I don’t want to write about this, mostly because you probably won’t want to read another bloody word about Covid, which is not exactly why I go to the trouble of… et cetera. But what precisely is going on when the only resistance to the insane rules now governing us come from the sort of people for whom the old padded-cells at Grangegorman should be re-opened and Albert Pierrepoint given his job back? Where is the voice of reason? Where is the “conversation” – and just when did that word acquire its slightly creepy note of bogus civility? – that should accompany the major transformations which have occurred in Irish society?
For the past year, the government has, effectively, being gift-wrapping the entire Irish retail sector and handing it over, lock, stock and barrel, to Jeff Bezos. Maybe some small specialist outlets – boutiques specialising in double-D cup bras for obese fourteen-year-old boys – might emerge amidst the post-nuclear rubble of our high streets and our shopping centres. But Ireland’s towns and cities probably have no commercial future. The original meaning of the word ‘shop’ – a place where things happen, as in workshop or bookshop – has been transliterated into its very opposite with that term ‘shopping-on-line’. A shop is not a location anymore but a meaningless meme circling like Pluto in the outer space of the Bezos mind.
How could so many bizarre and counter-logical rules have been accepted without challenge? How is suspending cancer-scans prolonging life? How is closing down childhood good for children? How is borrowing from tomorrow good for the day after tomorrow?
If it is illegal to travel more than 5km from your home, how can CIE still be running buses and trains between towns hundreds of kilometres apart? How is it possible that our airports are still functioning? Has Michael O’Leary devised a business model with an airline client-base that lives in tents at the end of runway Number One? And just why did the government make it illegal to go rough-shooting or play golf in the open air?
Across the world, beaches have been shut down, yet Mark Woolhouse of the University of Edinburgh recently told the House of Commons that not a single transmission of the virus could be attributed to people mingling in such places. Moreover, as the great Lord Sumption has observed, general rules that were devised for coping with the virus have been transmuted into iron laws, to be enforced by the courts, with prison sentences and criminal records for the “guilty”.
So, where is the discussion about this, where the debate? There is none, just abject submission and fervent pleas from the oppressed for yet deeper servitude. The Official media – primarily RTE and The Irish Times – sound like moronic newspeak, with all the epidemiological jargon that is vital for the triumph of this ideological hysteria. So, when you hear the endless repetition of those meaningless terms like “spike”, ie, a small increase, or “rollout”, a term invented by Boeing to describe the emergence of jet-airliner from its Seattle assembly-line, get ready to hear some double-dyed, pig-shit stupidity. Furthermore, this is now being infused with a nasty post-Brexit nationalism, a sort of mint-tea version of Sinn Fein’s full-on bombs-n-bodybags strategy.
Earlier this week, The Irish Times unctuously declared on its front page, “Although Ireland lags well behind the UK for the number of vaccines administered, it has a greater share of the population fully vaccinated – 3 percent against 1.6 percent….” That same day, The Spectator published a chart for numbers of doses per hundred people across Europe. The UK – which, The Irish Times had announced, had inoculated just 1.6% of its population – had in fact administered doses for 35% of its population. Moreover, Ireland – repeatedly trumpeted in our media as being in the forefront of EU vaccinations – is actually in a cluster of nine countries running neck and neck between 11.2% and 10.2%. Another seven EU countries are in a second-cluster of between 9.8% and 8.8%. This is less like an exercise in modern epidemiology and more like a really bad Grand National, with the UK (roughly) being a modern Foinavon (look it up).
Thus, most of the European Union is trailing behind poor, excluded Serbia, which at 26% vaccinations is doing around three times better than Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands. But these key facts are not even known by most Irish people, who have been deluded, misled, baffled, bemused and bewildered by the Europhiliac media, the very outlets that should have been telling them the opposite of what they’ve been getting.
The cultural calamity that is the loss of truth-telling news has long been in the making. Governments and non-governmental organisations alike have always misled journalists, but there was always dissent, with a vital and usually liberating friction between different outlets that were representing different interest-groups. One way or another, dreadful truths, such as Stakeknife, The Pentagon Papers, Operation Phoenix et cetera (again, look them up), would somehow or other emerge from within the conflicting babble of the mainstream media.
Not anymore. The liberal arts faculties, especially law- departments and media-studies courses, have long since been captured by the activists of the left-liberal, cultural-Marxian orthodoxies: fake-forms of feminism, multiculturalism, egalitarianism, socialism and doctrinaire anti-racism, now not merely dominate public “conversations” (that word again) but are intended to kill almost all dissent even during its gestation. A few lethal words – “misogynist”, “transphobe” “homophobe”, “xenophobe”, “racist”, “Islamophobe”- will swiftly perform the intellectual function of an abortionist’s uterine blade.
Take this term, “Islamophobe”. The German newspaper, Welt am Sontag, has estimated that in the nineteen years between the 9/11 attacks and April 2019, nearly 150,000 people – a clear majority of them, let us remember, being Muslims – were killed by Islamist terrorists. Furthermore, thousands of women have been raped by Islamists in Iraq and Nigeria. No comparable terrorism or rapine has emerged from any other ethnic or religious group in the world. Over roughly that same period, The Irish Times referred to the organisationally almost non-existent phenomenon of Islamophobia 220 times, including two articles several years apart that both used the term ‘the real and present danger of Islamophobia’. However, the term “Islamic terrorism”, which describes a real phenomenon, (see above) was actually mentioned in The Irish Times less often: just 209 times.
On Palm Sunday, 2017, Islamic terrorists launched carefully-synchronised suicide attacks on Coptic worshippers in two cities in Egypt, killing forty-seven people. The Irish Times carried just one report on this. The following year, Islamic terrorists double-bombed Mount Carmel Cathedral in the Philippines, killing twenty people outright and injuring over a hundred. The Irish Times never mentioned this, or another comparable attack last year which managed to kill fourteen people. But the mass slaughter of some fifty-one Muslims in Christchurch New Zealand by one very evil and unaccompanied Australian in 2019 has been mentioned (at the last count) fifty times in that newspaper.
Quite simply, The Irish Times assesses threats to Muslims by Islamophobes to be of a far greater danger than Islamic terrorism to everyone, including Muslims. Thus, preferred-truths are allowed to trump uncomfortable but empirical truths, even though the former blind us to the real threats to our freedoms, our well-being and our democracy. When journalists contrive to make empirical equivalence between the almost non-existent and its very opposite, you know madness rules.
So how was this even allowed to happen? Where were the institutions – the parliaments, the courts, the media, the NGOs – that historically have defended the rights of individuals, not merely of movement and of speech but of thought? Quite simply, the power of these institutions to protect our core freedoms had been destroyed by the creeping concept of “hate-crime”. This piece of ideological titanium constitutes a heat-shield that protects a range of pseudo-ideologies – feminism, multiculturalism, egalitarianism, socialism, gay rights and most recently, the chromosomal fictions of the trans-lobby – from the scorching intellectual rigours of entering the atmosphere of human reality.
In this surreal moral order, any defence of that human reality, is now outlawed. Worse, lies have been normalised as truths. And when this happened, no-one of importance complained.
With Covid, the state came for our freedoms, and no-one of importance complained.
It closed down the scans that would keep alive many of the most important group in our society, young mothers, and no-one of importance – even feminists – complained.
It closed our roads, our shops, our schools, our restaurants, our public places, and no-one of importance complained.
It assisted in the spreading of the disease in old peoples’ homes, and no-one of importance complained.
It imposed meaningless laws about facemasks and social distancing, and no-one of importance complained.
So don’t be in the least surprised when no-one complains that the state has finally chosen to silence persons of no importance at all, namely you lot….