Just when I feel I have come to grips with the loss of my country, the emotions start in again and I go through another part of the grief process. That is what it is because I have to grieve losses so many times in my life, from many treasured grandparents to pets to my mother to my husband.
At times, it is inconceivable to me what’s happened in New Zealand.
I’ve been enjoying so many pieces written by Rodney Hide, former Member of Parliament, who was part of the protests on the Parliament grounds. I excerpted one of his previous writings in another piece, War in Wellington. Here’s an excerpt from his latest piece, Aotearoa. For those of you who don’t know, Aotearoa is the Maori name for New Zealand.
There is constant fear in Aotearoa. Fear is a primitive emotion that overrides reason and keeps us compliant. We have X years to save the planet. We must do Y. Otherwise all life is doomed.
Or better, there's a pandemic. You are going to die. Tomorrow. Lock everyone down. Do as you are told. Don't question the policy. That will kill grandma. Or worse. Don't undermine public health. Report the truth. We will tell you the truth. Sweden? They will all die. Report that. They didn't die? Don't report that. That would undermine public health.
Don't talk to your neighbours. Stay in your bubble. Mask up. Don't go to the playground: it's a biohazard.
Take your medicine. Or lose your job. And become second class. Even your kids must take their medication. And keep taking it. Are your papers in order? Did you scan in? Still getting sick? Take more medicine: otherwise you will be even sicker. Oh it's like a bad 'flu? Ha! That's a dangerous conspiracy. It would have killed you but the closed borders, lockdowns and medication saved you and made covid the flu. Our models and scientists prove it. And our media endlessly repeat it. Covid was bad but government made it okay.
Oh no. A new strain is about to hit Aotearoa. Keep your papers up-to-date.
People are protesting? They have lost their jobs? Their homes? The medication injured them? They are filth. They are foreign. They are fascists. They are white supremacists. They have been on the internet. They are dangerous. Stay away. They will make you sick. Don't talk to them. You will lose your job. You will become one of them. You don't want to be abused and belittled. Even the opposition agree. We are united. We are a team of 5 million. Be kind. Stay safe. The police will clean out the filth. They will preserve the truth.
How does this happen in a country filled with some of the most decent, hardworking, virtuous people on earth? This is how. From The Day I Understood the “Good German”:
“…practically every German had contact with some Jewish family. They were a society that lived in reasonable harmony. Ordinary Germans went to Jewish businesses. Germans had Jewish employees. Their children attended the same schools. They all went to the same clubs, the same restaurants, and played sports together. Friendships were common and natural.
Less than ten years later, how do you, an ordinary citizen, accept that a family of neighbors is removed on trains to concentration camps? How do you accept that your Jewish friend's neighborhood business is closed, with the owners removed from society, without any protest?
Hate speech, the book "Mein Kampf", defamation, repression, dictatorship, censorship, and Goebbels' massive propaganda, no matter how devilishly brilliant they may have been, in my view, were never enough to explain the contempt of almost a whole society for the lives of other human beings.
For something of these proportions to occur, it is not enough for there to merely be a dictatorship. It needs a totalitarian state where the population is in harmony with the dictatorial government. It needs a people that collaborates by denouncing, helping, and not caring about the evil in front of them. For this, the population needs to understand the opposite: that evil is good.
Now, by studying the history of previous pandemics, I have discovered some clues to try to solve the mystery. It became a little clearer when I read a scientific paper that analyzes the typhus pandemic within the Warsaw Ghetto. I had never read anything about the conflict from this point of view.
…
Due to losses of soldiers to typhus in World War I, Germany in the 1930s and 1940s had great concern for public health. They cultivated an obsession with infectious diseases. "There was a fanatical fear of typhus spreading to the German people and its army" the Australian scientists explained.
Simultaneously, scientists reached the scientific consensus that Jews were the carriers of the disease. Therefore, to protect the population from the pandemic, a wall was built as a public health effort to contain the typhus spreaders. It was 10 feet high and 18 kilometers long. It was the "epidemic wall". In this way, the Jews of Warsaw, about one third of the entire population of the city, were confined in the neighborhood. The total number of Jews in all of Poland was 3.4 million.
When typhus cases increased in the ghetto, as was to be expected due to the crowding of people in a small space, physician Jost Walbaum, the highest health authority, reinforced the already established scientific consensus: "The Jews are overwhelmingly the carriers and disseminators of typhus infection."
Soon he resolved to spare no effort to control the pandemic. "We have one and only one responsibility, that the German people are not infected and endangered by these parasites. For that, any means must be right," Dr Jost added, being applauded by about 100 people, mostly doctors.
In the following, Hans Frank, one of the highest authorities of the General Government, following science, stated that the murder of 3 million Jews in Poland "“was unavoidable for reasons of public health."
…
Vaccines against COVID-19 to date do not reduce transmission. They do not sterilize the virus. That is already defined by science in several studies. It does not reduce waves in countries. It does not reduce contamination inside the home. Maybe it is even making contamination worse. And maybe it increases the possibility of catching the new variant, the omicron. Recently, for example, Israel, one of the most vaccinated countries, the only one on the planet with the fourth dose, broke the world record of cases per million and saw the number of deaths go way up.
In other words, science has already defined that these vaccines are not a societal pact. You take it for yourself, thinking about your disease, in case you get infected, and not to help society fight the pandemic. Vaccines don't stop infection and they don't stop transmission.
However, on television, the message is different: "The vaccine protects both you and the people around you," said epidemiologist Pedro Hallal on TV Globo, Brazil's largest network, in a recent report. He was just repeating a pseudoscientific consensus created by authorities and massively repeated like Goebbels' propaganda.
By saying that vaccines protect people "around you," a statement as untrue as the claim that Jews were the spreaders of typhus, you point out who is to blame for COVID-19: those who decided not to get the vaccine.
…
And I finally understood "good German"
With the pseudoscientific consensus that vaccines protect people "around you" massively disseminated, by reading a news story, I finally understood the "good German".
I needed something that experienced the mood of that time to understand it.
"Hospitals in multiple countries reportedly declined to treat a 3-year-old boy with a serious heart condition because his parents weren't vaccinated against COVID-19", says the story published in NewsWeek.
He is a boy from Cyprus. He tried to go to Germany to have surgery. "At the last minute, the Frankfurt hospital told authorities in Cyprus that the surgery wasn't going to happen. The hospital reportedly cited the parents' lack of a COVID-19 vaccine as the reason", the news reports.
"Cypriot authorities reportedly suggested a different guardian journey with the boy to Germany but were unsuccessful in persuading the hospital", informs the report.
With Germany's refusal, they tried in the United Kingdom, the country that was a base of the fight against fascism. It was also denied. Later they tried Israel, the country made up of the people who suffered the Holocaust, but was also refused.
The child was not infected. The parents were not infected. And even with vaccines that do not reduce transmission, they decided that the parents are to blame for the pandemic and sent a message: that their child deserves to die because of it.
What is the difference between the health professionals in those hospitals and the doctors who applauded Dr Jost Walbaum? What is the difference between them and those who saw the trains full of children going to Auschwitz and didn't care? None. They made me understand the "good German". A contempt for the lives of others.
"Recipients are heavily scrutinized to qualify for hard-to-come-by hearts or any other organs for transplant. They have to go to the patient most likely to survive," commented an anonymous "good German" in the news, behaving like the people who were afraid of the starving children in the Warsaw ghetto.
A child begging on the sidewalk of the ghetto in the summer of 1941. Photo by Georg, Willy ( Imperial War Museums)
"Ignore the rules, engage in high risk behavior and get tossed off the list for transplants. Same rules that have always been in place," commented a North American who appreciates rules being obeyed.
It is terrifying to come to grips with the fact that so many people I thought I knew became good Nazis. Rule-followers who look the other way, and are willing to accept evil as good. Because they are afraid. Which happened in turn because they have been manipulated and lied to and have neither the intelligence nor the courage to go digging. Again, from The Good German:
In other words, the "good German" was a guy who believed he was "following science". I have not found any record of Germans who opposed this fear created against Jews. But I believe that probably when someone did object, he was accused of being a "science denier".
It doesn't matter that today we have 10 billion doses administered, and every reasonably well-informed person knows or has heard of someone who, even if vaccinated, contracted COVID. People believe the authorities who call themselves spokesmen of science, not the science itself.
I already knew that something like this would happen in May 2020. But it’s still difficult to come to grips with how bad it has gotten, and unlike many, I don’t believe the covid psychosis is over. We are simply experiencing a temporary reprieve in the northern hemisphere. And now we are seeing how the dual covid and Ukraine psychoses will be woven together in order to cast out the “science deniers”, the “conspiracy theorists”, the “unpatriotic”.
I left a response on Rodney’s piece:
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True, and depressing. I had an unpleasant interaction with a FedEx clerk while sending a package the other day that involved her trying to get me to put on a mask, snapping at me to stay behind the plexiglass barrier in front of her workstation, then when she had to come out from behind the barrier to weigh my package, telling me to move back because "I don't want to get close to you". I sort of laughed and said, "I'm not sick, I'm not radioactive" which caused the other clerk to intervene and tell me to step back behind the barrier. I thought afterward, those people would certainly be either putting me on a boxcar, or applauding it. History may have moved on, but human nature hasn't.
While I acknowledge that that the mass psychosis is something that has been inflicted on people, using the most advanced tools and most coordination ever. I still harbor some frustration with the people entrapped within it.
As Canada essentially tries to get people to forget what has been done to people while never giving up the powers to do so...I struggle to forgive the people in my life who chose the virus over their relatives and neighbors.
Lots of people are celebrating "back to normal" but I know many of us will never be the same, many more who didn't make it this far who easily could have if not for the assault on the people.