“Two
categories of propaganda must be distinguished. The first strives to
create a permanent disposition in its objects and constantly needs to be
reinforced. Its goal is to make the masses ‘available,’ by working spells
upon them and exercising a kind of fascination. The second category
involves the creation of a sort of temporary impulsiveness in its objects.
It operates by simple pressure and is often contradictory (since contradictory
mass movement are sometimes necessary).” –
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
The
French-Algerian writer Albert Camus’ great 1947 novel, The Plague, is a warning to us today, but a warning
in disguise. When he died sixty years ago at the young age of forty-six,
he had already written The Stranger, The Fall, and The Plague, and had won the Nobel Prize for
Literature.
The
outward story of The Plague revolves around a malignant disease
that breaks out in a town that is quarantined when the authorities issue a
state of emergency. After first denying that they have a problem, the
people gradually panic and feel painfully isolated. Death fear runs rampant,
much like today with the coronavirus. The authorities declare martial law as
they warn that the situation is dire, people must be careful of associating,
especially in groups, and they better obey orders or very many will die.
So the town is cordoned off.
Before
this happens and the first signs that something is amiss emerge, the citizens
of the town of Oran, Algeria remain oblivious, for they “work hard, but solely
with the object of getting rich.” Bored by their habits, heavily drugging
themselves with drink, and watching many movies to distract themselves, they
failed to grasp the significance of “the squelchy roundness of a still-warm
body” of the plague-bearing rats that emerge from their underworld to die in
their streets. “It was as if the earth on which our houses stood were
being purged of their secret humors; thrusting up to the surface the abscesses
and pus-clots that had been forming in its entrails.” To them the plague
is “unthinkable,” an abstraction, until all their denials are swept aside as
the truth emerges from the sewers and their neighbors and families die from the
disease.
“Stupidity
has a way of getting its way;” the narrator, Dr. Rieux tells us, “as we should
see if we were not always so wrapped up in ourselves …. plagues and wars take
people equally by surprise.”
The
American people are wrapped up in themselves. Nor do they recognize the
true rats. They are easily surprised; fooled would be a better word.
Camus
uses a physical plague to disguise his real subject, which is the way people
react when they are physically trapped by human rats who demand they obey
orders and stay physically and mentally compliant as their freedom is taken
from them.
The
Plague is an allegorical depiction of the German occupation of
France during World War II. Camus had lived through that experience as a
member of the French Resistance. He was a writer and editor of the
underground Resistance newspaper Combat, and with his
artist’s touch he later made The Plague a
revelatory read for today, especially
for citizens of the United States, the greatest purveyor of the plague of
violence in the world.
We are all infected with the
soul-destroying evil that our leaders have loosed upon the world, a plague of
killing that is now hidden behind the coronavirus fear that is being used to
institute tight government controls that many will come to rue in the months
ahead, just as happened after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Coronavirus is a perfect cover-story for
the occupation of the public’s mind by a propaganda apparatus that has grown
even more devious over the past 19 years.
Ask
yourself: Where is the news about U.S. military operations in Syria,
Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia,
etc.? There is none in the corporate mainstream media, and little in the
alternative media as well. Have those operations ceased? Of course
not. It’s just that the news about them, little that it was, has
disappeared.
Now
it is all about us and the coronavirus panic. It is about how many of us
might die. It is about stocking toilet paper. For the rich, it is about
getting to their second or third houses where they can isolate themselves in
splendor. As I write, 150 or so Americans are said to have died of Covid-19,
and by the time you will read this the number will have climbed, but the number
will be minuscule compared to the number of people in the U.S.A. and those
numbers will be full of contradictions that few comprehend
unless, rather than reacting in fear, they did some comprehensive
research.
But
arguments are quite useless in a time of panic when people are consumed with
fear and just react.
For
we live in plague time, and the plague lives in us. But to most Americans,
Covid-19 is the plague, because the government and media have said it is.
Like the inhabitants of Oran, the United States is “peopled with sleep
walkers,” pseudo-innocents, who are “chiefly aware of what ruffled the normal
tenor of their lives or affected their interests.” That their own government, no
matter what political party is in power (both working for “deep-state,” elite
interests led by the organized criminals of the CIA), is the disseminator of a
world-wide plague of virulent violence, must be denied and divorced from
consensus reality.
That these same forces would use the fear
of disease to cow the population should be no surprise for those who have come
to realize the truth of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the anthrax
attacks that followed, both of which were used to justify the endless “wars on
terror” that have killed so many around the world. It is a shock for so many
people who can’t countenance the thought that their own government could
possibly be implicated in the death of thousands of U.S. citizens and the
release of the deadly anthrax, which we know came from a U.S. lab and was
carried out by a group of inside government perpetrators.
When it
comes to the plague-stricken deaths visited on millions around the world for
decades by the American government, this must be denied by diverting attention
to partisan presidential politics, and now the coronavirus that engenders fear,
loathing, and a child-like tendency to believe Big Brother. The true
plague, the bedrock of a nation continually waging wars through various means –
i.e. bombs and economic and medical sanctions, etc. – against the world,
disappears from consciousness. As U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine
Albrecht said to 60 Minutes Lesley Stahl in
1996 when Stahl asked her if the U.S. sanctions on Iraq that had resulted in
the death of 500,000 Iraqi children were worth it: “We think the price is worth
it.”
For
“decent folks must be allowed to sleep at night,” says the character Tarrou sarcastically;
he is a man who has lost his ability to “sleep well” since he witnessed a man’s
execution where the “bullets make a hole into which you could thrust your
fist.” He awakens to the realization that he “had an indirect hand in the
deaths of thousands of people.” He loses any peace he had and vows to
resist the plague in every way he can. “For many years I’ve been
ashamed,” he says, “mortally ashamed, of having been, even with the best
intentions, even at many removes, a murderer in my turn.”
The
rats are dying in the streets. They are our rats, diseased by us. They have
emerged from the underworld of a nation plagued by its denial.
Unconscious evil bubbles up. We are an infected people. Worry and
irritation – “these are not feelings with which to confront plague.” But we
don’t seem ashamed of our complicity in our government’s crimes around the
world. For decades we have elected leaders who have killed millions,
while business went on as usual. The killing didn’t touch us. As Camus said,
“We fornicated and read the papers.” He knew better. He warned us:
It’s a wearying business
being plague-stricken. But it’s still more wearying to refuse to be it.
That’s why everybody in the world looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick
of plague. But that is why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of
their systems, feel such desperate weariness.
Yet
the fight against the plague must go on. Tarrou puts it thus:
All I maintain is that on
this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, as
far possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. That may sound simple to
the point of childishness; I can’t judge if it’s simple, but I know it’s true.
You see, I’d heard such quantities of arguments, which very nearly turned my
head, and turned other people’s heads enough to make them approve of murder;
and I’d come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use
plain, clear-cut language. So I resolved always to speak – and to act –
quite clearly, as this was the only way of setting myself on the right track.
These
days, I keep thinking of an incident that occurred when I was a young
investigator of sexually transmitted diseases, working for the U.S. Department
of Health, Education, and Welfare through the Public Health Service as an
epidemiologist. My job was to track down sexually transmitted diseases by
finding links of sexual contacts. One day I went to interview and take a blood
sample from a poor woman who had been named as a sexual contact. I
knocked on her door on the third or fourth floor of a walkup apartment
building. She looked through the peep hole and asked who it was and I
told her my name and what government agency I represented. I could tell she was
very wary, but she opened the door. She stood there naked, a very heavy woman
of perhaps 300 pounds. She nonchalantly welcomed me in and I followed her as
she padded down the hall where she took a housecoat off a hook and put it on.
There
is, as you know, an old tale by Hans Christian Anderson called “The Emperor’s
New Clothes.” Although the emperor parades around naked, the adults make
believe he is clothed. Only a child sees the obvious. I was a 23-years-old
naïve young man at the time of this unforgettable incident, but it echoes in my
mind as a reminder to myself that perhaps that woman was unconsciously teaching
me a lesson in disguise. The year was 1967, and when I went out to get
into my government car with federal license plates, a white man in a white
shirt in a white car in a poor black neighborhood, a hail of bricks rained down
toward me and the car from the roof opposite. I quickly jumped in and
fled as the ghettos were exploding. Soon the National Guard would be called out
to occupy them.
Intuition tells me that although the
emperor has no clothes and a vast PSYOPS occupation is now underway, too many
are too grown-up to see it.
It’s an old story continually
updated. Like The Plague.
Edward Curtin [send him mail] is a writer whose work has
appeared widely. His website is edwardcurtin.com.
Copyright © Edward Curtine
