I had a couple of posts this week featuring Dr. Marty Makary. He is a public health professor who had an article over the last week at the New York Post website demonstrating 10 myths that were circulated by public health officials during the pandemic (HT: Carolina Plott Hound).
Makary’s contribution has not been unsullied. He supported the lockdowns during the early stages of the pandemic. And Johns Hopkins in Baltimore– the institution where he works– was a major problem from the standpoint of shaping perceptions regarding Covid-19.
But Makary and Johns Hopkins were only a tiny sliver of the problem. The fact is that numerous federal and state agencies and officials were horribly wrong. State officials were a huge part of the problem– as were the hospital systems and academic medical centers and physician groups. And the media was awful. We saw all of that right here in North Carolina.
How did this happen? Various theories have been circulated as to motives. But a couple of insights have been recently shared.
First, the AAPS in its recent newsletter published a letter written by Dr. Lawrence Huntoon who cited an article by Dr. Aaron Kheriarty in the Epoch Times. Dr. Kheriarty had pointed out that communist governments merely dismiss discordant points of view, and provide no explanations. They tend to characterize disagreement through the prism of their ideology instead of engaging on the substantive points.
Huntoon asserts that a form of Marxist totalitarianism has taken over in the field of medicine in which certain players claimed “a monopoly on truth”. He specifically names “medical boards, specialty boards, hospitals, and certain medical associations” although this point obviously also applies to public health and academic medicine.
Second, Dr. Peter McCullough blames an even more basic problem– stupidity. He cites Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Christian pastor in Germany who commented on public acceptance of the Nazi’s:
He concluded that they, as a people, had been afflicted with collective stupidity… (P)erfectly intelligent people were, under the pressure of political power and propaganda, rendered stupid—that is, incapable of critical reasoning.
And he quoted Bonhoeffer:
Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than wickedness… We are defenseless against stupidity. Nothing can be done to oppose it, neither with protests nor with violence. Reasons cannot prevail.
(McCullough differentiates stupidity from ignorance. The latter is a mere lack of information.)
This is precisely what we had seen with Covid-19. People were rendered absolutely stupid because of a propagandized media and intimidation. But the effort afoot had elements of Marxist totalitarianism. This makes sense because we were overall in the midst of a Color Revolution.
Yes, there is much more that explains all that happened. But these explain a good bit.
From 2021:
Covid-19/84: are we entering an Orwellian dystopia?
” From ‘Big Brother is watching you’ to ‘Big Pharma is watching you’
The celebrated novel 1984, by the committed anti-fascist George Orwell (the pseudonym of Eric Blair), is a dire warning about totalitarian government
Published in 1949, 1984 is the great modern myth of a dystopian future, of the hell of totalitarianism. Encapsulating its horrors, such terms as Big Brother, Thought Police, doublethink, thoughtcrime and Room 101, have become embedded in our culture.
Imagining the ordeals of disillusioned citizen Winston Smith in a despotic world where extreme repression ensures absolute obedience, Orwell (1903–50), in this the last work he completed, had Stalinist Russia in mind. Although Orwell was a socialist, he made a withering critique of communism, as in his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945), as well as of far-right totalitarianism. Both 1984 and Animal Farm were banned in the Soviet bloc.
Orwell was influenced by the novel We (1924), by the Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937), which imagines a scientifically-managed future society in which people have numbers, not names. But 1984 has had a much greater impact on world readership; indeed, the adjective ‘Orwellian’ entered the language due to Orwell’s convincing and disturbing picture of relentless and all-pervasive state control.
As well as drawing on the excesses of existing dictatorial regimes of his day, Orwell was also prophetic. A number of the novel’s central ideas — 24-hour surveillance, the degradation and manipulation of language, the rewriting of history — have come to be deployed by states worldwide. The disaster is that Orwell’s nightmare scenario failed to save the human race from them. The intention of 1984 was to sound an alarm bell; it wasn’t offering an instruction manual.
Right now, especially as Orwell was warning also about ideological tendencies in liberal democracies, C19, perceived as a national emergency, provides an ideal cover for authoritarian inclinations to gain traction, leading to abuse of power.
Human rights
There are daunting parallels to be found, I feel, between Orwell’s grim vision of never-ending warfare under which the populace is controlled, and the erosion of human rights and civil liberties in western democracies under the ‘war on C19’. [UPDATE: US President Joe Biden, in his C19 speech on March 2, 2021, referred to a ‘war effort’].
This ‘war’ is being prolonged into an indefinite future, with lengthy lockdowns, involving strict curbs on travel and assembly enforced by the police, and everyone ordered to wear a depersonalising face-mask in violation of bodily integrity. The distinction between legal requirements and public health advice is being blurred: such advice is presented as if it’s enforceable under criminal penalty, and swingeing restrictions are introduced without proper democratic scrutiny.
Ireland, where I live, at the time of writing in the last week of February, 2021, has by far the highest number of lockdown days (to date, 168), when workplaces were closed, in the whole of Europe (Oxford Coronavirus Government Response Tracker).
All dissent from the orthodoxy of response to C19 by the political-medical complex and its compliant media is marginalised, censored or suppressed altogether, without any consideration, it seems, of implications for the freedom of speech. The aim is to make life a misery for the dissenter in the hope that the challenge to the dominant paradigm will quietly go away. Typical tactics include ridicule, belittling, or using the handy labels ‘conspiracy theorist’ or ‘far right’.
And what did Orwell have to say about this in 1984? He wrote: ‘Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’
‘Masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, as long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.’ George Orwell, 1984.
Similarly, talk of mandatory vaccination and/or segregationist vaccination ‘passports’ or digital certificates is bandied about with little acknowledgement of the Nuremberg Code, the set of principles for research ethics on human experimentation which demand voluntary consent, or the Council of Europe declaration which says that no one must be discriminated against for refusing vaccination.
Clearly, what has been described as ‘health status apartheid’ presents serious moral, ethical and logistical issues, and raises the prospect of a slippery slope to genetic profiling, Chinese communist-style ‘re-education’ programmes and exclusion of anyone regarded as ‘unfit’ — or, in 1984 terms, the lie becoming the truth.
Council of Europe, Resolution 2361, January 27, 2021:
7.3 with respect to ensuring high vaccine uptake:
7.3.1 ensure that citizens are informed that the vaccination is NOT mandatory and that no one is politically, socially, or otherwise pressured to get themselves vaccinated, if they do not wish to do so themselves;
7.3.2 ensure that no one is discriminated against for not having been vaccinated, due to possible health risks or not wanting to be vaccinated.
A distasteful vaccine mania has gripped the corridors of power and the mainstream media and assumed cult proportions: high priests (chief medical officers, celebrity scientists, government ministers) and their acolytes officiate at mass ‘baptismal’ immunization events after which ‘cleansed’ converts rise up rejoicing in their new-found faith. None must question the edicts of the priestly elite lest they be branded heretics.”
That is, Fred, the overall direction this went, as you know. Orwell described it perfectly. But for all of this to occur, a lot of people had to cooperate, and many public officials had to stand by and allow it to happen. The system of checks and balances simply didn’t work.