemic success,” weforum.org claimed that “a strong positive correlation exists between LGBT+ inclusion and economic resilience.” “In particular, cities that embrace diversity may reap an ‘inclusion dividend’ as they begin to rebuild their economies,” it went on to say.

While the crisis is “threatening to roll back decades of progress in the fight against poverty,” it said that “LGBT inclusion” will allow to recover more rapidly according to “Open for Business,” a coalition of companies that promote “LGBT+ equality.”

“This is a significant finding: a one-point increase in social acceptance suggests a three-point increase in that economy’s economic resilience index, even when controlling for GDP per capita. Could LGBT+ inclusion be a secret ingredient for economic resilience?,” wrote John Miller. He suggested that “openness” and “innovation” are linked to the acceptance of homosexual and trans lifestyles.

“Now is the time to be embracing LGBT+ communities, not stigmatizing them. Creating inclusive societies isn’t just the right thing to do; as the evidence shows, it’s an important part of an economic strategy focused on resilience and recovery:” Miller’s conclusion is also a clear indicator of what the COVID-19 crisis is being used to promote.

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Jeanne Smits has worked as a journalist in France since 1987 after obtaining a Master of Arts in Law. She formerly directed the French daily Présent and was editor-in-chief of an all-internet French-speaking news site called reinformation.tv. She writes regularly for a number of Catholic journals (Monde & vie, L’Homme nouveau, Reconquête…) and runs a personal pro-life blog. In addition, she is often invited to radio and TV shows on alternative media. She is vice-president of the Christian and French defense association “AGRIF.” She is the French translator of The Dictator Pope by Henry Sire and Christus Vincit by Bishop Schneider, and recently contributed to the Bref examen critique de la communion dans la main about Communion in the hand. She is married and has three children, and lives near Paris.