Countering the American Way of War – Proof of Concept
By Patrick Armstrong | Strategic Culture Foundation | May 23, 2021
The American Way of War is founded on three assumptions. Ever since 1945 the USA has assumed that it would have air superiority: it knew that it would have to fight for it against the Soviets but assumed that it would be able to gain it, at least in the areas where needed (local air superiority). In Korea there was some resistance but the USAF was able to bomb pretty freely. Wikipedia informs us that it dropped more bombs on Korea than it did in the entire Pacific Theatre and about half as many as it did in the European Theatre in 1941-1945. North Korea was obliterated: “We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another, and some in South Korea, too.” Which, of course, is the principal reason why North Korea has nuclear weapons today.
Bombing became the American Way of War par excellence with ever greater tonnages dropped: Cambodia received about the same amount as Korea, Laos about three times as much, Vietnam about six times as much. And the bombing continues today throughout Washington’s forever wars. Officially it is precise, surgical, carefully selected: “The targets I’m assigned to destroy have been vetted through the most professional members of our armed services, and (I know) that others are taking their jobs as seriously as I am“. But U.S. Precision Bombing is a “Persistent Myth” and the reality is quite different:
Since World War II, the U.S. Air Force has loosened its definition of “accuracy” from 25 feet to 10 meters (39 feet), but that is still less than the blast radius of even its smallest 500 lb. bombs. [Here’s one.] So the impression that these weapons can be used to surgically “zap” a single house or small building in an urban area without inflicting casualties and deaths throughout the surrounding area is certainly contrived.
In the end, there is no difference from random carpet bombing: “precision strike” after “precision strike” after “precision strike” – even assuming the intelligence that guides the “precision” is accurate, which it isn’t – leaves nothing but rubble:
If you want a single word to summarize American war-making in this last decade and a half, I would suggest rubble. It’s been a painfully apt term since Sept. 11, 2001. In addition, to catch the essence of such war in this century, two new words might be useful — rubblize and rubblization.
Here are pictures from Raqqa in Syria. Amnesty International calculates that 30,000 artillery rounds were fired and the New Yorker estimates 10,000 bombs dropped; given an assumed population of 300,000 that’s one for every seven or eight people; “precision” or not, what would your neighbourhood look like after that?
Doing war from the air is pretty cost-free especially if your targets have weak air defence. The 1998 NATO operation in Kosovo had two accidental NATO deaths and two aircraft shot down. The 2011 NATO operation in Libya cost one soldier and two aircraft from accidents and one helicopter captured. It’s engagingly technical and allows much talk of precision. To say nothing of the opportunity to smugly accuse others of just tossing bombs around: “Putin’s modern Air Force choosing devastating dumb bombs over precision strikes“. (In this puff piece the authors do not understand that the Russians actually have figured out a cheap way to make “dumb” bombs “precise”. The process is explained here. Also note the familiar American boast “We’re able to do very precise weaponeering in order to strike and then also minimize civilian casualty”.)
The second assumption of the American Way of War is a prerequisite of the first – assured communications. The American way of precision bombing requires that the bomb or missile “talk” continually to its guide, whether that be a laser designator, a signal to the target and back or GPS satellites. This “talking” must be free, unrestricted and continuous – if it is stopped, the “smart” missile or bomb immediately becomes “stupid”. (Another advantage of the Russian way, incidentally, is that the “talking” is unnecessary once the bomb is dropped.)
U.S. warfighting doctrine depends on air power operating and communicating freely.
The countries on Washington’s target list are well aware of this and that is why they are continually improving their air defence and electronic warfare capabilities. Conversely, the reason why NATO members have feeble air defence and limited EW capability is that they’ve never thought they needed to have them. Years of beating up countries with trivial air defence and EW has left them complacent. (Even a wake-up call like the shooting down of the F-117 is soon sent down the Memory Hole.)
Great strategists have always known that victory is found in avoiding the enemy’s strength and attacking his weakness and that one should “fight the enemy with the weapons he lacks.” Russia, China and Iran cannot expect to win a naval battle in the South Pacific against the U.S. Navy: there will be no second Battles of Leyte Gulf, Midway or Coral Sea. That would be to attack U.S. strengths. Missiles to take out aircraft carriers are the answer: do not attack the enemy’s strength, fight him with the weapons he lacks. Neither would they attempt to invade and conquer the USA itself. Defence is what they want and these are the principles that guide them.
But there is a third assumption of the American Way of War and that is simply this:
the air raid sirens will sound somewhere else.
Everything that I have said above applies to Israel. Just like the USA, Israel has grown accustomed to using air power, “precision strikes” and all the rest of it. In 1973 it had a hard ground fight but since its 2006 repulse by Hezbollah in Lebanon it has relied ever more on air strikes. Like the U.S., it is confident that it has air superiority and secure communications. Being so much closer to its enemies, it is not as confident that the air raid sirens will always scream somewhere else, but confident that it can inflict, via its air power, unacceptable damage on its enemy, Israel proceeds. Hezbollah and Hamas would be fools to try – even if they could – to build an air force to fight Israel, neither can they expect to have air defence and electronic warfare assets to seriously challenge Israel’s air superiority. Because they cannot attack the two assumptions of air superiority and communications, they must therefore attack the third assumption of invulnerability. Not the enemy’s strength but his weakness.
The last big U.S. ground operations, the Iraq wars of 1990 and 2003, were preceded by months of unimpeded transportation of immense quantities of supplies across the Atlantic. Baghdad never interfered and the complacent supposition that the air raid sirens would sound only in the enemy’s skies was further strengthened. But, should NATO be so suicidal as to provoke Russia to war, this will not be the case: the Iskanders will come calling and there will be no uninterrupted buildup. NATO bases will not be safe sanctuaries and the convoys will have to fight their way through.
We see, today, the proof of concept. In May Gaza fired hundreds of simple, cheap rockets at Israel. The Israeli air defence system, Iron Dome, was reasonably effective but it will run out of missiles long before Gaza, to say nothing of Hezbollah, will. Iron Dome suffers from the weakness that it is far more expensive than the simple rockets Hamas is using. Debris rained down on Israeli cities, the odd rocket got through (probably more than we were told). The air raid sirens were continuous and Israelis were in bomb shelters. It’s true that Israel’s air force obliterated buildings in Gaza but that’s not the point: everyone knew they could do that, it’s the continuous rockets that are new. This went on for eleven days with no diminution of fire from Gaza. A piece in the NYT, not a noticeably Israel-hostile outlet, quotes an estimate of 30,000 rockets in Gaza; only about ten percent were fired. Hezbollah has at least four times as many. The myth of Israel’s invincibility has been broken: gravely diminished in 2006 on land, its skies are no longer safe. Fight the enemy’s weakness (its home morale – how many dual citizens are already packing their suitcases?) and use weapons it does not have.
A ceasefire was announced after eleven days; we’ll see if it holds: Israeli police have again stormed the al-Aqsa Mosque which was the trigger in the first place. The Jerusalem Post attempts a summing up; and a very pro-Israeli one it is: so many commanders, headquarters, launching sites claimed destroyed. Most important though is its recognition that Hamas “increased its volume and range” of rocket launches. And “Hamas took credit for redrawing the equation of power in the region in its battle with Israel, asserting that Israel is now in a state of decline”. A claim to be sure. But one with some reality. Hamas struck with greater numbers and deeper into Israel than ever before and there were also disturbances in the Arab population in Israel proper. Hamas is claiming a victory and it is not wrong to do so.
Air superiority, assured immediate communications and security of the home front. Gaza and Hezbollah present the poor man’s solution to the problem – lots of cheap rockets to challenge the assumption of a secure home front: Israel’s “illusion of normality” is gone.
Richer and more industrially-based entities can counter the first two assumptions and challenge the third with more sophisticated answers. Perhaps the greatest challenge to the complacency that other countries will be the amphitheatres for American wars is the Russian Poseidon; this weapon, a sort of giant autonomous underwater cruise missile, is designed to create a tsunami to wipe out U.S. ports and coastal areas. Iran, in its retaliatory attack on the U.S. base in Iraq last year, showed that U.S. forces were not safe in their bases. China and Russia are both creating weapons systems to attack the USA where it is weak using weapons it does not have. U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups, rather than projections of mighty power, are mere targets to hypersonic missiles. Russian EW capability has been described by at least one U.S. general as “eye-watering“, able to turn off U.S. systems; and one may be sure that the Russians are saving their best for later. (Can they blind an entire warship? Not at all! Disinformation! Nonsense! Information Warfare! A little too much protesting?) Russia and China can do this because they are not lost to fantasies of “power projection” or “full spectrum superiority“; they defend themselves with weapons the aggressor does not have that are directed at his weakness. Enough and not too much is their guide.
Gaza vs Israel represents the proof of the concept.
How Did a Disease With no Symptoms Take Over the World?
The WHO Says COVID-19 Asymptomatic Transmission Is “Very Rare”
Lockdown Sceptics | May 22, 2021
There are two ways in which people are controlled: first of all frighten them, and then demoralise them. An educated healthy, and confident nation is harder to govern.
Tony Benn
Biologists tell each other stories. These stories might involve lots of acronyms and use strange and wonderful verbs and nouns but, unlike say mathematics, the mechanism by which biologists convey their science is at heart through the use of language. But unlike works of creative writing, the language used by biologists needs to be precise because bad English can lead to bad science. Which is why it jarred so much when I first read the following statement:
A third of people with COVID-19 have no symptoms.
The more technically correct statement (assuming that “a third” is accurate) is:
A third of people infected with [more correctly, testing positive for] the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus have no symptoms.
So why did the first statement raise my biological hackles so much when at first glance these two statements might appear to be essentially very similar? It is because from a biological perspective they are profoundly different. The first statement asserts the existence of a disease with no symptoms i.e., a sickness that is indistinguishable from being healthy, while the second statement asserts that a viral infection does not necessarily result in a disease. It is not a question of semantics but accuracy and mixing these two concepts up is the sort of thing that would have resulted in an ‘F’ if I were to have submitted it in an essay to one of my professors. Yet, this is exactly the inaccurate language that has been used throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and not by students learning their discipline, but by experienced senior scientists who, one assumes, are well aware of what they are saying.
One could argue that this is unimportant as surely the point is to convey the idea that you could be infectious with coronavirus and be unaware of it and the first statement is an easy way to do this for the layman. Not only does this assumption treat the public as if they were children unable to understand the nuances of infection and disease, but I’d argue that the second statement is just as easy to understand as the first. No, the reason to create a disease with no symptoms is based on a profound decision, one that I believe was made with the intention of ensuring compliance but has, since its inception, grown to dominate our entire response to COVID-19.
First, let’s see why defining having a disease based purely on the presence of a pathogen is a flawed concept. This is best illustrated by reference to another virus, Epstein-Barr Virus or EBV. You’ll be forgiven if you’ve never heard of this virus, but it could be argued to be one of the most successful human pathogens because almost everyone is infected by it. Most people are infected early in life and if this happens then EBV takes up residence in your B-cells (the cells in your immune system responsible for making antibodies) where it quietly persists throughout your life. Every now and then the virus goes into active replication and makes copies of itself which get shed into your mouth, a process that you are blissfully unaware is happening. The problems with EBV generally occur if you don’t get infected early in life but avoid infection until you’re much older. Now when you get infected with EBV, you can develop a disease called infectious mononucleosis or, more commonly, glandular fever. This often happens in young adults when they become interested in close physical contact with members of the opposite (or same) sex… which is why glandular fever is sometimes referred to as “the kissing disease”.
Now let’s apply the new asymptomatic COVID-19 orthodoxy to EBV where we define having a disease purely through the presence of a viral genome. So, according to this definition, almost everyone in the U.K. (and the world) is suffering from a new disease, asymptomatic glandular fever, and if we were to do a large-scale mass screening campaign we’d discover that there were millions of ‘cases’ of asymptomatic glandular fever in the U.K. alone!
Of course, this is complete nonsense. We aren’t all ‘suffering’ from asymptomatic glandular fever. Glandular fever requires infection by EBV, but EBV infection does not necessarily lead to glandular fever. The same is true of COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 and so the concept of asymptomatic COVID-19 as a disease is as ridiculous as that of asymptomatic glandular fever.
But as is the case with EBV, being infected with SARS-CoV-2 means that you can still pass it on even if you aren’t sick. However, it is a matter of degrees and the reason that people can be healthy carriers is simply because they have less viral replication and a lower viral load, which is why they aren’t sick. Of course, if the lower levels of SARS-CoV-2 in an asymptomatic individual were sufficient to mean such an individual was as infectious as someone with symptoms, then from an infectivity perspective the distinction between asymptomatic carriers and people with COVID-19 is unimportant and our statement would need to read:
A third of people infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus have no symptoms but are just as infectious as those with COVID-19.
However, this situation would mean that the R number for SARS-CoV-2 would likely be much greater than it is, and that coronavirus infection and COVID-19 would have crashed through the population in one huge tsunami at the start of last year. This wasn’t the case, and all the evidence is that healthy, asymptomatic carriers (and pre-symptomatic sufferers) are much less infectious than those with symptoms and a disease (see Will Jones’s summary of COVID-19 facts for links to supporting evidence).
Given that this is all so blindingly obvious to anyone who has ever been near a biology textbook, the only reasonable conclusion we can draw about the creation of an asymptomatic disease is that it wasn’t done by a biologist but instead by individuals (probably on the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B)) whose agenda is not to convey accurate information to the public but something different: fear and uncertainty.
The effect of the asymptomatic disease is to blur the lines between being healthy and being sick and means that people will consciously, or subconsciously, transfer some of their understanding of symptomatic COVID-19 and apply it to asymptomatic COVID-19. The implication being that the absence of symptoms is somehow not relevant and that just because you feel fine, you are in fact suffering from a deadly disease. This naturally creates fear, fear for oneself (what if I have it?) and fear of everyone else (they look O.K., but what if they have it?). This fear is useful if you now want to control the behaviour of people and drive compliance with policies designed to limit the spread of COVID-19, but the problem is that having created the asymptomatic monster as a mechanism to ensure compliance, it soon starts to consume everything because you now need to manage this disease with no symptoms.
The first thing asymptomatic disease needs is a way of identifying who has it. By definition, asymptomatic individuals have no symptoms and so in order to identify who is sick we need a test. Not only do we need a test, but because anyone who is healthy could be silently suffering from this illness, we will need a lot of tests. And because healthy people can become sick without any change in how they feel or look, then the testing needs to be endless. Also, because the disease is only defined by the presence of the virus, then positive screening results (real or false positives) naturally become ‘cases’, confirming the ongoing presence of the asymptomatic disease. Testing begets more testing.
The whole host of non-pharmaceutical interventions – including lockdowns – can also be seen as logical steps to take in fighting an asymptomatic disease. If sick people have no symptoms, then we need to employ strategies in everyday life to manage them. In effect, we have to treat the entire population as if it were ill and deploy measures across the whole of society with this in mind. This effectively leads to ‘reverse quarantine’ where we lock up the healthy to try and protect the few genuinely sick people.
Likewise, vaccine passports are also driven by the need to manage asymptomatic disease because it is only by proving that you’ve had a medical intervention that we can be sure that your lack of symptoms are not a cause of concern. But being immune doesn’t stop an individual from becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2, it just means their immune system more rapidly and effectively recognises and deals with this infection and as a result they may never develop symptoms. In other words, vaccination is no protection from asymptomatic COVID-19 and suitably sensitive screening will continue to detect asymptomatic ‘cases’ amongst the immune population. Proponents of vaccine passports acknowledge this and argue (correctly) that if immune individuals are infected with coronavirus, they will carry a lower viral burden and so are less infectious. However, they then go on to demonise unvaccinated, naïve healthy individuals because they might be asymptomatic carriers. In reality, healthy people are healthy and even if they are carriers are unlikely to infect other people in normal social situations regardless of vaccination status. In fact, if you support the notion of asymptomatic COVID-19 ‘sufferers’ being a significant source of infection, it could be argued that we need vaccination certificates to protect the non-vaccinated from the vaccinated!
Finally, there is the whole question of variants. Clearly, a new, virulent more deadly strain of coronavirus that evades current immunity is a very concerning thing as it would essentially reset the clock back to the start of the pandemic: in effect it is a new disease. But because we have blurred the distinction between infection and disease and our focus is on the presence (and sequence) of viral genomes, every new variant is now treated as if it actually were a new disease. This in turn drives the need to continue to monitor (picking up more and more new variants) and manage ‘the spread of cases’ irrespective of the severity of disease they cause or the prior immunity within the population. Again, testing begets more testing in an endless cycle that will never stop unless we decide to stop it.
What all this means in practice is that the management of asymptomatic COVID-19 has become the the focus of the Government’s coronavirus policy, but if we go back to the original (mis)statement about asymptomatic COVID-19 and swap it around we get:
Two thirds of people with COVID-19 have symptoms.
Of course, this should read “three thirds (all!) of people with COVID-19 have symptoms” but the point I’m making is that hiding in plain sight is the fact that most people infected with SARS-CoV-2 get ill to varying degrees. We also know that people with symptoms account for the majority of onward transmission of the infection (again see Will’s summary for evidence). So, if we were designing an effective policy to manage COVID-19 we would focus our efforts on the sick as this is where we’re going to get the most bang for the buck.
What would this mean in practice? First, we would only need diagnostic testing capacity for the minority of the population with symptoms, rather than the industrial-scale screening that we have had to deploy to deal with asymptomatic COVID-19. Second, restrictions would be focused on ill people, and this would be much easier, not only because these individuals are easier to find, but because sick people behave as if they were, well, sick and as such may not require much encouragement to prevent others getting ill. (“Don’t come too close, I’m not very well.”) They also probably wouldn’t want to go to work, or the gym, or the pub, or visit Granny. These restrictions would be time limited as they only apply to an individual while they are ill. We could use the billions of pounds saved on not destroying the economy in a futile attempt to quarantine the entire healthy population to ensure that these individuals were supported until they got better. We could invest in extra capacity in the healthcare system to manage any increase in hospitalisations and focus resources on improved treatments rather than testing and managing healthy people. The need for vaccination certification becomes irrelevant because healthy people are treated as healthy people and new variants only become of concern if they make individuals sicker. Essentially, we could stop treating COVID-19 as a special case with all the collateral damage this causes to non-COVID-19 related health and manage it as we would any other potentially serious infection. None of this is surprising as it is based on centuries of accumulated wisdom about how to manage infectious diseases. Unfortunately, the creation and focus on asymptomatic disease has drawn our eye away from the real illness and devoured huge amounts of time, effort, and money.
Being told that you are sick with a major illness can be a devastating piece of news, not just for the individual themselves but for those around them. Even if this news is couched in terms of positive treatment outcomes, it would be impossible to not be fearful and run hundreds of ‘what if’ scenarios through one’s mind. Regardless of how you feel today, the worries are all about progression and how you will feel tomorrow. Normally, clinicians would have a duty of care to their patients and spend time in discussing a diagnosis and helping their patients come to terms with this news. But for COVID-19, people receive the results of their diagnosis with no support. Worse through track-and-trace they might even receive this news completely unsolicited; imagine if a complete stranger phoned you to tell you that you might have cancer? Then, rather than offer support and comfort, we demand that individuals cut themselves off from others (self-isolate); you’re ill but on your own. All of this has consequences, especially for those who have bought into the concept of asymptomatic COVID-19, and so is it not surprising that some people want to cling to mask wearing, social distancing and lockdowns. In the end, it turns out that – ironically – asymptomatic COVID-19 might not be asymptomatic after all because for any number of vulnerable people the very existence of this asymptomatic disease has the potential to make them sick – sick with fear, worry and anxiety.
The author, who wishes to remain anonymous, is a senior research scientist at a pharmaceutical company.
“No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, No Unvaxxed”
By Dustin Broadbery | OffGuardian | May 21, 2021
The government is pressing ahead with its Vaccine Passport and plans for a two-tier society are afoot. The effrontery of those leading the charge beggar’s belief.
When they said ‘there were no plans for ‘discriminatory’ Covid vaccine passports’, they were quietly funding at least eight different vaccine passport schemes since last year.
And that’s just the half of it. We are midway through a Europe-wide feasibility study for the development of a common vaccine passport, launched by the European Commission in 2018.
They would have you believe – they were caught with their trousers down, their policies are proportionate to the emergency as it unfolds, and at all times they operate according to a system of informed consent.
But hang on a minute. Since the onset of SARS-CoV-2, they have played the most astonishing game of deception and manipulation. Cooking the books and fiddling the tills.
They have deliberately plunged society into two camps – skeptics and adherents, compliant and non-conformists.
Last year established the mood for pettifogging anyone questioning the narrative, while those refusing to comply were branded narcissists and psychopaths or denounced as ‘Covid deniers’ – the modern-day equivalent of a Holocaust denier.
This government has polarised the nation on a scale never before attempted, legitimising a particular brand of prejudice and enmity not seen in Europe since the days of the Third Reich. And once the NHS App becomes your ticket to freedom on Monday, they will finally have means to weed out and punish dissidence while rewarding blind faith in authority. No matter how injurious their compliance is to society at large, the silent majority have lost their moral compass.
But it must be understood – this principle of divide and rule is as old as the hills. It was not so long ago that signs hung in the windows of establishments in Britain that read: ‘No dogs, No Irish, No blacks’. The difference today is that it won’t be the colour of your skin, your class, gender or sexual orientation that will condemn you, it will be something far more virulent – your ideology.
That this crucial point has been entirely missed by the chattering classes is astonishing. And despite the most flagrant attempts to marginalise large segments of society, identitarians, the woke brigade and other erstwhile defenders of the most marginalised remain largely unphased. Unless it is to flap their arms in the air over higher rates of vaccine hesitancy amongst ethnic minorities. But the rest of us can go to hell.
Who cares about anyone not from a protected social group, right?
In this bizarre parochial moral imperative, discrimination is only frowned upon if you’re discriminating against someone’s authorised and rubber-stamped marks of distinction, whereas discrimination, of and by itself, is entirely permissible.
These crowd-pleasers would defend their moral high ground by telling you “the unvaccinated are selfishly putting others’ lives at risk”, or that “mask refuseniks are superspreaders”. But hold on a minute. All of this is pure conjecture which, like everything else under the post-COVID sun, has been founded on speculative science and policies pulled straight from the magician’s hat.
Other than taking the government on its word, where is the actual evidence of asymptomatic transmission? Where is the evidence of mask efficacy?
In fact, can someone point me to a single risk assessment for any of these high-risk interventions? But to deny someone entry into an establishment, to prevent them from travelling, shopping, or worse, stepping foot outside of their own bolthole is no moot point. These are very real and tangible forms of discrimination, for no other reason than you personally disagree with their choices.
These people have clearly made peace with the fact that membership to society is now the exception rather than the rule. They labour under some neotribal sense of entitlement – if you’re not with us, you’re against us. Like their neolithic ancestors they take refuge in the herd from an unseen predator threatening their hand to mouth existences. Positioning themselves in the upper echelons of this looming two-tier system, with others equally desperate to get their lives back and ready to submit to whatever ephemeral demands are made of them in return for one coveted free pass to re-enter polite society.
While the rest of us – who will not be spoken for, bribed or coerced – will risk excommunication from the social-balm in defence of our principles.
This loose association of the poorest and most marginalised, conscientious objectors, lockdown skeptics, and anyone with a shred of faith in their god-given sovereignty of being or bodily autonomy will wage a personal crusade of civil disobedience against the tyranny de jour, as Tolstoy, Gandhi and Martin Luther King did before them. For them, braver men have endured far worse for much less.
But what the first group fails to realise is that they are doing the unofficial bidding of another group – the well-healed members of our political establishment to whom the rules do not apply. Who are protected by more exemptions than the rest of us are governed by regulations. And who, at the onset of the pandemic, were not caught with their pants down, as the general population was.
As this group spoke of herd immunity, they quietly struck a £119 million COVID advertising and propaganda deal with one of the world’s biggest marketing companies. Going on to become the UK’s biggest advertiser in 2020.
Just a day before the first lockdown, their Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) began work on the most criminal propaganda campaign in British history:
Extract from UK gov’t report “Options for increasing adherence to social distancing measures”, read the whole thing here.
What most card-carrying conservative voters fail to realise is that this group is the country’s biggest employer, with 17% of the British workforce employed in the public sector, whose every agency has been pointed like a cruise missile launch pad at the general population, to essentially knock our stuffing out and railroad us along a critical path, towards what is arguably a controlled destination – the complete nullification of our rights, indefinitely.
But that’s only half of it. Once you conflate unlawful policies with science that falls apart under the lightest of scrutiny to bring about the most controversial changes to Britain’s laws since the Norman Conquests, it is written in the cards that two types of citizens will be left in the wreckage: those wandering aimlessly into the trap having abandoned all reason and judgement to the trappers; and those whose contempt runs so deep they will lay their life on the line in opposition.
Now here’s the thing – there’s nothing particularly avant-garde about a two-tiered society or the discrimination of certain minority groups by the prevailing social order. And no matter what polite excuse is used to justify vaccine passports, it cannot be denied – this is the same system of caste, class, eugenics, apartheid, persecution and slavery that would inflict those toppling statues with an extreme case of dashed hopes.
But what is even more terrifying than the depths which the political class is prepared to sink, is the collusion of a silent majority – without a vested interest – whose own complicity will result in the persecution of everyone else not toeing the line.
And now, with 353,341 variants at their disposal, the government has 350,000 reasons to keep this fiasco going until hell freezes over.
Riding roughshod over the British public who, make no mistake, will continue to weather such violations, in spectacular ignorance of the fact that only 388 healthy people under the age of 60 died from COVID in 2020, the average age of death was 82, and strangely enough, the vast majority had pre-existing conditions. Equally unremarkable is the fact that between 23%-85% of all deaths attributed to COVID, died from other underlying causes.
And the fact that 2020 had a lower standardised mortality rate than every single year prior to 2009 can be found in the dictionary under ‘Ignorance is Bliss’.
You would also be forgiven for assuming that once the most vulnerable had been vaccinated (which is now), not much remains between the people and their freedom. That any further attempts to “protect us” with more turns of the screw entirely defy common reason.
Yet here we are, fighting a battle for humanity.
The trouble, therefore, with lockdown skeptics such as Peter Hitchens publicly throwing in the towel, or Lord Sumption accepting the inevitability of vaccine passports – they have raised the white flag long before the real battle has begun.
While lockdowns and social distancing represent the abstract of this ideological war, its frontlines are being waged on the physical surrender of our will and bodily autonomies. The former is arbitrary, the latter is systematised. One is going to happen with or without your consent, the latter is wholly dependent on it.
It follows that for each skeptic who surrenders their compliance, they sell the rest of us downriver. The balance swings more in favour of the New Normal. And let’s be honest, vaccine passports only work if a majority of us comply.
So while we still have the illusive veneer of democracy to hold onto, politicians remain duty-bound to at least pretend to be upholding some sort of system of informed consent. Just as we are compelled to at least give the appearance of upholding the necessary checks and balances.
Even if you accept the logic of vaccine passports, where exactly on your map does this end? Three weeks to flatten the curve, three lockdowns later and there is already talk of further lockdowns in the summer, or worse, restrictions lasting two more years.
Meanwhile, in the US, Sloppy Joe has made it clear: ‘get vaccinated or wear a mask indefinitely’.
If none of this strikes the fear of God into you, then perhaps this will:
The Pentagon have developed a microchip that will detect asymptomatic COVID. The chip would be inserted below the skin and trigger a sensor if COVID infects the body. This is despite the internet being flooded with factchekers and MSM pundits debunking what the so-called “tin foil hat brigade” has been warning of all along.
In plain sight, they hide their motives and by small degrees, we continue to surrender ancient rights and protections to an unthinkable dystopia that is now within sniffing distance.
Dustin Broadbery is based in London and is interested in social theory and particularly how a mutual society could bring about great advancements in the social fabric. You can read more of his work at TheCogent.org.
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Is America behind the massive surge in Kiev regime’s child trafficking?
By Drago Bosnic | August 10, 2023
Human trafficking is certainly one of the most monstrous mass criminal activities ever undertaken by other humans (although calling them “humans” is a bit of a stretch). And yet, there’s a special kind of this deeply repulsive crime that pushes it to diabolical proportions – child trafficking. Underage kids, particularly those who were abandoned, sold or have very poor/abusive family backgrounds, are by far the most vulnerable group. The depraved criminals who engage in such illicit activities specifically target unfortunate children and given there are millions of them all around the globe, particularly in war-torn areas, the “recruitment pool” is effectively endless. Unfortunately, the demand on the black market also seems to be constant and growing, making it a very lucrative and appealing prospect for criminals. … continue
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- What does Europe want – a war with Russia?
- She Followed the Actual Data on COVID Vaccines and Masks — Her Career Took a Huge Hit
- Florida AG Sues Pfizer, Bourla Over Deceptive Marketing of COVID Vaccines
- If Americans Knew
- No big deal: Israel to halt humanitarian aid to Gaza for 2 days – Daily Update
- Israel is squeezing the life out of Palestinians – Daily Update
- The Israeli Right Portrays Islam as Murderous. It Serves a Political Purpose
- Jordan Has Had Enough: King Abdullah’s Scathing Warning to Israel
- Israeli Colonizers (i.e. Settlers) Kill Palestinian Man Near Salfit
- New Google Maps images reveal massive scale of devastation in Gaza
- Jewish supremacy, anti-Palestinian bigotry on display in Israel – Daily Update
- Israeli Soldiers Abduct At Least 22 Across Occupied West Bank
- Eight Palestinians Killed in Israeli Attacks on Gaza
- Israeli former leaders and security chiefs threaten legal action over ‘Jewish terrorism’
- No Tricks Zone
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
