Another catastrophic World War looms that will engulf North America and Europe.

When COVID-19 came to the 21st century five years ago, it altered our psychologically as radically as the Black Death did to those who lived in 14th-century Europe. During the worst of our pandemic, populations around the world experienced moments of panic, intense fear and profound loneliness.

Photo by 𝕶𝖚𝖒𝖆𝖘 𝕿𝖆𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖓𝖊 on Unsplash

Initially, governments attempted to combat the anxiety of their citizens by messaging that the fight to end the pandemic was a battle for everyone's right to survive it. However, the wartime spirit of every shoulder to the wheel was short-lived because large amounts of capital resources were needed to effectively combat the pandemic, which could only be obtained by unloosening and redistributing a portion of the 1%'s wealth for the good of society. Not surprisingly, no government did this, and no oligarch volunteered their capital to preserve society in its 2019 variant.

As the pandemic persisted, denialism, abandonment of reason and the embrace of superstition to ward off death returned to society because social media was being manipulated by right-wing political forces whose allegiance was to the oligarchs of the economy. The shock from the pandemic overwhelmed people because the death rate was astronomical during its first year, and people’s lives were put on hold.

The lockdowns, the human contact restrictions, the financial worries, the stress and and uncertainty disturbed society’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction. It was more comforting to believe what was happening to them was not real. And if Covid wasn't real or lethal neither were measles, rubella, whooping cough, small pox, polio, and tuberculosis. Conservatives consider denial is better than science to defeat disease or prevent humanity’s extinction from the climate emergency.

Once doubt was created as to whether the plague was lethal or even existed, the economy could return to normal operations as if it was the day before the pandemic's arrival rather than the day after. People were compelled by peer, news media, social media and economic pressure to resume their "normal" lives of shopping, socialising and working without adequate protection against Covid.

The Covid pandemic divided humanity’s past and its present, the way the Berlin Wall once separated East and West Germany. In 2025, with strained eyes, we look out across a border of time that may as well be fortified with minefields, watchtowers, and barbed wire because it is impenetrable to cross.

The time before COVID wasn’t even close to being equal or progressive. But it felt safe because we were still allowed to believe the delusion that the system was able to reform, but not anymore. The Welfare State and post-world war consensus of the rule of law, social incrementalism, and removal of trade barriers are over. We can not return to the comforts and false notions of that previous world because politics and society were altered by the oligarchs, the 1%, the corporate news media, and the neoliberal political class.

Only grifters, charlatans, fools and the wealthy pretend the neoliberal system can be reformed or is functioning in the best interest of society. Fascism incubated in that pupa of pandemic chaos created by the 1%, and in 2025 emerged fully formed under Donald Trump’s Presidency and it has infected America’s vassal States. Governments, in Europe and Canada are retooling their economies for war, and replacing what is left of their Welfare States with Police States.

Another catastrophic World War looms. It may come this year or in the next, but it will. America, not just Donald Trump, has delusions of imperial grandeur to erase the doubt that their Empire is suffering from irrevocable decline. The right's battle against science, reason, truth and tolerance since COVID weakened society so much that eighty years after Hitler's suicide. It seems we didn't win World War Two but only granted humanity a stay of execution from totalitarianism, which has now expired.

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