RUTHFULLY YOURS

Part 2: Brainwashing

The ultimate goal of totalitarianism, Arendt says, is to dominate people from within. To keep them in a constant state of anxiety, with a moving narrative.

A section of the UK population, and in other liberal democracies, experience other citizens as unreachable when trying to open a discussion about Covid-19 policy. They get blanked, or attacked, for even posing questions. For sharing information on immunity, I have been called an anti-vaxxer, a conspiracy theorist and a Trump supporter!

What has happened to people’s critical thinking? Why is it, since March 2020, in order to belong to society, you now have to hold specific beliefs:

1. Lockdowns control the behavior of viruses
2. Cloth masks stop viral transmission
3. Immunity only comes via a vaccine. Naturally acquired immunity no longer exists.
4. The rights of the individual are subordinate to the greater good.
5. Anyone not in step with the above is a bad person, a danger to society, an ‘anti-vaxxer’.

How on earth did so many people accept government Covid policy, when never before in history have healthy people been locked down en masse. Surely, it is legitimate to question this, and examine evidence to support such a radical departure from the normal practice of isolating the sick, whilst protecting the vulnerable.

However, nearly two years down the line, questioning the government narrative is still met with derision, aggression and often name calling from a significant percentage of the population.

Science and democracy traditionally move forward, through civilized debate of opposing views. Not so since March 2020. It is not just members of the public who are pounced on and ostracized for having the audacity to ask questions.

Many eminent scientists have also been ridiculed and censored from the public arena for advocating different measures, such as the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration (1). Evidence has just been released to show that, in their case, the smear campaign came from the top, from Fauci, the Director of NIH, and the man in charge of America’s response to Covid-19 (2).

Articulated concern for civil liberties, closed businesses, children’s education, soaring mental health problems, including suicides, and three quarters of a million missed cancer diagnoses, get met with blank stares, or condescending replies:

‘It’s for our protection’, ‘It’s to protect the NHS’.

Why are people who fight for minority rights, now so energetically othering anyone who challenges the government line? People will champion ‘my body, my choice’  for women’s rights, and in the next breath damn anyone making an informed choice not to take an experimental vaccine. They no longer view bodily autonomy, as the given it previously was, and an essential ingredient of democracy.

People have even been told what to call anyone questioning the government Covid narrative. Illogically, they are all called anti-vaxxers, even if they support vaccines, but not mandates.

In September 2021, the Mercian-Webster dictionary changed their definition of anti-vaxxer, to include people who oppose mandates (3). It is a ploy of tyranny to change language in order to alter the truth.

Are we looking at a phenomenon similar to that described by Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt (1966) Penguin Books.), when she speaks of the totalitarian masses? “…the fanaticised members can be reached by neither experience nor argument; identification with the movement and total conformism seem to have destroyed the very capacity for experience…”

How did it happen that so many have fixed beliefs that are unreachable by reason or data? And, like Jehovah’s Witnesses, anyone outside this belief system is classed a sinner. It is like mass conversion to a cult through brainwashing.

Are we actually looking at something like brainwashing?

Brainwashing was studied by an American sociologist, Albert Biderman, in 1957 (Biderman, A. D. (1957). Communist attempts to elicit false confessions from Air Force prisoners of war. Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 33(9), 616-625 ncbi.nlm.nih.govarchive.org). He looked at the conditions that had led American prisoners of war to return home with a new set of beliefs, after the Korean War. Chinese and Korean captors used specific methods to indoctrinate the soldiers in Chinese ideology. These servicemen had to undergo re-education before they were able to return to American society.

These conditions happen to exactly map onto those used by governments, since March 2020. Known as Biderman’s Principles, they are listed in the chart below. Eight chronological methods of treatment, Biderman found, lead to an individual becoming brainwashed.

Biderman’s Chart of Coercion (6)

Examining the conditions listed in the left-hand column, it’s clear that these have operated since March 2020 in the UK, as well as globally. People were isolated in their homes, through lockdown, and subjected to a single narrative by the mainstream media, broadcasting an unchallenged government line. This tactic encourages people to bond with the government. With a fear generating narrative, people follow government measures which relieve their anxiety.

The people, in my experience, who appear to be in a deep Covid cult are those who were able to fully lockdown and work from home, as opposed to frontline workers like postmen, bin men and delivery staff who couldn’t.

Alleged non compliance, such as the two friends drinking coffee on a walk in Derbyshire (7), were humiliated through disproportionate media coverage.

On New Year’s Eve, 2021, in Glasgow, a pub was raided by six van loads of police, and older customers were tackled to the ground. Apparently, because three people were dancing (8).

The pub’s license was threatened and the state, through the police, shows its omnipotence and the futility of noncompliance.

Uncertainty about making plans has caused exhaustion and anxiety:

“Will we have Christmas?” “Will I be able to visit my dying relative?” “Will the children be in school?” “Yes, you can go on holiday,” offers relief and reward, but then the rules change continuously, and people are made to obey rules that either make no sense, or seem trivial demands. In a Dorset church, where the Vicar is mask exempt, some members are trying to get him sacked, because he spontaneously sang without a mask, forgetting for a split second that this was against regulations (9).

We have, in fact, been subjected to a political hokey kokey. The government puts one policy in, then takes it out, in, out, in, out, then they shake it all about, with details that have no logical sense. Measures are hinted at, and then threatened: “We’re not going to introduce…. We may have to introduce this…… we may unless you do this…. for example, “take boosters to save Christmas.”

The conditions we have lived under since March 2020, are not supported by scientific data (10). Is it coincidental that they follow Biderman’s principles? These methods have been known to tyrants at least since the Korean War.

We know that there was deliberate foul play by the CCP at the beginning of 2020. Information came from China that was designed to over scare the world about the virus. Our media broadcast people dropping dead in the streets of Wuhan and details of a hospital built by China in three days. These have been shown to be lies, as is clearly evidenced by Michael Senger’s seminal article in the Tablet magazine (10).

Again, it was through China’s influence that the WHO recommended lockdowns (10). This was on the say so of the CCP, and not data.

Yet the government and media, rather than address the influence of the CCP, continue to obsess with a narrow focus on the virus, counting and reporting the number of Sarscov2 infections. The Covid narrative is kept center stage, and moving. The numbers of people with colds from the mild omicron variant were continually reported through the Christmas holidays of December 2021, without much emphasis on the good news data from South Africa (11).

If we have been influenced into measures. still unsubstantiated by data, that have destroyed infrastructure, where is the national debate? And where is the national debate on the origin of the virus, which is now seen as most likely coming from the Wuhan lab of virology. How can trickery from a super power not be of utmost national interest? And we ignore at our peril the greatest transfer of wealth from nation states to global corporations, and from the citizens to the richest 1% (12) which governmental Covid policies has brought about.

Mass brainwashing is what Dr Matthias Desmet, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Ghent University, Belgium (13) calls “crowd or mass formation”. He points out that when you have mass formation, which he says is the same as mass hypnosis, people get a new sense of connectedness that is unifying. The rituals of masks and lockdowns give people a sense of solidarity.

Once people accept the starting point of a logic, all that follows on from this is accepted. To ‘save the NHS’, they will believe anything is necessary; for example, accepting that old people should die alone, women should give birth in masks and children should sit with their faces covered for eight hours a day. Previously accepted ethics are thrown out the window.

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

Primo Levi.

Desmet believes that for mass formation to occur, people needed to feel disconnected and have no meaning in their lives prior to the crisis. Many I observe in deep Covid cult are socially well connected, and part of strong meaningful communities. It’s my belief that the measures imposed since March 2020, coupled with a ratcheting up of fear, have themselves been sufficient to create the brainwashing.

Desmet says about 30% of the population are in deep mass hypnosis. These are the people who believe in removing the civil liberties of the outliers. He suggests 50% are not in deep hypnosis, but will not speak out against the status quo. The remaining 20% are not hypnotized and represent those prepared to speak against the accepted public narrative.

What can be done about mass brainwashing ?

Many find they hit a brick wall, or an attacking wolf, when they try to open a conversation about the COVID-19 narrative. In Psychology of the Crowds (1895), however, Gustave Le Bon says that it is imperative to keep speaking out, because it stops the mass hypnosis from getting deeper. Mass formation can lead to atrocities, because people believe they are doing their duty to maintain public safety. Dissonant voices need to remain in public spaces to prevent a possible progression to unspeakable acts against the outliers.

Desmet, as do I, recommends speaking out with a voice of reason and compassion. I suggest concentrating on the 50%. On occasion it is difficult not to feel angry with people who fail to see the threat of increasing authoritarianism. However, it’s important to remember that it is those in, or with social power, who have created this global situation, not them.

It is alarming to have a society running on neither reason nor science (15), like a return to pre-enlightenment thinking, or an era of post truth, as Mark Pickles says so well (16). My experience of those in the cult grip tells me it is a robust phenomenon. I do believe, however, that human behavior is multi-layered. The hypnotized can be brought back by the click of a hypnotist’s fingers. What will be the factors that trigger people out of mass hypnosis, even if, it’s on a one-by-one basis?

We had an example of this from Carole Malone, a regular guest on the Dan Wooton Show on GBNews. After having a cold from omicron, her mindset switched completely, from that of an authoritarian Covid cultist to a wise medicine woman. You could witness that her previous anxiety about ’the killer virus’ had drained from her face.

Take heart in the belief that speaking out is the right thing to do. Let us hope enough see the destruction that these social measures are causing in the UK, and elsewhere, and that the world’s liberal democracies can reclaim the way of life that their name implies.