BY JEREMY SALT
In H.G.Wells’ science fiction novel of 1898, The War of the Worlds, the aliens came from outer space. Now they are not only among us but they are us. They might be such a tiny minority that in the great mass of human life on this planet they would be invisible, but few as they are, it is they and not we who have their hands on all the levers of power. They are predators and we the prey, to be farmed and harvested for our labor and our consumption of their products.
They have now mobilized for the greatest assault on our freedoms in human history, through the use of the oldest but most powerful weapon ever used against we the people by the kings, the princes, the bishops, the priests and in modern times, the governments, the politicians, the media and the international institutions. Fear.
In the medieval world we could not see god or the devil but the priests and bishops knew they were there and threatened us with God’s punishment in the next world if we did not behave in this one. The kings and princes added punishment in this life to the one beyond. Terrorized by the state and the church, the people did as they were told. Those who did not and refused to recant were taken to the scaffold, burnt at the stake or thrown into a dungeon to rot forever. The determination to crush dissent when it becomes too dangerous flows on from the Spanish Holy Office of the Inquisition in the 15th century to the English Star Chamber in the 16th, Stalin’s show trials of the 20th and the judicial persecution of Julian Assange in the early 21st. Now we have the virus and the suppression of anyone who chales governments and their selected priest doctors and scientists.
We have always shared the planet with viruses and people have always died from them, sometimes in enormous numbers but not this time. In Australia, as of December 31, 2020, 0.003645 % of the population; in Italy, 0.12180 %, in the UK 0.10928 %; in the US, 0.10463 % and France 0.09630 %.
As much as each death is to be regretted, these are hardly huge numbers. The Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-20 killed perhaps 50 million people (overall death rate is based only on estimates) out of a global population of slightly under two billion. By the end of December, 2020, COVID-19 was held responsible for the deaths of just over 1.8 million people out of a world population of 7.794 billion.
This is not to say that COVID-19 is not to be taken seriously as a health issue, only that the threat and the response have to be kept in context, which is something governments, health ‘experts’ and the media have no interest in talking about. Put in context, people might start to calm down.
Scientific quicksand
The basis of much of what the people are being told is scientific quicksand. Infection rates rise or fall depending on how many people a government chooses to test. The infection might be mild or not even felt at all but ‘infection rate soars’ or ‘new cluster found’ headlines are enough to set off a new round of panic.
Very few people are dying just ‘from’ the virus, as claimed over months by governments and the WHO. Comorbidities are involved in almost all cases, with the aged (70 and over) worst affected. The underlying cause of death is generally a combination of a body weakened by age and serious disease and finally tipped over the edge by the virus.
According to the official advice given by the World Health Organization (WHO) “a death due to COVID-19 may not be attributed to another disease (e.g. cancer) and should be counted independently of pre-existing conditions that are suspected course of COVID-19.” However, “specification of the causal sequence leading to death is important … for example in cases where COVID-19 causes pneumonia, sepsis and acute respiratory distress, then pneumonia, sepsis and acute respiratory distress should be included [on the death certificate] … COVID-19 should be recorded on the certificate as a cause of death where the disease caused or is assumed to have caused or contributed to death.”
In Australia an ‘assumption’ is also the basis of listing COVID-19 on the death certificate as ‘a’ cause or ‘the’ cause of death. In the UK the doctor can decide the cause of death on “the balance of probabilities.” A distinction is made between a ‘contributory’ cause of death and the ‘underlying’ cause. The doctor certifying death “can” (not ‘must’) list all causes in the chaIn of events that lead to death, including pre-existing conditions that may have “contributed” to death.
Essentially, however, determining the ‘underlying’ cause of death boils down to the doctor’s judgment. This surely could be complicated when the patient is already suffering from other illnesses than can cause death from respiratory failure, including influenza, pneumonia, asthma, emphysema, chronic bronchitis, morbid obesity, pulmonary fibrosis and cystic fibrosis.
Comorbidities and the distinction between ‘contributory’ and ‘underlying’ causes of death are almost uniformly ignored by a media homing in just on deaths ‘from’ COVID-19 and the rising number of infections. The figures splashed into the headlines are not based on data systematically collected from the population but on the number of people who choose to come foward to be tested. The number of infections rises or falls accordingly.
Britain’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) reveals that in England and Wales, the overall death rate from all causes in 2020 (531, 829) was only slightly higher than 2019 (530,841) but lower than 2018 (541,589) and 2017 (533, 253). The 988 additional deaths in 2020 represent an increase of 0.1861 per cent over the figure for 2019. Yet the official death toll from COVID-19 for 2020, as registered on January 4, 2021, was 75,024. This is puzzling when the increase in the overall death toll for 2020 over 2019 was so small, but the statistics are all there for the reader to dive in and try to make some sense of them.
According to the World Doctors’ Alliance (WDA), grouping together 61,258 medical health professionals, doctors in in the UK do not even physically have to see the deceased to sign the death certificate. [1] There are no autopsies and, the WDA says, even the staff in care homes can give the virus as the cause of death.
A British journalist, Julia Hartley-Brewer, is now being subjected to public abuse for pointing out (not claiming) that according to the National Health Service’s own statistics, “just 377 healthy people under the age of 60 have died of Covid.” In Australia, noone under the age of 20 has died. Deaths under the age of 60 in Australia are as follows: 20-29, two; 30-39, two; 46-49, two; 50-59, fifteen. What the historian Geoffrey Blainey has called “the tyranny of distance” has worked well for Australia, an island continent surrounded by a cordon sanitaire of water. Perhaps this has been far more effective in keeping the spread of infections down rather than masking, closures, lockdowns and other measures that the state governments have used.
The WDA claims (December 23, 2020) that at no point was Britain’s National Health Service in danger of being overwhelmed in 2020. In fact, while the number of deaths dropped significantly in summer and early autumn, they rose again as winter set in. According to the ONS, by December 18 COVID-19 had been “mentioned” on the death certificates of 82,957 people, with 68,000 dying within 28 days of testing positive for the virus. As the unreliability of the PCR test, resulting in a high number of false positives, has now been widely acknowledged, this connection between positive test results and death is clearly open to questioning.
Again, none of this is to say that the virus has not been a serious health issue, the reductio ad absurdum argument used against critics of the mainstream government/media narrative, only that a sharply focussed approach, protecting the elderly and the medically vulnerable, and letting everyone else get on with their lives as far as possible, would surely have been a far more sane way to handle the outbreak than a panic-inducing response which has wreaked social and economic havoc around the world and enabled governments to crush human rights by using the thuggish methods of the totalitarian police state.
These are only some of the issues that need to be kept in mind but the fear deliberately generated by governments and the media is so great that people have been terrorized into silence, with those who dare to ask necessary questions being thrown aside as conspiracy theorists.
Coexisting with viruses
Fear of the virus has been used to blind people to a basic fact Viruses are as natural a growth on this planet as we are. We humans have developed an immune system to overcome them. Impelled to survive just as much as we are, they cope by mutating as soon as an old form is threatened.
Now and then a virus will take root that we cannot control because it is foreign to our environment. Viruses carried around the globe by expanding imperial European states were the footsoldiers of imperialism. Some viruses are so alien that they overwhelm the human system and can only be overwhelmed by a vaccine.
In the past four decades Ebola, the AIDS virus and SARS have thrown the world into recurrent bouts of panic. This has been a learning curve for pharmaceutical companies striving to be the first to develop a vaccine. If the threat of viral infection can be maintained in the public mind, they stand on the brink of harvesting profits comparable to if not even greater than the wealth harvested by the oil corporations during the energy crisis of the 1970s. Whether a vaccine is really necessary to control the current outbreak is part of the tug of war between governments and pharmaceutical companies at one end and dissident epidemiogists and virologists at the other. The risks attendant on the use of the COVID-19 vaccines have been drawn out by a number of writers [2] but are rarely discussed in any critical detail in the media mainstream.
Some of the best virological and sociological research available indicates that many of the measures governments have taken to control COVID-9 on the advice of their health experts, including masking, lockdowns and school closures, are unnecessary, ineffective or counter-productive.
By August, 2020, even the WHO’s special envoy on COVID-19, Dr David Nabarro, was urging world leaders to stop using lockdowns “as your primary control method,” partly because of the devastating economic consequences. [3] Although he said the WHO did not advocate them, governments have continued to use them, using the threat of prosecution and police violence to suppress dissent.
Safe medicines that can suppress symptoms of the virus have been around for decades and have been used successfully by some governments. They could have been used more widely this time but have been shunned and derided. After all, if they can be shown to be successful, what will the point be of all those vaccines the governments and the media are telling us we must have?
Playing up, playing down …
Much of what people might like to know about human life and death on this planet is generally unknown because governments and the media only relay what they want them to know. This should surprise noone, of course. Governments have a long history of deceit, dissembling and telling outright lies and the media history of packaging and selling the lies is just as long.
Not long after 9/11 a team of Scandinavian scientists analysed samples of the dust from the World Trade Centre and found “unreacted thermitic material incorporating nanotechnology and a highly energetic pyrotechnic or explosive material.”[4] The destruction of the twin towers was one of the most shocking events in modern history but the media showed no interest trying to find out where these particles might have come from. It was similarly disinterested in finding out how it was the ‘dancing Israelis’ were standing by in a car park waiting for the towers to come down.
Engineers based at the University of Alaska have just proved beyond any doubt that building 7 was not destroyed by fire but by “a global failure involving the near simultaneous failure of every column in the buildng.”[5] Again the media is not interested in trying to find who might have put these explosives there, and why.
Now the media is playing the same game over COVID 19 but dramatizing the threat for maximum effect, not playing the story down to minimal effect. Medical specialists who challenge the official narrative as relayed by the media are abused and dismissed as cranks, even if their qualifications are as good as or superior to those of the government’s selected experts. Although hydroxychloroquine is a safe drug that has been around for decades and has been used effectively in a number of countries to suppress the symptoms of COVID-19, Didier Raoult, a specialist in the containment of infectious diseases and one of France’s most senior medical reseachers, is now facing disciplinary action for recommending its use.
Dissent by members of the public is crushed through the threat of prosecution and/or the use of police force, including the smashing of front doors of houses to get at people protesting against lockdowns on social media or planning demonstrations.
What was inconceivable before in ‘democracies’ is no longer inconceivable. Out of fear no questions have been asked of what is absolutely questionable, including the claim that people were dying just ‘from’ the virus, that the young were threatened as well as the old, that masks had to be worn (against the WHO’s recommendation up to about July that masks should not be worn in any circumstances), that schools had to be closed (regarded as damaging to the young at several levels), and that societies had to be locked down.
Everywhere the foundations of human rights and ‘civil society’ have been undermined in the name of containing the virus.
Governments have passed emergency decrees allowing them to do whatever they decide without consulting the people: in the name of saving lives, they have destroyed livelihoods, wrecked economies and put lives at risk, but because of the fear they have generated they have got away with it. People everywhere have closed down their minds, not just because they refuse to think for themselves but because they do not want to think for themselves. They have huddled together and allowed the state and even one leader to think for them. With the approval of the state, they have even turned themselves into snitches and informers. This abject surrender of the individual will is a frightening recrudesence of what we saw in the 1930s.
Financial ‘Armageddon’
Financial crisis, pandemic, fear and the ‘great reset’ – a coincidence, occurring so close to each other from late 2019 or the outcome of manipulation by hidden hands, pulling the wires that control the public mind, as Edward Bernays wrote in the 1920s?
The financial crisis in the US was prevented from turning into a full-blown catastrophe only by the inervention of the Federal Reserve. Pam and Russ Martens, writing in Wall Street on Parade on January 27, pointed out that since September 17, 2019, the New York Federal Reserve had funnelled $6.6 trillion dollars into some of the 24 Wall Street trading houses known as ‘primary dealers.’ Thus the money went not to commercial banks that lend for productive purposes but speculators.
This extraordinary amount of cash was sent even to financial institutions found guilty of malpractice, including J.P. Morgan, which in September, 2020, agreed to pay nearly $1 billion to settle charges of fraud and unlawful trading by traders and other personnel who over nearly a decade had “openly disregarded US laws designed to stop illegal activity,” as the judgment found.
This near collapse in the financial sector followed a decade after the crisis of 2007-8. According to the Martens’, again, from December, 2007, to July 21, 2010, the Federal Reserve handed out $19.559 trillion to Wall Street trading houses plus another $10 trillion in central bank liquidity swaps, a total of more than $29 trillion. American taxpayers were entitled to ask where this extraordinary amount of money came from and why corporations profiting in a capitalist market should be saved at their expense. According to the rules of their own game, they should have been allowed to collapse.
According to a former governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King (Lord King), speaking on October 20,2019, the world economy was sleepwalking towards a new financial and economic crisis that would have devastating consequences for the “democratic” market system. The US would face a “financial Armageddon” if the Federal Reserve lacked the firepower to head off another sub-prime mortgage sell-off. “We”, he wrote, had entered the “Great Stagnation” and there was a need for action on many policy levels.
What the American people would have thought of this second massive bailout in a decade, and what others would have thought of these grim predictions, we don’t know because world attention was almost immediately diverted by a threat not just to homes and jobs as in 2007-8 but to lives.
Meeting in New York on October 18, the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security, the Woels Economic Forum (WEF) and the Bill and Melinda Gates had only recently held a pandemic planning exercise (‘Event 201’) when the virus that came to be known as COVID-19 surfaced in China. The first case was reported in Hubei province on November 17 but by the end of December, world attention had shifted to Wuhan and the alleged transference to humans of a virus from a bat or a pangolin in the city’s ‘wet’ markets. Soon, however, claims were being made that the virus had also been detected in Italy as early as November.
Claims were also made that the virus had been created in a biological research laboratory, perhaps the one run jointly by the US and China in Wuhan or the lab at the US mlitary base at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Dr Luc Montagnier, the French virologist and Nobel laureate who co-discovered the AIDS virus, believes the virus did not emerge in nature but was produced in a lab. On the basis of his research, he found that the virus genome has elements of HIV and malaria, which is not possible in naturally-occurring viruses and in his view, had to be the result of external intervention.
Fear and panic generated by governments and maintained month after month by the media swept the ‘western’ world. Between the rival claims of state health officials and dissident epidemiologists it was extremely difficult even for those asking questions to understand what was really going on.
Windows of opportunity
Already by 2016 Klaus Schwab, founder of the WEF in 1971 had published a book on the “fourth industrial revolution.” This was to be the foundation of the “great reset”, announced in May, 2020, with Schwab describing the pandemic as “a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine and reset our world.” Digitalization, nanotechnology, transhumanism, robotics, a cashless society and working from home instead of the office were among the markers of the new society to come. Small businesses incapable of adjusting would go under, but out of the dross and debris would rise something much more beneficial to humanity at large, to women, to childen, to the sick and those in need and to the environment.
The ‘great reset’ was immediately embraced by the corporations, the financial institutions and the World Bank. Goldman Sachs produced a research paper which looked forward to the company filling the ‘’empty spaces’’ left behind by collapsed businesses. On its front cover Time magazine depicted the ‘great reset’ as a world surrounded by scaffolding on which workmen in overalls reshaped the future.
This widespread approval at the top was inevitably counterbalanced by the suspicion of skeptical minds at the bottom. Even without delving into the origins and consequences of the second and third industrial revolutions, had not the same promises of a better and brighter world been made by the same class of people after the first, beginning in the late 18th century?
Charles Dickens and Friedrich Engels (The Condition of the Working Class in England) described the real outcome. Enrichment for the few on one hand and on the other, exploitation, child labor in factories and coal mines, slums and the poor house, filth and raw sewage in the streets, impoverishment and execution for petty crimes. The clan system of Scotland was almost destroyed because the lairds wanted sheep on their land, not people. An entire rural population was escorted under police guard to the beaches and shipped off to the colonies.
Economists had long seen the second wave of financial collapse coming and believed it would be more destructive than the first. This close call for the financial institutions was followed by Mervyn King’s warning that the “democratic” market system was rapidly heading towards meltdown. The inseparability of the two indicated that the system as a whole could no longer be patched up but would have to be reconstructed.
It is that this point that these seemingly separate but sequential developments appear to be organically linked rather than occurring coincidentally. Hitler called the Reichstag fire of 1933 “manna from the skies.” Condoleeza Rice described 9/11 as an opportunity “we” can’t miss. For Klaus Schwab COVID-19 appeared as a “window of opportunity’’ to reshape the world. The first of these three “opportunities” led to a world war and the second to widespread death and destruction in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries, so we are entitled to be skeptical about where the third might lead. Following financial crisis, the appearance of the virus was fortuitous, a key allowing Klaus Schwab to open the “window of opportunity” to his “great reset.”
There are conspiracy theories but there are also conspiracies. Governments routinely hide the truth in a haystack of lies, determined that we should never find it. They engage in conspiracies all the time, against each other and against we the people. Success, if they are never caught out, emboldens them to go even further.
In the battle between what we believe is our right to know and government determination to hide what it does not want us to know, we have to continue digging for the truth as best as we can. Who stands to benefit from this virus-ignited ‘great reset,’ we the people or governments, corporations, pharmaceutical companies and international institutions forfeiting their identity to the corporate world?
The manipulation of a health issue has precipitated the destruction of rights and freedoms on a global scale. There is no precedent for this outside Orwell. Having set up unprecedented levels of oppression through fear generated over a viral outbreak, governments have a template for holding us all in bondage for as long as they like, unless and until we the people rise up and say “no.”
This is our world, not theirs, and if we don’t reclaim it, we will lose it.
Endnotes
[1] www.http//worlddoctorsalliance.com
[2] See for example https://www.globalresearch.ca/what-not-said-pfizer-coronavirus-vaccine/5729461
[4] Niels H. Harrit et. al., ‘Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Centre Cayastrophe,’ The Open Chemical Physics Journal, 2009, 2, 7-341.
[5] J. Leroy Hulsey, lead investigator, and others, ‘A Structural Reevaluation of the Collapse of World Trade Centre 7,’ Institute of Northern Engineering, University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
WRITER
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