When Danielle Smith was chosen by the United Conservative Party of Alberta to replace Jason Kenney as their leader early last month and consequentially became that province’s premier she started off her premiership with a bang by giving an exceptionally great speech. Even if we had not heard a word of it we would know it to be very good from the outrage it provoked on the part of Alberta’s socialists and the clowns in the legacy media, that is to say, the print and broadcast news outlets that predate cable news, talk radio, and the internet, which in Canada are all hopelessly corrupt having been bought off years ago by the dimwitted creep and lout who currently occupies the Prime Minister’s Office. The best response to the legacy media, other than to cut oneself off from it altogether, is to look at what they are promoting and root for the opposite and to look at what they are saying and believe the opposite. So when they began to howl and rage and storm and demand that Smith apologize for saying that the unvaccinated had experienced the most discrimination of any group in her lifetime, their reaction in itself was a powerful indicator of the truth of Smith’s words.
It has now been a few generations since the old liberalism succeeded in generating a near-universal consensus of public opinion, at least within Western Civilization, against discrimination. At the time the discrimination the liberals were concerned with was of the de jure type – laws and government policies which singled out specific groups and imposed hardships and disadvantages of various types upon them. It was not that difficult, therefore, for liberalism to create widespread public opinion against it. Since ancient times it has been understood that government or the state exists to serve the end of justice. In Modern times justice has come to be depicted in art as wearing a blindfold. This imagery is somewhat problematic – blindness to the facts of the case to be ruled on is not an attribute of justice but of its opposite – but is generally accepted as depicting true justice’s blindness to factors which should have no weight in ruling on a dispute between two parties or on the evidence in a case involving criminal charges against someone, factors such as wealth or social status. If this latter is indeed a quality of justice then for the state to discriminate against people on the basis of such factors is for it to pervert its own end and to commit injustice. This is what made the old liberalism’s campaign against discrimination so effective. What they were decrying was already perceivably unjust by existing and long-established standards.
Liberalism, however, was not content with winning over the public into supporting their opposition to laws and government policies that discriminated on such grounds as race and sex. Liberalism had set equality, which is something quite different from justice as that term was classically and traditionally understood, as its end and ideal and consequently with regards to discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, etc., they adopted a much more ambitious goal than just the elimination of existing unjust laws and policies, but rather set their sights on the elimination of discrimination based on such factors from all social interaction and economic transaction and as much as possible from private thought and speech. Indeed it was this goal rather than ending de jure discrimination that was clearly the objective of such legislation as the US Civil Rights Act (1964), the UK Race Relations Acts of 1965, 1968 and 1976 and the Canadian Human Rights Act (1977). Ironically, having so expanded their anti-discrimination project to target private thoughts and actions the liberals had to move away from their initial opposition to the injustice of state discrimination. The project of achieving equality by eliminating private discrimination required the cooperation of the state and laws and measures enacted by the state in pursuit of the ends of this project were themselves discriminatory albeit in a different way from the discriminatory laws to which the liberals had originally objected.
Today, decades later, the anti-discrimination project has become even further removed from the opposition to unjust laws that had won it broad public support. “Discrimination” has ceased to be defined by specific actions or even general attitudes that underlie actions and has become entirely subjective. Such-and-such groups are the officially designated victims of discrimination, and such-and-such groups are the officially designated perpetrators of discrimination, and discrimination is whatever the members of the former say they have experienced as discrimination. Loud and noisy theatrical displays of outrage cover up the fact that a moral campaign against “discrimination” of this sort lacks any solid foundation in ethics, logic, or even basic common sense.
Liberalism, or progressivism as it is now usually called having given up most if not all of what had led to its being dubbed liberalism in the first place and adopted a stringent illiberalism towards those who disagree with it, has clearly gone off the rails with regards to discrimination. If any discrimination deserves the sort of moral outrage that progressivism bestows upon what it calls discrimination today it is the sort of discrimination that the old liberalism opposed sixty to seventy years ago, discrimination on the part of the state. If we limit the word discrimination to this sense then Danielle Smith was quite right in saying that the unvaccinated have been the most discriminated against group in her lifetime.
In early 2020, you will recall, the World Health Organization sparked off a world-wide panic by declaring a pandemic. A coronavirus that had long afflicted the chiropteran population was now circulating among human beings and spreading rapidly. Although the bat flu resembled the sort of respiratory illnesses that we have put up with every winter from time immemorial in that most of the infected experienced mild symptoms, most of those who did experience the severe pneumonia it could produce recovered, and it posed a serious threat mostly to those who were very old and already very sick with other complicating conditions, our governments, media, and medical “experts” began talking like we were living out Stephen King’s The Stand. Our governments enacted draconian measures aimed at preventing the spread of the virus that were more unprecedented – and harmful – than the disease itself. They behaved as if they had no constitutional limits on their powers and we had no constitutionally protected basic rights and freedoms that they were forbidden to impinge upon no matter how good their intentions might be. They imposed a hellish social isolation upon everybody as they ordered us to stay home and to stay away from other people if we did have to venture out (to buy groceries, for example), ordered most businesses and all social institutions to close, denied us our freedom to worship God in our churches, synagogues, etc., demanded that we wear ugly diapers on our faces as a symbol of submission to Satan, and with a few intermissions here and there, kept this vile totalitarian tyranny up for almost two years. All of this accomplished tremendous harm rather than good. Towards the end of this period they shifted gears and decided to create a scapegoat upon which to shift the blame for the ongoing misery. It was not that their contemptible, misguided, and foolish policies were complete and utter failures, they maintained, it was all the fault of the people who objected to their basic rights and freedoms being trampled over. They were the problem. By not cooperating they prevented the government measures from working. Those who for one or another of a myriad of reasons did not want to be injected with an experimental drug that had been rushed to market in under a year, the manufacturers of which had been indemnified against liability for any injuries it might cause, the safety of which had been proclaimed by government fiat backed by efforts to suppress any conflicting information, or who did not want to be injected with a second or third dose after a previous bad experience, were made the chief scapegoats. These were demonized by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in terms and tone that call to mind those employed by Stalin against the kulaks and Hitler against the Jews. A system was developed, seemingly by people who regard the beast in the thirteenth chapter of the Apocalypse as an example and role model to be emulated, whereby society was re-opened to everyone else, but the unvaccinated were kept under the same brutal and oppressive restrictions as earlier in this epidemic of ultra-paranoid hypochondria. Indeed, some jurisdictions imposed new, harsher, restrictions on them.
So yes, Danielle Smith spoke the truth. Our governments’ attempt to shut the unvaccinated out of society as it re-opened from a forced closure that should never have occurred in the first place was indeed the worst case of discrimination by government to have occurred in Canada or the Western world for that matter in her lifetime. Her critics in the legacy media know this full well of course. Since they hate and are allergic to the truth, which they never report when a lie, a half-truth, a distortion, or some other form of mendacity will suffice, this is why they howled with rage and fury when Smith spoke it. Hopefully, she will give them plenty more to howl at. Posted by Gerry T. NealDanielle Smith, discrimination, Jason Kenney, Justin Trudeau, legacy media, Stephen King, vaccine mandates, vaccine passports
The “experts” that our governments and the media have been insisting that we blindly trust for almost two years are now telling us that due to the Delta and other variants herd immunity to the bat flu is either unattainable or requires a much higher percentage of the population to have been immunized than was the case with the original strain of the virus. They are also telling us that the fourth wave of the bat flu, the one we are said to be experiencing at the present, is driven by the Delta variant and that those who, for one reason or another, have exercised their right to reject the vaccine either in full or in part – for those who have had one shot but opted out of a second, or in some jurisdictions have had two but have opted out of a third, for whatever the reason, including having had a bad reaction to the first shot or two, are categorized under the broad “unvaccinated” umbrella by those who think that it is our ethical duty to take as many shots as the government’s health mandarins say we should take – are responsible for this wave, which they have dubbed a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”.
This, however, is a case of the guilty pointing the finger at the innocent.
Think about what they are now claiming. If herd immunity was attainable with the original virus if 70-80% of the population were immunized but with the Greek letter variants it requires 90% or higher if it is attainable at all, then the blame for the current situation, however dire it actually is – and it is probably not even remotely close to being as dire as is being claimed because the media, the medical establishment, and the governments have grossly exaggerated the threat of this disease from the moment the World Health Organization declared a pandemic – belongs entirely to those who insisted upon the “flatten the curve” strategy. Flattening the curve, which required massive government overreach and the dangerous suspension of everyone’s most basic human, civil, and constitutional rights and freedoms, prolonged the life of the original virus, giving it the opportunity to produce these new, reportedly more contagious, mutations. It was the public health orders themselves – not people resisting the orders and standing up for their and others’ rights and freedoms – that gave us the variants. It would have been far better to have taken measures to protect only the portion of the population that was most at risk, while letting the virus freely circulate through the rest of the population to whom it posed minimal risk, so that herd immunity could have been achieved the natural way and at the lower threshold while it was still available. Natural immunity, as even the “experts” now acknowledge, is superior to what the vaccines offer if this can be called immunity at all seeing as it conspicuously lacks the prophylactic aspect that traditionally defined the immunity granted by vaccines for other diseases. When you took the smallpox or the polio vaccine, you did so in order that you would not get smallpox or polio. When you take the bat flu vaccine, purportedly, it reduces the severity of the bat flu so that you are far less likely to be hospitalized or to die from it. When we consider that for those outside of the most-at-risk categories, the likelihood of being hospitalized due to the bat flu is already quite low and the likelihood of dying from it is lower yet, being a fraction of a percentage point, the so-called “immunity” the vaccines impart is not very impressive, making the heavy-handed insistence that everyone must take the jab all the more irrational.
For all the hype about the supposed “novelty” of the bat flu virus, it is now quite apparent that its waves come and go in a very familiar pattern. The first wave, which started in China late in 2019, hit the rest of the world early in 2020 during the winter of 2019-2020 and ebbed as we went into spring. With the onset of fall in 2020 the second wave began and the third wave took place in the winter of 2020-2021. It once again waned as we entered spring of 2021, and the current fourth wave is taking place as summer of 2021 moves into fall of 2021. Each wave of the bat flu, in other words, has occurred in the times of the year when the common cold and the seasonal flu ordinarily circulate, just as the lulls correspond with those of the cold and flu, the big one being in the summer. How many more waves do we have to have in which this pattern repeats itself before we acknowledge that this is the nature of the bat flu, that it comes and goes in the same way and the same times as the cold and flu, compared to which it may very well be worse in the sense that the symptoms, if you get hit by a hard case of it, are much nastier, but to which it is far closer than to Ebola, the Black Death, or the apocalyptic superflu from Stephen King’s The Stand?
The politicians, the public health mandarins and their army of “experts”, and the mass media fear pornographers do not want us to acknowledge this because the moment we do the twin lies they have been bombarding us with will lose all their hold upon us and become completely and totally unbelievable. The first of these lies is when they take credit for the natural waning of each wave of the virus by attributing it to their harsh, unjust, and unconstitutional public health orders involving the suspension of all of our most basic freedoms and rights. The second of these lies is when they blame the onset of the next wave of the virus at the time of year colds and flus always spread on the actions of the public or some segment of the public.
It is the second of these lies with which we are concerned here.
Last fall, as the second wave was beginning, our governments blamed the wave on those who were disobeying public health orders by getting together socially with people from outside their households, not wearing masks, and/or especially exercising their constitutional right to protest against government actions that negatively impact them, in this case, obviously, the public health measures. There was an alternative form of finger-pointing on the part of some progressives in the media, who put the blame on the governments themselves for “re-opening too early”. This form of “dissent” was tolerated respectfully by the governments, a marked contrast with how they responded to those who protested that they could not possibly have re-opened too early because they should never have locked down to begin with since lockdowns are an unacceptable way of dealing with a pandemic being incredibly destructive and inherently tyrannical. Although there was much more truth to what the latter dissenters were saying it was these, rather than the former group, that the governments demonized and blamed for the rising numbers of infections. The governments and other lockdown supporters attempted to justify this finger-pointing by saying that the lockdown protestors, whom they insisted upon calling “anti-mask protestors” so as to make their grievances seem petty by focusing on what was widely considered to be the least burdensome of the pandemic measures, were endangering the public by gathering to protest outdoors. That their arguments were worthless is demonstrated by how they had made no such objections to the much larger racist hate rallies held by anti-white hate groups masquerading under banal euphemisms earlier in the year and, indeed, openly encouraged and supported these even though they had a tendency to degenerate into lawless, anarchical, rioting and looting that was absent from the genuinely peaceful protests of the lockdown opponents.
With the deployment of the rapidly developed vaccines that are still a couple of years away from the completion of their clinical trials under emergency authorization government public health policy has shifted towards getting as many people vaccinated as possible, with a goal of universal vaccination. At the same time, the finger-pointing has shifted towards the unvaccinated or, to be more precise, those who have not received however many shots the public health experts in their jurisdiction deem to be necessary at any given moment. This blaming of the unvaccinated is both a deflection from the grossly unethical means being taken to coerce people to surrender their freedom of choice and right to informed consent with regards to receiving these vaccines and is itself part of those means.
Perhaps “shifted” is not the best word to describe this change in the finger-pointing. While the less-than-fully-vaccinated are being blamed as a whole for the Delta wave the blaming is particularly acrimonious for those who both have not been sufficiently vaccinated to satisfy the government and who have been protesting the public health abuses of our constitutional rights and freedoms the latest of which is the establishment of a system of segregation based upon vaccine choice in which society and the economy are fully or almost fully re-opened to those who comply with the order to “show your papers” while everyone else is put back in lockdown. The CBC and the privately owned media, both progressive and mainstream “conservative” have gone out of their way to vilify such people, as have the provincial premiers and their public health mandarins whose vaccine passport system is obviously punitive in nature. The biggest vilifier of all has been the Prime Minister. In his campaign leading up to the recent Dominion election he was unable to speak about the “anti-vaxxers” – a term, which until quite recently, indeed, until the very eve of this pandemic, designated supporters of holistic medicine who object to all vaccination on principle and who were usually to be found among the kind of tree-hugging, hippy-dippy, types who support the Green Party, NDP, or the Prime Minister’s own party – without sounding like he was speaking about the Jews to an audience at Nuremberg in the late 1930s.
What we are seeing here is not a new phenomenon. When the ancient Greek city-states were faced with a crisis beyond human ability to control – such as a plague – they would choose someone, generally of the lowest possible social standing such as a criminal, slave or a cripple, and, after ritually elevating him to the highest social standing, would either execute him, if he was a criminal, or beat him and drive him out of their society, in either case as a symbolic sacrifice to avert disaster and save the community. This person was called the φαρμακός, a word that also meant “sorcerer”, “poisoner” or “magician”, although there is no obvious connection between this meaning and the usage we have been discussing and lexicographers often treat them as being homonyms. In some city-states this came to be practices as a ritual on a set day every year whether there was a looming disaster or not. In Athens, for example, the two ugliest men in the city were chosen for this treatment on the first day of Thargelia, the annual festival of Apollo and Artemis. Parallels to this can be found in almost every ancient culture as can the related practice of offering animal sacrifices. Indeed, the practice is generally called scapegoating, from the word used in the English Bible to refer to the literal goat over which the High Priest would confess the sins of the people on the Day of Atonement each year, symbolically transferring the guilt to the goat, which would then be taken out into the wilderness and sent to Azazel, a word of disputed meaning generally taken to refer either to a place in the desert, an evil spirit who dwelled there, or both.
Anthropologists have, of course, long discussed the origins and significance of this phenomenon. While going into this at great length is far beyond the scope of this essay, a well-known summation of the discussion can be found in Violence and the Sacred (1977) by French-American scholar René Girard as can the author’s own theory on the subject. Later in his Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1987), Girard, a practicing Roman Catholic, returned to his theory and discussed how it related to Christian theology and to contemporary expressions of violence. He put forward an interpretation of the Atonement that could in one aspect be understood as the opposite of the traditional orthodox interpretation. While there have been numerous competing theories as to how the Atonement works, in traditional Christian orthodoxy the relationship between the Atonement and the Old Testament sacrificial system was understood to be this: the former was the final Sacrifice to end all sacrifices, and the latter were God ordained types of Christ’s final Sacrifice. By contrast, Girard argued that sacrifices were not something instituted by God but arose out of man’s violent nature. When division arose in primitive communities, peace was restored through the scapegoat mechanism, whereby both sides joined in placing the blame on a designated victim who was then executed or banished, and built their renewed unity upon the myth of the victim’s guilt and punishment. The sacrificial system was the ritual institutionalization of this practice. As societies became more civilized the institution was made more humane by substituting animals for people. The Atonement, Girard, argued, was not the ultimate sacrifice but rather a sort of anti-sacrifice. It was not designed, he said, to satisfy the demands of God Who has no need for sacrificial victims, but to save mankind from his own violent nature as manifested in the scapegoat mechanism and sacrificial system. In the Atonement God provided bloodthirsty man with One Final Victim. That Victim offered to His immediate persecutors and by extension all of sinful mankind forgiveness and peace based not upon a myth about His guilt but upon the acknowledgement of the truth of His Innocence and the confession of man’s own guilt.
What is most relevant to this discussion, however, is not how Girard’s understanding of the Atonement contrasts with the more traditional orthodox view, but where both agree – that it brought an end to the efficacy of all other scapegoats and sacrifices. This does not mean that the practice ceased but that it no longer works. One implication of this pertains to the choice that the Gospel offers mankind. If man rejects the peace and forgiveness based upon the truth of the Innocent Victim offered in the Gospel, “there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins” (Hebrews 10:26), and so his violence, which the scapegoat mechanism/sacrificial system can no longer satisfy, increases. This means that in a post-Christian society the sacrificial and scapegoating aspect of human violence would reassert itself with a vengeance. Interestingly, Girard interpreted the New Testament Apocalyptic passages, both those of the actual book of Revelation and those found in the words of Jesus in the Gospels, that speak of disasters, calamities and destruction to fall upon mankind in the Last Days, as describing precisely this, the self-inflicted wounds of a mankind that has turned its back on the peace of the Gospel rather than the wrath of God (see the extended discussion of this in the second chapter entitled “A Non-Sacrificial Reading of the Gospel Text” of Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World). Certainly the twentieth century, in which the transformation of Christendom into secular, post-Christian, “Western Civilization” that was the main project of the liberalism of the Modern Age came to its completion, saw a particularly ugly resurgence of scapegoating on the part of secular, totalitarian regimes.
I alluded earlier to one such example, the scapegoating of the Jews by the Third Reich, of which it is unlikely that there is anyone living who is not familiar with the tremendous violent actions it produced. Another example can be found in the early history of the Soviet Union and this is for many reasons a closer analogy to what we are seeing today. In Hitler’s case, the group designated as the scapegoat was a real religious/ethnic group the identity of which had been well-established millennia prior to the Nazi regime. When, however, the Bolsheviks, a terrorist organization of mostly non-(ethnic)-Russians who hated the Russian Orthodox Church, the Russian Tsar, and the Russian people, most likely in that order, led by V. I. Lenin and committed to his interpretation of Marxist ideology, exploited the vacuum created earlier in 1917 when republicans forced the abdication of Russia’s legitimate monarch in order to seize power for themselves and form the totalitarian terror state known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, they created their own scapegoat.
Kulak, which is the Russian word for “fist”, was a derogatory term applied with the sense of “tight-fisted”, i.e., miserly, grasping, and mean to peasant farmers who had become slightly better off than other members of their own class, owning more than eight acres of land and being able to hire other peasants as workers. Clearly this was a loosely defined, largely artificial, category, enabling the Bolsheviks to hurl it as a term of abuse against pretty much any peasant they wanted. The scapegoating of the kulaks began early in the Bolshevik Revolution when Lenin sought to unify the other peasants in support of his regime by demonizing and vilifying those of whom they were already envious and confiscating their land. After Stalin succeeded Lenin as Soviet dictator in 1924 he devised a series of five-year plans aimed at the rapid industrialization and centralization of what had up to then been a largely feudal-agrarian economy. In the first of these, from 1928 to 1932, Stalin announced his intention to liquidate the kulaks and while this worded in such a way as to suggest that it was their identity as a class rather than the actual people who made up the class that was to be eliminated, that class identity, as we have seen, was already largely a fiction imposed upon them by the Bolsheviks and the actions taken by Stalin – the completion of the confiscation of kulak property, the outright murder of many of them and the placing of the rest in labour camps either in their own home districts or in desolate places like Siberia, clearly targeted the kulaks as people rather than as a class. The history of Stalin’s liquidation of the kulaks as well as that of the Holodomor, the man-made famine he engineered against the Ukrainians, is well told and documented by Robert Conquest in his The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine (1986).
“Anti-vaxxer”, like “kulak” is mostly a derogatory term used to demonize people. The term itself ought to be less arbitrary than kulak. Assigning someone to a class of greedy, parasitical, oppressors simply because he is fortunate enough to own a few more acres of land than his neighbour is quite arbitrary and obviously unjust. Identifying someone as being opposed to vaccines on the basis of his own stated opposition to such is not arbitrary at all, although dehumanizing someone on this basis is just as unjust. In practice, however, the “anti-vaxxer” label is used just as arbitrarily. Look at all who have been turned into third-class citizens, denied access to all public spaces and businesses except those arbitrarily deemed “essential” by the public health officials, and whose livelihoods have been placed in jeopardy by the new vaccine mandates and passports. While those who have not taken the bat flu shots because they reject all vaccines on principle are obviously included so are those who have had every vaccine from the mumps to smallpox to hepatitis that their physician recommended but have balked at taking these new vaccines, the first of their kind, before the clinical trials are completed. So are people who took the first shot, had a very bad reaction to it, and decided that the risk of an even worse reaction to the second shot was too great in their instance. So are people who came down with the disease, whose bodies’ natural immune system fought it off, who thereby gained an immunity that recent studies as well as common sense tell us is superior to that imparted by a vaccine that artificially produces a protein that is distinctive to the virus, and who for that reason decided that they didn’t need the vaccine. There are countless legitimate reasons why people might not want to receive these inoculations and it is morally wrong – indeed, evil, would be a better word than wrong here – to bully such people into surrendering their bodily autonomy and their right to informed consent and to punish them for making what, however much people caught in the grip of the public health panic may wish to deny it, is a valid choice. It is even more evil to demonize, vilify, and scapegoat them for standing up for their rights. Ironically, those currently being demonized as “anti-vaxxers” by the Prime Minister and the provincial premiers include all who have been protesting against the vaccine passports and mandates, a number which presumably includes many who have had both of their shots and therefore are not even “unvaccinated” much less “anti-vaxxers” in any meaningful sense of the word, but who take a principled moral stand against governments mistreating people the way they have with these lockdowns, mask mandates, and now vaccine passports and mandates.
The Nazi scapegoating of the Jews, the Bolshevik scapegoating of the kulaks, and the as-we-speak scapegoating of the “anti-vaxxers” by all involved in the new world-wide medical-pharmaceutical tyranny, all demonstrate the truth of the implication discussed above of the Atonement’s abolition of the efficacy of sacrifices and the scapegoat mechanism, whether this is understood in the traditional orthodox way, as this writer is inclined to understand it, or in accordance with Girard’s interpretation. If people reject the peace and forgiveness offered in the Gospel and can no longer find it in the old sacrificial/scapegoat system the violence multiplies. In the ancient pre-Christian practices, the victims were singular or few in number (there were only two victims, for example, in the annual Thargelia in Athens). These modern examples of the scapegoating phenomenon involve huge numbers of victims. The sought objective – societal peace and unity – is still the same as in ancient times, but it is unattainable by this method since scapegoating millions of people at a time can only produce division and not peace and unity.
The peace, forgiveness, and unity offered in the Gospel is still available, of course, although the enactors of the new medical tyranny seem determined to keep as many people as possible from hearing that offer. They have universally declared the churches where the Gospel is preached in Word and Sacrament to be “non-essential” ordering them to close at the first sniffle of the bat flu and leaving them closed longer after everything else re-opened, although the number of churches that willingly went along with this and even took to enthusiastically enforcing the medical tyranny themselves raises the question of whether anyone would have heard the Gospel in them had they remained open. Which brings us back to what was briefly observed earlier about Girard’s interpretation of Apocalyptic passages as depicting the devastating destruction of human violence which the scapegoat mechanism can no longer contain when man has rejected the Gospel. Perhaps it ought not to surprise us that throughout this public health panic the medical tyrants have behaved as if the Book of Revelation’s depiction of the beast who demands that all the world worship him rather than God and requires that they show their allegiance to him by taking his mark on their right hand or forehead and prevents them from buying and selling without such a display of allegiance had been written as a script for them to act out at this time. — Gerry T. NealAdolf Hitler, Atonement, COVID-19, Joseph Stalin, Justin Trudeau, kulaks, pharmakos, René Girard, Robert Conquest, scapegoat, Stephen King, Thargelia, V. I. Lenin
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.” – Rudyard Kipling
The way the World Health Organization, our power-hungry politicians, the
technocratic boobs with tunnel vision who are our health apparatchiks,
and the cheap harlots of the mainstream media talk about it, one would
think that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is a real life equivalent of the
artificially engineered, antibody resistant, superflu which wipes out
most of the world’s population in Stephen King’s 1978 novel The Stand
and the various adaptations thereof. It is not. Although it is
possible that like the weaponized flu strain in the novel, it escaped
from a laboratory, that of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, it is not
remotely comparable in terms of lethality. It is basically a normal
strain of bat influenza that has jumped species to humans, that has been
spreading rapidly due to it being new to the species and thus our
having no built up immunity to it yet, but most people are not at risk
of anything worse than the ordinary flu from it. Those who are most
susceptible to developing the severe and potentially lethal form of
pneumonia that it can produce are the same people susceptible to
catching pneumonia and dying from H1N1 and the other, ordinary, seasonal
strains of the flu.
From the beginning of this pandemic it has been apparent that the WHO’s
claims with regards to the lethality of this virus have been greatly
exaggerated. Although the press in its daily reports has used
“staggering” and similar scare words to describe the rising death tolls,
the numbers themselves have not supported the use of such adjectives.
Not when taken in context at any rate. COVID-19 has not become the
leading cause of death, it is nowhere close to it. The overall number
of deaths from all causes for the period of this pandemic has not risen
astronomically in comparison with the number for the same period in
other years. Indeed, in some areas that have been particularly hard
hit by COVID-19 this number has been down from recent years.
In most countries, the epidemiologists’ original projections of expected
deaths from this disease have been radically revised downward. At
some point the mortality rate will have to undergo a similar radical
adjustment. Contrary to the lies of the health authorities and the
media, the official death count for COVID-19 is not too low but too
high. Even though the vast majority of people who have caught this
virus and died have had multiple other conditions that also contributed
to their demise these have all been classified as deaths from COVID-19.
If deaths from regular influenza were counted the same way the
mortality rate for the flu would be much higher than it is. Similarly,
the other number that goes into the mortality rate calculation is much
too low. Since a large number – as many as fifty percent some
estimates put it – of those who contract the virus are completely
asymptomatic, the total number known to have been infected is obviously
much, much, lower than the true number of infected. Indeed, when we
consider that international travel in and out of Hubei province was
allowed long after the initial outbreak began there – and long after Red
China shut down travel from that province to the rest of their own
country – during a period in which Western countries, sick with a
liberalism far more lethal than this virus, resisted imposing travel
restrictions on China, it is almost certain that the virus had made it
into all of our countries long before we noticed that it had arrived.
Since the potential lethality of this virus has been hugely exaggerated,
the extent to which the repugnant, totalitarian, Communistic measures
being taken almost everywhere are “saving lives” is also exaggerated.
In pointing this out I do not wish merely to throw water on those
currently engaged in a nauseating orgy of self-congratulatory,
backslapping, tripe over their efforts to save lives by sacrificing our
freedoms, but to contrast the low number of lives saved with the
potentially much higher number of lives endangered by the same measures.
While I am no fan of Karl Marx – Groucho is much more my style – and am
of the firm opinion that he was wrong about almost everything, there are
a few rare exceptions to this. One such exception was the sentence
with which he opened his letter to Louis Kugelmann on July 11, 1868.
He wrote “Every child knows a nation which ceased to work, I will not
say for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish.” With this
sentence he introduces an argument that is neither interesting nor
relevant to the subject at hand, but the sentence itself states an
obvious truth, one very similar to that which is found in the verses by
Rudyard Kipling quoted at the beginning of this essay.
The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus continues to be remembered to this
day for his theory about population size and the food supply. Human
beings, Malthus argued, can increase our food supply through improved
means of production, but if we do so the natural human response will be
an increase in reproduction. The increase in reproduction will be
faster and larger than the increase in food production so that the
growth in population size will exceed the increase to the food supply
and as a result there will be famine, poverty, starvation, disease and
death. His essay on the Principle of Population was first
published in 1798. He expanded and revised it in 1803, and published
several further editions with minor revisions before his death in 1834.
From that day to this, it has inspired several prophecies of doom, the
most famous of recent times being the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb
by Stanford University’s Paul Ehrlich which predicted that hundreds of
millions of people would die in the 1970s from starvation due to
overpopulation. That, of course, did not happen.
There is obviously a flaw somewhere in Malthus’ theory. The question
is where. According to the popular Demographic Transition Model, first
developed by Warren Thomson in 1929, the problem is with his
understanding of human nature. According to this theory, as societies
progress towards industrialization they pass through stages and, after
they have achieved a certain level of industrial development, fertility
rates drop drastically and population size stabilizes. While the
demographic history of Western countries and other developed countries
such as Japan in the twentieth century would seem to bear this
interpretation out, explaining its having passed into conventional
wisdom, it has not gone without challenge. Dr. Virginia Deane
Abernethy of Vanderbilt University, for example, in her book Population Politics
(Transaction Books, 2000) gave several examples of empirical evidence
that goes against the theory, making the case that popular late
twentieth century progressive efforts to combat Third World
overpopulation and poverty with policies based upon the assumption of
the DTM, such as foreign relief and liberal immigration to the West as a
population safety valve, have not worked as the model would have
predicted but have, if anything, made the problem worse. The sharp
decline in fertility that developed countries have experienced since the
end of the post-World War II Baby Boom is better explained by other
aspects of the transition to modernity, such as a severe weakening of
the traditional idea that producing posterity is a duty we owe to our
ancestors, than by industrial prosperity itself.
The other leading explanation of the flaw in Malthus’ theory is that he
vastly underestimated our capacity to improve and increase the food
supply. This explanation is also borne out by the history of the
twentieth century and much more consistently than that of the DTM.
Now, if this explanation of what went wrong with the predictions based
upon Malthus’ theory is the correct one, and I believe it is, then what
could potentially happen when we have a global population of 7.8 billion
people and we shut down the economy all over the world, jeopardizing
out ability to produce food at this improved and increased capacity?
Why, lo and behold, we have just discovered where the potential for a
death rate as a high as the one in Stephen King’s book is to be found.
Yes, shutting down the economies of practically every country in the
world, is indeed a move that will put the food supply in jeopardy.
When those who produce and sell food are almost the only ones allowed to
be open they are essentially being asked or told to work for nothing,
for nobody else is producing anything with which to pay them. Yes,
governments are printing and handing out fiat money by the gazillions,
but money has no intrinsic value. Its role in the marketplace is to be
a convenient stand-in for real goods. The X number of dollars that
you pay someone for Y amount of magic beans, represents the cow that you
would have traded in a barter exchange. Perhaps that is a bad
example, because both beans and cattle are sources of food, but I think
it still gets the point across. If only category of producers are
allowed to actually produce anything for sale in the market, the
currency that is exchanged in that market will rapidly become worthless,
and those producers will become overburdened and start to fail. It
is estimated that nine million people in the world die from hunger every
year. It is responsible for half of the deaths of children under the
age of five. This is over three times the number of people known to
have been infected with COVID-19. It is about fifty times more than
the number who have died after contracting the virus. As of this
writing, the number who have died from hunger in 2020 so far is almost
three million. That’s about fifteen times the number who have died
after contracting COVID-19, whether the virus was the primary killer or
not. The measures being taken to combat COVID-19 will drive the number
who die from hunger up and by considerably more than they can bring the
number who die from COVID-19 down.
There are those who would say that this is the intentional and
deliberate true purpose of the global lockdown. I would not go that
far. The problem with the interpretation of events as being the
intended outcome of a very powerful and malevolent cabal is that it
requires assuming that politicians, bureaucrats, technocrats, and the
like possess an almost superhuman level of competence. In reality,
these are people who think they are Sherlock Holmes, when they are
actually Jacques Clouseau – the Jacques Clouseau portrayed by Peter
Sellers in Blake Edwards’ Pink Panther films, not the version of the
character more recently portrayed by Steve Martin. Unlike the latter,
who is able to scrape together enough deductive reasoning to actually
solve the case by the end of his movies, Sellers’ classic
interpretation of this character was of a bumbling, clumsy, nincompoop
whose incompetence is matched only by his vanity and arrogance, and who
succeeds only through an extraordinary degree of sheer accidental luck.
That having been said, large scale global depopulation has been one of
the chief goals of the environmentalist wing of the United Nations and
its ultrawealthy backers like Bill Gates, George Soros, and the late
Maurice Strong since at least the 1992 “Earth Summit” at Rio de Janeiro
that produced the famous – or, depending upon your perspective, infamous
– action plan “Agenda 21.” These people represent the most extreme
version of one of the two distortions of Malthus that have been around
since his own day. While his detractors, like Victorian novelist
Charles Dickens, unjustly accused him of heartlessly wishing upon people
the famine, poverty, and death his theory predicted, his supporters,
especially those of more recent times, have advocated measures to combat
overpopulation that he himself would have found morally repugnant, such
as abortion, infanticide, and totalitarian state control of
reproduction. Those who want the world’s population reduced by as much
as eighty to ninety-five percent are the worst example of this sort.
The overlap between the institutions such as the United Nations and
individuals such as Bill Gates who advocate this radical agenda and
those behind the global lockdown is certainly worth taking note of.
