#title Coronavirus Thoughtcrime #author Winter Oak #LISTtitle Coronavirus Thoughtcrime #SORTauthors Winter Oak #SORTtopics COVID-19 #date March 27, 2020 #source Retrieved on 2020-04-09 from [[https://winteroak.org.uk/2020/03/27/coronavirus-thoughtcrime/][winteroak.org.uk]] #lang en #pubdate 2020-04-09T03:32:21 It is hard to believe what has happened to our “liberal democratic” Western societies over recent days. Even those of us who have long been warning that we were heading into a new 21st century form of high-tech neoliberal fascism have been left gasping at the speed of the Blitzkrieg waged upon us. C.J. Hopkins sums up the situation in a March 27 article on the Off Guardian site. Police are patrolling the streets of Europe, checking people’s ‘permission-to-go-outside’ papers. In the UK, soldiers are standing by to assist with ‘protecting possible quarantine zones,’ or to ‘cope with the breakdown of civil society.’ Israel is tapping its formerly secret collection of everyone’s mobile phone records to identify people who might be infected, and assorted ‘others who need to be quarantined.’ Macron (now relieved of his Gilets Jaunes problem!) is ready to ‘rule by decree‘ if necessary. California is ‘prepared to enact martial law‘. The US military is ‘prepared to deploy in support of potential extraordinary missions,’ including ‘quelling civil disturbances.’ The US Department of Justice is asking Congress for the power to detain people indefinitely. The British Parliament is on the brink of passing an emergency “Coronavirus Bill” that will (among other unsettling provisions) grant authorities the power to arrest and indefinitely quarantine anyone they deem a ‘potentially infectious person’ … or, in other words, pretty much anyone they want. Winter Oak author Paul Cudenec has warned on his blog: “This is a nightmare world in which the total full-spectrum control of our lives by an arrogant, sociopathic ultrarich elite is imposed by all-pervasive lies and propaganda, by brutal force and by fear.” Meanwhile investigative reporter Cory Morningstar, renowned for her groundbreaking work exposing the “climate capitalism” scam, has been exploring the forces behind the coronavirus hype. For instance, she highlights the role of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who chairs the World Economic Forum’s Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (see Acorn 53). She reveals that on March 11, 2020 the WEF announced a partnership with the World Health Organization to establish the COVID Action Platform For Business and on that same day the WHO officially characterized COVID-19 a pandemic. Dissident medical experts have also been speaking up to challenge the alarmism which is justifying all these totalitarian measures. John Lee, a recently retired professor of pathology and a former NHS consultant pathologist explained that there are serious issues with the coronavirus figures. He said: “Most of UK testing has been in hospitals, where there is a high concentration of patients susceptible to the effects of any infection. As anyone who’s worked with sick people will know, any testing regime based only in hospitals will over-estimate the virulence of an infection But there’s another, potentially even more serious problem: the way that deaths are recorded. If someone dies of a respiratory infection in the UK, the specific cause of the infection is not usually recorded, unless the illness is a rare ‘notifiable disease.’ Now look at what has happened since the emergence of Covid-19. The list of notifiable diseases has been updated. This list has now been amended to include Covid-19. But not flu. That means every positive test for Covid-19 must be notified, in a way that it just would not be for flu or most other infections. There is a big difference between Covid-19 causing death, and Covid-19 being found in someone who died of other causes. Making Covid-19 notifiable might give the appearance of it causing increasing numbers of deaths, whether this is true or not. It might appear far more of a killer than flu, simply because of the way deaths are recorded. In the next few days and weeks, we must continue to look critically and dispassionately at the Covid-19 evidence as it comes in. Above all else, we must keep an open mind — and look for what is, not for what we fear might be. Dr Lee is far from alone. For instance, Dr Yoram Lass,an Israeli physician, politician and former Director General of the Health Ministry, has said: “In every country, more people die from regular flu compared with those who die from the coronavirus.” Professor Hendrik Streeck, German epidemiologist, professor of virology, and the director of the Institute of Virology and HIV Research, at Bonn University, comments: “The new pathogen is not that dangerous, it is even less dangerous than Sars-1.” UK government advisor Professor Neil Ferguson has said that up to two thirds of people who die from coronavirus in the next nine months are likely to have died anyway this year, from other causes. He told the Science and Technology Committee that experts were now expecting around 20,000 deaths, although there may turn out to be a lot fewer. Bear in mind, for context, that around 500,000 people die in the UK every year. There are more dissenting medical views here and here. In the light of all these voices challenging the system’s fear-inducing propaganda, it comes as no surprise that Operation Corona looks set to move into its second phase of repression. This will be to silence dissent and to stop anyone from questioning or examining what is happening to us in 2020. More information about this appears in an article in The Daily Telegraph by their “Global Health Security Editor” Paul Nuki, entitled “Covid Deniers: How shadowy social media groups are spreading myths and conspiracy about coronavirus.” Note how the term “Covid Deniers” is casually rolled out as if it was self-evidently a thoughtcrime to question the current agenda! The piece claims: “Conspiracies and fake news about Covid-19 are spreading across millions of users’ timelines.” Nuki speaks the familiar newspeak of liberal authoritarianism, talking about “false and divisive lies and myths spreading across the web.” Any challenges to the line spun by the authorities are branded “hate, bigotry and misinformation” peddled by sinister “health misinformation groups.” All the tired old neoliberal propaganda clichés are shamelessly trotted out by Nuki, not least the spectre of “conspiracy theories.” He writes of the offending thought criminals: “They are an odd mix of new and existing groups ranging from anti vaccination campaigners to right wing extremists to Russian-linked peddlers of fake anti-western news.” One of these heretics, a woman interested in natural healthcare, even apparently had the effrontery to declare that “I think it’s really important that we don’t just believe what the media tell us.” Send the police to smash down her front door and drag her off to the Global Health Security Re-Education Camps without any further ado! It seems that another “Covid denier” claimed – unbelievably enough! – that we were witnessing a period of “mass hysteria.” Lies! Treason! Heresy! Hate speech! Burn him! Burn him! The main source used by Suki for his article is, bizarrely, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (and yes, although it is based in East Finchley, London, it uses the American spelling of what should, in the UK, be “Centre”). This organisation previously came into prominence for its role in the Labour Party “anti-semitism” controversy and its patron is Rachel Riley, the pro-Israel TV presenter who famously pointed the finger at Jeremy Corbyn. Its CEO, Imran Ahmed, used to work as a spin doctor for Labour Party politician Angela Eagle. But the CCDH has now suddenly, and inexplicably, switched its focus to attacking those who dare to challenge the official line on the coronavirus. In doing so, it is using the very same language (“hate,” “populism,” “conspiracy theories”) that it has previously used in an entirely different context. Very strange indeed! The aim of all this hype is of course to clamp down on free speech and to impose a fascistic new world where it is considered a crime to question authority or its mass propaganda outlets. In this totalitarian aim, the CCDH is perfectly in step with the World Health Organization. Nuki reports: “Throughout the outbreak the World Health Organization has been vocal in warning that fake news can be as damaging as the virus itself. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director of the WHO, has repeatedly said that the world is fighting an ‘infodemic’ as well as a pandemic. In the UK, social media firms will be called in to Parliament after the extended Easter recess to explain what they are doing to combat the spread of false information. It is worth noting that countering “fake news” and “disinformation” also formed part of the notorious Event 201 pandemic “exercise” hosted in New York by The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on October 18, 2019. Draw your own conclusions!