The life of peoples are a vague and inexhaustible subject, and I should tell the reader that I am not presenting here yet another opinion on the Coronavirus phenomenon and its broadened effects on society. For, when examining current affairs, I am eroded by subtle remorse, weakened by rationalizations, laden by perplexities and constitutionally prone to be a martyr of doubt.
Therefore I will store what follows among sundry reflections on intertwined issues – notably how men, considered as a mass, react to events, and how the few whom I know react as individuals. While still very tentatively searching for the elusive clues that shape our collective thought, seeking to explain the abusive enormities of our times.
I (we) should leave behind the narrative, and all the pain caused by the rhetorical manipulation of data. For it is easy to mislead people at large, arousing terror by stimulating elementary emotions with the electrodes of fabricated information. Magnified by corporate media pundits who spend so much breath about pseudo-scientific propositions of speculation, set apart from any appearance of probability. But, nevertheless, producing huge political and economic consequences by routinely waving the fetish of science, almost reduced to marginal shamanism.
For one of the (perhaps) unintended results of the current enormity is the rare factual and confidently proven experimental truth, as opposed to the wildly diverging opinions of experts – experts hallowed by university titles, degrees, prizes, reputation, media presence, political influence and of course money. Notoriously responsible (money) to make black white, wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant, (1) and to convert an influenza into a plague.
Whereupon the bewildered news follower is presented with a confused mass of words without matter, a chaos of sentences without hardly any verifiable sense, common or otherwise, resembling drums, which, being empty within, sound big without.
I have no authority to pass judgment on so many experts who know much more than I ever will. But, when they clash among each other on so basic a phenomenon as an illness generally classified as a strain of influenza, we are left in deep darkness. Even numbers lack meaning, when divulged by themselves and without context.
For example, news outlets give out daily the numbers of ‘infected’ people and of the dead. There seems to be a (so far tacitly undisputed) consensus that the average age of those who died from the disease is 80 years. A number that should, by itself, at least revise the perception of the effects of the ‘pandemic’. Furthermore, as statistics are updated so quickly and efficiently, it should be reasonably easy to include the average age of the daily dead. And of how many had one or more ‘pre-existing conditions’, a verbal formula menacingly used by US medical insurance companies to deny coverage to applicants.
The lack of such qualifying information is (or should be considered) preposterous. Nevertheless, though a self-confessed martyr of doubt – and without access to the information pool from which world pandemic data is derived – I was finally able to obtain official government mortality data for Italy, which was, initially, the most negatively affected country in Europe. [https://bit.ly/2W86qjP]
From which it transpires that the nation’s mortality per week increased in March 2020 with respect to March 2019 for people in the 75 to 85+ age-range, and not much more than in 2019 for the age 67-74. And this, notably, only in the areas of Northern Italy most affected by industrial pollution. For, during much of Winter, the Po valley acts as a massive stagnant repository of remarkably (un)breathable air. And no special medical knowledge is necessary to acknowledge the effect of foul air on the lungs of the old.
But there is more. The weekly mortality rate for the most affected age groups, 65+, was actually higher in January 2017 than in March 2020. Besides, the uninstructed citizen is simultaneously told that masks are indispensable and useless, that swabs are reliable and uncertain, that there is ‘herd immunity’ and that herd immunity is nonsense, that just by breaking house-arrest rules (in Italy), he/she becomes an ambulating carrier of a plague-like disease. No wonder then that shamanism seems more credible, though inherently dubious.
Shamanism is a philosophy converted into a practice. It involves a practitioner reaching altered states of consciousness so as to connect and interact with a metaphysical world of the spirit and ‘channel’ these transcendental energies into this world.
Anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, religious studies scholars, philosophers and psychologists have examined shamanic beliefs with a massive volume of related books produced. Though somewhat less in fashion recently, counter-cultural movements have created modern magic-religious-medical practices influenced by their ideas of indigenous religions from across the world.
Nothing wrong, I think, with shamanism. William James, a philosopher and the father of American pragmatism, maintained that everything that makes us feel good is true, including ideas and perceptions, and therefore, if applicable,… shamanism.
Maybe the most apt description of the state of mind of the nation at large (USA) can be (historically) attributed to J. Edgard Hoover – legendary head of the FBI, who saw a red under every bed and who applied the following lines to Communism, though they may equally applied to the pandemic.
“The individual is handicapped by coming face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil that has been introduced into our midst. It rejects even the assumption that human creatures could espouse a philosophy which must ultimately destroy all that is good and decent.”
Lest the reader may think that suggest the proverbial conspiracy – that “cannot find a cavern dark enough to mask its monstrous image” (2) – I am not. It is too late to find the first drop that gave birth to the oceans. Besides, the rumor mills are currently and actively at work to make of China a diabolic mistress of pandemics.
We may never know, but J. Edgar Hoover helps us again to find a good situational parallel. He founded the Counter Intelligence Program known as COINTELPRO. Among his targets was Martin Luther King whom he named “the most dangerous Negro in the future of this nation.” Whereupon he set up a round-the-clock surveillance hoping to find evidence of Communist influence or sexual deviance.
It is commonly known that King was not a saint, to be euphemistic, but files regarding unsavory aspects of his life are sealed until late in the 21st century, when few or none of us will be around to comment or be shocked depending on sensitivities.
Just as I was writing this, a piece of news seems to prove the appropriateness of the Hoover-King parallel – thanks to one of those unusual chances that make truth stranger than fiction.
A few days ago, two qualified doctors and virologists in California, examined the data concerning mortality due to the Coronavirus in the state. They concluded that the mortality rate attributable to the disease, even discounting the influencing age-factor, is 0.03%. A number that, by itself would not justify the essential and existential destruction of the economy due to universal shutdowns and ‘social distancing’.
They compiled the information into a video watched by millions, following the presentation about their research on popular mainstream TV. Whereupon their Youtube video was removed under the ‘fake news’ protocol.
Under normal conditions this event would constitute an ignored additions to the tens of thousands of websites and videos arbitrarily removed. Here, however, the popularity of the video almost forced an official explanation. In the instance Susan Wojciki, head of Youtube and a Zionist extremist, said that Youtube would ban, censure and remove any proposition, statement or video that would contradict the official line of the World Health Organization.
Every form of censorship is a kind of self-refutation by him who implements it. For either he wants to hide something or to prevent something from being disclosed, regardless of its consistency or adherence to fact. The problem is control and never the truth, for which the controllers have no vocation or sympathy. Here there seems to be no reason for the censure but there may be one, as we will see later.
Incidentally, similar conclusions on the Coronavirus statistics for Italy and California were also reached in the state of Washington, and probably elsewhere by unheard or unknown others.
As for the pandemic, we can expect a harvest of books, movies, plays, APPs and video games and much talked-about ‘vaccines’, adding a new load of senselessness to what is already inexplicable by applying simple logic or common sense.
For rather than ‘epidemic’ it could be described as a crisis of cognition. And as the system is founded on lying to the public, it has no other way-out but to increase the stakes of unreality to the point of delirium.
It is a sort of collective penance inflicted by a sociological structure that can no longer keep any of its promises and whose masked intentions are daily unmasked. Its appeal being lost, it must overturn the table with the pretext of a virus.
How? By staking all its chips on the post-truth protocols, that is, retraining the multitude. A multitude that once used to choose by show, but now is taught to trust narrative rather than facts, while discouraging independent verification.
Where and when could we find the roots of a philosophy, an epoch and a type of world that is seemingly approaching its end with a final spectacle of pandemic fireworks?
Maybe at the onset of the 1970s, with the baptism of the neo-liberal ideology and, economically, with the divorce of the dollar from gold as a tangible reference of value.
Incidentally, this issue was never entirely clear to me (and I suspect to others). The dollar may not be convertible into gold, but I would still use dollars should I wish to buy some, which apparently is still possible. For example, during the crisis of 2009 one ounce of gold jumped to $1,032.00, but people could still purchase it. Hence, from my point of view, the dollar is still ‘convertible’ into gold, at whatever may be the price of the day. But let me not further expose the reader to my irrelevant ignorance.
Whatever the gold-dollar relationship may be, the inconvertibility of the dollar, along with the birth of neoliberalism, defined the Weltanschauung still affecting the current Western world. Which is based on the US dollar as the currency of reference, on the US as the majority stock-holder in the Western inter-economic system, and on English as the official language.
Language, as may agree, greatly contributed to the adoption of Post-Truth as a system of governance and intellectual education.
Historically, the connection between facts and truth is/was deeply steeped in the collective consciousness of the Greco-Roman world. Its upheaval deserves a closer scrutiny.
We are accustomed to associate truth with an implicit reference to fact(s). In lexical evidence, the same word ‘veritas’, through Latin, derives from the Sanskrit root “vrtta”, meaning both ‘fact’ and ‘occurrence.’ Whereas in English the word ‘truth’ derives from the old-German “Treuwaz,” which means ‘faith’ and/or ‘loyalty to something.’ In German, both roots (of ‘faith’ and ‘loyalty’) have remained independent. ‘Wahrheit’ means factual truth, while ‘Treue’ means fidelity.
But in English the two concepts overlap and ‘truth’ (as a derivative of “Treuwaz”) implies a subliminal loyalty to something. It could be loyalty to a school of thought, a political regime, a clan, a system of education, an official account of events, an ideology, a standardization or even a set of rules. In essence, something different, or actually diametrically opposed to what we semantically mean by truth.
So much so that in American politics there exists the expression “truth squad”, meaning truth-team, defined as “a group of people assigned the task of questioning the truth of statements made by members of an opposing party.” Translated it means (again) making black white, wrong right, base noble, etc. And as an aside, the official definition of ‘truth squad’ is misleading, given the core identity behind the illusory differences existing inside the irrefragable two-party US system. A possibly better description than truth-squads could be large matrioskas of self-contained and unalloyed rhetorical stench.
The lexically logical consequence deriving from conflicting etymologies is that even the expression ‘fake news’ has more the intrinsic meaning of ‘unfair news’ than ‘fake news.’ Unfair to whom? you may ask. Considering the targets of massive related and concentrated social-media censorship, it generally means ‘unfairness’ to the interests of a sect that shall remain nameless.
And in a final lexical twist, ‘fake’ is, in fact, part of a word born in the slang of London’s crime milieu at the end of the ‘ 700. ‘Fake’ is modeled on ‘feague,’ in turn derived from the German ‘fegen,’ which in essence means ‘to cancel.’ In short, more than ‘fake news’ it means ‘news to be deleted.’ Which proves that sometimes etymology cannot hide the thought behind the action, namely deleting news, however accurate, because ‘unfair’ to the official narrative.
The reader whose patience led him thus far can finally set his mind at lexical rest and understand why 19 drug-addict Arabs did 9/11, why Jack Ruby, Jewish mafia link in Dallas, killed Harvey Oswald to avenge the widowhood of Jacqueline Kennedy, why Saddam Hussein had weapon of mass destruction, why Gheddafi tortured the Lybian people after giving them free housing, education and excellent family assistance, and why America is grinding her teeth for not having been able, as yet, to have Maduro end up like Gheddafi.
And when Donald Rumsfeld, big wig in the Bush 2 administration said, “We create our own reality”, he was but articulating (I suspect unknowingly,) the implications of the lexical history of ‘truth’.
There remains the unexplained connection between the chosen-people’s popess of Youtube and the censorship of the video showing the real statistics on the pandemic in California.
Actually there is or may be. Recently Forbes Magazine published an article titled “The Private Goldman Sachs Coronavirus Meeting That’s Setting The Internet On Fire.” It refers to an internal meeting at the Goldman Sachs bank, from which there leaked a document predicting, among other things, that 50% of Americans will contract the virus.
That Goldman Sachs has a tradition of profiting from economic disease and collective pain does not need demonstration. To refresh the memory, in the first decade of 2000, Goldman Sachs gave house mortgages to large numbers of people who couldn’t possibly pay them back. Then Goldman Sachs packaged the junk-mortgages into various financial instruments and sold them to their customers as a ‘sound’ investment. All this while Goldman Sachs’ internal documents show that the bank itself knew them to be junk.
By so doing they inflicted an economic plague on hundreds of thousands, many of whom never recovered. The criminality was so massive and obvious that it could not be easily spirited away. An investigation was launched, directed by 3 chosen-people judges. As a result, no one was indicted and the ‘pebnalty’ was one week’s worth of income for a bank that swims in trillions.
In conclusion, actual data contradicting the narrative of massive epidemic and deaths runs against the interest of those who stand to profit from it. Or have already profited. As widely known, several US congressmen, senators and even the current US Attorney General (!) have profited at the tune of millions thanks to insider trading information on the impending fall of the stock market.
Who else can profit from the pandemic? It’s almost a case of ‘take your pick.’ Here I will mention a few instances.
Much is spoken in Europe, notably in Italy, about an APP that tracks the movements of individuals and how distant they remain from others. By the way, as I am writing this, the Italian population has been on house arrest for more than a month. The putative developer of the APP is a consortium of 3 monopoly-type companies, one of which, Benetton, also controls the Italian toll-ways. The same in charge of the bridge that collapsed in Genoa in 2018, killing 43 people.
Other obvious beneficiaries will be the pharmaceutical giants set to develop a ‘vaccine’ against a virus that is inherently unaffected by vaccines due to its property of quick mutation.
And naturally the health industry, a classification that, in the current circumstances has an ominous Orwellian ring. Actually, most hospitals have greatly reduced operations, which is counter-intuitive given that hospitals should be most active when many people are sick. The answer is that hospital admissions have greatly decreased, for a hospital is an ideal place to pick up the virus, therefore all but essential interventions can be postponed. But the same hospital groups, according to an inquiry by USA Today, have much to gain from the virus. Medicare, the basic health assistance for the old, pays 5,000 $ for a conventional pneumonia, and 13,000$ in the case of the Coronavirus, rising to 39,000 $ if ventilation is needed, but only in case of Coronavirus, even if the therapies are very similar.
It follows that federal financing is directly proportional to the number of patients admitted for Coronavirus. Since ‘federal financing’ in this case means trillions, cynically speaking, Covid 19 is good business from every angle.
Now the swabs, without much dispute among the experts, yield false positives in 80% of cases. However, at least at the moment, while the diffusion curve of the disease goes down, the number of Coronavirus patients increase. Clearly, the new illness has a monetary premium compared to other run-of-the-mill influenzas. A point that would support the contention of some doctors in Washington and California that they were invited to add Coronavirus to the medical records of the patients involved. If so, censorship of the doctors who made the matter public makes perfect neoliberal sense.
Moreover, the narrative of the epidemic may appear ridiculous and inconsistent in the data, at least from the point of view of health, but there are other neoliberal benefits. ‘Social distancing’, for example, is the undreamed-of incarnation of Thatcher’s world where ‘there is no society.’ Equally, social distancing is the perfect remedy for eliminating crowds, an indispensable ingredient for revolutions (colored or otherwise). In the instance and in eloquent silence the French gilets-jaunes have gone the way of all flesh.
But crowds, as a concept, have not been eliminated, they have been transformed into a random collection of millions, similar to atoms randomly shifting and moving along the smooth plain of globalization. Atoms that get in contact with each other only as temporary random dualities involved in a buy-sell transaction.
In America, the pandemic is, among other things, the last and best opportunity for the deep state to remove Trump. This is not an arbitrary invention. A popular talk-show host, belonging to the chosen people, said on prime TV that “It’s good that the economy dies so we can get rid of Trump.” (I heard an audio-snippet extracted from the show).
After all that Trump has done for Israel, it seems odd that the deep state would distaste him. Possible reasons may be his having (feebly) attempted to oppose the ‘open border’ policy, a fundamental tool for globalization and for the elimination of all ethnicities but one. The other is, probably, having pussyfooted on the military invasion of Venezuela and Iran. Better informed readers may think of other motives.
One other predictable outcome is the replacement by robotics of millions of lost jobs, without facing strong opposition, given the imposed training in social distancing. I do not think it is an exaggeration, anything which is or becomes a habit, leaves lingering traces of assuefaction, even when the habit (in the instance social distancing), is no longer an unavoidable necessity.
Next among the predictables is the universal amazonization of retail sales.
Finally, one more consideration about crowds. Traditional crowds will remain and gleefully return in such places as stadiums. Through two thousand years, no effort by philosophers or similar to convince the crowds of any stripe that ‘panem et circenses’ is a gift to the oppressors, was ever successful.
Even more insidious and maybe irreversible has been the individual, mental conditioning of millions – the lone atoms I referred to before – through the means of ‘information’ and ‘entertainment’ properly incorporated into the new term ‘infotainment’, and totally control by those we cannot mention. The effort has been ongoing for decades and it has been thorough, capillary, meticulous, painstaking, accurate, complete and comprehensive.
I have found instances, both in America and Europe of close friends and acquaintances, educated and intelligent, in whom just the idea of questioning, for example, the dogmas of the goodness of mass illegal immigration, of the promotion of sodomy, of the blind extinction of nationalities, or of what happened in WW2, provokes instant irritation, rejection and silence.
It can be equally attributable to conditioning, at least in part, the supine generalized acceptance of the absurdities connected with the Coronavirus. A matter that cannot but inspire gloom about what may be next. The deep state, to use one last euphemism, has won. “Give me a thousand eyes – said Cassandra – and I will fill them with prophetic tears.” (3) Of course I hope I am wrong.
To those who reject or dislike pessimistic considerations I wish them a continued life in the ebriety of perpetual amusement. For all others, there is always the possibility of making virtue out of necessity, and an art of patience.
References:
*** (1) Timon of Athens
*** (2) Julius Caesar
*** (3) Troilus and Cressida