There have been for some time, especially from libertarian quarters, accusations that the COVID-19 crisis has led to a state that has been called by some “medical martial law”. I believe the more accurate term and point of departure is “medical social engineering and management”. Martial law sounds more dramatic and seems simpler to understand. Yet we have to get beyond slogans and deal with long-term processes and policies if we are to find adequate responses today. Literary metaphors, like those found in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 have been reduced to clichés. While their ideas may in part illustrate what today seems like prophecy, it is not enough just to imagine that there is — or might be — some underlying or even secret “plan”.
Much of this reporting creates the impression that some base of fundamental liberties (civil or human) is at risk here, only now. Sporadic attention is given to the relationships between pharmaceutical companies, the BMGF and governmental as well as international entities, e.g. WHO. This reporting is easily dismissed by a population that has been immunised to such reporting, pre-emptively since the introduction of such communication concepts as “fake news”. The developments in digital and especially internet-based mass communications have reinforced the belief that technology is independent and that science and what is called knowledge is not only independent but also inevitable in form and substance. We have internalised the beliefs in our own domination so that we cannot conceive it as domination at all. A sentimental reference to lost or endangered liberties is really a distraction from the problems at hand, even if such “liberties” may be part of the heritage we honestly want to save from destruction.
The long-term perspective is missing because it is difficult to render comprehensible. John Maynard Keynes was to have said, “in the long term we are all dead.” Yet by mimicking the news cycle, grasping for some novelty or titillation, and omitting the redundancies of historical context, writers and speakers with ambitions to overcome the propaganda barriers to political activism are unlikely to reach anyone but the converted.
In my February article Re-Orientation I tried to give the emerging crisis, nominally triggered by the viral incidents in Wuhan, China, some of the historical context which even alternative media in their addiction to the “fear mongering news cycle” are wont to report. The first point is that there is no true, undeniable “origin”. We have to start with a problem and then draw on numerous sources and observations – research — to define the problem by giving it a context into which the history flows. We create a history by the way we define the problem. The origin is, in fact, the beginning—the value we pursue in uncovering events and translating them into fields of action rather than frustration.
If we assume that the governments of the West, in particular that of the US, are what they claim to be, then all the concern about the USG response to the so-called pandemic remains focussed on whether and how it meets the needs of the people on whose behalf it claims to govern. In other words framed in the propaganda terms specified by the regime itself. If, however, we recognize that the governments of the West, in particular the US, but also those governments it helped to reorganise after the subsequent world wars in the 20th century (most of the Western peninsula and much of the Western hemisphere) are Business operations or extensions of corporate power, then the focus changes fundamentally — depending on whether one is on the side of Business or its target.
The USG as an extension of Business, especially its monopolist/ oligarchic forms, and has been firmly established as such since 1913 at the latest. It is also from about this time that the major oligarchs in Business set about organising first the US and then the rest of the world in ways amenable to system maintenance and control for Business. This strategic organisation pre-dates such post- WWII institutions like the IMF or UN and the quasi-conspiratorial committees so familiar now that they need not be mentioned here.
WWI was a milestone because it essentially created the current Anglo-American Empire through which Business rules to this day.
Without rehearsing all the actions and transformations along the way, it is useful to focus on some relevant policies or attitudes that became anchored in the West.
- The Bank of England became the model for international financial management and manipulation. After WWII it would become the model for all central banking. This was the significance of the so-called Aldrich Plan and the Federal Reserve Act.
- Military-led industrialization and economic organisation would prevail under so-called “scientific” management principles, promulgated by elite “business schools” where mathematical modelling would displace political contests. Alfred Marshall was one of the principal theorists for the creation of de-politicised “scientific” economics based on mathematics. Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford helped establish “scientific” industrial organisation.
- Mass media organisation would be integrated throughout state and commercial organizations — propaganda would be shared to promote Business. The formalisation of this practice derived from the work of the Creel Committee and was later theorised and intensified by Edward Bernays.
- Medicine would become the focus of all social engineering and management. Medicine would replace religion as the ideological vanguard of imperialism. This was the principal contribution of the Rockefeller tax dodges (General Education Board, Rockefeller University, Rockefeller Foundation et al.) under the management of Frederick T. Gates.
The problem we face here is that after a century of “scientific” management and medicine we are unable to reconstitute political contests. Even those people who claim to be trained in fields like economics are thoroughly dominated by the ideology of positivist science, which became the underlying religion of 20th century capitalism. Science in the West was adopted primarily as a weapon of anti-communism and against popular democratic movements.
We therefore have enormous almost insurmountable difficulties in challenging the State politically because there is only a scientific-technological framework (purified of any historical context). This framework asserts above all class neutrality — thus denying the political power struggle that is really the core of events. It is not an accident that one of today’s grand political managers, George Soros, named his espionage and political warfare operations after the concept popularised by Karl Popper, whose main ideological contribution was to insist that “real science” was only possible under capitalism in what he called the “Open Society”. What he actually meant was a translation of the US “Open Door” doctrine. The US regime’s “Open Door” is a euphemism for manifest destiny or Business domination through the Anglo-American Empire.
For several months now debate has focussed on the truth and accuracy or efficacy of the science and governmental actions supposedly derived from said science. This is best dramatized in the obsession on all sides with “body counts”. The factual basis of the pandemic is reduced to how many “pairs of ears” the COVID armed propaganda teams bring back from their raids. The constant repetition of the official pandemic narrative is illustrated by video footage of the same scenes every day, hours on end. If one watches at least TV reporting carefully one will notice that most of the video film shows practically empty wards, single patients at the most and lots of people in hazmat suits standing around machines. In footage from Brazil- a regime even more merciless toward its poor than the US—the images bear more resemblance to the Christo (1935-2020) public wrappings and happenings of the 1990s, promoting the sensationalism of the country’s archetypical telenovellas, rather than radical political action. Yet the repetition has its effect also by supplanting all other information. 30,000 deaths per day due to preventable starvation never got so much coverage as the deaths of an 88-year-old and 94-year-old this week, attributed to COVID.
There has been no serious challenge to the science, per se, or the claim that the government acts based on science rather than the interests of the people for whom it ostensibly governs (although it is clear that the “for whom” is Business and not real human beings).
Moreover the theology of economics has not been challenged either — as if this were a real science; e.g., something objective. Pronouncements from central banks and government ministries are presented as based on accurate measurement and analysis. A cursory review of the history reveals, however, that the definitions of such core concepts as “cost of living”, “unemployment”, “inflation”, “purchasing power” etc. are changed routinely to permit the Business regime to present data which is misleading at best. The benchmark figure, growth in GDP, bears little or no relation to the most important issue for real human beings, the capacity to generate enough income to sustain a decent living; i.e., home, food, clothing, education, healthcare, etc.
It is particularly telling that the same material misstatements in all manner of economic data are made by officials clothed with government or scientific authority are made now during the so-called pandemic.
For example, it is no secret that unemployment is undercounted—all the time. For real people unemployment means lack of a source of adequate income. However, the regime’s definition of unemployment is number of people who register under whatever narrowly specified conditions permit such registration. The informal sector is omitted as well as those who were previously self-employed but due to bankruptcy, illness or disability are no longer able to work. Then, of course, there are the deliberate deceptions like not counting people who have been assigned to “programs”, like training or part-time subsidised jobs of limited duration. Then, of course, there are people who are not counted because there is no one counting.
In the case of the pandemic, it must be said that the definition of “case” has also been changed from time to time to permit reporting in line with the prevailing political warfare agenda:
“A COVID-19 case includes confirmed and probable cases and deaths. This change was made to reflect an interim COVID-19 position statement issued by the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists on April 5, 2020. The position statement included a case definition and made COVID-19 a nationally notifiable disease.”
Thus “probable cases” include–
“A probable case or death is defined as:
- A person meeting clinical criteria AND epidemiologic evidence with no confirmatory laboratory testing performed for COVID-19;
- A person meeting presumptive laboratory evidence AND either clinical criteria OR epidemiologic evidence;
- A person meeting vital records criteriawith no confirmatory laboratory testing performed for COVID-19.”
The “epidemiological evidence” means that you have been in close proximity (less than 6 feet) with a person who is a confirmed case. Clinical evidence means only that you have COVID-like symptoms and those include colds, flu, allergies, and much more.
This is abetted by the quasi-official status given to people who are, in fact, agents of Business—but then again the entire government apparatus is an extension of Business. Official sounding entities like the “Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists” suggest higher authority without any indication of who the members of this body are and what interests they may actually represent, let alone who constituted them with the colour of authority in the first place. The creation of “authorities” was one of the major innovations of the 20th century PR industry.
Why should we trust statistics or statements about COVID from people and entities that habitually lie and distort data as a matter of public policy? If they cannot count the living accurately, why should we believe when they pretend to count the dead? This data cannot be adopted seriously. There must be a presumption that it is at best wilfully misstatement intended to support the interests and policies of the Business in “disease”, as well as any other Business interests that may be conveniently so achieved.
Just as DuPont has more or less controlled the US atomic weapons program since its inception, the pharmaceutical cartel has controlled the chemical and biological weapons programs jointly managed by the Pentagon and the CDC/ NIH establishment. To determine for whom someone like Dr Fauci works is easy enough when one checks his patent and investment portfolio. It requires no feats of magic or sorcery to recognise that virtually every mass campaign leading into the COVID “pandemic” has been organised and promoted by Business. Moreover these campaigns have been focussed since 2016 on the removal of the present POTUS, Donald Trump, at all costs! To put this in perspective, we should remember that the Inquisition and the Crusades were colossal undertakings mainly for the benefit of controlling the Papacy in the Middle Ages. The Papacy as the titular head of the largest multinational corporation of its day (and still one of the “big players” today) was to the barbarians of the Western peninsula what the POTUS is today for the barbarians of the Anglo-American Empire.
Since we have lost the capacity to engage in politics and pursue a human political-economy, we are forced to accede to a form of rule which at present will become “corporate medical social engineering” in a pure form unmediated by any of the rituals of political process. In fact, it is a religious form of control just like the Inquisition was in its heyday. It relies upon fear of disease, instead of mere sin. We are already witnessing the denunciatory culture, fanatical moralism, irrational fear, obsession with rituals, and all of those human practices that were supposedly banished by Enlightenment. Although it has been common sense for decades that viruses are vulnerable to the light of day and humans flourish in fresh air, Business—the universal Church of our era—is returning us all to our caves and huts, to the very conditions which led humanists to call that past era of Christendom—the DARK AGES.
That is a problem that needs to be taken seriously as a precondition for any critical attack on the kinds of actions and transactions that will — if continued — destroy the material basis for real human life and whatever civilisation we have been able to maintain despite Business and the Church.