Earlier this week, on a special quarantined edition of the RIP a Livecast, we had System of A Down drummer John Dolmayan on the show to talk about his new solo album, These Grey Men. We kicked off the conversation with some small talk and asked him about how the current quarantine is affecting him.
Dolmayan was very forthcoming with his answers (transcribed by Blabbermouth). He said he was most concerned about the economic impact: "Honestly, I think there's a lot of positives that can come out of this. But at the end of the day, what I'm really concerned with is that people are financially gonna be hit very hard. I don't wanna see high unemployment levels. I have a business that I run. We have 15 empoyees, and I'm doing the best I can to keep everybody employed. That's the only thing you're really concerned with during times like this.
"I guess I'm not quite as afraid as other people are about the virus itself," he continued. "I feel like human beings are made to combat viruses. We have systems in place in our bodies to combat viruses. If there's one positive thing, to powers that be, it got rid of a lot of people that were protesting really fast. So, I don't know. I question stuff, and I have my own theories on things, and people think I'm an idiot sometimes for it. But I also have a big imagination."
We asked him to clarify what protesters he meant, and then he elaborated "Well, there were protesters in Hong Kong, there were protesters in France, there were protesters in Italy, Lebanon, Chile — there were protests happening worldwide, people demanding change from their governments, and it's just kind of convenient that there's a coronavirus and all those protests go away.
"I write for a hobby, and I actually started writing my own comic book that's gonna come out in a couple of months or so, whenever this thing clears up, so I do have an active imagination and I see depths in things and reasons within reasons and stuff like that," he explained. "Maybe I'm nuts or maybe my philosophies have a ring of truth to them, but I just think that there's interesting coincidences and convenient things that happen to motivate things. World War I started on an assassination attempt. Was that person assassinated by the people that wanted the war? There's just things that happened in history that are interesting that are hard to explain.
"What did these viruses pop out of? It's not bats and shit like that," he said. "People in China have been eating that way for thousands of years."
He then spoke about China's role in the spread of the pandemic, theorizing "There's nothing China's gonna do in the first few weeks to stop people from buying and consuming Chinese product. This is my theory — they would prefer the entire world economy being bad than just the Chinese economy. Because what happens if we can't get our goods from China because there's a shutdown in China? Then we're gonna get it from other places — their competitors. And once you develop supply chains from other places, then people get used to working with other people, they're not necessarily gonna wanna go back and work with China afterwards.
"There's a whole political, global, financial thing you have to understand," he added. "They don't care about a couple of million people dying. And I'm not just talking about China; I'm talking about governments in general. Because they have to look at it kind of like an ant colony. It's more important for the ant colony to survive than members of the ant colony, including the queen. It's understandable, although it's not fun to think about things in those terms."
A recent study first published in the scientific journal Nature Medicine, concluded that the virus "is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus." The researchers ultimately concluded "we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible" because it does not share any "previously used virus backbone." The study said the virus likely originated from a recombination of a virus found in bats and another virus, with researchers speculating it may have come from pangolins.
Listen to the full interview below:
