A reader brings up the use of the “we’re at war!” trope being used to justify the metastasizing medical police state. In a way, it’s true – but in a very different way than it was.
He writes as follows:
I have recently heard comparisons between the “home front” in World War II and the WuFlu situation, saying that just as the wartime generation made sacrifices (rationing, curfews, etc.) that we need to do the same with Face Diapers, bans on gatherings, etc., to “fight” WuFlu. I do see some parallels in propaganda use. I remember seeing a poster online from WW2 that showed a man driving his car and and a “ghost” of Hitler in the seat beside him, with the tag line “When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler!” to encourage car pooling to save fuel and the curtailing of rights such as the internment of Japanese-American citizens. However, I think there’s some significant differences, including:
1) In general, “it’s been done before” doesn’t mean something is right, and is thus a weak moral argument.
2) With the war restrictions, there was an end in sight — once the war ended, the wartime rules were expected to end as well; it wasn’t just open-ended, “whatever we feel like imposing.”
3) Although most Americans supported the war, they wished it over as soon as possible— therefore, good news “from the front” was eagerly awaited and welcomed. I don’t imagine many people saying. “we’re really winning this war, but let’s pretend we’re losing so we can continue these restrictions indefinitely.” In contrast, as you’ve mentioned in your articles and talks, there’s a certain mean-spiritedness in the diaper-pushers. They absolutely refuse to acknowledge any good news about WuFlu and seem to take a perverse pleasure in how miserable they can make others (through harassment, degradation, stealing of joy by canceling events and traditions, etc.). Unlike the wartime generation, it’s as if they never want the WuFlu hysteria to end. Have you heard these comparisons of WW2 and WuFlu, and do you feel there are parallels to be drawn between them, or is it comparing apples and oranges?
. . .
The basic problem with the analogy is that WWII wasn’t based on mass hysteria. There really was an Axis; the United States was actually at war with serious powers.
WuFlu is a contrived war against a “virus” that is the equivalent of Grenada in terms of its ability to “conquer” the United States. It is actually a war against the American people, using the American people as pawns.
It is based on manufactured fear, produced by suppression of relevant facts.
There is no legitimate (i.e., no medically valid) reason to imprison (i.e., “lock down”) the population, force-close businesses, impose bizarre kabuki-cult rituals such as “social distancing” and the wearing of old rags and dust “masks” as the condition of being allowed to be in proximity of other people.
Because this “virus” has proved to be a very slight threat to the population. It is now very clear that for the most part, only a small percentage of the population – the very elderly and those who are afflicted with serious chronic – and ultimately fatal – health problems such as COPD and advanced heart disease are in any real danger. The same danger they were in before anyone heard of the WuFlu. The danger of old age – and serious, chronic illness, which tends to result in people dying.
One of the many odd things about this mass hysteria is the rise of the belief that it is unnatural for the old and very ill to die in greater numbers than the young and healthy, accompanied by the dangerous delusion that any and all preventative measures are warranted to prevent this.
Which is almost the equivalent of attempting to prevent the sun from setting.
We are at the point now that when an elderly or very sick person dies it is taken as a surprise – and cause for a kind of shaking of fists – at others, who are blamed for it. They are the “Japs” and “Krauts” in this “war.” Granny died, they rail, because someone refused to wear a “mask.”
As opposed to sadness at the passing of granny, but acceptance of the inevitability.
For all of us.
Just not all at once.
No sane person is indifferent to the death of an elderly person or a person laid low by COPD or advanced heart disease. Death is always sad.
But it used to be understood that this sort of death was part of life. Now it is taken as the excuse for shutting down the lives of people decades ahead of their natural deaths, for the sake of preventing, King Canute-style, the deaths of people who are nearing the end of their natural lives.
And it is not even that.
Or rather, it is worse than that.
Because this “prevention” is phantasmagorical. How does it prevent the death of anyone to force people who can’t transmit a sickness they haven’t got to walk around wearing a neck scarf or dirty old bandana or dust mask over their faces?
This is not medicine.
It is theater – as the doctor who has appointed himself the head of this cult of sickness admitted a few months ago, before changing his mind. The man is therefore either a liar or an incompetent or something far worse – and either warrants dismissing everything the man says.
It is also a play in that people know it’s an act. Nothing else explains the weary going- through-the-motions. They wear a “mask” – just the right word, because that is the true purpose – loosely around their mouth, their nose exposed. They wear it for the ten steps it takes to go from the entry door to the place where you order, then take it off while they sit down to eat.
This is not the behavior of people afraid of a virus. It is the behavior of people who are afraid.
Of being seen as not believing. And not obeying. Their mask-wearing is no different than the armband wearing in another country, another time. They, too, wore the cloth out of fear of being seen as not belonging. Of being excluded. The parallels are obvious but few are willing to say so openly much less show so openly – as by not wearing the cloth – because they are afraid.
As well they ought to be.
Because this “war” is directed at them. It is also meant to be an endless “war.” If the casus for this belli is that some people might get sick and die each year and the chance that this might happen is intolerable, then the “war” will go on forever.
There will be no VE Day. No demobilization. No end to the dreary hysteria and black-and-whiting of our lives.
Orwell had something to say about this in The Book within his book, 1984.
The Book was an explication of the principles of the Party, including its slogan that War is Peace. Which it is when war becomes perpetual, when there is no longer any end to it. War becomes the natural condition – the new normal – and people acclimate.
It becomes “peace.”
. . .
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I remember studying propaganda in Jr. High and wondering how in the heck anyone could be taken in by such obvious BS, or why no one pointed out the obvious exaggerations and BS.
Sadly, I am living that history lesson today, in real time. There are too few of us, and it frustrates me to no end. So many people whose intelligence I respect have fallen for it all, hook line and sinker. It isn’t about intelligence, even geniuses are susceptible. It’s something else, something deeper, probably deeply tied to the emotions and (particularly evident with today’s iteration) the fear of death itself. Christianity, with its focus on the Resurrection, is supposed to render this fear unnecessary and irrelevant…but even that does not, for many that I know personally. None of them would claim to have lost their faith, if asked, but…
The disease runs deep indeed.
Hi Publius,
Many smart people are quite stupid. Also, there is an element here not being discussed as much as it ought to be discussed. It is that WuFlu was meant to be the disease that cured the Orange Man. Put another way, it was meant to be the cure for people who cannot stand the Orange Man. They will not admit this, openly or even to themselves. But it is true nonetheless, as can be established by observing the correlation between Diaper Fever and Democrat voting. If the Diaper Mandates went away tomorrow, you’d see this in action. The majority of people wearing the rag by choice are people who are desperate to get rid of the OM by any means available.
This is their sickness.
The general population, AKA the sheeple, appear to suffer the illusion that death can be avoided. Indeed, the very premise which supports the sanctification of the medical professions, that they “save lives”, is itself a bald faced lie. They have never saved a single life. The best they can do is prolong one, and quite often they shorten them. After all, the real third leading cause of death that is never shown on a death certificate is medical error, killing about 250,000 per year in the US. Contrary to popular notion, the likelihood of one finding a saint walking down the street is far more likely than finding one in a medical position. They stand to make a great deal more money by attacking your health by promoting all disease as a drug deficiency, only treatable with Pharma product. The Medical Industrial Complex is upon us, and it’s just as dangerous as the Military Industrial Complex.
Nobody is getting out of this crap shoot alive.
The numbers I’ve seen have iatrogenic causes at between 250k and 750k per year. Most of the things practiced are pure quackery, snake oil sales. Cancer treatments do nothing to prolong life- cancer sometimes remits completely or for years or decades naturally, and sometimes kills quickly. But radiation and chemical poison definitely sickens and often kills people.
Anasthesia is a truly dangerous process- and often induces enough trauma to cause cardiac arrest and death on its own- even when properly done.
Childbirth is an entirely natural process to which most medical care contributes nothing.
The only thing they are pretty good at is surgery from all the practice they’ve had with bone carpentry and tissue repair because of all our damned wars.
And pharmaceuticals when studied closely are no different than the witch doctor giving you special combinations of herbs, berries, fungi, and bark.
And they’ve convinced people that they are saviours. Sadly, our society is as primitive and superstitious as that of the dark ages or bush people.
“By definition, a true pandemic causes a high degree of mortality (death)”. [medicinenet.com]
Death of 0.00062% of the US population does not even come close to the definition.
The WHO discarded deaths as a factor back in 2009, so they could call the H1N1 Swine flu a pandemic.
Most of the WWII shortages were more due to government incompetence, mismanagement and it’s general overall inefficiencies rather than actual shortages of materials. Remember the feds nationalized nearly every industry during the war.
Like now, it wasn’t necessary. The private sector was handling it just fine, but there were power hungry know it all types in government even then.
Hi eric,
“It is actually a war against the American people, using the American people as pawns.”
The country’s been there a number of times, probably the beginning of the end of freedom: The War of Northern Aggression.
It’s too bad Hitler didn’t win.
Are you normally that stupid or have you made a special effort just for us?
It all reminds me of something I heard in another lockdown/mask-skeptic community. Sometime during WWII in Germany, a group of housewives came out and started protesting… something. The person who related this didn’t remember precisely what; something about the daily food ration being too small or some other wartime QoL issue. Now of course, when he first read that, he assumed that, being Nazis, the government would just shoot the protestors. Actually, no: they let the protest continue.
Their point in relating this is that even living in one of history’s most brutal dictatorships, in the middle of a brutal war, there’s a million little “everyday life” things that people just do and no one really things twice about it. People still go out to eat and drink, they still buy and sell to the extent they are able, they still yell and scream at the government (“and the government still ignores them”).
On the allied side, there was never any doubt that the restrictions would be as temporary and as minimal as they could be. Londoners hid in the subways while the German bombers were flying – then reemerged along with the sun to search for survivors and carry on as best they could. Think about some of the slogans of the time. “Keep calm and carry on.” “We have nothing to fear except fear itself.”
What we are witnessing is less a war against a virus than a controlled demolition of life itself and everything that makes us human.
Kind of like the war on terra, war on poverty, war on drugs, war on crime, war on homelessness, war on obesity – they never end, are casually accepted as part of life, and destroy freedom. Now a war on viruses, or more aptly war on putative grandma killers, or war on asymptotic super spreaders (war on ass).
Though I’m no so sure it’s all about killing grammy. People’s fear seems to be that it will kill them or their kids. Driven by the fact that some young people have died. Deliberately hidden, though, that young people have always died of respiratory diseases such as flu. Moreso, even, than covid. And that the young that have succumbed here generally had comorbidities or, likely, unknown and genetic risk factors as well.
So long as the propaganda, truth suppression, disinformation campaign, and media-driven fear porn are allowed to continue, and as long as people tolerate distancing, lockdowns, and face diapers, this will continue apace.
*asymptomatic super spreaders
The politicians never actually want to solve anything, otherwise you might not “need” them anymore. Far easier to dust off the same BS issues every reelection cycle than come up with something new. And if, in the off-chance something actually does get solved (for example, poverty), they just redefine the measurement.
I thought the War On Terror™ was the ultimate political issue. The odds of you being affected at all by a terrorist act is so low as to be nearly immeasurable, yet we’re all commanded to upend our lives and agree to suspension of the 4th amendment (and probably a few others too). And because terrorist acts are so rare, there’s really no way to measure results. And because they phony up the numbers by egging on some sub-normal IQ person, they make it look like they’re doing something.
This brilliant lecture by Jordan Peterson summarizes exactly what we have been living thru. Jordon sights a study that found; in modern societies where infectious diseases are prevalent, the higher the probability of totalitarian attitudes to be expressed at the local levels. To contain the disease justifies placing boarders around and restricting movement of the people and restricting their free discussion of ideas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBu6xI1iUM0&t=127s
‘A poster from WW2 showed a man driving his car and and a “ghost” of Hitler in the seat beside him, with the tag line “When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler!”’
In 2016, that WW2 poster was cleverly adapted to show presidential candidate Clinton at the wheel. Adolf H throws up his arms in disgust as a furry little red-eyed DemonRat scurries across the dash in his direction.
The tagline: “When you ride alone, you ride with Hitlary!”
To my own coruscating horror, credible commentators suggest that Hitlary will be nominated for a cabinet post in the Harris-Biden administration, along with some other Ghosts of Harpies Past, blood dripping from their manicured neocon fingernails.
Jim,
She’ll get appointed as head of the FBI. Now she’ll get even.
Hi Hans,
How about the Supreme Court?
And that’s without accounting for the FACT that the restrictions diminish our overall health, and destroy our economic, social, and psychiatric health, leading to MORE deaths instead of fewer. We are indeed at war, and the enemy is not some foreign monster. Its just the bank cartel doing what they do. Consuming the wealth of others as fast as possible, aided and abetted by their minions in government and corporations.
Why not another endless war with no definition of mission or goal? The War on Drugs, War on Poverty and War on Terror still have lives left to destroy and wealth to be transferred.
this is akin to wearing WIN buttons (whip inflation now) during Geradl Ford time as president.