The Rhyming of History in the Time of COVID-19

Let's open this posting by quoting from a speech given on January 27th, 2020 with my bolds for emphasis:

 

"Let us shift our imagination for a moment to Berlin in the early 1930s. We are almost in the city centre, in a district called Bayerisches Viertel, the Bavarian Quarter....And here, one day in the early 1930s, a sign appears on the benches: “Jews may not sit here.” “Okay,” you might think, “this is unpleasant, it’s unfair, it’s not nice, but after all there are so many benches around here, you can sit somewhere else, it’s fine.”

 

This was a district inhabited by German intelligentsia of Jewish origin. Albert Einstein, Nobel laureate Nelly Sachs, the industrialist, politician and Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau lived here. One day a sign appears at the swimming pool. “Jews are forbidden to enter this swimming pool.” “Okay,” you might think, “this is unpleasant, but Berlin has so many places to swim, so many lakes, canals — it’s practically Venice — so you can go and swim somewhere else.”

Then another sign appears. “Jews are not allowed to belong to German choral associations.” So what? They want to sing and make music? Let them gather together and sing by themselves. Then another sign. “Jewish, non-Aryan children are not allowed to play with German, Aryan children.” So they can play by themselves. And another. “We sell bread and other food products to Jews only after 5pm.” Okay, now this is a real inconvenience because there’s less choice, but in the end you can still shop after 5pm.

And here we start to get used to the idea that you can exclude someone. That you can stigmatise someone. That you can turn someone into an alien. Slowly, gradually, day by day, people begin to get used to it — victims, perpetrators, witnesses those we call bystanders — all begin to get used to the idea that a minority that gave the world Einstein, Nelly Sachs, Heinrich Heine and the Mendelssohns is different, that these people can be pushed to the edges of society, that they are strangers, that they spread germs and start epidemics. These terrible, dangerous thoughts are the beginning of what happens next.

  

This speech was given by Marian Turski, a survivor of Auschwitz, on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.  Here is his speech in its entirety:

I have had the privilege of visiting four concentration camps during my lifetime; Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Terezin/Theresienstadt and Treblinka.  Each of these visits was a very emotional experience; to think that you are literally walking on the ground where millions of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and other outcasts from society met their untimely end, is deeply troubling.  In my case, it led to very vivid dreams as my unconscious self tried to deal with the fact that a society could perpetrate such evil on its own citizens.  After each visit, I would think that in this time where we believe that we are intellectually superior to the Germans of the 1930s and 1940s who believed their government's propaganda, no matter how totalitarian it became, that surely such a situation would never recur.

 

The past two years have proven me wrong, particularly the actions being taken by governments of the so-called advanced economies as they locked down society, dividing us from the ruling class and separating us from each other.  This has become increasingly apparent over the past few months as governments are now beginning to use their unfettered powers to separate the vaccinated from the unvaccinated, blaming the unvaccinated for prolonging the pandemic which has resulted in wave after wave of lockdowns, creating the "need" for mandatory vaccinations.  Just as Marian Turski said in his speech, the unvaccinated are being "....pushed to the edges of society, that they are strangers, that they spread germs and start (prolong) epidemics."  Governments and their obedient media lapdogs have successfully created "the other" by terming the current global health situation as the "pandemic of the unvaccinated", clearly ignoring any scientific research that may suggest otherwise.  Bit by bit and piece by piece, those that we elect to serve us have taken steps which are reducing our freedoms through the use of fear-based propaganda, setting us up for a totalitarian future where complete obedience is required by the state under the threat of arrest and imprisonment .

 

While I would never compare the plight of the concentration camp victims of the 1930s and 1940s to the plight of the unvaccinated today, as it has been said, history doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes and such has clearly been the case over the past two years right down to the use of quarantining facilities like this one in Australia:

...which is shockingly reminiscent of this one located in Oswiecim, Poland:

While we may like to believe that we are far more intelligent than our forefathers, this is clearly not the case.  Instead of relying on critical thinking, the majority have blindly accepted the fodder that is being fed to them on a daily basis, willing to accept whatever the authorities and the legacy media have to say without examining the scientific validity of their comments for themselves.

Let's close with this quote from the miniseries Chernobyl which seems particularly apt:

"What is the cost of lies? It's not that we'll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all.