Fervent follies

No peer reviewed studies demonstrate a medical necessity for masks; in fact, quite the opposite. And yet, this symbolic lark of being forced to be ‘muzzled’ with constricted oxygen flow, has no broadcast endpoint – Pic by Shehan Gunasekara 

So, there seems to be confusion in the air. The panic orthodoxy is showing cracks. Immunity to evidence seems to be gradually declining. And the ritual of vaccination is calming unnecessarily agitated brows.

However, political autocrats the world over have been leveraging our mass gullibility and unthinking servility to their proclamations, and the real fear is whether that genie will ever go back into the bottle again. Asserting ‘another four weeks of lockdown’ because of some uptick in demonstrably less than precise PCR tests (indicated to be so now by WHO as well), or some alleged tour by a new C-19 ‘scariant’, apparently needs no justification, just bald assertion. 

And the sheer madness of applying over and over those failed tactics that clearly seem not to work is of course not contested either. There is a playbook here, as commentator Naomi Wolf has identified for would-be tyrants. First you invoke a terrifying internal and external threat, then move onto creating a ‘thug caste,’ target or recruit the media (depending on their independence or lack thereof, what a change there has been on that front in the US for example from the time of Watergate to WMD), moving onto ‘emergency’ suspension of the rule of law and annulling its progressive cohorts.

What provoked Wolf’s 2008 best seller was fear that terrorism, with all its nationalistic flag waving and theme songs, would be the leverage. But maturity happily, perhaps providentially, prevailed there. Then came the financial crisis, and it seemed we had to ensure no one culpable actually paid any real penalty, and taxpayers ‘bailed’ out the ‘too stupid and big’ and power brokers fiddled with financial circuit breakers so that meltdown was less likely to be repeated in the near term.

Then cameth COVID

Medical crises have historically been rich fodder for such intrusions into lives and liberties. Cholera and typhus were exploited in the 19th century by the British to intimidate freedoms and invade people’s privacy. Interestingly, the first anti-vaccination movements, arose from British parents in the Victorian period. 

Naomi Wolfe’s earlier screed now seems unnervingly prophetic. From the pandemic has flowed vastly less freedom worldwide, and perhaps the worst expressions of this have been in the allegedly ‘free’ West. The fall from grace though was sadly quick and comprehensive.

We have the ability to interrogate this, following Wolfe’s catalogue of fascistic sins:

1) Emergency measures suspending due process of law. The perpetuation of this is the very definition of a police state. We can be grateful that in Sri Lanka, where initially the ‘all or nothing’ fixation took over, this has mellowed, and economic revival is having to waltz with pandemic prudence.

2) Schools being shut, completely against all the medical data and science, and while eviscerating the prospects of our young, and therefore frankly, our own prospects down the road, in more ominous jurisdictions than ours this also serves to break the social contract with the next generation.

3) ‘Vaccine passports’ for a middling pathogen with a 99%+ recovery rate is utterly absurd. But the ‘optics’ of taking so called but currently unproven ‘preventive’ measures it seems, as with schools, are far more compelling than the realities. Sadly, there are human forces far stronger than logic. These actions all add to the wherewithal of a digital surveillance state, and ‘private’ data increasingly if such passports/certificates are undertaken, becomes public fodder.

4) Forced business closures. This happened here, still is to some extent, in terms of inept tourism policies and destructively extended import controls. But overseas, the targets are very clearly the Main Streets, the smaller entrepreneurs, restaurants and sole proprietor businesses, therefore concentrating the economic bonanzas on the Amazons, Wal-Marts and Targets. 

Tech stocks rose a vertiginous 27% in one quarter of the pandemic, showcasing their role as an absorbent of our waylaid time and energy. But furthermore, if everything humans can do with constricted freedom, allows these companies to profit from and harvest data from such locked in activities – an insatiable tech leviathan on the prowl – then going out to exercise, worshipping in a Church or meandering through a park, eating at a restaurant, going to a pub, actually being immersed in an educational environment, are all inimical to the monopolising underway. If humans can only or primarily connect through digital platforms, then profit and social influence can be continuously superimposed upon us. Once more, let us cheer Lanka having substantially transitioned beyond this oppressive nonsense.

5) And once businesses are closed, just limit assembly per se, go after people desperately trying to flock to beaches or playgrounds, or organise playdates for their kids. In California, much of Britain, and other cuckoo land jurisdictions, fines are slapped on for being ‘out’ in the ‘wrong’ zip code, penalties are assessed for gathering in larger than prescribed numbers (10 or something ‘colossal’ like that), in ‘open’ schools students sometimes get one day to play outdoors overseen by ‘educational’ storm troopers, meaning penal environments are more humane in terms of daily exercise and fresh air.

Again, let us recall, this is a viral strain that most people don’t even know they had and virtually everybody recovers from, and for which now, for better or worse, there are also vaccines! How absurd does absurdity need to be, before people demand their lives back?

6) Forced ‘face nappies.’ Sweden has no such requirement, Florida does not, in much of South Asia people wear these contaminated masks (from soot and pollution), half off and half on, and all these places have either ‘as good’ results in terms of mortality (Sweden matches the EU average despite its mismanaging of care homes), or better (Florida’s stats are better than 70% of US States, certainly better than the ‘poster children’ of the orthodoxy as I call them, New York and California) or far better (South Asia’s death stats are so remarkable that you cannot factually say ‘pandemic’ and be remotely serious). No peer reviewed studies demonstrate a medical necessity for masks; in fact, quite the opposite. And yet, this symbolic lark of being forced to be ‘muzzled’ with constricted oxygen flow, has no broadcast endpoint. 

7) Muzzles on, certainly marries readily with suppressing free speech. Censor dissenting voices, have Twitter and Facebook impose ‘truth standards’ (and when did the Fount of verity pass to them?). And everything that is against the mulish, ‘one size fits none’ paradigm must be disdained. And so here we are, policing the slightest ripple of emotional duress among ‘true believers’, where every mediocrity who is an official mouthpiece has to be lionised as a celebrity, and every push back against the ‘lamestream’ orthodoxy is called ‘incitement.’ 

So ‘incitement’ gets its fangs, and the right of free expression, the equivalent of the US First Amendment, is left languishing, in tatters. Universities are telling professors they risk their livelihood for say speaking up against the ridiculous PCR tests which were designed for manufacturing processes originally (an example is Dr. Simon Goddeke of the Netherlands), news stations choose only ‘sanitised’ voices, and the echo chamber reverberates with mass produced ‘nonscience’ as I call it, ‘nonsense’ with credentials.

8) Certain mouthpieces of what Wolfe calls the ‘biofascists’ are unduly deferred to, no matter how regularly and consistently wrong they are. Christian Drosten in Germany was co-author of the spurious article ‘validating’ PCR tests (the peer review has gone missing) that was validated in only two days by a magazine (Eurosurveillance) he is on the Editorial Board of, and this led to the manufacture of a testing protocol he profits from! And all this from Germany. He is being sued and has received a ‘cease and desist’ order and no major media outlet will of course cover that controversy. 

Neil Ferguson has never had an accurate pandemic prediction we know of and has no medical background to make any of his prognostications unduly authoritative, and he has been catastrophically wrong this time. But his ‘SAGE’ (all the world’s a stage for silly data-free predictions), still holds the British government apparently spellbound. 

And the fickle medical chameleon in the US, Fauci, who is a true contortionist, having held virtually every view (no masks/masks, no asymptomatic spread/asymptomatic spread, no lockdown/lockdown and many other dizzying gyrations), joins his unsavoury cohorts listed here, in being the recipient of massive funding, as long as those views continue to flatter the interests of big Pharma and big Tech. Dissenters, far more eminent researchers in the field, are reputationally attacked and undermined.

9) Corporate interests seem to have merged with public policy in a heinous way. Unverifiable COVID data is purportedly served up in a way that directly affects stock markets (COVID-19 tracking and Johns Hopkins are both recipients of large donations from technocrats like Michael Bloomberg). Corporate interests and public policy have intertwined in many autocratic regimes over history, but digital presentation being leveraged for stock market influence, is very 21st century.

10) The period becomes an excuse for clamping down on religious minorities. Churches have been singled out, Muslim communities in various countries, Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, even in Canada a well-publicised case of a Priest who insisted he would stay ‘open’ to provide weekly services for those who wished to worship was locked up. Again, remember this is over a vastly hyped flu with an infection fatality rate globally of around .12% based on seroprevalence studies, including those affirmed by WHO.

11) And the frosting on this anti-human confection is the championing of policies that weaken bonds between human beings, that dilute family ties, that keep friends and colleagues apart. All these have been introduced and policed and enforced, and this may be the most pernicious part of the entire package. And again, this is why I am so delighted that in Sri Lanka, friends and family are back to celebrating, government offices have people back to work, places to mingle are flourishing. We have struggles ahead, but at least we can struggle together as a human community.

Beware the Western contagion

Western Europe and the United States are benchmarks for much of modern society, and rightly and deservedly so. They championed liberties, gave us the Industrial revolution, and then the digital revolution, taught us branding, created templates for individual enterprise, had corporations become more socially conscious and contribute to markets they operate in. Extraordinary literature and music and the arts, liturgies and wit and global paradigms have flowed from these commercial hotbeds and from these greenhouses for creativity. Medical breakthroughs there have saved lives around the world and added countless years to the lives of children, and education and aid have at their best, provided both benevolent compassion and a healthy developmental catalyst.

However, there is now something rotten afoot (and not just, a la Shakespeare, in the state of Denmark). It seems COVID policy in too much of the West (and no surprise that Eastern autocrats jump on board) seems to be an attack on the granular distinctiveness of free human beings and the very qualities that make us human. 

While we welcome technology and investment and ideas, we must resist any temptations to ape this. And the ‘masks’ will be the biggest challenge symbolically. No science attests to them. Masked jurisdictions as explained have done no better in any way that makes a palpable difference, and that is scientifically clear on the data. It’s not an argument anymore. When very tightly together in congested spaces, sure apply the precautionary principle if you like. But everywhere else, it’s an affront.

Bonding face-to-face is part of our humanity, to enjoy smiles, nuances, jokes, irony, the full range of our expressiveness. We run the danger of losing the ability to pick up social clues or read each other, from behind our ineffectual wrappings. 

In Lanka we at least can assemble again! Banning that, as in too much of the West still, keeps human alliances from forming, or people with similar interests and aspirations from communing. New cultures, heroes and even business models, emerge from such interactions. We are otherwise ‘frozen’ with the ideas and relationships we had in March 2020, augmented by some Zoom ‘screen time’, invariably suboptimal and invariably far more transactional.

Children in and out of school still having to be distanced and wear masks, when every iota of medical data argues against it, shows a dogmatic immunity to facts that undermines the entire educational enterprise on its face. Imagine a generation terrified of every ‘stranger’ as a source of infection! Oh, and this has to be anchored in the conclusion that somehow all human biology, immunology, virology and the evolution of coronaviruses, all transformed fiendishly and malevolently in 2020! All public health nostrums (which were anti lockdown and masking), without any new studies or evidence, were with the swish of political ‘magical wands’ completely upended. 

And these nerve wracked kids, look dubiously at each other, as they keep their prescribed distance (said distance pulled out of a hat), ‘masked’, invariably feeling menaced, an entire generation who won’t learn how to form human alliances, pick up cues from adults, and who don’t trust their bodies or their own instincts. This is how you render potential future rebels or original thinkers docile and compliant.

And if we can maximise ‘distance learning’ (platforms are ready, and they don’t ‘educate’ they just provide a barrage of facts by which to tick a box), then space not mediated by technology, including inner space, becomes for these youngsters, alien territory, clunky and inaccessible. We become remote from ourselves.

And the contagion could spread

So, now, if human interaction becomes ever more congregated on Zoom, not only do we run the risk of too much being recorded, IP being harvested and spied upon, but the ‘inconvenience’ of throwing off our ennui, inertia and torpor and ‘going’ somewhere to meet people and being enlarged by doing so, becomes not only a health hazard, but something that we can ban on ‘efficiency’ grounds, having lost sight of larger, more ecumenical value.

Desperate to retain power, the current juntas and autocrats fear ‘analog’ engagement, and they will keep at it, finding ever more cartoonish ‘COVIDIAN’ justifications to punish, encumber and restrict it. Humans coming together are at times a revolutionary force says Naomi Wolfe, but even more potently, they are the only sustainable evolutionary force too. 

And if Wolfe is wrong, and this is just the appearance of malign intent, but actually just dominoes of ineptitude, stupidity and passivity all falling, with a crashing thud, and then we are lurching from one catastrophe to the other, so be it. But we can’t hold that hope out. Actually, as per Occam’s Razor, power blocs availing of well tested levers of mass manipulation for their own profit and advantage, on some days seems a simpler thesis than wanton, oblivious stupidity on such an Olympian scale. 

Again, Lanka’s leaders have wisely given a wide berth to the most noxious of the above temptations. And I believe more of Asia will wake up, even if it needs the ‘philosophical placebo’ of something called ‘vaccine’ to be able to do so. 

And remember, what about next time? And what happens if our now impaired immune systems struggle against a resurgent flu or influenza epidemic? And what happens when the printing presses can’t oblige and the magical money trees experience drought? What happens when the insanity of policies, such as property owners in New York going bankrupt as they can’t evict tenants due to C-19 regulations, and those tenants are living rent free (therefore hoping things ‘don’t’ go back to normal), become ever more evident? 

We can’t ever do this again, it’s not sustainable. Eventually, even serfs rebel, and the tipping point of this no longer being adequately credible even to those untroubled by facts, I suspect is coming.

Here in Lanka, we need to strengthen our economic and educational foundations. We need to have a latticework of alliances and not put all our eggs in any one geopolitical basket. We have to have competitive local industries and simplify our regulations and mobilise our political will in upgrading human capital so we can credibly be a service and IT hub. And we must fight our own battles, not participate in this ghoulish pantomime on display in the West. 

There is a war afoot, on what it is to be human. As I wrote earlier, ‘non-death’ is not life. We have to reclaim for the human beings of this resplendent isle, the right to be ‘alive’ and the accountability to decide, individually and collectively, what that will really mean.