{"id":156737,"date":"2020-03-23T12:00:53","date_gmt":"2020-03-23T12:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=156737"},"modified":"2020-03-23T09:28:53","modified_gmt":"2020-03-23T09:28:53","slug":"the-coronavirus-is-not-the-plague-the-plague-is-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/03\/the-coronavirus-is-not-the-plague-the-plague-is-us\/","title":{"rendered":"The Coronavirus Is Not the Plague: The Plague Is US"},"content":{"rendered":"

21 Mar 2020 – <\/em>\u201cTwo categories of propaganda must be distinguished.\u00a0 The first strives to create a permanent disposition in its objects and constantly needs to be reinforced.\u00a0 Its goal is to make the masses \u2018available,\u2019 by working spells upon them and exercising a kind of fascination.\u00a0 The second category involves the creation of a sort of temporary impulsiveness in its objects.\u00a0 It operates by simple pressure and is often contradictory (since contradictory mass movement are sometimes necessary).\u201d\u00a0 \u2013 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society<\/em><\/p>\n

The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus\u2019 great 1947 novel, The Plague<\/em>, is a warning to us today, but a warning in disguise.\u00a0 When he died sixty years ago at the young age of forty-six, he had already written The Stranger, The Fall, <\/em>and The Plague<\/em>, and had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.<\/p>\n

The outward story of The Plague<\/em> revolves around a malignant disease that breaks out in a town that is quarantined when the authorities issue a state of emergency.\u00a0 After first denying that they have a problem, the people gradually panic and feel painfully isolated.\u00a0 Death fear runs rampant, much like today with the coronavirus. The authorities declare martial law as they warn that the situation is dire, people must be careful of associating, especially in groups, and they better obey orders or very many will die.\u00a0 So the town is cordoned off.<\/p>\n

Before this happens and the first signs that something is amiss emerge, the citizens of the town of Oran, Algeria remain oblivious, for they \u201cwork hard, but solely with the object of getting rich.\u201d\u00a0 Bored by their habits, heavily drugging themselves with drink, and watching many movies to distract themselves, they failed to grasp the significance of \u201cthe squelchy roundness of a still-warm body\u201d of the plague-bearing rats that emerge from their underworld to die in their streets.\u00a0 \u201cIt was as if the earth on which our houses stood were being purged of their secret humors; thrusting up to the surface the abscesses and pus-clots that had been forming in its entrails.\u201d\u00a0 To them the plague is \u201cunthinkable,\u201d an abstraction, until all their denials are swept aside as the truth emerges from the sewers and their neighbors and families die from the disease.<\/p>\n

\u201cStupidity has a way of getting its way;\u201d the narrator, Dr. Rieux tells us, \u201cas we should see if we were not always so wrapped up in ourselves \u2026. plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.\u201d<\/p>\n

The American people are wrapped up in themselves.\u00a0 Nor do they recognize the true rats.\u00a0 They are easily surprised; fooled would be a better word.<\/p>\n

Camus uses a physical plague to disguise his real subject, which is the way people react when they are physically trapped by human rats who demand they obey orders and stay physically and mentally compliant as their freedom is taken from them.<\/p>\n

The Plague<\/em> is an allegorical depiction of the German occupation of France during World War II.\u00a0 Camus had lived through that experience as a member of the French Resistance.\u00a0 He was a writer and editor of the underground Resistance newspaper Combat<\/em>, and with his artist\u2019s touch he later made The Plague<\/em> a revelatory read for today, especially for citizens of the United States, the greatest purveyor of the plague of violence in the world.<\/p>\n

We are all infected with the soul-destroying evil that our leaders have loosed upon the world, a plague of killing that is now hidden behind the coronavirus fear that is being used to institute tight government controls that many will come to rue in the months ahead, just as happened after the attacks of September 11, 2001.<\/p>\n

Coronavirus is a perfect cover-story for the occupation of the public\u2019s mind by a propaganda apparatus that has grown even more devious over the past 19 years.<\/p>\n

Ask yourself: Where is the news about U.S. military operations in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, etc.?\u00a0 There is none in the corporate mainstream media, and little in the alternative media as well.\u00a0 Have those operations ceased?\u00a0 Of course not.\u00a0 It\u2019s just that the news about them, little that it was, has disappeared.<\/p>\n

Now it is all about us and the coronavirus panic.\u00a0 It is about how many of us might die. It is about stocking toilet paper.\u00a0 For the rich, it is about getting to their second or third houses where they can isolate themselves in splendor. As I write, 150 or so Americans are said to have died of Covid-19, and by the time you will read this the number will have climbed, but the number will be minuscule compared to the number of people in the U.S.A. and those numbers will be full of contradictions<\/a> that few comprehend unless, rather than reacting in fear, they did some comprehensive research.<\/a><\/p>\n

But arguments are quite useless in a time of panic when people are consumed with fear and just react.<\/p>\n

For we live in plague time, and the plague lives in us. But to most Americans, Covid-19 is the plague, because the government and media have said it is. \u00a0Like the inhabitants of Oran, the United States is \u201cpeopled with sleep walkers,\u201d pseudo-innocents, who are \u201cchiefly aware of what ruffled the normal tenor of their lives or affected their interests.\u201d\u00a0 That their own government, no matter what political party is in power (both working for \u201cdeep-state,\u201d elite interests led by the organized criminals of the CIA), is the disseminator of a world-wide plague of virulent violence, must be denied and divorced from consensus reality.<\/p>\n

That these same forces would use the fear of disease to cow the population should be no surprise for those who have come to realize the truth of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the anthrax attacks that followed, both of which were used to justify the endless \u201cwars on terror\u201d that have killed so many around the world. It is a shock for so many people who can\u2019t countenance the thought that their own government could possibly be implicated in the death of thousands of U.S. citizens and the release of the deadly anthrax, which we know<\/a> came from a U.S. lab and was carried out by a group of inside government perpetrators.<\/p>\n

When it comes to the plague-stricken deaths visited on millions around the world for decades by the American government, this must be denied by diverting attention to partisan presidential politics, and now the coronavirus that engenders fear, loathing, and a child-like tendency to believe Big Brother.\u00a0 The true plague, the bedrock of a nation continually waging wars through various means \u2013 i.e. bombs and economic and medical sanctions, etc. \u2013 against the world, disappears from consciousness.\u00a0 As U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albrecht said to 60 Minutes<\/em> Lesley Stahl in 1996 when Stahl asked her if the U.S. sanctions on Iraq that had resulted in the death of 500,000 Iraqi children were worth it: \u201cWe think the price is worth it.\u201d<\/p>\n

For \u201cdecent folks must be allowed to sleep at night,\u201d says the character Tarrou sarcastically; he is a man who has lost his ability to \u201csleep well\u201d since he witnessed a man\u2019s execution where the \u201cbullets make a hole into which you could thrust your fist.\u201d\u00a0 He awakens to the realization that he \u201chad an indirect hand in the deaths of thousands of people.\u201d\u00a0 He loses any peace he had and vows to resist the plague in every way he can.\u00a0 \u201cFor many years I\u2019ve been ashamed,\u201d he says, \u201cmortally ashamed, of having been, even with the best intentions, even at many removes, a murderer in my turn.\u201d<\/p>\n

The rats are dying in the streets. They are our rats, diseased by us. They have emerged from the underworld of a nation plagued by its denial.\u00a0 Unconscious evil bubbles up.\u00a0 We are an infected people. Worry and irritation \u2013 \u201cthese are not feelings with which to confront plague.\u201d But we don\u2019t seem ashamed of our complicity in our government\u2019s crimes around the world.\u00a0 For decades we have elected leaders who have killed millions, while business went on as usual. The killing didn\u2019t touch us. As Camus said, \u201cWe fornicated and read the papers.\u201d\u00a0 He knew better. He warned us:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a wearying business being plague-stricken.\u00a0 But it\u2019s still more wearying to refuse to be it. That\u2019s why everybody in the world looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of their systems, feel such desperate weariness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yet the fight against the plague must go on.\u00a0 Tarrou puts it thus:<\/p>\n

All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it\u2019s up to us, as far possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. That may sound simple to the point of childishness; I can\u2019t judge if it\u2019s simple, but I know it\u2019s true. You see, I\u2019d heard such quantities of arguments, which very nearly turned my head, and turned other people\u2019s heads enough to make them approve of murder; and I\u2019d come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.\u00a0 So I resolved always to speak \u2013 and to act \u2013 quite clearly, as this was the only way of setting myself on the right track.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These days, I keep thinking of an incident that occurred when I was a young investigator of sexually transmitted diseases, working for the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare through the Public Health Service as an epidemiologist.\u00a0 My job was to track down sexually transmitted diseases by finding links of sexual contacts. One day I went to interview and take a blood sample from a poor woman who had been named as a sexual contact.\u00a0 I knocked on her door on the third or fourth floor of a walkup apartment building.\u00a0 She looked through the peep hole and asked who it was and I told her my name and what government agency I represented. I could tell she was very wary, but she opened the door. She stood there naked, a very heavy woman of perhaps 300 pounds. She nonchalantly welcomed me in and I followed her as she padded down the hall where she took a housecoat off a hook and put it on.<\/p>\n

There is, as you know, an old tale by Hans Christian Anderson called \u201cThe Emperor\u2019s New Clothes.\u201d Although the emperor parades around naked, the adults make believe he is clothed.\u00a0 Only a child sees the obvious. I was a 23-years-old na\u00efve young man at the time of this unforgettable incident, but it echoes in my mind as a reminder to myself that perhaps that woman was unconsciously teaching me a lesson in disguise.\u00a0 The year was 1967, and when I went out to get into my government car with federal license plates, a white man in a white shirt in a white car in a poor black neighborhood, a hail of bricks rained down toward me and the car from the roof opposite.\u00a0 I quickly jumped in and fled as the ghettos were exploding. Soon the National Guard would be called out to occupy them.<\/p>\n

Intuition tells me that although the emperor has no clothes and a vast PSYOPS occupation is now underway, too many are too grown-up to see it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an old story continually updated.\u00a0 Like The Plague<\/em>.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>. Website: <\/em>Behind the Curtain<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

21 Mar 2020 – Intuition tells me that although the emperor has no clothes and a vast PSYOPS occupation is now underway, too many are too grown-up to see it. It\u2019s an old story continually updated. Like \u2018The Plague. \u2018<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":108249,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[1829,555,642,234,372],"class_list":["post-156737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-coronavirus","tag-elites","tag-literature","tag-media","tag-propaganda"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156737\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}