This is what you want… This is what you get

In a recent appraisal of the current situation in the country, it was noted in these pages that “UK Government has evidently been looking for, and is perhaps now finding a level of imposition at which a majority of the public is happy to remain”. It meant that lockdown had been eased where it wouldn’t invite flagrant disobedience (making UK Government look weak) and where it could fend off Dolan’s Judicial Review application. However, when this comprehension was written down (in the article, Good hard look required as drawn-out lockdown finds tolerance level for authoritarianism…), there was no envisioning that UK Government would require shops to adopt a policy whereby customers would be obliged to wear face coverings on company premises. And yet, the emergence of the requirement makes perfect sense.

Previously, it was at least appreciated that a new one-meter distancing rule was essentially “normal [behaviour]…. appear[ing] to be possible only through sanction by UK Government”; to express the sentiment in another way: the UK Government wanted a continuation of the appearance of its command as had been self-awarded through the pretext of “Covid-19”. Naturally, one-meter distancing on its own would not have been visual enough, hence the connecting of it with wearing face coverings.

That being established, before the UK Government announced the compulsory wearing of face coverings (on July 14th), but at a time when there was plenty of chatter about the measure reckoned to be coming soon, it was thought hereabouts (in the article, The facemask balancing act: a matter of controlling heat in the economy, to be precise) that the UK Government just would not find the necessary willingness in the public to comply. It would be safe to say that, in the experience of most people visiting a shop at that time, the number who were already wearing masks was negligible. Moreover, any intention of the public to wear masks in droves was non apparent.

And so, it was a great surprise to the author to discover, on his visit yesterday to a supermarket, that everyone else bar him in the store had donned a mask. This dramatic turnaround can only be explained by a campaign of propaganda that was fired at the public in the interval days between the announcement of the measure and its commencement. The author can’t describe what the television content must have been, but knows that the online chatter was immense. Again, to be found playing a crucial role in the demoralisation of people who would be more minded to resist was that wolf in sheep’s clothing, Mail on Sunday columnist, Peter Hitchens.

Ahead of the UK Government’s announcement on wearing face coverings in shops, Hitchens – as we can plainly see – was preparing the ground, and conjuring up the idea of inevitability by declaring that everyone was already wearing masks, and being muzzled like a dog to boot: “We’ve all turned from normal humans into muzzled masochists”. Now, this already drew denunciation in these pages (to be found in the second of the articles linked to above), but mention must be made about the term “muzzle”, which is a disparaging nickname for “face covering” that appears to have been coined by Hitchens. Who does the reader think that the term is aimed at in the context of its intent? The answer is always the audience, and Hitchens’ is looking for solace and leadership in a traumatic time. Instead, they get told that there is already no opposition to mask wearing (so resistance is futile), and in fact it’s not a mask, it’s a muzzle. How does an enemy create desolation in the ranks of its opponents? In gets amongst them and whispers despair in their ears.

Still in anticipation of the UK Government’s announcement, in the next instalment of his column (11th July), Hitchens wrote the following:

But in the meantime what are those of us who have not been cowed into submission to do?

I suggest that we are allowed to register as ‘relaxed’. We will sign declarations that we will not sue anyone or claim on anyone’s insurance if we catch Covid-19. We regard it as a minor risk of life, to be coped with…

Everyone else can carry on, shrouded in gowns like the staff of a mortuary, muzzled in face-nappies, hiding from each other on footpaths and in doorways….

In return for it, even I am prepared to submit to tracking and tracing while the experiment lasts.

Firstly, lest we forget this is coming from the anti Rosa Parks, who wears a gasmask on his train journeys as an object lesson in uber compliance. But when he puts himself amongst the uncowed, he is identifying with his audience.

Secondly, no one can catch Covid-19; this is the lung disease that develops from the presence of two types of microorganisms in the host – but we’ll get into the persistent and deliberate misrepresentation of the disease in a moment.

Thirdly, and to the main point, Hitchens has a “solution”. Now, the FBEL readership has been told that gatekeepers never have solutions – and so it continues to be the case. We shouldn’t for a moment imagine that Hitchens is serious about segregating those who feel relaxed about the risk of “catching” Covid-19, and those who have been made to feel anxious: this is an introduction to the notion of trading the superficial restrictions of the UK Government’s mitigation measures for compliance in other areas that are even more important for Government agenda. As Hitchens puts it, people could stop wearing masks if they submitted to track and trace. Well, the progression is all too obvious: the end of social distancing could be a condition for taking the vaccine. The author is astonished that Hitchens, being all too evidently execrable, can be lauded as he is.

Then there is the idea of having to sign declarations so that unlawful infringements upon civil liberties don’t apply. Truly appalling, and equally astonishing, but consistently Hitchensian: for, Hitchens is a believer in the right of the pharaoh by dint of his being the pharaoh  – and this is easily comprehended from his writings. Freedom, in this landscape, is gifted by the ruling class; but don’t take the author’s word for it. Go and read Hitchens carefully, for a change.

Moving on, and after the announcement by UK Government, Hitchens’ very next Sunday column (appearing before the commencement of the requirement for face coverings) returned to presenting a picture of “muzzles” as an in-demand commodity:

Now it [Government] presumes to tell us what to wear. And what it wants us to wear is a soggy cloth muzzle, a face-nappy that turns its wearer from a normal human into a mumbling, mouthless submissive.

And this, it seems, is popular. Is there nothing the modern British people will not put up with?

Again, the “British people” is an entirety that would encapsulate Hitchens’ audience: it’s them he’s really messaging. These are the people he tells are “face-nappy” wearers.

It is a running source of intense irritation here at FBEL that dissenting mainstream corporate and alternative media is failing to present a unified front regarding the real nature of Covid-19, with its actual characteristics that would make it a low incidence disease of relative rarity. The complaint was made already in the first of the FBEL articles linked to above, so there’s no need to go through the issue again. However, it has to be said that when there has been such a huge silence for so long about real Covid-19 (after British newspapers published reports of SARS-COV to ACE2 binding way back at the beginning of the entire episode), and such an effort to send people away from knowledge about it, the information has undoubtedly taken on an “off-the-wall” aspect. And no doubt this is the express intention. So, it’s not really that dissenting media is failing, it is actually instead camouflaging to deceive.

And while Hitchens has an audience that is evidently as thick as a lot of bricks so that he has to clearly spell out that he is a Judas goat, other media have more of a front to preserve in the credibility stakes, and thus perhaps need to be a bit slyer about it. The author is specifically referring to the way that UK Column presented how it would be dealing with face coverings in a particular show (which the author hasn’t watched). “We do not recommend”, it said in a promotion tweeted out by one of the show’s presenters, “that you wear a mask while listening to the show”. This was a “mask free policy” for listeners. It could be excused as humour – for apparently this and satire is a tool against the UK Government’s requirement for wearing face coverings in shops (as per actual comment under website post carrying the same show from someone who evidently had knowledge of its content: “However ridicule is a great weapon to use against them and I love your piss taking with ‘corony’. lol.”). The author is with Woody Allen (see Manhattan) regarding the effectiveness of satire, cutting or otherwise, against brute authoritarianism. Ridicule is not as effective as going to supermarkets without a mask to show other people that they should not be cowed, and if the UK Column’s jocularity is not a distraction from its not promoting the civil disobedience that is clearly necessary, then all has been a misconstruction, and it hasn’t offered another opportunity to see its true colours.

It’s been a month now since the following appeared in the first FBEL article linked to above:

In 2020, as people have their “go-along-to-get-along” buttons pressed, we proceed into a state of drawn-out ludicrous lockdown not because there is no dissenting voice, but because there has been no powerful revelation of the emperor’s nudity. In fact, to be precise, there has been revelation because the reader will find it in these pages; unfortunately, it is only as good as the discernment in a prospective audience (we live in an age where people can’t identify the weapon they require to fight the battle that they need to win, and that’s even if they appreciate their struggle), and the facility to reach such a thing (which certainly isn’t granted by self-contained alternative media).

This makes a very important point: there hasn’t been a revelation of the hoax – which is all too easy to do – because if there had been, and at the required volume, then the UK Government would not be able to use it as pretext for any Covid-19 mitigation measures. The UK Government continues to make people jump through hoops. QED. As always – as the extract also gets into – at the root are the led-by-the-nose and the can’t-read-an-academic-work, and the can’t-process-the-information, and the won’t-believe-the-information, and the show-me-a-bloke-on-Youtube, getting what they deserve.

Next up is vaccines – perhaps. There will be lots of noise made – especially about mandatory ones. People will get frit to smithereens by the incessant chatter, and there will be lots of bluster, but underneath no support for those who object to being interfered with in such a way, and in the end, if the UK Government wants to (just as happened in Bosham and Fishbourne), people – perhaps the police – will knock on doors, and apply peer pressure, and householders will run along like good little boys and girls to mobile vaccination centres. Maybe the UK Column can make a joke out of it.

Now, as previously mentioned elsewhere on this site, because your alternative media has Covid-19 so well covered, FBEL is going to deal less in the topic, and try to catch up with material that has been planned since February (if not a long time before). However, there will be three more articles on the old subject. The first will be about the vaccine being made by a team in Oxford. The second will be about the UK Government’s plan to tackle obesity, and the claimed connection with Covid-19. Thirdly, because covering it it isn’t “crying in the wilderness”, there will be a revisit of material discussing SARS-COV to ACE2 binding as the cause of an illness that is as like to flu as is warts (or so it seems to author, who also has this to say: that the public think in terms of Covid-19 as a flu that tips people into death is an outcome of your failing alternative media).