The Covid Propaganda War

When in doubt, let Goebbels and Psychology be your guide

In the waning days of the second year of Covid, plenty of serious and smart people confess that they no longer know what to think about the pandemic, the efficacy of vaccines, the death rate, or anything else associated with it. They are a sizable minority in a wasteland of general agreement about ‘following the science’, a ludicrous concept because there is no such thing. There is the scientific method, there are scientists, and there are scientific disagreements and peer reviewed papers. “The science” is a public relations buzz word without any scientific validity whatsoever.  But even excellent journalists like Andrew Coyne use this handy phrase without any analysis. In a recent opinion piece in Canada’s paper of record, The Globe and Mail, he says That so many people are so unwilling to trust the science on vaccines…is troubling.

What’s more troubling is that someone like him simply parrots this idiotic phrase.

But the reason is clear:  we’re caught up in an information war that is heating up as I write this. When Biden recently threatened to make vaccines mandatory, walking off stage muttering get vaccinated like an angry grandpa, I am sure his Public Relations team wasn’t thrilled. He had stepped over the line and revealed his hand, which is always a bad move. In PR you never show your hand, but you do go to great lengths to control what’s called ‘the narrative’. This is the officially agreed upon story about anything of importance. Forcing people to get vaccinated is not part of it, at least not yet, so you don’t go around pushing that narrative.

What you want to do is ‘nudge’ people into it, and there’s an entire theory about how to do that properly. In essence, the author of the theory, the economist Richard Thaler, says that one can ‘influence’ people’s choices in health and finances by shaping their environment or as he puts it, the choice architecture, in such a subtle way that everybody still believes they have free will. Which in this case means creating a ‘vaccination architecture’ that pits friends and family against each other. But it’s ‘your choice’, of course. You can watch Thaler artfully dodging questions on Unherd:

And explaining why nudging might not do the trick with the vaccines, after all. He is firmly in the ‘follow the science’ camp, of course.

You see, public ideas have to be handled with dexterity and strategy. I should know; I was once the communications director of an important Canadian high-tech company. That’s where I learned the significance of controlling ‘the narrative’, how to massage it, and how to sideline competing ones. It’s a fine art, it is. And in a public health ‘crisis’, it is imperative to speak with one voice, to show unanimity, as one of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, Professor Jay Bhattacharia, says. But, and this is a big but, for that to happen there must be scientific consensus. And as far as this pandemic is concerned, there never was any consensus. There have been and continue to be, deep disagreements about how to handle it, how to talk about it, how to deal with an anxious and confused population, he says. Of course, that bit of background information has never appeared on the evening news. Instead, we get carefully massaged numbers without context, scary stories about children dying, and a divide and conquer strategy about vaccine mandates. Prime Minister Trudeau himself, hopefully voted out of office tomorrow in a cynical early election, has dismissed anyone who dares to question the pandemic narrative as ‘those people’.

Governments have always known that those who control the public narrative can manipulate the people and public life. For example, every time a foreign power takes over, their first order of business is gaining control of the means of communication: TV stations, the electricity grid, newspapers, cell phone towers, and of course, ‘social media’. Dissidents are shot or jailed. And then the new ‘leader’ makes a speech, duly reported on all those captured communications channels. And then, the message is repeated, ad nauseum, no matter how bizarre it might be.

It’s the repetition that matters. You might have heard that, “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, a law of propaganda often attributed to Goebbels, the brilliant head of the Ministry of Propaganda during the Third Reich. That is how the ‘illusion of truth’ is manufactured. According to the psychologist Tom Stafford, it works like this:

The key finding is that people tend to rate items they’ve seen before as more likely to be true, regardless of whether they are true or not, and seemingly for the sole reason that they are more familiar.

Another rule from the Nazi era stems from Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, in which he says All effective propaganda must restrict itself to a few key points…until even the last person understands it’.

Even a cursory analysis of the key messages re the virus follows these two rules of simplicity and repetition. The pharmaceutical industrial complex has said from the beginning that this is a very dangerous virus, we are in a ‘war’ against it, and that only vaccines or lockdowns can save us. Rinse and repeat, with slight variations, for almost two years. And it has worked. Most people believe this story and will get quite angry when you question it. Complex story lines that get into the details of what the tests actually measure, how deaths are reported, and why we hear so little about vaccine side effects or other treatments, let alone taking care of your immune system, don’t make it into the evening news. Questioning is only for the strong minded. Here is a piece about the huge but denied elephants in the pandemic room that the likes of Coyne should read before they spout off about ‘the science’. https://www.pandata.org/elephants-in-the-room/

The trouble lies the way the human mind works. When we get confused or frightened, we tend to stick to the herd mentality, don’t we. Other deplorable habits of the human mind also make us all easy victims of propaganda. One of them is the confirmation bias, which is why we tend to focus on stories we agree with, ignoring those we don’t. And if that weren’t bad enough, there is the concept of Noise, discussed at length by the preeminent psychologist of our day, Daniel Kahnemann. In his recent tome by that name, he demonstrates that we are very poor at spotting what is in fact false, i.e., Noise. Goebbels already knew that because his speeches played on the emotions and frustrations of the Weimar Germans. It was he who screamed ‘do you want total war?’ and received a howl of agreement. He knew how to play them, the Germans, sick of paying reparations, sick of squabbling politicians, and fearful of the future. They weren’t so different from us, as it turns out. We’re as easy to fool and manipulate as they were.

When it was all over in Berlin, where Goebbels was the hated Gauleiter until he committed suicide and poisoned his six children in the bunker in 1945, they called Goebbels the ‘Giftzwerg’, or poison dwarf.

Berliners always were and still are (I hope) satirists, jokers, and outliers in a politically correct and painfully self-conscious German media landscape. Conformist thought is not for them; they have their own, irreverent take on life. For me, they embody fearless freedom of thought, the bedrock of any democracy worthy of the name. When Berliners called Goebbels a poison dwarf, they were endangering themselves, but they were right. He was that, but also much more. One of the most cynical and effective propaganda masters of all time, he was the architect of the official narrative that convinced the Germans that loving the Fuehrer was the smartest thing they could do. Any counternarrative was verboten.

And that is what has happened to the Covid story. At a time when an anxious population is in existential need of clear, factual and above all, wide ranging comparisons on a global level, we get one, locally approved mainstream media message, and vilification of people holding other opinions. Especially on YouTube, any opinion deemed to be ‘dangerous’ by a non-human algorithm, can get you deplatformed. A recent example is the utterly bland Dr Saneel Dhand, a British medic who has never said anything negative about vaccines and is clearly anything but a dissenter. But he was threatened with cancellation, nonetheless, though still posting last I looked. If he is ‘dangerous’, what the hell am I?

This is a disaster. The media landscape is now so confusing that finding out what’s really happening has become a full-time job. Nobody except an old retiree with an overactive mind (me) or a full-time professional journalist with backbone, has the time or energy to do that. Most people accept what they see on their favourite news channel and condemn the narratives coming from other ones. Thinking for oneself has always been hard, but it’s now become excruciating.

And dangerous. A group of doctors in British Columbia recently wrote an Open Letter to Bonnie Henry, the Minister of Health and Premier Horgan, a ‘counterfactual narrative’ about the pandemic bristling with links to hard data. This paper asks the missing questions about the abuse of statistics, especially statistics about the death rate, which some people believe to be around 40 percent. Fear mongering really does work. It also asks why they are not correcting the false information on the dangers of Covid for children. And examines why the PCR tests are unreliable.

The important takeaway is that none of the doctors identified themselves. If they did, they would run the risk of being canceled, hounded, and branded as bad doctors and bad people. This in a so-called democracy. Here is a link to this document,

OPEN_LETTER_TO_BH_AD_JH_-_Sept_9_2021__1_.pdf

So, the official pharmaceutical industrial complex PR machine is in control. No amount of arguing, cajoling, new information, new studies, and so on and so forth, seems to be able to move opinions. It is like talking to people inside a cult; they can’t hear you. Indeed, the so called ‘conversation’ has all the earmarks of a religious belief system with its own internal logic hermetically sealed off from any and all dissent. You either ‘believe’ in the vaccines, or you’re a heretic who should be and soon will be, outcast from the bosom of the people who are ‘doing the right thing’. There is no other way to control the virus except by vaccines and lockdowns. Doctors pleading to be heard above the din, who have saved thousands from dying by treating Covid early with a cocktail of known medicines that have been systematically vilified, cannot get any traction in the media. The faithful don’t want to hear about it. They’ve been captured by the dominant narrative, and once you swallow that story, you’re immune to the competing ones. Admitting that it might be flawed is simply too awful to contemplate. We want to feel ‘secure’ in our beliefs. Nuance is lost; you’re either with us or against us, as Bush had it. And we know how that war ended.

There is another layer to this story, and it’s the one I find most disturbing. Why are all governments intent on scaring an already frightened population? Is this even about the virus anymore? Or is there another, bigger agenda? I hate conspiracies. But at this moment, they simply present themselves. They seem to be in the very air I breathe through my damn mask. But that’s a topic for another post on the endless pandemic info wars.