The New Normalization
Atlanta, GA
September 19, 2020
This year has been generous. It’s given us plenty to complain about, and I’ve taken full advantage. I’ve drunk from every half-empty glass, and found the cloud within each silver lining.
Dazed and confused, groping in the dark as the ground shifts beneath our feet, it’s hard each day not to bang our head on beams of anxiety, step in a pile of angst, or stumble into pits of absurdity.
Each week offers a bountiful harvest of ripe gripes, in a vast assortment of sour varietals. The vines weigh heavy…with government over-reach and popular acquiescence…with superstition masquerading as science…with neighborly snitching and sanctimonious snooping…with an inability to open businesses and free rein to loot them…with an expunged past and forfeited future.
Grafted to these rancid roots are toppled statues and razed cities. Fake money and real depression. Arsonists in the mountains and Marxists in the streets. Dystopian isolation of youth, and solitary confinement of the elderly. And an emerging tendency to reduce fellow human beings to nothing more than viral vectors and potential pathogens. As these noxious fruit fill the vat, they ferment to form the bitter brew of a toxic swill.
As the putrid contents decant, we recline for a moment, take a deep breath, and swirl our thoughts. And we realize things really aren’t that bad.
They’re worse.
Because this concoction was not inevitable, nor accidental. Much of it is deliberate, diabolical, and deceitful.
We just learned that the mayor and “public health” officials in Nashville conspired to intentionally withhold COVID statistics because the news was too good. Apparently, the “case” count from Broadway bars was too low to instill hysteria, so they decided not to share the information.
“Case count” is obviously a meaningless metric. But we all know that had it been high enough to provoke panic, it would’ve been published immediately. Nashville is almost certainly not the only government guilty of such malicious malfeasance. Why anyone believes anything coming from any of them is beyond me.
Still, fear persists, and authorities double down.
Despite mounting evidence that this virus is only somewhat nastier than the seasonal flu, certainly less severe than the 1957 Asian flu, and not remotely comparable to the 1918 Spanish flu, kids stay socially isolated in “online schools”, mask and distance mandates remain in effect, livelihoods continue to be destroyed, and seniors are forcibly shielded from loved ones, left to wither away, to die alone in sterile nursing homes or antiseptic hospital wards.
And dictatorial restrictions are lifted in the manner of a bad striptease, slowly removing the incidentals while leaving the heaviest elements in place.
Meanwhile, the CDC now tells us we might be allowed to return to normal around the third quarter of 2021! So much for “fifteen days to flatten the curve”. And who knows what the CDC means by “normal” anyway?
What gives? Are politicians and bureaucrats really this detached from reality?
Maybe. But I don’t think so. An honest politician, like a chaste prostitute, is rare.
At some point, we need to acknowledge that the people ruling over us are more self-interested than senseless, more sinister than stupid, more devious than dumb. They may not rise to an occasion, but they will stoop to it.
They have incentive to shovel BS, and to believe it. After the calamity they’ve caused, they better believe it. They must make everyone think their devastation was not for naught.
To reverse field would confess culpability for self-inflicted damage unparalleled in peacetime. They must maintain the charade that the virus succumbs to compulsion, and then take credit when the bug inevitably fizzles.
But the selfish explanation is insufficient. There may also be a more ominous one. Our overlords are more interested in their power than in our health. And their tactics for obtaining it thru phony “science”, false narratives, and rising tension are not without precedent.
I was reminded this week of a prescient 1984 interview between G. Edward Griffin and Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB agent who defected in 1970. In it, Bezmenov explained four stages of collapse that Marxists orchestrate from inside a “target nation”.
Unlike the four turnings of Howe and Strauss, the episodes Bezmenov described are not of equal length, and do not recur. Instead, each is shorter than its predecessor, till the final phase…which is indefinite.
To erode a country from within, its people must first be demoralized. This entails an undermining of that society’s traditional values, making it ripe for revolutionary take-over.
The process requires at least twenty years, which is the time needed to “educate” a single generation. According to Bezmenov, the “Demoralization” of America was nearing completion at the time he gave the interview.
And it had been quite successful. It was a thorough cleansing, to an extent “Comrade Andropov could not have dreamed” (wonder what he’d think now, after being asleep for thirty-five years). As this stage proceeded, indoctrination and disinformation were eventually inflicted by Americans on Americans, “because they lacked moral standards”.
After the demoralization, “exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized is unable assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him.” Academia, entertainment, and the media are the primary actors in this de-morality play. For the last fifty years, they have read their lines and played their part to sap society’s soul.
“Destabilization” follows. This is the wave that has soaked the 21st century. Particularly since the financial melt-down of 2008, it has been building to a crescendo. This feels like the year it will crash, if it hasn’t already.
In this period, the subverters don’t much care about the populace. The propaganda has already permeated the people. By now, they are no more than disposable pawns or useful idiots. Their ideas and actions are irrelevant, except insofar as they can be used to distract the plebs into artificial factions, and pit them against one another.
The bread and circuses of social media, popular entertainment, and electoral politics keep the rubes occupied while the real action happens behind the curtain. There the operatives focus on the economy, the military, and foreign relations, primarily thru the Fed, Pentagon, and CIA. What happens in any of those agencies is rarely up for debate, and when it is it is mostly ornamental. The peons generally have no say in (and less awareness of) the matter.
With the third phase comes the “Crisis”, and the climactic collapse. Bezmenov indicated this can happen quickly, and seemingly from nowhere. It can take many forms, including (to grasp a few random hypotheticals) an over-hyped virus, manufactured riots…or a contested election.
The precipitating factors usually provoke uprisings that bring police action or military intervention. The revolutionary stage sets out to correct wrongs, but usually ends up stripping rights. As Doug Casey put it, whereas the powers-that-be once treated the populace as milk cows, they now view them as beef cows.
As the cattle moves thru the chute, they enter the final phase.
“Normalization” comes when the Crisis is quelled. The people are worn out. They seek security and crave calm. The previous phases have dimmed their cultural outlook, discredited their traditional behavior, anesthetized them into submission, and acclimated them to force. Many even welcome a crack-down of perceived threats to public safety and prevailing ideology. The State, posing as their pastor, is happy to save them. It makes a desert, and calls it peace.
At this point, as Brezhnev announced after the Soviets pacified Prague, “the situation is normalized.”
Maybe that’s what the CDC meant.
JD
