Enrolled in the Religion of Fear

Professor Douglas Farrow writes that Health and Environment is the new Blood and Soil ideology, backed by signs of the old violence.

Jeremy Isaacs’ The World at War includes an interview in which Hitler’s personal secretary, Traudl Junge, reports that the Führer, in his last days, replied to a question about the future of Germany as follows: “I believe there will not any more be a National Socialist Party; the idea will die with me. But maybe in a hundred years or so there will arise another National Socialist idea, like a religion.”^[1]

It has not yet been a hundred years, but I begin to see what Hitler meant. From the South Pacific to the North Atlantic, even democratic countries such as Australia and Canada are rapidly going full Nazi.^[2] We’ve been living for eighteen months now under a “health emergency” in which rule by fiat has replaced the rule of law. In Australia, rubber bullets are flying to suppress resistance to this perpetual state of exception. In both countries, and in America too, isolation camps are being built in pursuit of the COVID-zero phantasy (“One is one too many”) or, more accurately, the COVID-zero plot.^[3]

Who knew that constitutional rights could be suspended for such a long and indefinite period, with routine renewal of emergency powers by the same people who wield them? Who knew that this could be done in the name of Health and Safety when more people are dying as a consequence of the special measures than are dying from the health threat that putatively requires them? Who knew that to “safeguard” healthcare, the government could cancel much of it or make it difficult to access; build and staff quarantine camps instead of hospitals, when neither are needed; impose coercive mandates that violate the most basic principles of the Nuremberg Code; dismiss physicians and healthcare workers who dissent from the dirty tactics and dare to expose government lies?

The most remarkable thing, however, is the stupendous credulity that characterizes significant tracts of the population, especially in academia, where our “critical minds” are said to reside. The credulity and the cowardice; for when it comes to enrolling in the religion of fear, the universities have vied with each other to be first in line and to teach that religion to their students.

I have listened in disbelief to a mob of McGill professors demanding that the administration deny constitutionally guaranteed rights to students and colleagues who refuse their religion of fear. I have read with dismay the American Medical Association instructing its members how to manipulate patients and public opinion with dishonest language.^[4] I have taken note of government psy-op activity and of media censorship.^[5] Alas, I have also seen bishops and pastors, who ought to know better – who are obligated to know better – succumb to the new law of Fear and preach the new gospel of Safety, even to the closing of their churches, the coercing of fellow clergy, and the dividing of their flocks.^[6]

One would think that several months with a weekly COVID-related death rate of less than one per 100,000 Canadians would have calmed this hysteria. ^[7]  One would think that critical minds might recover their lost wits when jolted by new data showing that in Britain all-cause mortality has for some time been lower among the unvaccinated than among the vaccinated.^[8] Or when shown by age-stratified data that, for the majority of people, the risks of vaccination outweigh the risks of remaining unvaccinated. Or that vaccination does not prevent infection and transmission, and that a non-sterilizing vaccine cannot do so.^[9] Or that these are not vaccines in the first place, but novel gene therapy treatments with short-term efficacy at reducing symptoms, uncertain long-term dangers, and unacceptable levels of serious adverse reactions.

But no, our supposedly critical minds are baying for the blood of the unvaccinated and of any administrator who refuses to shed it through coercive mandates. Evidence of their own political, medical, and moral folly they simply refuse to consider.^[10]

 

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

If patriotism was once the last refuge of the scoundrel, today that refuge is environmentalism and global health. Watching over the sphere of global health is the heavily politicized World Health Organization. There are also “independent” monitors and advisory committees, such as The Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness & Response and the soi-disant Global Preparedness Monitoring Board.^[11] The former, maintaining that “the threats to human, animal and environmental health are inextricably linked,” has used the COVID crisis to call for the establishment of a Global Health Threats Council with sweeping powers to monitor progress towards WHO objectives, including those of the 2030 Agenda. ^[12]

Exactly who is monitoring whom, and who is colluding with whom to achieve what, is no easy question for a layman to answer.^[13] But collusion there plainly is, including collusion dating back more than a decade, to engineer crises that could be put to good use for economic and political ends. Both the definition of a “pandemic” and the strategy for fighting one were quietly changed. The new strategy, what we know as the COVID-zero strategy, holds real promise of concentrating power in the hands of a few. Indeed, it has already done so.^[14]

Something else changed, too, which anyone could have and should have noticed. By early last year, the media had moved into lockstep mode. Identical (if highly contradictory) memes such as “two weeks to flatten the curve” and “the new normal” and “build back better” and “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” began to appear simultaneously in the mouths of officials and of reporters the world over. So did censorship of opposing voices. Where censorship was not possible, the charge of Misinformation! was laid down as covering fire by hired guns in the media or in the university sector, as by public figures such as Dr Fauci.

Misinformation! covers a multitude of sins, sins that are not always random or inadvertent but quite often well-planned and carefully executed, many of them committed in the quest – the futile and medically counter-productive quest – to eliminate a coronavirus, something that has never before been done and cannot now be done.^[15] No one knows better than those who engineered SARS-CoV–2 that, like other coronaviruses, it cannot be eradicated by human measures and that there is in any case no need to eradicate it.^[16] But the phantasy of eradication must be maintained and Misinformation! is the charm by which every threat to that phantasy is warded off.

I find it astonishing that so many people have not noticed how odd all this is, or how sinister. Can anyone who takes the slightest trouble to examine the facts doubt that we are faced with a plan, a ruthless plan, of global proportions?  That the phantasy in question – together with the hysteria it feeds, the discrimination it breeds and, above all, the unconscionable abuse of children to which it leads and by which it will be damned^[17] – has been carefully prepared and perpetuated? Some who are more or less immune to the Misinformation! charm point to corporate greed, combined with political corruption and bureaucratic bumbling, to account for what has been unfolding around us. No doubt much of it can be accounted for in that way; that, after all, is the usual way. Yet what we are experiencing is not usual. It has the look and feel of a globalist coup.

To illustrate: It was already clear by late spring this year, from data in America and Europe, that adverse reactions and deaths through vaccine injury were at unprecedented and entirely unacceptable levels.^[18] The refusal of governments, international agencies, and the media to acknowledge this or to take account of it – the determination instead to keep on repeating the “safe and effective” mantra while maintaining the “vaccine” rollout at all costs – tells us that we are dealing with a criminal conspiracy. The fact that this rollout was supposed to be either “one and done” or “two and done” but has instead morphed into a perpetual booster program, backed with the threat of a lapsed health passport, points to the same conclusion.^[19] The documented psy-ops, backed where necessary by the adoption of jackboot methods, further cements the conviction that we are faced with a purpose and a plan. Mass dismissals of uncooperative doctors and nurses, and the imprisonment of protest leaders, deprives even the most reluctant onlooker of any contrary conclusion. ^[20]

What is that plan, you ask? Who is behind it and how did it achieve such enormous reach and success? My best guess is that we are dealing with several overlapping plans: that of Bill Gates and his Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (Gavi), to make everyone dependent on Big Pharma; that of Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum, to effect the Great Reset; that of Xi Jingping and the Communist Party of China, to subvert democratic governance and economic power in the West; that of the eugenicists and transhumanists who inhabit the bowels of the Wellcome Trust;^[21] that of Peter Daszak and his EcoHealth Alliance, which appears to have worked with Anthony Fauci to fund and conduct enhanced-function coronavirus research in cooperation with the Chinese;^[22] that of Victor Dzau, who runs the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board and helps to coordinate some of the others – to say nothing of George Soros, or the Rockefeller Foundation, or various other agents and agencies whose high and holy mission is “to improve lives and the planet, and unleash human potential, through innovation.”^[23]

Please note: I am neither emulating nor mocking those despised conspiracy theorists who claim that one or more of these is deeply involved. I am not just rounding up the usual suspects. I have read or seen enough of their own aims and claims to conclude for myself that they are involved, in one fashion or another, though the particulars lie beyond my competence. Such organizations plainly have very deep pockets, very ambitious plans, and very extensive networks. It is not at all unreasonable, then, to suppose that what we have been experiencing has been both planned and conducted with malice aforethought. Of course its engineers wouldn’t call it malice, but “unleashing human potential.” Yet they have happily leashed us all in the process, preventing the sick from getting timely medical help from effective drug protocols,^[24]preventing the healthy from working or even leaving home without permission, dragging our whole society step by step into their bio-surveillance programs.^[25]

What they will do with us then, when we are confined like dogs behind invisible fences moved at will by our masters, one shudders to imagine.^[26] It is not even clear what they will do with and to each other, for this much is certain: they can’t all be in charge and they can’t all get their own way. What’s clear enough is that we are not dealing with men or women who themselves have boundaries, moral boundaries. We are dealing with scoundrels of the first order, who have upended whole societies and countries, and watched ordinary people suffer and die, to advance their own agenda. Nor, unless I miss my guess, have they yet got to the bottom of their bag of dirty tricks.^[27]

 

Unmasking the Masked

As all this unfolds, what are we academics doing? Certainly not thinking! Just tiptoeing warily through campuses surrounded by billboards reminding us to wash up, wear masks, practice antisocial distancing, get vaccinated (again), report daily on our personal health, and stay safe. Our theatre of the absurd! Yet no one is permitted to say so, for this now is the nearest thing we have to a religion.

“In a world where everything is ridiculous,” wrote G. K. Chesterton, “nothing can be ridiculed. You cannot unmask a mask.” ^[28] But unless my eyes deceive me, you can unmask a mask, because some people, conscious of the fact that the masks are as leaky as the “vaccines,” wear one on top of another, just as they take one booster on top of another. In a world where everything is ridiculous, you can’t have enough masks to unmask! Nor can you have enough jabs. For there is no such thing as being fully vaccinated, not when Pfizer does your thinking for you and Pharma runs your immune system, tinkering at its pleasure.^[29]

We ourselves are being unmasked, are we not? I don’t mean the university, which some time ago began peeling off sectors of its own moral economy for a share in Pharma’s filthy lucre, and China’s too; its present behaviour is not surprising. I mean we ordinary denizens of the university. Our masks are the most visible sacramental of the new religion. That we are willing to wear them for hours at a time, over months and even years, demonstrates our devotion, our dedication, like nothing else. Men without chests, to use Lewis’s phrase, are becoming men without faces either. Our masters have told us to don the veil and we have done so. We are no longer free individuals, making rational choices of our own. We are the compliant, and the mask is our badge of compliance.^[30]

In the meeting to which I alluded earlier, between members of the McGill Association of University Teachers and representatives of the senior administration, I pointed out the modest weekly virus-related death rate (0.2 per 100K in Quebec) and enquired whether such contortions as we are presently performing will have to be performed every time that very low bar is reached. One outraged colleague responded in the chat box, THIS IS A VERY SERIOUS DISEASE!  I restrained myself from replying that it seems a very serious case of rampant fervour than of rampant fever.

St Augustine had us pegged long ago. In discussing the gods of the Romans and the folly of their devotees, he pointed out that all the evidence demonstrated that these gods did not actually exist, except in human fancy. And what could be more wretched, he asked, than “for a person to be under the dominion of a figment of his own imagination!”^[31] Augustine believed what Christians generally believed; namely, that behind such false gods were oppressive spiritual forces that enslaved people through their worship. He therefore invited his neighbours “to acknowledge the true religion, by which the demons are unmasked and sent down to defeat.”^[32]

Behind the religion of fear in which so many colleagues and students seem to be enrolled, some of them my fellow Catholics, I too see spiritual forces that need to be unmasked and sent down to defeat. I don’t mind saying that I pray fervently for just that! I also pray that colleagues and students who value academic freedom will stand and be counted alongside the courageous who have already stood. ^[33]

To those who are valiant on other fronts, but who wish to sit out this particular battle, I say: There is no point pursuing academic freedom in a society that lacks personal and political freedom, or in an institution where one either worships the god COVID or is excluded from the communal life. There is far too much at stake to sit this out. We are witnessing the rise of something analogous to what we saw in the 1930s – not a national socialism, but a global socialism every bit as insidious, for which the watchwords are not Blood and Soil but Health and Environment.

Douglas Farrow is Professor of Theology and Ethics at McGill University in Montreal.

 

This article was first published in the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship Newsletter, Issue no. 90, October 2021, and is republished here by kind permission of the author and the publisher.

 

***

 

[1] Jeremy Isaacs, producer (Thames Television, 1973), vol. 9. See further Douglas Farrow, Ascension Theology (T&T Clark 2011), 112 n. 62. Giorgio Agamben was the first to identify what we are now witnessing as a religion.

[2] Examples, alas, abound.

[3] See Julius Rueschel, “The Snake-Oil Salesmen and the COVID-Zero Con: A Classic Bait-And-Switch for a Lifetime of Booster Shots (Immunity as a Service).” See further n. 14 below.

[4] AMA COVID-19 GUIDE: Background/messaging on vaccines, vaccine clinical trials & combatting vaccine misinformation (Winter 2021). One learns there, for example, that one shouldn’t say “hospitalizations” but rather “deaths” – as if the one led inevitably to the other.

[5] On the former, see Laura Dodsworth, A State of Fear (Pinter & Martin 2021), reviewed here. As for the latter, where does one begin, or end?

[6] I have several times tried to warn against such actions. See, for example, “Let the Dead Bury their Dead,” “The Health-First Heresy,” “Whether There is a Moral Obligation to be Vaccinated,” and “Unclean! Unclean!”, which can be found at douglasfarrow.academia.edu. I will add here that no one is bound by edicts issued without the requisite moral liceity and statutory authority.

[7] At the time of writing, the rate is 0.7 in Canada as a whole and 0.3 in Quebec: this despite (a) denials of life-saving early treatment and (b) the inflated reckoning of deaths by including every deceased subject with a recent positive PCR test and (c) inclusion in some cases of vaccine-induced deaths. “COVID related“ is, to say the least, an extremely generous category.

[8] When the partially vaccinated are taken into account: see Norman Fenton and Martin Neil,  “Probability and Risk,” who rightly conclude that there is no foundation for vaccine mandates; cf. Chris Waldburger, “Bombshell: U.K. data destroys entire premise of vaccine push.”

[9] See the mathematician Luboš Motl’s analysis of vaccine efficacy at The Reference Frame. With his customary rhetorical reserve, Motl laments the fact that so many Western nations “have been totally overrun by these unhinged fanatics” who worship PCR tests, “one of the most characteristic symptoms of the disease of the Covidah Witnesses.”

[10] See. Charles Eisenstein, Mob Morality and the Unvaxxed. See also David Cayley, “The Case Against Vaccine Passports” (First Things, 17 Sept. 2021).

[11] These, including the Independent Oversight Advisory Committee – which before the pandemic began was already spreading the meme, “From ‘never again’ to the ‘new normal’” – are incestuously related; see further n. 13 below.

[12] See COVID-19: Make it the Last Pandemic (2021), chapter 6. This Independent Panel wants to “elevate political leadership for global health to the highest levels” (46). In short, it wants to give more power over the planet to those who believe they know how to “strengthen universal peace in larger freedom,” as the 2030 Preamble puts it. And who are these people? One supposes them to be very like those on the Panel.

[13] At sorting some of this, “the amazing Polly” is pretty amazing; she was on the right track early. Anyone following up with their own review of the GPMB’s September 2019 Report will see that some people were peculiarly well-prepared for the COVID crisis.

[14] In 2009, just before the swine flu episode, the definition of a “pandemic” was changed to elide severity (which matters) and emphasize transmissibility (which, by itself, does not). Later the strategy for fighting a pandemic was changed from protecting the vulnerable (which again matters) to preventing transmission. Eventually the definition of “herd immunity” was changed to tie it to vaccines, the definition of “vaccine” was altered, and the measure of vaccine success likewise. All of these changes were designed to make Pharma field goals easier to kick. But with the appearance of extraordinary search and seizure powers and confinement camps they begin now to look more sinister than that.

[15] See Grant Brown, “Can we really inject our way out of this pandemic?” (C2C Journal, 22 September 2021).

[16] After himself insisting on this point, Dr Eric Payne adds that “Alberta Chief Medical Examiner of Health, Dr. Deena Hinshaw, shared evidence and publicly acknowledged that we cannot eradicate COVID-19 and are rather transitioning from a COVID-19 pandemic to endemic.” Payne’s well-documented letter to the CPSA is worth reading in its entirety.

[17] See “Why are we vaccinating children?” (Toxicology Reports, vol. 8, 2021, 1665-1684). Good question.

[18] “The EudraVigilance database reports that through June 19, 2021 there are 15,472 deaths and 1,509,266 injuries reported following injections of four experimental COVID-19 shots” (Technocracy News & Trends). These numbers continue to climb. I have tried to warn my university that it will not escape liability for any damage suffered by students or staff through its constant pressure to get vaccinated.

[19] “Morphs” is not quite the right word, perhaps. The European Commission, by 2018, already had in hand its Roadmap for the Implementation of Actions that would establish vaccine passports and “address vaccine hesitancy.” And as soon as “vaccine” orders were opened, the ever-profligate Justin Trudeau took options for enough doses to jab Canadians ten times each.

[20] The citizen who is not utterly appalled by the dismissal or even threat of dismissal faced by so many conscientious doctors and nurses (see n. 24 below) is the citizen of a country I do not recognize. Likewise those who turn a blind eye to the arrest of principled young women or men for such high crimes and misdemeanours as refusing to wear a mask in a public place.

[21] See Whitney Webb, A “Leap” towards Humanity’s Destruction, which reads a bit like an update to C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength.

[22] See Ian Birrell, Beijing’s Useful Idiots: Science journals have encouraged a false Covid narrative,” and the (putatively) leaked Drastic Analysis Project Defuse document.

[23] Beware the philanthropists and the Gaia worshipers alike! Both can be “haters of the human race,” to toss back an old epithet aimed at Christians in Roman days, especially where they are one and the same.

[24] Thankfully, thousands of medical people are now protesting against this. They need our support. They know very well that things have gone very seriously amiss. Dr Payne again (from the letter linked at n. 16 above): “While I grew to respect and trust long-standing health organizations like the WHO and CDC, financial and political interests have crippled their independence, and during this pandemic, they have egregiously misrepresented facts and helped to censor scientific experts worldwide. This is not surprising, as it has been proven in court that WHO did not act ethically during the 2009 H1N1 swine flu “pandemic” when it came to their global vaccine agreements. These organizations that inform Canada health policy are completely compromised by vaccine and big pharma interest money.”

[25] If you think this fanciful, you might take the time to read The Emerging Nowa Huta, in which I probe the underlying logic of the extraordinary events we are experiencing, and to follow that essay’s links, which will take you to institutional sources where various aspects of that logic appear.

[26] Many things are becoming possible, things scientist in universities and in private labs are very keen to explore, and to explore without too much oversight. This, I think, explains some of the silence about the very bad “science” behind official COVID policies.

[27] In The Fight for Canada, Major William Wood discusses the criminal empire run in New France by Governor-General Rigaud (Marquis de Vaudreuil) and his brother, together with François Bigot. Of the latter, he remarks that “he showed a truly satanic genius in all that he did” (1905: 55). Of the former, after acknowledging his weakness of character, he says: “Yet he was so deeply involved in all the machinations of Bigot that he was drawn down from one bad step to another, until there was nothing for it but to let the confederates plunge the colony into utter confusion, in order to cover up their own misdoings” (46). This illustration I offer in support of the Preacher’s thesis that there is nothing new under the sun. But note well:  What is transpiring today is not merely a fight for Canada, or even for Europe and its colonial dominions. It is a fight (as Patrick Wood maintains) against global technocracy, a fight for the whole world and every inhabitant thereof. What William Wood says of Bigot & Co. may be said, on a grander scale, of their globalist counterparts today: “Altogether, it was one of the very worst bands of chartered brigands known to history that lived upon the misery of New France. And all their crimes were done officially, and with due decorum” (55).

[28] Illustrated London News, 10 July 1927.

[29] That, of course, is its gain and your loss. At present, natural immunity against COVID is more than ten times as effective as artificially induced immunity; by this estimate, thirteen times. As for Pfizer, it has more than once been forced to pay millions or even billions for fraudulent marketing of dangerous products; but what is that against its current profits?

[30] In the opening chapter of The Abolition of Man (1943) Lewis points to the loss, especially in the academy, of those capacities and habits of heart that make men strong enough to be free: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful” (12). But I allude also to Till We Have Faces (1956), a novel he originally entitled Bareface, which describes a movement from the masked self, which cannot recognize even itself, to the honest self capable of knowing the other as well as itself.

[31] Augustine, The City of God, 8.23 (Babcock trans.; New City Press,, 2018).

[32] Ibid., 7.35.

[33] Dr Francis Christian at the University of Saskatchewan, for example, or Julie Ponesse at Huron, or Byram Bridle at Guelph; or even, if necessary, from the White Rose Society at Munich during the dark days of the struggle with National Socialism.