I.
The brutality of the Victorian police in crushing the anti-mandate protests and the police's harassment, detention, beatings, etc., of Melbournians going about their everyday business has shocked the world: it is here that the power of the Covidian police state displays itself naked, unconcealed, unashamed. But, if we are to look past spectacle, we are confronted by a Covidian state at work in a less overt and perhaps more insidious manner: Covidianism has gotten inside the heads of Melbournians and Sydneysiders, which is to say that the residents of these cities have internalised the dogma of the Covidians and made it part of their personalities. I saw that one weekend when I was walking, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, through an inner-city suburb: while strolling by a cobble-stoned laneway in a quiet and lonely street, I spied a young man washing his car and wearing a Covid face mask; I wanted to stop to talk to the man and tell him that he had nothing to fear - that he could take off his mask, the police would not find out: for the police were more likely to be concentrated in the city center; they rarely appeared in this part of town, which is one of the reasons why I had decided to take a walk there. Why, then, should he be wearing a mask? It was because he had achieved a state that cults aim to induce in their members: a state of self-surveillance, self-monitoring. I strongly doubted that he was wearing the mask for reasons of health: the 'coof' would not be blowing down that laneway, and even if it were, it would have been undeterred by flimsy cloth.
I consider that man to be a prisoner - like millions of Melbournians and Sydneysiders - and I believe that he has been damaged psychologically by his internment. As part of what has been the greatest social experiment in Australia's history, his psyche has been taken apart and rebuilt by the Covidians, and by doing so, the Covidians have warped his mind. But such turning of the mind inside out, and consequent psychological disruption, is quite common in cults. According to this 1982 article from the New York Times, 'the experiences described by cult members resemble personality changes regularly associated with disorders of the temporal lobe of the brain':
''The symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy,'' said Dr. Clark, ''are similar to those seen or reported as resulting from cult conversions: increased irritability, loss of libido or altered sexual interest; ritualism, compulsive attention to detail, mystical states, humorlessness and sobriety, heightened paranoia.''
Nothing indicates the cultishness of Covidianism more than the ubiquitous Covid mask, which serves the purposes of the cult in a number of ways:
Firstly, the mask destroys a person's individuality: if we cannot see a person's face, we cannot know them to be an individual. For that reason, members of the Synergon cult in California in the 1960s and 1970s had their heads shaved (as can be seen in the photo above). Other cults avail themselves of similar methods. In a chapter on Reverend Jim Jones' People's Temple cult, Colin Wilson writes,
In 1972, Jones began to institute an even more authoritarian regime. All church members were ordered to cut their hair short, and a squad of barbers enforced this' [Rogue Messiahs: Tales of Self-Proclaimed Saviours (2000)].
Secondly, the mask denotes submission. Worn virtually all the time, under threat of shunning, shaming, fines, imprisonment, even a beating at the hands of the police (as we have seen in Melbourne), the mask signals the acquiescence of the wearer. Significantly, the mask covers the mouth, and resembles nothing more (and here I apologise in advance for the vulgarity of the comparison) than a BDSM 'cuck' or 'gimp' mask or a BDSM 'ball gag'. I think that the analogy is perfectly apt, as cults are not about religion, they are about power; they aim at nothing more than breaking the individual and forcing him to submit to the cult leader's will. Which is another reason why cults demand uniformity of clothing, hair styles, speech, thought, etc., from their members: the cult only wants members who have been 'broken in'.
Thirdly, the mask looks absurd - and this is quite intentional. People labouring under mask mandates have become so accustomed to wearing surgical masks (well, pseudo-surgical - these masks do not come up to the standards of those worn in hospitals) that they have forgotten how ridiculous they look. (This why during the disturbances in Melbourne, the riot police presented us with this jarring sight: the same men who were wearing Judge Dredd-style helmets and battle armour wore surgical masks). In contrast, one can find throughout history plenty of examples of face coverings which are both smart-looking and functional. Think of the Tuareg's facial and head coverings, which protect him from the sand and the heat; think of - in popular culture and folklore - the English highwayman's face scarf, the Wild Western cattle rustler's bandanna, the Japanese ninja's face mask and cowl... The Covid mask does not possess nearly as much elan; to put it plainly, it looks stupid. But once again, this is deliberate. A cult works at breaking a member's will through degradation, and it will use public ridicule, humiliation, etc., to that end.
All this brings us back to the mandates for the injections of Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Johnson and Johnson, Moderna. In my view, the pro-choice advocates concentrate far too much on what is in these concoctions and not enough on the fact that these are being forced upon people. Even if the injections were vaccines (they aren't), were effective (they aren't), were harmless (they aren't), they would still be detrimental to our well-being, as they are being introduced into our bloodstreams through compulsion for the sake of compulsion. The man who has taken one, two, three injections, and then six-monthly, monthly, bimonthly 'booster shots' - he has submitted, and submitted thoroughly. And, as a mark of his submission, he will proudly display the band-aid over the puncture on his arm or even have a tattoo engraved upon it...
Such submission brings with it benefits. It shows that he is acceptable, as a person, to his community, and it differentiates him from those who will not abide by the standards of the community - those who do not take the injection. The latter group, in his eyes, are not only wrong but downright irrational, mad; and like all mad dogs, they must be put down:
[Cults] generate an elitist mentality whereby members see themselves as lone evangelists struggling to bring enlightenment to the hostile forces surrounding them. There is only truth - that espoused by the cult. Competing explanations are not merely inaccurate but degenerate. Cults do not have opponents. They have enemies and frequently dream about their ultimate destruction. [On the Edge: Political Cults Right and Left (2000), Dennis Tourish and Tim Wohlforth]
In late 2021, our society is clearly heading in the above direction. And this is quite an abnormal development: what we are seeing is not politics as usual. And in order to understand what has happened, we need to look beyond politics and into the meta-political. Which is why I will here be discussing cults, and an esoteric subject - the attempted brainwashing of American POWs by the Communist Chinese during the Korean War.
This is necessary because those who are opposed to the mask mandates, the lockdowns, the injection mandates, are looking at it all in the wrong way: they have developed the bad habit of using inappropriate historical analogies. They scratch around the past, dig up ideologies a hundred years old (fascism, for instance, or communism) and use them as a reference point or framework in which our current predicament can be viewed correctly. But in Australia, the lockdowns, the coming injections of children, etc., can be only be properly understood if we are to consider the recent history of cults in this country: the Australian Covidians have more in common with the members of notorious Australian cults such as, for instance, the Family and the Universal Brotherhood. Indeed, the former can be used as a guide to the present and anticipated strategies of the Covidians: the Family abducted children, concealed their original identities, disguised them, made them wear peculiar costumes and adopt unusual hairstyles, indoctrinated them, and plied them with enough drugs to kill a horse: the reader will agree, I think, that Australia is heading down the same path, or at least its widespread acceptance.
II.
This year I came across the following chart, entitled '"Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance": The Biderman Report of 1956 and COVID-19':
This graphic used Biderman's famous Chart of Coercion. When I first saw it, I was impressed by how it correlates with the treatment of Australians under the Covidian regime.
The chart comes from a 1956 paper by the American academic Albert J. Biderman, 'Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War'. During the Korean War, Chinese interrogators, skilled and experienced in what Mao called 'the washing of the brain', used manipulative techniques to break down the resistance of captured US airman so as to persuade them to admit 'guilt' and sign 'confessions' to 'crimes'. But Biderman was not writing a polemic against Chinese Communism: he was outlining general principles which be applied outside of the unfortunate circumstances these airmen found themselves in. Anyone familiar with the history of cults in the 20th century will see the similarities between the points on Biderman's chart and the methods of cult indoctrination.
I have read Biderman's paper (which is a fascinating historical document in itself) and found an expanded version of the chart, which I shall reproduce here:
The 'Variants' column, I think, bears a great deal on our present quandary. I will go through some items.
1) ISOLATION: Complete solitary confinement, complete isolation, semi-isolation, group isolation.
2) MONOPOLISATION OF PERCEPTION: Physical isolation, barren environment, restricted movement.
4) THREATS: Threats of Death, threats of non-repatriation, threats of endless isolation, vague threats, threats against family, mysterious changes of treatment.
5) OCCASIONAL INDULGENCES: Occasional favours, fluctuations of interrogators' attitudes, promises, rewards for partial compliance, tantalising.
6) DEMONSTRATING "OMNIPOTENCE" AND "OMNISCIENCE": Confrontations, pretending co-operation [is to be] taken for granted, demonstrating complete control over victim's fate.
7) DEGRADATION: Personal hygiene prevented, demeaning punishments, insults and taunts, denial of privacy.
8) ENFORCEMENT OF TRIVIAL DEMANDS: Enforcement of minute rules.
We can see the above at work every day, not only in Melbourne, Australia, but in New York, USA: there the governor Kathy Hochul has announced the mass firing of thousands of health care workers who refused to be injected - and the stripping of welfare benefits from these workers. That certainly accords with what Biderman calls 'threats' and 'demonstrating "omnipotence" and "omniscience"'.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul stood at a Brooklyn pulpit on Sunday and preached to the congregation about how the Covid-19 vaccines “are from God to us" and asked those present to be her “apostles.”
Instead of wearing a cross to deliver her Covid "sermon," Hochul donned a “vaxed” necklace.
If you read Hochul's sermon, you'll see that she states, quite plainly, that the 'vaccinated' can catch Covid from the 'unvaccinated' - one of the now-typical absurdities spouted by the Covidian regime).
I found, in the Variants column, 'Personal hygiene prevented' intriguing. A few weeks ago I happened across an televised interview with Noam Chomsky, who had grown long hair and a rather unkempt beard during a lockdown. (On a side note: do you think that Chomsky, a self-professed 'anarchist', was in favour of the injection mandates? Of course he was - he is a leftist, and leftists are a 100% in favour of them). I marveled at Chomsky's dishevelment and recalled to myself other instances of people 'letting themselves go' during lockdowns. Now, after reading Biderman, I now see that our captors - for Australia is now a big prison - sought that result. They wanted people to 'let themselves go', become disheveled, because a prisoner who is unkempt is more likely than not to lack self-respect and is thereby more susceptible to conditioning. This explains why it is that hairdressers, barbershops, beauty salons were among the first businesses to be closed during the recent crisis, and why it is that shopping for new clothes and shoes has been made extremely difficult.
III.
Normal political paradigms do not help us in understanding our current predicament; only the above will. Once you realise that Melbournians and Sydneysiders have been catapulted into a Korean POW camp (or perhaps Jonestown 2.0), then everything becomes clearer.
How, then, to resist? Biderman's chart tells us that degradation 'reduces [the] prisoner to "animal level" concerns' - and unfortunately, we in our present captivity do need to start paying more attention to animal level. In order to resist, anyone under lockdown ought to be focusing upon domestic minutia, part of which is the looking after one's clothes and shoes (as these cannot be easily replaced) and making sure that one's house (which at the moment is a prison cell for millions of Australians) is clean, bright, well-ordered and uncluttered. As well as the care of one's clothes, the care of one's skin and hair should take priority as well. Even if one lacks the services of a drycleaner or a hairdresser, one can still look reasonably smart - and thereby retain some self-respect.
Related to this is the subject of vice, which has exploded under the lockdowns. One really should avoid as much as possible alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, gambling, pornography, distracting as all these can be: you need to keep your wits about you, and conserve your energies and not dissipate them.
One should cut down on one's consumption of the news as well. Many have developed the habit of scouring the news for the latest government communique on 'plans' for 'easing restrictions' (that is, what Biderman calls 'occasional indulgences'). But the government uses the media as a platform for the 'demonstration of "omnipotence" and "omniscience"'; and the government uses it as a means of uttering 'threats', of achieving the 'monopolisation of perception', of inducing 'debilitation, exhaustion'. Through 'insults and taunts' disseminated through the media (including social media (e.g., platforms such as Twitter) the government and its accomplices effect 'degradation'. The media can be compared to a loudspeaker in a Korean POW camp, through which Chinese propaganda is blared at all hours.
Perhaps, when all of this is over, studies will show that individuals who had consumed less media fared better psychologically than those who had consumed more. I am at the moment uncertain as to the value of news even from sites which are opposed to the mask mandates, lockdowns, injection mandates, etc., and which report daily on abuses by the Victorian and New South Wales police. Does this reporting - even though it intends not - lead to a growing sense of helplessness, powerlessness, fear, demoralisation, despair? Should one not direct one's attention to other things?
To put it another way. Three groups of people who are responsible for our present predicament: politicians (especially regional ones), journalists and health officials. These groups want to shun those of us who 'won't get with the program' - should we not in turn shun them? And that would entail our not listening to anything they have to say.
One can object, 'But not all journalists...'. True enough, but what, at present, is the value of any reporting on Covid, lockdowns, mandates, etc.? If by now you do not know by now of the adverse affects of the injections, then you will never know. And while it may seem a good idea to tune into news bulletins to keep track of the ever-shifting and arbitrary rules changes, I think one can negotiate one's way through life without knowing the rules in great detail. One knows enough by now to wear a mask in public; one knows enough to be careful around the police.
IV.
A study of the history of cults will reveal that cults often function as a state within a state: they will have their own courts, judiciary, police, informants - and in the case of Jones' People's Temple, executioners. Cults will use their state apparatus to punish rule-breakers within the cult often for the most innocuous things - e.g., expressing a desire to see one's family again, or evincing doubts and misgivings towards the cult's doctrine. In the early years of Mao's China, a student was put on 'trial' for masturbating in the privacy of his room.
All this helps us understand the pivotal part of Biderman's essay - that dealing with forced confessions and the degrees of resistance towards this Chinese demand. (The attribution of 'guilt' for alleged 'crimes', the admission of 'guilt' under tremendous pressure, and the cleansing, cathartic nature of the 'confession', occupy a central place in Chinese Communist ideology; we can glean from Frank Dikötter's The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (2013) that the number of 'defendants' in 'trials' for ideological 'crimes' in that period must have run into the hundreds of thousands).
This section of Biderman is pertinent because many residents of Melbourne and Sydney since the lockdowns began have committed crimes which are not crimes. Here is a partial list:
- Travelling outside the 5 kilometre (or whatever the arbitrary and ever-shifting distance is) radius outside one's home;
- Travelling across state lines, e.g., from New South Wales to Queensland;
- Not wearing a mask, or not wearing at the right time (for instance, in Queensland there is a rule that says one must, at a workplace, wear a mask when standing, but one has the freedom to take it off while sitting);
- Taking one's mask off to drink alcohol in the street (yes, this is a rule in Melbourne);
- Not scanning a QR code or 'checking in' when entering a store;
- Failing to respect the one and a half metre 'social distancing' rule while shopping in a supermarket aisle;
- Attending a funeral, wedding, religious service or celebration, etc., or attending one of these where the number of those present exceeds the prescribed limit;
- Attending or organising a demonstration against the lockdown measures;
- Showing up to work when you are not an 'authorised' worker;
- Leaving one's house without a 'valid reason';
- Staying outdoors for more than the time allotted for 'recreational activity';
Etc., etc.
Soon, no doubt, spreading 'misinformation' ('Covid denial', for instance) will be criminalised, as will reluctance to take the 'vaccine' and refusal to divulge one's 'vaccination' status.
All of these laws were introduced piece by piece, in what Tourish and Wohlforth call a 'spiral of escalating commitment':
Prospective members adopt what are at first small behaviours in line with the group's belief system, and which do not require the formal endorsement of its ideology. An example would be the act of attending a group meeting. In the first instance, the new behaviours are not perceived as challenging the prospective recruit's preexisting belief systems. However, the new behaviours are slowly escalated. Attendance at a meeting might be followed by a forceful "request" to participate in a weekend conference, followed by voting for the group's proposals at other public forums, leading to asking others to do likewise, resulting in the selling of group literature on the streets and climaxing in a public identification with the group's goals.
The gradual nature of what is involved enables the recruit's belief system to slowly adjust to the new behaviours they have adopted. By the time the full impact of the changes is apparent, they have become for all practical purposes a new and permanent identity. [On the Edge-.]
The result produced by the above 'spiral' is that many Australians have lost sight of normality; they are unable to see how absurd the pettifogging rules introduced by the Covidians are. We need, then - in order to grasp Biderman's point on the crime which is not a crime - a fresh pair of eyes. Suppose that, in a science fiction scenario, a time-travelling battalion of Victorian police 'arrest' a number of Melbournians from 1956, the year of publication of Biderman's essay, and proceed to detain them and interrogate them, seeking to force an admission of 'guilt' for the above anti-Covidian 'crimes'. The captive Melbournians would see, at once, that they are being held hostage by madmen. Here is our fresh pair of eyes...
Biderman sketches out, in a chart, an exhaustive list of 'Responses to demands for false confessions; [degrees of] resistance and compliance'. Now, in our above science-fiction scenario, the captive Melbournians would after a time realise that the Victorian policeman are deadly serious; some of them would, in order to avoid detention, decide to 'be smart' and play a game with their captors. Perhaps they would acquiesce - or pretend to acquiesce - to the statements of identity that 'not wearing a mask' = 'crime', 'travelling 5 kilometres outside one's home' = 'crime', etc. They may 'confess' that yes, indeed, they did drink beer in public while not wearing a mask, or they did attend a large wedding - but they may ask, was that a crime? Or perhaps they would agree with the policeman that from a 'certain perspective', yes, not signing one's name and giving one's phone number when entering a public building could be considered a 'crime'. Such equivocations belong in Biderman's categories of 'defensive compliance' and 'active compliance', both of which are perhaps the two most interesting.
What is the appropriate response to the captor's demand for a 'confession'? Too many of those opposed to Covidianism respond with what Biderman calls 'defensive resistance' (see below); they respectfully disagree with the Covidians, and list their reasons for that disagreement in bullet points. But arguing one's case with the Covidians does not work. I remember seeing footage of an unfortunate man in Melbourne who, while crossing the road, blundered straight into a group of police, who went and arrested him for not wearing a mask. He attempted to argue his way out of the arrest by reciting Covid facts and statistics (which were probably true) but the police wrestled him to the ground and handcuffed him anyway while a policewoman soothingly intoned 'It's for your own good'.
The only response to a demand for a 'confession' or admission of 'guilt' is what Biderman calls 'complete resistance' (see below). No compliance, only defiance.
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