Recently my wife and I returned from a quick trip to the United States. We had dropped off our daughter and grandchildren for a return flight to their home in Texas and, in showing documents at the border, it became apparent that I had made a mistake on the ArriveCAN app and only my wife’s information had been registered.
“No problem,” says I. “I have my proof of injection status card.”
“Big problem,” said the border agent. We can’t take the underlying basis for ArriveCAN – only the ArriveCAN documentation. You will have to quarantine for 14 days. But lucky for you we are lovely people, and you are allowed one mulligan. Next time you are off to the quarantine sin bin.”
Now let’s think about this for a moment. I had proof that my covid injections were real but they were not properly logged into the surveillance program. Apparently, scientifically, this made me a biohazard. Also, I would be spending the next five hours sitting in the car beside my wife who, due to her proper registration on the surveillance program, was apparently immune from my contagion. Are you following the science here?
This is not going to be a rant against or for mRNA injections or anything to do with the epidemiological science of pandemics because I know enough about the topic to approach danger levels and by this time everyone has their go-to heroes. I recognize that I will never be able to dislodge your heroes causing you to give an audience to mine. However, there are bigger issues at stake that I want to investigate. Nothing will be resolved but some questions are valuable even if only to ask them.
In previous articles I have discussed the importance of history and the lessons to be learned from those born before us. The corollary to this is that we must suffer the relearning of those lessons if we refuse to study and remember that history. I fear we are at such a juncture in our educational and public life in Canada.
History is the story of tyrants but not all tyrants are born equal. Prior to the French Revolution, tyrants were benign in that they wanted money and sex and when they got it, they pretty much left folks alone. Some tyrants, in fact, tried to make things better for their kowtowing peasants. Machiavelli’s advice was for these “garden variety” tyrants.
Maximilien Robespierre changed the nature of tyranny by eschewing money and sex and demanding his version of utopia. He was convinced that his paradise was so desirable that killing tens of thousands was a small price to pay for it. In fact, he thought that the French civilization needed to be destroyed with the clock reset to year one to achieve his dream. Presaging John Lennon, he imagined a world “with no religion too” and, just like that, 50,000 people in the Vendee region of France were annihilated. And then he, too, lost his head to the cheering, Jacobin mob. I think there is a lesson in there somewhere.
The French Revolution was the first of the millenarian tyrannies, but it was not to be the last. Another poet named Lenin was the next to imagine how violence is the precursor to Nirvana. He died before he could kill too many, but he passed the baton to his acolyte Josef Stalin who proved to be a genocidal champ.
About ten years ago I was in Russia and remarked on the beautiful architecture of the city of Khabarovsk. I was surprised to learn that Mr. Stalin, of ugly high rise apartment fame, was the architect of beautiful Khabarovsk. Why is this relevant? Hannah Arendt made famous her aphorism about the banality of evil. Kind-hearted and artistically talented Uncle Joe Stalin killed as many as sixty million of his countrymen and women to achieve the communist vision of a Marxist paradise that he was sure would spread around the world.
Another frustrated artist, contemporary and sometimes partner with Stalin was Adolph Hitler. It is reported that they recognized a kinship in each other and admired the other’s stylistic approaches to creating their utopia. They both knew that soon enough they would be at each other’s throats, but others would die and not them. Hitler, by most reports, was a soft spoken, very polite vegetarian who never drank. He was ultimately responsible for the efficient elimination of over six million Jews and who knows how many other “sub-Aryan” people. The banality of evil.
These two were followed in rapid succession by Mao-Zedong and Pol Pot. The death count by violence in the twentieth century was over 200 million people. Millenarian tyrants have quite a record and, according to Waller Newell (Tyrants: A history of power, injustice, and terror), they share belief in an accessible utopia for everyone that is achieved by absolutist, authoritarian and/or totalitarian control through mob “justice” to delegitimize and dehumanize their opposition. Lenin and Stalin had the NKVD and their “useless kulaks”. Seven million died in the Ukrainian Holodomor. Hitler had the Schutzstaffel and his Jewish “pigs”. Six million died in the gas chambers of the work camps.
In the case of the Soviet Union, the horrors of Stalin have been chronicled in sickening detail by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the German horrors were entered as evidence at Nuremburg. Both Solzhenitsyn and Nuremburg codified what needs to be done to prevent a reoccurrence. One of the most important documents to come from the aftermath of World War 2 was the Nuremburg Code which, among other things, spelled out the requirements for informed consent in permissible medical experiments.
With this background, are there hints of tyranny in the actions of governments around the world because of the Covid-19 outbreak? Was any of the tyranny inspired by dreams of millenarian utopianism. Are Antifa and Black Lives Matters an update of the SS? Do “great resets” and “build back better” schemes prove that the Davos crowd wanted to kill by the billions? Does Yuval Harari mean it when he says that artificial intelligence will make redundant all but the self-described “smart people”? Will we actually have nothing and be happy? It makes one wonder but in my mind, there are reasons to doubt that death by covid was deliberate, inspired and intentionally high. In fact, I doubt if we even know how many died of covid with any accuracy. What is not in doubt, however, is that the Nuremburg Code was shredded by the injection campaigns and that serious attempts by governments were made to create “useless kulaks”.
I have had doctors push back at these assertions and tell me that their patients were fully informed before receiving the injections. I respond that this was patently impossible as there was very limited information on what the impacts of the injection would be. (Although the CDC has recently revealed that they knew about the myocarditis connection in early 2021. Thanks CDC.) The double blind testing was not done for long enough to test long term impacts and any valuable data from the testing was destroyed when the drug companies injected the control group. Despite claims to the contrary, no one really knew what to expect from the mRNA shots. Was information withheld from us to generate terror and invite obedience to the government? Perhaps, but bear in mind Lenin’s maxim,
“A revolution without firing squads is meaningless… the purpose of terror is to terrorize.”
You have to admire his clarity. In the absence of firing squads perhaps the recent tyranny was of a less than millenarian kind. Nevertheless we are now finding out things that perhaps we should have been told prior to the injection campaigns.
Should we have been told that all cause mortality would increase twenty-five percent after the shots were administered? Perhaps my decision to be injected would have been different had I known about the risk of myocarditis. Wouldn’t these be important facts to convey to someone considering an untested medical treatment? If everyone was so well informed than why did the FDA want to withhold all document release for seventy-five years? ? Shouldn’t that information have been made available for informed consent? Informed consent must be given without coercion and to argue that threats of job loss, actual job loss, inability to shop for groceries or to have access to medical facilities, inability to use public transportation or enter churches, restaurants or public facilities does not constitute coercion is risible. Despite current headlines screaming that hospitals are full of covid patients who are dying in larger numbers than in 2020, we have the CDC walking back virtually all of its previous covid guidance and pretending to reform itself. Well …? If the disease remains ever present and dangerous then why walk back your “solutions”? There was no informed consent consistent with the Nuremburg Code. This is deeply problematic.
What was perhaps more deeply problematic was the willingness of so many to ostracize, denigrate and abuse those who were not willing to take the injections. Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot could never have killed so many without the blind complicity of a large segment of their populations. Many Germans accepted that their Jewish neighbours were pigs. Many Russians thought the food producing kulaks were pariahs of the state. Many young Chinese students willingly forced their parents and grandparents to suffer and die in the re-education camps. Many North Americans despised their unjabbed neighbours and relatives for “putting my life at risk”. (But I thought the injections protected us from the “deniers”?) Nurses and doctors went from being civic heroes one year to despised villains who lost their jobs the next based purely on their unwillingness to participate in an experiment for which they could not give informed consent. Heroic truck drivers in 2020 became “extremists who don’t believe in science/progress and are very often misogynistic and racist”, in 2021. At least according to our Prime Minister. The quid pro quo for meeting with friends and relatives was the injection status card.
Were we witness to tyranny? Is Mr. Trudeau a tyrant? Of course he is, but this is not news. He openly stated his admiration for the tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party, and he was elected by Canadians who had this knowledge. There was no bait and switch. I was surprised at how cowardly he behaved when the truckers descended on Ottawa, but his inclinations are entirely towards that of a tyrant. The real question is whether Mr. Trudeau and other world leaders are millenarian tyrants. Any politician who did not push back at the government tyranny has little to be proud of and these less than courageous elected folks are found in all the parties. We should not expect much from our politicians and indeed we will never be disappointed. But should we not expect a bit more humanity from each other?
The full story of covid will be told one day likely decades from now. Perhaps, when the life insurance companies receive their settlements from the Big Pharma companies for the unexplained deaths of young, insured workers following the mRNA injections, the truth will be exposed. On a more hopeful note, I will not be surprised if mRNA technology some day becomes a life saving treatment and key medical therapeutic. But we are not there yet regardless of the speed of computer algorithms looking at recombinant chemical reactions. This modeling determined that the nanoparticles and other gooey things were going to stay in our arm muscles remember? And we know how far off the mark that turned out to be. For the moment at least, these treatments are experimental and no one should be vilified or denied constitutional rights for refusing to participate in the experiments.
In reviewing the events of the past two years, I am reminded of the thoughts of Thomas Jefferson in considering the impacts of slavery on the United States,
“Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever; that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events; that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.”
Beware the revolving wheel of fortune. Do we have to relive the horrors of the utopian dreams of sociopathic tyrants to recognize that it is a bad idea to forget the evil events of the twentieth century and to ignore the restorative benefits of the Nuremburg Code? I am not so afraid of callow attempts at tyranny as I am about our individual response to it. The great revelation of Mr. Solzhenitsyn as he rotted in the Soviet Gulag was that we are all to blame,
"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."
To the extent that we reflect on the events of the past two years we might conclude that there is a need to fight against tyranny. I would agree with that. But maybe we should also consider where the line between good and evil cuts in our own hearts. Jordan Peterson calls it “telling the truth” and, given the paucity of that particular virtue in these covid times, I think he is on to something.