Up until just yesterday, Canadians were repeatedly told that closing our borders to travellers from infected regions will do nothing, because said travellers can always bypass flight restrictions by first flying to a country with no restrictions, or by simply lying about their travel history. At the same time, we were told that asking suspected or confirmed coronavirus patients to “self-quarantine” themselves, with virtually no oversight provided aside from (we should hope) their own conscious, is a perfectly reasonable and smart thing to do.

Because people who want to travel, for whatever reason, will do just that, and there’s apparently nothing we can do to stop them. But people who want to break their self-quarantine, for whatever reason, will… not do just that? Our officials may invoke The Science™ alleged to be informing their actions however many times they like, but one does not need any sort of educational or professional qualifications to understand that this reasoning simply doesn’t hold up.

Meanwhile, in the real world, if we can expect that people might lie about their travel history, we should certainly expect that people might lie about remaining in self-quarantine. Moreover, it now appears that a large percentage of our recent coronavirus cases have been “imported” from the only nation with which we share a land border: the United States. Closing this border would appear to be the most obvious and sensible thing to do — but leave it to the Canadian government to be egregiously involved in the day-to-day lives of its citizens during the best of times, and almost entirely absent and ineffectual at precisely the moment when we really do need them to do something, anything at all.

For the lion’s share of the outbreak, the World Health Organization had embarked upon a most virtuous crusade to combat the real threat facing our so-called “global village”: hurt feelings. Aside from their persistent and rather patronizing calls for people the world over to engage in proper hand-washing protocol, the only other activity of note from the WHO over much of the last two months had much less to do with the virus itself than with how people feel about the virus.

In other words: perhaps the real virus is the stigma generated along the way.

Now, it is quite easy, and admittedly quite tempting, to chalk all of this up to mere incompetency. However, I do not personally believe this to be the case — at the very least, it’s not the whole story. Rather, I do believe there to be at least some sort of method behind this madness.

Imagine: you’re one of the big-shots at the WHO. You have an extremely virulent and potentially deadly sickness making its way around the globe, and you are, of course, expected to do something about it. Unfortunately, as a branch of the UN System, you are forced to juggle your commitment to the globalist project with that of your core mandate — public health. This means that several potential options for combating the spread of the virus are off the table before negotiations even begin.

In brief:

You can’t (openly) encourage countries to implement travel restrictions, because this will have too much of a negative impact on the global economy (not to mention the implications of giving the impression that wide-open borders not always being a good thing);

You can’t encourage countries to implement more heavy-handed screening processes for potential coronavirus patients, because this will freak people out;

You can’t (openly) call for the same kind of large-scale, city-wide quarantines as those seen in China, because the residents of most other countries are unlikely to tolerate such a thing (and it will freak people out, and be bad for the economy);

You can’t be entirely honest about the overall difficulty of the situation we’re facing, because this would further undermine the already-limited confidence that much of the public has in your organization. At any rate, you absolutely cannot admit that you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, trying to strike a balance between the interests of the global economy and that of global health, because some people may (rightfully) begin to wonder why on Earth the World Health Organization is concerning itself with economic matters in the first place.

Briefer still:

So — what’s an un-elected bureaucrat to do? At this point, it will help to remember that these are bureaucrats we’re dealing with, here — they’re not saints; they’re people, just like you and me, every bit as liable to fall for the allure of self-interest as any of those currently dodging symptom-checks at airports, hoarding toilet paper, or breaking their self-quarantines to attend public gatherings.

The answer to this problem, then, is simple, if only because it’s the last one left. Basically, you’re going to have to figure out a way of doing something — or at least, looking like you’re doing something — without actually doing much of anything at all. A necessary component of this strategy will entail that your organization consistently down-plays the nature of the risk that this virus poses to the world: so long as the public genuinely believes that there’s nothing to be worried about, they will not be demanding that you take any of the aforementioned, unsightly options.

That way, your overall lack-of-action will appear not irresponsible, but rather reasonable. As far as the WHO’s continued existence is concerned, it doesn’t really matter whether or not their actions (or lack thereof) really are irresponsible, only that they don’t look that way.

Herein lies the danger with putting a single organization in charge of public health on a global scale: like most UN agencies, the WHO is accountable only to itself, despite being charged with the health interests of (for all intents and purposes) the entire planet. If any of us have a problem with the way the WHO is governed, there is effectively nothing that we can do about it — not unless the WHO itself happens to agree with our concerns. Until that day comes, if it ever does, we remain entirely at their mercy.

Again, we must ask ourselves: what incentive do they have to agree with us? In fact, they have much more incentive to outright lie to us, lest their cushy office jobs be put on the chopping block. To an extent, I can understand the difficulty of their present situation: surely, it is no easy task to balance the needs, wants, and demands of some 8 billion people with the needs, wants, and demands of the politicians, bankers and bureaucrats signing your paychecks. I only say “to an extent” because — call me crazy — I don’t really care whether or not anyone gets to keep their cushy office job after the dust settles, and frankly, with so many lives at stake, I can’t understand why we haven’t yet seen at least one or two whistle-blowers emerge whom would presumably agree with me on this point.

To quote @DaveEncompas0 on Twitter, who summarizes the debacle quite nicely:

One of the most striking, morbid symptoms of this era is public institutions’ fixation on the interior, subjective strata of a public they seem to increasingly mistrust. The Managerial State’s surveillance of mind rises in proportion to its failure to attend to material reality. [source]

Indeed, in our present era of global oligarchy, public opinion is not the means of understanding and alleviating concern that it may have once been. Rather, it is a dangerous and institutionally life-threatening obstacle that must be overcome by any means necessary. And if you cannot — or, in this case, are perhaps not allowed to — combat the issue that has caused such negative public opinion, you are then forced to combat — or, in this case, distract from — the negative opinion itself.

*

The bulk of the preceding paragraphs were drafted prior to the WHO’s extremely belated, “official” designation of the novel coronavirus outbreak as a pandemic. Since then, the crisis has accelerated considerably: just one of many examples comes from the hard-hit nation of Italy, where hospitals are reportedly being forced to choose which incoming patients will be eligible to receive intensive, life-saving care, and which will be left to their fates. Parts of Spain and France are now on lock-down, and multiple nations have suspended both land and air-based travel into their territories, whether for travellers from specific regions or — as is the case in Denmark, Poland, and, quite ironically, a number of Central American nations — from anywhere else in the world. Even Canada, too, is now closing its borders to most, albeit not all, foreigners.

These are dark days indeed, and darker still remain. It may seem difficult to fathom at this stage, but we must remember that this, too, will pass. The day will come when our lives return to normal — though what appears to be “normal” to us on that day may be drastically different from what we would have considered “normal” before all of this began.

Although Canada has not yet initiated any large-scale lock-downs such as those seen in China, Italy, Spain, France, and parts of the United States, many of us will be spending much more time indoors, away from our jobs and other commitments, whether with our families or alone with our thoughts. As tempting as it may be, I think it would be a terrible shame to spend this sudden surplus of free time on fearing for the future. You will likely end up doing this to some extent, anyway — we’re only human, after all. My point is that you should try not to spend all of your time doing so.

At any rate, fear is far from the only emotion that you ought to be feeling at this moment. In particular, if you are not angry with the powers that be for having inflicted this mess upon you in the first place, I would urge you to reconsider.

Yes, we certainly have the right to be upset with the Chinese government for their bungled and haphazard response to the outbreak while it was still contained within their borders. We have just as much of a right to be upset with the WHO and their lackeys for having sacrificed our health and safety on the alter of money, power and “progress.” But do not forget that governments around the world — in all likelihood, yours included — consistently delayed putting the proper measures in place in time to protect you and your family from harm. That citizens all over the world are now being faced with widespread unemployment, uncertainty, and quarantine — mandatory or otherwise — on top of a very real and dangerous threat to their health, was not inevitable. If anonymous Twitter accounts and citizen journalists knew that this was a big deal as far back as early January, it’s a sure bet that our leaders knew as well, if not sooner. All the same, they did nothing.

None of this had to happen. Nearly all of this chaos, both coming and ongoing, could have been prevented. To re-iterate: calling this mere incompetence gives them far more credit than they deserve. It is not incompetence, but cold, calculated malice. Somewhere along the chain of command, a decision was made that your health did not matter nearly as much as your behavior — after all, dead men tell no tales.

God forbid that any of you reading this (or any of your loved ones) become ill with this terrible sickness. No matter who you are, whether you agree with my views or not, I sincerely hope that this virus passes by you and your family without incident. Though the coronavirus has done a better job at exposing the rotten foundations of our globalized economy and its complex, off-shored supply chains than all the thousands of hours of YouTube exposes on the topic combined, the last thing I’d want is for anyone to lose their lives in the process.

Sadly, lives have already been lost. All we can do now is to try to do our best to ensure that we do not lose any more. Do not trust your government to do this for you: remember that the only reason they are acting so swiftly at this stage is because the problem has become too big, too scary, to deflect with simple accusations of bigotry and intolerance.

Do not forget that, when you were afraid and desperate for answers, the government called you a ‘racist’ for having dared to ask questions.

I am not at all certain that our global elite will learn anything of value from this experience. In all likelihood, they will be itching to get back to “business as usual” as soon as possible — as ‘usual’ as it can be, at any rate. We must not allow them to do so. We have a responsibility to those whom have already suffered and perished from the consequences of these decisions to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again. And if we do not learn anything from this, mark my words, it will happen again.

To return to Dave’s quote: our institutions, both national and international, do not trust us. They do not trust us to make the appropriate decisions with the information they have on hand, and by withholding it, they have forced us to do whatever it is they think we should be doing, whether it is the right thing to do or not. The tragic results are now piling up in hospitals, morgues, and graveyards across the world.

Use this time wisely. Use the fear and anger you are feeling now just as wisely. They do not trust us, and we should make damn sure that the feeling remains mutual.

Do not forget who did this to us, and, most importantly, do not forget why.