BY DAVID SOLWAY | P J MEDIA
AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
We have suffered through a year and a half of a viral
pandemic, which has become for a majority of us the Alpha and Omega of everyday
life. We think of little else and organize our lives around media-inflamed
anxiety, ever-changing medical reports, and government ordinances. We wear
masks. We put distance between ourselves and our fellows. We isolate. We line
up for what seems like a never-ending succession of jabs. We devour the News as
if it were the truth. We are victims of what is called “fear appeal,” defined
as “a persuasive message that attempts to arouse fear in order to divert
behavior through the threat of impending danger or harm.”
Yet, in our addiction to the doctrine and apparatus of
the COVID industry, far too many of us have missed the big picture. “Maybe
there is something darker and more nefarious at work,” remarks Jeffrey Tucker
in Liberty or Lockdown. For there is indeed a pandemic that has spread its
pathogens across the world and afflicted the West with a disease from which it
may not recover, a kind of viral contagion from which there may be no immediate
or even long-term escape. We are confronting a curve that may not be flattened
in the foreseeable future.
It is a political disease for which we have many
names—progressivism, Wokeism, Agenda 2030, the Great Reset, etc.—but they are
all subsumed under the aegis of the Left, which approaches in stages or
“waves.” We recall Israel’s official virologist Salman Zarka informing us that
“[t]his is our life from now on, in waves.” We might say that the Welfare State
is the first wave; “Democratic Socialism” is the second wave; full, undisguised
socialism is the third; and the absolute tyranny of Communism is the fourth.
Admittedly, the analogy with the COVID regime partially
breaks down since, in the transposition I’m proposing, the disease itself is
the object and booster shots cannot be regarded as preventative. (Many will
argue that this is the case with the medical pandemic as well, but the question
is moot.) In the correlate scenario, however, the “boosters” should be thought
of as social and cultural “injections” whose ulterior purpose is to prolong the
virulence of the political pandemic. For example, “health and safety”
mandates—that is, official rhetoric—are designed to convince the people that
they are being cared for, thus rendering them obedient and docile; or “vaccine
passports”—that is, identity papers—are intended to fracture social unity by
creating a compliant class of propagandized citizens and an outcast class
subject to harsh measures of repression and exclusion.
The parallel may not be as farfetched at it initially
seems. After all, citizens of state collectives are conditioned to regard their
political rulers as ostensible benefactors, having their best interests at
heart. Those who resist—the politically “unvaccinated”—are regarded as
malefactors, agents of subversion, enemies of the state, social pariahs, and
finally as traitors to be interned, cast out, or otherwise punished. In this
comparison, what we call “escape variants” are merely specific aspects of the
fourth wave, particular manifestations of social and political domination
applying to local conditions. The “new politics,” for which the COVID event is
a convenient stalking horse and pretext—a “dress rehearsal” for the one-party
state, writes Cheryl Chumley in Lockdown: The Socialist Plan to Take Away Your
Freedom—will have become the authoritarian dispensation under which we would be
condemned to live. And the new politics is the old politics redivivus, the
pandemic of Leftism intent on annihilating the common, democratic life of
rights and freedoms we have known and taken for granted for several generations
past.
COVID is a virus that will be with us in perpetuity, like
the common cold and the flu. The plague of Leftism in its various forms,
issuing ultimately in Communism, is also a perpetual menace, circulating around
the planet like the SARS virion. And as with any despotic regime, there will
always be privileges and exemptions enjoyed by the governing elite but not by
the governed: the freedom to break the rules, the advantage of accumulating
capital, private and unobstructed travel, special favors for family, friends
and collaborators, access to the best medical facilities, and the absolute
exercise of power—precisely as we have seen with the COVID hierarchy of medical
experts and political authorities. The official response to COVID appears to be
a strategy and preparation for something far more deadly, a pathology of
governance based on economic threat, mass surveillance, police repression, and
unitary state control, as we see developing in many Western countries such as
Australia, Canada and the U.S. under Biden. As Dr. Peter Breggin explains in
his monumental COVID-19 and the Global Predators, it is a function of “military
civil fusion [which is] the nature of the totalitarian state.”
We need to recognize that Communism advances on many
fronts and, as noted, under various denominations, in its effort to revive
Marx’s dream of global hegemony. Of course, the situation “on the ground” has
changed since Marx’s day. Its new watchword may well be: Oligarchs of the
World, Unite! But we should make no mistake about this. Leftism is a
superspreader. It is COVID by another name. It is a thought-virus with
real-world consequences. It is the true pandemic.
Of course, we will never reach Communism-zero. There are
no miracle vaccines against it, but there are therapeutic measures to halt the
scope of its diffusion. As Breggin advises, “It shouldn’t make you helpless. It
should rouse you to look with reason at what is happening in the world…unless
we unite against the implementation of this plan, there will be no happy ending
for any of us.”
Although the Leftist pathogen and its end point in
Communism cannot be eradicated, it is, like COVID, treatable by sane and
responsible measures: education, political wisdom, a knowledge of history,
personal courage, a phalanx of patriots who will not be intimidated and who
will not allow the Constitution to be trampled on, and, yes, where necessary,
militant quarantine. Recovery is possible and herd immunity may be attainable.
Or so we hope.
