Technofascism: Digital Book Burning in a Totalitarian Age

Posted on May 18, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

“Those who created this country chose freedom. With all of its dangers. And do you know the riskiest part of that choice they made? They actually believed that we could be trusted to make up our own minds in the whirl of differing ideas. That we could be trusted to remain free, even when there were very, very seductive voices—taking advantage of our freedom of speech—who were trying to turn this country into the kind of place where the government could tell you what you can and cannot do.”—Nat Hentoff

We are fast becoming a nation—nay, a world—of book burners.

While on paper, we are technically free to speak—at least according to the U.S. Constitution—in reality, however, we are only as free to speak as the government and its corporate partners such as Facebook, Google or YouTube may allow.

That’s not a whole lot of freedom. Especially if you’re inclined to voice opinions that may be construed as conspiratorial or dangerous.

Take David Icke, for example.

Icke, a popular commentator and author often labeled a conspiracy theorist by his detractors, recently had his Facebook page and YouTube channel (owned by Google) deleted for violating site policies by “spreading coronavirus disinformation.”

The Centre for Countering Digital Hate, which has been vocal about calling for Icke’s de-platforming, is also pushing for the removal of all other sites and individuals who promote Icke’s content in an effort to supposedly “save lives.”

Translation: the CCDH evidently believes the public is too dumb to think for itself and must be protected from dangerous ideas.

This is the goosestepping Nanny State trying to protect us from ourselves.

In the long run, this “safety” control (the censorship and shadowbanning of anyone who challenges a mainstream narrative) will be far worse than merely allowing people to think for themselves.

Journalist Matt Taibbi gets its: “The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who tells people to inject disinfectant.”

Don’t fall for the propaganda.

These internet censors are not acting in our best interests to protect us from dangerous, disinformation campaigns about COVID-19, a virus whose source and behavior continue to elude medical officials. They’re laying the groundwork now, with Icke as an easy target, to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

This is how freedom dies.

It doesn’t matter what disinformation Icke may or may not have been spreading about COVID-19. That’s not the issue.

As commentator Caitlin Johnstone recognizes, the censorship of David Icke by these internet media giants has nothing to do with Icke: “What matters is that we’re seeing a consistent and accelerating pattern of powerful plutocratic institutions collaborating with the US-centralized empire to control what ideas people around the world are permitted to share with each other, and it’s a very unsafe trajectory.”

Welcome to the age of technofascism.

Technofascism, clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem. As journalist Chet Bowers explains, “Technofascism’s level of efficiency and totalitarian potential can easily lead to repressive systems that will not tolerate dissent.”

The internet, hailed as a super-information highway, is increasingly becoming the police state’s secret weapon. This “policing of the mind: is exactly the danger author Jim Keith warned about when he predicted that “information and communication sources are gradually being linked together into a single computerized network, providing an opportunity for unheralded control of hat will be broadcast, what will be said, and ultimately what will be thought.”

It’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.

Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

We’re almost at that point now.

What you are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them.

Today, the forces of political correctness, working in conjunction with corporate and government agencies, have managed to replace actual book burning with intellectual book burning.

“Free speech for me but not for thee” is how my good friend and free speech purist Nat Hentoff used to sum up this double standard.

This is about much more than free speech, however. This is about repression and control.

With every passing day, we’re being moved further down the road towards a totalitarian society characterized by government censorship, violence, corruption, hypocrisy and intolerance, all packaged for our supposed benefit in the Orwellian doublespeak of national security, tolerance and so-called “government speech.”

The reasons for such censorship vary widely from political correctness, safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remains the same: the complete eradication of what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the “principal pillar of a free government.”

The upshot of all of this editing, parsing, banning and silencing is the emergence of a new language, what George Orwell referred to as Newspeak, which places the power to control language in the hands of the totalitarian state.

Under such a system, language becomes a weapon to change the way people think by changing the words they use.

The end result is control.

In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used.

In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind lest they find themselves ostracized or placed under surveillance.

Even when the motives behind this rigidly calibrated reorientation of societal language appear well-intentioned—discouraging racism, condemning violence, denouncing discrimination and hatred—inevitably, the end result is the same: intolerance, indoctrination and infantilism.

It’s political correctness disguised as tolerance, civility and love, but what it really amounts to is the chilling of free speech and the demonizing of viewpoints that run counter to the cultural elite.

The police state could not ask for a better citizenry than one that carries out its own censorship, spying and policing: this is how you turn a nation of free people into extensions of the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent police state, and in the process turn a citizenry against each other.

Tread cautiously: Orwell’s 1984, which depicts the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism, has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.

1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”

We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.

Much like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984, the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move. Much like Huxley’s A Brave New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who “have their liberties taken away from them, but … rather enjoy it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing.” Much like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the populace is now taught to “know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.”

And in keeping with Philip K. Dick’s darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state—which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report—we are now trapped in a world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.

What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.

Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming our reality.

In fact, our world is characterized by widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, fusion centers, driverless cars, voice-controlled homes, facial recognition systems, cybugs and drones, and predictive policing (pre-crime) aimed at capturing would-be criminals before they can do any damage. Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Government agents listen in on our telephone calls and read our emails. And privacy and bodily integrity have been utterly eviscerated.

We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state.

What many fail to realize is that the government is not operating alone. It cannot.

The government requires an accomplice.

Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of the massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental overreach.

In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles have spread worldwide.

The government now has at its disposal technological arsenals so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections null and void. Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown itself to care little to nothing for constitutional limits or privacy, the “security/industrial complex”—a marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant surveillance—has come to dominate the government and our lives.

Money, power, control.

There is no shortage of motives fueling the convergence of mega-corporations and government. But who is paying the price?

“We the people,” of course. Not just we Americans, but people the world over.

We have entered into a global state of tyranny.

Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.

This is the final link in the police state chain.

Americans have been conditioned to accept routine incursions on their privacy rights. In fact, the addiction to screen devices—especially cell phones—has created a hive effect where the populace not only watched but is controlled by AI bots. However, at one time, the idea of a total surveillance state tracking one’s every move would have been abhorrent to most Americans. That all changed with the 9/11 attacks. As professor Jeffrey Rosen observes, “Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.”

Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry—mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all—we have nowhere left to go.

We have, so to speak, gone from being a nation where privacy is king to one where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government.

In search of so-called terrorists and extremists hiding amongst us—the proverbial “needle in a haystack,” as one official termed it—the Corporate State has taken to monitoring all aspects of our lives, from cell phone calls and emails to Internet activity and credit card transactions. This data is being fed through fusion centers across the country, which work with the Department of Homeland Security to make threat assessments on every citizen, including school children.

Wherever you go and whatever you do, you are now being watched, especially if you leave behind an electronic footprint.

When you use your cell phone, you leave a record of when the call was placed, who you called, how long it lasted and even where you were at the time. When you use your ATM card, you leave a record of where and when you used the card. There is even a video camera at most locations equipped with facial recognition software. When you use a cell phone or drive a car enabled with GPS, you can be tracked by satellite. Such information is shared with government agents, including local police. And all of this once-private information about your consumer habits, your whereabouts and your activities is now being fed to the U.S. government.

The government has nearly inexhaustible resources when it comes to tracking our movements, from electronic wiretapping devices, traffic cameras and biometrics to radio-frequency identification cards, satellites and Internet surveillance.

Speech recognition technology now makes it possible for the government to carry out massive eavesdropping by way of sophisticated computer systems. Phone calls can be monitored, the audio converted to text files and stored in computer databases indefinitely. And if any “threatening” words are detected—no matter how inane or silly—the record can be flagged and assigned to a government agent for further investigation. Federal and state governments, again working with private corporations, monitor your Internet content. Users are profiled and tracked in order to identify, target and even prosecute them.

In such a climate, everyone is a suspect. And you’re guilty until you can prove yourself innocent.

Here’s what a lot of people fail to understand, however: it’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted.

We’ve already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter.

Say hello to the new Thought Police.

Total Internet surveillance by the Corporate State, as omnipresent as God, is used by the government to predict and, more importantly, control the populace, and it’s not as far-fetched as you might think. For example, the NSA has designed an artificial intelligence system that can anticipate your every move. In a nutshell, the NSA feeds vast amounts of the information it collects to a computer system known as Aquaint (the acronym stands for Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence), which the computer then uses to detect patterns and predict behavior.

No information is sacred or spared.

Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared freely with its agents.

Thus, what we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).

Clearly, the age of privacy is at an end.

So where does that leave us?

We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers. This is the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us on a daily basis.

It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.

To be an individual today, to not conform, to have even a shred of privacy, and to live beyond the reach of the government’s roaming eyes and technological spies, one must not only be a rebel but rebel.

Even when you rebel and take your stand, there is rarely a happy ending awaiting you. You are rendered an outlaw.

So how do you survive this global surveillance state?

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we’re running out of options.

We’ll soon have to choose between self-indulgence (the bread-and-circus distractions offered up by the news media, politicians, sports conglomerates, entertainment industry, etc.) and self-preservation in the form of renewed vigilance about threats to our freedoms and active engagement in self-governance.

Yet as Aldous Huxley acknowledged in Brave New World Revisited: “Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it.”

Which brings me back to this technofascist tyranny being meted out on David Icke and all those like him who dare to voice ideas that diverge from what the government and its corporate controllers deem to be acceptable.

The problem as I see it is that we’ve allowed ourselves to be persuaded that we need someone else to think and speak for us. And we’ve allowed ourselves to become so timid in the face of offensive words and ideas that we’ve bought into the idea that we need the government to shield us from that which is ugly or upsetting or mean.

The result is a society in which we’ve stopped debating among ourselves, stopped thinking for ourselves, and stopped believing that we can fix our own problems and resolve our own differences.

In short, we have reduced ourselves to a largely silent, passive, polarized populace incapable of working through our own problems and reliant on the government to protect us from our fears.

In this way, we have become our worst enemy.

You want to reclaim some of the ground we’re fast losing to the techno-tyrants?

Start by thinking for yourself. If that means reading the “dangerous” ideas being floated out there by the David Ickes of the world—or the John Whiteheads for that matter—and then deciding for yourself what is true, so be it.

As Orwell concluded, “Freedom is the right to say two plus two make four.”

Death: A Simple Idea with a Powerful Punch

Posted on May 17, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

Source: Off-Guardian

Since death is one idea that has no history except as an idea and not a reality any of us have experienced, it is the most frightening idea there is and also quite simple. It is the ultimate unknown. It has always haunted human beings, whether consciously or unconsciously.

It lies at the root of war, violence, religion, art, love, and civilization. The good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, why we like to win and not lose, pass and not fail, “pass on” and not die. It is so funny and so sad. We would be lost without it, even when we feel lost when thinking about it. And it is fundamental for understanding the action and reaction to Covid-19.

Societies have always been people banded together in the face of death. And since people are not just physical beings but symbolic creatures who can think and imagine the past and the future, societies are necessarily mythic symbol systems whose job is not only to protect people physically, but symbolically as well.

Sometimes, however, the protection is a protection racket with racketeers holding people hostage to fabricated fears that keep them locked in a living-death.

Thus death, this most potent imaginative idea and reality that doesn’t exist except as a mystery about which anything we say is speculation, can be used for good and evil, depending on who controls society.

Death is the great fear, the human haunting that hangs by a thread over life like the sword of Damocles.

In 1944 in a newspaper column, George Orwell made an astute remark:

There is little doubt that the modern cult of power worship is bound up with the modern man’s feeling that life here and now is the only life there is. If death ends everything, it becomes much harder to believe that you can be in the right even if you are defeated…. I would say that the decay in the belief in personal immortality has been as important as the rise of machine civilization.

Beliefs, of course, like “personal immortality” and all others, such as the recent rise in the belief in atheism, which is as much a belief as belief in God, are, partially at least, relative to time and place, and develop out of social storytelling. The “hard facts” on which many feel their lives and security rest are themselves dependent upon the symbols which give them legitimacy.

Reality is indeed precarious with society suspended by a web of myths and symbols. It is through cultural and social symbol systems that society’s meaning is transmitted to individuals, and it is within the symbol systems that the control and release of action resides.

In today’s electronic mass media world, those who control the mass media that control the narrative flow – the storytelling – control the majority’s beliefs and actions.

Since society is held together by this myth system – the beliefs and values people live for and live by – that sustains it, societies have always had to offer symbolic “answers” to death. For without a meaningful symbolic for coming to terms with death, human action would be stymied and people would be reduced to what the psychiatrist Allan Wheelis termed “intense, preoccupying yearning.”

Today we can hear such yearning everywhere.

Shortly after Orwell made his prescient comment in The Tribune, nuclear weapons were developed and used by the United States to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians. With those weapons and their use, the ages-old symbolic narrative of life and death was transformed in a flash.

“The significance of the possibility of nuclear death is that it radically affects the meaning of death, of immortality, of life itself,” wrote Hans Morgenthau.

The traditional symbolic sources that once served to allow humans to transcend death were fundamentally undercut, and the search for new modes of death transcendence was carried on beneath the portentous covering of the nuclear umbrella.

A qualitative transformation in the meaning of human existence was thus brought about as humans, who had the weapons, replaced the belief in God as the holder of the power over life and death, since nuclear war could result in the extinction of human life, leaving no one left to die.

This is our world today, and it is where the Covid-19 story takes place. A world not just of nuclear fear, but a host of other fears constantly inflamed by the mass media that hypnotize people through the conjuring of death-fear.

In his great work on group psychology, Freud showed us how it was not just mental contagion and the herd instinct that got people to join in group behavior. People could be induced to become little children and obey their leaders because they have “an extreme passion for authority.”

When leaders speak, the children hear the inner voices of their parents telling them to be careful, be very careful, the bogeyman is everywhere, so listen and obey. Freud, the Jewish atheist, and Dostoevsky, the Russian Orthodox Christian, were in agreement about people’s desire to give up their freedom to authority figures who would allegedly shelter them within their warm embrace.

The easiest way to do this is to convince people that death is stalking them, for the bogeyman is always death in one form or another.

It works to get people to support the terrifying sadism of wars against fabricated “others,” who are always portrayed as aliens who are out to kill the good people.

It works to get people to give up their freedoms out of fear of “terrorists,” who are said to slide and hide in the interstices of everyday life, ready to pounce and kill at any moment.

And it works to get people to obey orders to protect themselves from terrifying viruses that are lying in wait everywhere to strike them dead.

In his novel The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky said that people want miracles, mystery, and authority, not freedom. His Grand Inquisitor, while a fictional creation, lives on in reality.

For the Grand Inquisitor represents those power elites across the world who wish to cower people into accepting their dicta on Covid-19 as truth without questioning its logic or rationale.

To question has become an act of insubordination deserving death by censorship or the defiling of one’s name via the term “conspiracy theorist,” a name used by the CIA to dismiss anyone questioning its murder of President Kennedy. Death comes in many forms, and the fear of it has always been used by the powerful to render the common people speechless and obedient.

How can any thinking person, anyone not totally crippled by fear, not question what is going on with the coronavirus disaster when reading what Peter Koenig, a thirty-year veteran economist of the World Bank and World Health Organization, writes in his article The Farce and Diabolical Agenda of a ‘Universal Lockdown’:

The pandemic was needed as a pretext to halt and collapse the world economy and the underlying social fabric.

There is no coincidence. There were a number of preparatory events, all pointing into the direction of a worldwide monumental historic disaster. It started at least 10 years ago – probably considerably earlier – with the infamous 2010 Rockefeller Report, which painted the first phase of a monstrous Plan, called the “Lock Step” scenario. Among the last preparatory moves for the “pandemic” was Event 201, held in NYC on 18 October 2019.

The event was sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and the World Economic Forum (WEF), the club of the rich and powerful that meets every January in Davos, Switzerland. Participating were a number of pharmaceuticals (vaccine interest groups), as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s of the US and – of China.

One of the objectives of Event 201 was a computer simulation of a corona virus pandemic. The simulated virus was called SARS-2-nCoV, or later 2019-nCoV. The simulation results were disastrous, killing 65 million people in 18 months and plunging the stock market by more than 30% — causing untold unemployment and bankruptcies. Precisely the scenario of which we are now living the beginning.

The Lock Step scenario foresees a number of ghastly and disturbing events or components of The Plan to be implemented by the so called Agenda ID2020, a Bill Gates creation, fully integrated into the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) – target date for completion – 2030 (also called Agenda 2030, the hidden agenda unknown to most of the UN members), the same target date for completion of the Agenda ID02020.

I ask the question but I am afraid I know the answer: miracle, mystery, and authority usually defeat evidence and simple logic. Fear of death and free thought scare children. The Grand Inquisitor lives on:

But man seeks to bow before that only which is recognized by the greater majority, if not by all his fellow-men, as having a right to be worshipped; whose rights are so unquestionable that men agree unanimously to bow down to it.

Death: A simple idea with such a powerful punch.

Why You Should Oppose The Censorship Of David Icke (Hint: It’s Got Nothing To Do With Icke)

Posted on May 10, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: Waking Times

Within 48 hours both Facebook and then Youtube have deleted the accounts of David Icke for posting “content that disputes the existence and transmission of Covid-19 as described by the WHO and the NHS.” Other platforms may soon fall in suit, as they did with Alex Jones in 2018.

This article is not about David Icke. I will say it again in italics for the especially dense: this article is not about David Icke. This article is about why we shouldn’t be okay with monopolistic billionaire-owned Silicon Valley tech giants with extensive ties to US government agencies controlling human communication.

I know next to nothing about David Icke, and I have done exactly zero research into his views for this article; for all I know he’s every bit the raving lunatic the narrative managers say he is. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’re seeing a consistent and accelerating pattern of powerful plutocratic institutions collaborating with the US-centralized empire to control what ideas people around the world are permitted to share with each other, and it’s a very unsafe trajectory. Making this conversation about Icke and his views distracts from the very important topic we need to actually focus on discussing.

“The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who tells people to inject disinfectant.” https://t.co/KFA8jC6XiY

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) April 30, 2020

Journalist Matt Taibbi recently wrote an excellent essay about the dangers inherent in the increased demand we’ve been seeing for more censorship and deplatforming during the coronavirus pandemic, correctly arguing that more authoritarian control over the ideas people are allowed to discuss is vastly more dangerous than the ideas themselves.

“The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who tells people to inject disinfectant,” Taibbi writes. “It’s astonishing that they don’t see this.”

“Instead of asking calmly if hydroxychloroquine works, or if the less restrictive Swedish crisis response has merit, or questioning why certain statistical assumptions about the seriousness of the crisis might have been off, we’re denouncing the questions themselves as infamous,” says Taibbi.

Taibbi argues against the increasingly normalized trend of elevating “authoritative” content while silencing content which does not wear that magical label in an attempt to fight disinformation. If you examine which content is considered “authoritative”, you’ll find a bunch of outlets who have consistently lied to the world about war after war, who spent years promoting the baseless conspiracy theory that Vladimir Putin had infiltrated and secured control over the executive branch of the US government, who consistently normalize a status quo which is wholly incompatible with the surviving and thriving of life on this planet.

Two weeks after the Atlantic Council explained to us that we need to be propagandized for our own good, Facebook announces a new partnership with the Atlantic Council to make sure we're getting the right kinds of information.https://t.co/aXwHvxdREX https://t.co/3CkVtvBs0s pic.twitter.com/sEz52VjNTe

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) May 17, 2018

Google, who owns Youtube, has been financially intertwined with US intelligence agencies since its very inception when it received research grants from the CIA and NSA for mass surveillance. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has called on the government to take “a more active role” in regulating “harmful content”, and has been actively collaborating with government agencies and government-funded think tanks to decide what content to remove. Social media executives are now routinely called before government hearings and lectured about the need to increase censorship under the implicit threat of antitrust cases being brought to bear. These massive corporations now consistently censor with an extreme bias against governments which refuse to bow to the demands of the US government and its allies.

In 2017, representatives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google were instructed on the US Senate floor that it is their responsibility to “quell information rebellions” and adopt a “mission statement” expressing their commitment to “prevent the fomenting of discord.”

“Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words,” the representatives were told. “America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”

Whenever anyone objects to censorship on these massive platforms they’re always told that those platforms are private companies who are free to do what they like on their private property, but how “private” is a corporation that is interlaced with government power with increasing inseparability? The reality is that in a corporatist system of government with vanishingly few meaningful distinctions between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship.

Narrative Managers Argue China-Like Internet Censorship Is Needed

"The only difference between @TheAtlantic article and something you might read on a libertarian site is that this article argues that all of these regulations on speech are a good thing."https://t.co/aXhhlQY366

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) April 27, 2020

Proponents of increased internet censorship have already openly conceded this point. A recent Atlantic article by two legal professors subtitled “In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong”, the case is made that western internet censorship will necessarily involve a collaboration with “private” corporations and government power.

“As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China,” the article’s authors favorably argue. “Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices, which further values and address threats different from those in China. But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.”

Apart from the fact that they are here claiming that increasingly authoritarian speech control is good and necessary, these two bootlickers are absolutely correct. Human communication is indeed being controlled using the so-called “private sector” to circumvent constitutional limitations which prohibit the government from censoring speech directly.

These Silicon Valley tech corporations have ensured their continued monopolistic dominance by demonstrating their willingness to collaborate with establishment power structures, so there are no platforms of anywhere near the same size and influence that people can move to if they don’t feel like letting government-tied plutocrats police what thoughts are permitted to enter into their minds. This has given this corporate-government alliance the ability to control the thoughts that people are allowed to share, discuss and think about in the same way totalitarian governments can, with the false mask of freedom plastered over it.

A truly free being does not need an alliance of plutocrats and government agencies to protect their mind from David Icke. A truly free being does not want an alliance of plutocrats and government agencies to exert any control whatsoever over what ideas they are permitted to share and what thoughts they are permitted to think. A truly free being opposes with all their might any attempt to lock in a paradigm where human communication (and thereby thought) is controlled by vast unaccountable power structures which benefit from the absence of dissent.

Be a truly free being. Oppose this intrusion into your mental sovereignty.

Why are some respected alt-media embracing a police state?

Posted on April 27, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Catte Black

Source: Off-Guardian.org

It should be obvious by now to anyone that the covid19 pandemic, whatever its origins, is being used to fast forward a “new normal” world of unparalleled government power, surveillance and curtailment of individual liberty.

We are looking already at:

Compulsory DNRs for some elderly.
Biometric chips or bracelets to monitor whether or not you have permission to be outside your home or engage in work
Drone surveillance as normal.
Apps on your phone that can detect any breach of the self-isolation policy.
Huge new police powers of arrest and detention for anyone suspected of carrying the virus.
Suspension of elections for indefinite periods at government discretion

And this is only the starter course. We can be pretty sure they are currently just easing us in. The real stuff will be rolling along in the next months or maybe years (depending on how quickly they feel able to get this on)

This is the fabric of nightmare. A worst-case horror story that is the absolute quintessence of everything the alt-media is supposed to oppose.

Surely, you would think, any self-respecting alt-media person would be opposing this with everything they have while they still have a voice.

Well, some of us are of course. And we’re going to be posting links to other sites currently doing great work challenging this rollout.

But, weeks into this crisis, there are some very prominent voices still refusing to either question the official narrative of the pandemic or unequivocally condemn the fast dawn of the “new normal” Brave New World.

We’ve held off from confronting this for a while now. We figured people needed time to adjust or wake up to the reality of what was happening. It’s shocking after all, and deeply disorienting, and different individuals need different amounts of time to get their bearings when something that shakes their worldview comes along.

But adjustment time is long over by now.

Let’s also be clear, we’re not condemning people for simply disagreeing with us. We expect disagreement on some issues. It’s a source of strength for all of us.

But this is not about relatively minor differences of opinion or interpretation.

This is sophisticated analysts, with resources and experience, failing to condemn, and even supporting, what amounts to de facto international martial law.

This is Labour activists who mere weeks ago were calling Boris Johnson a murderer and psychopath, now cheering as he is handed total control of their lives and their children’s lives.

This is respected journalists, commentators and academics who loudly condemned the cynical lies about WMDs or ‘chemical attacks’ in Douma, the fake videos and fake White Helmets, suddenly and uncritically accepting the veracity of every government virus narrative, every unsourced video and media meme that has #covid19 as a hashtag.

This is people who have campaigned against the Patriot Act for 19 years, signing off on the new US anti-covid19 legislation without a murmur; who know that governments always abuse their powers, thinking they somehow just won’t abuse these.

This is people who know about Guantanamo and who have seen Julian Assange humiliated and abused, somehow thinking the people who did these things won’t use the new post-covid police state to do them even more.

This is something more than simple denial. It’s – what?

Are they simply paralysed with fear, either of the hyped-up virus, or the scary dystopia we are all suddenly inhabiting? Is it Stockholm Syndrome? Is it still possible some of them will wake up or unfreeze and see what is going on?

Are some of them gatekeepers, sleeper assets being activated in this extreme situation specifically to divert and delude the questioning and sceptical people who tend to follow them?

Well, I guess we can’t completely rule that out, can we, though I wouldn’t want to make that claim about anyone.

Are some just being self-serving and shallow, playing at being dissident while the price was low enough? Did they think writing a popular alt media blog was an easy way to be cool, but never had any intention of standing by any of it once it got a bit risky to do so?

I mean you are not gonna get that coveted slot on RT or Buzzfeed by taking on this major ‘new normal’ narrative are you? So that’s a factor potentially.

You can see the appeal of just sitting on the fence and talking in vague terms about how this fascism malarkey is a bit worrying, but stopping short of actually condemning it. That way you keep the option open to be ‘radical’ again once it looks safe enough to do so, but also don’t risk your comfy and lucrative relationship with the Establishment Left, who are all eagerly embracing the new age of mass incarceration and really want you to do the same.

Are some, as has been unkindly suggested, just too stupid to see what’s going on? Do epidemiology stats hurt their brains? Does thinking too much take up valuable psychobabble time? Is it hard to see the black clouds of tyranny rolling in when your head is too firmly planted in your own delightfully quirky posterior?

Or – we have to ask this – are a number of them simply, well, fascists? Do they actually support tyrannical top-down authoritarianism? Has their beef with the PTB merely been that they themselves are not currently high enough up that hierarchy? And do they see the covid19 rollout as some sort of revolution that will launch them and their chums into the positions of sweet supremacy they always knew they deserved?

Easy to preach permanent lockdown and biometric implant slavery when you figure none of it will apply to you and your family, I suppose.

All of these potential explanations may be the answer in some cases. And there could be a hundred other reasons besides.

But, in the end, do the explanations really matter? Do they change anything? Excuse anything?

The fact is these people stood at the barricades cheering and rallying the masses until the tanks could be seen rolling down the street – when they promptly upped and went over to join them.

Is there anything else to be said about that?

And where do we go from here?

The Culture of Fear: Coronavirus and the Human Animal

Posted on April 19, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Steve Attridge

Source: Waking Times

Fear is a weapon. It is also a deadly disease, far more potent than Corona virus. It also tells us much about our society, our relationships and ourselves. Fear inhibits thought, it restricts freedom, it limits imagination and it isolates us from each other and ultimately from ourselves. It is also a useful political and cultural tool to bend and even break people.

A dictionary definition of fear is that it is an unpleasant emotion caused by the threat of danger, pain, or harm.

So it is a mental state. An imaginary act, and the key word is threat. There are well over five hundred fears and phobias, and the list is growing as our culture becomes increasingly terrified of itself, narcissistic and neurotic.

There is real fear and there is manufactured fear. If someone is running at you holding a machete and saying they want to kill you then flight or fight kicks in and fear is good. If a suicide bomber jumps at you shouting Allah Akbar fear is good. It will also help the adrenalin to kick in when you run away. To stay put and ignore your fear is just silly.

But manufactured fear is something else altogether. It may be based on something entirely imaginary, such as four years ago if the majority voted for Brexit the economy would collapse overnight. People actually said that. It didn’t. Or it may be based on something real, like coronavirus, but then be distorted. In that case the fear is not a healthy response, it’s kneejerk reaction that paralyses us from proper understanding.

The manufacture of fear has three steps to it; one. Seed it. Two – let it grow. Three – harvest it. Why frighten people? Because frightened people are diminished. They shrink. They eventually lose their humanity. They are easy to manipulate. The holocaust is a terrible example of this.

Just think of the things that have been used to frighten us: Brexit, the Corona virus, financial collapse, political correctness, global warming – all of these things have a currency of fear. Even something like the TV license is designed to create fear. You get a letter from the TV Licensing agency – of course outsourced by the BBC with tax payers money to get someone else to do their dirty work. You’d think if the BBC was so great they’d say – look what amazing things you’re getting for your money – re runs, WOKE dramas and propaganda – who wouldn’t want to pay for that. But no – the letter is a threat, full of words like warning, enforcement, penalty, criminal, which criminalise you in advance and is designed only to frighten you into paying their absurd tax – over five billion a year to supplement ludicrous salaries, exorbitant expenses, and substandard programming that fewer and fewer people want to watch.

The coronavirus is the latest example of fear mongering and it is part of a bigger picture. In a surveillance society and where police are already being used to monitor people, it only takes a few emergency powers to crank up the law telling us where we can go, who we can go with and how long we can stay there. The army is on standby.

In terms of a Fear index this virus also shows how far we have come along the road of expecting others to do our thinking for us.

This virus is nasty but it does not justify the global terror unleashed by constant media fear mongering. In the UK 6,600 people have died of flu and 120,000 people have been hospitalized with it during the 2019-2020 flu season, but we haven’t got our knickers in a twist over that. At the time of making this video 71 have died in the UK of coronavirus. It seems that most people recover from the virus. It is real but it is distorted in how it is presented and perceived. And we must guard against false perceptions. Science is still grappling with this virus so we should be wary of those who espouse certainties.

We live in a world of manufactured fears because in a sense they are easier to deal with than real fears. And so many people think they know best. And they can’t shut about it and themselves. I was in a coffee shop in London’s Soho about a month ago. Next to me was a man wearing expensively scruffy jeans, a little goatee beard hiding a double chin, and talking very loudly. It was clear he was a metropolitan liberal and, I had to smile, it turned out he worked in television. The woman he was talking at, rather than to, nodded furiously at everything he said and constantly furrowed her brow to create the illusion of thought. In fifteen minutes he poured ridicule on Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Brexit, Nigel Farage, global warming – all the usual suspects for metropolitan liberals – as well as Israel, the virus, the Syrian government, racists, fascists – these last two seemed to be everyone who didn’t think like him. He said he found all these things terrifying and only the ignorant wouldn’t be scared shitless by them. As he pontificated he scoffed a panini with ham and lettuce and smashed avocado on the side. He also had a double expresso. The woman held a Pierre Cardin bag.

Four things about this. One. The ham came from a pig. If motormouth with a beard really wanted to experience fear, indeed terror, just visit an abattoir. Two. Avocado farming is causing deforestation, destroying ecosystems, funding drug cartels, and contributing to climate change. In the biggest avocado producing region in the world in Mexico, farmers are illegally razing pine forests in order to plant lucrative avocado trees. Three. Coffee is often used by drug cartels to smuggle drugs. Drug cartels are often used to protect coffee production. Migrant workers are paid poorly and are at the mercy of seasonal variations. Many die. Four. Pierre Cardin has repeatedly come under fire for using suppliers that employ child labour that amounts to slavery. Fear of starvation often forces these kids into slavery, and many become ill. Many die prematurely. So while Motormouth was pontificating his litany of moans the real holocaust of fear and suffering was on the little table in front of him where the ghosts of a thousand stories went unheard.

My point is that people prefer their fears when they can blame someone else and not take responsibility for the actual concrete details surrounding them. That requires real thought and real responsibility.

Fifty years ago, the psychiatrist R.D. Laing said that we are becoming frightened of our own minds. Psychophobia. That the medical profession is constantly coming up with new illnesses, new phobias, new forms of depression, so that eventually everyone is ill, just as in WOKE thinking everyone is a victim or an oppressor. So, everyone is frightened of something. But what they are actually frightened of is themselves – of the body that harbours disease, of thoughts that are no longer allowed, ideas that are frowned upon, or even outlawed, of speech that dares to criticise and articulate uncomfortable truths. So this is the real virus – the manufacture and dissemination of fear. And it’s deadly.

Social media narrows our field of vision and experience too by placing us in discrete groups of like-minded people – and of course we collude in this – so that people start to feel the whole world thinks like them. Then when differences do strike , people either get ‘triggered’ or terrified or abusive.

The supermarket is full of murderous intentions. The person who last week was a good liberal is now considering hacking an old man to death to steal his toilet roll. The woman who last week was delivering meals on wheels is now thinking of battering her neighbour with her shopping trolley because she’s taken the last 23 tins of baked beans. At my local hospital people have ripped the hand sanitisers off the walls and stolen them and filched toilet rolls from the hospital toilets. In America there are queues outside gun shops as people panic buy weapons because of the virus. This is a culture that has been fed on fake news, news as propaganda, partial science, WOKE thinking and a popular culture that is addicted to zombies, invasions, virus stories, and an arts culture that has been sanitised to the point of banality. Walk into a crowded room and say you’ve got corona virus and sneeze and then see how long before people are smashing each other to the ground to get out.

We are so used to living in our little bubbles that we have lost touch with the real, with each other and with ourselves. We are slaves to fear. We are paralysed by it, from small nagging anxieties to full-blown pathologies. Peoples imaginations have become shrunken receptacles for fear.

The lion doesn’t fear attacking the antelope. The mosquito doesn’t fear biting. The hawk doesn’t fear flying or hunting. These creatures are simply being themselves and their natures are acting through them, that they may survive.

People will say – Oh but we have bigger brains. We’re top of the pile. But the question is not how big the brain is but how much of it is used. To judge by the behaviour of many, about one per cent, so in reality we may be on the bottom rung of the evolutionary ladder.

It is also impossible to separate the idea of fear from religiosity. Is the coronavirus some sort of punishment by something greater than ourselves, of retribution, of being judged, of something supernatural out to get us, of hell. And traditionally of course religions use fear to control people. If you think there is something out there that knows every thought you have then you might start to fear your own thoughts. In a largely secular society those primitive, animistic, religious fears leap into all kinds of strange territories – why doesn’t the government (i.e. a god substitute) save us? Is it a judgement and punishment from nature? And so it gets complicated and messy.

During this virus, there is much talk of communal solidarity, as in certain communities in World War Two. People helped each other. There will be cases of that, but it’s a bad analogy. During that war there was a perceived common enemy out there and a common purpose. With the virus the enemy is our own biology, our neighbours and the strangers around us. So there is fear everywhere, inside and out. Is he or she a disease on legs? Am I?

Fear weakens and diminishes us. Many have forgotten how to imagine the big picture. To join up the dots. I used to teach a course on Leonardo Da Vinci. The whole purpose of the course was to help people, including myself, to reawaken Renaissance thinking. Focus on detail but always be aware of the big picture. To put apparently isolated events and facts into the larger map. Like the elephant in the land of the blind, where one person touches the trunk and thinks that is an elephant, another the tail and thinks that is an elephant. But it needs someone to see that it is the sum of the parts that makes something what it is. To make connections, not based on wild speculations, but on what is there. And if people laugh at what you discover, or hate you for it, then too bad. Because it is more important to think fearlessly in the hope that you can then live fearlessly.

A few possible ways out of this (there are others, of course):

Magical thinking and Life Writing. Using language to explore and liberate rather than to inhibit or control or punish.

Imaging fear in order to control it, and not the other way round. Image making as a positive route through life. I carry a notebook and if something scares me I make a doodle of what I think the fear looks like. Pretty soon I’m smiling at it.

Reclaiming the unconscious as a journey full of delights and dangers and a place where ideas and thoughts and events can be rehearsed and explored. I think many of my books attempt this, and often fail, but at least I try. I do the same in my teaching.

Related to the unconscious is jettisoning the taboos surrounding certain words and thoughts. Reclaiming free speech, and therefore free thought. Then the world starts to crack open rather than shut down.

Understanding that orthodoxies invariably become corrupt and controlling, in religions and in politics and culture. The way to correct this is by teaching critical thinking – i.e. how to think and not what to think.

Refocusing on the individual as the prime focus for collective action.

The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup Against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully

Posted on April 17, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

I have previously explained how the COVID-19 infection is being used to frighten us into submitting powerlessly to the global elite’s latest move to take much greater control of our lives and how those who can perceive this, and wish to resist it, can do so effectively. See ‘Observing Elites Manipulate Our Fear: COVID-19, Propaganda and Knowledge’ and ‘Defending Humanity Against the Elite Coup’.

In this article I want to document a sample of the rapidly increasing evidence of how this coup is taking shape and to reiterate a strategy for defeating it.

The coup was designed to take immediate measures to ensure that fundamental rights and freedoms, only ‘won’ (in name at least) after many centuries of struggle, were stripped away from us and to do it in such a way that people would fearfully accept it. This is why the idea of a virus ‘pandemic’ was quite clever. Because the fear of contracting the virus (and its possibly deadly consequences) could be grotesquely magnified by inflating the figures, constant harping on it by the World Health Organization, the medical industry (in league with the pharmaceutical industry) and governments, and then magnified by the corporate media – with one outlet laughably suggesting COVID-19 could be worse than the flu outbreak in 1918 (falsely attributed to Spain): see ‘COVID-19 has the potential to become as severe as the Spanish flu’ – it made virtually all people submissive to any measure taken, or order given, ostensibly to prevent the spread of the virus.

Fear manipulated by propaganda defeats knowledge and evidence every time, as history has endlessly demonstrated. Just ask Joseph Goebbels how they did it in Nazi Germany. Play on the fear, play on the fear….

But if you are not too scared to seek out the evidence, you get an utterly different picture of what is taking place.

So, for example, US physician Dr. Annie Bukacek observes that ‘The real number of COVID-19 deaths are not what most people are told and what they then think. How many people actually died from COVID-19 is anyone’s guess. … Based on inaccurate, incomplete data, people are being terrorized by fear-mongers into relinquishing freedoms.’ See ‘Montana physician Dr. Annie Bukacek discusses how COVID 19 death certificates are being manipulated’.

If you would like to read a wider sample of the literature and videos discussing how the infection and death rates from COVID-19 have been deliberately misinterpreted, inflated and presented in a way that induces fear, and hence willing submission to elite control, see the daily updates on ‘A Swiss Doctor on Covid-19’ and the articles/videos ‘Corona: creating the illusion of a pandemic through diagnostic tests’, ‘12 Experts Questioning the Coronavirus Panic’, ‘Can We Trust the WHO?’, ‘How deadly is the coronavirus? It’s still far from clear’, ‘Perspectives on the Pandemic II: A Conversation with Dr. Knut Wittkowski’, ‘Never Has So Little Done So Much Harm to So Many: The Latest Coronavirus Attack Is A Cover for Restricting Our Health Freedoms’, ‘Covid19 Death Figures “A Substantial Over-Estimate”’ and ‘Dr Scott Jensen Reveals “Ridiculous” Covid19 Guidance’.

As a result of this pandemic of fear, the human rights to privacy (Article 12), freedom of movement (Article 13.1) and freedom of assembly (Article 20.1), for example, which are enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948 (but not necessarily legislated into law by individual countries and routinely violated by governments in any case) have now been publicly and completely eviscerated in one fell swoop with bans on gatherings, legal requirements for ‘social distancing’ and even greater surveillance of our private activities with barely a murmur of protest. For a comprehensive global summary, which monitors individual government responses to the pandemic that affect civic freedoms and human rights focusing on emergency laws, see the ‘COVID-19 Civic Freedom Tracker’.

Denied these fundamental rights, others – including those preventing arbitrary arrest or detention (Article 9), entitlement to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal in response to any criminal charge (Article 10), to make a living in the manner of our choosing (Article 23), to adequate healthcare irrespective of personal circumstances (Article 25.1) and to have some say in how we are governed (Article 21) – have, if they previously existed in practice, largely disappeared as many governments around the world have used a variety of illegal and sometimes unconstitutional measures – ranging from ‘lockdowns’ and curfews to martial law and suspensions of parliaments in favour of dictatorships – to usurp more complete control of national societies.

For just a brief taste of what is taking place in some countries, see ‘Denmark rushes through emergency coronavirus law’, ‘DOJ seeks new emergency powers amid coronavirus pandemic’, ‘For Autocrats, and Others, Coronavirus Is a Chance to Grab Even More Power’, ‘Suspending the Constitution: Police State Uses Crises to Expand Its Lockdown Powers’, ‘Hungary’s Leader Grabbed Powers to Fight the Virus. Some Fear Other Motives’, ‘Americans Beware: Trump Could Emulate Netanyahu’s Coronavirus Coup’ and ‘The Coronavirus State: New Zealand and Authoritarian Rumblings’.

In addition, by deliberately crashing national economies it was easy to conceal the fact that they were on the brink of crashing anyway. In the words of Scott C. Tips: ‘As the American and other economies falter from major structural problems, out-of-control debt, reckless spending, and government stupidity in shuttering businesses, the blame for markets crashing and economies tanking is borne by the conveniently available COVID-19 disease.’ See ‘Never Has So Little Done So Much Harm to So Many: The Latest Coronavirus Attack Is A Cover for Restricting Our Health Freedoms’.

In this way, the elite has rapidly and vastly expanded the number of people who live a precarious economic existence, due to the exploitative functioning of the global economy – see ‘Who Profits From the Pandemic?’ – while also giving vast sums of money to wealthy corporations via government bailouts. See ‘Trump Signs Corporate Bailout Bill: A Measure That Will Live in Infamy’.

Moreover, adverse outcomes from the use of COVID-19 to wreak this economic destruction will multiply rapidly but the underlying corporate dysfunctionality will now escape the blame from most observers just as COVID-19 will help to obscure the elite’s true purpose in precipitating this crisis. See, for example, ‘Coronavirus pandemic will inevitably cause food crisis’, ‘10 Signs the U.S. Is Heading for a Depression’, ‘After the Lockdown: A Global Coronavirus Vaccination Program…’, ‘COVID-19. The Unspoken Truth. The Most Serious Global Crisis in Modern History’, ‘The worst economic collapse ever?’ and ‘Coronavirus – The Aftermath. A Coming Mega-Depression…’.

But apart from these more obvious encroachments on our rights, freedoms and economic well-being, there is a vast range of encroachments happening either outside or on the periphery of public view, given the phenomenal corporate media attention focused on COVID-19 to distract us.

Talking about US government surveillance in 2014, former Technical Director of the NSA, William ‘Bill’ Binney, explained that the NSA sought ‘total population control’. See ‘Whistleblower: NSA Goal Is “Total Population Control”’.

Six years later it is clear that the global elite is now making another push in its ongoing and longstanding effort to achieve total control. Will this be the final push?

As you consider this question, here is another small sample of those encroachments and devastating impacts that are happening while our attention is elsewhere:

The public acceptance of surveillance technology to spy on us in the interests of our ‘health’ is facilitating elite efforts to rapidly expand its monitoring capacities in this regard. See, for example, ‘To Track Coronavirus, Israel Moves to Tap Secret Trove of Cellphone Data’ and ‘For Autocrats, and Others, Coronavirus Is a Chance to Grab Even More Power’.
The deluge of propaganda is convincing us that compulsory vaccination will be necessary to ensure our ‘health and well-being’. However, apart from the conclusively and extensively documented harm from vaccinations – for one brief article just touching on this, see ‘Vaccines and the Liberal Mind’ – there is extensive evidence that any such vaccination program will be the trojan horse for implementing an electronic identification program that uses generalized vaccination as a platform for launching a scheme to give everyone ‘a portable and persistent biometrically-linked digital identity’. See ‘The Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic: The Real Danger is “Agenda ID2020”’, ‘After the Lockdown: A Global Coronavirus Vaccination Program…’, ‘Coronavirus: Biometric IDs could be “gamechanger” for tests, vaccines’ and ‘COVID-19: Perfect Cover for Mandatory Biometric ID’.

If you think this is fairyland stuff, check out the website of the elite agents advocating it: ‘The need for good digital ID is universal: The ability to prove who you are is a fundamental and universal human right. Because we live in a digital era, we need a trusted and reliable way to do that both in the physical world and online.’ See ‘The Need for Good Digital ID is Universal’.

Without thinking too hard, I can list a few ‘fundamental and universal human rights’ that I would nominate before I got too excited about my digital identity. I wonder if these people are concerned about whether I have enough to eat, whether I am clothed and housed…. Of course, I know they have no interest in my privacy given that digital ID and the surveillance that goes with it will make that non-existent.

The deployment of the highly dangerous 5G which, under the guise of improving internet speed and capacity, will vastly expand everyone’s exposure to electromagnetic radiation with its long list of seriously adverse health impacts. For a taste of the extensive documentation on this point, see the ‘International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space’.
A dramatic increase in the violence inflicted within the family home, especially by men and women against children – see ‘Why Violence?’ – and by the more usually acknowledged men against women, during the lockdown. See ‘UN chief calls for domestic violence “ceasefire” amid “horrifying global surge”’.
Intensified efforts to overthrow governments in Iran and Venezuela. See ‘COVID-19: Cover for Military Attack on Iran and Iraq? Trump ignores Iraqi demand US occupation forces leave the country’, ‘Not letting Covid-19 crisis go to waste? US ramps up war on drugs… focusing on Venezuela’s Maduro’, ‘Trump sends gun boats to Venezuela while the world partners to fight a deadly pandemic’ and ‘NATO in Arms to “Fight Coronavirus”’.

The background framework to what is happening regarding Venezuela has been exposed by its President Nicolás Maduro. See ‘Letter from President Nicolás Maduro to the People of the United States’.

No end to the many ongoing wars involving the United States – see, for example, ‘U.S. Confirms Deployment Of Patriot Missiles In Iraq. Iran Prepares For Conflict In Straight Of Hormuz’ and ‘US Empire Exploits COVID-19 For More War’ – although a pause in some wars in which the US is not a party – for an overview, see ‘UN Ceasefire Defines War As a Non-Essential Activity’ – as a result of an appeal by the UN Secretary-General for warring nations to desist until the effort to contain COVID-19 is won. See ‘The fury of the virus illustrates the folly of war’.

Unfortunately, this appeal, unlike the Secretary-General’s appeal for a ceasefire on domestic violence which attracted no significant public endorsement, quickly drew in many others equally devoid of any analysis of what is actually taking place and thus happy to help distract people from the core issue. See, for example, ‘COVID-19: Sign the Call for Global Ceasefire!’, ‘Global Ceasefire: Running List of Countries Committed’ and ‘Global Ceasefire Now!’

Obviously, I am heartily in favour of ending war. But this is only going to happen when we campaign strategically to do so and provided we have sufficient political freedom to do it. See ‘Strategic Aims’ (for ending war).

As an aside and displaying its usual projected fear of threats, when some US military personnel became infected with COVID-19 – see ‘Request for Assistance in Response to COVID-19 Pandemic’ – the Pentagon issued a suppression order on further reporting of COVID-19 in the US military. See ‘Pentagon orders all installations to stop reporting COVID-19 infections and deaths’.

Ongoing economic sanctions by the United States directed against a variety of countries, notably including Iran and Venezuela, are complicating efforts to address COVID-19 effectively. In contrast, countries such as Cuba, China and Russia are leading the international effort to support other countries dealing with a higher level of infection. See ‘US Continues Sanctions Against Venezuela And Cuba During COVID-19 Pandemic – Analysis’ and ‘Expert: US sanctions on Iran, Venezuela during pandemic could be genocidal’.
A variety of actions, including legal manoeuvres and false flag attacks, undertaken to inflict greater repression in some contexts, particularly against indigenous peoples and those engaged in national liberation struggles. See ‘Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe Threatened with Land Disestablishment, Tribal Leaders Step in to Address Ongoing Land Issues and Threats to Sovereignty’, ‘Media advisory notice on alleged shooting near Freeport mine in Timika’ and ‘During the Coronavirus crisis, Israel confiscates tents designated for clinic in the Northern West Bank’.
Dramatic increases in absolute impoverishment among marginalized individuals and communities throughout the Global South who barely survive day-to-day under their usual, difficult economic circumstances. As one Asian NGO network, engaged in attempting to secure emergency relief to assist those most adversely impacted, has just reported: ‘We are receiving alarming reports that ADB and AIIB project-affected communities across Asia, especially South Asia and South East Asia are in an absolute state of crisis. Due to the enforced lockdown, they have no work or access to sanitizers and food supplies. Leaving them completely exposed and vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic. The state responses are slow and in some cases non-existent.’ See ‘COVID-19 Community Emergency Fund’.

And Arundhati Roy wrote an evocative account of how the Indian government’s lockdown exposed the ‘brutal, structural, social and economic inequality’ in that country and the government’s ‘callous indifference to suffering’ as the lockdown caused employers and landlords in cities and towns to drive out millions of impoverished, homeless and hungry workers to walk the hundreds of kilometres to their villages. Many have died along the way, but not of COVID-19. See ‘Social Devastation and Despair. How Coronavirus Threatens India’.

No pause in the economic exploitation of countries in the Global South with, for example, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) quick to offer ‘emergency finance’ to some 80 of these countries that have requested it. See ‘IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva’s Statement Following a G20 Ministerial Call on the Coronavirus Emergency’.

What Ms. Georgieva didn’t mention is that these loans will no doubt be done on the usual highly conditional and exploitative basis for which the IMF has built its reputation for destroying the lives of ordinary local people by opening the door for corrupt or naive governments to accept corporate exploitation of their people and natural resources while building unsustainable levels of national debt trying to pay back the loans and interest to the IMF. For more detail on how this exploitation works, see the many Global Justice Now reports on the IMF and the book The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

In contrast, World Bank President David Malpass was not so coy, clearly declaring that COVID-19 would be used to further exploit poorer countries by making any funding conditional on a willingness to make such exploitation easier in future: ‘Countries will need to implement structural reforms to help shorten the time to recovery and create confidence that the recovery can be strong. For those countries that have excessive regulations, subsidies, licensing regimes, trade protection or litigiousness as obstacles, we will work with them to foster markets, choice and faster growth prospects during the recovery.’ See ‘Remarks by World Bank Group President David Malpass on G20 Finance Ministers Conference Call on COVID-19’.

To reiterate: The World Bank will help existing heavily exploited countries with some funding for short-term health measures directed at containing COVID-19 provided the country removes laws that would make it difficult to exploit it indefinitely thereafter.

No pause in environmentally destructive activities, ranging from the ongoing use of health-destroying poisons, such as glyphosate, used to contaminate our food – see ‘Locked Down and Locking in the New Global Order’ – which cause vastly more deaths than COVID-19 will cause, to the ongoing destruction of pristine rainforests to create, among other possibilities, more palm oil plantations. See ‘New player starts clearing rainforest in world’s biggest oil palm project’.

And while there has been a short-term reduced negative impact on the climate as a result of the slowdown in industrial activity and the use of fossil fuel-powered vehicles, the ongoing COVID-19 coup has been used to destroy whatever momentum has been achieved by the climate and environment movements in recent years.

While COVID-19 is causing problems for the 100,000 skilled technicians responsible for controlling, maintaining and fuel loading/unloading of the 96 remaining nuclear power plants in the USA, given the confined space in which the technicians work which make ‘social distancing’ virtually impossible, ‘The industry is now using the Coronavirus Pandemic to rush through a wide range of deregulation demands. Among them is a move to allow radioactive waste to be dumped into municipal landfills.’ See ‘Terrified Atomic Workers Warn That the COVID-19 Pandemic May Threaten Nuclear Reactor Disaster’.
Long intent on dominating Space both militarily and industrially – see the US Space Command’s ‘Vision for 2020’ – in violation of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 which declared ‘The exploration and use of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries… and shall be the province of all mankind’ – see ‘Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies’ – US president Trump has just signed an executive order to allow corporations and ‘citizens’ (that is, billionaires) to begin mining the moon. The elite also wants to use nuclear reactors to fuel spacecraft so they can mine Mars in the future. See ‘Trump Signs Executive Order to Mine the Moon’.

If you are a US citizen and wondering how the ‘largest industrial project in the history of the planet’ will be financed, look in your own purse or wallet and wonder how much more will be taken from you so that, as usual, you pay the upfront costs associated with the vast profits they plan to make. Of course, you will also pay with budget cuts to health, education and social security funding.

The 13-point list above is actually very short – and confined to readily observable ‘moves’ – but, hopefully, it gives you some idea of what is taking place behind the elite’s barrage of COVID-19 fear-mongering. Needless to say, it is the ‘moves’ that we do not know about that are, no doubt, even more troubling.

So what can we do in response to this fear-mongering and the coup it is being used to disguise?

Resisting the Elite Coup Powerfully

I have previously outlined this nonviolent strategy, identifying its political purpose – obviously ‘To defend humanity against a political/military coup conducted by the global elite’ – and I have set out a basic list of 26 strategic goals, of which eleven are as follows:

(1) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by wearing a global symbol of human solidarity, such as an image of several people of different genders/races/religions/abilities/classes holding hands.

(2) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by boycotting all corporate media outlets (television, radio, newspapers, Facebook, Twitter…) and by seeking news from progressive news outlets committed to telling the truth.

(3) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by withdrawing all funds from the corporate banks that are supporting the coup and to deposit their money in local community banks or credit unions.

(4) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by boycotting the medical and pharmaceutical industries – including by conscientiously refusing to submit to vaccination – and by seeking health advice and treatment from natural therapists. (If you are unfamiliar with the different philosophies underpinning these approaches, and hence why many natural therapies are so much more effective, there is a straightforward explanation here: ‘Pasteur vs. Bechamp: An Alternative View of Infectious Disease’.)

(5) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by boycotting corporate supermarkets and by supporting small and family businesses, and local markets.

(6) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in other locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For this item and many subsequent, see the list of possible nonviolent actions in the document ‘198 Tactics of Nonviolent Action’.

(7) To cause the workers [in trade unions or labor organizations T1, T2, T…] all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For example, this might include withdrawing labor from an elite-controlled bank, media, pharmaceutical or other corporation operating in your country.

(8) To cause the small farmers and farmworkers [in organizations F1, F2, F…] all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For example, this might include distributing farm produce through (existing or created) grassroots networks to small and family businesses as well as local markets rather than through corporate supply chains.

(9) To cause the indigenous peoples [in organizations IP1,IP2, IP…] all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For example, this might include utilizing indigenous knowledge to improve local self-reliance in food production and in other ways.

(10) To cause the soldiers and military police [in army units AU1, AU2, AU… and MP1, MP2, MP…], wherever stationed around the world, to refuse to obey orders from the global elite and its agents to arrest, assault, torture and shoot nonviolent activists and the other citizens of [your country].

(11) To cause the police [in police units P1, P2, P…], wherever stationed around the world, to refuse to obey orders from the global elite and its agents to arrest, assault, torture and shoot nonviolent activists and the other citizens of [your country].

Rather than detail all 26 strategic goals here, you can read the ‘Strategic goals for defeating a political/military coup conducted by the global elite against humanity’ by scrolling down the page at ‘Strategic Aims’.

Remaining pages on the website fully explain the twelve components of the strategy, as illustrated by the Nonviolent Strategy Wheel. These include the need to provide leadership and mutual aid at local levels, which are already happening in many places, as part of the overall effort.

The website also has articles and videos explaining all of the vital points of strategy and tactics, including articles to help you understand ‘Nonviolent Action: Why and How it Works’, the difference between ‘The Political Objective and Strategic Goal of Nonviolent Actions’ and how to prepare, frame and conduct any nonviolent action to minimize the risk of violent repression. See ‘Nonviolent Action: Minimizing the Risk of Violent Repression’.

It is worth emphasizing that, in some contexts, there is a place for large public nonviolent actions for those who are inclined to plan and conduct them. And the article just referenced will assist you to conduct them with minimal risk of violent repression. However, because the bans on public gatherings are being implemented widely, I have concentrated on providing tactical options in the examples above that do not depend on gathering in one place.

Nevertheless, as more people become aware of the coup and the energy to resist it gathers pace, it will be worthwhile to choose a locally significant date on which as many people who are willing to do so act to ‘End the Lockdown’ in that country. Using a locally relevant focus, or perhaps several, for which many people would traditionally be together – a cultural or sporting event, a community activity such as working to establish a community garden to increase local self-reliance, a birthday celebration and/or a return to work – we can mobilize people to collectively resist the coup that is taking place. Because the actions taken will be dispersed with large numbers of people responding in a vast number of locations, it will be impossible for police and military forces to inflict violent repression against everyone, particularly if local organizers have implemented the points in ‘Nonviolent Action: Minimizing the Risk of Violent Repression’.

Equally importantly to any of the points above, particularly given the pressing threat of human extinction – see ‘Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth’ – but also because becoming more self-reliant is vital to our ongoing capacity to resist elite encroachments on our rights, freedom and economic security, consider joining those participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. This project also explains how to take full advantage of non-monetary forms of community where goods and services are exchanged directly, without money as a medium of exchange. Money only has value in certain types of economy and these types of economy must be superseded if humans are to survive.

And given the enormous pressure on children at the moment, as their lives are upended, it would be useful to spend time listening to them. Of course, if you know an adult who is having trouble coping, it will help them enormously as well if you listen while giving them the opportunity to talk about, and focus on feeling, their own emotional reactions to what is taking place. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’. If you do not have anyone who can listen to you, try ‘Putting Feelings First’.

Moreover, because the foundation of this entire elite-controlled world, and the coup it is now implementing, is the submissively obedient individual, the world can only be rebuilt as we might like it if we stop terrorizing children into being submissive. So I would start by parenting and educating children so that they become powerful. See ‘My Promise to Children’ and ‘Do We Want School or Education?’

In addition, if you would like to better understand the origin, identity and behaviour of the global elite and why it is insane, see the section headed ‘How the World Works’ in ‘Why Activists Fail’ and the articles ‘Exposing the Giants: The Global Power Elite’ and ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ and the many references cited in these documents. For a deeper understanding of why elite and other human violence is so pervasive, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

Finally, as touched on above, apart from the ongoing elite coup the Earth is under siege from our assaults on a vast range of fronts. See ‘Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth’. So if we are serious about tackling this crisis too, we must be willing to consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

I will listen deeply to children (see explanation above)
I will not travel by plane
I will not travel by car
I will not eat meat and fish
I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
I will not buy rainforest timber
I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Conclusion

Given that the statistics clearly show that the COVID-19 ‘pandemic’ is already fading in most places where it previously had serious impact, it is possible that the global elite will not complete its execution of this coup against humanity in the near future. It will be content with the demonstration of its phenomenal power to manipulate populations into passively submitting to its bidding and defer its final putsch for a short time.

If that is the case, the damage wrought by this socalled pandemic – on our rights, freedoms, economic security, opportunities, democratic governance, the global economy and the environment – will be irreparable and it would take many years to even restore a partial version of what we thought we had while knowing that they can be taken away, again, at any time just as they were on this occasion.

But, quite frankly, if I was a member of the global elite and had witnessed the remarkably submissive manner in which even activists were deceived by the COVID-19 coup, I would advocate for completing the coup now and lock us down, force-vaccinate us with our own unique digital ID and surveillance chip, and promptly implement all of the measures necessary to take final control of the prison planet previously known as Earth.

However, because I am not a member of the global elite, I will continue to draw attention to what is taking place and encourage people to resist in the strategic ways I have outlined above. And then do what I can to ensure that as many people as possible, who are powerful enough to do so, respond before it is too late.

I would rather act sooner, while we still have some room to move, rather than later, when we might have much less.

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

Question Everything

Posted on April 15, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Michael Krieger

Source: Liberty Blitzkrieg

Crises, like pandemics, don’t break things in and of themselves; they show you what’s already broken.

– Patrick Wyman

Big macro crises in any form are scary, massively disruptive, and in some cases, literally deadly. This is why governments and entrenched institutions always see such events as opportunities to further consolidate wealth and power.

The current global pandemic is no exception, as I detailed in last week’s piece: Power Grab. While it’s necessary to be aware of this reality — and to push back against it wherever possible — it’s equally important to recognize there’s a silver lining to all of this.

The paradigm we live under depends on us not thinking too hard about how power functions. It relies on us being so busy with the basics of survival, or distracted by superficial consumerism and endless entertainment, to contemplate how the system actually works. This method of social control has been wildly successful throughout my lifetime, but what’s interesting about moments of global crises is the mask is forced off for a period. In a desperate scramble to marshal all of the corporate-imperial state’s resources to save the interests of the oligarchy, we’re shown in full color who really matters and who doesn’t.

For every $1000 check that goes out another $1,000,000 check goes out.

The corporations get 1000X more than you.

You get 1/1000th what the corporations receive.

Business as usual, even in a “pandemic”.

— JohnnyB (@JohnnyBananas79) March 30, 2020

It's amazing how quickly all of Congress turns into socialists (for corporations) the minute billionaires start losing some money.

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) March 27, 2020

You do not matter. The imperial state doesn’t care about you. Oligarchs don’t care about you. Mega corporations don’t care about you. This truth is cleverly hidden from much of the public during “normal” times when the machine is humming along as intended, but it’s far more in your face during a crisis period. It’s much harder to hide the truth when the world gets turned upside down.

Aside from the grotesque spectacle of the U.S. government funneling all of its resources toward propping up Wall Street and large corporations, this crisis has exposed the rot and disfunction in another meaningful way. Our health experts, ostensibly there to help the public navigate exactly this sort of event, have failed us in spectacular fashion.

https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/1233725785283932160

My government:
– Pretended it wasn’t real.
– Made tests that didn’t work.
– Didn’t allow local labs to make their own tests.
– Told the public masks don’t work.
– Gave trillions to Wall Street and an assortment of other predatory oligarchs.

How you doing? https://t.co/0iwe9YKELD

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) March 27, 2020

This is what political actors masquerading as experts do in a crisis. They either give bad advice, or intentionally mislead the public to hide the fact the U.S. simply doesn’t have adequate mask supply and sent its manufacturing capacity overseas. Which brings up an important topic worthy of further discussion: the crucial distinction between experts and expertise.

An “expert” in our society is someone with expertise in a particular field who’s been propped up by either the media, government or both as an authoritative source to listen to on a particular topic. This individual’s elevated stature is artificially created by an external source that’s selected this particular person as someone you should listen to. It tends to be a political appointment. This person has been chosen, not only because he or she has expertise (many others also do), but due to other attributes that appeal to those who’ve decided to prop them up. Anyone who’s worked in corporate America knows full well that many of those promoted to middle management, or higher, often end up there not because they’re particularly skilled, but because they’re good at playing politics and know the right ass to kiss. The same is true in all large organizations, and government is no exception.

In the days before the internet and social media, the public might know that government/media experts were behaving dishonestly, but didn’t have realtime access to competitive nonpolitical voices with equal or superior expertise to the government experts. What many of us discovered during this pandemic is people with expertise engaging publicly on Twitter provided far better and more timely advice than the government/media experts. This makes perfect sense because these people tend to not be political actors, but rather humans attempting to share information in an honest and selfless manner. If we’ve learned anything in the 21st century, it’s that actual track records don’t matter when it comes to media and government positions. In fact, the more catastrophically wrong you are in the interests of oligarchy, the more likely you are to be promoted and elevated.

Fortunately, I entered this crisis with a well established distrust of mass media and government, and therefore knew better than to look toward their experts for any useful guidance. Rather, I sought out the opinions of various nonpolitical individuals with relevant expertise who helped me see things for how they were very early on. Others have not been as lucky, but will no doubt emerge from this crisis with a deep distrust of established institutions and individuals, and with very good reason.

We’ve just witnessed a catastrophic failure of the centralized state in America, and the blowback will resonate within the larger culture for years if not decades. Similar to how many people were shaken to their core during the financial crisis a decade ago, I think this pandemic event will lead to an even larger wave of people awakening to how completely rotten, pernicious and corrupt the whole system is. Once you see that reality in all its glory, you can’t unsee it.

Of course, recognizing how broken things are isn’t enough. We need to have a thoughtful conversation about what we have too much of versus what we need. If we’re going to change the world, we need a vision. I have some thoughts on the matter.

What we need more of:
– Small businesses
– Empowered individuals
– Decentraliation/localism
– Look inward, bottom up change.

What we need less of:
– Monopoly, dominant oligarchs
– A mass of indebted cubicle slaves
– Centralization/empire
– Searching for saviors, politicians

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) March 18, 2020

Nothing is set in stone. The world as it is today is not some divine eternal paradigm beyond reproach. Humans shape the world through their choices, actions and mentality.

For additional thoughts on that and much more, check out my recent interview with Tales From the Crypt.

Dr. Peter Gotzsche On Coronavirus: “A Pandemic Of Panic, More Than Anything Else”

Posted on April 13, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Richard Enos

Source: Collective Evolution

Peter Gotzsche, a Danish physician and medical researcher, is well placed to comment on the measures being imposed to combat the Coronavirus. And he has his reasons to be suspicious of some of those measures.

In 1993, Gotzsche co-founded the Cochrane Collaboration, an international and independent non-profit organization that produces and disseminates systematic reviews of healthcare interventions and diagnostic tests, and promotes the search for evidence in the form of clinical trials and other interventional studies. As I examined in-depth in a previous article ‘Bill Gates Donation Turns Respected Independent Research Company Into HPV Vaccine Supporter,’ a massive donation of over $1M USD from Bill Gates was part of the transformation of Cochrane from an open and independent research company to a top-down hierarchy in which ‘there is stronger and stronger resistance to say anything that could bother pharmaceutical industry interests.’

In an unprecedented move, Peter Gotzsche was expelled from the Cochrane Collaboration in 2018 by a powerful minority within the newly-instituted Governing Board. Gotzsche’s outspoken and independent scrutiny of the pharmaceutical industry, highlighted in his 2014 book Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How big pharma has corrupted healthcare, made him an insufferable opponent to Cochrane’s new agenda. Suffice it to say, when we hear Peter Gotzsche’s opinion on health-related issues, they are sure to be direct, thoughtful, and unaffected by the prevailing narratives.

Weighing In On The Coronavirus Pandemic

Gotzsche, a specialist in internal medicine that has worked for two years at a department of infectious diseases, is not shy about calling out the ‘Elephant in the Room’ regarding the Coronavirus pandemic, even as some of our governments and medias organizations are treating it like the future of humanity is at stake if draconian measures of the highest order are not instituted across the board for the foreseeable future.

Gotzsche wrote in a recent blog post that he and most of those around him, both lay people and colleagues, ‘consider the Coronavirus pandemic a pandemic of panic, more than anything else.’ He believes that fear and panic are propagated by those with an agenda of control, not those who put the health and safety of citizens first. He cautioned that if people with mild symptoms are made to panic they are liable to flood the hospitals, which does more harm than good.

I do find it very prudent that they told people to stay in their homes in South Korea if they fall ill, and only if they become very sick, will a car come and bring them to a hospital that is not overcrowded. If the infectious dose is high, mortality will also be higher because there will not be sufficient time to establish an immune response. Therefore, overcrowded hospitals will have higher mortality rates. The panic does just that: leads to overcrowded hospitals.

The Perils Of Panic

Panic, in and of itself, is never useful. And during a crisis, it is even more dangerous. We see different types of recommendations coming out from our elected leaders, doctors and scientists, and mainstream media commentators. Often these recommendations are made based on unduly dire predictions about the danger of the virus.

It is important to have fine discernment around who is advocating for calm and who is actually stoking the fires of public panic. Whenever our elected leaders, with the power to legislate societal rules, try to instigate fear in our hearts, and threaten huge sanctions and punishment if we do not obey their decrees, we need to pay close attention to what the real motivation may be.

In a broader sense, we need to ask ourselves: how much are we agreeing to continue to play into the old parent-child relationship that has long existed between our elected leaders and ourselves? Do we really need to be shamed and threatened into a certain type of behavior if we really believe that such behavior will be beneficial for our community and world? And if a small percentage of people are not obeying in lock-step, does this justify the implementation of threats and more draconian measures for the rest of us?

As citizens, it is our duty to avoid following our elected leaders blindly. We actually need to be self-responsible for our actions and their impact on the health and well-being of the community around us. In the long run, it is much more beneficial for society to cultivate self-responsible citizens rather than blind followers. Of course, our leaders might not see it that way. They are aware that self-responsible citizens are more able and likely to hold them accountable and compel them to represent the will of the people, not their own agenda.

How Much Is Too Much?

Peter Gotzsche is the prototypical self-responsible citizen in this regard. And he characterizes some of the responses and measures applied to the Coronavirus as too much. He infers that if we had responded to the viral infection and mortality rates in previous years the way we have with the 2019 Coronavirus, the whole world would have had to be shut down permanently years ago!

Our main problem is that no one will ever get in trouble for measures that are too draconian. They will only get in trouble if they do too little. So, our politicians and those working with public health do much more than they should do. No such draconian measures were applied during the 2009 influenza pandemic, and they obviously cannot be applied every winter, which is all year round, as it is always winter somewhere. We cannot close down the whole world permanently.

Should it turn out that the epidemic wanes before long, there will be a queue of people wanting to take credit for this. And we can be damned sure draconian measures will be applied again next time. But remember the joke about tigers. “Why do you blow the horn?” “To keep the tigers away.” “But there are no tigers here.” “There you see!”

Since politicians have little to lose by overreacting, the citizens have to be vigilant about the current response to make sure we are not being drawn into dangerous precedents. Gotzsche calls out the ploy of the political establishment, which constantly seeks to gain more control over the people while making decisions based on what will make them look the best in the end. And the point he made that ‘we can be damned sure draconian measures will be applied again next time,’ is worth a much deeper examination–especially in the context of comments made by none other than Bill Gates.

Bill Gates Gives Chilling Forecast

In a recent interview with TED Talks founder Chris Anderson, Gates is given full latitude to speak from his home about the things we should be learning from the Covid-19 pandemic. The following is a summary of what Gates states in the interview:

(1) Covid-19 will fade away within a few months
(2) There will be fewer casualties than predicted
(3) That will be credited to strong action taken by governments
(4) Pandemics serve the purpose of testing and improving response
(5) The correct response centers on the development of vaccines, an industry in which he is heavily invested
(6) Pandemics and global warming have the common advantage of being sufficiently frightful to motivate the public and governments to accept drastic changes to society
(7) Leadership for this must come from technocrats, not politicians

What is most striking in this interview is the way Gates begins to pivot towards his vision of a post-Covid-19 world. Perhaps he had already given up on what may have been his original goal to orchestrate worldwide Coronavirus vaccine mandates; however, he takes the opportunity to explain that future pandemics will be met much more swiftly with medical interventions, and central to those interventions will be the timely development and implementation of vaccines for the entire population. He urges that scientists and technocrats, rather than our elected leaders, should be the decision makers regarding such policies, further alienating the general population from their individual sovereignty.

To listen to Bill Gates without understanding the agendas that truly drive those with power, it may be difficult to discern that he is not actually trying to help humanity. Perhaps for just that reason, it may be interesting to listen to the full interview to see if you can detect any signs of Bill Gates’ agenda of personal profit, depopulation and the creation of a global technocracy in which elite rulers like himself wield even more power than they have today.

Peter Gotzsche certainly has personal experience with how Bill Gates came into a company that was standing in the way of his vaccine-fueled profits and used his money and influence to turn that organization into an ally for his agenda. He has reason to believe that some of the way the response to the pandemic is playing out is aligned with that agenda.

Of course many in the public may dismiss the need for our vigilance and simply spout “it’s better to be safe than sorry.” And in principle I would agree with that sentiment. However if this motto is simply applied to the Coronavirus pandemic in a lazy and uncritical way, and we don’t collectively question seemingly unnecessary draconian moves by our leaders, then a society led by technocrats which further takes medical freedom away from individuals may be the future we are contributing to.

The Takeaway

I’ll be honest. Some of the restrictions and cancellations that have been put in place in our society have benefited me in terms of allowing me to take care of things around the house, reflect on my own life and spend more time with my family. But let’s not get lulled into complacency here. This should not stop us from being vigilant about the response to the Coronavirus in our communities and contemplating and talking to others about whether the response is measured and appropriate.

This applies as well to the responses going on all around the world. I certainly believe that many who are part of our global authority have agendas that are not in the best interests of humanity. It is imperative that we not assume the position that our political leaders and the medical ‘experts’ that are paraded out in mainstream media have the answers and we should blindly follow them. Would you not agree that the current goal for a humanity awakening to what is going on is to break the bonds of authority and become self-responsible and self-governing? In order to make this happen, we need all hands on deck.

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

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