Keep It Simple and Question: Propaganda, Technology, and Coronavirus

Edward Curtin

My father, a well-educated lawyer with a very sophisticated mind, used to advise me to “keep it simple.” By simple he didn’t mean simplistic. He meant fundamentally logical and to the point. So I will do that here and stick to some simple realities, now that understanding what is going on in the world has become an idiot’s game played by the corporate mass media to confuse people.

I have been writing about the dangers of technology for many years. Not all technology, of course, for the pencil I am writing this with is a technology, and an amazing and underappreciated one. I am referring to the techno-scientific, digital, high-tech sort, the world of computers, cell phones, genetic engineering, biological weapons development, etc. You know, all the stuff that has made our lives better and easier.

Two of the major problems the world faces – world destruction with nuclear weapons and the poisoning of the earth’s ecology and atmosphere – are the result of the marriage of science and technique that has given birth to the technological “babies” (Little Boy and Fat Man) that were used by the U.S. to massacre hundreds of thousands of Japanese and now threaten to incinerate everyone, and the chemical and toxic inventions that have despoiled the earth, air, and water and continue to kill people worldwide through America’s endless war-making and industrial applications.

Technology and technique, the technical way of thinking that undergirds it, are what we should fear most, not the will-o’-the-wisps marched out daily by the corporate mass media to create fear and panic. Those are ghost fears that should only frighten children.

But as I have written before, most Americans are children, living inside a doll’s house of illusions and delusions while government and intelligence forces and their mass media accomplices play with them through technological propaganda.

For every problem caused by technology, a technological “solution” is always offered that creates further technological problems ad infinitum. But since people have been taught to love technology, they embrace the alleged technological “solutions” that are necessitated by the problems caused by the original technology. It’s a circle game.

In our technopoly, logical thinking has become illogical; cause and effect, means and ends have been inverted. The causes of our problems are touted as the means to end them. These “solutions” are always offered with a straight face, as if they made perfect sense. This is how societies operate when in the grip of myths. In this case, the myths of science, progress, and history.

Such myths render the obvious invisible as they create a hopeless inevitability in people who can imagine no alternative and have been convinced that science is the secret to salvation and the means to the things they have learned to desire, including longevity and perhaps “immortality.” And these things have become the means to additional means in an endless loop from which, by definition, ends are absent. As a result, the search for truth, celebrated as a goal of science, is slyly eliminated. Keeping it simple becomes harder and harder.

The important point is that the entire system of propaganda works on fear that is promulgated via the electronic media: television, cell phones, and computers. It is pumped out non-stop.

The fear is the fear of death, the fundamental human fear that haunts humans like nothing else and is a linchpin of human activity. It is what the powerful know how to manipulate to control people.

Death that can come at the hands of fabricated enemies, disease, or state forces that will get you if you step too far out of line. Russia, China, Iran, corona virus, Julian Assange, and Chelsey Manning being a few prominent recent examples of what to fear and what will become of you if you resist the fear-mongering and lies, and are brave.

Since today’s news is dominated by the fear of coronavirus, here is a partial list of other diseases that since 2003 we were told loudly and repeatedly would become pandemics and decimate the human race. Diseases to be very afraid of since they were coming for you if you weren’t very vigilant and forgot to wash your hands.

• 2003 SARS
• 2005 Avian Flu
• 2009 Swine Flu
• 2012 West Nile Virus
• 2014 Ebola
• 2016 Zika

Well, they didn’t, very far from it; they were like scam telephone calls that scare the gullible into believing the message that they will be immediately arrested if they don’t send $1,000 to Mr. X somewhere. But just like the colour-coded terrorism warnings under George W. Bush, the pandemic alerts regularly pressed the panic button and kept fear in the air, until the panic balloon later burst under careful scrutiny, but at a point when most people had ingested the false fear of the earlier headlines and were not about to follow-up.

Now we have Coronavirus (COVID-19). So beware. Let us show you how to wash your hands and protect yourself.

Ten minutes viewing of any of the major television networks news shows is like entering a house of horrors at an amusement park. After viewing one, you want to wear your football helmet and mask, go to bed, and never get up. They ooze fear, as is their intent.

The game is both obvious and subtle. Even while COVID-19 is hyped, here and there the media throw in exaggerated figures on the regular flu, as if to say: we are fair and objective; both are bad, even if the coronavirus might soon become a pandemic.

It’s akin to their saying Trump is really scary, but look how scary the socialist Sanders is. You don’t want either.
You want the one we will tell you to want who will protect you. Listen to us, for we are here to advise, so you will consent.

The news reports about the regular seasonal flu are most revealing. If you peruse the media across all platforms, including alternative sources, you will see people repeating as fact the numbers of flu deaths in the U.S.A. so far this flu season (October 1, 2019 until today).

The numbers range from 12,000 to 18, 000 and higher, from CNN, CBS, NBC, etc. Try it. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates the “flu deaths” for this season will be 18,000 to 46,000.

However, if you dig down into the CDC figures and look at its table, which few do, you will see that the actual number of flu deaths claimed by the CDC for this season is 3,994 at the time of writing (3/6/2020 – the latest data through eight weeks of 2020), while they also estimate at one place on their website the deaths from flu at 20,000 – 52,000 so far and 20,000 at another spot.

The disparity in figures is bizarre. They also claim the number of cases is decreasing and this season doesn’t look particularly bad. (Go here, scroll down, and click on “View Data Chart”).

Isn’t that strange? A bit of a simple discrepancy, wouldn’t you say? Why would the CDC do that, and why would the media repeat it?

The CDC estimates that there will be 18,000-46,000 deaths this season and estimates 50,000 or 20,000 have already died of the flu but their facts show only 3,994 have so far died of the flu and the peak months for flu have ended. Where do those tens of thousands of additional deaths come from? Estimates?

Despite the facts at the table on their own website, in the next six months, the CD will announce , as they do every year just in time for the next flu season and the PR campaign for everyone to get their flu shot, the cumulative results for the season, which will be many tens of thousands.

What kind of game is going on here? Are you confused yet?

To repeat: the essential fear that the powerful use to manipulate and control people is the fear of death. Death in many guises: physical, social, psychological, etc. But the fear of death must be used in a way that is very confusing and scrambles people’s thinking while it frightens them.

If we keep it simple and examine what there really is to fear, it is the growth of the sophisticated modern technology in the hands of governments and corporations that has destroyed privacy, poisoned people and the earth, created digital dementia on a vast scale, allowed propaganda to flourish as never before, and is poised to blow the world to smithereens with nuclear weapons.

Then, of course there is the biologic disease warfare research and development that the U.S.A. has been involved in since it brought the German scientists here after WW II (Operation Paperclip) to continue the work they did for Hitler. Genetic research and the creation of virulent forms of viruses and bacteria became twisted into a system of science and medicine funded by the government to serve duel purposes that have become hard to distinguish.

So instead of panicking, perhaps it is better to ask some simple questions and seek simple answers. Maybe start by checking the CDC data and then asking what those anthrax attacks following the attacks of September 11, 2001 were all about, and why the U.S.A. refused in the summer of 2001 to sign the Protocol to the 1975 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) that would have added verification procedures to the BWC.

Maybe read Graeme MacQueen’s eye-opening book, The 2001 Anthrax Deception.

Maybe see that the mass media reports about the coronavirus conceal more than they reveal.

Keep it simple and question.

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