5/19/20: OPERATE IN HATE – THE RETURN OF THE SHOW TRIALS
MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS
Every time I hear people argue over what is best for those who have COVID-19 or what is best for the economy or the people, there is always one person who will say “Well I do what the science tells me.”
The other day I had someone pull that on me on Facebook and I asked “Is Pluto a Planet?” The person posted “Don’t be ridiculous of course it is a planet.”
I smirked and said “not according to science.”
The response of course was “I will let Bigfoot know that the next time I see him.”
I then said great “Because he, like all elusive monkeys, practice social distancing.”
Yes, I got trollish but science says that Pluto is no longer a planet.
While science is great and is needed, there are some people who come up with outrageous ideas and if they can convince enough people that their theories are correct then a consensus can be had and this generates more interest in something that is merely a theory with a number of scientists that have signed of because of political and or corporate nudging.
Whenever science gets entangled with powerful political causes or financial interests, or both, a healthy amount of skepticism is always a good idea.
The phrase that begins with: “the overwhelming majority of scientists agrees that…” was historically applied to things like the superiority of the white race long before the Nazis, the unquestioned truth of historical materialism à la Karl Marx in the communist countries, and countless other, now obsolete, theories that were once en vogue like eugenics.
The political platform push for mandatory changes in the American lifestyle is the reason why there is so much irrationality and confusion around the COVID-19 issue – it’s not just about the scientific debate. Because no matter where you stand on the validity of these abusive social changes there’s plenty of myths and problems with The Trump shaming, Gates inspiring, Greta expert, death is for your Future-style mania and yet when anyone tries to speak about the issue, and try to ascertain ethics they are told that they are anti-science and irresponsible or that if you don’t play ball you are denier or a person who is a White nationalist that wishes to infect everyone they see.
Probably the biggest trap this whole COVID-19 hysteria is the idea that “if we don’t act now, we are all going to die soon”: apocalyptic thinking. This shuts down calm, rational thought. But once you get out of that mindset, the issue simply becomes a problem among many.
But the bottom line it is abusive behavior by executive order. I had a really interesting conversation with my wife about abuses of power and abusers never admit they are abusive. We discussed that most people have had a friend or someone they know that has been or is in an abusive relationship.
A relationship where a partner or even a boss is using destructive dynamics to reduce someone’s dignity, gas lighting them until they are second guessing themselves. The abuser demands that the person toe the line and do as the abuser says. The abuser may say, I want you to distance yourself from your friends. So the person doesn’t go out. The abuser then says not to socialize with anyone. When the person asks why the abuser says that the person is toxic and that this person has no business going out in public. The person is shamed for wanting to do normal activities, bullied into doing things that make the abuser happy. Then, when the abusive partner finally decides to allow the person to go out – the abuser states that the person should hide their face because of how ugly they are or that ugly is contagious. That other people would be offended if the abused in question, did not hide their face.
I am hoping that you are seeing this picture and understanding what abuse of power is and how it demeans other people’s dignity and their ability to have moral agency and the right to dignity. I know that many times I have mentioned 1984 the classic book by George Orwell. While many people have not read the book they probably have the basic totalitarian skeletal version of the book ingrained in their knowledge of popular culture.
Some of us are familiar with the film that was released with John Hurt playing the part of Winston Smith.
The opening scene is a kind of rally in which perhaps a thousand people, men and women, all dressed like Smith, are being shown a propaganda movie. A banner marked INGSOC (English Socialism) first appears on the screen, then a series of battle newsreels. People alternately scream with rage and cheer madly, all in a peculiarly mechanical, arbitrary way. At high points they stand and, clenching both fists, cross their wrists with arms extended in what seems a combination of the Communist and fascist salutes. They appear completely mindless.
As we can see in the film and in the book propaganda certainly was effective in generating a lot of hate against a character named Emanuele Goldstein. In fact, the rally was appropriately the “two minutes of hate.”
We all know about the surveillance state that the characters live in –“Big Brother is watching you” but what we deal with is living in the aftermath and how the leaders are fighting among each other operating in hate.
The advancement of the surveillance state in our time is certainly being discussed with the idea or the proposed requirement of contact tracing, which I am literally puzzled as to why this is even being discussed. I am surprised that we actually have to debate over whether or not we have fourth amendment rights anymore.
Even without a constitution, the moment you are born you should have rights to what gives you joy, and the freedom to live without being harassed or abused or threatened. Almost overnight, our freedoms have been trampled and they have been commandeered by those we voted in to lead us.
A skeletal view of 1984 is really not enough because what is missing from the zeitgeist and what is missing from the film inevitably, is a sense of the historical moment when the Orwell’s novel appeared. Few books in history can have been published at a more auspicious time than ”1984.”
There was the blockade of Berlin, the Prague Coup, the explosion of the first Soviet atomic bomb, the communist victory in China, the attack in Korea. The onset of the Cold War created a voracious appetite in the West for works explaining ”the Communist mind.” For a decade or more ”1984” became almost the definitive popular work on the subject.
Any number of pundits have claimed that ”1984” is a warning to America today that with our computers and electronic surveillance systems ”1984” is almost upon us. The most cursory study of Orwell’s life, journals, letters, essays, and of ”1984” itself (which contains score after score of road signs) reveals that Orwell was possessed of the bitterest hatred of the Soviet Union and Communism, a system which aspired to total control over its citizens. It was the totalitarian lust to control men’s minds that so alarmed Orwell, not simple information-retrieval systems.
It seems almost forgotten now that Orwell wrote under the dark spell of the famed Moscow Trials (1936 to 1938), trials in which one eminent Soviet leader after another confessed to crimes which they not only had not committed, but which defied plausibility.
These “trials are called show trials where people are coerced into confessing to a crime that they didn’t commit or being forced into a public apology for something that was trivial but was overblown in a political way.
Orwell had never lived in a totalitarian state. He had seen at first hand Communist ruthlessness in Spain when he fought in the Spanish civil war, but what a Communist regime would do to prepare eminent ”deviationists” for a show trial he had to infer from his perception from the outside of the totalitarian mentality – which thirsted not only to penetrate all branches of society and to repress all dissent, but to crush ”the revolt within the skull.”
Show trials are something that most Americans are not used to. That is because many people are too young to remember them are unaware of how people can be coerced into going on an apology tour – or even being force to day things in public because they are either blackmailed into doing it or are threatened financially with their own lives.
I saw what can only describe as a “show trial” that has gone viral on social media. It was report from MSNBC.
Brian Hitchens, a rideshare driver who lives in Jupiter, Florida posted on his Facebook April 2nd:
“I’m honoring what our government says to do during this epidemic but I do not fear this virus because I know that my God is bigger than this Virus will ever be, Jesus is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.”
In mid-April, Hitchens, began documenting his and his wife’s health on Facebook.
“Been home sick for over a week. Both my wife and I home sick,” he wrote in a post on April 18. “I’ve got no energy and all I want to do is sleep.”
A day later, Hitchens and his wife, Erin, were admitted to Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center, Hitchens said in a Facebook post.
They both tested positive for COVID-19.
Hitchens said he never experienced terrible aches and pains but felt weak and exhausted. He said he felt better on May 12, at which point he had been in the hospital for three weeks, and that he still had COVID-19.
He then posted that “As of today my wife is still sedated and on the ventilator with no signs of improving,” Hitchens wrote. “There were a couple times were they tried to start weaning her off the ventilator but as soon as they’ve done that her oxygen level dropped and they had to put her back on the ventilator full time.”
He said his wife of eight years has been sick “quite a few times” in the past and she always fought through. This time, he said, “I have come to accept that my wife may pass away.”Hitchens, who has seen his wife infrequently since they were hospitalized, said he was holding out hope she would recover.
At that point it seems that the cameras had turned on him and this is where the show trial begins – just like something out of 1984:
He states online and on camera “This thing is nothing to be messed with please listen to the authorities and heed the advice of the experts, we don’t have to fear this and by heeding the advice doesn’t mean that you fear it that means you’re showing wisdom during this epidemic time.”
He continued, looking back I should have worn a mask in the beginning but I didn’t and perhaps I’m paying the price for it now,” he wrote. If he passed the virus on to his wife, he said, he knows that she and God will forgive him.
He concluded, “So just think about what I said and if you have to go out please use wisdom and don’t be foolish like I was … so the same thing won’t happen to you like it happened to me and my wife.”
Of course after he said these things, and posted it all on Facebook he got scores of people telling him that he deserved to die for what he did.
When he was tested negative on Monday he was grateful. Sadly though he became a target for shaming and ridicule – he became an enemy of the state until he confessed his unforgivable sin.
This is also part of the “show trial” provided by the abusive party—the shaming and hating process by the public.
Another example of this is when Nancy Pelosi did an interview with Anderson Cooper of CNN.
Pelosi was asked if she was “concerned” about Trump’s announcement that he had been prescribed hydroxychloroquine by the White House physician.
Pelosi answered the question but could not resist the need to throw shade on the President’s age and weight.
“As far as the president is concerned, he’s our president and I would rather he not be taking something that has not been approved by the scientists, especially in his age group and in his, shall we say, weight group — what is it, morbidly obese they say.”
Then they rolled out a number of doctors including the Former President of Planned Parenthood to admonish him.
I was particularly curious as to why they would as the former President of Planned parenthood about the President’s health and the side effects of hydroxychloroquine.
Dr. Leana Wen said there was “NO evidence for hydrochloroquine being effective in treatment of #covid19 or prophylaxis to prevent the disease.”
She continued, “This medication has serious side effects. I am very concerned about DonaldTrump continuing to model behavior that could harm many Americans.”
This is almost as astounding as having Greta Thunberg on an expert panel on the subject of COVOD-19, which CNN did do much to the eye rolling of the American public.
If you remember back in 2016 Westerners who found themselves detained in North Korea ended up in front of television cameras making full-throated confessions of crimes that they committed against the North Korean regime.
American Otto Warmbier was forced to appear before the North Korean press, reading a prepared statement in which he confessed to the “severe crime” of trying to steal a propaganda poster from his hotel.
Jeffrey Fowle of Ohio spent almost six months in detention in North Korea in 2014 after leaving a Bible in a bathroom stall at a seaman’s club in Chongjin, a city on the northeast coast.
Fowle appeared before the media several times. Before his first appearance, in front of North Korean journalists from Associated Press Television News, Fowle’s controller told him to “put some emotion into it.”
Merrill Newman, an 85-year-old California man held in 2013 after mentioning to his tour guide that he fought in the Korean War – on the “wrong side” – said afterward that he tried to signal in his televised confession that it was being made under duress.
Show trials have been carried out by terrorists to get Americans to denounce their country and denounce their faith.
Now, show trials are being carried out against people who have faith in God that they will somehow beat COVID-19 with faith alone.
When Richmond Virginia Pastor Gerald Glenn Died of COVID-19 last month the headlines indicated that the pastor said “God is larger than this dreaded virus.”
Glenn preached in church about the virus in March, before he became sick, encouraging people not to be afraid. On March 22, five days after Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam had urged people to “avoid non-essential gatherings of more than 10 people,” Glenn told his congregation that “I firmly believe that God is larger than this dreaded virus.”
It was inferred that Pastor Glenn committed the unforgivable sin of having faith in God over science.
These stories are now becoming endemic.
We now know that in the Communist show trials throughout the Soviet bloc the accused ”confessed” far more banally, through fear of torture or of retaliation against their friends and family. Some were tricked, thinking that if they ”confessed” they would be spared. Former Comintern chief Grigori Zinoviev, having made an elaborate and ostentatious confession during the most celebrated of the Moscow Trials, took it all back as he stood before Stalin’s executioners and shouted that ”fascists” were in power in Moscow.
From show trials to shaming the stories and the video confessions are similar to what was the normal for “Winston Smith” in 1984.
If you showed any kind of doubt about big brother you were forced into a show trial where you would have to confess all sorts of things in order to make the controller happy.
It did not change the hate and disdain the public has for them – it’s one more form of public humiliation for having faith in something other than science.
It is also ironic that when Winston was finally tortured they place a mask on his face. The mask is fasten to his face and it has attached to it a cage apparatus that allows rats to leap through the mask into his face.
What we are facing now is going to have horrible consequences later. The consequence is that we are at risk the longer this persists, we are at a greater risk of continued abuses until someone has the where with all to stop it.
