A number of people have said it, but — and I feel it, actually: I’m a wartime president. This is a war. This is a war. A different kind of war than we’ve ever had.
-Donald Trump, Former President of the United States
We are at war. All the action of the government and of Parliament must now be turned toward the fight against the epidemic, day and night. Nothing can divert us.
-Emmanuel Macron, President of France
This war – because it is a real war – has been going on for a month, it started after European neighbors, and for this reason, it could take longer to reach the peak of its expression.
-Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, President of Portugal
We are at war with a virus – and not winning it.
-Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary General
We must act like any wartime government and do whatever it takes to support our economy.
-Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
The president said this is a war. I agree with that. This is a war. Then let’s act that way, and let’s act that way now.
-Andrew Cuomo, Former Governor of New York
You get the picture. Leaders at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic really wanted us to think of ourselves as combatants possessing a civic duty to fight an insidious, unseen enemy. They wanted us to think that victory was possible. They wanted us to understand that there would be casualties, and collateral damage, and to steel ourselves for the inevitable enactment of broad and unfocused policies that would keep us safe, no matter the cost.
This isn’t all that surprising in hindsight. Politicians love to use war as a metaphor for just about every collective enterprise: the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on cancer. They understand that war provides an incomparable motivation for people to make sacrifices for the greater good of their countries, and when they want to harness some of that motivation, they pull out all the metaphorical stops.
Leaders have been searching for a “moral equivalent of war” for a very long time. The idea was introduced by psychologist and philosopher William James in a speech at Stanford in 1906 that has been credited for inspiring the creation of national projects such as the Peace Corps and Americorps, both organizations aspiring to “enlist” young people into meaningful, non-military service to their country:
I spoke of the “moral equivalent” of war. So far, war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way. But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames of social man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of organizing such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other just as effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but a question of time, of skillful propagandism, and of opinion-making men seizing historic opportunities.
People are willing to do things during a war that they wouldn’t be willing to do during peacetime. During World War II, it was impossible that German bombers would reach the middle of the United States, yet citizens in the U.S. Midwest practiced blackouts to demonstrate their commitment to defeating an enemy they had in common with people far away. People that actually had to sit in the dark at night to be safe.
This was what leaders using war metaphors were asking from their citizens at the start of the pandemic:
The war metaphor also shows the need for everyone to mobilize and do their part on the home front. For many Americans, that means taking social distancing orders and hand washing recommendations seriously. For businesses, that means shifting resources toward stopping the outbreak, whether in terms of supplies or manpower.
However, it wasn’t just social distancing and handwashing—leaders were asking for cooperation for a complete lockdown, a complete suspension of normal life for a short, yet vague and undefined period of time. There was no thought to how this would actually stop a highly contagious virus, or how people would be expected to return to normal life when the virus hadn’t completely disappeared. There wasn’t a desire to mobilize the engines of democracy for war. Instead, there was a mandate to shut them down. Economic production wasn’t maximized, it was minimized.
I was skeptical of the ability of shutdowns to do much good from the beginning, and was very much afraid that panic and overreaction would have serious consequences. I didn’t use war metaphors because it never occurred to me that they would be in any way helpful. Yet when I advocated trying to minimize collateral damage by allowing people who were less vulnerable to severe disease to resume their lives, others criticized that I was for “surrendering to the virus”. The use of war metaphors wasn’t just limited to leaders, but had quickly spread to the broader population.
Some international leaders tried to resist the temptation to use war metaphors, but ultimately failed. After telling the Canadian House of Commons that the pandemic wasn’t a war, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau couldn’t resist: “The front line is everywhere. In our homes, in our hospitals and care centers, in our grocery stores and pharmacies, at our truck stops & gas stations. And the people who work in these places are our modern-day heroes.” Trudeau later also couldn’t resist using extreme measures normally reserved for wartime to quell a protest led by the very truck stop heroes he had once glorified.
War metaphors have their uses, as explained by sociologist Eunice Castro Seixas:
Indeed, the findings of this study show how, within the context of Covid-19, war metaphors were important in: preparing the population for hard times; showing compassion, concern and empathy; persuading the citizens to change their behavior, ensuring their acceptance of extraordinary rules, sacrifices; boosting national sentiments and resilience, and also in constructing enemies and shifting responsibility.
“Constructing enemies and shifting responsibility” would play an important role later on in the pandemic, when extreme and damaging measures didn’t work and politicians resorted to blaming their own citizens for failing to cooperate with damaging and unsustainable measures.
Some academics, like anthropologist Saiba Varma, warned that:
Analogising (sic) the pandemic to a war also creates consent for extraordinary security measures, because they are done for public health. Globally, coronavirus curfews are being used to mete out violence against marginalised (sic) people. From the history of emergencies, we know that exceptional violence can become permanent.
It was obvious that working class and poor individuals would be disproportionally harmed by draconian COVID measures, and that the wealthy, or Zoom class might actually benefit:
We have, for example, already witnessed how people in already quite privileged positions are the ones who have the ability to work from home, which means that they also have more potential to act according to health recommendations, while others run the risk of being dismissed from their work or of their businesses going bankrupt. Then, there are those in positions identified as socially important functions that cannot choose to avoid risks, particularly in the care sector, where the risk of infection is the largest and shortages of protective equipment exist. Last, not everyone has the resources that are required to participate in pandemic self-governance (knowledge of how and when to shop, having people who can help you, the hospital closest to you having enough respirators, etc.).
The authors to the above article, Katarina Nygren and Anna Olofsson, also commented on the criticism of “lax” pandemic response measures in Sweden, noting how the pandemic response in Sweden was vastly different from that of most other countries in Europe because it emphasized personal responsibility rather than relying on government coercion:
Thus, the Swedish strategy to manage Covid-19 has been largely based on the responsibility of the citizens who receive daily information and instructions for individually targeted self-protection techniques by the Public Health Agency of Sweden’s website and press conferences held by state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, and other representatives of the government. They continue to underline the importance of all citizens playing their part to stop the virus from spreading and avoiding the enhancement of law enforcement’s restrictions on citizens’ rights as long as possible.
With recommendations rather than prohibitions, the individual becomes the unit of decision making towards whom claims of liability are directed if he or she does not manage to act ethically according to social expectations. This kind of governing of conduct, which has been characteristic of the Swedish risk management strategy during the pandemic thus far, targets the self-regulating individual in terms of not only trust but also solidarity. This type of governing was explicitly made by the prime minister in his speech to the nation on the 22nd of March (speeches that are extremely rare in Sweden) in which he particularly emphasized individual responsibility not only for the sake of personal safety but for the sake of others.
The Swedish Prime Minister, Stefan Löfven, used precisely zero wartime metaphors in his March 22, 2020 speech to the nation about the COVID pandemic and the response of the Swedish government. Within the next few months, the Swedish response was, rather predictably, viciously attacked by other leaders and media outlets for its failure to conform to the rest of the reflexive lockdown-mandating world. Yet the Swedish strategy has overall not resulted in much higher deaths, currently 57th in COVID deaths per million inhabitants, well below many of its critics.
There were only a few other notable exceptions in the metaphorical blitzkrieg of war imagery by world leaders in their early pandemic speeches. Another was German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who said of the pandemic, “It is not a war. It is a test of our humanity!” The reluctance of a German leader to use a war metaphor for something that is clearly not a war is both understandable and admirable.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was contemptuous of lockdowns and refused to use war imagery in his speeches, making it quite clear that pandemic deaths had no easy collective solution, only hard choices: “Stop whining. How long are you going to keep crying about it? How much longer will you stay at home and close everything? No one can stand it anymore. We regret the deaths, again, but we need a solution.” Not surprisingly, he was widely condemned for these comments.
Interestingly, much of the analysis and criticism of the use of war metaphors for the early pandemic response came from left-leaning outlets, like Vox, CNN, and The Guardian, where journalist Marina Hyde wrote:
As the news gets more horrifyingly real each day – and somehow, at the same time, more unmanageably unreal – I’m not sure who this register of battle and victory and defeat truly aids. We don’t really require a metaphor to throw the horror of viral death into sharper relief: you have to think it’s bad enough already. Plague is a standalone horseman of the apocalypse – he doesn’t need to catch a ride with war. Equally, it’s probably unnecessary to rank something we keep being informed is virtually a war with things in the past that were literally wars.
An article in Vox warned of the consequences of too much power in the wrong hands:
A war metaphor can also have dark consequences. “If we look at history, during times of war, it’s often been the case that war is accompanied by abuses of medicine and the suspension of widespread ethical norms,” Keranen said, citing Nazi use of medicine or other public health trials that have been conducted on prisoners and war resistors over the years. “Especially now, we need to be on guard for this with the clinical trials and other product development that we’re undergoing, so that in our haste to ‘fight’ the disease with a military metaphor, we’re not giving away our fundamental ethical concepts and principles.”
“Giving away our fundamental ethical concepts and principles” is arguably exactly what happened in many western nations, yet hard-hitting and often accurate criticism from left-leaning media outlets speaking out against the pandemic as a war view had all but gone silent sometime after November 3rd, 2020. Coincidently, the conflation of a pandemic public health response with a military one has all but been erased by an actual war when Russia invaded Ukraine. An actual war tends to bring perspective back to places where it has been lost rather quickly.
With two full years of hindsight, it’s clear that lockdowns were a disaster and that mandated measures caused more harm than benefit, yet this has not prevented leaders from declaring victory, crediting their own brave and resolute leadership for saving millions of lives and routing the viral enemy. However, SARS-CoV-2 isn’t a real enemy—it doesn’t have an intention other than to exist and spread, and it won’t agree to an armistice. Instead, we will have to live with the virus forever in an endemic state, and skip the victory parades.
There’s no evidence that calling the pandemic what it truly was—a global natural disaster, admitting our limitations for “defeating” it, and calling on people to stay calm and avoid acting in irrational fear, would’ve resulted in a worse outcome. It’s more likely that the collateral damage of broad and unfocused responses would have been avoided in a pandemic-as-disaster scenario. There would be no need to view leaders as military commanders or experts as heroes or high priests of absolute truth. Rather, the humble and rational response that Sweden’s leaders enacted and the proponents of the Great Barrington Declaration proposed will be remembered as the least damaging among many others that resulted in failure and defeat on the metaphorical battlefields of public health.
Steve Templeton, PhD. is an Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Indiana University School of Medicine – Terre Haute.
March 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights |
Leave a comment
Please help support us on Patreon, read our goals here: https://www.patreon.com/truthstreammedia
(We’re also getting a Subscribe Star going here: https://www.subscribestar.com/truthstreammedia)
Our First Film: TheMindsofMen.net
Our First Limited Series: Vimeo.com/ondemand/trustgame
Site: http://TruthstreamMedia.com
Twitter: @TruthstreamNews
Insta: @Truthstream_Media
Backup Vimeo: Vimeo.com/truthstreammedia
Donate: http://bit.ly/2aTBeeF
Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/bbxcWX
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.
…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PomZQC5_Ch0
March 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Video | Human rights, United States |
Leave a comment
Drug harm reporting systems, like the MHRA’s yellow card system, are designed to alert the regulator to a potential issue. They are not designed to measure the size of the problem. If an issue is highlighted then the regulator has a responsibility to carry out an audit and see whether the incidence of the condition of concern has been higher than historical levels in the population who were vaccinated.
The Government appears to be treating the yellow card reports as if they are a record of every occurrence of a condition in the country, comparing the number of reports with background levels in the whole population. It is well known that reporting systems only capture a fraction of cases and it is very odd that the Government is treating this data as comprehensive.
As an example, let’s take Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS) which is a rare condition where the immune system attacks the nervous system. It is usually caused by a viral infection but has been attributed to vaccination adverse reactions in the past. There are 1,300 cases every year and 608 cases have been reported on the yellow card system.
A study by Hanson et al in the USA of 10 million patients showed that in the first 21 days after the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine the rates of GBS were 15 times higher than expected levels. Extrapolating from this figure we would expect 500 AZ vaccine related cases in the UK. There have been a total of 488 reported in the yellow card system but it is not clear whether these were within 3 weeks of vaccination.
In a three week period we would expect 29 background cases to have occurred co-incidentally. Based on the Hanson data of 500 cases after 24.9 million doses, the cause of someone having GBS within 3 weeks of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine would be the vaccine 95% of the time and coincidental 5% of the time. The morally right thing to do for these people, is to accept that they have been vaccine injured and be wrong 5% of the time rather than claim these were coincidental and be wrong 95% of the time.
The Government appears to want to claim coincidence. A few of these patients have filed claims with the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme. None of the claimants have been helped, even patients whose deaths have been investigated at inquest and where a coroner has determined the vaccine as the cause of death. When rolling out a £12bn vaccine programme it is naive not to set aside a budget for vaccine injury. The current claims system requires proof of “60% disability”, a ‘proof of cause’ and does not compensate for lost earnings or costs of care. Maria Caulfield, the minister for patient safety and primary care, said that they were employing people to look through the claimant’s medical records for a “causal link” as if vaccines write confession notes. Surely, this is the real waste of public funds and seems to point to a reluctance to compensate deserving victims.
March 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, UK |
Leave a comment
As I described in my last article, the California Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee have embraced the Pan Doctrine that is junk-science-eugenic-fascism with the added twist that they want everyone to be chronically ill in order to enrich their largest donors. This particular political machine works right up until the point at which the entire society collapses — which is fast approaching.
So what’s the alternative to the Pan Doctrine?
Actual Science.
What are the elements of actual science in connection with our current debate? These are the principles that came to mind for me but I imagine you’ll be able to add many more:
1. Nullius in verba which means “take nobody’s word for it.” Secondary sources are not a valid epistemology. One must read original source documents. Examine data and evidence. Draw your own conclusions. Think for yourself. Escape information bubbles and transcend dogma. Morality and ethics are vital. Skepticism, disinterestedness, transparency, and rigorous debate are the hallmarks of good science. Reductionism, censorship, and conflicts of interest are fatal to good science.
2. Civil engineers, not vaccines, produced the large gains in life expectancy over the 20th century. About 90% of the decline in infectious disease mortality among U.S. children occurred before the introduction of mass vaccination campaigns (Guyer et al. 2000). The large gains in life expectancy over the twentieth century were mostly the result of the construction of water and sewer systems, improvements in food safety, hand washing, improvements in housing, and reduced overcrowding in U.S. cities.
3. The best vaccine safety data set in the world shows that all vaccines on the U.S. childhood schedule produce more harms than benefits. The data show that only a few live attenuated vaccines produce more benefits than harms (oral polio, measles by itself, and tuberculosis) in regions where these viruses are endemic. None of those vaccines are available in the U.S. However, all live virus vaccines eventually revert to virulence and cause outbreaks of the disease that they are trying to protect against. The harms from coronavirus shots far exceed any benefits.
4. The human immune system is wondrous, more sophisticated than any man-made product, and not well understood by so-called “experts”. When our bodies need extra support, nature has given us a wide array of tools for treating disease. Community, a sense of connection, and meaning are key to health too. Allopathic medicine has a role to play in emergency treatment but over the long run the largest gains in health often come from lifestyle changes. Toxicants play a huge role in disease but they are poorly studied because government is captured by industry.
5. Science, technology, class, health, sex, wealth, and power are interwoven. From medieval witch trials through today, the wisest healers are often persecuted and the most effective treatments are often suppressed. Pure objectivity is impossible because the observer is always part of the world that is being observed. Science is always changing. Institutions exist to reproduce themselves. The purpose of the pharmaceutical industry is to enrich shareholders. It is essential to take personal responsibility for one’s own health.
Those are my initial thoughts.
March 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
Leave a comment
Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
Do you get the feeling digital id is being hyped by every government, corporation, financial institution and globalist-connected NGO as “the way of the future”? Well, you’re right! But why is this being pushed so hard right now. Don’t miss this important edition of The Corbett Report podcast where James lays out the digital ID agenda and how it serves as the linchpin of the entire global enslavement grid.
Watch on Archive / BitChute / Minds / Odysee or Download the mp4
For those with limited bandwidth, CLICK HERE to download a smaller, lower file size version of this episode.
For those interested in audio quality, CLICK HERE for the highest-quality version of this episode (WARNING: very large download).
SHOW NOTES:
WEF 20 | Accenture: Digital Identity
Digital ID Wallet – Thales
Canadian Bankers Association Promotes Digital IDs And Refers To WEF #TheRayzorsEdge
EUROPEAN DIGITAL IDENTITY – message by President Von Der Leyen
Digital iD™ – a simpler way to verify
Digital identity – weighing the risks of misuse and missed use | Dakota Gruener | TEDxMarrakesh
id2020.org
Who Is Bill Gates?
Bill Gates at the Financial Inclusion Forum, December 1, 2015
March 2020: Known Traveller Digital Identity Specifications Guidance
Nov 2020: A billion people have no legal identity – but a new app plans to change that
Jan 2021: How digital identity can improve lives in a post-COVID-19
2022: Advancing Digital Agency: The Power of Data Intermediaries
You Are Being Programmed to Accept the Global ID Control Grid
UN SDGs – The 17 Goals
Episode 357 – Language is a Weapon
Episode 261 – International Law?
World Economic Forum Founder Klaus Schwab on the Fourth Industrial Revolution
March 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular, Video | Human rights |
Leave a comment
ESG stands for “Environmental, Social, Corporate Governance” and has been likened to a globalized Social Credit Scoring system for business. If you have a high ESG score, it will be easy to qualify for credit, to get the best deals with vendors and to participate in the global supply chain.
Alas, if you don’t have a high ESG score, you won’t be in business long unless you change your behavior and knuckle under to its demands.
So, how is ESG determined and who sets the rules and guidelines?
First, ESG has nothing to do with the physical aspects of a company, like capital, cash flow or profit. Rather, it concerns intangible factors such as how closely you, your vendors and customers adhere to Sustainable Development and climate change policies.
According to Forbes,
“The story of ESG investing began in January 2004 when former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote to over 50 CEOs of major financial institutions, inviting them to participate in a joint initiative under the auspices of the UN Global Compact and with the support of the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the Swiss Government. The goal of the initiative was to find ways to integrate ESG into capital markets.”
One year later (2005), an environmental policy wonk, Ivo Knoepfel, wrote a a major paper, Who Cares Wins: Connecting Financial Markets to a Changing World. This 58 page report contained “recommendations by the financial industry to better integrate environmental, social and governance issues in analysis, asset management and securities brokerage.”
The corporate collaborators, far from real people like ordinary citizens, included all the big names one might suspect: World Bank Group, Morgan Stanley, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance, Citigroup and others.
And just like that, ESG was born.
The report summarizes ten innocuous and subjective principles that read much like the UNs’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs):
U.N. Global Compact Principles
Human Rights
Principle 1: Businesses should support and respect the protection of internationally proclaimed human rights within their sphere of influence; and
Principle 2: make sure that they are not complicit in human rights abuses.
Labour
Principle 3: Businesses should uphold the freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining;
Principle 4: the elimination of all forms of forced and compulsory labour;
Principle 5: the effective abolition of child labour; and
Principle 6: eliminate discrimination in respect of employment and occupation.
Environment
Principle 7: Businesses should support a precautionary approach to environmental challenges;
Principle 8: undertake initiatives to promote greater environmental responsibility; and
Principle 9: encourage the development and diffusion of environmentally friendly technologies.
Anti-Corruption
Principle 10: Businesses should work against corruption in all its forms, including extortion and bribery.*
Who decides ESG standards and scores? It is repeatedly stated that financial analysts are the key operatives:
-
- “We invite financial institutions to expand the scope of ESG integration in research to other asset classes impacted by ESG factors, beyond equity.” Beyond equity implies a rating system for bonds, corporate debt and other financial instruments.”
- “We encourage analysts to further advance the development of valuation methodologies to better deal with qualitative information and uncertain impacts related to ESG issues.”
- “Financial analysts should expand their understanding and analysis of these factors to other industries.”
- “Financial analysts should improve their understanding and integration of ESG issues in emerging markets research.”
- “Financial analysts and investment professionals should take a leading role because they are the specialists best placed to show how ESG issues impact company and investment value.”
To put this in perspective, the financial analyst position at a large financial institution is typically an entry-level job for people just out of college. In reality, they are coached by ESG policies to act like “fact checkers” as they examine these non-tangible aspects of a company. With the stroke of a pen then can upgrade or downgrade a company according to its ESG compliance, but no two analysts would likely come to the same exact conclusion.
Nevertheless, with subjective ESG research reports in hand, senior executives then call on pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds, investment funds, etc., to divest themselves of low scoring companies and reinvest in high scoring companies. If they refuse to cooperate, they are branded with a lower ESG score of their own. Lending institutions are approached to examine the ESG value of their loan portfolios. Not high enough to satisfy the “fact checkers”? Then stop loaning money to low ESG companies, or risk being downgraded yourself!
It gets worse from here. The report calls for government force to mandate disclosure:
“We also believe that regulatory frameworks requiring a minimum degree of disclosure and accountability on ESG issues would improve the availability and comparability of data, and therefore support integration in financial analysis.”
And for stock exchanges to inform rank-and-file investors and institutions alike:
“Stock exchanges, for instance, could include ESG criteria in listing particulars for companies. Both voluntary and market-friendly regulatory approaches are needed to improve disclosure. Both should be flexible enough to allow for diversity of approaches and providers, rather than relying on rigid prescriptions.”
Conclusion
ESG is a globalist scam, and having just said that, my score probably went to zero. It is designed to drive investments and company operating policies into Sustainable Development, aka Technocracy. It is also a circular design that once started, reinforces itself with every spin around the financial universe.
Next up will be ESG for individuals, which goes one step further into how you actually think about these things.
What? You own an investment in a dirty old low-ESG company? Own a gas-guzzling car? Big house? Too much grass in your front yard? Work for a low-ESG company? Post social media pictures that lampoon global warming or mask mandates? Well, that shows that you just don’t care, so boom, down goes your score. Now, try to get financing for that new car you want to buy, or get underwritten for a new life insurance or homeowner’s policy.
You get the idea.
Patrick Wood is a leading and critical expert on Sustainable Development, Green Economy, Agenda 21, 2030 Agenda and historic Technocracy. He is the author of Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation (2015) and co-author of Trilaterals Over Washington, Volumes I and II (1978-1980) with the late Antony C. Sutton.
COPYRIGHT COHERENT PUBLISHING, LLC 2016-22
March 11, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Economics | ESG, Human rights |
Leave a comment
During 24 harsh months of lockdowns, masking, mandates and segregation, the establishment media are trying to spin as “unintended” the serious and often life-threatening fallout from those policies — whether vaccine injuries, economic devastation, spiking child suicidality or the increase in babies and toddlers in need of speech therapy.
The most strenuous form of critique the media seem able to muster is to tell policymakers to apologize for “getting COVID wrong.”
Early on, Children’s Health Defense and other independent voices forcefully called out the government’s sub-rosa agenda as a deliberate, multisectoral effort spearheaded by central bankers and billionaire technocrats to ensnare the world in a global control grid — in other words, modern-day digital slavery.
Viewed from this angle, the “separate mind-boggling events” of the past two years “line up as sequential moves on a worldwide chessboard.”
Restrictive COVID policies and strange central bank maneuvers were no accident but rather the tools of a planned economic takedown of the most vibrant and independent segments of the economy, notably the small “retail, arts and entertainment, personal services, food services and hospitality businesses” that, together with other small business sectors, have “pretty much driven most economic activity throughout our known history.”
The takedown, amounting to what organizations such as Oxfam called “economic violence,” permitted the “biggest asset transfer ever.”
Even before this purposeful economic havoc, the developed world’s richest denizens were living at least 10 to 15 years longer than the world’s poorest.
When experimental injections were added in December 2020 to the mix of COVID interventions, the takedown began taking on even more gruesome dimensions.
Discussing far-reaching vaccine fraud allegedly perpetrated by Pfizer, acting in cahoots with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, former BlackRock investor Edward Dowd has said:
“I think this is the greatest crime ever committed because most of the frauds I’ve been involved with are financial frauds where money’s lost; This has killed and maimed people.”
On March 1, shortly after a board member of German insurance company BKK ProVita expressed public alarm at the widespread killing and maiming — noting that Germany’s federal health agency was underreporting COVID vaccine injuries by a factor of 10 — the executive was summarily fired.
Prominent physician Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, who blazed a hopeful trail with his inexpensive and successful COVID treatment protocol, bluntly characterized the toxic jabs as instruments of “premeditated first-degree murder and genocide.”
Empty words and gestures
Of late, policymakers seem to have decided it’s time for some crocodile tears — and also time to make a show of putting a few COVID restrictions on hold.
For example, consider the recent remarks by Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Walensky said health officials “had perhaps too little caution and too much optimism” about the COVID shots.
For those paying attention, there can be little doubt these words and gestures are less about a policy one-eighty than about window dressing and distraction — as well as perhaps a clever move to “undercut” the momentum of the People’s Convoy currently demanding an end to all emergency measures.
As Jon Rappoport warned, “Although some governments … are lifting COVID restrictions and mandates, we should remember they still hold the power to re-impose those measures at the drop of a hat — for any reason they cook up.”
The key takeaway of the last two years, Rappoport clarified, is that governments’ COVID actions were expedient political decisions — designed to “advance tyranny” — and had “nothing to do with science or morality.”
New York City’s recent actions exemplify the duplicity of the policy rollbacks and the steady behind-the-scenes march of the control agenda. Remember — officials there willingly spent two years gutting the city’s famed restaurants, other small businesses and cultural institutions.
Now, while announcing an easing up of restrictions out of one side of his mouth, the new mayor fired almost 1,500 unvaccinated municipal workers, is insisting on continuing to mask 3- and 4-year-olds (defying widespread parental objections) and is advising businesses they “can still choose to require proof of vaccination.”
Maryland is another jurisdiction that has been indifferent to the distress caused by its policies, ignoring, for example, a leading trade group’s warning that politicians’ capricious on-again, off-again restrictions — promoted as protecting “well-being” — would permanently close four in 10 of the state’s restaurants.
In the state’s largest city, the Baltimore government is suddenly reopening some government services and lifting masking edicts. Yet at the same time, the prominent Baltimore Sun is beating the drum for joint COVID and influenza vaccine mandates.
In thinly veiled praise for coercion and segregation, the Sun argued, “employers and municipalities can certainly require flu vaccinations in order to engage in certain activities.”
Policy hypocrisy is also alive and well internationally. While the World Health Organization (WHO) issues parameters for “carefully relaxing the rules” — parameters so narrow as to be meaningless — Italy and China (the two countries that set the global precedent for lockdowns) are fining individuals who decline mandated interventions or denying them entry to workplaces, restaurants, stores, banks and post offices.
Vaccine passports and digital identities — full speed ahead
As Off-Guardian’s Kit Knightly noted on March 1, “Covid might be dying, but vaccine passports are still very much alive.”
In late February, Knightly also pointed out that the WHO, ominously, is working on an “international treaty on pandemic prevention and preparedness” that would invest the global health organization with the authority to preempt national sovereignty in the management of future pandemics and health challenges.
In a five-part series, Corey Lynn of Corey’s Digs outlined many disturbing implications of the push for vaccine passports. Falsely marketed as a “convenience,” the “passports” eventually will encompass far more than just vaccination records:
“From education to health records, finances, accounts, travel, contact info, and more, will all be linked to your QR code, along with biometrics and fingerprints, then stored on the Blockchain.”
The longer-term aim, said Lynn, is to achieve “full power and control,” down to the individual level, of spending, taxation, education, transportation, food, communications and healthcare, among other domains.
As writer Cherie Zaslawsky sees it, globalists “seek to enslave humanity worldwide in their long-dreamed-of totalitarian utopia. That’s utopia for them — as the ruling class that owns the world and everything in it — and dystopia for We the People.”
Knightly’s March 1 commentary drew readers’ attention to SMART Health Cards — “a covert federal vaccine passport” — rolled out in roughly half the country thus far, including in red states that previously had paid lip service to banning vaccine passports.
Overseen by the Vaccine Credential Initiative (VCI), SMART Health Cards are intended to “issue, share, and validate vaccination records bound to an individual identity” as well as store “other vital medical data.”
A late February article in Forbes boasted that more than 200 million Americans can already “download, print or store their vaccination records as a QR code.”
VCI was created by the federally funded MITRE Corporation (an MIT spin-off), which receives an estimated $2 billion a year from U.S. taxpayers to develop advanced surveillance technology, among other dubious national security pursuits.
MITRE received a $16.3 million CDC contract “to help construct an efficient game plan for the country during the health crisis,” and also spearheaded U.S. Department of Homeland Security efforts to “coordinate” responses among the nation’s mayors and governors.
Members of VCI’s public-private coalition include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, the Mayo Clinic, and the California and New York state governments, as well as “other health and tech heavyweights.” Additional organizations are contributing to the initiative as “data aggregators” and “health IT vendors.”
As an inner-circle member of VCI, New York State has been in the vanguard in building out a digital identity infrastructure intended to be interoperable (able to exchange or assemble data) “throughout the United States and abroad.”
New York’s “Digital Identity” policy, conveniently updated in July 2020, stipulates that citizens, businesses and government employees who conduct online business with the state must go through an “identity vetting” process that could involve authentication via “smart card” or “biometrics.”
Refuse totalitarian tyranny
Almost immediately after the COVID shots began being rolled out, Dr. Mike Yeadon, at one time a chief scientist and vice president at Pfizer, began protesting the push to inject children.
Yeadon also denounced vaccine passports, describing the apps as a sly vehicle for implementing “illegal, medical apartheid” and totalitarian tyranny.
In a more recent talk, Yeadon emphasized that the QR codes’ global interoperability will translate into 24/7 tracking of every person “in that moment, in that spot, down to the individual level.”
To impress upon the public the dangers of allowing a vaccine passport system to take hold, Yeadon described what it would mean to become an “out-person:”
“One example: Your VaxPass pings, instructing you to attend for your 3rd or 4th or 5th booster or variant vaccine. If you don’t, your VaxPass will expire & you’ll become an out-person, unable to access your own life.”
Fortunately, the globalists’ stark vision is becoming increasingly apparent to many members of the public, who are coming to understand, as Ron Paul said, that “authoritarian politicians will always lie to the people to protect and increase their own power.”
Mainstream media outlets also have begun openly worrying that “parents have a long memory when it comes to how their children have been treated.”
And, although it may not seem like it, governmental decisions “ARE affected by what citizens do or don’t do,” said Rappoport, arguing that it’s no time to “let up on pressure.”
The bottom line at this critical juncture is simple — rather than be lulled into complacency (or distraction) by the latest propaganda, just say no and don’t comply.
Don’t wear a mask. Don’t get tested. Don’t accept toxic jabs. And don’t download any QR codes or any other tools (no matter how “convenient”) that allow the build-out of digital tyranny.
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
March 11, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States, WHO |
Leave a comment
According to a speech made by Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi on March 9th, Ukrainian refugees arriving in Italy will be forced to “either agree to have a swab every 48 hours or agree to be vaccinated“ against the coronavirus. A transcript of the speech has been published by the Italian daily Il Tempo. Some Italians have complained that Italian citizens have not been given the swab option, saying that the country’s citizens either get vaccinated or are suspended from work without a salary.
In Iceland, where all Covid-related restrictions have been abandoned, both internally and at the border, the refugees are still required to be tested for COVID-19 infection, according to the General Manager of the Primary Care of the Capital Area. As other travellers are not subject to this requirement, this is clear discrimination against Ukrainian refugees. While no plans of forced vaccination have yet been confirmed nor denied, according to the General Manager, “an emphasis is put on vaccinating them”.
As it has already become clear the vaccination does not protect against the Omicron variant now prevalent, and that the protection against infection may even be negative, there is no medical justification for forcing refugees to get vaccinated, as in Italy, or for cajoling them into it, as seems to be the intention in Iceland.
Only 35% of the Ukrainian population are vaccinated against COVID-19. Scepticism towards the vaccines is high in Ukraine and in August 2021, 56% of the population said they would not get vaccinated against the disease. Being forced to leave your war-torn homeland is bad enough. Being forced or pushed to accept a useless medication you do not trust when you finally arrive at your destination could hardly be described as kind hospitality, or free consent.
Thorsteinn Siglaugsson is an economist who lives in Iceland. Find him on his blog.
March 11, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine, European Union, Human rights, Italy |
Leave a comment
A wide-sweeping censorship order
They trained for this day for a long time; particularly by quashing online dissent during the two years of Covid hell, and now the big day is here: once considered an aspirational beacon of democracy, the EU is deploying some of the most egregious-to-date acts of censorship and suppression of free speech and access to information – certainly, at least, for a Western democracy.
And once considered an innovative and exciting company that brings knowledge to the people, and along the way “do no evil” – Google – and its ilk – will be there to help make it happen.
What spurred the European Commission to act this way is the war in Ukraine, and the desire to completely silence the Russian side, by preventing citizens living in EU member countries from being able to see or hear any content other than that approved and pushed by Brussels.
The question of why this is necessary – does the EU really fear people across Europe will believe Russia? Or is this being done to set a precedent that could be “useful” in so many situations down the line?
One can only speculate (until that is banned by decree, too), but what is clear is that the EU thought the price to pay by using hard censorship and authoritarian tactics and thus undermining the very tenets of the bloc is somehow the price worth paying.
And this is what the EU has done. After first banning two Russian media outlets, RT and Sputnik, from broadcasting (which RT is challenging in court), the EU has now gone to Google to make sure that any content produced by these media companies is purged from the search engine, while social media posts “reproducing” it must get deleted.
When RT and Sputnik got banned, there was some push-back from speech advocates in Europe, but those behind the decision vigorously defended it – if at times giving away how fully aware they are of the way their actions are perceived – namely, as Orwellian.
EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell (who has been “on fire” these last weeks – he just proposed imposing sanctions on people labeled as spreading misinformation) told members of the European Parliament that the EU in fact “doesn’t have ministers of truth” and dismissed the Russian outlets as not being independent media (as if all media broadcasting in the EU is “independent” and not affiliated with different states.)
He went a step further, accusing them of being “Kremlin’s weapons.” At the same time, another commissioner revealed that the plan is to keep trying to “reach the Russian people and provide them with (EU’s ) information” – effectively saying that the EU hopes to do exactly what it says it is preventing Russia from doing.
There is an email submitted to the Lumen database on March 4, sent by the European Commission and containing a government removal request. Citing a previously adopted regulation to ban RT and Sputnik, the request states that the prohibition the EU intends to impose is to be “very broad and comprehensive.”
The job of internet search services like Google here is to index results with any possible content that the EU has deemed to be “misinformation and propaganda,” as well as websites throughout the world, and delist them.
“It follows from the foregoing that by virtue of the regulation, providers of internet search services must make sure that any link to the internet sites of RT and Sputnik and any content of RT and Sputnik, including short textual descriptions, visual elements, and links to corresponding websites do not appear in the search results delivered to users located in the EU,” the EU notice sent to Google reads.
Social-media-wise, the EU wants posts made by individuals who “reproduce” RT and Sputnik content to be deleted. A reference is made repeatedly to “proportionality” – i.e., between restrictive policies and people’s right to freedom of speech.
“Pursuant to the freedom of speech, media have the right to report objectively on current events and to form their opinions thereon. The freedom of speech also entails that users have the right to receive objective information on current events,” writes the EU, but then adds: “At the same time, the right to free speech can be restricted for legitimate public interests in a proportionate manner.”
At the end of the day, little of this has to do with the current war in the East of Europe. More likely it’s another instance of the authorities using a crisis to slip through dangerous policies that would in normal circumstances receive much more pushback. And once they know they can do it, there is a real danger they will keep doing it any time dissenting voices of various kinds need to be silent.
March 11, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | European Union, Google, Human rights |
Leave a comment
Neatly nestled behind the Ukraine headlines plastered all over the front pages, this past week has seen the World Health Organization meeting to discuss the global legislation to empowering the WHO to combat “future pandemics”.
The first consultation was held on March 1st. The EU passed a motion authorizing the bloc to negotiate such a treaty on March 3rd.
Nobody knows exactly what the hypothetical international regulations – dubbed the “Pandemic Treaty” – would entail, but there are hints.
It’s almost certainly going to involve some kind of international vaccine passport, possibly based on the SMART Health Cards currently rolling out all across the US.
It’s also interesting to note that this treaty is being developed in parallel to the UK “reforming” their Human Rights Act 1998 into a new “UK bill of rights” which seeks to prevent the “abuse” of “rights culture” and place a new emphasis on “social responsibility”.
However, the specifics will remain a mystery until the final proposal is published later this year.
One thing we do know though, is that a big part of the proposed “strengthening” of our pandemic response will be increased funding and resources for developing vaccines even faster than the Covid vaccine.
This aim was announced at the recent Global Pandemic Preparedness Summit in London, where the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) announced their “100 Days Mission”.
CEPI, for those who don’t know, is a foundation jointly funded by (among others) the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum, whose stated aim is “to develop vaccines to stop future epidemics”.
The 100 Days Mission, which already has its own website and a trending hashtag (#100DaysMission), is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.
In future CEPI wants to produce new vaccines for unknown emerging diseases – what they call Disease X – within 100 days of the pathogen being isolated.
They’ve already secured 1.5 BILLION pounds sterling to further this effort.
Let that percolate.
Over a billion pounds to produce vaccines for a disease that – as yet – does not even exist, and may never exist.
This looks like a further step in the process, begun by the ‘pandemic’ narrative, of redefining everything we previously understood about how infective agents and vaccines interact.
Covid, let’s remember, was a disease-narrative totally removed from all social, scientific and historical context to create a fluid, agenda-driven alternate reality. And it looks as if this is intended to be the ‘new normal’.
Here’s a little refresher course on just how fast the Covid vaccines sped through the usual scientific process:
- The virus was allegedly discovered in December.
- It was fully genetically sequenced by January 10th 2020.
- The paper that all the PCR tests were based on was peer-reviewed in less than 24 hours.
- After decades of failure, the human race produced a dozen effective coronavirus vaccines in less than three months.
- These vaccines were then “safety tested” in less than six months.
All told, from ‘discovering’ the virus to getting the vaccine(s) approved for use on people, it took 300 days.
This process normally takes at least 3-10 years.
It usually takes at least 5-10 years to bring a fully-tested vaccine to market. A paper by Pronker et al, “Risk in vaccine research and development quantified” (PubMed 2013), estimates the average development time for a new vaccine to be over 10 years.
Simply put, it has never been possible to make a vaccine for a new disease in 1000 days, let alone 100.
The speed with which the covid vacines were produced is totally unprecedented in the history of vaccines.
The idea you could further reduce this unprecedented time frame, and produce a safe and effective vaccine in only 100 days is frankly absurd. It’s surreal. Fictional.
For one thing, the vast majority of candidate vaccines don’t work.
The Pronker paper, found that of all potential vaccines products being researched, only about 6% ever actually hit the market.
So, back in the real world, a vaccine manufacturer will go through that 5-10 year process knowing there is a ~94% chance there will be nothing to show for it in the end.
After decades of trying they haven’t managed to produce a vaccine against AIDs, or the flu, or malaria or many other common diseases. These are conditions they know and (allegedly) understand, but they cannot make vaccines for them.
So, in that old world of veridical reality, even if you managed to make a vaccine in 100 days, the odds are it either won’t produce immunity, or it will but will also produce harmful side effects, or maybe it will do literally nothing.
Now, granted, science and technology are not static. We are always moving forward and making progress… but that’s irrelevant to this issue, because even if vaccine manufacturing technology really did take a huge leap forward just in time to battle covid, you still can’t produce a safe vaccine in 100 days, or even 300 days – because the process NEEDS time.
It takes time to test rigorously, it takes time – a lot of it – to a assess long term side effects. The clue is right there in the name.
No amount of new tech is going to permit you to know the ten-year effects of a vaccine in under three months.
With the public eye fixed on Ukraine, and Covid now firmly in the collective unconsciousness’s rearview mirror the powers that be are trying to normalise what was, inherently, an abnormal, unreal (if not impossible) process. To make it easier “next time”.
We’ve already seen Bill Gates lament that the vaccine was too slow, and he was partially right. The Covid story didn’t keep people hypnotized enough to secure everything they needed, in part because their “vaccine” rollout took almost a year.
But for the future “Disease X” waiting in the wings, it will officially only take three months, and the fear will still be fresh. The fact the process will be completely incompatible with reality or sense will not matter in the slightest.
To be clear: You cannot develop a “safe and effective” vaccine for a brand new disease in three months.
You can’t do it in one year.
And if in the future they claim to have done so, they will be lying.
March 11, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine, Gates Foundation, Human rights, UK |
Leave a comment
The European Commission has sent Google a request to remove Russian state media results for searches performed in countries within the EU. As The Washington Post reports, Google has uploaded a letter from EU officials to a database of government requests. In it, the officials explain how the commission’s official order to ban the broadcast of RT and Sputnik in the European Union also applies to search engines and internet companies in general.
If you’ll recall, the commission issued a ban on the state media outlets a few days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began. Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, said back then that by doing so, the outlets “will no longer be able to spread their lies to justify Putin’s war.” While it wasn’t quite clear how the order applies to internet companies, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok promptly restricted access to RT and Sputnik across Europe. Google also announced its own restrictions, but only for the outlets’ YouTube channels.
In the letter Google has uploaded, officials explained that search engines play a major role in disseminating content and that if the company doesn’t delist the outlets, it would facilitate the public’s access to them. Part of the letter reads:
“The activity of search engines plays a decisive role in the overall dissemination of content in that it renders the latter accessible to any internet user making a search on the basis of the content indication or related terms, including to internet users who otherwise would not have found the web page on which that content is published…Consequently, if search engines such as Google did not delist RT and Sputnik, they would facilitate the public’s access to the content of RT and Sputnik, or contribute to such access.
It follows from the foregoing that by virtue of the Regulation, providers of Internet search services must make sure that i) any link to the Internet sites of RT and Sputnik and ii) any content of RT and Sputnik, including short textual descriptions, visual elements and links to the corresponding websites do not appear in the search results delivered to users located in the EU.”
Google didn’t return The Post’s request for comment, but the publication says a search conducted within the EU didn’t bring up links for “Russia Today.” RT links still showed up for us, however, when we conducted searches using Google Austria and France.
The letter also said that the order applies to “posts made by individuals that reproduce the content of RT and Sputnik” — for example, screenshots of articles from those outlets — and that social networks must delete those posts if they get published. That could create a deluge of additional work for social media websites already struggling to moderate content posted by their users. According to The Post, though, the actual sanctions law doesn’t define the order in the way that’s written in the letter, so the officials’ interpretation could be challenged in court.
March 10, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | European Union, Human rights |
Leave a comment
Late in the summer of 1971, a young man was taken from his home in Palo Alto, California. Then another. And another. Nine in all, they were each spirited away. Eventually brought to a place with no windows and no clocks, they were stripped and they were chained. They were costumed in dress-like gowns. They were given numbers to be used in place of their names. Minor pleasures were redefined as privileges, as were such basic acts as bathing, brushing one’s teeth, and using a proper toilet when one pleased.
In essence, they had become the playthings of the nine other young men who now kept them in that windowless place. Uniformly dressed in khakis pants and shirts, along with large reflective sunglasses, wearing whistles around their necks and brandishing clubs, these nine other young men could have been their classmates, their co-workers, their friends had they met in another place or time, but instead now possessed near absolute control over them, often exercising it for no other purpose than to humiliate and emasculate, to remind their prisoners of their subordinate state.
These uniformly dressed young men in khakis and sunglasses were the guards of the “Stanford County Prison.” They were acting at the behest of Dr. Phillip G. Zimbardo.
The research that Zimbardo carried out that August would go on to become one of the most renowned and most infamous studies in the history of psychology.
As the story is told in most introductory psychology texts, Zimbardo set out to study the power of situational forces and social roles on identity and behavior. To do this, he randomly assigned seemingly normal college students with no criminal history or mental illness to the role of guard or prisoner in a simulated prison, providing little to no instruction.
However, due to the spontaneous and increasingly sadistic actions of the guards and the extreme emotional breakdowns of the prisoners, Zimbardo had to call off the experiment prematurely – but not before making some important discoveries about how social roles and oppressive environments can alter the psyches and actions of normal people in pathological ways.
Zimbardo’s own descriptions of his work tend to be somewhat more grandiose, sometimes bordering on a telling of a Greek myth or biblical tale, a story of something surreal, or as Zimbardo once put, something “Kafkaesque.”
The way the story is presented in the transcript of a slideshow put together by Zimbardo, all who entered that mock prison he constructed seemingly drifted into a dream. The minds of those who stayed too long fractured. Soon, everyone who remained began to metamorphose into nightmarish vermin.
Fortunately though, the good doctor was awakened by the pleas of a young man, who, in the midst of a mental breakdown, begged not to be released so he could prove he was a good prisoner. This is when Zimbardo knew it was time to bring the world he had created to an end.
Critics, however, have questioned many aspects of Zimbardo’s telling of the tale and its often uncritical, albeit less dramatic, retelling in psychology texts.
Only a third of the guards actually behaved sadistically. Some of the prisoners may have faked their emotional breakdowns for early release after being led to believe that as volunteer prisoners they were not permitted to leave the pretend prison.
But perhaps the most damning critique is that from the beginning, Zimbardo, who took on the role of prison superintendent, made it clear that he was on the side of the guards. He did this along with his undergraduate warden, who had researched and designed a rudimentary dormroom version of the simulation three months prior for a project in one of Zimbardo’s classes. He provided the guards with detailed instructions for how to manage the prisoners at the start, then continuously pressed them to be tougher on the inmates as the Stanford experiment went on.
In a documentary, Zimbardo acknowledged that, although he forbade the guards from hitting the prisoners, he explained to them they could instill boredom and frustration. Video from orientation day shows the charismatic professor in his prime instructing his guards, “We can create fear in them, to some degree. We can create a notion of arbitrariness, that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system.”
Some participants later admitted to leaning into their assigned roles deliberately. Given that Zimbardo was paying them $15 per day for their participation, he was essentially their boss at their summer job.
Despite these additional details though, it remains difficult to deny that Zimbardo’s study can tell us something important about human nature.
Maybe like the pre-teen boys with whom Muzafer Sherif played Lord of the Flies in the summers of 1949, 1953, and 1954, the young men of Stanford County Prison came to internalize the identities associated with their arbitrarily assigned groups, but here in an environment intelligently designed for oppression and with a pre-established social hierarchy.
Maybe like the seemingly normal Americans Stanley Milgram instructed to deliver what they thought were increasingly painful shocks to forgetful learners in an alleged memory experiment, they were just obeying authority.
Maybe they simply knew they were getting paid by the day and wanted this arrangement to continue.
Maybe it was a combination of the above.
In the end though, at least a portion of guards and prisoners acted in accordance with their arbitrarily assigned roles, with perhaps members of both groups accepting the authority of those above them, even if it meant behaving with casual cruelty or accepting degradation.
The Current Experiment: Year One
In the early days of the Pandemic Era, our superintendents and wardens took control over all aspects of daily life. They costumed us in masks. Minor pleasures, as well as basic acts such as spending time with family and friends were redefined as privileges. They created fear. They instilled boredom and frustration. They created a notion of arbitrariness, that our lives were totally controlled by them, by the system. We were their prisoners. We were their playthings.
In the early days of the Pandemic Era, there weren’t true guards or arbitrary groupings beyond authorities and prisoners – at least not any with which many truly came to identify.
We had actual law enforcement who could be said to have acted as guards in some places, following the orders of the superintendents and wardens, arresting lone paddle boarders and harassing parents for letting their children have playdates. Yet, most people throughout much of the United States, at least, never quite experienced that level of direct tyranny.
Early on we had the designations of essential and nonessential, but no one really knew what those categories meant. No one derived real power or status from them.
The only distinctions that could be said to have meant anything for Year One of the Pandemic Era were obedient and dissident, masked and unmasked, good prisoner and bad prisoner, although even these lost some meaning by virtue of the fact they were impermanent and fluid and that revealing one’s affiliation was generally a matter of personal choice.
The obedient granted themselves the occasional indulgence, meeting up with romantic partners and taking off their masks in the company of intimates. The unmasked reluctantly donned the symbol of their oppression when required. No one had to state their cognitive dissonance.
It was not until the Covid vaccines became available that more meaningful groups began to emerge.
The Current Experiment: Year Two
As the Covid vaccines became widely available, the objective groups of vaccinated and unvaccinated took shape and it was clear which group our superintendents and wardens favored from the start.
Sometimes they provided direct instructions. Sometimes they did not. But, in locations and institutions where their power was strongest, our superintendents and wardens encouraged and coerced their prisoners to be part of the favored group, allowing them to earn back such privileges as education, employment, and minor pleasures from the lives they once lived. They also made it clear that no one could fully rise from their present state until virtually everyone chose to do so.
Before long presumably normal people came to support vaccination requirements for travel, work, and education.
Some, however, seemed to go a step further and began to fancy themselves as guards.
As in the Stanford County Prison, physical violence was out of the question. So was the kind of pushing, shoving, and nighttime raids Sherif observed among the arbitrarily divided boys chosen for his summer camps. However, various forms of ostracism were deemed fully acceptable, if not encouraged and condoned.
Most explicitly this came in the form of those newly deputized guards who, acting in an official or professional capacity, obediently enforced the orders of our superintendents and wardens, turning unvaccinated patrons away from restaurants, having unvaccinated doctors removed from hospitals, putting unvaccinated pilots on indefinite unpaid leave.
Yet, more subtly, it also took the form of a kind of casual cruelty within families, offices, and schools.
Loved ones required one another to show proof of vaccination to attend weddings and holiday gatherings.
Those who had received medical or religious exemptions from employers and universities with vaccine mandates had, in some places, supervisors that barred them from certain corners of their workplaces and co-workers and classmates, who long ago stopped masking and social distancing around one another, reminded them to keep their distance and demanded that before entering a room they stand in the doorway and give those present time to mask up.
Although maybe not sufficient to foment the kind of alleged breakdowns noted by Superintendent Zimbardo at the Stanford County Prison, at least in the short term, it does not take much to imagine how such day-to-day humiliations could erode one’s sense of belonging or meaning. Long-term, it would seem only natural for such constant reminders of one’s subordinate state to engender feelings of depression, alienation, and worthlessness.
A considerable body of research on ostracism and social exclusion would suggest such feelings would be only natural.
Additional work in the area indicates that those that have been ostracized, to some degree, come to see themselves and their social aggressors as losing elements of their human nature, changing into cold and rigid things lacking agency and emotion.
In other words, our modern prisoners, with time, come to see themselves and their guards as metamorphosing into nightmarish vermin.
Future Directions: Year Three
As time passes though, it is becoming increasingly clear that the effectiveness of the Covid vaccines is not quite what was initially promised.
Numerous studies from California, Israel, Ontario, and Qatar, along with others, have consistently shown that fully vaccinated individuals can still contract and presumably transmit SARS-CoV-2, especially following the rise of the Omicron variant.
Hence the basis for ascribing any real meaning to the groups of vaccinated and unvaccinated, or at least any real meaning from which the former could be granted or derive some form of social or moral superiority over the other, has been demolished.
Subsequently it would only make sense that these groupings dissolve.
Yet, research has shown that people still find meaning in even the most meaningless groupings even when there is no objective reason to do so.
After a year of our superintendents and wardens publicly impugning the unvaccinated as a literal and figurative blight on society standing in the way of a return to normalcy, it is even more understandable that some continue to find meaning in these designations.
Thus, even as some cities and companies drop vaccine mandates, not all have been willing to return the same rights, now termed privileges, to both vaccinated and unvaccinated alike.
Additionally, the family, friends, co-workers, and classmates of some unvaccinated individuals still experience no qualms about behaving with casual cruelty towards them. Some unvaccinated individuals are even still willing to accept their casual degradation.
Maybe like the pre-teen boys with whom Muzafer Sherif played Lord of the Flies, these modern guards and prisoners have come to internalize their new identities, but in an environment intelligently designed for oppression and with an implied social hierarchy.
Maybe like the seemingly normal Americans, Stanley Milgram instructed to deliver what they thought were increasingly painful shocks to forgetful learners in an alleged memory experiment, they are just obeying authority.
Maybe they are trying to do their part to please their superintendents and wardens in the hope of earning some imagined reward.
Maybe it is a combination of the above.
A Final Lesson from Superintendent Zimbardo
Given the world in which we have been living for the past two years, despite the numerous flaws critics have found in both Zimbardo’s work, as well as Zimbardo the man and Zimbardo the legend, it would seem that both he and other members of social psychology’s golden age can still tell us a lot about how social roles, oppressive environments and powerful authorities can alter the psyches and actions of normal people in pathological ways.
But perhaps one of the last lessons Zimbardo can teach us is more a reminder of something George Orwell wrote in 1984 : “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past”.
Throughout his career Zimbardo appears to have actively worked to write his own myth and influenced the fields of psychology and criminal justice for decades.
Hence, perhaps as long as those who worked to give social or moral meaning to the groupings of vaccinated and unvaccinated are allowed to write the myth of how the public policies and interpersonal behaviors that followed contributed to delivering us to our returning semblance of normalcy, the more likely we will be to continue to have a society of guards and prisoners who act with casual cruelty and accept degradation as we move forward into the future.
Daniel Nuccio holds master’s degrees in both psychology and biology. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in biology at Northern Illinois University studying host-microbe relationships. He is also a regular contributor to The College Fix where he writes about COVID, mental health, and other topics.
March 10, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
Leave a comment
Aletho News
