In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State – Solzhenitsyn
IN A healthy society the publication of a peer-reviewed study demonstrating that lockdowns have no clear positive effect on reducing mortality from SARS2-COVID19, along with irrefutable evidence from Sweden, Japan, Florida, South Dakota, Mexico, Belarus and elsewhere that lockdowns are unnecessary would lead to the immediate cessation of this catastrophically destructive policy, just as evidence that wearing masks has no clear positive effect would have led to the cessation of this shameful assault on human dignity.
The fact that this has not occurred in either case, or even been considered, shows that whatever logic is driving UK government policies it cannot be a reasonable concern for public health, nor is it based on science.
What then is the logic? Since at least May last year, by which point it was clear that initial claims about the lethality of the virus had been wildly exaggerated, the same question of madness or conspiracy has exercised the minds of everyone who refuses to stop thinking for themself.
Evidently both panic and incompetence, on the one hand, and sociopathic opportunism on the other are involved to some degree; the question is their relative proportions. Who is the conductor of this orchestra, and who is only following the score?
The central role of China was anatomised by Michael Senger in a forensic article published in Tablet last year. As Senger notes, the policy of lockdown, never implemented in any previous pandemic, was in effect invented by the Chinese Communist Party in January 2020. It was then pushed in the West by online botnets and China-friendly institutions including the World Health Organisation and Imperial College London, not to mention Anthony Fauci, the American medical bureaucrat involved in commissioning ‘gain of function’ research on coronaviruses in the Wuhan lab from which SARS2-COVID19 probably emerged.
For the CCP, weakening American and therefore Western influence is a logical objective in itself given their geopolitical ambitions. The problem is that this aim is shared inside the United States by the globalist coalition which controls the Democratic Party and its clients.
For them, lockdowns facilitated the destruction of a booming Trump economy which had produced the first downward transfer of wealth in America in this century, and sent it back towards their oligarch backers. At the same time, it allowed the Democrats to institute a new voting system, which they used to install Biden in the White House.
The importance of vaccine capitalist Bill Gates, who last October organised the pandemic simulation exercise Event 201, and who financially backs all the key players pushing for lockdowns and vaccines, awaits a systematic exposition, but his economic motives are relatively clear. A genius at creating monopolies, Gates once boasted of the huge returns his investments in global health have produced: ‘We feel there’s been over a 20-to-1 return.’
But there is a broader vision. As a strategic partner of the World Economic Forum, an honorific held only by those whose share an ‘alignment with forum values’, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is an architect of the ‘great reset’ initiative of technocratic corporatism replacing capitalism and democracy. From this perspective the lockdowns and the devastation they cause is a means towards an end, and there’s no reason to think the next phase of the plan will be gentler.
Conspiratorial power exists in every society, and in a healthy society represents the spirit of enterprise. But as civilisations decline it becomes corrupt and rapacious. The power elite and their retinues are dominated by individuals without any integrity or even personality, who have acquired positions through flattery and collusion rather than merit or virtue. Incapable of leadership, they surrender to delusions and greed.
Doubtless every crisis creates opportunities for profiteers: hence the return of Anthony Blair, the true scale of whose global business empire is revealed here, one based on lucrative contracts with many who can be described as criminal and tyrants. Nonetheless from a more national perspective, the political failure which lockdowns represent is unmistakable. Like the slave-labour economy of post-revolutionary Russia, it represents the sacrifice of an entire society by dysfunctional governments, incapable of managing social problems in a more sophisticated way.
Notwithstanding their recent logistical success in the roll-out of an untested experimental genetic therapy, in fact a highly risky gamble, the corruption and incompetence of Johnson and his government must be obvious to everyone with eyes to see. But the deeper issue lies in the system which delivered them to power in the first place.
In a healthy system, Parliamentarians of the calibre of Graham Brady, Desmond Swayne and Charles Walker would be normal, not extraordinary, and Labour would be a party of the workers, not the creature of the administrative State. In the House of Commons sit six hundred individuals who have no business being there, and a similar number in the Lords. This same story extends to journalism, which is overcrowded with careerist apparatchiks, not to mention the police force, education and the law. As with the virus itself, which presents only a minimal risk to healthy individuals, it was the weakened social immune system of Britain and the West in general which enabled the events of 2020 to devastate the free world with such force.
Abuse of power always involves abuse of language. Since March 2020 discourse in the UK has been dominated by mixed metaphors and leaden cliches, and propaganda slogans designed by government behavioural psychologists to terrorise the population.
Emergency press conferences called with calculated urgency showcase Johnson and his henchmen speaking in unfalsifiable subjunctives and conditionals intended to suspend the question of the truth. Elsewhere, a clumsy use of metaphors and metonyms, whether the depersonalising ‘jabs in arms’ or Johnson’s refusal to take his ‘foot off the neck of the beast’, reveals the failure of leadership to grasp the nature of the problem.
Misuse of language is accompanied by a blizzard of decontextualised and manipulated numbers deployed to justify yet more repressive policies.
‘The ideal subject of totalitarian rule,’ remarks Hannah Arendt, ‘is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.’ This is a description of the British government and also the broader British elite. What matters to them isn’t controlling the virus, but controlling the narrative, regardless of the suffering it causes.
The usual idea of madness is a dramatic deviation from a normal rationality, but the truth is that most people are not thinking rationally most of the time. Balanced judgment is the exception, not the rule. The point of education and culture is to produce a people and a leadership which is capable of thinking clearly and confronting problems calmly. Evidently such a culture hasn’t existed in this country for some time.
Johnson, who is interested in classics, will know the term phronesis, or wise practical judgment. In its absence Britain is abandoned to shallow, therefore widespread motives which the Prime Minister embodies: arrogance and vanity and cowardice, piling wreckage upon wreckage, lie on lie.
