(LifeSiteNews) — Much has been said and written of late about medical tyranny in the West and the vaccine apartheid being cemented by authoritarians, not just in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Europe, but here in the United States. Multiple dehumanizing trends that were developing far in advance of the CCP’s spread of Fauci’s virus have been accelerated by the pandemic.
It is important to recognize two things: first, that the proponents of those dehumanizing trends are now seizing upon the technologies that have been deployed over the past year, the precedents set, and the apparent nonresistance exhibited by the supermajority; and second, that those same proponents are furnished with a utilitarian ethic, a statist mindset, and a materialist philosophy. To combat or at the very least withstand the totalitarianism to come, we must first address the culture that sustains it. Change the culture, and you’ll free the West.
This is not the first pandemic we’ve had to deal with. There was SARS-COV-1, MERS, and H1N1, to name three in recent memory. However, unlike in previous ordeals, for this virus the powers-that-be have done their best to run roughshod over our liberties, to destroy our economy, to atomize individuals, and to turn our society upside down.
Why? People convinced that we are uninspirited meat; that we and our children belong to the state; that our rights are subordinate and second to the good of the ruling elite and the collective; that our freedoms can be suspended to allay manufactured fears; and that any technology that might harmonize us should be implemented—that is, the death cultists—are in charge. The death cultists are keen to weaponize the perverse culture they first introduced to secure for themselves more power over life and death.
Our eudemonistic / epicurean Culture of Death—that name given it by St. John Paul II in Evangelium vitae—has made our society morally weak, unaccountable, and unprincipled in the name of individual freedom. There is obviously nothing wrong with freedom, but here we’re dealing with a transmogrified form: freedom from risk; freedom from responsibility; freedom from inconvenience; freedom from tradition. Liberated from all the above, these swinish cultists instead enslave themselves—but more often than not enslave others whose subjugation might be required—to the pursuit of [their] fleeting pleasure. Though made in the image of the infinite, omniscient, and loving Creator of everything visible and invisible, they turn their eyes downward and seek meaningless thrills in the dark at the expense of their souls and our civilization.
Though we’re happy to off the old and butcher the new (96.5% of all abortions are performed for social or economic reasons) and appear entirely indifferent to those lives claimed by the opioid epidemic (over 81,000 lost in 2020), for freedom from risk some will go to any lengths to protect themselves. Of course, those with the greater power and resources will be more successful in this regard.
“The excuse for the last oppression will always serve as well for the next oppression; and to that tyranny there can be no end.” G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils
To avoid the sniffles, we’ll create an apartheid state; require people to carry around passports and let complete strangers analyze our medical histories; let the government track and police our movements; shutter our churches and synagogues; and surrender our liberties willy-nilly. Why now? What’s changed? Very little, as a matter of fact, save for the will to resist.
The marginalization of people thought unfit or unclean by groups seeking to maximize their own comfort and illusory security is hardly a new phenomenon. It certainly predates the massacres of 20th century Europe, as one could look at the treatment of Untouchables in India, European lepers in the Middle Ages, and so on. Nevertheless, where parallels are concerned, the turn of the last century is a good place to start. After all, that’s where the Culture of Death, building on a century of leftist and utilitarian thought, really took off in the form of the eugenics movement, taken up, among countless others, by Planned Parenthood’s founder Margaret Sanger, by the founder of Canada’s New Democratic Party founder Tommy Douglas, by the British establishment (particularly by the Fabians in its midst), and by the Nazis: they who sought to break and or discard images of God.
One vociferous opponent of eugenics, the culture of death, and the insidious ideas that, if implemented, seek the separation of the purported pure from the unclean, the strong from the weak, the healthy from the sick, and the conflation of man with beast, was G.K. Chesterton. One hundred years ago, long before the introduction of mask mandates and vaccine passports, Chesterton observed tyranny “stride to reach the secret and sacred places of personal freedom, where no sane man ever dreamed of seeing it,” such that human rights were determined to be at best a matter of opinion, and—as was increasingly becoming the case—a matter of utility, as judged by those in power.
In the name of security, comfort, and a greater good largely defined by megalomaniacal materialists, medicine-men—whom Chesterton regarded as the mark of both over-civilization and barbarism, each within an inch of the other—encroach upon the private and the sacred, upon our rights and our very bodies.
Chesterton wrote:
It is not only true that it is the last liberties of man that are being taken away; and not merely his first or most superficial liberties. It is also inevitable that the last liberties should be taken first. It is inevitable that the most private matters should be most under public coercion. This inverse variation is very important, though very little realised. If a man’s personal health is a public concern, his most private acts are more public than his most public acts. The official must deal more directly with his cleaning his teeth in the morning than with his using his tongue in the market-place. The inspector must interfere more with how he sleeps in the middle of the night than with how he works in the course of the day. The private citizen must have much less to say about his bath or his bedroom window than about his vote or his banking account. The policeman must be in a new sense a private detective; and shadow him in private affairs rather than in public affairs. A policeman must shut doors behind him for fear he should sneeze, or shove pillows under him for fear he should snore. All this and things far more fantastic follow from the simple formula that the State must make itself responsible for the health of the citizen. But the point is that the policeman must deal primarily and promptly with the citizen in his relation to his home, and only indirectly and more doubtfully with the citizen in his relation to his city. By the whole logic of this test, the king must hear what is said in the inner chamber and hardly notice what is proclaimed from the house-tops. We have heard of a revolution that turns everything upside down. But this is almost literally a revolution that turns everything inside out.
Besides having the policeman ensure your teeth are brushed, what else must the medicine-men mandate for the sake of an ill-conceived greater good? For the sake of comfort or for a sense of security? How many lives can or should be taken? Sanger, Mengele, and Fauci each might answer differently, but all three would answer in the spirit of the Culture of Death.
G.K. Chesterton provided the answer all might give in the spirit of the Culture of Life: “We of Christendom stand not for ourselves, but for all humanity; for the essential and distinctive human idea that…man is an end in himself, that a soul is worth saving.” We shouldn’t permit the “strong and crafty to twist him into new shapes for all kinds of unnatural purposes.” We should stand up for life; against the medicine-men and the statists behind them who seek to divide, control, and change us. Doing so, however, will require us to risk serious discomfort, which the Culture of Death has conditioned us to resist and avoid at all costs, including costs tallied spiritually.
According to Rod Dreher (author of Live Not By Lies and The Benedict Option), unlike the kinds of hard totalitarianism witnessed in Communist China, the former Soviet Union, and in Nazi Germany—synonymous with mass killings, the gulag, torture, gas chambers, concentration camps, and so forth—soft-totalitarianism “depends on people being afraid of losing their comfort, status, and at worst, employment, to force conformity.” For an illustration of the machinations and success of soft totalitarianism, look no further than our nation’s own universities and public schools.
The uniformity of vision and monoculture on college campuses today are the result of decades of horizontal pressure; of years of people abandoning their pursuit of the good and the truth to maintain status and comfort. Don’t threaten with the stick. Threaten to take the carrot away. If an adjunct faculty member steps out of line, perhaps someone will suggest to them that their hopes of securing tenure are at risk. Maybe Chase Bank will cancel their credit card.
Those willing to provide an answer other than “five” to the question concerning the sum of two and two need not be tortured like the protagonist in George Orwell’s 1984, Winston Smith. Conformity and obedience can be instead achieved bloodlessly. They need only be discomforted. Alexis de Tocqueville presaged this trend in Democracy in America:
When [the majority] has irrevocably pronounced, everyone becomes silent, and friends and enemies alike then seem to hitch themselves together to its wagon…In America the majority draws a formidable circle around thought. Inside those limits, the writer is free; but happiness awaits him if he dares to leave them. It is not that he has to fear an auto-da-fe, but he is the butt of mortifications of all kinds and of persecutions every day…He yields, he finally bends under the effort of each day and returns to silence as if he felt remorse for having spoken the truth.
Mortifications that don’t cut. Persecutions that don’t bruise. It’s a kinder, gentler way of keeping people in line, and it would be wholly ineffective if pleasure and security weren’t the end-all-and-be-all in our society; if we embraced instead a Culture of Life.
The Culture of Death, which we have ostensibly embraced whole-heartedly, feeds into (historically and procedurally), is propagated by, and supports the soft-totalitarianism we see growing before our eyes. Where the former goes, so goes the latter. Soft-totalitarianism only works amongst adherents of the Culture of Death; amongst eudaemonists pursuing the false freedoms discussed earlier, and, unfortunately, those who haven’t the will, the strength, and or the ability to reject the herd. The trouble is that this culture has become dominant in the West.
Benjamin Franklin, like Washington, Tocqueville, and the now-cancelled Jefferson, understood the importance of virtue to America’s health. “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters,” he wrote. Virtue has been swapped out for entitlement, and liberty for comfort. Consequently, the Culture of Death has taken hold, and its high priests and priestesses have drawn the parameters around thought and moral considerations to sustain it via the system of soft-totalitarianism just discussed. Of especial importance are those parameters drawn around appropriate responses to critical events and or ideas. The CCP Virus is no exception.
F.A. Hayek pointed out that “‘emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.” In the Culture of Death, all potential threats to comfort and safety are treated by the cultured as emergencies. The aforementioned faux positive rights, which arise with the manufacture of new emergencies, apparently trump all real universal and timeless freedoms. The small albeit impactful invasions that Chesterton observed thus become—with the threat of emergency—big and dreadful invasions. Forget whiter teeth and fresher breath for the good of the marketplace. Now we’re looking at marginalizing one-quarter of the population, firing them, isolating them, and experimenting upon their children.
Soft-totalitarianism is here, and it will continue to cement its hold on our society. The way to combat it is by changing the culture that sustains it. The policeman Chesterton spoke of—the one sent into our homes to ensure that we brush our teeth for the collective good—is sent only if the collective agrees that it is good. We must remind our compatriots that it is not good; that comfort and security are not together the end-all and be-all; that, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
One century ago, the elites of Britain planned to shave the heads of the poor, of little girls and little boys, to curb the spread of lice. G.K. Chesterton was appalled that anyone could be tyrannical enough to think that the humane thing to do was precisely to dehumanize, and vowed:
With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilization…She is the human and sacred image; all around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall; the pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs of ages come rushing down, and not one hair of her head shall be harmed.
Today, the medicine-men and the statists behind them call for their fellow citizens to be destroyed for their own good. Never mind a hair: they wish to shave the unvaccinated and conscientious objectors off of society itself. They hope to isolate them with passports and to suffocate them in their isolation with masks. In so doing, they risk the social fabric. They risk the pillars of society. They risk the roofs of ages.
In the face of this latest advance of the Culture of Death, this latest shave, we must follow the example of the Southwest Airlines employees, the Navy Seals, Pastor Artur Pawlowski, and all others now risking more than mere discomfort to do what is right and fight what is wrong.
To truly be free and American, we must not be motivated by comforts but by challenges. We must seize, not shirk, the responsibilities before us. We must stand as proud men and women, not crawl about like swine, or further distort our forms to fit the inhuman shapes drawn by the medicine-men. We must proudly bare our faces, all made in the image of God, accept that the world will forever remain hostile and dangerous, shoulder our crosses, and greet life with a cheer.