The New Kulaks

 

The "experts" that our governments and the media have been insisting that we blindly trust for almost two years are now telling us that due to the Delta and other variants herd immunity to the bat flu is either unattainable or requires a much higher percentage of the population to have been immunized than was the case with the original strain of the virus.   They are also telling us that the fourth wave of the bat flu, the one we are said to be experiencing at the present, is driven by the Delta variant and that those who, for one reason or another, have exercised their right to reject the vaccine either in full or in part – for those who have had one shot but opted out of a second, or in some jurisdictions have had two but have opted out of a third, for whatever the reason, including having had a bad reaction to the first shot or two, are categorized under the broad “unvaccinated” umbrella by those who think that it is our ethical duty to take as many shots as the government’s health mandarins say we should take – are responsible for this wave, which they have dubbed a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”.   

 

This, however, is a case of the guilty pointing the finger at the innocent.   

 

Think about what they are now claiming.   If herd immunity was attainable with the original virus if 70-80% of the population were immunized but with the Greek letter variants it requires 90% or higher if it is attainable at all, then the blame for the current situation, however dire it actually is - and it is probably not even remotely close to being as dire as is being claimed because the media, the medical establishment, and the governments have grossly exaggerated the threat of this disease from the moment the World Health Organization declared a pandemic - belongs entirely to those who insisted upon the "flatten the curve" strategy.   Flattening the curve, which required massive government overreach and the dangerous suspension of everyone's most basic human, civil, and constitutional rights and freedoms, prolonged the life of the original virus, giving it the opportunity to produce these new, reportedly more contagious, mutations.   It was the public health orders themselves - not people resisting the orders and standing up for their and others' rights and freedoms - that gave us the variants.   It would have been far better to have taken measures to protect only the portion of the population that was most at risk, while letting the virus freely circulate through the rest of the population to whom it posed minimal risk, so that herd immunity could have been achieved the natural way and at the lower threshold while it was still available.   Natural immunity, as even the "experts" now acknowledge, is superior to what the vaccines offer if this can be called immunity at all seeing as it conspicuously lacks the prophylactic aspect that traditionally defined the immunity granted by vaccines for other diseases.   When you took the smallpox or the polio vaccine, you did so in order that you would not get smallpox or polio.  When you take the bat flu vaccine, purportedly, it reduces the severity of the bat flu so that you are far less likely to be hospitalized or to die from it.   When we consider that for those outside of the most-at-risk categories, the likelihood of being hospitalized due to the bat flu is already quite low and the likelihood of dying from it is lower yet, being a fraction of a percentage point, the so-called “immunity” the vaccines impart is not very impressive, making the heavy-handed insistence that everyone must take the jab all the more irrational.

 

For all the hype about the supposed “novelty” of the bat flu virus, it is now quite apparent that its waves come and go in a very familiar pattern.   The first wave, which started in China late in 2019, hit the rest of the world early in 2020 during the winter of 2019-2020 and ebbed as we went into spring.   With the onset of fall in 2020 the second wave began and the third wave took place in the winter of 2020-2021.   It once again waned as we entered spring of 2021, and the current fourth wave is taking place as summer of 2021 moves into fall of 2021.   Each wave of the bat flu, in other words, has occurred in the times of the year when the common cold and the seasonal flu ordinarily circulate, just as the lulls correspond with those of the cold and flu, the big one being in the summer.    How many more waves do we have to have in which this pattern repeats itself before we acknowledge that this is the nature of the bat flu, that it comes and goes in the same way and the same times as the cold and flu, compared to which it may very well be worse in the sense that the symptoms, if you get hit by a hard case of it, are much nastier, but to which it is far closer than to Ebola, the Black Death, or the apocalyptic superflu from Stephen King’s The Stand?

 

The politicians, the public health mandarins and their army of “experts”, and the mass media fear pornographers do not want us to acknowledge this because the moment we do the twin lies they have been bombarding us with will lose all their hold upon us and become completely and totally unbelievable.    The first of these lies is when they take credit for the natural waning of each wave of the virus by attributing it to their harsh, unjust, and unconstitutional public health orders involving the suspension of all of our most basic freedoms and rights.    The second of these lies is when they blame the onset of the next wave of the virus at the time of year colds and flus always spread on the actions of the public or some segment of the public.

 

It is the second of these lies with which we are concerned here.

 

Last fall, as the second wave was beginning, our governments blamed the wave on those who were disobeying public health orders by getting together socially with people from outside their households, not wearing masks, and/or especially exercising their constitutional right to protest against government actions that negatively impact them, in this case, obviously, the public health measures.    There was an alternative form of finger-pointing on the part of some progressives in the media, who put the blame on the governments themselves for “re-opening too early”.    This form of “dissent” was tolerated respectfully by the governments, a marked contrast with how they responded to those who protested that they could not possibly have re-opened too early because they should never have locked down to begin with since lockdowns are an unacceptable way of dealing with a pandemic being incredibly destructive and inherently tyrannical.   Although there was much more truth to what the latter dissenters were saying it was these, rather than the former group, that the governments demonized and blamed for the rising numbers of infections.     The governments and other lockdown supporters attempted to justify this finger-pointing by saying that the lockdown protestors, whom they insisted upon calling “anti-mask protestors” so as to make their grievances seem petty by focusing on what was widely considered to be the least burdensome of the pandemic measures, were endangering the public by gathering to protest outdoors.    That their arguments were worthless is demonstrated by how they had made no such objections to the much larger racist hate rallies held by anti-white hate groups masquerading under banal euphemisms earlier in the year and, indeed, openly encouraged and supported these even though they had a tendency to degenerate into lawless, anarchical, rioting and looting that was absent from the genuinely peaceful protests of the lockdown opponents.

 

With the deployment of the rapidly developed vaccines that are still a couple of years away from the completion of their clinical trials under emergency authorization government public health policy has shifted towards getting as many people vaccinated as possible, with a goal of universal vaccination.   At the same time, the finger-pointing has shifted towards the unvaccinated or, to be more precise, those who have not received however many shots the public health experts in their jurisdiction deem to be necessary at any given moment.    This blaming of the unvaccinated is both a deflection from the grossly unethical means being taken to coerce people to surrender their freedom of choice and right to informed consent with regards to receiving these vaccines and is itself part of those means.

 

Perhaps “shifted” is not the best word to describe this change in the finger-pointing.   While the less-than-fully-vaccinated are being blamed as a whole for the Delta wave the blaming is particularly acrimonious for those who both have not been sufficiently vaccinated to satisfy the government and who have been protesting the public health abuses of our constitutional rights and freedoms the latest of which is the establishment of a system of segregation based upon vaccine choice in which society and the economy are fully or almost fully re-opened to those who comply with the order to “show your papers” while everyone else is put back in lockdown.   The CBC and the privately owned media, both progressive and mainstream “conservative” have gone out of their way to vilify such people, as have the provincial premiers and their public health mandarins whose vaccine passport system is obviously punitive in nature.   The biggest vilifier of all has been the Prime Minister.   In his campaign leading up to the recent Dominion election he was unable to speak about the “anti-vaxxers” – a term, which until quite recently, indeed, until the very eve of this pandemic, designated supporters of holistic medicine who object to all vaccination on principle and who were usually to be found among the kind of tree-hugging, hippy-dippy, types who support the Green Party, NDP, or the Prime Minister’s own party – without sounding like he was speaking about the Jews to an audience at Nuremberg in the late 1930s.

 

What we are seeing here is not a new phenomenon.      When the ancient Greek city-states were faced with a crisis beyond human ability to control – such as a plague – they would choose someone, generally of the lowest possible social standing such as a criminal, slave or a cripple, and, after ritually elevating him to the highest social standing, would either execute him, if he was a criminal, or beat him and drive him out of their society, in either case as a symbolic sacrifice to avert disaster and save the community.    This person was called the φαρμακός, a word that also meant “sorcerer”, “poisoner” or “magician”, although there is no obvious connection between this meaning and the usage we have been discussing and lexicographers often treat them as being homonyms.  In some city-states this came to be practices as a ritual on a set day every year whether there was a looming disaster or not.   In Athens, for example, the two ugliest men in the city were chosen for this treatment on the first day of Thargelia, the annual festival of Apollo and Artemis.   Parallels to this can be found in almost every ancient culture as can the related practice of offering animal sacrifices.   Indeed, the practice is generally called scapegoating, from the word used in the English Bible to refer to the literal goat over which the High Priest would confess the sins of the people on the Day of Atonement each year, symbolically transferring the guilt to the goat, which would then be taken out into the wilderness and sent to Azazel, a word of disputed meaning generally taken to refer either to a place in the desert, an evil spirit who dwelled there, or both.   

 

Anthropologists have, of course, long discussed the origins and significance of this phenomenon.   While going into this at great length is far beyond the scope of this essay, a well-known summation of the discussion can be found in Violence and the Sacred (1977) by French-American scholar René Girard as can the author’s own theory on the subject.   Later in his Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1987), Girard, a practicing Roman Catholic, returned to his theory and discussed how it related to Christian theology and to contemporary expressions of violence.   He put forward an interpretation of the Atonement that could in one aspect be understood as the opposite of the traditional orthodox interpretation.   While there have been numerous competing theories as to how the Atonement works, in traditional Christian orthodoxy the relationship between the Atonement and the Old Testament sacrificial system was understood to be this:  the former was the final Sacrifice to end all sacrifices, and the latter were God ordained types of Christ’s final Sacrifice.   By contrast, Girard argued that sacrifices were not something instituted by God but arose out of man’s violent nature.   When division arose in primitive communities, peace was restored through the scapegoat mechanism, whereby both sides joined in placing the blame on a designated victim who was then executed or banished, and built their renewed unity upon the myth of the victim’s guilt and punishment.   The sacrificial system was the ritual institutionalization of this practice.   As societies became more civilized the institution was made more humane by substituting animals for people.   The Atonement, Girard, argued, was not the ultimate sacrifice but rather a sort of anti-sacrifice.   It was not designed, he said, to satisfy the demands of God Who has no need for sacrificial victims, but to save mankind from his own violent nature as manifested in the scapegoat mechanism and sacrificial system.  In the Atonement God provided bloodthirsty man with One Final Victim.   That Victim offered to His immediate persecutors and by extension all of sinful mankind forgiveness and peace based not upon a myth about His guilt but upon the acknowledgement of the truth of His Innocence and the confession of man’s own guilt.

 

What is most relevant to this discussion, however, is not how Girard’s understanding of the Atonement contrasts with the more traditional orthodox view, but where both agree – that it brought an end to the efficacy of all other scapegoats and sacrifices.     This does not mean that the practice ceased but that it no longer works.    One implication of this pertains to the choice that the Gospel offers mankind.   If man rejects the peace and forgiveness based upon the truth of the Innocent Victim offered in the Gospel, “there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins” (Hebrews 10:26), and so his violence, which the scapegoat mechanism/sacrificial system can no longer satisfy, increases.   This means that in a post-Christian society the sacrificial and scapegoating aspect of human violence would reassert itself with a vengeance.    Interestingly, Girard interpreted the New Testament Apocalyptic passages, both those of the actual book of Revelation and those found in the words of Jesus in the Gospels, that speak of disasters, calamities and destruction to fall upon mankind in the Last Days, as describing precisely this, the self-inflicted wounds of a mankind that has turned its back on the peace of the Gospel rather than the wrath of God (see the extended discussion of this in the second chapter entitled “A Non-Sacrificial Reading of the Gospel Text” of Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World).   Certainly the twentieth century, in which the transformation of Christendom into secular, post-Christian, “Western Civilization” that was the main project of the liberalism of the Modern Age came to its completion, saw a particularly ugly resurgence of scapegoating on the part of secular, totalitarian regimes.

 

I alluded earlier to one such example, the scapegoating of the Jews by the Third Reich, of which it is unlikely that there is anyone living who is not familiar with the tremendous violent actions it produced.   Another example can be found in the early history of the Soviet Union and this is for many reasons a closer analogy to what we are seeing today.   In Hitler’s case, the group designated as the scapegoat was a real religious/ethnic group the identity of which had been well-established millennia prior to the Nazi regime.    When, however, the Bolsheviks, a terrorist organization of mostly non-(ethnic)-Russians who hated the Russian Orthodox Church, the Russian Tsar, and the Russian people, most likely in that order, led by V. I. Lenin and committed to his interpretation of Marxist ideology, exploited the vacuum created earlier in 1917 when republicans forced the abdication of Russia’s legitimate monarch in order to seize power for themselves and form the totalitarian terror state known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, they created their own scapegoat. 

 

Kulak, which is the Russian word for “fist”, was a derogatory term applied with the sense of “tight-fisted”, i.e., miserly, grasping, and mean to peasant farmers who had become slightly better off than other members of their own class, owning more than eight acres of land and being able to hire other peasants as workers.   Clearly this was a loosely defined, largely artificial, category, enabling the Bolsheviks to hurl it as a term of abuse against pretty much any peasant they wanted.   The scapegoating of the kulaks began early in the Bolshevik Revolution when Lenin sought to unify the other peasants in support of his regime by demonizing and vilifying those of whom they were already envious and confiscating their land.    After Stalin succeeded Lenin as Soviet dictator in 1924 he devised a series of five-year plans aimed at the rapid industrialization and centralization of what had up to then been a largely feudal-agrarian economy.   In the first of these, from 1928 to 1932, Stalin announced his intention to liquidate the kulaks and while this worded in such a way as to suggest that it was their identity as a class rather than the actual people who made up the class that was to be eliminated, that class identity, as we have seen, was already largely a fiction imposed upon them by the Bolsheviks and the actions taken by Stalin – the completion of the confiscation of kulak property, the outright murder of many of them and the placing of the rest in labour camps either in their own home districts or in desolate places like Siberia, clearly targeted the kulaks as people rather than as a class.    The history of Stalin’s liquidation of the kulaks as well as that of the Holodomor, the man-made famine he engineered against the Ukrainians, is well told and documented by Robert Conquest in his The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine (1986).

 

“Anti-vaxxer”, like “kulak” is mostly a derogatory term used to demonize people.   The term itself ought to be less arbitrary than kulak.    Assigning someone to a class of greedy, parasitical, oppressors simply because he is fortunate enough to own a few more acres of land than his neighbour is quite arbitrary and obviously unjust.   Identifying someone as being opposed to vaccines on the basis of his own stated opposition to such is not arbitrary at all, although dehumanizing someone on this basis is just as unjust.   In practice, however, the “anti-vaxxer” label is used just as arbitrarily.   Look at all who have been turned into third-class citizens, denied access to all public spaces and businesses except those arbitrarily deemed “essential” by the public health officials, and whose livelihoods have been placed in jeopardy by the new vaccine mandates and passports.    While those who have not taken the bat flu shots because they reject all vaccines on principle are obviously included so are those who have had every vaccine from the mumps to smallpox to hepatitis that their physician recommended but have balked at taking these new vaccines, the first of their kind, before the clinical trials are completed.   So are people who took the first shot, had a very bad reaction to it, and decided that the risk of an even worse reaction to the second shot was too great in their instance.   So are people who came down with the disease, whose bodies’ natural immune system fought it off, who thereby gained an immunity that recent studies as well as common sense tell us is superior to that imparted by a vaccine that artificially produces a protein that is distinctive to the virus, and who for that reason decided that they didn’t need the vaccine.   There are countless legitimate reasons why people might not want to receive these inoculations and it is morally wrong – indeed, evil, would be a better word than wrong here – to bully such people into surrendering their bodily autonomy and their right to informed consent and to punish them for making what, however much people caught in the grip of the public health panic may wish to deny it, is a valid choice.    It is even more evil to demonize, vilify, and scapegoat them for standing up for their rights.   Ironically, those currently being demonized as “anti-vaxxers” by the Prime Minister and the provincial premiers include all who have been protesting against the vaccine passports and mandates, a number which presumably includes many who have had both of their shots and therefore are not even “unvaccinated” much less “anti-vaxxers” in any meaningful sense of the word, but who take a principled moral stand against governments mistreating people the way they have with these lockdowns, mask mandates, and now vaccine passports and mandates.

 

The Nazi scapegoating of the Jews, the Bolshevik scapegoating of the kulaks, and the as-we-speak scapegoating of the “anti-vaxxers” by all involved in the new world-wide medical-pharmaceutical tyranny, all demonstrate the truth of the implication discussed above of the Atonement’s abolition of the efficacy of sacrifices and the scapegoat mechanism, whether this is understood in the traditional orthodox way, as this writer is inclined to understand it, or in accordance with Girard’s interpretation.   If people reject the peace and forgiveness offered in the Gospel and can no longer find it in the old sacrificial/scapegoat system the violence multiplies.   In the ancient pre-Christian practices, the victims were singular or few in number (there were only two victims, for example, in the annual Thargelia in Athens).   These modern examples of the scapegoating phenomenon involve huge numbers of victims.    The sought objective – societal peace and unity – is still the same as in ancient times, but it is unattainable by this method since scapegoating millions of people at a time can only produce division and not peace and unity.

 

The peace, forgiveness, and unity offered in the Gospel is still available, of course, although the enactors of the new medical tyranny seem determined to keep as many people as possible from hearing that offer.   They have universally declared the churches where the Gospel is preached in Word and Sacrament to be “non-essential” ordering them to close at the first sniffle of the bat flu and leaving them closed longer after everything else re-opened, although the number of churches that willingly went along with this and even took to enthusiastically enforcing the medical tyranny themselves raises the question of whether anyone would have heard the Gospel in them had they remained open.    Which brings us back to what was briefly observed earlier about Girard’s interpretation of Apocalyptic passages as depicting the devastating destruction of human violence which the scapegoat mechanism can no longer contain when man has rejected the Gospel.   Perhaps it ought not to surprise us that throughout this public health panic the medical tyrants have behaved as if the Book of Revelation’s depiction of the beast who demands that all the world worship him rather than God and requires that they show their allegiance to him by taking his mark on their right hand or forehead and prevents them from buying and selling without such a display of allegiance had been written as a script for them to act out at this time.