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When Will They Ever Learn?

by Thorsteinn Siglaugsson
22 March 2023 1:00 PM

Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing?
Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago?
Where have all the flowers gone?
Young girls have picked them everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

I’ve listened to Marlene Dietrich sing this song more often than I can remember, but it never fails to send chills down my spine. The first three verses were written by Peter Seeger in 1955, but it was Joe Hickerson who added the final two in 1960, making it a circular song; the flowers are picked for the soldiers resting in the graveyards, then they grow again on those same graveyards, only to be picked again for yet new soldiers, ad infinitum:

Where have all the graveyards gone, long time passing?
Where have all the graveyards gone, long time ago?
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Gone to flowers, everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

A couple of weeks ago an Icelandic survey showed how 93% of the population still believe all the restrictions, lockdowns, border closures and travel bans of the last three years were fully justified; that they were inevitable. No matter if our next-neighbouring country, the Faroe Islands, didn’t do it and did better than us. No matter if our Swedish neighbours didn’t do it, also doing much better than us. Still, they believe it.

When will they ever learn?

I thought of this when I saw Alex Berenson’s account of a new New York Times interview with Bill Gates. Gates has learned all the wrong lessons from Covid, Berenson says, and he has the power to drive public health policy in dangerous directions.

Apparently, Gates is terrified of what the next pandemic might bring. If it will spread through surface droplets, be sexually transmitted, if it will be the result of bioterrorism. To prepare, Gates wants a Global Emergency Corps:

The Emergency Corps plans to run drills to practice for outbreaks. The exercises will make sure that everyone — governments, health care providers, emergency health workers — knows what to do when a potential outbreak emerges.

In other words, it looks as if Gates has fallen into the trap of panicking about a very scary, but highly improbable, almost impossible event, and lost sight of everything else.

When will he ever learn?

Marlene Dietrich’s interpretation of ‘Where have all the flowers gone’ has unique depth to it. Perhaps because during World War II she travelled through Europe and sang to the soldiers, to those very soldiers for whose graves the flowers were picked, and on whose graves they grew again.

“When will they ever learn?”

Who are “they”? It isn’t the generals, the dictators. “They” are the soldiers who head to the battlefield instead of refusing to, their sweethearts who pick the flowers for their graves instead of forbidding them to leave. For war doesn’t happen without soldiers, and, as Lysistrata teaches us it doesn’t happen without their sweethearts either; war can only happen with the support of people, or with their indifference.

It happens, again and again, and it happens because of all of us.

When will we ever learn?

At the outset, the coronavirus pandemic was likened to a war. A war against an invisible enemy. Soon enough it turned into a civil war; a war between the masked and the unmasked, between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. Almost from the start, it was a war against truth. A war against reason. A war against decency. Against humanity.

In his classic They Thought They Were Free Milton Mayer describes the views of his German Nazi friends after the war. Their country in ruins, they were still unable to face the true reason for the devastation; the pure madness that had gripped not only the leaders but a large part of the population. “Yes, perhaps a few mistakes were made” they might mumble, but that was it. No reckoning, no realisation of what had been done, not only to the victims, but to themselves also, to their humanity, their integrity, their self-worth.

They never learned.

Perhaps the truth in ‘Where have all the flowers gone’ is the final truth. Perhaps we are simply doomed to repeat the same mistakes, the same catastrophes, over and over again. Perhaps the boulder of Sisyphus is the only philosopher’s stone there is.

But this I refuse to believe. This you refuse to believe. (When will we ever learn?)

Honestly, I couldn’t care less about the state of mind of Bill Gates. He may go mad for all I care. He is but one man. He has money and power, but in the end he’s just one man.

What I care about is why 93% of my nation still believe an obvious lie. Among them are highly intelligent, well-meaning people. I have good friends among them. But they still believe this.

We’ve never given up exposing the facts, appealing to reason, explaining. Just like Sisyphus, I sometimes think. For they still believe it.

Why?

Answering this question is the single most important task at hand.

This is no easy task. For to answer this question we need meticulous step-by-step analysis, based on cold and hard rationality, never jumping to conclusions, never letting our feelings or predjudices get in the way. Only that way may be able to find the answer. And only armed with that answer can we really break the deadly cycle now pushed for more strongly than ever by Bill Gates and his cronies.

That’s the only way they will ever learn.

This article was first published on Thorsteinn Siglaugsson’s Substack newsletter, From Symptoms to Causes. You can subscribe here.

Tags: Bill GatesCOVID-19LockdownLockdown harmsPandemic PreparednessPropagandaReckoning

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52 Comments
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Geoff Cox
Geoff Cox
1 year ago

Some of us have been saying this for 50 years! But isn’t it interesting how, above the line, this unfolding disaster for white people everywhere has to be told through the eyes of non-English people. Why not give some time to discuss the efforts of Britain First or Tommy Robinson? Oooo, better not go there – they are all skin-headed thugs.

All the time we talk about a problem “over there” we will not address anything over here.

One final point: did white Brits (don’t forget a lot of Scots, Welsh and Irish were involved as well as English) really try and change the way things were done in colonised countries to eradicate their cultural history or was it simply a case that, amongst the administrators and buccaneers and entrepreneurs and administrators, well meaning people (secular and non-secular) went to the colonies to improve, as they saw it, the lives of those they sought to govern?

88
-1
RW
RW
1 year ago
Reply to  Geoff Cox

They did in colonies in countries considered suitable for large-scale European settlement, most prominently/ successfully in northern America. But phrasing it in this way really doesn’t make any sense. Conquerors dominating conquered territory is how things have always been. The Romans even had a saying for that: Vae victis! (Woe unto the conquered!) and no present-day woketurd will have an ounce of sympathy for, say, the so-called Siebenbürger Sachsen (saxons of the country of the seven castles), Germans who had been peacefully living in Hungary for centuries until the advancing Red Army violently drove them out at the end of WWII.

8
-4
A. Contrarian
A. Contrarian
1 year ago

It certainly seems to be acceptable for us to “colonize” other countries with our whacky ideas about Net Zero, trans rights and so on…

50
-1
DHJ
DHJ
1 year ago
Reply to  A. Contrarian

That’s us exporting democracy so we can liberate their people from a different life and their resources from oppression to benefit the good of the few.

17
0
Mogwai
Mogwai
1 year ago

This <4min clip is just disgraceful actually. Basically a load of Irish politicians banging on about ”white privilege” and a lack of diversity. Please say they don’t represent the majority and they’re just some woketard, masochistic outliers;

“During [Ireland’s] oppression, we still maintained our invisibility cloak of white privilege.”

Irish politicians discuss “white privilege” and the need for racial quotas, with one recalling the “very dull, white, pasty Ireland” that he grew up in before mass migration.”

https://twitter.com/griptmedia/status/1729838198778437885

43
-1
NeilParkin
NeilParkin
1 year ago
Reply to  Mogwai

When I first went to Ireland about 40 years ago, the girls had light skins and dark hair. The last time I went it was the other way around…

25
0
TheTartanEagle
TheTartanEagle
1 year ago
Reply to  Mogwai

Throughout my childhood, the daily news on TV and in the paper was banging on and on about “The Troubles”. I remember Guildford, Birmingham, Brighton, horrific bombings and killings in Belfast etc etc etc, it went on and on. Even back then, we pondered about where all the money came from, given that ammo etc is not cheap. We teenagers naively thought it was from patriotic Irish American families wearing beer goggles reminiscing about the old country. Given the last 20 years I now presume it was all theatre for political destruction of the UK to be rebuilt in the theme required by those running the planet from behind the scenes. Otherwise the disappointed hot heads full of patriotic zeal would surely be kicking off by now.

31
0
JXB
JXB
1 year ago

Colonisation… bad!, has morphed into immigration… good!

Colonists… evil!; immigrants… virtuous!

40
0
Claphamanian
Claphamanian
1 year ago

Most likely the standard procedure when a new people settle in a territory in any numbers.

The term ‘Welsh’ means ‘foreigner’ in Old Saxon. Therefore, the Britons – ‘the Welsh’ – were the people who were foreigners in their own land. Mercian law codes discriminated against the Britons.

Out of necessity the newcomers must legitimise their presence. Hence the reference in the poem to colonisation but in reverse. The problem (for those of the woke persuasion) with that particular approach is that if reverse colonisation is legitimate, then the original colonisation must have been too.

And most likely the reaction to colonisation is the same as Mr McConnell’s. A writer of letter that survives from the late Saxon period of what had become England complained about English men adopting Danish hairstyles.

However, China will still be there at the end of the century, just the same as she is now. All the CCP have to do is wait patiently. When the USA and Europe have joined the demographic South, their political administrations will not be comprised of people who will have any ambition to follow current objectives to contain China, any more than Jamaica, Barbados or Trinidad do today. (The street protests against the Gazan war is an indication of that).

Poor Taiwan will slip out of the American imperial orbit as it dissolves just like Britannia did from ancient Rome in the 5th century after the Western Empire had been ‘colonised’ by different peoples who replaced the Gallo Romans. (In contrast, the Eastern Roman emperors prevented the ‘Germanisation’ of their territories and the Eastern Empire continued until the 15th century. Even so, in this world, every day must close. It might as well do so with glorious memory).

13
-1
varmint
varmint
1 year ago

I remember thinking about this philosophically when I was about 18, long before all the wokery, the political correctness, the tumbling of statues, and the ranting about the slave trade. ——–I saw a pattern of England going out into the world, creating it’s empire and then that empire crumbling all the way back to there only being England again. Not the England as it started out, but England in name only.

17
0
RW
RW
1 year ago
Reply to  varmint

I don’t think that’s what really happened. It’s probably more that, with the exception of India, the British empire was a financial liability and dividing the world into financially dependent stinos¹ more-or-less governed by local thugs equipped with the necessary amounts of money and weapons to be willing and able to cooperate effectively with resource extraction companies was a much cheaper way to achieve the desired outcome (resource extraction). On top of that came that English politicians, especially Lloyd George and the other WWI fossil, Winston Churchill, bankrupted the country several times over in order to destroy the Germany in two entirely avoidable so-called world wars².

¹ States in name only.

² The first world war, especially, Lloyd George’s idea of the so-called knock out blow instead some kind of negotiated peace among equals, directly begat what happened in Germany from 1933 onwards.

Last edited 1 year ago by RW
12
0
varmint
varmint
1 year ago
Reply to  RW

Remember I was 18 when those thoughts came into my mind.—-I simply looked at it as something that expanded outwards and then shrunk back…….This is a very simplistic view ofcourse. It was based on how I perceived the direction of travel of the Empire at that time.

Last edited 1 year ago by varmint
7
0
Hound of Heaven
Hound of Heaven
1 year ago

Of relevance to this informed article is the fact that in 1939 the man who became the first president of the commission of the European Economic Community, Walter Hallstein, gave a speech for the Nazi regime and IG Farben. In his speech he describes the planned German conquest of the rest of Europe and the subjugation of the continent. He was an elite Nazi lawyer. […] “The supreme race has to be particularly protected from the Jewish race by eliminating it from society for all time.” Hallstein served as president of the nascent European Commission from 1958 – 1967. He wrote Die Europäische Gemeinschaft (of which I have a copy) ISBN 3 430 138981, which is a blueprint for an EU that requires only a fig leaf of democracy. Naturally, his own biography has been sanitized. From this it is possible to form a theory that the Islamification of society, particularly with Merkel’s seemingly impetuous policy, is a method of achieving the annihilation of Israel and the Jews without western politicians becoming involved. I offer this only as a theory, but the fact that this former Nazi was promoted to the very highest position in the EU, as it is now, needs to be examined.

23
0

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