The Journey from 1950s Maoist Thought Reform to 21st Century Covid Tyranny – Part II

Part I of this essay discussed the Government’s deployment of psychological warfare techniques to induce compliance with Covid containment policies. Robert Lifton’s 1961 study of ‘brainwashing’ in China elucidates eight psychological themes that characterised 1950s Chinese Communist ideologues’ indoctrination techniques. Using both Sue Parker Hall’s and Lifton’s work as a platform to provide my own perspective, Part I discussed themes one to four to explore the extent to which UK Government psyops mirrored methods employed by 1950s Chinese Communist ideologues. Part II discusses themes five to eight. Part III is an exploration of the ultimate cause of Covid ideological totalism.

5) The Sacred Science

The creation of the illusion of a ‘single source of truth’, mystical manipulation, demands for purity and a confessional cult all converge to prohibit any questioning of the prevailing dogma. The preceding four psychological themes are catalysts for the conversion of science from a rational pursuit of truth to a means of endorsing political decisions encapsulated in slogans like ‘flatten the curve’, ‘protect the NHS’, and ‘safe and effective’.

Lockdowns, the first pillar of Covid containment policy, “saw the abandonment of previously well thought through pandemic preparation in virtually every country in the world, in favour of a never conceived of before, homogenous, global, ‘one size fits all’ approach.”

Each successive pillar of the official narrative, although bereft of scientific foundation, received the imprimatur of moral authority, making it sacrosanct and impervious to questioning in the public mind. 

The most macabre and mesmerising element of the sacred science was the incessant death count, itself made possible only by an outrageous double contortion in firstly defining a Covid death as any death occurring within 28 days of a positive Covid test and secondly making that statistic dependent on a test which proved to be so unreliable that some experts estimated that as many as 97% of positive results were false positives. 

This culminated in a January 2021 BBC Television News bulletin in which the presenter Clive Myrie repeatedly punctuated sentences with the chant: “We’re all scared” and “Dying and dying and dying”. This was no ordinary news broadcast. It was the chant of a death cult whose aim was not to report facts but to terrorise viewers.

A January 2022 FOI request answered by the Office of National Statistics has revealed that the number of deaths solely attributable to Covid in England and Wales is 17,371 versus 153,000 official deaths within 28 days of a positive test or 174,000 deaths with Covid on the death certificate. The highest official figure is ten times higher than the number of deaths for which Covid was the only factor. The average age of death for Covid was 82.5 years. Presenting these new facts is not an assertion that the death toll is 17k. Rather, it raises the question: what would the official toll have been had the medical profession not been instructed to radically alter, for no good reason, the way in which cause of death is determined and recorded? What I will assert is that this radical alteration amounts to a falsification of the death records.

Any deviation from the sacred science was not just wrong, but immoral. Saying or doing anything that ran counter to the official narrative was tantamount to wanting to kill people. In the most unhinged opinion piece I have ever seen on any platform, The Mirror declared that “Anti-vaxxers want to kill your babies, stage a coup and cause another lockdown.”

Making the science sacred is a psychological theme that was instrumental in terrorising the public into a mesmeric acceptance of the core elements of the official narrative. It has also been undeniably instrumental in fuelling the vilification of dissenters by official narrative acolytes. 

I do not believe it is possible to consider how the science was made sacred without discussing a new condition in science that was not fully formed in the environment that Lifton analysed when he elucidated his themes. This new element is a mind-boggling level of corruption, enabled by a network of government and corporate interests. An important lynchpin in this network of interests – Big Tech – sticks out because it has been extremely influential and yet appears, on the face of it, to have no clear-cut reasons for colluding in a nefarious arbitration of scientific discourse.

Sue Parker Hall correctly points out that “the sacred science was created by a conglomerate of agencies including the WHO, the CDC and the pharmaceutical industry”. She doesn’t delve into the murkiness of these relationships, probably because that is the subject matter of investigative tomes, but we should attempt a brief flyover. 

The FDA receives 45% of its budget from the pharmaceutical industry through ‘user fees’. The CDC owns 57 vaccine patents and spends 41% of its $12bn budget buying and distributing vaccines. High level CDC officials receive substantial royalty payments on products they help develop and usher through the approval process^[1]. The second largest donor to the WHO at the time it was recklessly endorsing global lockdowns was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, itself heavily tied to the pharmaceutical industry.

Google, a lynchpin in Big Tech censorship of dissenting scientific opinion on Covid, has a stated policy of banning all sites that are sceptical of “well established scientific consensus”. This is absurd on at least two levels. 

Firstly, banning scepticism of scientific consensus is antithetical to science. Banning ideas that are sceptical of “well established scientific consensus” was foundational to the barbaric medieval papal inquisitions. It is what led to the house arrest of Galileo for advocating, contrary to Church doctrine and the “well established scientific consensus” of the day, that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Nearly 400 years later, the banning of ideas that are sceptical of “well established scientific consensus” is happening all over again.

Secondly, putting aside the contemptible hostility to intellectual discovery that is inherent in the act of censorship, what business does an internet services company have in arbitrating scientific opinion and debate? Implicit in that question is an invitation to follow the money. Google’s parent company is Alphabet Inc. which is broadly owned by the same financial institutional investors (78%) that own the major pharmaceutical companies (Pfizer is 68% owned by the financial institutional investors). Robert Malone, one of the highest profile victims of the Big Tech Inquisition, described the relationship between Big Media and Big Pharma as a horizontal integration in his landmark interview on the Joe Rogan podcast on 30 December 2021.

A cursory review of the conception of the PCR test illuminates scientific fraud writ large over a testing industry that has so far cost the country some £37bn. How could it have been possible to ship PCR test kits on the same day the virus genome sequence was made available on the online community resource virological.org on 10 January 2020? In another reversal of the natural order of things, the testing protocol, already shipped, was subsequently submitted to the medical journal, Eurosurveillance, on 21 January 2020 for scientific review. It was published the very next day on 22 January.

Of all the 1,595 publications at Eurosurveillance since 2015, not one other research paper was reviewed and accepted in fewer than 20 days. Such was the descent of this so-called respectable journal into Wild West scientific territory. It could not have been subjected to any meaningful peer review and the paper’s many flaws were highlighted in a retraction request submitted by a team of experts led by molecular biologist Pieter Borger.

When it comes to the suppression of early treatments, the term ‘scientific fraud’ itself does not adequately capture the gravity of the crime because it conjures images of data and spreadsheet manipulation. The sickening truth is that there is compelling evidence that the deliberate suppression of early treatments to ensure that the vaccines received a smooth path to emergency authorisation may have cost hundreds of thousands of lives^[2].

In the light of these actions, the relationship between government health agencies, scientific journals, Big Pharma and Big Tech looks like an organised crime syndicate. This syndicate worked hand in glove to create the illusion of scientific terra firma which contributed to the impregnability of the sacred, albeit bankrupt, official narrative.

6) Loading the Language

Lifton describes language in the totalist environment as “characterized by the thought-terminating cliché”^[3]. Easily memorised and highly reductive slogans were developed with the effect of blunting nuance, complexity and critical analysis. The effect of this was primarily to constrict thinking but the developed jargon also serves the purpose of judging and moralising.

Sue Parker Hall summarises the “new vocabulary [that] emerged to garner support for policies” as:

“a utilitarian shorthand, which significantly forestalls critical analysis and therefore contributes to the general public’s compliance. Being confined to home alone was called ‘cocooning’ or ‘sheltering’; keeping an anti-social distance of two metres from other human beings, a measure that results in a sense of ‘increasing social rejection, growing impersonality and individualism, and the loss of a sense of community…[that]…negatively affects learning and growth, and…prevents people from effectively socializing, which is a fundamental human need’ (Sikali, 2020), was titled, ‘social distancing’; surveillance became ‘contact tracing’, and the justification for the multitude of life limiting policies was to ‘flatten the curve’ and, telegraphing that life could never be the same again, the innocuous sounding, ‘new normal’.”

Let’s not forget ‘protecting the NHS’, a cynical role reversal between the public and the institution meant to guard the public’s health.

Anyone who had not succumbed to abject fear but had invested time to formulate a different opinion could have been viewed, in Parker Hall’s words as “sovereign, grown up, pro-social individuals who, having done extensive, independent research and risk assessment, are taking responsibility for their own health, as well as the health of their family in a different way.” Instead, they are contemptuously labelled “uneducated, anti-scientific, anti-social, a covidiot, selfish, irresponsible, reckless, inconsiderate, stupid and anti-vax.”

In a class all of its own is the metamorphosis of science into a fine art in which shifting public policy is rationalised by overnight changes in the definition of well-established scientific principles. With an overnight website update, herd immunity is now something that can only be achieved through mass vaccination. And when the vaccines fail to confer immunity to the targeted pathogen by failing to prevent transmission and infection, the definition of a vaccine is changed by replacing the word ‘immunity’ with the fuzzy concept of ‘protection’. 

While Sue Parker Hall has analysed this crass manipulation of scientific language under the rubric of loading the language, it could just as easily fit within the theme of sacred science as a type of scientific fraud that renders science into a religion whose doctrines evolve according to the demands, financial and ideological, of its high priests. 

7) Doctrine over person

The imperative to preserve totalist dogma results in the subordination of individual human experience to the totalist doctrine. Therefore, Lifton observed that doctrine, including its mythological elements, “is ultimately more valid, true, and real than is any aspect of actual human character or human experience.”^[4] Thus an abstract idea can be placed above human life.

‘Protecting the NHS’ has meant severely restricting access to health services with the result that people who would not have died from the virus have died from the lack of care for other conditions. People have been killed by the deliberate suppression of proven effective early treatments to ensure there were no competing treatments that would jeopardise the emergency use authorisation of vaccines, a sacred pillar of the Covid containment strategy. Lockdowns to ‘save lives’ have destroyed lives. Individuals are now being told by the state that any assessment of individual risk of injury and death from vaccination must be subordinated to the imperatives of universal vaccination.

The theme of doctrine over person and the role it has played in Covid underscores the truth that totalist ideology always causes more death and decay than it claims to prevent. Totalitarianism is a death cult that uses a ‘greater good’ to subordinate the needs of the individual to the cult of total control over all aspects of the life of the individual. All the worst crimes against humanity have always had a ‘greater good’ as their alibi.

8) The dispensing of existence

Totalist ideology is, by definition, polarising. The resistance to complexity, nuance, greyness, and difference creates animosity to those who manifest all these things in opposition to a simplistic and false narrative. Totalism is a form of extremism. The more extreme the pursuit of a ‘single source of truth’, the more extreme the hostility to those who oppose it. The totalist animus is quick to identify those who have a right to exist – adherents to the ideology – and dissenters who forfeit their right to exist by virtue of the threat they pose to ideological goals. 

Belief in and adherence to the official narrative engenders both superiority over the non-believer and a sense of security because it affirms the right to exist, to be – I believe/obey, therefore I am. Attached to this belief is its corollary – the fear of extinction through apostasy. In the UK, the mainstream media in its most charitable moods, asks what is to be done about the “anti-vaxxers” arguing that “serious barriers” will make them “drop their objections very quickly.” When viciously baring its teeth, the MSM likens them to “baby killers” deserving of the same treatment accorded to terrorists. Austria has passed laws that will make it illegal and therefore virtually impossible to live there as an unvaccinated person.

To understand how depraved this position is, one simply needs to reflect on how far removed it is from the norm. And what is the norm? It is, for the most part, a world in which we face disease threats without a vaccine. There are numerous examples of how we behave towards each other when there is a disease threat in the absence of a vaccine or in the presence of a vaccine with low uptake and no stigmatisation attached to opting out.

The most comparable disease is influenza, for which we have a notoriously ineffective vaccine available annually, but which is not mandated, and which had a less than 50% uptake for those under 65 before Covid. It’s clear that people weigh up the need to live without undue fear against the desire to take reasonable precautions to protect their health. Abstainers are not dehumanised as terrorists. There is no blaming and scapegoating but rather a tacit acceptance that facing the risk of death by virus, or any other cause, is part of the meaning of life itself.

Or we could look at AIDS. When AIDS arrived on the world stage it was understood that an HIV diagnosis was an unequivocal death sentence. We have lived for 40 years without an AIDS vaccine. I imagine most people behave responsibly in managing the risk to themselves and others, and I’m sure many of us also know of some people who don’t behave all that responsibly. But we don’t talk about dehumanising potential AIDS terrorists or putting up “serious barriers” for them. 

So, it’s valid to ask why the insertion of a single additional variable into the equation – a vaccine and, ironically, a very ineffective one at that – should cause human populations around the world to harbour genocidal intentions towards those who opt out of the vaccine on very rational grounds. The answer to that must lie in the intoxicating effects of a totalist ideology.

Put it this way – in the absence of a vaccine, we are equally (ignoring individual risk profiles) at risk of the pathogen and yet, in this state of equality, we are at our most civilised towards each other. Introduce a vaccine into the equation and the door to savagery is opened despite the promised risk reduction to those who take it. 

Put it another way – if universal vaccination for a disease that has killed 150k over 2 years (and we know that figure is inflated) could potentially result in a vaccinated 85% of the population acquiescing to the genocide of, or at the very least, subjecting to severe deprivation, the 15% of abstainers –  roughly 9.5 million people in England alone – you’ve got to ask yourself if the human race is really worth saving.

If the drive to mass vaccination can catalyse that most lethal combination of vices – meanness and stupidity – in the general population, thereby threatening a destruction of life far greater than that caused by the disease itself, is that not sufficient justification for banning universal vaccination, not mandating it?

Part III is an exploration of the ultimate cause of Covid ideological totalism.

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^[1] Robert F. Kennedy Jr, The Real Anthony Fauci, New York, Sky Horse Publishing, 2021, Introduction, page xv

^[2] Robert F. Kennedy Jr, The Real Anthony Fauci, New York, Sky Horse Publishing, 2021, Ch 1, pages 41, 52.

^[3] Robert J Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, University of North Carolina Press, 1989, Ch 22, pg 429.

^[4] Robert J Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, University of North Carolina Press, 1989, Ch 22, pg 431