Joseph Mercola - The Truth About COVID-19

Government technocrats, billionaire oligarchs, Big Pharma, Big Data, Big Media, the high-finance robber barons, and the military industrial intelligence apparatus love pandemics for the same reasons they love wars and terrorist attacks. Catastrophic crises create opportunities of convenience to increase both power and wealth. In her seminal book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein chronicles how authoritarian demagogues, large corporations, and wealthy plutocrats use mass disruptions to shift wealth upwards, obliterate the middle classes, abolish civil rights, privatize the commons, and expand authoritarian controls.

A consummate insider, the former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel is known for his admonition that vested power structures should never let a serious crisis to go to waste. But this tread-worn strategyto use crisis to inflame the public terror that paves the road to dictatorial powerhas served as the central strategy of totalitarian systems for the millennia.

The methodology is, in fact, formulaic, as Hitlers Luftwaffe commander, Hermann Gring, explained during the Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremberg: It is always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it is a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same in any country.

The Nazis pointed to the threats from Jews and Gypsies to justify the homicidal authoritarianism in the Third Reich. The dictatorial demagogue, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the HUAC committee warned against communist infiltration of the State Department and film industry to rationalize loyalty oaths and the blacklist. Dick Cheney used the 911 attack to launch his long war against amorphous terrorism and the Patriot Act abridgments that laid the groundwork for the modern surveillance state. Now the medical cartel and its billionaire Big Tech accomplices have invoked the most potent, frightening, and enduring enemy of allthe microbe.

And who can blame them? Increasing the wealth and power of the oligarchy is seldom a potent vessel for populism. Citizens accustomed to voting for their governments are unlikely to support policies that make the rich richer, increase political and social control by corporations, diminish democracy, and reduce their civil rights. So demagogues must weaponize fear to justify their demands for blind obedience and to win public acquiescence for the demolition of civil and economic rights.

Of course, the first casualty must always be freedom of speech. After stoking sufficient panic against the hobgoblin du jour, robber barons need to silence protest against their wealth and power grabs.

In including free speech in the First Amendment of the Constitution, James Madison argued that all our other liberties depend on this right. Any government that can hide its mischief has license to commit atrocities.

As soon as they get hold of the levers of authority, tyrants impose Orwellian censorship and begin gaslighting dissenters. But ultimately they seek to abolish all forms of creative thinking and self-expression. They burn books, destroy art, kill writers, poets, and intellectuals, outlaw gatherings, and at their worst, force oppressed minorities to wear masks that atomize any sense of community or solidarity and prevent the subtle, eloquent nonverbal communication for which God and evolution have equipped humans with 42 facial muscles. The most savage Middle Eastern theocracies mandate masks for women, whose legal statusnot coincidentallyis as chattels.

The free flow of information and self-expression are oxygen and sunlight for representative democracy, which functions best with policies annealed in the boiling cauldron of public debate. It is axiomatic that without free speech, democracy withers.

The most iconic and revered monuments of democracy therefore include the Athenian Agora and Speakers Corner at Hyde Park. We cant help feeling exhilaration about our noble experiment in self-government when we witness the boisterous, irreverent debates in the House of Commons, or watch Jimmy Stewarts filibuster scene in