Delingpole: BoJo's Lockdown Did Not Protect Us, But It Will Destroy Us
Britain held a minute’s silence today to mark one of the most shaming moments in her long island story: the day Prime Minister Boris Johnson put the whole nation under house arrest in order, so he claimed, to save the National Health Service.
The initial lockdown lasted just weeks. This was all that was necessary, some suggested at the time, to flatten the curve (or “squash the sombrero”, as Johnson comically put it) of COVID-19’s trajectory. That way, we were told, NHS hospitals would not be overwhelmed and Britain could build up herd immunity, just like it had with every other novel disease outbreak since time immemorial.
One year on, though, Britain remains in lockdown. People are required to wear masks, maintain “social distancing” and to stay at home unless absolutely necessary. There is plenty of evidence of the collateral damage these measures have caused to the economy (which suffered its biggest fall in output in 300 years), to the many businesses it has destroyed, and the lives that have been lost as a result of everything from undiagnosed and untreated cancers to suicide.
Lockdowns have been a disaster not only for Britain but for all the countries that have been foolish enough to adopt them. But then, that was always the intention of the organisation that did most to promote lockdowns as a means of combating Chinese Coronavirus: the Chinese Communist Party.
U.S. lawyer and investigative journalist Michael P Senger suggests lockdowns were essentially a CCP invention, heavily pushed on social media via thousands of fake accounts run by Chinese operatives with the purpose of destabilising the West:
11/5 This collage is a tiny sample of the fake accounts CCP used to popularize COVID lockdowns.
In these Tweets, CCP sends its regards to the world by denigrating every other government in the world, using many dialects, and contrasting them with its authoritarian "success." pic.twitter.com/azrUDDl0Wy
— Michael P Senger (@MichaelPSenger) July 14, 2020
After a year of on-off lockdowns many people in Britain and elsewhere have developed a form of Stockholm Syndrome where they have not only come to identify with their political tormentors but have even come to share their torturers’ desire for a “new normal” in which masks and lockdowns and quarantines remain a near-permanent fixture.
What none of these lockdown masochists appear to have realised is that they have been played. Initially they were played by the agents of the CCP; subsequently they were played by those in their governments or official “scientific” advisory bodies who acted as the CCP’s useful idiots by imposing these draconian and unprecedented measures on their once-free countries.
This is the real lesson of a year of lockdowns. But almost no one will learn it because the facts have gone largely unreported in the mainstream media which continues slavishly to promote the official line that lockdowns play an important part in keeping the citizenry safe.
National lockdown — itself a term redolent of prison guards locking prisoners in their cells — had never, until 2020, been recommended as a preventative measure, even by the World Health Organisation. Nor had they been tried before by Western governments, not least because it was believed that citizens in a free country would never tolerate such an imposition on their freedoms.
This was a point that one of the architects of the British lockdown, the disgraced computer modeller and SAGE committee member Neil Ferguson, made in an interview with TheTimes (of London):
In January, members of Sage, the government’s scientific advisory group, had watched as China enacted this innovative intervention in pandemic control that was also a medieval intervention.
“They claimed to have flattened the curve. I was sceptical at first. I thought it was a massive cover-up by the Chinese. But as the data accrued it became clear it was an effective policy.”
Then, as infections seeded across the world, springing up like angry boils on the map, Sage debated whether, nevertheless, it would be effective here. “It’s a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought.” In February one of those boils raged just below the Alps. “And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.”
As I wrote when we covered this extraordinary confession at Breitbart:
That phrase ‘get away with it’ is instructive. It implies that, at least on a subconscious level, Ferguson is aware that copying Communist China’s lockdown policy was not a morally acceptable act, merely one that peculiar circumstances made possible.
Future historians will look back on lockdowns as one of the greatest acts of collective suicide in the history of Western Civilisation. At least they will if historians in the future are allowed to write truthfully and honestly. Given the direction our civilisation is headed, they may well not be. That’s because, once you allow governments to take as much unbridled power as they have during lockdown — and with remarkably little pushback too — they tend to acquire such a taste for unchecked authority that they become more than reluctant to give it back.
Lockdowns, we may soon come to realise, were never really there to protect us. They were there to control and dominate us — and, perhaps ultimately, to crush us.
