Aletho News

The not-so-heroic lockdown critic

By James Delingpole | TCW Defending Freedom | June 2, 2023

Dan Hannan has written another piece reminding us how heroically outspoken he was during lockdown. He writes in the Sunday Telegraph: ‘A handful of columnists – and it really was a handful, you could count us on your fingers – had argued from the beginning that the restrictions were excessive. We were almost universally howled down as murderers who wanted to cull the population . . .’

I’m sure many of us will remain eternally grateful for Lord Hannan’s selfless courage. But rather than resting on his laurels over what he may or may not have written three years ago, might not the noble lord more usefully direct his talents towards addressing the much more pressing problems of the present?

Foremost among these problems, I would suggest, is the looming WHO Pandemic treaty and the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005). If implemented they would give the World Health Organisation unprecedented powers over sovereign states. These powers would include the right to mandate all manner of highly restrictive measures: lockdowns, masks, quarantines, border closures, travel restrictions, medication of individuals including vaccination and medical examinations.

For full details I recommend the excellent summary by Dr Elizabeth Evans of the UK Medical Freedom Alliance published by TCW under the headline ‘Fight this sinister power grab by the unelected, unaccountable WHO’.  What becomes clear if you read the article and follow the links is that the threat posed by the WHO is very real. If its plans are implemented – as currently appears more likely than not – it will represent arguably the most egregious assault on human freedom in the history of the world.

Never before, after all, has an unelected, supranational body been given such power over the lives of pretty much every single person on the planet. The WHO won’t just be able to decide on freedom of movement (whether, for example, it is permissible to keep them under house arrest or in quarantine camps, as happened during lockdown) but even whether or not they live or die or spend the rest of their days as cripples as a result of a compulsory ‘vaccine’ programme.

So let’s read what that doughty freedom fighter Dan Hannan has to say on the subject, shall we? Here he is, further down his hero-of-the-lockdown article: ‘Even more incredibly, some leaders would suggest we set up an international ‘pandemic treaty’, potentially giving the World Health Organisation binding powers on such matters – almost as if they were trying to validate the conspiracy theorists.’

Hmm. I’ve read that sentence a number of times and still I can’t quite make sense of what he is saying. Why is he trying to turn a real problem into a merely theoretical one? Surely, verifiably, unquestionably the case is that the World Health Organisation IS pressing ahead with its treaty, and that sovereign nations around the world will probably sign up to it. Yet instead of acknowledging this fact, Hannan has chosen to dress it up as something highly improbable – ‘incredibly’ – being mooted by certain, unidentified silly politicians or newspaper columnists. Then, as if to pull the rug from under the possibility that this nonsense should ever come to pass, he adds that curious, distancing phrase ‘almost as if they were trying to validate the conspiracy theorists’.

Well, yes, indeed, it would unarguably make ‘conspiracy theorists’ more credible because they have been warning of this threat for quite some time. But would their being proved right really be such a bad thing? In Hannan’s view, it appears, yes it would because – as he hints in a subsequent paragraph – he has a bit of an axe to grind on this score.

‘Two people I know have been pushed by all this into conspiracist paranoia. They went from asking (perfectly reasonably) why young people needed to be jabbed for a disease that posed no danger to them to doubting the efficacy of all vaccines. Then they started muttering about Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab. Now they are parroting the Kremlin line on Ukraine.’

I’m not quite sure what the relevance of Ukraine is to lockdowns. But I think what Hannan is telling us from his lofty perch in the House of Lords is that there is a right way to think about things and a wrong way to think about things – and that he clearly knows which is which, whereas these paranoid conspiracists are so away with the fairies that their every argument can be dismissed.

But are they? Are they really? On the subject of vaccines, for example, there is a perfectly lucid and reasonable case to be made that they are not the medical miracle but a gigantic con trick which has done far more harm than good to the health of the public.

As for the dismissive line about Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab, this is plain dishonest. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the second-biggest funder of the World Health Organisation after the US. Klaus Schwab wrote and published a book in 2020 called Covid-19: The Great Reset, spelling out how the global pandemic was a beneficial crisis which political leaders groomed by his World Economic Forum could use to make a new world order in which we would own nothing and be happy. Using a dismissive word such as ‘muttering’ doesn’t magically vanish these men away into a paranoid fantasy world where they pose no threat to our real one. Rather, it suggests a writer who is using rhetorical tricksiness to lead his readers away from the truth.

On lockdown, he concludes: ‘It would be comforting to pin the responsibility on someone: autocratic politicians, cowardly bureaucrats, sensational broadcasters. But the horrible truth is that, as a country, we did this to ourselves; and, in all likelihood, we would do it again tomorrow.’

The deception here is worth of Iago. ‘Politicians’ pushed the lockdown and vaccine agenda not because they were ‘autocratic’ but because they were corrupt, spineless and under the thumb of supranational institutions such as the World Economic Forum and the WHO. Bureaucrats pushed it not because they are cowardly but because as Deep State functionaries that was precisely their job. Broadcasters and newspapers like the one Hannan writes for pushed it not out of sensationalism but because they were either bought and paid for – or bullied and cowed – by the government to pump out relentless Covid propaganda while suppressing inconvenient truths such as vaccine injury.

At no point in his piece does Hannan address the fact that the primary driver responsible for all those things he so laments about lockdown Britain (‘taped-off playgrounds’, ‘power-crazed coppers’, ‘listless moody teenagers’) was the military-grade, state-orchestrated propaganda campaign designed to brainwash the public into believing that a fairly routine flu bug was the worst thing since the Black Death. The public would never have overreacted in the way it did if it hadn’t been bullied, cajoled, bribed, blackmailed and tricked into doing so by the political class of which Lord Hannan is a card-carrying member.

June 2, 2023 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Covid-19, Gates Foundation, Human rights, UK, WHO | 1 Comment