Centre For Local Research into Public Space (CELOS)


See also Site Map

Citizen-Z Cavan Young's 2004 film about the zamboni crisis

Contact

mail@celos.ca

Search


Custodians:

Bernard L'Hermite: "How did we get here?" Part Two. The mega-event

August 2021

Although change is a constant in human history, in the life of societies it is not always continuous and regular, since there are countervailing forces as well that seek to maintain the status quo. For this reason change often occurs through Events, important moments where a host of influences come together to create a new kind of social reality. These influences are both long- and medium-term trends, and the decisions of many different actors which either promote these trends or react against them. Over time they build up a kind of pressure against the status quo, which eventually leads to an explosion, a crisis which reconfigures society and represents a kind of new beginning, and the cycle begins all over again. Among such Events we can count the French and Russian revolutions, the two World Wars of the twentieth century, the Great Depression and other economic crises, the AIDS crisis and other epidemics and pandemics, and finally 911 and the war on terror. For over a year now we have been in the throes of what can be considered a Mega-event, known as the Covid-19 pandemic, the scope and potential consequences of which may well be unprecedented. Here I would like to explore how this Mega-event fits in the process we have been describing, as well as what makes it unique in its genre.

The Trigger

Events always begin with a Trigger, often of modest dimensions, which allows all the different energies which have been building up to explode onto the stage of history and reconfigure society. In the case of Covid-19, the trigger was, typically, almost insignificant. On December 31, 2019, Chinese health officials informed the World Health Organization about a cluster of 41 patients with a pneumonia of unknown etiology in the city of Wuhan. Almost immediately, the sickness was attributed to a new and particularly toxic coronavirus, ostensibly of animal origin from the Wuhan wholesale seafood market. (A later variant spoke instead of a pathogen released, either accidentally or intentionally, from a laboratory in that city doing gain-of-function research and funded internationally, thus potentially involving the virology establishment and, indirectly, the military and intelligence services.) By early January, with record speed, Chinese scientists claimed to have isolated the new virus and established its genome, even before the first death attributed to it. Two weeks later, the region was placed under a drastic lockdown.[1]

In a 1980 study we read: “Pneumonia is one of the leading causes of death in adults and children in China. In urban areas, pneumonia is the fourth leading cause of death, and in rural areas pneumonia is the leading cause of death. A recent article in the Chinese literature estimated that each year in China there are 2.5 million patients with pneumonia and that 125,000 (5%) of these patients die of pneumonia-related illness.”[2] In a city where tens of thousands of cases of pneumonia occur each month, one may well ask why these 41 cases attracted such great attention. And why the search began at once for a new virus, one which, incidentally, was immediately found. Why were not many other factors endemic to the province considered such as air pollution, the presence of glysophate and other toxic chemicals from the agricultural and livestock industries, and electromagnetic radiation (5G had recently been installed)? All these possibilities were apparently neglected in favor of the hunt for a new “killer virus.”

Undoubtedly the road taken had a lot to do with the power of the virology establishment and orthodox germ theory. Other possible causes would have seemed less attractive, both scientifically and economically. On another level, the rapidity with which the trigger was identified should give pause for thought. One has only to remember the equivalent speed with which Lee Harvey Oswald was identified as the assassin of John F. Kennedy, or Saudi Arabian terrorists as the culprits on 911. Such rapidity naturally evokes the suspicion of something planned ahead of time and kept in the wings until the right time comes for it to be revealed.

The Narrative

Indeed, the planning for such a pandemic was hardly a secret. Aside from all the previous Events of a similar character (mad cow disease, SARS-1, swine flu, avian flu...), usually involving dramatic predictions of large numbers of casualties, all of which more or less fizzled out after spectacular beginnings, in October 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted a simulation exercise called Event 201 in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The exercise, which was far from being the first of its kind, modeled a fictional coronavirus pandemic in order to examine preparedness and look for the best ways of responding to such an emergency. Although the organizers naturally claimed that it was not a prediction, a few short months later fiction apparently turned into fact. The World Health Organization proclaimed a public health emergency on January 30, 2020, and this was upgraded to a pandemic on March 11, at a time when cases in China were sharply declining, and the rest of humanity only registered 1440 deaths in 117 countries. All of the political, economic, scientific and medical forces of the planet were brought to bear on the new SARS virus. After all of the previous false starts, this time we had a winner.

With breathtaking speed, all the disparate elements coalesced into a new Narrative that was propagated across the world by the mainstream media. Once again, it should be emphasized that this does not necessarily mean that it was crafted by a small group of conspirators behind closed doors. By this time almost all the elements were already at hand in the worldwide medical and scientific establishment, generously funded by wealthy donors with their own agenda: one could almost say that the Narrative wrote itself. And on a more everyday level, beliefs that made the Narrative credible had been circulating among the population for over a century. It is not for nothing that the Covid-19 Narrative closely resembles a blockbuster movie from Hollywood, something along the lines of “The Attack of the Megavirus of Doom.” Again, it was a Big Idea, a monolith prepared over decades whose time had now finally come.

The main lines of that Narrative were fairly simple. Humankind is currently being attacked by a deadly virus that, unless unprecedented measures are taken, will decimate the population of the globe. It has already spread in record time from China to the rest of the world, causing hospitals to overflow and overtaxing the medical resources of many countries. But fear not: courageous researchers are already in the process of developing a remedy. What is essential is to trust the authorities and follow their instructions; then and only then can we defeat this peril.

In this short summary, we see the two most important attitudes the Narrative wishes to convey. First and foremost, it seeks to awaken the great fear of suffering and death that lies just beneath the surface of most people’s lives, especially in the more developed lands. This may seem paradoxical but in fact, in the poorer parts of the earth, people are already familiar with sickness and hardship; it is their daily bread. In affluent societies, on the contrary, we spend enormous amounts of time and resources denying our mortality, all the while realizing deep down that this is impossible.[3] This unreal and contradictory mindset creates an unstable condition, a free-floating anxiety ready to explode in the presence of the appropriate trigger.

Secondly, after describing the menace at length, the Narrative inculcates the belief that salvation is possible. The only thing that can save us is trust in the authorities. And this trust is all the more mindless because, as is well known, fear is an emotion that bypasses the rational part of the brain and prevents calm reflection. It should therefore not surprise us that people were ready at the drop of a hat to consent to policies and regulations by which they voluntarily gave up their hard-earned freedoms. We should mention here that fear was not the only cause of this attitude: in an ever more complex world, people’s sense of their own ignorance and consequent trust in the “experts” has become widespread. This is a basic tenet of the cult of scientism, rivaling anything that the religions of the past were able to achieve.

The Lockdown

As explained earlier, the Narrative exists not just to modify people’s understanding by explaining the new situation in which they find themselves; it intends to change their behavior as well. It thus leads inevitably to a Praxis.

In most parts of the developed world, the Praxis of Covid-19 was not based on rational recommendations to the population listing steps to be taken in order to avoid catching the disease. In previous situations this would have been the procedure—the identification and perhaps isolation of particularly vulnerable groups and advice to others on the best course to follow to avoid contagion and to seek treatment if necessary. Instead, governments immediately imposed restrictions of dubious legality upon the entire population, restrictions which may have been justified for a short-term situation of extreme risk but which were quickly generalized and extended indefinitely.

Basically, the entire functioning of society was put on hold. Businesses, educational institutions, commercial outlets, sporting activities were all shut down or severely curtailed. Gatherings of individuals, even in private homes, were limited. Strict curfews were set. Such government encroachment in the private lives of citizens was unheard of in Western democracies, even in time of war. And yet the level of fear and surprise was such that it proceeded with almost no opposition. Psychologically speaking, it must be admitted that the operation was well thought out: the regulations were at first declared to be emergency measures “to flatten the curve” and then, as time passed, they became “the new normality” and aroused only a minimum of resistance.

Analogous to the rapidity of the creation of the Narrative, the quickness with which the lockdown took place was significant. Already on January 31, 2020, President Trump had suspended air travel between the United States and China, and less than two months later 190 national economies were shut down. One would have assumed that before taking such a radical and unprecedented step, governments would have undertaken a precise and rigorous risk analysis to evaluate the costs and benefits of undertaking the action or not. In normal times, that is what any serious business enterprise or professional institution would have done. Yet apparently the costs of the lockdown—the business failures, the loss of employment, the effect on schooling, the neglect of other medical conditions, the psychological devastation (suicide, depression, addictions...), famine—were not taken into consideration at all. Everything was justified by the slogan of “flattening the curve,” ostensibly spreading out hospital admissions in the short term so that patients could be better taken care of, a patently fraudulent justification that was quickly swept under the rug.

The transformation of civil society into a flock of compliant sheep occurred so quickly and unexpectedly that it led some commentators to speak of the imposition of a “Chinese model.” Upon closer examination, however, one can see that the seeds of this transformation had already been present and growing in the Western world for a long time. Reliance on so-called experts, disinterest in social questions in favor of a focus on personal comfort and fulfillment, the weakening of social bonds and belief systems that gave meaning to life, an exaggerated need for security and the denial of one’s vulnerability, pressures to conform vastly amplified by an omnipresent communications media, these and other trends turned originally self-reliant men and women concerned with the public good into frightened individuals ready to sell their birthright to anyone claiming to rescue them from potential disasters, however hypothetical. In retrospect, however unbelievable it may once have seemed, contemporary Western society was ready for the imposition of drastic means of control, for what can aptly be termed a soft totalitarianism.[4]

The Praxis

The lockdown was accompanied by a host of more specific requirements, many imposed by diktats with no basis in constitutional law. What at first might appear surprising is that virtually none of them could be justified by real science, and even were potentially dangerous. But when it is realized that protecting people from the virus was only the ostensible purpose of these requirements, their truer and often covert role can be seen, namely to create a sense of unity of the population around the Narrative, to reinforce people’s active participation and, secondarily, to brand and penalize the nay-sayers. They were in essence the sacraments of the Covid cult.

Masks. The first and clearest sign of the “new normal” was the wearing of masks. At first this was not encouraged by the experts, and indeed discouraged since it was felt it would create a false sense of security, especially since no serious studies have ever showed the efficacy of mask-wearing in the general population to prevent contagion. Then, in an unexplained turn of events, in June of 2020, the World Health Organization reversed its policy overnight and began to encourage the use of masks, first for certain groups of people and situations, then more generally. Mask-wearing quickly became the first sacrament of the Covid-19 pandemic, and it is not difficult to see why. It dramatized in highly visible fashion the both the danger and the response to it, the two poles of the Narrative. People saw that the world had changed and felt there was something they could do; moreover, compliance was easy to measure and coerce. As stated earlier, this dehumanizing act played the role of a fetish in the new cult. It is significant that even after widespread vaccination, which many people thought would lead to a return to “normality,” after a short hiatus encouragements and requirements to continue wearing masks returned with even more insistence. And even where it was not mandated, many people continued to wear their masks to “feel more secure.” Is not this a clear indication of the psychological importance of the mask to keep alive the narrative?

Social distancing. This oxymoron quickly became another slogan of the new situation. It was based on the unquestioned premise that the killer virus passed from person to person through bodily contact. In fact, almost no hard scientific evidence exists to show that this is the case. Some serious studies, in fact, indicate that viruses are airborne and do not travel mainly by physical contact. By now many people have heard of the extensive experiments done in 1917 with prisoners, in a wholly unsuccessful attempt to infect them with the Spanish flu by direct and prolonged contact by patients ill with the disease. The question of contagion is a complex one, and of course depends in part on whether one accepts germ theory in its traditional form. An alternative view proposes that our bodies already host billions of bacteria and other genetic material, and what causes us to become ill is not their presence or absence but a myriad of other factors. In addition, bodily contact has been shown to be vital for human health, physical as well as psychological, and deprivation has serious and dehumanizing consequences.

Testing. Followers of serious dissenters to the official version such as Tom Cowan, Sam Bailey, Andrew Kaufman, Stefan Lanka and Jon Rappoport are well aware of the layers of mystification surrounding the PCR test for Covid-19.[5] Not only is the procedure itself in no way a test for the presence of a pathogen, as its creator, the late Kary Mullis, steadfastly maintained, but the bits of genetic material that it multiplies have nothing to be compared to, since no one has ever isolated or purified a SARS-CoV-2 virus, at least if those verbs have any real meaning. All we have as a basis for comparison are segments of a genetic code created in large part by computer simulation. Moreover, the test was first based on the Drosten Report, published on January 23, 2020, a mere two weeks after the Chinese claimed to have discovered a new virus and although, as the report itself stated, “virus isolates or samples from infected patients were not available.”[6] If this is not enough to discredit the test, it is by now well understood that the number of cycles is key to identifying the presence of specific genetic material. If they are high enough, a positive result will almost always be found, and no universal standard exists for this.

If the real purpose of the test were strictly medical, intended solely to assist diagnosis and treatment of an illness, then these caveats would seem to invalidate it. In fact they do not do so, because the test exists for another reason entirely, which most of its practitioners may even be unaware of: it is used to support the Narrative by defining the number of existing “cases” and thus the gravity of the pandemic.

Here we see quite clearly one of the nefarious consequences of the religion of scientism, which has come to a head in this Mega-event. For most of human history, illness was defined by a constellation of symptoms felt by a human being—aches and pains, runny nose, diarrhea, difficulties in breathing, concentrating or moving—and their potential outcome. Someone did not feel well, and so consulted a physician. The doctor made his or her initial diagnosis starting from these symptoms, which may then have been confirmed by other means (“tests”). But one of the tenets of scientism is that what is real is only what can be expressed in mathematical language and not what is felt by anyone. So slowly, medical tests have become more important than any symptoms experienced by actual people.

This was already true for AIDS. Testing positive for HIV antibodies meant that someone had the syndrome even if they appeared to be perfectly healthy, and were in good health as far as anyone could tell. For Covid-19, a “case” is defined as someone who receives a positive result from a PCR or other similar test, regardless of the presence or absence of any symptoms. So among the neologisms that this Mega-event has fostered, we are treated to one worthy of George Orwell’s newspeak, the “asymptomatic case.” And such “cases” are assumed to be carriers of the disease, again without any real scientific justification. So we are led to assume that there are millions of men and women walking around, passing on a deadly virus to one another, although the vast majority of them seem to be in perfect health! In previous times, the presence of individuals with a pathogen in their system to which they did not react would have meant that they had achieved personal immunity and were thus helping to bring the illness under control, but in our looking-glass world this is no longer true.

And since the PCR test can detect a greater or lesser number of positives by varying the number of cycles, authorities have the perfect means of controlling or manipulating official reports of the spread of the disease, either in order to augment fear and uncertainty or to proclaim a (usually limited) victory over it. As someone remarked, “There is no virus pandemic, but rather a testing pandemic. To stop the pandemic, it would be enough to stop testing apparently healthy individuals.”

What is striking here is how quickly the mass of the population, mesmerized by the prestige of “the science,” has accepted the bogus notion of asymptomatic cases. This has allowed media outlets to paste atop their pages each day huge numbers of the thousands or millions of new cases so as to stoke the flames of fear. Governments make decisions regarding lockdown based on the rate of increase or decrease of these cases, which naturally is correlated with the number of tests performed and the amount of cycles. And last of all, but most diabolically, this system makes it impossible to evaluate what is really happening, how many people in reality have symptoms and how serious these are. Since “cases” are meaningless, the only statistics based on real-life events are hospitalizations and deaths, and enough has been written about how their causes have so often been falsified, sometimes to receive government funding and sometimes simply to maintain the Narrative, that it is clear that even these do not give us a much clearer picture of what is really going on.

In a recent development, on July 21, 2021, the Center for Disease Control published the following statement: “After December 31, 2021, CDC will withdraw the request to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel, the assay first introduced in February 2020 for detection of SARS-CoV-2 only. CDC is providing this advance notice for clinical laboratories to have adequate time to select and implement one of the many FDA-authorized alternatives.” Implicitly admitting they were not going to get permanent approval for the procedure, the CDC will change the rules again and develop a different test.

Vaccines. If masks were the sacrament or fetish of Stage I of the Narrative, vaccination has quickly taken on that role in Stage II. Earlier we saw how vaccination has been part of germ theory and virology since the beginning, from the time of Pasteur. Many people are already familiar with the arguments against “the Covid vaccine,” beginning with the fact that it is not what previously would have been called a vaccine. It is rather an artificially concocted genetic therapy with unknown and potentially adverse consequences, especially in the long run.

Since the vaccination campaign began in earnest, the disadvantages and even dangers of the so-called Covid vaccines have become even more striking. The numbers of adverse effects—injuries and even deaths—are such that in any other time and place, they would have been quickly taken out of circulation. Reports (still to be confirmed) speak of the dangers of blood clots, especially over the long term, and the possibility of toxic substances present in the vaccines. A former vice-president of Pfizer, Dr. Michael Yeadon, and one of the inventors of , certainly not your typical anti-vaxxers, have spoken out publicly on the dangers of the vaccine. And yet in the public sphere, not only has there been no serious debate about the desirability of the vaccines, but there is incredible pressure on everyone to be vaccinated, including children (who are scarcely affected by the virus at all) and pregnant women, and opposing views are censored in the mass media. Again, these facts show once again that what drives the Narrative is not real science and medicine but something else.

Not much more needs to be said, except for one fact that illustrates perfectly the case I have been trying to make throughout this article. Almost everyone I have spoken to and indirectly heard about take for granted, as absolute truth, that the so-called vaccines (1) prevent a person from catching Covid-19 and (2) keep them from passing it on to others. This, despite the fact that the pharmaceutical companies themselves openly state that the only thing their products have been proven to do is to eliminate or reduce symptoms in the tiny minority of individuals who would otherwise become ill or more seriously ill. Tests concerning the vaccines’ ability to present transmission and contagion of the disease were not performed. Try and tell people that, and it will fall on deaf ears. The denial is well-nigh total. The vaccine is a magic remedy, a silver bullet.

In short, masks, social distancing, tests and vaccines are all the results of dubious science, to say the least, and yet incredible quantities of time, energy and money are spent on them. They are thus better understood as the Praxis that follows from a Narrative that underlies a Mega-event. So the question naturally begs for an answer: where did the Mega-event come from; who or what are responsible?

Cui bono?

We will probably never know with certainty to what extent certain groups or individuals planned all or part of the Mega-event. This does not mean, it must be pointed out, that conspiracy theories are false per se, only that such claims are practically impossible to verify in practice. It is clear, at any rate, that networks of powerful people and institutions do exist and attempt to promote a particular agenda; it is their success or lack thereof that is hard to ascertain. Human actions, moreover, usually have unintended consequences, both positive and negative ones. A more promising line of research is to ask the age-old question Cui bono? Who benefits from it? To close this article, I will mention just a few possibilities in no apparent order to stimulate reflection.

The economic elites. In 2020, income distribution continued to widen. The richest people and institutions saw their wealth increase dramatically, while those in the middle and on the bottom of society lost even more of their possibilities and resources.[7] Mega-corporations profited from the temporary closing of smaller firms. The policy of printing money, so-called financial easing, has mainly benefited large banks and investment firms. Very recently, a bit more money has been distributed to the population in general, creating an illusion of an upturn, but is more likely a prelude to widespread inflation and collapse. The Mega-event has had in addition the great advantage of covering up the dramatic situation of the economy since 2008. Everything could be blamed on it, when in fact economic policies consciously decided upon in past decades had as much or more to do with the current dismal state of affairs[8].

The biomedical establishment and Big Pharma. In our day science, technology and President Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex have come together to form an interlocking unity. “Pure” scientific and medical research has very little purity left, but is increasingly at the service of specific ends. Among them are increased profits for large pharmaceutical concerns, much of which goes for advertising and is plowed back into research to satisfy the new needs which have been created. The Mega-event has been a windfall for Big Pharma, and in addition has elevated to prominence a new group of “experts” whose word is treated as infallible, as much or more so than any pope or bishop of the past.

Mainstream media. Nothing sells newspapers better than disasters. The media has known this for centuries, and the Mega-event has given them everything they could wish for. And because in our day, the mainstream media is in the hands of a small economic elite and serves essentially as the Department of Propaganda for government and industry, they have the added benefit of being official spokespersons for the Mega-event, endorsing the experts and political leaders and uncritically relaying their decrees to the population at large. They serve as the Holy Scriptures that communicate the Narrative.

The surveillance state. Here too, a trend which has been developing apace in recent years has received a new lease on life. Apps on mobile phones to locate potential carriers of the virus, databases registering the intimate behavior and characteristics of citizens and, last but not least, vaccine passports—a whole panoply of techniques accepted with few misgivings by the majority, whose critical faculties have been disabled by fear.

All of these interlocked oligarchies are benefiting significantly from the current situation. It is even easier to see who does not benefit: the proprietor of a restaurant who has gone bankrupt; a small-business owner forced to lay off most of her employees; ordinary wage-earners who have lost their jobs; psychologically fragile individuals threatened by depression, mental illness and even suicide; children growing up in a dehumanizing educational environment; overworked lower-level medical personnel; potential cancer and coronary disease patients whose diagnosis and treatment is postponed; the ill and the elderly who are forced to die alone without their loved ones. None of these groups, and they are significantly more numerous than the former ones, can possibly be responsible for the world we are creating or overjoyed to live in it.

The dictionary defines “lockdown” as “a protocol followed in an emergency that involves confining people in a secure place, such as the confinement of prison inmates in cells after a disturbance.” We are turning society into a prison in the vain attempt to eliminate the illnesses due to a putative new virus or viruses which, in the end, we will have to learn to live with, as humanity has always done in the past. In recent years, our health has been assaulted less by harmful pathogens and more by a deregulation of the immune system, whereby the body reacts to harmless stimuli or attacks its own cells and tissues. This seems to be happening now on a global scale: as was arguably the case with the “war on terror,” is not the reaction to the so-called Sars-2 virus is creating far more damage to the body politic than any virus has ever done?

Notes

[1] See Chapter II, “The Corona Timeline,” _https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-2020-worldwide-corona-crisis-destroying-civil-society-engineered-economic-depression-global-coup-detat-and-the-great-reset/5730652

[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0011721

[3] Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (1974).

[4] See the illuminating interview with Prof. Matthias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, https://www.bitchute.com/video/RIzxcU8nBYQX/

[5] For example, _https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9GccuvNs9U

[6] See “The Controversial Drosten Study” in _https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-2020-worldwide-corona-crisis-destroying-civil-society-engineered-economic-depression-global-coup-detat-and-the-great-reset/5730652

[7] “The COVID-19 pandemic has caused immense economic damage, but the harm has not been evenly felt. [...] These data [...] confirm concerns that the pandemic is exacerbating the income inequality that existed before its arrival.” _https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/311714/unequal-distribution-economic-damage-covid.aspx ; _https://inequality.org/facts/inequality-and-covid-19/

[8] Fabio Vighi, “A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Systemic Collapse and Pandemic Simulation” http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/a-self-fulfilling-prophecy-systemic-collapse-and-pandemic--simulation/

Bernard L'Hermite is the pseudonym of an outsider who, from his hilltop, views contemporary society with dismay, compassion and occasional amusement. (June 2021, updated August 2021)


Content last modified on October 02, 2021, at 01:39 AM EST