What I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself) [and] all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously).
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
I will begin this post by saying something that I think will gain almost universal acceptance amongst readers, irrespective of where in the world they live or what their opinions are: something truly dreadful has happened to politics. We are now living in Milan Kundera’s nightmare; our governing classes have become almost totally swept up into “fantasies, images, words and archetypes that come together to make up this or that political kitsch”. There is no longer anything resembling sensible, rational discussion of policy in public life – there are merely atavistic contrasts between us and them, in-group and out-group, goodies and baddies, four-legged and two-legged.
Voters, in this environment, find themselves being cast in the role not of reasoning actors but rather simply as bundles of instinct, whose job is to determine which side, red or blue, is most fittingly aligned with the angels or demons. What will actually happen as a result of an election is considered to be an issue which only a pedant or hopeless nerd would find interesting – what matters is (it is fitting to use an entirely inane word at this juncture) the identification of the better set of ‘vibes’. And this, as you will no doubt have noticed, extends far beyond electoral affairs – our entire political lives indeed now seem to revolve around whether or not we are able to tune in, at any given moment, to the appropriate mood music and act accordingly.
We have a vague sense of what the underlying cause of this disastrous state of affairs is: the technology, stupid. But technology, I would like to here argue, is in itself not the real problem. Our crisis is properly understood as an aesthetic one. And we need to be clear-eyed about what this means: there is no technical fix. Things will get worse before they get better. Indeed, they will likely get much, much worse before we see a recovery. The appropriate metaphor to use for our predicament, as we shall see, is a train: we are going in one direction, and we cannot deviate or reverse. At some point, we’ll crash. So, at the risk of overextending that metaphor – make sure you’re sitting close to the emergency exit and that you’ve got your luggage ready for when things come shuddering to a halt.
The fin de siècle French constitutional theorist Maurice Hauriou is hardly a household name even amongst French constitutional lawyers, but he long ago gave us the tools to understand our predicament. Writing in ‘The Theory of the Institution and the Foundation’, Hauriou described human social movements and purposive associations (what he called ‘institution persons’) as being imbued with “directing ideas” – relatively fixed concepts which pass from individual to individual, and “from one mind to another”, by their own “force of attraction”.
Purposive human associations, then – whether a political party, company, church and so on – are characterised by moments of “communion” in which a group of human individuals gets together to proclaim their shared commitments to such directing ideas, and thereby interiorise them. These ideas are then “refracted into similar concepts” in their minds, and this unites the group in a sense of shared ownership over the ideas in question. Once the moment of communion is over, the individuals involved all then go out into the world and put those ideas into effect in acts of power, in anticipation of the next communal moment of shared feeling. And this is what gives the relevant ideas continuity across time – sporadic meetings of communion during which the participants jointly ‘obsess’, linked together by the actions which those participants subsequently undertake, in the name of those ideas, in the interim.
The result, for Hauriou, is something like “the couplings thrown between rail-road cars to establish the trembling continuity of an express”. Human social movements are driven forward. They are directed by ideas. Those ideas have an independent existence, and individual human beings imbibe them at communal meetings, and make them concrete in their own minds through action in between. Human associations, therefore, almost literally, have lives of their own; with apologies to Jung, individual people do not drive their associations, but rather associations drive people.
The classic, stereotypical example of this would be the religious movement, wherein on a weekly basis a congregation gets together to interiorise and re-interiorise a common set of concepts and feelings, and then (ideally) puts them into effect in between. No individual believer originates those concepts and feelings in question himself; they rather come to him, in relatively fixed form, for him to swallow and digest. And the same pattern, for Hauriou, can be seen in any sort of purposive association in the very broad sense – from labour unions to companies to charities. People are not animated by their own ideas, and such associations are not amalgamations of the individualised visions of all of their participants; rather the opposite. Ideas, if you like, are, to use modern parlance, memetic. They spread like a ‘mind virus’. And purposive associations are therefore to be understood, to return to the metaphor of the train, as akin to a railway express: the human individual gets on board and is swept along. He does not steer; he is carried to a destination.
Hauriou’s admittedly schematic analysis shows remarkable insight into the basically aesthetic nature of political preferences. For most people, most of the time, ideas are interiorised during moments of shared feeling. It is not that people are reasoned into what they believe. Rather, what they believe comes to them through ‘communion’ with others who they know to have a similar emotional response to the world around them. The individual feels something, and becomes aware that others around him feel the same thing. And this causes everybody involved to drink from the same conceptual well, and take in the same conceptual cocktail, not in the manner of a debate club who arrive at a conclusion about a discussion topic, but in the manner of a crowd of dancers raising their hands in unison at a rave.
To return to Kundera, this is why it is important to understand politics as rooted in ‘kitsch’ rather than in reason. Kitsch, for Kundera, is in essence to be understood as an emotional response to a work of art or set of circumstances that a person, crucially, knows himself to be sharing with others. Seeing a group of children playing in the sunshine on a patch of grass, a person is moved and sheds a bittersweet tear. But he also knows that the rest of mankind, seeing such a scene, would react in the same way – and, therefore, he also knows that, in shedding his tear, he is partaking in a communal feeling. This, Kundera tells us, is the heart of kitsch: not the feeling of being moved by seeing children playing, but the feeling that, in being moved by such scene, one is thereby united with all of right-thinking humanity in being so moved.
Politics is a phenomenon of kitsch, for Kundera, because it operates on the same conceptual basis. People do not, by and large, arrive at political opinions through the application of reason. Rather, they feel something. And they feel that what they feel is a feeling shared by good people everywhere. This, in turn, sets in motion a force of vast social power. And, of course, we see its effects all around us – the formation of political belief based not on thought but on the intoxicating and magnetising energy of kitsch: the glee and sense of abandon that results from knowing oneself to be swept along by a communal march of progress with everybody that one respects and admires.
This analysis is endorsed by a passage in For Whom the Bell Tolls, in which Hemingway lays out a similar dynamic, describing the mood that animated the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War:
[Y]ou felt that you were taking part in a crusade. That was the only word for it although it was a word that had been so worn and abused that it no longer gave its true meaning. You felt, in spite of all bureaucracy and inefficiency and party strife, something that was like the feeling you expected to have and did not have when you made your first communion. It was a feeling of consecration to a duty toward all of the oppressed of the world which would be as difficult and embarrassing to speak about as religious experience and yet it was authentic as the feeling you had when you heard Bach, or stood in Chartres Cathedral or the Cathedral at Leon and saw the light coming through the great windows; or when you saw Mantegna and Greco and Brueghel in the Prado. It gave you a part in something that you could believe in wholly and completely and in which you felt an absolute brotherhood with the others who were engaged in it.
It is the last sentence that is the most important: what matters, and what ignites the magic of kitsch, is the fact that one is giving oneself to a cause and knowing others to be engaged in it too. It is the communality that sets the metaphorical train in motion – not the hearing of Bach or the vision of Chartres Cathedral, but the ‘brotherhood’ one hears or sees along with, and who are similarly moved (and who one knows to be moved in the same fashion as oneself).
There are three things to say about this in the current context.
The first is that, while technology is not itself the problem, it is making things vastly worse. This is because it widens the net of communal feeling to the entire globe – it is possible, thanks to the internet, to imagine oneself as being united in a shared emotional response to, say, what is happening in Ukraine or Palestine, with literally all of the decent people on planet Earth. It is also because it rapidly accelerates the forward motion of Hauriou’s railroad express by shortening the gap between moments of communion to the timespan between the last time one looked at one’s phone and the current second. Now, the meetings when one’s ‘brotherhood’ bands together to ‘obsess’ over directing ideas in light of a shared emotional response can happen whenever one desires. For many people, this will mean tens or even hundreds of times a day. When one’s ‘brotherhood’ is potentially billions strong, the force of kitsch thereby becomes amplified to truly monstrous proportions, and the ‘current thing’ becomes almost impossible to avoid – it inserts itself into the mind not so much like the infiltration of a virus as like the forceful stomping of the sole of a heavy hobnailed boot.
The second thing is that this all explains why it is that our politics is so fraught. What Kundera sought to emphasise is that political kitsch, like any other form of kitsch, is characterised above all by the “denial of shit”. When people are caught up in an idealised aesthetic – when they have become convinced that they, along with their brotherhood of fellow Good People, have aligned themselves with truth and beauty and are partaking in the heady emotional payoff of imagining themselves to be envisioning perfection – the last thing they want is anybody casting flies in the ointment by asking awkward questions or raising points of dispute. And therefore, when anyone causes a disruption of any kind, they immediately trigger an enraged, irrational response. Honest questions are not met with good-faith answers or explanations; instead, they are met with aggravated put-downs and loud, red-faced shouting, because honest questions, simply put, spoil the mood. They allow shit to intrude. Fiercely aggressive responses to honest questioning – a style of response with which we are all growing increasingly familiar – are the natural consequence when one has convinced oneself that one is fighting off people who are simply flinging faeces for the sake of it.
The third thing to mention is that this also gives us an idea of where things are heading. When people are in the grip of an aesthetic response, they cannot be reasoned out of it: that would be a category error. As Immanuel Kant pointed out long ago, when someone is gazing adoringly at a beautiful sunset, they do not respond in kind to those who point out that there are more important things to do than look at sunsets, or who launch into a discussion of the underlying science, or who compare tonight’s sunset with a nicer one from a few days ago. Indeed, they despise those people and find their failure to share their own response to the sunset appalling and small-minded.
Instead, one is only shaken out of an aesthetic frame of mind by the intrusion of reality into one’s reverie and the consequent disruption of it. This is always a distressing experience and can be quite painful. Because one is not argued or debated into a different frame of mind but forced into it, the process is necessarily unpleasant.
And that, I am afraid, is the position we are in. It seems obvious to me that the reason our age is so strongly characterised by the aesthetification – or kitschification – of politics is that non- or pre-political associations have diminished in role in our societies compared to previous eras. It is not that there were ever distant, halcyon glory days for the human race during which people sat around having reasonable political discussions to resolve their differences and design perfectly functioning institutions. Rather, it is simply that politics matters less when people devote their attention to their extended families, religious institutions and communal activities – and matters more when they do not attend to such matters.
We are now in a position in which very large proportions of the population in our societies do not have extended families, religious commitments or communal lives to speak of, and as a result, the political sphere has become grotesquely enlarged. This means that non- or pre-political forms of association are losing their effectiveness as alternative sources of shared feeling and, hence, of animating ideas. All that we have – returning to the beginning of this post – is competing political aesthetics. This, depressingly, has the short-term consequence of reducing politics to a struggle between two bitterly opposed ‘sides’. But it has the long-term consequence that people increasingly find themselves, often largely unknowingly, being locked into a kitschified identification with some political movement or other – a state of affairs that will only end when the mood is shattered by reality reasserting itself.
And what is true at the individual level is, as will be obvious, true societally too: we are rattling at increasing speed down a railway line – “wrong way on a one-way track”’, as the old song used to go – and we cannot be reasoned off course or provided with some sort of engineered alternative. We can only wait for the mood to be dispelled by what is real. We can no doubt go along in this way for some time yet, but we cannot do so forever – and something big is going to happen when we are forced to a halt and the aesthetic and the actual are finally forced into collision. Get ready for it.
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. You can subscribe to his Substack – News From Uncibal – here.
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So who is going to gaol?
Speculation in the US is that Joe Biden will give Fauci and others a pre-emptive pardon.
It’s a start, and we should be grateful for that, but as Jeffrey Tucker says there is a long way to go before government’s and their letter agencies have any sense of contrition or that they got things so badly wrong that we will be dealing with the after effects of their mistakes for many generations to come.
It’s a start to what exactly???
Are you that deluded that you think someone will be held accountable and prosecuted…
I was trying to be positive but maybe that’s beyond you.
Nobody got anything wrong. The activities of all agents of government were set out for them. To we Sceptics, or should that be realists, government activities were patently corrupt but to the sheep it was all ‘ desperate times call for desperate measures’ and I don’t doubt many of the individual actors were well aware they were acting in a pantomime.
This was the greatest Scamdemic ever played against the people of this world ever although the nut zero scam will supersede it.
Quite, far too many people still mistake this for incompetence..
To us skeptics. Accusative pronoun after preposition.
They weren’t mistakes …. it was all deliberate.
Reading this while thinking about the incoming bird flu epidemic makes me frankly sick to the stomach.
” Industry mostly went along too, at least the highest reaches of it, even as small business was crushed”
And even more shamefully so did the Church. Then again, WW1 saw the Church glorifying the meatgrinder and shaming those that objected. Wars are started by the rich and fought over by the rest of us.
Unfortunately whilst our Christian beliefs and values are of fundamental importance to our civilization, the church whether that be COfE or the left footers, has always been hand in glove with the political establishment, just another way of shaking down the populace and keeping them in line.
Church made a 1934 Concordat with Hitler which effectively neutered the Church and put it under the Reich’s control.
2020 the Church did the same. I had many a fight with priest and bishop over this. The miserable cowardice to get some quid. They were paid to comply. Sermons were preached in which I (sitting undiapered, unstabbed) was classed as Satanic.
Arselings and limp wristed effiminates that most of them are.
As Hitler sneered the priests and bishops always vote with their pensions and salaries. So they do.
As Maajid Nawas puts it….”They shown their hand”. The 2009 Swine Flu faux pandemic was almost like a trial run when you look at what they tried to do.
HIV-AIDs.
$300 billion industry created saved CDC, NIAID from being defunded.
67 symptoms for HIV which does not exist. There is no simian virus flying around. The genesis story changed from the Gay Canadian Gaetan airline steward having sex with Africans and bringing it back to New York; to HIV has always existed in North America. Fake PCR tests. Massive propaganda. Choose a group – queers – which do poppers, pills, drugs, bath houses, and anal sex (rectal cancer etc). Lots of ‘symptoms’. Add in AZT their drug which killed thousands and made everyone ill. Magic Johnson was the poster boy, he got off the program, cleaned up his life and presto, became healthy.
Evil but admirable in a way that they were able to pull that off with nary a dissent. Fauci again of course. ‘The $cience’.
Yes there was an article on TCW a while back questioning any objective evidence of the existence of HIV beyond a cocktail of various illnesses.
Yawn yawn yawn….. There is absolutely nothing to add to this debate, it’s utterly exhausted, it’s been done a thousand times over, this is now all about distraction.
The only debate to have in regards to the Scandemic is how we should be ensuring they never do anything similar again.
“how we should be ensuring they never do anything similar again”
Totally agree, but surely the first step is for there to be a more general recognition of what happened?
Isnt 4 years enough???… 4 years and a ton of evidence??
If they havent got it by now, they never will… Only gotta look at Monro’s post 🤦♂️..
Bottom line… There’s no hope.. At all
4 years appear not to be enough – I find this somewhat puzzling but I guess we’re all different. I think the problem is that most people were hoodwinked and a lot of them probably know that but who wants to admit it, and who wants to face the fact that everything and everyone they trusted is rotten to the core (excuse the hyperbole)?
Probably not much hope in our lifetime, I agree, but doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. You may view it as a distraction (not sure from that) but surely coming to terms with being more sceptical is a good foundation for thinking about everything else that is happening in our world?
In Britain, the problems were stupidity and incompetence at the highest level.
That’s it.
‘Matt Hancock speaking, in the House of Commons, “The Great Barrington Declaration is underpinned by two central claims and both are emphatically false. First, it says that if enough people get COVID, we will reach herd immunity. That is not true. The second central claim is that we can segregate the old and vulnerable on our way to herd immunity. That simply is not possible.’
(Note: this is also the man who said that he had put ‘a protective ring’ around care homes and then later admitted that to be nonsense: 18 May “We absolutely did throw a protective ring around social care, not least with the £3.2 billion-worth of funding we put in right at the start, topped up with £600 million-worth of funding on Friday.”
19 May “I am glad that we have been able to protect the majority of homes, and we will keep working to strengthen the protective ring that we have cast around all our care homes.”
’30 Nov 2023Mr Keith quoted England’s former deputy chief medical officer, Professor Sir Jonathan Van-Tam, who said in his statement to the inquiry: “My view is a ring is a circle without a break in it.”
Addressing Mr Hancock, the barrister asked: “However you describe the protective processes you put in place around the care sector, they did not form an unbroken circle, did they?”
Mr Hancock replied: “It is quite clear from the evidence that Professor Van-Tam is right.”)
‘Well, first of all, he doesn’t understand what herd immunity means, right? So herd immunity…..Yeah, so I think he’s using it as a synonym for zero COVID. The COVID’s gone away because enough people are infected. COVID is a coronavirus. The other coronaviruses that are in common circulation in human populations produce colds. And they’re controlled by herd immunity. They’re not always increasing exponentially so that everyone gets it. What happens is they rise and fall with the season. Enough people get it and what herd immunity means is when one person has the infection, they spread it to one or fewer additional people…….So herd immunity is not a synonym for zero COVID. I think Hancock, I think, that’s the mistake he made there……it was clear in October of that year of 2020, and even more clear now that if you are infected, you actually gain substantial protection against re-infection. So there was a study that was just released actually recently, but verifies a whole long line of studies… This is out of Italy. At one year after infection, 0.3% are reinfected. So you’re infected, you recover from COVID and within the context of the full year, three out of 1,000 get reinfected. And almost always, it’s less severe than the first time, because your body still remembers how to fight it off.
(Now what about Hancock’s second claim…that you can’t protect the old and vulnerable)
That’s turned out to be catastrophically false. 80% of the deaths in the United States are people over 60. 80% of the deaths are people over 60. We did not protect the vulnerable because we didn’t even attempt to protect the vulnerable. Just to give you some sense of how backward it was, we sent people in the early days of the epidemic that were infected with COVID back into nursing homes who then infected a large number of vulnerable people, instead of realizing who the vulnerable were and seeking to protect them, that was the scarce resource. We thought hospital beds with a scarce resource. Most parts of the country in March, April 2020 were empty hospital beds.’
Jay Bhattacharya 21 Oct 2021
A Health Secretary in charge of a common cold coronavirus epidemic who is incapable of understanding herd immunity and who thinks it a really good idea discharging the elderly and infirm, many already infected with the coronavirus, out of hospital and back into care homes to free up hospital beds that, in most cases, were never required…..
If you were going to have a conspiracy, the well named Hancock would be far too stupid to participate.
And Britain’s Prime Minister…….enough said.
The whole idea of a coup is, apart from anything else, a mathematical impossibility:
‘I wanted to take the opposite approach, to see how these conspiracies might be possible. To do that, I looked at the vital requirement for a viable conspiracy – secrecy’
‘He then looked at the maximum number of people who could take part in an intrigue in order to maintain it. For a plot to last five years, the maximum was 2521 people……Even a straightforward cover-up of a single event, requiring no more complex machinations than everyone keeping their mouth shut, is likely to be blown if more than 650 people are accomplices.’
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2016-01-26-too-many-minions-spoil-plot#:~:text=If%20you're%20thinking%20of,very%20quickly%20give%20themselves%20away.
There was no coup…..only a whole bunch of hopelessly over-promoted ‘yes men’.
Wrong.. Again… There was no “incompetence”
Stick to Ukraine…
There was a lot of incompetence, Hancock is an utter, utter imbecile, but it’s quite true that the scamdemic hypothesis fits the (at present) known facts better than all the others.
That said I am still unconvinced by most of the hypotheses so far advanced as to the who and why.
Here’s some incompetence, although ”incontinence” might be more accurate as everyone’s walking like they shat themselves. What’s going on in Scotland ( another country I happen to not live in ), please? Anyone?…. Anyone?…
”SCOTLAND- The infantilisation of a nation.
The NHS instructs people to walk like penguins, to <checks notes> erm … protect’ them from the weather.
I shit you not, this is actual advice from the NHS in Scotland.”
https://x.com/Artemisfornow/status/1865742429543964722
Strange how global “incompetence” happened at the same time and exactly the same specifics…
Youve believed the forced narrative..
Of course it was “incompetence”.. Anything else is just a conspiracy theory… 🙄
Ps, Hancock is an imbecile agreed… An obedient imbecile..
Have you not seen the Dominic Cummings interview???
I quote.. “The Deep State runs the UK”
“Cabinet is just staged theatre”
From the horses mouth…. From the horses mouth….
The scandemic was NOT incompetence
Here you go…. What u make of this then….
https://youtu.be/zEnLI0eD-9k?si=SGOOd1f-b5J5CDtf
Do you really think the elected politicians made any decisions?
Do you think the elected politicians are making the decisions on the level of immigration, for example ???
Wake up..
And even if i told you the who and why, not only would you disbelieve it as you’re so wedded to the “incompetence” red herring but youd get offended too..
Maybe you just need another 4 years….
You’re wrong again pal, I’m not wedded to the incompetence narrative.
However I do not delude myself that I fully understand yet what is going on.
Although to be fair so far the conspiracy theorists (and I) have turned out right pretty well every time and the next chapter of the conspiracy is truly dark, and we’re going to need to start fighting back.
So yes, trying to hold off believing that just yet.
“A Health Secretary in charge of a common cold coronavirus epidemic who is incapable of understanding herd immunity”
Incapable, or unwilling, or uninterested, or good at playing the fool? “Herd immunity” is not rocket science. Christ I understand it, or think I do, and I’m just a f***wit with crap A level grades in non-STEM subjects.
“Hancock…took A-levels in Maths, Physics, Computing, and Economics.[3] He later studied computing at the further education college, West Cheshire College.[6][7] Hancock then studied at the University of Oxford where he was an undergraduate at Exeter College, and graduated with a first class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE). He later earned a Master of Philosophy degree in Economics from the University of Cambridge, where he was a postgraduate student at Christ’s College.[7][8] ”
I know people who went to Oxford and Cambridge. All of them were “intelligent” using the normally accepted definition of the word. I’ve also met “stupid” people who can barely read, write or speak anything beyond basic sentences. Hancock may not be wise, certainly not honest, but he is not “stupid”.
He is rich, and not in prison, as far as I know healthy. The “stupid” people I know are generally poor.
There are many different measures of intelligence.
There are many different measures of ability.
Academic qualifications are but one.
Probably the best measure of all is empirical observation.
By that measure, the well named Hancock and the man who appointed him are both a pair of total feckwits.
We’ve observed what they did publicly, and what they said publicly about what they did and why they did it. We can’t know what they really think or what their real reasons were. We can speculate. My speculation is that they knew it was bullshit, based on the leaked WhatsApp messages and the fact they were all partying and shagging (assuming of course the leaked messages are not just another windup).
What worries me about your position as I understand it is that let’s say we get someone in government you deem “competent” – is that then job done? I would say not. The default position should be to question and doubt motives at every turn.
The vast majority of the population are perfectly happy with this representative democracy.
If you are not, then you will need not just a better alternative but to convince 70 million souls that it is a better alternative.
Do you have a better alternative?
Democracy: the least worst form of government.
I don’t see where I’ve written that I am not happy with “this representative democracy” – I just think it works much better if people are less trusting. I have always voted, previously for the least-bad candidate and latterly only for candidates who meet minimum standards, or I spoil my ballot paper. I certainly agree that the key task is to convince my fellow citizens of the rightness of my political views, especially regarding what the proper function of government is and what the limitations should be on political power. I’m not expecting politicians to stop being politicians without a fight.
The “too many minions” theory assumes that one whistleblower or one leak will blow the gaff. However, as we have seen with the climate scare, the truth can easily be drowned out in a sea of propaganda. Thousands of people with science degrees can declare that there is no climate crisis, but the scare continues.
As President Trump has just remarked, the world has recently gone a bit crazy.
However the U.S. is about to undergo a sea change regarding climate and healthcare policy in particular.
What happens in America never stays in America.
If the federal budget no longer supports either the existing covid or climate change narrative, then, as if by magic, that narrative will change.
As the man said, America is not a country, it’s a business.
Let’s see if any of the many covidians I know mention this report to me. I’m still waiting for the apologies and the admission they were wrong. An acquaintance of mine just texted me to postpone a meet up – he has “covid”. I don’t know how many boosters he has had but it’s definitely a few.
I think the wheels will somewhat come off the net zero wagon because I don’t think even Labour will want to have regular power cuts, so we will hobble along with the mess we currently have – overly expensive energy and subsidised EVs and useless technology receiving our money, but I think they won’t go the whole hog. Still, I thought that about “covid” too….
They were following Orders, almost certainly from the American Military Industrial Complex, – as did the rest of the Five Eyes and NATO members (although East Europe NATO members were “less successful” in complying with the instructions).
Sweden didn’t comply … and presumably didn’t get the Order … because at that point, Sweden although in the EU, wasn’t in NATO.
A very fair review of the report.
I would identify its worst errors as the uncritical lauding of Operation Warp Speed, and the failure to see the crucial role of the security state hiding behind the desperate attempts of Fauci and co to cover up the virus’s origins, and behind the “control the masses anyhow until the vaccines arrive” policy (and then we can control them forever).
The first probably reveals the political partisanship of the report, since Trump regarded Warp Speed as his success. The second? Willful blindness, or maybe the fear of congressmen ending up in a plane crash, like Assad.
To my mind the report gives a good deal of insight into the UK and Western bungling, especially when one factors in the military and intelligence involvement. Farrar and Vallance were deeply involved in the Fauci obfuscation, and were in a good position to manipulate wise fools like Hancock. And we know well from Ukraine, Iraq and now Syria how Western governments jump when US pressure is applied (for they all have dirty secrets known to the Washington/London Deep State).
Staggeringly good article. Alas, with the latest buzzword ‘quad-demic’ doing the rounds I have noted a significant return of the ghastly and ultimately useless face nappies, particularly in bus queues.
I wish this piece was mandatorily broadcast under balanced reporting rules. If just one mask wearer woke up it’d be worth it.
Dominic Cummings explains…. “The Deep State runs the UK”
“cabinet is just a staged theatre”
From the horses mouth….
Apply this to the “incompetence” theory…..
https://youtu.be/zEnLI0eD-9k?si=SGOOd1f-b5J5CDtf
“mistakenly called a vaccine.”
There was no mistake about that. They called it a vaccine to (a) get around the laws on medicinal testing and (b) so that the sheeple wouldn’t get worked up about it and be difficult. If they’d called it what it is … experimental human gene manipulation ….. they wouldn’t have been able to carry out their experiment on very many of them!
The people who authorised and carried this out … all of them, including the politicians who fronted the abuse and lied to their people …. are no better than Mengele and the Nazis.
This was a coup against science and against democracy, for purposes of industrial and political reset, not just in one nation but all nations at once
And most of us fell for it and perhaps, continue to fall for it.
Well, not most of us on here.
Scam after scam after scam. It seems our lives have been reduced to dealing with this constantly. The elite level people in positions of power have learned that the masses can be easily controlled and manipulated. Huge amounts of cash are available from government treasuries to those creative enough. As Morrison points out in his article today, the ozone hole over Antarctica was a total scam and that dates from the early 1990s. The easy cash has to dry up before this will stop.