Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

The Hague court sides with activists, tells Dutch government to IMMEDIATELY lift ‘illegitimate’ curfew

RT | February 16, 2021

The Dutch government has been told by the court to reverse its coronavirus pandemic curfew after The Hague ruled there was no legal basis for it and called it an infringement on people’s rights.

In a statement, The Hague declared that the government’s use of the Extraordinary Powers of Civil Authority Act – an emergency act which allows the state to bypass the legislative process to impose a curfew in “very urgent and exceptional circumstance” – was not justified in this case during the Covid-19 crisis.

“The Preliminary Relief Judge ruled that the introduction of the curfew did not involve the special urgency required to be able to make use of the [act],” the Hague continued, noting that the government had had time to discuss such a curfew beforehand, before ruling that “the use of this law to impose curfew is not legitimate.”

“The curfew is a far-reaching violation of the right to freedom of movement and privacy and (indirectly) limits, among other things, the right to freedom of assembly and demonstration.”

The country’s Justice Ministry says it is now studying the ruling.

After the Dutch government imposed the curfew on January 23, citizens were legally required to stay home between the hours of 9pm and 4:30am unless they had a valid excuse, and they were warned that they could face fines if they refused to do so.

Valid excuses to go outside during the curfew included emergencies, essential work, to seek medical assistance, and to walk a dog on a lead.

The Hague’s decision was made after a group known as the Virus Truth Foundation filed a lawsuit arguing that the curfew was an infringement on human rights and the Dutch constitution.

The Netherlands experienced several nights of rioting over the curfew, which resulted in burnt cars, looted business, clashes with police, and hundreds of arrests.

February 16, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Solidarity and Activism | , | Leave a comment

Rapid Covid Tests Could Be Route Back To Socialising – Boris Johnson

By Richie Allen | February 16, 2021

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is refusing to rule out the introduction of Domestic Vaccine Passports. “We’re looking at everything” he told the press at yesterday’s Downing Street briefing. He went on to say:

“What we are thinking of at the moment is more of a route that relies on mass vaccination… we intend to vaccinate all the adults in the country by the autumn… plus lateral flow testing, rapid testing.

I think that will be the route that we go down and that businesses will go down. You are already seeing lots of businesses using the potential of rapid, on-the-day testing as well. I think that, in combination with vaccination, will probably be the route forward.”

Imagine a world, where you must stock up on testing kits (similar to pregnancy tests), that you will be expected to self-administer and pass, before being admitted to your workplace, or the shops, or even the theatre? Welcome to that world. Boris Johnson wants rapid testing to become part of everyday life. That’s what Operation Moonshot proposed.

It’s lunacy. He wants to routinely test people who don’t have so much as a runny nose or a fever, people who are perfectly healthy, to see if they’re carrying a virus. Let’s not forget that the man running the US coronavirus response, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said last year that asymptomatic people do not spread the virus.

And as for domestic vaccine passports, The Telegraph newspaper reported today that UK cinemas are keen to implement them, if it means they can get bums back on seats as soon as possible. According to the paper:

David Chadwick of Verifiable Credentials, which has received government funding to develop vaccine passports, said he had already agreed a tie-up with one UK theatre and cinema complex to trial the technology. Under the scheme, Verifiable Credentials would create electronic certificates for people to show they have been vaccinated. These certificates would be verified by the NHS and stored in a digital wallet on users’ smartphone.

When users buy a film ticket from a participating cinema, that ticket would be combined with the digital vaccine passport to generate a QR Code that would provide them with access to the theatre. Mr Chadwick said the trial was currently assessing the technical feasibility of the system rather than whether it was commercially or legally viable.

Do not believe government ministers, when they say that there are no plans for domestic vaccine passports. The government itself has funded the scheme. Pubs and restaurants will quickly follow cinemas lead. In the future, if ministers are ever challenged on the sheer tyranny of it, they will say, “Don’t look at us. We are liberal Conservatives. We can’t tell private business who they should and shouldn’t let in.” How utterly predictable this is becoming.

February 16, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

USA Sitrep – President’s Day in a Divided Nation

By John Lockwood for the Saker Blog | February 15, 2021

February 15th is Presidents’ Day.

America has two Presidents on this day, besides Washington and Lincoln.
One half of the country believes Trump rightfully won.

Yet the events of Jan. 6th still hang like a cloud over Washington.
Critics fault his claims of a stolen election for provoking the protests.

But what if the Democrats really did steal the election? Wouldn’t the fault be theirs?
And how can we know whether they really stole it?
Claims of “Massive fraud” on one side vs. “No sign of fraud” on the other — who is right?

One thing is crystal clear:
Unconstitutional, illegal changes to voting laws generated millions of irregular ballots — a hundred times greater than the margin between the candidates, in some swing states. If the balloting is illegal, there is no way the count can be correct.

An unconstitutional vote can only produce an unconstitutional result. Everything that followed — the certification of the popular vote, the electoral college vote, and the inauguration — none of these steps had any legal foundation.
Bad data makes bad decisions. Since Nov. 3, our machinery of government has been spinning off course on erroneous, unlawful inputs.

The only solution in such cases is to correct the error.
Until runoff elections are held in conformity with the law, we will still have two Presidents.
Only one of them can be the rightful one.

February 15, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | | Leave a comment

Bernays and Propaganda – The Marketing of War

By Larry Romanoff for the Saker Blog  | February 15, 2021

In the revelation of propaganda as a tool of public mind control and its use for war marketing, it is worthwhile to examine the historical background of Bernays’ war effort. At the time, the European Zionist Jews had made an agreement with England to bring the US into the war against Germany, on the side of England, a favor for which England would grant the Jews the occupation of Palestine for a new homeland. Palestine did not ‘belong’ to England, it was not England’s to give, and England had no legal or moral right to make such an agreement, but it was made nonetheless. The Jews had created in US President Wilson an intense desire to enter the war, but the American population had no interest in the European war and public sentiment was entirely against participating.

To facilitate the desired result, Wilson created a body named the Committee on Public Information (CPI), to propagandise the war by the mass brainwashing of America. The group was led by a muckraking publicist/advertising man named George Creel, and the CPI was known as “The Creel Commission”, but it appears Creel was only a ‘front’, with little contribution to the events that actually occurred. The CPI was staffed with a heavy slate of psychologists and carefully-selected men from the media, academia, advertising, and the movie and music industries. Two of the most important members were Walter Lippmann, whom Wilson described as “the most brilliant man of his age”, and Edward Bernays, who was the group’s top mind-control expert, both Jews and both aware of the stakes in this game. Bernays planned to combine his uncle Freud’s psychiatric insights with mass psychology, blended with modern advertising techniques, and apply them to the task of mass mind control. Movies were already powerful new tools for misinformation and opinion control, as was radio, and TV would soon be added to this list.

“Wilson’s agreement to create the CPI was actually a turning point in world history, the first truly scientific attempt to form, manipulate and control the perceptions and beliefs of an entire population.” (1) (2) (3)

With Wilson’s authority, these men were given almost unlimited scope to work their magic, and in order to ensure the success of their program and guarantee the eventual possession of Palestine, these men and their committee carried out “a program of psychological warfare against the American people on a scale unprecedented in human history and with a degree of success that most propagandists could only dream about”.

In his 1922 book Public Opinion, Lippmann wrote, “The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event … For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.” And it was this psychological manipulation that these men employed to turn an entire nation of peaceful Americans into rabid war-mongers. (4) (5)

Note to readers: Some part of the immediately-following paragraphs is not mine. They are partially verbatim and partially paraphrasing, of some content I discovered many years ago and, even with diligent effort, I am today unable to locate the original source.

Having received permission and broad authority from the US President to “lead the public mind into war” and, with success threatened by widespread anti-war sentiment, these men determined to engineer what Lippmann called “the manufacture of consent”. The committee first identified all the different ways that information flowed to the population, examined the characteristics of each, and filled every channel with specially-crafted pro-war material. Their effort was unparalleled in its scale and sophistication, since the CPI had the power not only to manufacture false news and distribute it nationally through all channels, but to officially censor news and withhold information from the public. “They produced and distributed many thousands of ‘official’ press releases, virtually functioning as the information arm of the US government and were in fact the major provider of war news to the nation.”

These men wasted no time in organising a vast propaganda network and began flooding the US with anti-German propaganda consisting of hate literature, hate movies, songs, media articles and much more.

Lippmann and Bernays divided their Committee into nineteen ‘divisions’, each responsible for a different type of propaganda, and each utilising the expertise of vast numbers of psychologists, advertising experts, media personnel and movie moguls. (6) (7) The intention was to flood every means of communication with the goal of inciting hatred of everything German and to promote American entry into the war as the only option for patriotic Americans. They filled every part of US print media with anti-German hate propaganda. In the News Division alone, in an average week, more than 20,000 newspaper columns carried entirely false propaganda articles produced by the CPI, promoting hatred of Germany and Germans, describing atrocities that had never occurred and painting the Germans as vicious and inhuman monsters. Lippmann and Bernays not only instituted (compulsory) “voluntary guidelines” for the inclusion of their monstrous tales in all media, but they rigidly enforced a censorship in the American mass media to suppress any contradictory content.

Bernays cleverly realised that much of the public is disinclined to read long articles, and so formed a special division to produce brief rants and sound bytes meant to arouse the loathsome emotions of those with short attention spans. They created a Syndicated Features Division employing popular novelists to produce essays containing the official propaganda, which reached 10 to 15 million people each month. Another division was responsible for the cartoon sections of newspapers and other media, with the stated intention to “mobilize and direct the scattered cartoon power of the country for constructive war work”. They employed thousands of cartoonists who “achieved new heights in hate-mongering”, picturing the Germans as primitive and evil animals who stole, killed or raped everything they encountered.

They created a similar Division for Cinema that resulted in the Hollywood production of dozens of outrageous and virulently anti-German movies, hate films containing completely fictional tales of atrocities and bestialities committed by the Germans. Bernays was the source of movie scenes where “dirty” Germans (and later the dirtier Japanese) machine-gunned brave American pilots while parachuting to the ground. (8) None of these tales were ever true; these and all others were total fabrications. Then, as now, the motion picture industry in the US was entirely controlled by Jews who were eager to assist. One Jewish editorial stated that “every individual at work in this industry wants to do his share . . . through slides, film leaders and trailers, posters and newspaper publicity they will spread that propaganda so necessary to the immediate mobilization of the country’s great resources”.

In addition to movies produced by the film studios, the CPI created its own Film Division which produced 60 or 70 “official” films that were viewed by many tens of millions of people each week. They created an Advertising Division to influence commercial advertisers to insert anti-German war propaganda into newspaper and magazine advertising, with almost every major US publication carrying a large quota of these ads. Then, as today, much of the media was Jewish-owned or controlled, and these men received much free space.

They created a ‘Division of Work with the Foreign Born’ (9) to reach all immigrants in the country in their own languages, and used members of these communities to propagandise their own people, especially targeting all military-age foreigners who might become war conscripts. The CPI hired bi-lingual speakers to target every specific immigrant group in the US, and even had a Sioux ‘Four-Minute Man’ delivering speeches in seven native languages. They specially targeted all Jews in America, providing Yiddish speakers in thousands of theaters and workplaces. There also was a Foreign Section with sixteen divisions, which established offices in over thirty countries, to propagandise the populations of other nations.

Lippmann and Bernays wrote: “It is a matter of pride to the Committee on Public Information, as it should be to America, that the directors of English, French, and Italian propaganda were a unit in agreeing that our literature was remarkable above all others for its brilliant and concentrated effectiveness”.

Bernays’ Speaking Division organised a group known as the “Four-Minute Men’, 75,000 volunteers who gave speeches provoking hatred and fear of Germany and Germans, and urging war. They used farmers to appeal to farmers and businessmen to businessmen, with short, rousing speeches filled with imagery. These were so emotionally-loaded they often had dreadful consequences, in thousands of instances mobs gathering afterward and vandalised German homes and businesses in their city. (10) In total, their speakers gave nearly 8 million speeches to more than 300 million listeners, all provoking hatred of Germany and Germans, and urging war. (11) (12) (13) (14) (15)

A continuing atrocity is that even today misinformation sources like Britannica and the Smithsonian, and many American history websites, carry articles claiming “the CPI’s representatives, known as four-minute men, traveled throughout the U.S. urging Americans to buy war bonds and conserve food.” (16)

The Committee particularly targeted women, establishing a major Women’s Division, from fear that women “might constitute a subversive element in the nation, detrimental to wartime unity and the smooth functioning of [mandatory military conscription]”. They created a womens’ Four-Minute Man division to speak at womens groups and matinees to counteract the resistance to sending their sons and husbands to war. They inserted themselves into many women’s magazines where they controlled the cover and much of the internal content, encouraging women to send their sons to war, claiming he would return as “a man” instead of a corpse. The Ladies Home Journal, once the most inoffensive of publications, had many covers with dirty anti-German posters and most every issue with patriotic articles written by Bernays’ staff extolling the sacrifices of war.

One of Bernays’ mind-control divisions was responsible for popular music, the CPI hiring thousands of songwriters to create songs with anti-German lyrics, these playing constantly on the nation’s radio stations. Another division was responsible for public library content, tasked with the removal of any books favoring Germany, including the works of famous German authors and philosophers. Everything favorably German was censored, removed from public accessibility, or destroyed.

Perhaps the division most indicative of the moral bankruptcy of these men was their work with public school children. They heavily utilised psychologists in programs to spread hatred of Germany throughout America’s public school system where small children were taught the full gamut of Bernays’ hateful propaganda, then used as travelling salesmen to visit other schools and spread the hatred to their classmates, delivering totally fabricated tales of German atrocities to other small children. Uncounted thousands of children were organized as Four Minute Men speakers, with more than 200,000 schools participating. Bernays’ psychologists did their work well: American children became not only hate-filled but terrified of Germans. After these inflamed propaganda sessions, many American children demonstrated their “patriotism” by groups attacking German-Americans and stoning them, sometimes being congratulated by local newspapers for “doing their duty”. The ‘patriotic’ Boy Scouts of America contributed to the effort by regularly burning bundles of German newspapers that were on sale, and Germans were regularly insulted and spat upon by other citizens.

Bernays’ group published many thousands of children’s books and comics containing the most vile and hateful propaganda lies. Libraries sponsored anti-German children’s ‘story hours’ that used hate propaganda supplied by Bernays. Sunday school children were given coloring books depicting and encouraging violence against Germans.

Bernays’ Public literature attacked everything German in America, including schools and churches. In many schools the German language was forbidden to be taught to “pure Americans”, and administrators were urged to fire “all disloyal teachers”, meaning any Germans. The names of countless towns and cities were changed to eliminate their German origin: Berlin, Iowa became Lincoln, Iowa. German foods and food names were purged from restaurants; sauerkraut became ‘liberty cabbage’ and German Shepherds became ‘Alsatians’.

All American orchestras were ordered to eliminate from their performances any music by classic German composers like Beethoven, Bach and Mozart. In some states, the use of the German language was prohibited in public and on the telephone. German professors were fired from their universities, German-language or German-owned local newspapers were denied advertising revenue, constantly harassed, and often forced out of business.

Bernays instituted a program of questioning the patriotism and loyalty of all Germans in America, including those who had lived there for generations. He created a plan that enlisted volunteers to gather information on Germans, forming a semi-official organisation named the American Protective League that eventually had more than 200,000 members deputised as FBI agents to “police” community loyalty. This group and others “investigated” every German, and soon every person with anti-war views, as prima facie evidence of treason.

http://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/tarred-and-feathered.jpg

Germans were forced to gather in public meetings and denounce Germany and its leaders. They were forced to purchase war bonds and publicly declare their allegiance to the US flag. As Bernays’ rhetoric reached dangerous levels, the anti-German hysteria and violence increased proportionately. Many Germans were forcibly removed from their homes, often torn from their beds during the night, taken out into the street and stripped naked, beaten and whipped, then forced to kneel and kiss the American flag. Many were tarred and feathered, then forced to leave their cities or towns. Some were lynched from trees. Priests and pastors were dragged out of their churches and beaten for giving sermons in German. (17) (18) (19) (20)

The anti-German hysteria had people seeing spies everywhere, with House and Bernays greatly inflaming this trend by preparing Wilson’s infamous “Flag Day” speech (21) (22) where he claimed “The military masters of Germany have filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators and have sought to corrupt the opinion of our people”. Newspaper editors were screaming that all Germans were spies who were poisoning American water supplies or infecting medical shipments to hospitals, and that most “ought to be taken out at sunrise and shot for treason”. The Saturday Evening Post, one of America’s most popular and influential magazines, announced that it was time to rid America of Germans, “the scum of the melting pot”. Congressmen recommended hanging or otherwise executing all Germans in America, State Governors urging the use of firing squads to eliminate “the disloyal element” from the entire state. The US Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels stated that Americans would “put the fear of God into the hearts” of these people.

According to Bernays, the key was to dehumanise and demonise the German people by filling American minds with fabricated tales of horror. The compliant media, largely Jewish-owned, obediently carried fake stories of poisoned candy being dropped from airplanes, German soldiers skewering babies like shish kebabs, the raping of nuns, and so much more. Eventually, the stories were accepted as true and the public’s natural resistance to war was overcome. From his uncle Freud, Bernays learned that a particularly effective strategy for demonising Germans was the use of atrocity stories. According to Harold Lasswell:

“So great are the psychological resistances to war in modern nations that every war must appear to be a war of defense against a menacing, murderous aggressor. There must be no ambiguity about who the public is to hate. A handy rule for arousing hate is, if at first they do not enrage, use an atrocity. It has been employed with unvarying success in every conflict known to man.” (23)

The CPI used every weapon available to spread their message to, as Creel would later say, “turn the American people into one white-hot mass (of hatred) . . .” Their psychological travesty so indoctrinated the public that daily life in America became infused with hatred and with Americans automatically conditioned to disgust and hatred for all things German.

They succeeded, and not only in the US. Teams of the same Jewish ‘specialists’ were following the same script in most other nations, all instilling massive hatred for Germans who, in every nation were vehemently portrayed as evil incarnate, simply from the fact of their German origin. In countries all around the world, the media spread the same message of hatred against Germany and the Germans.

In Brazil, anti-German demonstrations and riots consumed the country, with German businesses being destroyed and Germans being assaulted and killed. The Brazilian press carried Bernays’ intensely anti-German atrocity propaganda, stimulating demonstrations that were very ugly anti-German affairs. In some cities, hundreds of businesses, schools and homes were burned. In Porto Alegre, almost the entire German district was burned to the ground. In others, almost all German assets were seized. (24)

In almost every nation, the German-language press and use of the German language completely disappeared during the war from fear of reprisal, as did all German schools and most businesses. None re-opened. In Canada and Australia, many names of towns or streets were changed to eliminate their German origin. In Britain, France, and Canada also, thousands of people were falsely interned and their apartments and shops most often looted. They didn’t miss any opportunity; in one case, they found a photo of a German soldier with a child on his knee and published it with the caption, “One wouldn’t believe I have just killed the mother.” The Jews’ atrocity war propaganda in Canada was almost as bad as in the US, with even the military vandalising German businesses, and all Germans not imprisoned having to register with the government. (25)

The UK was as bad as the US. Persons bearing a German name were driven to despair, driven out of their positions and their businesses ruined. The Guardian archives document that anti-German riots in England were remarkable for their destruction and violence. “Some Germans were pursued into their homes by the mob and pitched through the windows into the street, others were ducked in troughs, and others had their clothing stripped off their backs.” (26) The anti-German hysteria became so severe that King George V had to change his German name of ‘Saxe-Coburg’ to ‘Windsor’, and relinquish all his German titles. (27)

Most Americans are aware that during the (again Bernays-induced) national hysteria during the Second World War the US government forced more than 100,000 US-born Japanese into concentration camps, but history has deleted the fact that many more Germans were interned in concentration camps in the US prior to and during the First War. German Mennonites who refused the draft as conscientious objectors were given prison sentences for as long as 30 years, and many died from abuse and torture in US prisons. Not only were Germans imprisoned, but all their assets were confiscated, this during both world wars, and not only personal assets but entire corporations owned by Germans were simply seized and sold. The government amassed more than half a billion dollars in seizures, nearly equivalent to the entire national budget at the time. Bayer in America was auctioned off on its own doorstep, to a friend of the Administration. (28) In fact, the US military entered every country with a German corporate presence and claimed ownership of all German assets. This portion is of such consequence I have dealt with it in detail in a separate article. (29)

While Bernays was “making the world safe for democracy”, that safety was not meant for Americans. Under the coaching of Col. E. M. House who was Wilson’s Jewish handler, Wilson passed oppressive legislation including the Espionage Act and Sedition Act that were prepared by Bernays, were entirely fascist in content and which made illegal anything that might hinder American entry into the war. Freedom of speech and assembly, and press freedom virtually disappeared from America during this time, it eventually becoming illegal to say or write anything critical of the US government, its officials and even its “symbols”.

Any expression of objection to American entrance into the war would result in a fine of $10,000 (ten years’ average wages at the time) or 20 years in prison, with much of the policing power given to what were in effect private vigilante groups like the infamous American Protective League that operated virtually without oversight. The suppression of public opinion and of dissent, and the control exercised on anti-war communication was universal. The Espionage Act stated “Every letter, writing, circular, postal card, picture, print, engraving, photograph, newspaper, pamphlet, book, or other publication, matter or thing of any kind containing any matter which is intended to obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States is hereby declared to be non-mailable.” Nothing was permitted that might prevent the successful recruitment of American soldiers for a war that only the Jews wanted.

Because of Bernays, atrocity propaganda, the deliberate spreading of fabricated evils and inhuman war crimes became the foundation of the Committee’s efforts. With all of this and much more, Bernays and Lippmann turned America into a hotbed of hatred for the entire German population, accomplishing the goal of the Zionist Jews to use the US military as a tool, their own private army in the European war to fulfill their ambition for Palestine, and thus these two men changed the course of history.

Of course, the causes and aims of the propaganda were far more evil than anything the supposed ‘enemy’ had contemplated, but the goal was to not only invent an enemy but to make that enemy “appear savage, barbaric, and inhumane”, and thus worthy of destruction. This process has been followed many dozens of times in recent history, the latest being the US-Israeli destruction of Iraq, Libya and Syria. Usually, the compliant media repeat and embellish the stories without attempt at confirmation and, in virtually every instance, later attempts to confirm the atrocity tales prove fruitless with researchers able to uncover no evidence whatever of the events. Think of Iraq’s gassing of hundreds of thousands and burial in mass graves and the tales of Libyan Viagra; these and many others proved groundless fabrications – typical atrocity propaganda. Prior to the Iraq invasion, stories appeared of Saddam using wood shredders to eliminate political opponents and dissidents but, as always, researchers later determined there was no evidence whatever to support those horrendous allegations. Thanks to Bernays, there were World War One tales of Germans cutting off the breasts of every woman they encountered, of eating babies, of rendering the bodies of massacred Jews for fat and glycerine to make weapons, tales of a tub-full of eyeballs collected by the Nazis. After the war, Bernays openly admitted that he used fabricated atrocities to provoke hatred against Germany. It appears the media will cooperate in propagating the most fantastic lies, and the people will believe almost everything they read.

Bernays and his group produced thousands of posters containing lurid descriptions of these fake atrocities (30), to say nothing of the newspaper articles, cartoons and so much more, but the historical record of this years-long tapestry of lies and hate has been quite well buried. It is possible to find copies on the internet of many wartime posters, but this collection has been well sanitised with virtually all of the genuinely evil and dirty productions apparently lost to history. The narrative today in the history books casually dismisses all this as “an innovative use of graphic arts to stir patriotism”, but it was hatred rather than patriotism that was being stirred, and both America and the Jews will one day need to openly face this entire reprehensible chapter of history.

The official story is that after World War One, propaganda developed such a poor reputation that the US Congress terminated the Committee in disgust, “ending these activities amidst great controversy”, and refused to bother with funding to preserve and archive its vast collection of hate literature and propaganda, but the truth is that the White House, Congress and the Committee conspired to eliminate or destroy much of the evidence of their crimes. There exists a section of Records of the Committee on Public Information in US Government archives (31), but little of use remains, the more dangerous elements all sanitised. And in fact, far from developing a bad reputation, Bernays and his propaganda methods became widely popular with governments and large corporations for both consumerism and the control of public perception during peacetime.

This wouldn’t be the last time Lippmann and Bernays would use these techniques against Germany. This massive attack was repeated little more than ten years later to destroy Germany and push it into yet another war the Germans didn’t want. In the 1930s, the same Jewish European bankers with largely the same agenda wanted the US to join another war they planned to initiate against Germany. In 1933 they embarked on an extensive worldwide commercial war intended to destroy Germany financially, with newspaper headlines screaming “Judea Declares War on Germany”. They had already induced in Roosevelt “an intense desire for war”, but were having the same problem again with the unwilling American public. And they employed precisely the same solutions, this time demonising Hitler.

In all of this, Lippmann and Bernays were not working independently or without guidance. Prior to their massive ‘war effort’ in the US, they had operated a successful pilot test case in the UK, using British newspapers owned by their controllers, primarily Rothschild, to determine the efficacy of their methods. You may want to think about this next sentence and apply it to recent world events. “They (Bernays and his group) practiced revealing fabricated stories of atrocities, false accusations of terror and brutality against any nation or people they wanted the public mind to view as “the enemy”, then tested and evaluated public reactions to their manipulations of this false propaganda.”

Compare those words with George W. Bush’s demonisation of Iraq, the sordid tales of mass slaughters, the nuclear weapons ready to launch within 15 minutes, the responsibility for 9-11, the babies tossed out of incubators, all the fake propaganda against Saddam and Iraq to get the public mind onside for an unjustified war launched only for political and commercial objectives. Compare them to the demonisation of Khaddafi in Libya, his supplying of Viagra to his troops so they could rape more women, the long list of fabrications and lies to get the public onside for yet another war launched for more political and commercial objectives. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and dozens of other demonisations followed this same template, usually culminating in wars and invasions. It was Bernays who created “war marketing”, the theory and the template for the manipulation of public opinion, the plan and pattern for the propaganda and lies that the US government would use repeatedly for the next century to successfully deceive the American public about its motivations and actions in more than 100 military adventures, and to blind everyone to the tragic results of America’s brutal foreign policy. This is the man Americans celebrate today as “the father of Public Relations”.

The plan to mass-engineer public opinion began in a propaganda factory at Wellington House in London in the early 1900s, with Lords Northcliffe and Rothmere, Arnold Toynbee, and of course our two war-marketing geniuses Lippmann and Bernays. It was from this source that the scheme was hatched to force the Rothschild’s privately-owned Federal Reserve banks onto the US Congress, and that trained and coached Lippmann and Bernays on the methods of molding American public opinion to push the US into the First World War for the promotion of Zionism. Bernays’ book ‘Propaganda’ offers a clear vision of his training, not only for war marketing but for the pathology of American consumption, automobiles, the hysteria of patriotism and much more.

Funding reportedly came from the UK Royal Family, the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers, and eventually included the formation of trans-Atlantic relationships. At various periods, memberships in the Tavistock Institute, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Rothschild’s Round Table, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Club of Rome, the Stanford Research Institute, the Trilateral Commission and NATO, were interchangeable. They also created the ideology for the large American Foundations like Rockefeller and Carnegie that today play a silent but major role in population management.

Wellington House eventually morphed into the Tavistock Institute, which was created at Oxford University in London by the founders of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the Round Table (Rothschild again), and was essentially a kind of mass brainwashing facility beginning as a psychological warfare bureau. It was the Tavistock Institute’s studies in psychological programming that were used to create and then exploit a grand mass hysteria during the cold war, evoking fearful delusions of a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union that even led to millions of Americans building bomb shelters in their back yards. In Tye’s biography of Bernays (32), he wrote that:

“It is impossible to fundamentally grasp the social, political, economic and cultural developments of the past 100 years without some understanding of Bernays and his professional heirs.”

Many dirty things emerged from this rat’s nest of Satan-worshippers, one being Britain’s Psychological Warfare Bureau which hatched a plan to destroy Germany not by attacking the military but by virtual genocide of the population. It seems that international bankers owned munitions plants and other valuable military targets on both sides of the war fence, and wanted their property maintained in working order in spite of the war. The solution was saturation bombing of the civilian population to collapse the morale of the German people. These ‘scientific sociologists’ determined that the destruction of 65% of German housing, usually including its occupants, would be sufficient to achieve such a collapse. This was the origin of the fame of the British aviation hero “Bomber” Harris, who carried out these night raids – always at night – that culminated in the fire-bombing of Dresden. The explanation of night raids is usually given as safety for the bomber crews, but its purpose was mostly to engender more terror among the civilian population. Working class housing areas were targeted because they had a higher density and firestorms were more likely.” This would disrupt the German workforce and Germany’s ability to produce war materials in its defense. Harris’ widespread deliberate massacres of German civilians – and those by the Americans as well – were desperately kept secret from the public and still appear nowhere in history books in useful detail or with any sincere attempt to accurately estimate civilian casualties. As I pointed out elsewhere, this was the plan that US General Curtis Lemay was following, the same low-level night raids attempting to exterminate the populations of Japan and Korea.

Everything we have seen, read, or heard in the past 70 years that demonised other nations, usually leading to military intervention or “color revolutions”, stems from this template by Lippmann and Bernays originally to support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine and to promote the agenda of Zionism. This template has been in constant use by the US government since the World War I, ‘engineering consent and ignorance’ in the American and Western populations to mask nearly a century of atrocities, demonising innocent countries and peoples in preparation for 60 or 70 politically-inspired ‘wars of liberation’ fought exclusively for the financial and political benefit of a handful of European bankers, using the US military as a private army for this purpose, resulting in the deaths and miseries of hundreds of millions of innocent civilians.

It does not appear widely-known, but the intense anti-German propaganda surrounding World War I (and also World War II) had an aim additional to the seizure of Palestine, and this was the destruction of the culture and the very soul of Germany. Churchill was clear on this matter, stating “This war is for the soul of the German people.” It was largely successful. There is no question that Bernays’ propaganda had a devastating effect on Germans and their cultural heritage. (33) Germany today is a cowed nation, still humiliated and still paying billions in reparations for crimes it never committed, in large part because the propaganda has never ceased. Even today, movies and TV programs depict Germans as cold robots lacking humanity, and we were recently treated to a widely-publicised revelation that Hitler had been cursed with a “twisted micro-penis”. Few peoples today are ashamed to admit their national heritage, but no Germans boast of being German. Where in America do we find German beer halls and restaurants, German churches or newspapers? In 2004, The Guardian published a review of a book titled “The loneliness of being German”. (34) This is not an accident.

In one CPI publication, Professor Vernon Kellogg asked “Will it be any wonder if, after the war, the people of the world, when they recognize any human being as a German, will shrink aside so that they may not touch him as he passes, or stoop for stones to drive him from their path?” (35) No wonder at all.

In this context, you may care to read my recent article titled “The Anger Campaign against China”, (36) and think of the physical and other attacks ethnic Chinese are experiencing today in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and other Western nations. Consider the accusations of ‘genocide’ in China’s Xinjiang, China’s ‘cover-up’ and full blame for COVID-19, all the (undocumented) tales of spying, of IP theft, of prison camps, of forced abortions, of being ‘Communists’, and much more. Only the atrocity details have changed; all else is the same. Bernays’ template is being followed to the letter, in preparation for World War III.

Introduction – If America Dissolves – http://thesaker.is/if-america-dissolves/

Part 1 of 5 – Bernays and Propaganda – http://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda/

Part 2 of 5 – This current essay


Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 30 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English-language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. His full archive can be seen at https://www.moonofshanghai.com/ and http://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com

Notes

(1) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-woodrow-wilsons-propaganda-machine-changed-american-journalism-180963082/

(2) https://theconversation.com/how-woodrow-wilsons-propaganda-machine-changed-american-journalism-76270

(3) https://www.history.com/news/world-war-1-propaganda-woodrow-wilson-fake-news

(4) https://www.amazon.com/Public-Opinion-Original-Walter-Lippmannn/dp/1947844563

(5) https://archive.org/details/publicopinion00lippgoog

(6) https://propagandacritic.com/previous-version-propaganda-critic/articles/ww1.cpi.html

(7) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-woodrow-wilsons-propaganda-machine-changed-american-journalism-180963082/

(8) Cinema as an imperialist weapon: Hollywood and World War I; https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/08/holl-a05.html

(9) https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1917-72PubDip/comp1

(10) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-woodrow-wilsons-propaganda-machine-changed-american-journalism-180963082/

(11) https://www.cincinnatimagazine.com/citywiseblog/one-hundred-years-ago-anti-german-hysteria-consumed-cincinnati/

(12) https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2017/03/11/anti-german-hysteria-city-during-wwi/98895422/

(13) https://spartacus-educational.com/FWWantigerman.htm

(14) http://www.revisionist.net/hysteria/index.html

(15) http://www.revisionist.net/hysteria/german-triangle.html

(16) https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/wilson-asks-for-declaration-of-war

(17) https://www.npr.org/2017/04/06/522903398/lynching-of-robert-prager-underlined-anti-german-sentiment-during-world-war-i

(18) https://journal.historyitm.org/2013/10/17/feathered-and-tarred/

(19) https://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/05/wwi-and-german-americans.html

(20) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4992032/Germans-AMERICA-World-War.html

(21) https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/u-s-president-woodrow-wilson-gives-flag-day-address

(22) https://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/president-wilson-proclaims-flag-day-224127

(23) http://www.revisionist.net/hysteria/cpi-propaganda.html

(24) https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1168&context=historyfacpub

(25) https://www.warmuseum.ca/firstworldwar/history/life-at-home-during-the-war/enemy-aliens/anti-german-sentiment/

(26) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/13/anti-german-riots-lusitania-1915-first-world-war

(27) https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-25450726

(28) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/us-confiscated-half-billion-dollars-private-property-during-wwi-180952144/

(29) https://www.moonofshanghai.com/2020/04/the-greatest-intellectual-property.html

(30) https://www.historyhit.com/anti-german-propaganda-posters-from-world-war-one/

(31) https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/063.html

(32) https://www.amazon.com/Father-Spin-Edward-Bernays-Relations-ebook/dp/B0091I177W

(33) https://www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/entries/german-americans-during-world-war-i/

(34) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/sep/07/germany.society

(35) https://propagandacritic.com/previous-version-propaganda-critic/articles/ww1.demons.html

(36) https://www.moonofshanghai.com/2020/08/blog-post_49.html

February 15, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

Israel To Ban Citizens From Gyms, Cafés and Shops If They Refuse Vaccine

By Richie Allen | February 15, 2021

SKY News correspondent Mark Stone is in Tel Aviv today, reporting on Israel’s vaccine roll-out. Israel offered the jab to everyone over-16 at the beginning of this month. Since then, uptake has dropped significantly. Younger people are reluctant to be vaccinated. The country’s Health Minister has proposed that the unvaccinated be excluded from museums, cinemas, shops and cafés. Taking to Twitter Health Minister Yuli Edelstein declared:

“Decide whether you are part of the celebration or whether you will be left behind. Just lend a shoulder to the vaccine.”

The Health and Culture ministries confirmed yesterday, that museums, libraries, concert venues and other cultural events will reopen later this month, but only to those who have been vaccinated.

Israel is blaming misinformation and fake news for the low uptake amongst the young. The government set up a digital task force to counter the alleged misinformation on the coronavirus vaccines. Incredibly, DJ’s have been sent to vaccination centres to lure the kids and free food has been offered as a further incentive. They, and by they I mean our governments and their advisers, are desperate for us to take this vaccine. The only question of any value now is why?

UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab told LBC Radio yesterday that domestic vaccine passports, for shops and café’s hadn’t been ruled out. Upon hearing this, Good Morning Britain presenter Piers Morgan was delighted. He Tweeted:

“Love the idea of covid vaccine passports for everywhere: flights, restaurants, clubs, football, gyms, shops etc. It’s time covid-denying, anti-vaxxer loonies had their bullsh*t bluff called & bar themselves from going anywhere that responsible citizens go.”

Morgan would undoubtedly have told his viewers back in 2009, that they should have the Pandemrix Swine Flu Vaccine, to protect themselves and others. Then, when people began dying and coming down with narcolepsy, he would have ignored it. Nothing to see here and all that. Morgan is wretched, but he’s not alone. Raab made his chilling comments on domestic vaccine passports nearly 24 hours ago.

There isn’t so much as a murmur of dissent in today’s British newspapers. It is no exaggeration to say now, that the UK is a fascist state. Did you ever imagine that your government would threaten to destroy your life, if you didn’t consent to being vaccinated? Welcome to Dystopia.

February 15, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , , , | Leave a comment

Trump Acquitted (Again), But Trump Hatred Continues

By Ron Paul | February 15, 2021

Last week’s second impeachment trial of former President Trump should serve as a warning that something is very wrong in US politics. Far from a measured, well-investigated, rock-solid case against the former president, America was again abused with day after day of character assassination, innuendo, false claims, and even falsified “evidence.”

The trial wasn’t intended to win a conviction of Trump for “incitement” because the Democrats already knew that the votes were not there. So, just as with the last impeachment trial, the goal was to fling as much dirt at Donald Trump as they could while the cameras were rolling. Their hatred of Donald Trump is so deep and visceral that probably a psychologist would have been more beneficial to them than yet another impeachment trial.

It would be incorrect to say that the House managers’ case fell apart, because they had no case to begin with. They never had a case because they made no effort to develop a case. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court saw from the beginning that this was no legitimate impeachment trial and informed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer that he would not preside. Without the Chief Justice, there was no Constitutional impeachment trial. So they put on a show trial instead.

As Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley kept asking, why didn’t the House schedule a single hearing to investigate what really happened up to and on the day of the Capitol melee on January 6th? They had weeks to do so. Professor Turley believes they might even have been able to make a decent case if they had tried.

Why did they not call witnesses? Were there no rioters who could be called to explain under oath how Trump’s speech had inspired them to enter the Capitol building to overturn the election?

Were they afraid that under cross-examination we might have found out more about Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows’ claim that Trump offered to deploy 10,000 National Guard troops in Washington before January 6th but that his offer was rebuked? What about reports that Capitol Hill Police were left without back-up and unprepared for what happened? House and Senate leadership is responsible for security at the Capitol and they obviously failed. Why?

The House and Senate Democrats (and a few Republicans) did not succeed in their ultimate goal: preventing Trump from ever running again for political office. But that doesn’t mean they are giving up. They are not about to give citizen Trump a moment of peace. They are intent on continuing their witch hunt but it looks less and less like any desire for justice. It looks like fear. They are afraid if he is allowed to run again he may be elected. So they cannot allow that vote to happen.

And they accuse Trump of undermining democracy.

There were a number of reasons to impeach and convict President Trump while he was in office. Bombing Syria on bogus grounds without authorization was one of them. But Democrats love war as much as Republicans so they weren’t about to uphold their Constitutional obligations.

Impeachment 2.0 may be over, but those blinded by hatred for Trump are not about to give up. They are irrational and obsessed. They are also dangerous.

Copyright © 2021 by RonPaul Institute.

February 15, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite | | Leave a comment

Disappearing Freedoms in America

By Stephen Lendman | February 15, 2021

The self-styled land of the free and home of the brave exists only in Hollywood films, television productions, mind-manipulating classrooms at all levels, and Big Media propaganda reports.

The real thing disappeared long ago.

Activist attorney, law professor, author and public advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sounded the alarm in a straight talk letter and report to 100,000 lawyers on the urgency of “protecting individual rights” at a time when they’re disappearing altogether that demands action to halt the US road to tyranny.

Seasonal flu-renamed covid is the invented driving force behind what’s going on.

RFK Jr.: Covid is “an opportunity of convenience for totalitarian elements who have put individual rights and freedoms globally under siege.” 

“A (diabolical) medical cartel composed of pharmaceutical industry, government regulators, financial houses, and telecom and internet billionaires are systematically obliterating freedom of speech and assembly, religious worship, property rights, jury trial, due process, and — ultimately” what remains of a free and open society in the US, West, and elsewhere to be eliminated for unchallenged control by Big Government and Big Money.

Looking ahead, the alternative for freedom-loving people is either mass-activism against what’s going on or face serfdom under totalitarian rule, enforced by police state harshness.

Shockingly, over half of US children “have chronic health issues, (including) allergies, ADHD, autism, eczema, asthma, obesity, autoimmune conditions and more,” RFK Jr. explained.

What was rare when he was growing up is commonplace today.

US children now “receive 72 mandated doses of 16 vaccines, prior to age 18” — their young bodies pumped full of dangerous toxins 

They don’t protect and are destroying their health and well-being.

Numerous “peer-reviewed studies (show) vaccines (are) the primary culprit in this public health calamity.” 

“That isn’t stopping our health authorities from mandating more hugely subsidized, shoddily tested, zero-liability vaccines for children.”

Highly toxic covid vaccines to be shunned, not taken as directed, represent a potential motherlode of big bucks for Pharma bandits — who don’t give a damn about protecting health and well-being, just the opposite. 

They’re poisoning millions of Americans and countless abroad with what just societies would ban.

Kids in America aren’t permitted in classrooms without receiving up to 75 shots that are eroding their health and shortening their lifespan.

“After studying this subject for years, I am more horrified than ever by the system’s pervasive corruption,” said RFK Jr.

An epidemic of vaccine-related harm to human health and well-being goes on with full support and encouragement of US ruling authorities.

Adults like children are harmed by a nation indifferent to their lives, health, welfare and safety.

If covid vaccines are mandated ahead for access to public places, for work, education, and normality in our lives, full-blown tyranny will have arrived in the US.

Kennedy’s report is titled “Protecting Individual Rights in the Era of COVID-19,” its key points stating:

Mandatory vaxxing breaches the Nuremberg Code and other international human rights laws.

Seasonal flu-renamed covid is a diabolical pretext for mass-vaxxing.

Mandating this practice rests on the shaky foundation of a Supreme Court ruling over a century ago that’s no longer relevant in today’s America.

New millennium “sanitation, hygiene, refrigeration, and the provision of clean water produced dramatic declines in infectious disease” — unrelated to vaxxing.

Vaxxing in the US causes an epidemic of harm to individuals unaware of the risks.

The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is a state-sponsored scam, capturing a scant 1% of adverse events that include serious illness and deaths from vaxxing.

The system is rigged for Pharma and other corporate predators at the expense of human rights, health, welfare, and safety.

Pharma cannot be held liable for harm caused by vaxxing — no matter how serious.

Pharma and other corporate giants are virtually free to do whatever they wish in pursuit of maximum revenue, profits and market share.

Though mandated to study vaccine injuries, HHS in cahoots with Pharma hasn’t done it in over 30 years.

The above and much more are proof positive that Big Government, Big Pharma, Big Media, and Big Money are the mortal enemies of freedom loving people everywhere.

February 15, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Conspiracy Theories Are Caused By Government Secrecy

By Caitlin Johnstone | February 14, 2021

The DC Circuit has ruled that the CIA is under no obligation to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests pertaining to its involvement with insurgent militias in Syria, overturning a lower court’s previous ruling in favor of a Buzzfeed News reporter seeking such documents.

As Sputnik’s Morgan Artyukhina clearly outlines, this ruling comes despite the fact that mainstream news outlets have been reporting on the Central Intelligence Agency’s activities in Syria for years, and despite a US president having openly tweeted about those activities.

“In other words, the CIA will not be required to admit to actions it is widely reported as having done, much less divulge documents about them to the press for even greater scrutiny,” Artyukhina writes, calling to mind the Julian Assange quote “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security.”

The CIA’s brazen collaboration with dangerous extremist factions seeking to topple Damascus, and its equally brazen refusal to provide the public with any information about the extent of its involvement in Syria from the earliest stages of the violence in that nation onwards, will necessarily provide fodder for conspiracy theories.

It is public knowledge that the CIA was involved in the Syrian war to some extent, it is public knowledge that the CIA has a well-documented history of doing extremely evil things, and it is public knowledge that the US government has long sought control over Syria. Due to the agency’s refusal to be transparent about the exact nature of its involvement in that nation, people are left to fill in the knowledge gaps with their own speculation.

Of course they will do this. Why wouldn’t they? Why would anyone give the lying, torturingpropagandizingdrug traffickingcoup-stagingwarmongeringpsychopathic Central Intelligence Agency the benefit of the doubt and assume their actions in Syria have been benevolent just because the hard facts have been hidden behind a wall of government secrecy?

Yet they will be expected to. Anyone with a sufficient degree of influence who comes right out and says the CIA knowingly armed violent jihadists with the goal of orchestrating regime change in Syria will be attacked as a crazy conspiracy theorist by the narrative managers of the establishment media. If their words are really disruptive to establishment narratives, there will be calls to deplatform, unemploy, and ban them from social media.

And really such is the case with all the melodramatic garment rending about the dangers of conspiracy theories today. All the fixation on the way unregulated speech on the internet has contributed to the circulation of conspiracy theories conveniently ignores the real cause of those theories: government secrecy.

If the most powerful government in the world were not hiding a massive amount of its behavior behind increasingly opaque walls of secrecy, people would not need to fill in the gaps with theories about what’s happening, because there would be no gaps; they would simply see what’s happening.

“But Caitlin!” one might object. “How could America engage in all its military operations around the world if it didn’t keep information about its behaviors a secret?”

Exactly, my smooth-brained friend. Exactly.

Government secrecy is indeed necessary for winning wars. Government secrecy is also necessary for starting those wars in the first place. US government agencies have an extensive history of using false pretenses to initiate military conflicts; if they could not hide the facts behind a veil of government opacity, the public would never engage in them. The American people would never have allowed their sons to go to Vietnam if they’d known the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a lie. They’d never have sent their sons and daughters to invade Iraq if they’d known weapons of mass destruction were a lie. They would lose the support of the public, and the international community would refuse to back them.

Protecting the lives of foreign military and intelligence personnel is the primary argument against government transparency in the United States, a premise which takes it for granted that there need to be foreign military and intelligence personnel at all. The only reason the lives of troops and intelligence officers would be endangered without massive walls of government secrecy is because those personnel are out there facilitating imperialist acts of mass murder and tyranny. The argument is essentially “Well we can’t tell you the truth about what’s happening in our government, because it would mean we’d have to stop doing extremely evil things.”

The argument that the internet needs strict censorship to eliminate dangerous conspiracy theories takes it as a given that simply eliminating government secrecy is impossible, which in turn takes it as a given that the US government cannot simply stop inflicting grave evils around the world. Our ability to share information with each other online is therefore ultimately being increasingly choked off by monopolistic Silicon Valley megacorporations because no one in charge can fathom the idea of the United States government ceasing to butcher human beings around the world.

That is the real underlying argument over internet censorship today. Should people have free access to information about what their own government is doing, or should their government be permitted to do evil things in secret while people who form theories about what they’re doing are shoved further and further away from audibility? That’s the real debate here.

The powerful should not be permitted to keep secrets from the public. They should not be permitted to jail journalists who try to reveal those secrets to the public, and they should not be permitted to collaborate with monopolistic corporations to censor people who form theories about those secrets. The amount of secrecy you are entitled to should be directly inverse to the amount of power that you have.

The US government has powerful agencies whose literal job is to conspire. The fact that people are punished and condemned for forming theories about how that conspiring might take place, even while those agencies are completely lacking in transparency, is abusive.

If the government was not doing evil things in secret, then it wouldn’t need secrecy. If the government didn’t have secrecy, there would be no conspiracy theories. Stop pointing your attacks at powerless people who are just trying to figure out what’s going on in the world amidst a sea of government secrecy and propaganda, and point your attacks instead at the power structures that are actually responsible for the existence of conspiracy theories in the first place.

February 14, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Whistleblower from Berlin nursing home: terrible dying after vaccination

2020News – February 14, 2021

For the first time, there is an eyewitness report from a Berlin nursing home on the situation after the vaccination. It comes from the AGAPLESION Bethanien Havelgarten retirement home in Berlin-Spandau. There, within four weeks after the first vaccination with the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine Comirnaty, eight of 31 seniors, who suffered from dementia but were in good physical condition according to their age before the vaccination, died. The first death occurred after only six days, and five other seniors died approximately 14 days after vaccination. The first symptoms of the disease had already appeared shortly after the vaccination. From information available to 2020News the patients have not been duly informed about the risks of this vaccine. One reason being that no detailed information about the novelty of this mRNA vaccine which has only conditionally been certified in the European Union have been provided.

Attorney at Law Viviane Fischer and Attorney at Law Dr. Reiner Füllmich of the Corona Committee spoke in a video interview with the whistleblower about the closer circumstances of the vaccination, the symptoms that occurred and the different nature of the deaths in temporal connection with the vaccination.

On January 3, 2021, 31 female and male residents of the dementia ward “ground floor/protected area” had been vaccinated with Comirnaty. Relatives of another three seniors had objected to vaccination, and two residents were in terminal care, so no vaccination was given.

The residents of this ward are very active, “self defending” dementia patients who are physically in good condition. They are allowed to move around the ward all day without restriction. The day before the vaccination, the 31 vaccinated persons were all in good health. A few days earlier, all had tested negative for Corona, according to the whistleblower report.

According to the whistleblower, the first vaccination event with Comirnaty on January 3, 2021, took place in such a way that all residents were gathered in the recreation room of the first floor area. A vaccination team consisting of an aged vaccinator, three aides and two federal soldiers in camouflage uniforms performed the vaccinations. The home staff as well as the home physician assisted in the process. The role of the soldiers, who at no time moved away from the vaccine, has not been conclusively determined.

What the whistleblower was able to establish, however, was that the presence of the uniformed men greatly intimidated the seniors. The group, which normally shows a “strong defensive behavior” in the case of unfamiliar treatments, was hardly recognizable, so predominantly “lamblike” they had let the vaccination with Comirnaty pass over them. The whistleblower suspects that this could also be related to the fact that the elderly seniors, who had still experienced the war, could not properly assess the role of the soldiers and possibly felt reminded of war-traumatic circumstances.

During the first vaccination, a resisting senior citizen was detained by a nurse under the watchful eyes of the German soldiers, the eyewitness reported. A judicial decision for the detention, which as such represents a coercion and therefore requires in principle a judicial evaluation in the individual case, had not been issued.

According to the whistleblower’s account, the administration of the second vaccination dose took place without warning always on the spot where the person to be vaccinated was found. For example, an elderly lady lying unsuspectingly in bed who began to resist the second dose was restrained by two members of the nursing staff in order to overcome her resistance – again without the necessary court order. The swabbing for the PCR test, which some seniors tried to resist, is also regularly done with the use of physical force against the seniors resisting the unwanted treatment, the whistleblower said.

According to the whistleblower, the vaccination education of the caregivers and relatives – the seniors are unable to effectively consent to vaccination due to their dementia – was based on outdated information sheets from the RKI/Grünes Kreuze. In particular, the information required by Regulation (EC) No. 507/2006 on the fact the vaccine Comirnaty has only been granted conditional marketing authorization and why this is the case is missing. In particular, the information should have been provided that from the point of view of the regulatory authority EMA, the data situation still needs to be improved with regard to various aspects, e.g. the interaction of Comirnaty with other drugs.

Already on the day of vaccination, four of the vaccinated seniors began to show unusual symptoms. In the evening of that day they were fatigued and extremely tired, some of them fell asleep at the table during dinner. A sharp drop in blood oxygen saturation was noted. In the further course, the leaden fatigue continued, the oxygen saturation in the blood remained insufficient, in some cases gasping breathing occurred, and fever, edema, skin rash, a yellowish-gray discoloration of the skin, and a (characteristic) muscle tremor of the upper body and arms occurred.

The seniors also showed a change in demeanor, were partially unresponsive, and refused to eat or drink. One vaccinated senior, who had previously been “in great shape” for her age and suffered from no serious previous illnesses, died as early as January 9, 2021, just six days after vaccination. Deaths among vaccinated seniors and senior citizens occurred on January 15, January 16, January 19 (2 deaths), January 20, February 2, and February 8, 2021. The most recently deceased senior citizen was a former opera singer who had been playing the piano the day before vaccination. The whistleblower reports on the state of health that the old gentleman regularly went jogging, danced, played music and was otherwise very dynamic and active.

Of the seniors who tested negative before vaccination, various suddenly showed a positive test result after vaccination. However, all of these seniors did not show any of the known COVID-19 symptoms, i.e., symptoms of colds such as cough, cold, loss of sense of smell and taste, etc.

On January 24, 2021, the second dose of Comirnaty was applied to 21 seniors. After this vaccination, according to the whistleblower, eleven seniors are now showing persistent extreme fatigue, partially gasping for breath, partially edema, skin rash, and the yellowish-grayish skin discoloration. As of February 10, 2021, none of the seniors who received the second dose of Comirnaty has died, but the health of some of the seniors in this group is steadily deteriorating.

The whistleblower impressively describes the different nature of the dying process of the vaccinated. Normally, the person dying would eventually accept their approaching death and – perhaps after seeing a loved one for the last time – go in peace. Dying as after vaccination, however, was different, he said. It is “inhumane.” The old people he had seen dying had breathed heavily, trembled strongly, and seemed as if inwardly they had passed away already. It seemed to him like a lonely, futile struggle against death, as if “the people knew that their time had not yet come, and therefore they had not yet been able to let go.”

The AGAPLESION Bethanien Havelgarten senior citizens’ residential home was requested to comment on the events on February 3, 2021 by Attorney at Law Viviane Fischer, in the name and on behalf of two journalists researching the topic, but has still not received a response.

Attorney at Law Viviane Fischer filed a criminal complaint with the public prosecutor’s office on February 3, 2021, 12:04 a.m., and informed the police as well as Prof. Klaus Cichutek, the head of the Paul Ehrlich Institute, which is responsible for recording vaccination side effects, and the Senator for Health of Berlin, Dilek Kalayci, about the events. The health department was also informed, as well as the office of the senate administration responsible for nursing homes.

Lawyer Fischer requested the public prosecutor’s office to secure the body of the last deceased old gentleman, She alerted the officials to the imminent death of the eighth death victim, which was to be feared at that time promptly. In the meantime he succumbed to his illness.

Upon telephone inquiry on February 8, 2021, the file could not be found in the registry at the public prosecutor’s office. Such a registration, so it was communicated, can in Corona times take up to six weeks.

On February 8, 2021 Attorney a Law Fischer has therefore additionally filed a criminal complaint via the Internet guard of the Berlin police.

A press inquiry with view of initiated investigations, seizure of the corpses and possible similar occurrences in the past examined by the authorities, which Attorney at Law Fischer had placed again in agency of the two journalists on February 8, 2021, answered the police in the evening of February 9, 2021, as follows: “So far the Berlin police led no investigations in connection with the deaths described by you. Such investigations are always initiated when a doctor certifies a non-natural cause of death when issuing the death certificate. The two deaths you mentioned are also not known to the Berlin police. In this respect, no investigations were conducted nor has the body of the deceased been seized. The criminal charges filed by you are available to the Berlin police and are currently being investigated by a specialist department of the criminal police or by the Berlin public prosecutor’s office. Information for this can be received from the press office of the public prosecutor’s office in Berlin.”

The investigation behavior of the police presenting itself at present as little engaged stands in contrast to the legality principle and pursuit obligation for criminal offences, to which police and public prosecutor are subject, Attorney at Law Dr. Fuellmich states. A violation of this could justify the reproach of an obstruction of justice in the office pursuant to § 258 a StGB.§ Section 160 (I) sentence of the Code of Criminal Procedure stipulates: “As soon as the public prosecutor’s office becomes aware of the suspicion of a criminal offense through a report or by other means, it must investigate the facts of the case in order to decide whether to file a public complaint.” Section 163 (I) sentence 1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure stipulates: “The authorities and officers of the police service must investigate criminal offenses and issue all orders that do not permit any delay in order to prevent the case from becoming obscure.

It would therefore be contrary to current law for the police to take action only when the family doctor, emergency physician or even the vaccinator himself filling out the death certificate confirmed an unnatural cause of death. It was already questionable whether an external physician, who in case of doubt could not know the medical history in detail, would at all be able to assess the situation and the dying process correctly. According to Dr. Fuellmich, the lawyer, there is undoubtedly a considerable initial suspicion that the extraordinary accumulation of deaths – otherwise only one or two seniors die per month in the respective department of the nursing home – was not due to natural causes.

With regard to the eleven seniors whose health condition had deteriorated after administration of the second dose of Comirnaty, there was also imminent danger.

The police, the health offices and the senate administration have a guarantor position to avert danger for the population. If the persons installed to fend off danger from the public do not follow their obligation, a punishability of the acting persons because of active assistance and/or assistance by omission to the body injury (possibly even with death consequence) – committed while in office – comes into consideration, Attorney at Law Fischer states. Also a negligent act participation must be examined. In order to avoid dangers for possible future victims the police is obligated to immediately start professional investigations. Post-mortem examinations must be carried out. A retreat to a possible theoretical assessment of police experts, as this was indicated to Attorney at Law Fischer by the police department in charge (LKA 115, offenses against humans), could not be accepted. The question, which symptoms develop after a vaccination and possibly cause the death of the patient can at present not be answered by any expert simply because up-to-date no study exists for instance regarding the endangerment of old humans by the vaccine. In particular no interaction studies regarding other medicines have been performed. After deaths in Norway following the Corona vaccination, the vaccination of very old, fragile people is no longer recommended in Norway.

The causal relationship between vaccination and the accumulation of deaths, especially among the elderly, is such that government action is urgently needed to protect the health and lives of all those willing to be vaccinated and those who have already received a dose of Comirnaty. The precautionary principle may include temporarily suspending the use of this vaccine for the duration of a full and transparent investigation into any role it may have played in the deaths of the elderly whose fates are the subject of this article.

These governmental measures should also be taken, in particular, for the benefit of those who wish to visit vaccination centers, are residents of retirement or nursing homes, or have a job in health care with contact with patients.

Comirnaty seems by no means as safe as one might think based on the government’s vaccination campaign and the many public statements by politicians and experts who support the government’s lockdown course.

Comirnaty is a so-called mRNA (messenger ribonucleic acid) vaccine. The mRNA contains the “blueprint” for a protein on the surface of SARS-CoV-2. Through vaccination, this blueprint enters the body cells of the vaccinated person via tiny fat particles (fat nanobodies). These are then supposed to produce a protein that is found on the surface of the virus. This is intended to induce a response in the immune system that will in turn cause an appropriate immune response to occur in the event of subsequent infection with SARS-CoV-2.

Because of the unusually short duration of clinical testing on humans, it is obvious from the point of view of 2020news.de that not all possible negative effects of this vaccine could be researched. In particular, experts believe there is a risk of the formation of antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). This is the term used to describe antibodies that bind to the surface of viruses but do not neutralize them, instead leading to enhanced uptake of the virus into a cell and thus promoting the spread and multiplication of the virus. Infection-enhancing antibodies promote immunopathogenesis and constitute a long-known potential hazard of certain vaccines.

The occurrence of this hazard has been well documented for previous unsuccessful attempts to develop vaccines against coronaviruses (such as SARS-CoV). In some preclinical animal studies, test animals became severely ill or even died after encountering the wild virus because of the appearance of infection-boosting antibodies.

Experts also fear that the occurrence of autoimmune diseases and an impairment or endangerment of fertility, pregnancy, unborn life, breastfeeding with breast milk and children whose mothers were vaccinated during pregnancy cannot be ruled out. In their view the probability of the occurrence of these negative consequences could not – or not sufficiently – be investigated due to the design of the clinical trials in humans, which BioNTech/Pfizer conducted before the conditional approval of Comirnaty.

According to the assessment of the Paul Ehrlich Institute, the polyethylene glycol (PEG)-containing lipid nanoparticles contained in Comirnaty may, too, be possible triggers of observed serious reactions in connection with the vaccination. This is also troubling because in numerous preclinical studies, PEG liposomes have been shown to transport substances across the blood-brain barrier. Certain liposomes have also been linked to the death of specific cells in the liver and lungs in animal studies. For more details, see the recording of Corona Committee Meeting #37 (starting at 03:55:00).

According to the EMA Dashboard, as of February 12, 2021, 54,828 adverse vaccine reactions have already been reported. As of January 31, 2021, there were 26,849.

Because of the multiple concerns about the vaccine, a withdrawal request against the approval has already been submitted to the EMA. According to lawyer Fischer, Attorney at Law Dr. Renate Holzeisen will file an action against this approval, including summary proceedings, with the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in due time on behalf of clients residing in Italy. Such an action and such an application is possible within a period of two months after the conditional approval of Cominarty had been granted. According to lawyer Fischer, these proceedings will now also be accompanied by an international network of lawyers and scientists, to which the members of the Corona Committee also belong. The judgment in the main proceedings and the decision in the summary proceedings will have an impact in all member states of the EU for which the conditional approval of Comirnaty has effect.

On February 12, 2021, the public prosecutor informed attorney Viviane Fischer in writing: “Your criminal complaint is already known here, but not yet recorded in our system, so I cannot provide you with any further information on this at present. However, within the scope of the permissible investigations, everything necessary will be arranged with the necessary acceleration.”

2020News will report on further developments.

February 14, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

While State Governments are Ending Their Mask Mandates, President Biden Is Going Full Mask Tyrant

By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | February 13, 2021

This week, statewide mask mandates terminated in two states — Iowa and Montana.

While state governments were giving the OK for ditching masks, President Joe Biden was telling reporters Thursday at the National Institutes of Health that people should keep wearing masks until at least next year, claiming that doing so “can save lives, a significant number of lives.”

This declaration came in muffled words and heavy breathing through at least two masks while Biden, standing behind a podium, acknowledged he was more than ten feet from anyone.

Biden made this claim of masks’ life-saving ability despite the facts that regular mask wearing does have negative health consequences and that it has not been established that mask wearing provides any net protection against coronavirus infection.

Biden is not just recommending that people wear masks. The Biden administration has already rolled out in its first three weeks sweeping countrywide mask mandates. Mask wearing is now mandated across the country — via executive branch fiat — for people in many circumstances related to public transportation and even when just in a taxi or ride share vehicle and for people who are in a US government building or on US government land.

And the plan is for these US government mask mandates to be enforced harshly. As James Bovard wrote in a recent article, for example, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) policy calls for monitoring both if people are wearing masks and if people are wearing the right kinds of masks in the right way, with fines of up to 1,500 dollars imposed on individuals who TSA determines have not adequately complied.

It looks like Americans are set to suffer tag team mask tyranny. As state governments remove authoritarian mask mandates, the US government is stepping in to ensure freedom remains suppressed.

February 13, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

MSM’s narrative about the murderous Capitol mob has collapsed, but don’t let that stop a political lynching

By Tony Cox | RT | February 13, 2021

As their dishonest narrative collapses around them, mainstream media outlets and Democrat politicians are trying to hold together their latest bid to destroy Donald Trump, but some of the lies are getting too big to shrug off.

I’m reminded of  the media-speak popularized during the Trump era – lightly used words or phrases that became ubiquitous in the talking points, like “violating norms” – especially the term “debunked.” In the eyes of MSM and their controllers, Trump was a president who needed to be debunked thousands of times. Whether it was about the size of his Inauguration Day crowd, the animal-like savagery of MS-13 gang-bangers or the fact that Haiti is “a s**thole”, any Trump claim had to be debunked, false or not.

When an obnoxious loudmouth constantly blurts out things that lift the skirt on the ruling class’ treachery, his voice must be discredited. And even if just part of his story can be attacked, the rest will be forgotten. It’s like a Jenga game where all the pieces automatically fall down when one is removed.

But the same standard doesn’t apply to the media’s own story lines. No matter how many times MSM and establishment politicians are exposed as liars — from the MLK bust in the Oval Office to the Russia collusion hoax — the people are supposed to keep believing the gist of their arguments. The Jenga tower can be levitating with entire floors missing, but the con artists insist that it’s still standing.

We’re seeing it again in Trump’s second Senate impeachment trial. Giant holes have been blown in the MSM-DNC narrative about the January 6 “insurrection” at the US Capitol, but that’s not supposed to matter. For instance, when lead House impeachment manager Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) got caught lying on Wednesday about the content of an alleged telephone call between Trump and a Republican senator during the Capitol riot, he admitted that his claim was false and shrugged it off. “This is much ado about nothing because it’s not critical in any way to our case,” he said.

Never mind that the point was apparently considered important enough to submit as evidence. Raskin was essentially allowed to wriggle out as if he said, “The fact that we’re lying about this doesn’t reflect whatsoever on the veracity of anything else we’re telling you.”

A far bigger and more central piece of the impeachment Jenga tower shouldn’t be sloughed off so easily. In fact, Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick is so central to the narrative that his cremated remains were displayed in honor at the Capitol Rotunda to remind everyone of the viciousness of the alleged Trump domestic-terrorism army.

The tale of the brutal Trump mob is always punctuated with the fact that five people were “killed” during the riot, er, “white-supremacist insurrection.” One of those people was Ashli Babbitt, one of the rioters, who was fatally shot by a law enforcement officer. Three others were election-fraud protesters who died from health crises – a heart attack, a stroke and an unidentified medical emergency – during the January 6 demonstration and riot.

The talking heads who wish Trump supporters dead in every other case are counting Trump supporters in the death toll from an incident perpetrated primarily by Trump supporters. It’s as if they’re leading a story on a hostage crisis by saying that 30 people were killed without mentioning that 25 of those were hostage takers, including 22 who died of food poisoning.

Therefore, it’s easy to see why Sicknick is so important to the story. He’s the one alleged victim who wasn’t on Team Trump that day. MSM and Democrat politicians told us over and over that the officer died from being bludgeoned in the head with a fire extinguisher, even though Capitol Police’s official statement was only that he “passed away due to injuries sustained while on duty.”

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Anderson “CIA” Cooper and other MSM hosts ignored the Sicknick family’s request to not make the officer’s death a political issue. They portrayed it as a murder without any such determination by investigators. No one has been arrested in connection with Sicknick’s death, and no murder case has been built so far.

But the Sicknick story has crumbled in recent days with the revelation that medical examiners didn’t find any indication that the officer sustained any blunt force trauma. Investigators are reportedly considering a theory that Sicknick became ill after coming in contact with a chemical irritant, such as pepper spray, that was deployed in the crowd.

The vast majority of Americans haven’t heard about this gigantic wrinkle in the Sicknick story because the media, predictably, hasn’t blasted out corrections of their false reporting. They’ve adopted more careful storytelling about the officer’s death, with the fire-extinguisher bit missing.

Also obscured is the wrinkle that Sicknick communicated with his family after the riot. Ken Sicknick reportedly said his brother sent him a text hours after the riot, saying, “I got pepper-sprayed twice,” and that he was in good shape. The next day, the family was informed that Sicknick was in critical condition, on a ventilator.

Without issuing a correction on any of its false stories with the fire-extinguisher tale, CNN reported the fact that Sicknick died of something other than blunt force trauma. In its first article acknowledging that reality, the network immediately transitioned from the Sicknick investigation to background about other officers being injured by rioters. It was like saying, “our central claim wasn’t true, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Trump mob was vicious.”

Daily Dot writer Mikael Thalen argued the propagandists’ case, saying mainstream outlets didn’t lie to fit a narrative. There was just a “communication breakdown” between sources and reporters. He conceded that the facts of Sicknick’s death are important, but concluded that those details have no bearing on the fact that “thousands of people, egged on by the most powerful man in the world, attempted to violently overthrow the democratic process.”

It’s the Jamie Raskin response all over again. Never mind the falsehoods that we’ve been telling you. None of that stuff we said over and over had anything to do with our central point that Trump incited an insurrection. And don’t let the fact that we’ve been telling you falsehoods cause you to question our credibility. The house of cards, the Jenga tower, still stands strong.

But how many pieces have to be debunked before we can call the project debunked?

By Tony Cox is a US journalist who has written or edited for Bloomberg and several major daily newspapers.

February 13, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

Study: Mass Hysteria & Poor Public Policies Link During Lockdown

Principia Scientific | February 13, 2021

A new study shows that ‘lockdown’ mass hysteria over COVID19, generated via the media and politicians, has worsened the outcomes for policy decisions causing avoidable and unnecessary additional public health costs.

The new study, ‘COVID-19 and the Political Economy of Mass Hysteria’, written by Philipp Bagus et al., was published February 3, 2021 in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. [1]

The paper’s conclusion is reproduced below:

Conclusion: Mass hysteria can have enormous public health costs in terms of psychological stress, anxiety, and even physical symptoms. To these costs must be added indirect adverse health effects from alcoholism, suicides, or damage from deferred treatment and delayed recognition of illness. Policy failures in mass hysteria can lead to economic decline and poverty, which in turn negatively impacts public health and life expectancy.

Studies of mass hysteria have mostly focused on outbreaks in localized settings of schools or businesses. However, in the digital age of global mass and social media, the possibility of global mass hysteria exists, a phenomenon that has not yet been studied. Our study of the political economy of mass hysteria draws on the well-established psycho-logical phenomenon of mass hysteria and applies it to a new and innovative context of global mass hysteria for which no literature exists yet. More specifically, we analyzed how the political system can influence the likelihood and spread of mass hysteria in a digitized and globalized world based on economic principles. We discussed how the state and its size increase the likelihood of mass hysteria by comparing an idealized minimal state with an idealized welfare state, addressing a previously completely unexplored research question. Our findings are highly relevant and important because the policy failures induced by mass hysteria are potentially catastrophic for public health.

We found that the size and power of the state contributes positively to the likelihood and extensions of mass hysteria. The more centralized and the more power a state has, the higher the probability and extension of mass hysteria. In a minimal state, there exist self-correcting mechanisms that limit collective hysteria. The enforcement of private property rights limits the harm inflicted by those that succumb to the hysteria. The state (thanks to a fuzzy public sector and its soft power [123,124]), by contrast, amplifies and exacerbates mass panics, potentially causing important havoc. What are temporarily, locally limited, isolated outbreaks of mass hysteria, the state may convert into a global mass hysteria for an extended period of time. Recent development in information technology and, particularly, the use of social media, as well as a decline of religion, have made societies more prone to the development of mass hysteria [125,126,127]. Unfortunately, once a mass hysteria takes hold of the government, the amount of damage the hysteria can inflict to life and liberty surges as the state’s respect for private property and basic human rights is limited. The violation of basic human rights in the form of curfews, lockdowns, and coercive closure of business has been amply illustrated during the COVID-19 crisis. Naturally, the COVID-19 example is indicative rather than representative and its lessons cannot be generalized. During the COVID-19 crisis, several authors have argued that from a public health point of view, these invasive interventions such as lockdowns have been unnecessary [128,129,130,131] and, indeed, detrimental to overall public health [132,133]. In fact, prior scientific research on disease mitigation measures during a possible influenza pandemic had warned against such invasive interventions and recommended a more normal social functioning [134]. Moreover, in reaction to past pandemics such as the Asian flu of 1957–1958, there were no lockdowns [135], and research before 2020 had opposed lockdowns [136]. From this perspective, the lockdowns have been a policy error. We have shown that these policy errors may well have been produced by a collective hysteria. To which extent there has been a mass hysteria during the COVID-19 crisis is open for future research. In order to prevent the repetition of policy errors similar to those during the COVID-19 crisis, one should be aware of the political economy of mass hysteria developed in this article and the role of the state in fostering mass hysteria. Public health is likely to be affected negatively by state interventions during a mass hysteria due to policy errors.

[1] Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 202118 (4), 1376; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18041376

February 13, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment