Watching the Soviet Story again, the modern parallels are remarkable. The propaganda techniques back then and now are essentially identical. Then, bold ad hominems against broad swaths of undesirables disregarded discourse to short the circuit to HATE. Very effectively. Narrower ad hominems shorted the circuit to Jews.
Repeating the sins of the father to atone for the sins of the father. This was today’s politically-corrected German. Thankfully, generations of brutal collectivism had immunized Russians from today’s p.c. pandemic.
We knew the ghosts of their guilt drove their silly repentance, perhaps, even though they were too young or weren’t even alive in WW2. But what about the rest of us? The great repudiation had been going on for years now, but was accelerating. There weren’t many statues–either physically or psychologically–left to topple.
Almost every western country fell in line, save for the good ‘ol U.S.A., but even she was suffering severe political indigestion. Antifa, Black Panthers, BLM, the Democratic Party, MSM, environmentalists–every radical faction was arrayed against Trump. The political mid-ground was effectively removed. Goebbels would be proud. Accusing any denier of any branch of scientism, or flowing-like-water gender identity, was quite enough to have one branded a Nazi. It was precisely the excuse used by Russia and Germany to stamp out “Polish Fascism” at the outset of their invasions of that country. No such bona fide threat existed, which necessitated the need to create it. It was as masterful a use of reverse engineering as had been used anywhere in terms of propaganda techniques, and it would be used again and again. News sources spooned the people just enough truth to seduce them into accepting select narratives. The socialists knew they’d succeeded when truth became stranger than fiction to the man on the street, and so he rejected it.
When first I heard about the ban on acetylsalicylic acid the gravity of the psy-op we were in, hit home like Joanna Kozloski’s home-run swing in the 2021 World Series final. She was the first transexual athlete to make it to the top of the sports world, and did so with elan. When finally she trounced on home plate in the bottom of the ninth, after launching the ball out of Wrigley Field, she removed her high-heels and flung them high in the air in elation. Yes, she had run the bases to victory in stilettos. It had quickly become her trademark, and a symbol of her unbeatable confidence. Much like Babe Ruth pointing to the sky when he came to bat. Thirty-five thousand mask-wearing fans went berserk. She then grabbed her crotch and gave her now patented one-finger salute to her adoring followers. The crowd went even crazier at this flip off. In a post-game interview she said the finger was aimed at the patriarchy, and to Antifa. The balkanization of every group, sub-group, and sub-sub-group was now mission complete. The demoralization described by Yuri Bezmenov had become a hyper-ripened perpetual-motion machine of societal atomization. Not even the modern Soviets knew how to stop it now, except perhaps by adding a pinch of fresh holocaust to their recipe.
The Commissioner’s Trophy was presented to Miss Kozloski by a very old George Soros, who had just announced his candidacy for President in the 2024 election. The Democrats, still smarting from their 2020 defeat to Donald Trump, had learned at least one lesson. It mattered not how old or infirm your candidate was. What mattered was who controlled the narrative. 2020 had been a surprisingly close election despite Joe Biden’s dementia having boiled his brains to borscht, and despite the Dems successfully arguing that not a single pre-election debate was needed. Heaping endless disinformation upon the American public through multiple fire hoses, domestic and foreign, had shown real effects. Now, with a little tweaking, Democratic strategists knew they couldn’t lose.
What the left had not seemed to realize, however, was that they had already won, essentially. They were the establishment in every western nation. They largely controlled the media and institutions. They didn’t see that the right was now the counter-culture. The left was sure the silent, moral majority that had held its proverbial tongue right up until stepping into the ballot box would be usurped, this time, by mail-in and internet voting. Yes, Soros was old, but he still had his mind, name recognition, and a way with words. Absurd? –No more than anything else the Dems had accomplished. They even convinced the country that Soros had been born in America. He was their next Trojan horse. With a little luck he’d drop dead a few months into office. For his part the President, ever the brilliant strategist, surprised the nation by announcing Bari Weiss in counter-weight as his running mate. The former New York Times writer shot to fame when she quit the paper back in 2020, declaring war on cancel culture in the process. She had managed to maintain a voice despite numerous social media shutdowns. The President recognized her value as a youthful, articulate veteran of the raging propaganda battle in which the country was mired, and knew he needed the kind of turncoat media general her inside knowledge afforded. Besides, he reasoned behind closed doors, she could help siphon liberal Jewish votes and donations from the Dems.
The off-licence use of a drug had never before been disallowed. Fear mongering pushed by the mainstream media said aspirin caused stomach bleeding and a host of other side-effects. It was then rumoured a study was coming out in the Lancet journal proving it caused elevated eosinophil counts in some Covid-2022 patients. It would take very little, but deft, fictitious placements to accomplish the relegation of acetylsalicylic acid to the trash heap of medical history. Tucker Carlson compiled the msm repetition of key words over the broad outlet spectrum to little avail. “DANGEROUS”, “FATAL”, and “WITCH-DOCTOR MEDICINE” were the strike words used. The witch doctor reference, however, was dropped because of the outcry over cultural appropriation, and so to not malign legitimate, hard-working witch doctors everywhere.
Most medical doctors knew it was because the President had endorsed it as a remedy when used with the proper dosage of iron supplement and antibiotics. Of course, most were afraid to speak out. Cancel culture was as pervasive in the medical community as anywhere. Career-crippling sanctions were but a misplaced utterance away.
It was also imperative that the drug cocktail be given to the patient as soon as symptoms appeared. The President admitted his taking it as a prophylaxis against the virus. Up to now cases of Covid-22 were dropping quickly, as was the death rate. An aspirin a day keeps the doctor away, went the grassroots slogan. CNN tried hard to change this to: an aspirin a day keeps the undertaker at play.
I was listening to the radio when first I heard. I was driving Tom Hicks to the hospital. He’d had a lifelong problem with booze and drugs, and was at the business end of another bender. He was rough. He couldn’t tell if his cough was from his COPD, his emphysema, or from a viral infection. We assumed the former but feared the latter. He was talking about some old girlfriend as we drove. He would never leave the hospital. He would be denied aspirin. While not yet geriatric, Tom was the poster child of comorbidity vulnerabilities.
When the announcement came I swore I heard the sound of every last bottle of aspirin, and every brand that contained it, flying off every store shelf in the country. People had already been hoarding because of the media campaign, and government telegraphing its intentions with the usual word salad. Within hours it was impossible to get your hands on a single pill. Doctors were even forbidden from giving it to their own friends and family members. Sales of Advil and Tylenol spiked briefly before the public realized these contained no acetylsalicylic acid. A $5,000 fine was introduced, combined with possible jail time, for anyone caught cutting down willow and poplar trees. Long ago, indigenous North American tribes boiled the bark and leaves of these trees to extricate the chemical contained therein. They would drink the tea to mitigate pain and fever. The run on tree bark ended as quickly as it had begun. The poaching industry for animal parts went back to status quo, which meant supplying the massive traditional Chinese medicine industry with the likes of caribou antlers, black bear scrotums, and beaver foreskins. Canada’s Trudeau government seemed quite happy to oblige its CCP masters in this regard.
As my old friend got out of the car, feeble and unsteady on his feet beyond his years, I tried to remember what life was like before all of this. I tried to find perspective.
So many old people were dying in old age homes. The aged were always considered a huge, expensive liability by socialists. Socialism can’t afford them, or any of the infirm, for that matter. Besides, the older you were the more conservative you tended to be, and the more you remembered the now-racist and non-inclusive “old normal”. Ah, the old normal. A world of wondrous, beautiful statues and non-postmodern art. (The arthole graphic embodiment of the great deconstruction.) A time when government answered to the will of the people and not the reverse. A world without masks, social-distancing floor dots, hate speech laws, or false neo-Marxist narratives stacked upon each other like old, piss-stained mattresses piled from here to the moon. The very proof of this successful deconstruction. The Frankfurt School fraternity surely gazed up from their eternal hell holes with broad, self-satisfied smiles.
