When the new year of 2021 dawned I made a resolution and foolishly recorded it publicly. That’s a bad move. It’s inevitable that you will face the embarrassment of failing to keep it. And that’s what I did. Mine was simply to say no more about the whole nasty Covid business. Now, I didn’t mean the reality of the vicious virus, whether natural or mad made and the devastation it has caused across the world. Nor did I mean the disease and the suffering and death that has followed and those who have to endure its long-term chronic debilities. No, I mean the insane irrational hysteria, which has dominated as well as crippled society, the skewed obsession with the single narrative and the sinister intent of those who made and continue to make a killing out of it all. That business.

At the beginning of 2021 it seemed a reasonable aspiration that this would soon be all behind us. Perhaps not talking about it might make it go away. There was a feeling that we had come to the end of this aberration and sanity would somehow return. How wrong I was. A year later there it is, still in full swing and no sign that it will ever end. True the words change and opinions too, people shift their ground, backs are covered and inconvenient facts buried.  But the fatal error and the gross abuse of power is overlooked in the frenzy over wine and cakes.  But I am going to try and make one last attempt to close the chapter and halt my musings on this sorry tale.

To be honest I am tired. The whole thing has become so unbearably wearisome. There is nothing much more to say and I am beginning to repeat myself. Languishing in ten days house arrest following a positive Lateral flow test from a close contact, it all seems pretty pointless anyway. The system can’t be bucked against, that’s for sure and we are in this for the long haul. In Scotland the government are in the process of taking more power to allow them to shut down society whenever it seems right to them to do so and we just have to get used to that. Like long term prisoners we need to learn to settle down and get on with our life sentence. We need to stop fixating on the dream of an early release.  It is hope deferred that is the real killer and wasting energy on any more outrages is a futile banging a head against a wall. And it’s too late, anyway. The inmates are already running the asylum.

The big question is how you retain your sanity in a world that has gone mad? I am beginning to think that Foucault had a point. Maybe it’s the internees who are the sane ones?  Under this enforced isolation I have had a chance to think and learn again from those who have gone before and have faced the real trials not phoney ones. People like Bonhoeffer, Jägerstätter, Havel, Solzhenitsyn and others. So I will try and follow their example:

To live not by lies: ”The simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation is this: personal non-participation in lies. Though lies may conceal everything, though lies may control everything, we should be obstinate about this one small point: let them be in control but without any help from any of us.” ¹

To not allow the names, they give you, intimate: “The term dissident (which to the soviets in Havel’s day meant a renegade) frequently implies a special profession, as if, along with the more normal vocations, there was another special one – grumbling about the state of things. In fact, a dissident is simply a physicist, a sociologist, a worker, a poet, individuals who are merely doing what they must and, consequently, who find themselves in open conflict with the regime. This conflict has not come about through any conscious intention on their part, but simply through the inner logic of their thinking, behaviour or work, often confronted with external circumstances more or less beyond their control.” ²

To trust to common sense, that special gift from God.

To not comply with what we know is foolishness. 

To think about “Whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” ³

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1. Alexander Solzhenitsyn “Live not by lies” 1974
2. Václav Havel “The Power of the Powerless” 1998
3. Philippians 4:8-9 English Standard version

I would like to pretend that I have known the word for years but, the truth is, it was new to me. Nocebo, I mean. It was a report I read last week detailing some research carried out in an American university that showed that the majority of people who receive a covid-19 vaccine will have phantom side effects. That is, a general anxiety over possible side effects will result in the patient believing they are actually experiencing them. It’s called the “Nocebo effect”. You can see where the idea comes from. It is the mirror image of the placebo effect where people take the pill believing it to be the drug that will help them and, while it is just sugar, it works because they think it will. With nocebo they can be hyper-alert to how they are feeling and imagine all sort of horrible things are happening to their bodies. This is important, because if people experience a side effect, it may simply be put down to anxiety triggered by reading scare stories on the internet. You know the sort of thing: stories of blood disorders, deep vein thrombosis, acute cardiac issues, infections, herpes, immune system disorders, blindness, eye disorders, deafness, spontaneous abortions, skin disorders, psychiatric disorders, migraines and headaches, central nervous system disorders, Guillain-Barre syndrome, facial paralysis, vertigo, tinnitus, respiratory disorders, seizures, paralysis, tremors, reproductive disorders and other mild and rare side effects, as well as death. That sort of thing. Professor Ted Kapchuk who is behind the study thinks it’s a mistake to hide or downplay the reported side effects he wants people to be told more information not less. “Honesty” he says, “is the way to go”. Well, it’s encouraging, of course, when a professor tells us that it’s good to be truthful.

I wish the BBC and all the usual suspects would heed that too. Last night on their late evening news programme they had a report from Covid wards with Clive Myrie walking around talking to patients and staff. It began with the consultant following the camera around a ward pointing to patients “unvaccinated, unvaccinated, unvaccinated, unvaccinated, unvaccinated….”  It was pretty gross, but the message was clear.  Our Covid wards are full of the unvaccinated and this places the NHS under considerable stress.  But is not the truth. It is simply not true. We know that from the government’s own reports.  In each of the four nations, the majority of patients in Covid wards are actually vaccinated and those who do not have a vaccination are in the minority.  In some cases, the ratio is almost five to one. So why would a journalist produce something so misleading and so seriously mis-representive of the actual facts? Is it just laziness and sloppy reporting? Or has someone been lent on to tell a particular story with the aim of encouraging the hesitant “to do the right thing”?  An alternative, but truthful report, showing that vaccination could mean you are more likely to end up in hospital, wouldn’t quite be the thing. It would raise the difficult question – why are more vaccinated patients ending up in hospital than unvaccinated? But ignoring the facts is always a bad idea. A very bad idea.

Which brings me back to Professor Ted Kapchuk and his study. Maybe it is the “Nocebo effect” on a world-wide scale. We watched scary videos on the internet of people dropping in the street gasping for breath, of piles of coffins stacked high and massive graves being dug, we heard the doom-laden prophecies and our collective anxiety made us hyper-alert and believe that we were actually experiencing a pandemic.  Maybe some of the time we were simply fulfilling our own prophecies. The governments and media controlling the narrative certainly did their level best to make sure that this was so and only told one side of the story. Any suggestion that things might not be a bad as portrayed was treated with scorn and ridicule. There was hardly any good news (the reported benefits of the vaccine rollout being the exception). Goodness me, the relentless nightly ritual of covid statistics detailing the cases, the hospitalisation, the ICU figures and the deaths while failing to mention the statistics on those who had actually recovered, was scare-mongering on an industrial scale. The facts are that UK 150 thousand have died with Covid in the UK, while 12million have recovered. (in the world it is 5.6 million against 283 million). Why were we not told these figures? Surely being honest and open and telling us all the facts, would have been a welcome boost to morale? For some strange reason in the fake war against the virus raising morale was never part of the plan. That might have stiffened our resolve, given us a reason to pull and stand together. Instead, we were encouraged to hide and to run so we hid and we ran.

Maybe someone should carry out a study to examine this Nocebo effect.  But don’t hold your breath, that study is not likely to be carried out anytime soon.

There was something about the announcement this week that was depressing as it was predictable and I struggle to make up my mind if the actors are simply evil demagogues impelled by dark forces or just bit players and useful idiots in a treacherous game over which they have no control.

The appearance of Omicron, an anagram of “moronic”, having jumped Nu and Xi, so as not to cause offence to our oriental friends, came at just the right time.  There was the possibility that people were beginning to believe the storm had passed, the nightmare was over and we could begin to rebuild the house and repair the roof. There was the ever-present danger that citizens might see the complete disconnect from what they were hearing and what they were seeing and begin to ask questions. The time would come soon enough when the people’s enquiry into what had happened would expose the fraudulence of the official narrative and someone would be in dock in the Hague. Some boy would eventually cry out that the emperor had no clothes.  So, it was vital that something new had to be found to divert attention from what was really happening. To cover over what may have been behind the introduction of this plague. And, sure enough, it was found. This time in beautiful Botswana.

The trouble is, evil always overplays its hand. The cunning plans eventually unravel and there is no place to hide. It has always been that way.  The video clip I have in my mind is Ceausescu’s wooden speech from the balcony of the Central Committee building in Piata Revolutie, Bucharest where he misreads the crowd, who seem, at first, to be chanting and cheering but it soon becomes booing and jeering with cries for his downfall which was enacted a few days later.

The banal “cause for concern” chant repeated by so many betrays a staggering out-of-touchness with reality, the real world and the real concerns of real people. The “Concern” over a new strain with barely a dozen reported cases in the UK, where there is no evidence that it could in the future cause fatalities, or lead to serious illness or hospitalisation or maybe just a runny nose, when this is the cause for concern, where is the concern for the real distresses that face real people every day?  for cancer, for heart disease, for type2 diabetes, for mental health, for dementia, for the adverse effects of the vaccine: (Blood disorders, pulmonary Embolism and deep vein thrombosis, anaphylaxis, acute cardiac issues, Infections, Herpes, Immune system disorders, blindness, eye disorders, deafness, spontaneous abortions, skin disorders, psychiatric disorders, migraines and headaches, central nervous system disorders, Guillain-Barre syndrome, facial paralysis vertigo tinnitus, respiratory disorders, seizures, paralysis, tremors, reproductive disorders and almost 1,800 deaths in the UK) the destruction of economies, for the jobless, for dept, for child abuse for drug deaths and drug lives, for migrants, for violence, crime, for poverty, for….?

Sooner or later the skin on the bubble will be stretched so thin that the whole thing will burst. Illusions are illusions but reality is reality and eventually all the shams and charades, the deceit and maleficence will be exposed.

But maybe I am totally wrong about all of that. Maybe it is me who is out of touch. Maybe us plain folks don’t know all the story. Maybe we have misjudged and attributed false motives to those who have been responsible. Maybe we have allowed a level of scepticism and cynicism to creep into our thinking and see corruption in every level of government, in the World Health Organisation, in Fauci and Bill Gates, in Moderna and Pfizer and Astra Zeneca, in Davos, Klaus Schwab, and the great reset, in the Chinese Communist Party, the Guardian, the Independent, CNN and the BBC.  Maybe we should trust in the noble altruistic selfless character of human nature and acknowledge that all of these players are acting out of truly unselfish motives and only with our best interests at heart. Maybe.

Laura Dodsworth has published a devasting and explosive book cataloguing her forensic ferreting into the dark art of behavioural science and its employment by the authorities in the past 18 months. “A state of fear” clinically exposes the government and the cartel of advisors, medics, scientists, public health experts, statisticians and modellers in their cynical weaponizing of fear to get the population to do what they want, without them knowing it.

While a lot of this has had some airing before, hardly any of it has reaches the main stream media or has been taken up by journalist or political opposition, the people who you would expect would notice.  So, it is up to Laura a photographer, artist and author, not really known for journalism to step in to the breach, to scratch around, to push hard at the doors, to follow the evidence and get to the truth, while the rest of journalist, with some notable exceptions, have gone limp and supine. Even the rock and roll anti-establishment suspects, who are always quick to pounce on any titbit to throw at the establishment, have been strangely silent. It’s as if their mouths have been stuffed with gold or injected with drugs to stay quiet. Shout about anything they seem to be told, but don’t go there. There, however, is where Laura goes and when she has her teeth into the something she doesn’t let go. Funny, this is what I thought true journalism was all about. But it’s heartening, at least, to find someone who actually does it.

What is notable about the book is that it is sane and balanced. It isn’t fired by rage or anger. It isn’t an anti-vaxxers rant or the bleatings of a covid denier. It is simply the inquisitiveness of a curious mind and a nose that can smell a rat.  She manages to interview significant figures close to the government, some anonymous but others willing to give their names, including notable people involved in the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) who report to SAGE. What she finds is that fear was deliberately and specifically used to direct the behaviour of the population. Many of the advisors had deep misgivings about the morality and the ethics of the programmes, but never enough, it seems, to blow the whistle.

What is disturbing, to her, is the way the pattern mirrors that of a strict parent child relationship. 

During the Covid epidemic, the UK government threated us with longer lock-downs or tougher restrictions if we misbehaved, and rewards such as the rule of six or garden meetings were dangled in front of us if all went well. The relationship between government and citizen is reminiscent of a strict parent and child relationship, with alternating use of the naughty step and then offering sweets for good behaviour. Citizens were not treated like adults. We were told frightening ‘Bedtime stories’ everyday via the news and Downing Street briefings to ensure compliance with a set of everchanging and sometimes bizarre rules. 

“The weaponization of fear is a particularly destabilising tactic in the behavioural psychology toolbox

because it clouds our judgement, which in turn increases reliance on government, which then creates more fear, which paralysis us further, creating a self-perpetuating doom-loop.”

Naomi Wolfe goes further and puts it more graphically, in a recent interview, when she described it as an abusive domestic relationship where the partner, invested with the power, teases, controls, humiliates and infantilises the victim caught in a horrendous trap of dependency.

One of the SPI-B advisors explained this, as it related to mask wearing: “There is a behavioural science ‘reason’ for wearing masks, to increase a sense of collectivism. This is the feeling favoured by the psychologists that is entirely unrelated to the scientific evidence regarding transmission. Essentially, they want us to feel like we are ‘in it together’” So there you have it, from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.

Another from the same group explained “People are passive and biddable. A lot of people don’t question. Their thinking is shaped by other people, especially the media and social media and that is a dangerous thing. As a society we are set up to encourage a passive and biddable population.”

Throughout the book she slots in short interviews with ordinary people she meets on the way. They don’t make the story but illustrate it and they are exactly the stories I hear from individuals caught up in it all, bewildered, frustrated, frightened.

The bleak prospect in the end is the death of freedom “We seem to have forgotten that no one is safe. You have never been safe and you never will be. Nor will I. In the blind global panic of an epidemic we have forgotten how to analyse risk. If you don’t accept that you will die one day, that you can never be safe, then you are a sitting duck for authoritarian policies which purports to be for your safety. If too many individuals immolate their liberty for safety, we risk a bonfire of freedoms.”

Frank Furedi set the ground work for this analysis in his significant piece “How fear works, culture of fear in the twenty first century” and he explains how, from an early age, people are encouraged  “to become preoccupied with their safety and to regard being fearful as a sensible and responsible orientation towards the world”  While in another time, it would be assumed that our response to threats would be in accordance with virtues such as wisdom, courage, moderation, justice and duty, now it is considered virtuous to adopt the technique of “risk assessment” and “powerlessness, fragility and vulnerability are the characteristics that resonate with the current representation of personhood.”  

But an authority which deliberately and calculatingly creates a climate of fear amongst the population are playing with fire. Once the heather is lit it is not so easy to put out, no matter how many jackets are ruined in the process. A frightened population may act in quite unpredictable ways. There may be compliance for a time but things can suddenly turn and fear can quickly morph into rage. Who knows how an otherwise biddable populace will react when they discover that they were deceived and the devastating and prolonged restrictions were quite unnecessary and achieved nothing. Their belief may will be resilient while so much is invested in it, but with a crisis of faith, things could get ugly.

A government’s intentional employment of fear also betrays the fact that they themselves are fearful: fearful of losing their popularity, fear of failure, fear of not doing or acting quickly enough, fear of losing power and ultimately, fear that the people may rise up and destroy their masters. Those who live by fear die by it. History shows that dictators and despots never know when to give up. They never leave when there is a window for a peaceful exit. Instead, they cling on to the bitter end, to face the rope and get the bullet.

Critically,  the weaponization of fear breaks down trust, trust that may have taken centuries to build, and when trust is destroyed it is hard to know where, as a society, we can go.

Crawford Mackenzie