The Economist: Prophecies for the World, Russian covers and the Rothschilds loud-hailer

Especially if you do not forget about the fact that the magazine is considered to be the loud-hailer of the Rothschilds, the oldest financial clan of the planet.

Christina Zabirova

2019 ended, and 2020 began for The Economist with a cover on which there were no pictures or collages traditional for the weekly magazine: it was stylized as a table of Dutch ophthalmologist Herman Snellen, which has become the world standard for checking visual acuity. (In the territory of the former USSR, the so-called Sivtsev table is most common)

Only, of course, it was not just a literal vinaigrette that was portrayed, but a kind of encrypted message, open for the interpretation by a multimillion readership.

The weekly circulation of the publication is 1,500,000 copies. One of the editorial records was the success of 2012, when the circulation exceeded 1,600,000 copies. On the Internet you can find information that each issue of The Economist is read by more than six million people, among them, of course, global players: key politicians and leading businessmen from different countries.

In this coded “dispatch” dedicated to the onset of 2020, one could “consider”, for example, the following: Trump, recession, Xi (Jinping), climate, Brexit, artificial intelligence (AI), Tokyo, Mars, Russia, biodiversity , rat, nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) and much more.

The covers of the publication have long been credited with conspiracy theories, they are often called "predictions." For lovers of reading between the lines and looking everywhere for the secret meaning here is a real expanse.

In this context, the cover of June 27 of this year is very curious, the inscription on which reads: "The next disaster (and how to survive it)"

Illustration by Andrea Ucini. A family of three is depicted. Parents - and even the cat - in gas masks, and the child, for some reason, only in a helmet.

All of them are sitting on a sofa, and the wall behind is decorated with seven paintings on which, obviously, these same "catastrophes" are captured, among which there is a nuclear explosion, and an asteroid, and viruses, and a volcanic eruption. You can also see flashes in the sun, a submarine and a picture of a pig (apparently a reference to swine flu).

At the same time, the wall clock shows 12 minutes without two, and, among other things, ducks are circling the “merry” family. Probably symbolizing the mass "flight" of birds, in connection with the impending "catastrophe".

However, the cover of The Economist, as always, is open to interpretation.

Without registering on the publication’s website, you can only read the introduction.

The article, an illustration from which hit the June cover, is called: “Politicians ignore far-out risks: they need to up their game”

Further the text is as follows:

Preparedness is one of the things that governments are for

IN 1993 THIS newspaper told the world to watch the skies. At the time, humanity’s knowledge of asteroids that might hit the Earth was woefully inadequate. Like nuclear wars and large volcanic eruptions, the impacts of large asteroids can knock seven bells out of the climate; if one thereby devastated a few years’ worth of harvests around the globe it would kill an appreciable fraction of the population. Such an eventuality was admittedly highly unlikely. But given the consequences, it made actuarial sense to see if any impact was on the cards, and at the time no one was troubling themselves to look.

Asteroid strikes were an extreme example of the world’s wilful ignorance, perhaps—but not an atypical one. Low-probability, high-impact events are a fact of life. Individual humans look for protection from them to governments and, if they can afford it, insurers. Humanity, at least as represented by the world’s governments, reveals instead a preference to ignore them until forced to rea

Humanity, at least in the face of world governments, discovers instead a preference to ignore them until it is forced to reeact - even when foresight's tag-price is small. It is an abdication of responsibility and a betrayal of the future”

Does this mean that that this leap coronavirus 2020 year is preparing for us some new “surprises”?

But back to the cover design for The Economist.

The correspondent of "Novye Izvestia" got acquainted with the electronic archive of the publication, located on the website of The Economist.

Here you can find issues of the magazine since 1997. Of course, it was especially interesting what kind of covers during this time the influential foreign media devoted to Russia.

In total, I managed to count over 30 covers, one way or another connected with our country.

Looking at these creations, even if you don’t know English, you can easily make sure that the “original” stereotypes about Russia in the West are still reverently loved: bears, rude men in winter cotton-wadded jackets, icons and churches, bloodthirsty and rattling weapons...

The main character, of course, is President Putin. But even several covers with Yeltsin have survived. It is curious that there is not a single cover with Medvedev, who was president of Russia from 2008 to 2012. During his reign, The Economist published a photo of Putin on the covers.

We invite our readers to follow the evolution of the “Russian” cover of The Economist and form their opinions on the work of the foreign editorial office and on the meanings and ideas that Western journalists put into these works.

I would also like to show some spectacular covers that are of the current interest.