BY DAVID SOLWAY | PJ MEDIA | SEP 15, 2021
One does not wish to join the pandemic of viral fear whipped up by our political leaders, collusive medical “experts,” and the grossly irresponsible and programmatically ignorant media conglomerate. And yet, there is good reason to fear being inscribed in the category of “the unvaccinated”—the New Jews at risk of disenfranchisement and worse in the increasingly fascist temper of the times.
From my perspective, this is not a frivolous analogy. Growing up Jewish in a small town in the north of Quebec under the sway of an ultramontane clergy, I know what it is to be publicly mocked, prohibited as an undesirable from entering certain local establishments, and fighting my way out of ambushes when walking to school. I am familiar with epithets like maudit Juif (damned Jew), which I heard so frequently that for some time I thought it was one word, mauditjuif—which in effect it was.
Now, as a member of the tribe of the unvaccinated, I sense once again that primal fear of exclusion and imminent violence. As I wrote in an earlier article for PJ Media, my wife and I are under virtual house arrest, prevented from crossing our provincial borders, forbidden to attend a wide range of public activities and venues, including movie theaters, plays, sporting events, gyms, swimming pools, night clubs, concerts, conferences, and university seminars, or to dine in restaurants. I am back in the Quebec of my youth. We are still permitted to walk abroad and to visit the supermarket (masked), but how long these sparse exemptions will last is an open question.
Public intellectual and author Charles Eisenstein has written an extraordinary essay, Mob Morality and the Unvaxxed, in which he anatomizes the ancient narrative of blood libel, of removing pollution from the body social. “There can be little doubt,” he writes, “that some kind of totalitarian program is well underway,” shrewdly conscripting a public that wishes above everything to belong to a pervasive consensus while consigning a portion of the population to a social leprosarium. When corrupt forces hijack group norms, values, rituals, and taboos “through propaganda and the control of information, these good folks can become instruments of totalitarian control.” A form of “violent unanimity” is created, targeting “the heretics of our time: the anti-vaxxers…ideal candidates for scapegoating,” in this way “investing a pariah subclass with the symbology of pollution.”
This is what is now happening in the current cultural context. We may be observing a kind of ethnic purge in the making, for “this primal mob energy can be harnessed toward fascistic political ends.” When politicians get a savor of unlimited and incontestable power, most cannot withstand the allure. It is the devil’s offer to Christ on the domestic plane, and they have neither the character nor the moral fortitude to resist the temptation. The state then proceeds to forge an alliance with the corporate world to enhance its control of the public atrium, knowing that corporations will assist the government in refusing service to medical dissidents. Given the symbiosis between political power and corporate enterprise, we have the core definition of fascism. The issue is complex and hotly contested, but state corporatism remains the crux and organizing principle of the movement, as Paul Gottfried’s excellent Fascism: The Career of a Concept makes clear.
Meanwhile, the multitudes are mobilized and confirmed in their weakness for the comforts of righteous proxy, completing the political trifecta. It is a human-all-too-human phenomenon. The meld between state, business and populace explains why we now find ourselves living in what has come to resemble a fascist collective, a police state in all but name seizing on the COVID event to justify the arrogation of collective authority. As editor Paula Bolyard writes in PJ Media, “The Great American Nervous Breakdown has captured the hearts and minds of a once-sane nation and turned it into a fascist regime in a matter of months.” The same atrocity applies to other Western nations, particularly Canada and Australia. The vaccine passports become the “papers” we are commanded to show in order to demonstrate our ritual purity as loyal denizens of the state.
The vaccine passport is in many places now pretty well a fait accompli. But there is surely more to come. “Imagine needing to go shopping, drive a car, or exit your home,” Eisenstein muses, “The flimsiest pretext will suffice once the ancient template of sacrificial victim, the repository of pollution, has been established.” It appears that a new tyranny, grounded in an act of social cleansing, is in process of announcing itself.
Is there a silver lining in a very dark cloud? As the vaccines become ever more problematic, as new variants continue to emerge accompanied by an endless supply of enforced booster shots, as adverse events continue to mount, as the CDC expediently changes its definition of “vaccination” to account for its perceived inadequacy as a reliable COVID suppressant, and as the vaccinated are shown to be increasingly prone to “breakthroughs” irrespective of disclaimers and despite the enormous proportion of vaccinated individuals, will it gradually begin to dawn on a pharmagandized people that something is genuinely amiss? Will it become evident that guilt can no longer be logically assigned to the minority of “hesitant” and “resistant” when those supposedly immune amount to 70-90 percent of numerous national populations? Will people see through the rite of excommunication we are now witnessing?
And if not, one wonders if a secular version of the Benedict Option is somehow feasible. Will the exiled community of the unvaccinated build a viable alternative to the prevalent cultural hegemony and “construct a resilient counterculture,” to quote Rod Dreher in his seminal book The Benedict Option? Will small “monastic” communities of the independent-minded, local or individually dispersed like flares of reason, spring into existence? Is “going Galt,” as Ayn Rand put it in Atlas Shrugged, a rational option, recognizing that one is being punished not for one’s vices but for one’s virtues and resisting the urge to submit to ideological pressure, even if necessary by isolating oneself voluntarily?
Perhaps the north of Alberta would serve. As “cancelled” Calgary radio celebrity Danielle Smith advises, “You should probably move to a small town…If you are going to be trapped anywhere, Alberta is the best place in the world to be trapped. We have the mountains, arable land for food, abundant energy. When the weight of all this social division reaches the end of its natural life, we will be in the best position to rebuild.” One may speculate.
Finally, we may ask—to adapt the medieval canard against Jews—who is really “poisoning the wells”? The unvaccinated, who are building up natural immunity, or the proponents of an untested, gene therapy injection whose ingredients have not been publicly revealed, which comes with no attendant, legally required product warning, and which has been vigorously contested by a veritable host of medical practitioners and scientists with impeccable credentials? Who are the saved and who are the damned?
This may well be the central issue.