The Great Reset

'The Great Reset' was an initiative launched at the 51st meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2021. The aim was to unite people of goodwill to bring about a post-COVID-19 world that was more prosperous, cooperative and respectful of the environment and human beings, resolutely turning the page on neoliberalism (defined as "unregulated and unrestricted capitalism").

According to the WEF head Klaus Schwab, "this global pandemic has also demonstrated once again how interconnected we are [and it] is our duty to re-establish a functional system of intelligent global cooperation, structured to meet the challenges of the next 50 years. [...] We must ensure that new technologies in the digital, biological and physical world remain people-centred and serve society as a whole, offering everyone equal access."

In July 2020, Schwab, together with economist Thierry Malleret, published the book COVID-19: The Great Reset, described as "a guide for anyone who wants to understand how COVID-19 disrupted our social and economic systems, and what changes will be needed to create a more inclusive, resilient and sustainable world going forward. Klaus Schwab, founder and executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, and Thierry Malleret, founder of the Monthly Barometer, explore what the root causes of these crisis were, and why they lead to a need for a Great Reset. Theirs is a worrying, yet hopeful analysis. COVID-19 created a great disruptive reset of our global social, economic, and political systems. But the power of human beings lies in being foresighted and having the ingenuity, at least to a certain extent, to take their destiny into their hands and to plan for a better future. This is the purpose of this book: to shake up and to show the deficiencies which were manifest in our global system, even before COVID broke out."

Like a number of other scientific, diplomatic and technocratic expressions (see "Coloured Revolution", "Deep State" and "New World Order"), the "Great Reset" theme has been the subject of a major disinformation campaign, especially on the part of the far right.

Taken up by Mgr Carlo Viganò, the former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, in an open letter to US President Donald Trump on 25 October 2020, the term "Great Reset" has become increasingly popular with conspiracy theorists, who interpret it as a stage in a diabolical globalist plan to push through freedom-destroying measures. In their view, the health measures taken in several countries around the world to curb the Covid-19 pandemic, such as lockdown and business closures, were in fact intended to deliberately ruin the economies of the countries concerned in order to accelerate the introduction of a "health dictatorship" and/or a generalised regime of totalitarian surveillance. The "Great Reset" has been portrayed as "a plan by the global elite to abolish private property and borders, end individual freedoms and enslave humanity".

(Last updated on 10/02/2021)