No Lives Matter

Our dystopia is their utopia.

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

The only way to control a substantial population is to murder enough that the rest are terrified into submission. But it isn’t really the control that’s the objective, it’s the murder. At root, murder stems from a grotesque hatred of one’s self, which animates a craven fear of anything and everything, particularly death, and paradoxically, a psychotic desire to kill one’s self and every other value. Only by understanding our enemies do we have any chance of defeating them.

The twentieth century and the two decades of this one offer ample material to study the psychology of evil. In the nineteenth century, Fyodor Dostoyevsky masterfully plumbed those depths. In the barren desert that constitutes today’s intellectual life, the study of history has been discarded and great literature ignored or burned. They’re casualties in the war being waged on anything that helps us understand ourselves. In one sense Dostoyevsky couldn’t have anticipated the collectivist charnel houses of the century to follow, but in one sense he did. He knew charnel houses were the work of individual souls, and one couldn’t grasp the one without examining the other.

With many minority groups claiming historical injustices against them and demanding remedial recognition and reparation, with official endorsement by many institutions of those claims and demands, and with their propagation via all major channels of communication, no voices have been raised in support of the indisputably smallest and most persecuted minority group—the individual. “Individual” and “individual rights” are words that must not be spoken.

Any recognition of the individual draws attention to the fundamental and massive violation of individual rights stemming from coronavirus totalitarianism and governments’ encouragement of riots, vandalism, and violence. In a Peanuts cartoon, Linus exclaims, “I love mankind… it’s people I can’t stand.” The game is always the same. In the name of some collective greater good—safety, anti-racism, fill in the blank—the wealth, property, work, rights, freedom, and lives of individuals are stolen. Of course the alleged greater good is never realized, but that was never the point. The fountainhead of any collectivist ideology is the hatred these lovers of mankind have for people and their pursuit of happiness.

For coronavirus, the blueprint has been to test restrictive measures in one jurisdiction, see if they fly, and then move to universal implementation. China’s lockdown was the model for global lockdown. Sweden was condemned and smeared for refusing to follow the crowd, but its condemners have no more concern for the Swedish population than they do for any other population.

Sweden has demonstrated that lockdowns are unnecessary. Its death rate is no higher than other European countries, and would have been substantially lower, perhaps cut by one-half to three-quarters, had it done a better job of protecting its elderly and nursing home patients. Unlike Andrew Cuomo and several other Democratic governors who made the same mistake, Swedish officials have admitted theirs.

Swedish openness is antithetical to coronavirus commissars bent on propagating propaganda and enforcing draconian dictates. However, the ultimate danger to their regime will come when a vaccine arrives. After almost five months of what were supposed to be two weeks of lockdowns ostensibly sold as necessary to “flatten the curve,” it’s obvious the lockdowns are meant to prevent herd immunity, keeping people away from sunlight and fresh air, both of which bolster the immune system, and enforcing isolation and loneliness, which impair it. In other words, they’re designed to make the outbreak worse. If you’re surprised—regular readers won’t be—welcome to reality.

When the vaccine arrives, the Swedish people will have achieved herd immunity (apparently they already have in urban centers), which traditionally has been the way humanity has dealt with viruses. An immune herd doesn’t need a vaccine and while the Swedish government probably won’t prevent anyone who wants one from getting one, it probably won’t be mandatory, unlike most of the rest of the world.

That will prompt unwelcome questions among the thinking remnant. If herd immunity works, why did we have to lockdown? Why can’t we just complete the herd immunization we’ve already started? Will a vaccine, like lockdowns, make the outbreak worse? Why are we running the risks and bearing the enormous expense of a vaccine that’s been rushed to market and inadequately tested, will be only partially effective, will be adulterated with unhealthy preservatives and adjuvants, and will undoubtedly have unanticipated side effects, some of which may be severe? What’s the rights-destructive, life-threatening agenda behind the vaccine?

While China was the beta test for lockdowns, apparently New Zealand and Australia serve as such for the next iteration of totalitarianism. China’s draconian measures were instituted in Wuhan, which actually had a serious coronavirus outbreak. New Zealand’s and Australia’s coronavirus death rates are infinitesimal: 4 per million in the former, 18 per million in the latter (Worldometers.info). Despite these scant numbers, New Zealand is under lockdown and has postponed an election (nobody has died of the coronavirus since May) and Melbourne has instituted, “the harshest lockdown conditions of all Western democracies” (“Letters From Melbourne, a ‘Ghost Town Police State’ Under Brutal Covid Lockdown,” Robert Bridge, strategic-culture.org). Here are Melbourne’s restrictions, the preview of coming attractions that will eventually be rolled out around the globe:

Despite the extremely low death rate, Melbourne residents – or shall we call them what they really are, prisoners – must adhere to the following rules:

– No traveling more than 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) from their homes;

– No traveling to other states inside of the country;

– Those under house arrest are permitted to leave home for just one hour each day for exercise;

– Only one person is permitted to go shopping per family each day; shopping is to be done within 5 kilometers from home;

– Unlike traditional prisons, visitations are not permitted to house arrestees;

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– All school activities are to be conducted online;

– All businesses, services and construction cancelled;

– Organized sport, forget it;

– In the case of funerals, try and delay your demise if at all possible, otherwise, expect just 10 guests;

– Ditto for weddings;

– Curfew in effect between 8 pm and 5 am.

These restrictions will be in place for (at least) six weeks.

“Letters From Melbourne, a ‘Ghost Town Police State’ Under Brutal Covid Lockdown,” Bridge

So much for pompous invocations of the “traditional Anglo-American protection of freedom and individual rights.” It also gives the lie to the desperate delusion to which millions still cling: that these measures have something to do with health and safety. They are all about power and control, which is why their proponents are uninterested in research that demonstrates their measures are ineffective or counterproductive (or demonstrate that the cheap, readily available drug hydroxychloroquine, used with an antibiotic and zinc, is an effective prophylactic and treatment), and censor such research. In the US, that hypocritical indifference was made clear when coronavirus totalitarianism was relaxed for politically approved George Floyd protests and riots.

The often unstated objective of power and control is death. It’s easier to see when rioters are allowed to loot, destroy, and murder with impunity. Coronavirus killers hide behind doctors, scientists, and public health officials making scary predictions and pronouncements, “greater good” justifications for bankruptcy, unemployment, and misery, cloying propaganda that turns professionals charged with caring for the afflicted into “heroes” for caring for the afflicted, and sheep-like compliance with draconian, ineffective, freedom-destructive edicts to combat tiny risks. It’s the difference between a quick execution and slow but deadly poisoning.

You see it on the Internet videos of once great cities—New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Portland, Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, St. Louis—in their death throes. Coronavirus totalitarianism and the riots should be listed as causes of death, but there is common underlying comorbidity: statist collectivism. The productive tax base is fleeing, but it’s been milked and extorted for years by profligate, corrupt Democrat politicians (all of the above cited cities have been run by Democrats for decades) to line their pockets and buy votes. From each according to his ability to each according to his vote.

The heretofore insulated elites who prattle about social justice and defunding the police are now beset by “social justice warriors” destroying their neighborhoods, looting their shopping districts, and brutalizing innocents as pleas for protection go unanswered. The police-maintained barrier between the ghettos and the high-rent districts has been breached by thugs who drive, cell phones, instant messaging, flash riots, random destruction and violence, and plenty of cash and firearms. It won’t be restored and the elites know it. They can hire private security and hunker down or they can flee. A substantial percentage are fleeing.

The rest of us watch the urban detritus videos in horror: homeless encampments stretching for blocks, boarded up stores and restaurants, beggars, food lines, thieves, random violence, impoverished mothers and children, people urinating, defecating, masturbating, and shooting up in full view, discarded needles, broken windows, abandoned and burnt-out buildings, decimated neighborhoods, and the ubiquitous cockroaches and rats. Only if you understand that this is what the collectivists had in mind can you understand the chaos and unfathomable evil enveloping the world. Our dystopia is their utopia.

The carnage, chaos, and collapse in full bloom in American cities are the sum and substance of what the statist collectivists want. Is this the prelude to the imposition of a totalitarian order? By whom and with what? The cities are technically bankrupt, burdened with medical and pension promises they couldn’t pay when they had economies and tax bases, and now both are withering. They could turn to their respective states, but the states are in no better shape. That leaves the federal government—the world’s biggest debtor—and its magic central bank. They can create debt and exchange it between themselves but neither can create a dime’s worth of real production or employment. Anybody see the flaws in this arrangement?

That supposedly leaves only a totalitarian global superstate, headed by statist collectivists, to impose its brand of order, which is just another brand of death. A totalitarian global superstate and its cash-abolishing, cryptocurrency-issuing, transaction-monitoring central bank will still have the same old problem: neither one can create a dime’s worth of real production or employment. A fiat cryptocurrency is still a fiat currency and will go the way of all fiat currencies—debasement to worthlessness (see “Doubling Down On Failed Policies With Central Bank Digital Currencies,” Alasdair Macleod, goldmoney.com).

They’ll have what they call a demand management problem, that is, a lot of desperate, hungry people. One way to manage demand is to eliminate it, so expect them to take up the sport of tyrants—killing people—in earnest. They may clear homeless encampments with bulldozers without bothering to move the inhabitants out of their tents and boxes. Their vaccines might have side effects that wipe out a few million or billion—sacrifices must be made for the greater good (the tyrants will of course be exempt from such sacrifices). Perhaps a war or two. Records set by Hitler, Stalin, and Mao will be in jeopardy. They could Soylent Green their victims to feed the rest of the population; they’ll have to keep some of the drones alive.

Free, self-interested, productive people in a capitalist economy will always figure out ways to feed themselves and make their lives better. Collectivist statism brings only poverty, starvation, horror, and death. Beneath their rhetoric that’s what its proponents want. It’s better to realize this before the boarding calls for the socially distanced cattle cars and the socially distanced line for the gas chambers.

Power, as they like to remind us, grows out of a barrel of a gun, but moral legitimacy ends when that gun is aimed at the innocent. Nothing good has or ever will come from such evil. Dostoyevsky knew that it’s not history, or a socioeconomic system, or a political ideology from which evil flows, it’s the human soul. Recognize the homicidal-suicidal souls among us for what they are.

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