Israel Shamir – The Unz Review March 25, 2020
In these Corona times, I often listen to Monty Python’s Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.
This black cloud has a silver lining. With the virus roaming outside,
teenagers deign to spend more time with their parents; wives are at home
cooking dinners instead of hanging out with gorgeous strangers in posh
cafés; we do not have to plan expensive holidays on far-away islands;
there is more time for reading books or playing checkers with the kids.
The enforced modest lifestyle (no restaurants, no parties) is suitable
for Lent, this sombre period of time before Easter. We can live for a
while with this calm domestic Lent, 1956- style.
Despite my age, the disease does not worry me at all. One dies only
once, and it is unavoidable. It’s the heavy-handed government
interference that is a real pain in the neck. It is lockdown I fear, not
the disease. Consider the example of Israel, this pilot project of the
Masters of Discourse.
In Israel, as in a few other countries, they ordered the most severe
lockdown: people aren’t allowed to leave their apartments unless to
shop for food. Even a lonely walk along the seashore or in the park is
forbidden, and there is the police and the army to enforce the ban.
Balmy weather, blue Med, green hills, but you have to stay indoors. A
recommendation to stay home and take it easy can be taken into account;
this total imprisonment of citizens is a step no tyrant had tried.
The authorities have us where they always wanted: in the grip of
fear, shopping for bread as the only permitted activity, no protests, no
demonstrations, social distancing instead of solidarity. The first
victim of coronavirus in Israel is a chronically ill 88-year old
Holocaust survivor. (But for the virus, he would live forever.) The
second is an old lady with the whole spectrum of diseases crowned with
the corona. The third and the last one is a nonagenarian. The malady is
not too bad, but the remedy is much worse. After the lockdown was
announced, six hundred thousand Israelis applied for unemployment
benefit, as small and medium businesses sent their workers home without
pay. The laid-off workers would be able to take out loans, to be repaid
with interest after the emergency is over; nobody says where they will
get money to repay.
The internal security (Shabak), the external security (Mossad), and
the police force have united to create and activate a futuristic system
of total surveillance. Now they know and follow all Israeli residents
all the time. If a person has fever and is considered a potential virus
carrier, the surveillance system traces everybody he had been recently
in touch with, or just passed by, and texts them that they must go into
seclusion for a fortnight. Now they track all movements and all meetings
of all Israeli residents at all times. Secret police forces of the
world never had such magical abilities; now they do. The Jewish state is
the testing ground for the total surveillance world project. The corona
will pass, but total surveillance is here to stay forever, predicted
Yuval Noah Harari. Only fear of the pandemic could make people accept
it, and the corona panic did it.
The virus worries are peanuts in comparison with the terrible
consequences of the massive shutdown. The real economy will
disintegrate, and the workers and the precariat
will be ruined and impoverished. They will work for their daily bread
or die. Only financiers will survive and prosper – financiers and their
liberal troops. That is what they hope for. Fear and Poverty is our
future if they have their way.
The world is divided between those wishing to submit to the lockdown
and those who preserve some sanity. The Masters of Discourse, the
liberal media and its adepts are all for lockdown. The Guardian and the New York Times
preach the mortal danger of the virus. TV networks are spreading panic.
I have tried to watch Israeli TV News; there was no news, just hysteria
online.
President Trump had made a valiant attempt to keep America functioning; but being accused by the New York Times
of complicity in the mass murder of America’s senior citizens he
acquiesced and allowed them to lock some states down. He still mulls
over some way to save America, but will he dare? His British counterpart
Boris Johnson has already surrendered after some initial resistance.
There are islands of sanity. Sweden is standing firm as a great
positive example. Though people have been warned to cool it and minimise
their outings, industry works, schools and kindergartens are open;
cafés and restaurants function; trains are running and no army has been
brought into Swedish towns. The Swedish liberal media owned by Bonnier
tried to spread panic but it was quickly brought to heel by the threat
of a hostile takeover of the newspapers. Swedish elites understand that
if they allow the country’s industries to collapse in the lockdown,
Sweden would be thrown back into its 19th century poverty.
This is too steep a price for sticking to the party line. Sweden has its
own independent mind and a strong self-preservation instinct that
allowed her to refuse the Euro and to navigate between the 20th century warring camps.
Russia is still free and open, more or less. The Russian president
sticks to the middle way. He went to visit Corona-stricken patients in a
hospital near Moscow, like Napoleon in Jaffa.
In a speech to the nation, he granted everybody a fully paid holiday
week beginning this weekend. No lockdown for Mr Putin and his subjects,
so the Russians can spend this extra holiday the way they like. He also
declared tax and mortgage holidays, and to offset the expense he slapped
the rich Russians with a tax on offshore transfers and on interest on
bank deposits, signalling that the Corona crisis won’t be used to rob
the workers for the benefit of the bankers. Previously he approved of
some protective measures, closed the borders, but still Russia is free.
Very low numbers of infected Russians make Putin’s strategy appear to be
justified.
A tug-of-war is going on between the Russian adepts of the Masters
and the Putin supporters. Putin’s enemies, the Moscow liberals, called
for Israel’s example to be followed, terminating the country’s
production. Meanwhile they shot themselves in the foot by closing down
the museums and theatres leaving them without income. Putin added much
to his popularity in the country by refusing to lock down, while Moscow
mayor Sergey Sobyanin is free to introduce more local restrictions to be
cheered by the liberals.
Tiny Belarus is the last bulwark of freedom – they do not give a
damn about the virus, though they closed the borders. I always admired
their President Lukashenko, whom the Western media called The Last
Dictator of Europe. He said that physical work in the fresh air and a
shot of vodka for lunch will keep you safe, and he is probably right.
After viewing these differing modes of response, we conclude: the
liberals, the shock troops of the Masters of Discourse, want a state of
siege and lockdown enforced by the army and police. They want our
society to commit economic hara-kiri and to doom our children to the
poverty our parents escaped. Fear, poverty and surveillance is their
suggestion for us.
As always, they try to claim the high moral ground saying they do it
for the sake of the old vulnerable people. As always, they lie. It is
not moral to prolong the life of old and sick people at the expense of
our children’s future, at the price of economic devastation. And the old
aren’t powerless. The EU and the US are being led by old people, for
these are safe and stable countries with social elevators being
out-of-function for many years. Trump is 73, Biden is 77; Soros and
Pelosi are even older. They are scared by the Corona.
The financiers behind them see in the Corona crisis a great
opportunity to scare mankind and to buy their assets for a small price
with the money they will get now from the Federal Reserve System (FRS).
The trillions of dollars released by the FRS will be handed to the big
financiers and they will buy the world. They will enslave mankind,
establish total surveillance and end the pathetic era of individual
freedoms and liberties. If they can punish you for going out for a walk,
they can do anything.
Who created COVID-19? It is an interesting but less important
question now. Who created the panic and who is using the panic to reach
their goals, this is important. I call this obscure entity ‘the Masters
of Discourse’. They have the media; they have talking heads and experts.
Corona panic is not a natural phenomenon; the virus is not particularly
deadly; very old and sick people may be speeded away, but it is not a
bad thing, for the present attempt to keep everybody alive forever can’t
survive even such a weak epidemic as Corona.
The Russian writer, Count Alexei Tolstoy (a distant, younger
relative of Leon) charted an imaginary attempt of bad guys to take over
the world. Five American tycoons spread the panic that the Moon is about
to fall on earth and kill everybody. Unbeknownst to all, they shell the
Moon with their powerful missiles, and shatter it to pieces. As people
panic and the stock market drops, the Five Tycoons buy all and become
the masters of the world. But the fear that was supposed to entrap
citizens sets them free. They disregard the stock market and dismiss the
whole private ownership system as irrelevant. At the end of the short story, a young man enters the inner sanctum of the Five Tycoons and asks them to get out for the place is needed for the youth club.
In real life, the scheme is equally neat. Mankind is being scared
into panic by the disease. The panic stops the production; shares fall
down; the bad guys get trillions from the FRS and use this money to buy
the assets of the world. The world will be devastated by lockdowns;
people will lose their means of earning their bread. The established
system of total surveillance won’t allow them to rebel. In the end, the
obedient and useful ones will be fed by the generous Masters, while the
disobedient will die out.
In a way, it is a replay of Joseph in Egypt plot of the Bible. In
the Biblical story, Joseph hoards the grain while the harvests are good,
and sells food with handsome profit when harvests are lean. In the
process he enslaves the Egyptians. Our Masters do not wait for years;
they create hardship by forcing people to stay away from their work, and
then they buy all there is to be bought.
It is a hare-brained scheme, actually. Its success depends on our
passivity, but we do not have to be passive. We can refuse panic, deny
lockdowns, forbid bailout of the bankers and the tycoons. Instead of the
socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor we have now, we can
make the rich to pay for the rest by making the biggest capital transfer
since Reagan and Thatcher, in the opposite direction. Let the whole
expense of the Corona crisis be carried by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and
other beneficiaries of the recent bountiful years. At the very least,
the Europeans and the Americans can take a leaf from Putin’s book and
provide full salary to their laid-off citizens. I think these measures
will end the Masters desire to induce panic.
And then we shall see the Corona crisis as a nice opportunity to
spend more time with our dear ones, and perhaps incidentally relieving
the old and sick of the tiring burden of a fruitless life.
This article was first published at The Unz Review
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