REPEATING THE PAST

 

          From the beginning, the most disturbing aspect of the COVIDian dystopia was the ease with which citizens in free countries accepted the edicts and mandates of government bureaucrats and public health officials.  Public gathering in theaters and arenas ended overnight, restaurants and bars were closed, schools emptied, churches were locked, millions of businesses got shut down, many of which would never reopen.  Here and there, a few rebels appeared---a gym in New Jersey that defied the government, a pastor in California who wouldn’t shut his church, a few restaurants that tried to stay open, under the radar.  Almost all were crushed by the authorities.

          And as we now know, there was never much justification for any of the mandates or the crushing of our traditional civil liberties.  When Anthony Fauci decided, in April 2020, that we all had to wear masks, there was zero scientific basis for believing that mask-wearing could prevent the spread of respiratory viruses.  Later, a number of pharma-funded and government-funded studies (none of which were peer-reviewed), were published in order to support the mask mandates, but there was never a time when the weight of the evidence could be read to support masking.

          Social distancing?  Well, it’s true that if you are far enough away from a sick person (a mile?), you won’t catch their cooties.  But “six feet” was purely arbitrary.  In other countries, it was one meter, or two meters, or 1.5 meters.

          Then, of course, there were the vaccines, and the vaccine mandates.  Here, “effectiveness” was the mask behind which all the lies and half-truths were told.  We all thought “effectiveness” meant that if you got the shot, you wouldn’t get the disease, or even if you did, you couldn’t pass it on to somebody else.  We were told that repeatedly on TV, on the internet, in newspapers---everywhere.  We are still being told that.  Rachel Walensky, CDC boss, told both these lies to Congress one week ago, on June 13.  But she knew in November 2020 that the vax would not stop anybody from getting COVID or transmitting it because that’s what Pfizer told the CDC.  Those pre-vaccine Pfizer documents are public now, released through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, but Walensky saw those documents before the first shots were authorized.

          Still, you were forced to get the shot.  People were fired from their jobs for not getting the shot.  Soldiers (all volunteers, remember, who chose to serve their country), were kicked out of the service.  The unvaxxed were ostracized, demonized, scorned by their friends and family, and scolded by the president and other government officials.  “It’s YOUR fault,” they said.  (And that’s just here in the U.S.; in other countries, the unvaxxed were treated much worse.)      

          Finally, there was “asymptomatic spread,” which made all the restrictions on perfectly healthy individuals necessary.  Fauci was undoubtedly correct when he said in February 2020 that asymptomatic spread was so unlikely it was not worth worrying about.  But two months later, after several apocryphal anecdotes were circulated (remember the woman who unknowingly carried the virus on a flight from Seoul to Frankfurt?), it became the basis for all the mandates.  Healthy people were dangerous!  Stay in your bubble, goddammit!!

 

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          Some people are primarily remembered for a single quotation.  That is the case with George Santayana and his famous gag: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

          And that is what we have done with the public health establishment and the public health rationale.  We have failed to remember.  The history of “public health” over the past century is primarily a story of abuse, the abolition of liberty, mutilation, and mass murder.  And yet, we all did what we were told to do when COVID came along, and we did it without question.

          The public health rationale has always been a popular tool for tyrants since it can be used to justify virtually any suppression of fundamental human rights.  In the Soviet Union, political dissenters were put in mental hospitals on the theory that their sick ideas about freedom might infect other people’s minds and undermine the communist state.  In other words, this was a public health policy.

          For the Third Reich, the Jews represented a public health crisis because of the possibility their “blood” might mix with the blood of white Aryans and pollute the superior racial purity of the German people.  Again, the extermination of the Jews was an explicit public health campaign.        

          Ah, but we’re not like Stalin and Hitler, are we?  Sure there might be occasional excesses or mistakes in America, but we’re not monsters, right?

          But much of the intellectual underpinning for the extermination of the Jews came from the American eugenics movement of the 1919s, 20s, and 30s, which championed the forced sterilization of the “feeble minded” and of “moral defectives.”  The movement, also called Scientific Racism, was based at Harvard where its most enthusiastic proponent was the highly-respected Charles William Eliot, president emeritus of the college.  Other prominent names were Stanford President David Starr Jordan, Yale economist Irving Fischer, and Margaret Sanger, who later founded Planned Parenthood and was primarily concerned with finding ways to prevent black people from reproducing so much.  There was little dissent in academia to the basic concept of eugenics, which was that we must prevent our DNA from being polluted by idiots and people of undesirable racial and ethnic ancestry.

          The fruit of this poisoned tree was the forced sterilization of about 70,000 Americans in the 20^th Century.  The practice was even approved by our Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell, a case decided in 1927, where Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”  Twenty years later, Nazi defendants in the Nuremberg trials cited Buck v. Bell in defense of their actions.

          Is any of this so different from what we did to “slow the spread?”  Or what the Chinese did as part of their “no-COVID” approach, when doors of apartment houses were bolted so people were trapped and no one could violate lockdown orders?  In Australia, which was not previously thought of as a totalitarian state, citizens were plucked off the street by police for being unmasked or unvaxxed and stuck in “quarantine camps” for weeks, with no legal process.

          The allure of the public health rationale is irresistible for those who know what’s best for us and are extremely irritated by our traditional freedom to ignore their scolding. This is at least partly the reason for the intrusion of governments into the medical/hospital business over the last sixty years.  Public health used to be concerned primarily with trying to control the spread of deadly infectious diseases.  But now that we are all, to some extent, paying each other’s medical bills, the argument is that I’m on the hook if you eat too many potato chips, so I can use the law to make you stop.

          This is why buckling your seatbelt is now a “public health problem,” as is whether you are depressed, whether you have guns in the house (a question I am asked every time I go to the doctor), how much you drink, what sort of recreational drugs you take, whether you wear a helmet when you ride your bike or motorcycle, how much red meat you consume, whether you belong to a gym, whether you smoke, and how much you watch TV.  All these things used to be your business, remember?

          And don’t forget: have you had your COVID shots?  And your booster?  And your second booster? And your fifth?

          (I hear an objection in the back row---that vaccines are a traditional role of public health, and not some modern attempt to expand the definition.  However, that was when vaccines were designed to prevent you from getting a disease.  Now that we have COVID vaccines that don’t protect you from getting COVID and don’t stop you from transmitting it once you catch it, it’s not obvious what their purpose is, but it sure ain’t “public health.”)

          We are already being warned by the really, really smart guys at Davos, as well as our more-local totalitarians, that the next pandemic is coming and we have to be ready for it, or that climate change is going to create crises that will require new sacrifices from all of us.  They are counting on us to forget the recent past.

          And I worry that we will forget.  Fear will be used, again, to make us forget and secure our acquiescence.  Fear works.  It usually does.  The problem is, as my friend Yoda put it, “Fear is the path to the dark side.”

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki