INFECTION CONTROL
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Death, misery and tears.

Calculated waves of fear.

Drawn up by think tanks.

There’s a darkness in the West….

Killing Joke, I Am The Virus

In Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 science fiction novel Solaris, a team of cosmonauts discover a planet which is essentially a gigantic brain whose thoughts become visible on the planet’s surface, solidify, and then dissolve back into nothing. The shapes shift and change, seeming to settle into a pattern and then collapsing back in on themselves to begin again, as ultimately illusory as they are momentarily real.

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This is as good a metaphor as any for the media and cultural response to the coronavirus, the real star of 2020, no matter how many celebrities use their phones to sing John Lennon’s Communist dirge Imagine. This is not war, in which we are famously told that the first casualty is truth. This is not 9/11, or JFK, or Jimmy Hoffa or Jack the Ripper, this is a virus. Little cells. You can isolate it in a laboratory, and look at it through the lenses of a microscope, where it is available for inspection. It is not hiding. It is shamelessly open about itself, displaying its hideous, spherical, petal-studded beauty for the world to see.

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So why don’t we know anything about it? It started in China, and is ultimately the fault either of Chinese food retail habits or poor laboratory protocol. No, it was introduced to China by a US military delegation and calling it ‘Chinese’ is racist. It is highly infectious. It is quite hard to catch. These are the morbidity figures for this particular country. No, that set of figures does not account for people who died with the virus rather than from it. Those are co-morbidity figures. These are the real figures. Closing borders is right and safety-conscious. Closing borders is wrong and racist. Animals can’t catch it. Oh, yes they can. As Johnny Rotten said at the last-ever Sex Pistols gig at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom, ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

Will lies become truth in the face of fading youth?

The The, Infected

Like opposing armies massing on some Biblical plain, two camps have emerged in the corona war. The first believes that the virus is every bit as deadly as the media and various experts say it is, and the drastic response is vital and necessary. The second holds that the virus is no worse than the regular ‘flu, and the response is a power-grab by political and corporate elites desirous of a global police state.

But what of the tertium quid? What if the virus is every bit as deadly and virulent as the media are telling us, and the elites – for there are elites – know an opportunity when they see one. And perhaps it’s just as well they did, perhaps the virus is a blessing in bacterial disguise. It is difficult, in these days when there are men who are so rich and powerful they make Bond villains look like street punks dealing weed at a fiver a baggie, to know what will satisfy these éminences noires. When the world is your Monopoly board, when happens when you get bored? Maybe we’re lucky this wasn’t a nuclear war.

You have the right to food money.

Provided of course

You don’t mind a little

Investigation,

Humiliation.

The Clash, Know Your Rights

You see, it’s all about compliance. You are required to comply with the wishes of the people who rule, the rulers. You remember the intergalactic bad guys from the sci-fi movies and the comics? They came to earth because they wanted to rule it, to rule over its people. You never saw an alien space fleet flash across galaxies to earth because they wanted to open a smoothie franchise. No bat-winged, many-eyed colossus ever came marauding in from another dimension because he wanted to interview Kim Kardashian. They came to rule. Well, those films and comics were just foreshadowing, just dreaming the future. Now the future is here, but there are no spaceships or cosmic rays or giant robot spiders, just WASP guys from Silicon Valley who hit the gym and wear T-shirts to work. And they are bored and they want to rule.

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And the way they want to rule is to get you to buy crap and to keep you buying crap, the way a Vegas casino wants you to keep coming back and dropping your money in the slots. This is why the rumours of the cashless society become murmurs become everyday conversation. No black economy, no cash-in-hand payments, no money in a shoe-box in the garage. Card payments only. No card, no food. If you’re name’s not down you’re not coming in. You have a number or you have nothing. And that no man might buy or sell, except he that had the mark, or the name of the Beast, or the number of his name… The three-digit security number on the back of your card, the one you have to give the other party? Soon it will be an insecurity number, 666, every time…

Richie said,

‘Hey man, let’s dress up like cops.

Think of what we could do’.

Television, Venus de Milo

And so how is your free, 30-day trial of the police state working out for you? In the UK, the same cops who turned a blind eye – were told to turn a blind eye – to Muslim rape gangs in a dozen British towns, the same cops who dragged a woman out of her apartment shouting DO NOT RESIST US! because she had pointed out to an officer that Muslims aren’t allowed to pray in Hyde Park, the same cops who told Harry Miller they needed to ‘check his thinking’ after he re-Tweeted some humorous verse about transgenderism, the same cops who could end street gang culture in about a month but have no intention of doing so, the same cops who won’t attend burglaries in some areas, the same cops who paint their faces with rainbow flags, who go on courses that tell them that sometimes a foetus can have the wrong gender entered into it ‘by mistake,  who will lead a gang of angry Muslims towards a Tommy Robinson event rather than away from it, these rumblejacks can now push you around if they want to, which they will.

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Feel good about that? The Left will, of course, because they foolishly believe that some kind of Masonic handshake will let them off the hook when things go full North Korea, although it won’t. Let them off the hook, that is, not go full North Korea. That’s in the balance. But you and your family had better learn – and quickly – about the advisability of backchat, criticism of protected species on social media, loose talk, any dissent shown towards authority. It sounds so good at first, doesn’t it? Comforting and secure. The police are going to start using their authority again. But then you realise it isn’t going to be on criminals. It’s going to be on you.

Some day this war’s gonna end.

​Apocalypse Now

This pandemic will, we must assume, end. What should you take from it? Here are some suggestions:

• The elites despise you. Whoever they are, ultimately, the people who run the planet have a contempt for you that you cannot begin to fathom because you are not them. You didn’t even try to be them.

• China is a Communist cess-pit. Don’t buy anything Chinese. Do not befriend a Chinese person unless they have denounced their home nation to your satisfaction.

• You do not need a vast percentage of the things you regularly buy. Sit down and make a list of what you need, a proper list, not your usual shopping list minus a couple of feeble token sacrifices. Anything you buy that is not on that list, stop buying it.

• Get rid of your television. You will get a partial refund from the licencing authority and, if you like, you can time your stopping watching to your advantage.

• If you read more books during your quarantine, don’t stop just because the quarantine has stopped. If you didn’t, start now. Kindle is free to download and many classic books (key in ‘public domain’ while searching) are free. Buy books from charity shops. Don’t buy any book that is advertised anywhere. Read anything that attracts your interest.

• Don’t ever co-operate with the police again. Look up what you do and don’t have to tell a police officer if they stop you in the street or anywhere else. In terms of personal details, you will be surprised at the difference between what they think they can obtain from you and what you have to give them.

The virus is not over yet, but it will be. It’s the deeper infection you should fear, the dark cancer of authoritarianism whose cells are growing and multiplying in the body of the state, that nanny-state you always thought would protect you with its magic, but instead turned into Scary Poppins. Perhaps none of this will happen. Perhaps it hasn’t even begun.