The Totalitarians’ Most Successful Gambit Yet

     As I’ve said on other subjects, word gets around. Today it gets around faster than ever before in history. But a mechanism I described in that old essay is taking an uncomfortably long time to bear fruit:

     Something that people in general would want to know is something they will know, eventually. If you assist them in learning it, you will earn their gratitude. If you retard their edification, then when they've finally learned it, if they learn that you were responsible for denying them the data they need, you will reap the whirlwind.

     Now for a few links: the “words” that are starting to “get around:”

• CDC reduces COVID-19 death totals by 94%.
• Stopping COVID-19: What’s The Limit?
• A Tyranny Perpetual And Universal.

     So it’s now a matter of record – and from the Centers for Disease Control, at that – that the COVID-19 virus is about a fifth as dangerous as common influenza. Yet the nation remains gripped by fear of this relatively innocuous bug: a fear artificially produced and stoked by governments and the media. And the Left, which has been casting about for a rationale under which to destroy what remains of Americans’ freedom, is smacking its lips over its success.

“Mass unemployment” due to “automation” didn’t work.
“Deforestation” due to “acid rain” didn’t work.
The “population bomb” didn’t work.
The “energy crisis” didn’t work.
“Resource exhaustion” didn’t work.
“Eco-disaster” and “loss of species” didn’t work.
“Global warming / climate change” didn’t work.

     But this COVID-19 panic...they believe they’ve hit upon a winner there!

     I’m tired of writing encyclopedia-length articles that largely repeat arguments I’ve made and themes I’ve stressed before, so I’m going to cut this one short. But I will remind you of a statement by Argentinian novelist, journalist, and diarist Adolfo Bioy Casares, quoted by the great Thomas Szasz in his book Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America:

     “When man believed that happiness was dependent upon God, he killed for religious reasons. When he believed that happiness was dependent upon the form of government, he killed for political reasons….After dreams that were too long, true nightmares…we arrived at the present period of history. Man woke up, discovered that which we always knew, that happiness is dependent upon health, and began to kill for therapeutic reasons….It is medicine that has come to replace both religion and politics in our time.”

     Still wearing one of those pointless, useless masks, Gentle Reader?