On the Great Covid Reckoning

And shooting Covid Elephants in German rooms

Remember when parents dreaded having ‘the talk’ with their kids? And then discovered that the kids knew more about sex than they did? We have a similar situation with regard to having an honest talk about the massive social, political and psychological damage done in the name of Covid. I think it started in earnest at the beginning of this month with the much derided Atlantic article by Professor Emily Oster, in which she basically said that though a few ‘mistakes’ were made, we should just forgive, forget and ‘move on’. That went over like a balloon full of Pfizer vaccines.

The ‘Official Narrative’ is Unraveling

Since then, a lot has happened. Instead of mindless blanket ‘forgiveness’, we are witnessing a gradual but incessant unraveling of the ‘official narrative’ re vaccines, lockdowns and the profound damage those terrible policies have done. The truth is leaking out in spite of furious efforts to stop it, ignore it, or simply be silent. In Britain, a lone MP called Kruger has started an official inquiry into the reasons for shocking numbers of ‘excess deaths’. People dying in larger numbers than from Covid itself are the ‘new normal’ in all western countries where the vast majority is vaccinated. Asking questions about that is becoming unavoidable. Also, according to fellow Substacker The Naked Emperor, an important new petition has been created asking the UK Government to launch a public inquiry into the approval process for Covid-19 vaccines. And finally, the damage done to children’s education is suddenly news in the MMM.

As for the safety of the vaccines, a video called ‘Died Suddenly’ was released recently and caused another furore because it dares to talk to the embalmers and undertakers who noticed an awful lot of weird blood clots they’ve never seen before. I have not watched this somewhat flawed yet important piece of the Covid puzzle because I have to protect my sanity, but there is no doubt that those undertakers cannot be ignored or silenced again. That genie is out of the vaccine bottle too.

So it is with great pleasure that I discovered that two very unlike public intellectuals, the Canadian guru and author Jordan Peterson and the German film maker, author, and musician, Dietrich Brueggemann, have come to very similar conclusions about how we got here and what needs to be done to heal the festering Covid wounds.

Let’s begin with DB, notable member of a vanishing breed, the serious satirist, and incidentally, my cousin twice removed. Here he is playing a sad song about the lack of beer in Quatar and how he can’t marry his fiancee of a dozen years because…she wants to have the honeymoon in Quatar…

On a more serious note, DB has stepped once again onto the muddy field of the German Covid Disagreements (he has been a consistent dissident all along) with a brilliant critique in Die Berliner Zeitung, one of the few liberal, independent newspapers in Germany. It caused a sensation because he went all in on identifying the barriers to having an honest, public discussion of what has gone so deeply wrong in western democracy. By framing the debacle in social and political terms, he gets to the heart of the matter.

https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/kultur-vergnuegen/corona-unrecht-jede-kritik-als-querdenken-einzuordnen-ist-eine-fata-morgana-li.288664

The paper deliberately promoted a heated back and forth discussion between DB and an anonymous stringer about a new German book with the provocative title; May the entire republic point fingers at them Corona Injustice and its Perpetrators, (Moege die gesamte Republik mit dem Finger auf sie zeigen Das Corona Unrecht und seine Taeter). Published in November 2022 by an online portal, Rubikon, by Marcus Kloeckner and Jens Warnicke. It’s already a German bestseller.

I have translated excerpts of DB’s comments that I hope will interest my readers and also demonstrates him as a master stylist. He begins by musing on how the political failures began to play out, notable because this is what happened to all of us living in democracies that suddenly went totalitarian. He says he grew up in a land free of bullies and name calling, where democracy seemed rock solid. But…

…I rubbed my eyes in disbelief in the spring of 2020 and haven’t been able to stop. The State began issuing directives that heretofore would have been considered beyond the pale and also trampled on several basic legal rights. In a functioning democracy, which I naively believed I inhabited, I would have expected sharp disagreements and controversies in the media. This failed to materialize. Instead, anyone who dared to express doubts was labelled a ‘science denier’ or a worthless shlub who wanted people to die, etc.. Since then, it has apparently become acceptable to intimate that one is mentally deranged or should just shut the fuck up.

Though such verbal excesses demonstrate the paucity of good arguments and make it necessary to engage in the equivalent of verbal stone throwing, nobody appears to be upset.

He called out the anonymous critic for not having the guts to put his name to the discussion and identified the deeper Covid issues asElephants in the room, slaying them, one by one.

Elephant #1 Normalizing anonymity and fear of being ‘cancelled’

The interesting question is no longer whether the book or the review is good or not; rather, it’s what’s wrong with a society where someone is too scared to put his name to a Book Review, which he nevertheless writes because he apparently believes it’s important though he could just as well not write it. Are we going to handle all disagreements like this, where there’s only one approved narrative and all others could only be uttered by ‘Anonymous’?

Elephant #2 Silent citizens and not knowing what others think creates public hysteria

We are ignorant of the actual public opinion on Covid because so few are willing to talk openly. And that drives a society into hysteria. It’s a bit like the Middle Ages, when everyone was under suspicion of devil worship, so that it was better not to say his name at all because in doing so, one could inadvertently become one! It’s quite possible that during every Zoom call, in every pub and each parent teacher conference, a quarter or even half of the participants find the Covid policies horrible and wish to be somewhere else, far away. I know what I’m talking about because I know of many. Public opinion that can only survive via journalism and is propagated by sanctions, revealing their true face during the ‘antivaxxers’ finger-pointing of 2021—will collapse, that is certain.

Elephant #3: Pretending that everything is fine won’t work. DB argues that we can no longer pretend that our democracy didn’t suffer a severe body blow

…the pendulum is swinging back and the elites in Germany, the media, public personalities and politicians, cannot escape asking themselves some uncomfortable questions. We can still pretend that nothing of consequence has happened, that only a few troublemakers are making noise. But categorizing every critic as a ‘Querdenker’ (difficult to translate, perhaps ‘freethinker’ with negative implications) is a Fata Morgana. Criticism of Covid politics is legitimate and necessary, and the more people get cancelled, the more crucial it becomes. Our beautiful, open society has fallen flat on its face. That is the huge elephant in the German public sphere.

And of course, the same is true of our Canadian sphere, even more beset by nascent Nazis, like Justin Trudeau who managed to insult, lock up and steal from, his citizens by invoking the most extreme legislation we have, the Emergency Measures Act, once known by a more honest title, The War Measures Act. An official inquiry about the necessity for doing such a thing is underway and as always, is dead on arrival because politicians are such expert liars and dissimulators. There is a growing consensus that maybe, just maybe, there was a less draconian way to deal with The Freedom Convoy, but it’s slow going. For the majority of Canadians, it still hasn’t sunk in that Covid and its ill conceived mandates was a frontal assault on basic rights and freedoms. Which is ongoing because we are now living with what looks like a permanent ‘state of emergency’, giving our government extraordinary powers. Nobody in Canada seems to get that.

Someone who does get it is Jordan Peterson, who has just released one of his most brilliant interviews with SkyNews Australia. It is fascinating that he uses language identical to Brueggemann’s when discussing the cost of keeping silent. Like DB, Peterson uses the word ‘hysterical’ when describing a society where the costs of speaking honestly are deemed too high. Both of these very different public figures agree that there is a direct relationship between keeping one’s mouth shut and ushering in the hell of a totalitarian regime. Peterson says that

You have to decide ‘am I better served by the Truth or the lie of silence?’ Both keeping silent and speaking out have consequences, those are your options.

I know what happens when you allow other people to control your tongue—it’s not good, not good. …the core of the totalitarian state is the lie.

So, dear reader, that’s ‘the talk’ we’re having today, next week and next year as well. The unpacking of the Covid regime and its lies is crucial to our survival as a democratic society,

so the deep analysis of what has happened and where we are going will take time and a certain number of open minds. I know a few. But the question that nags me, my particular elephant is this: are there enough of us and will we persuade the fence sitters, the people who are beginning to see that they have been duped, to come and join us? I’m hoping and praying they will because like the kids, we know so much more about this topic than they ever did.