The Emperor’s New Euphemism: “Coronavirus-Related”

Yesterday, I saw a big red breaking news headline announcing millions of new “COVID-19 related unemployment claims” in the US. Such phrasing has become part of the vernacular during this fabricated global crisis. You have seen it often, so ubiquitously that you may have become slightly numb to it, as I have, and as we are all meant by our masters to do.

Daily now, we read or hear of “a COVID-19-related rise in mental illness,” “the coronavirus recession,” “COVID-19 job losses,” “coronavirus anxiety,” and so on. These expressions are not merely convenient shorthand. They are lies, and their purpose is to protect our authoritarian overlords from culpability and punishment for all the tangible harm they are causing with their “COVID-19-related” assault on individual liberty, which we may also refer to as “coronavirus totalitarianism.”

To clarify this point by way of the most obvious example, consider those millions of “COVID-19 related job losses.” What does the phrase “COVID-19 related” mean in that context? How many people have lost their jobs because the coronavirus outbreak itself — that is, debilitating illness — forced their workplace to shut down, to drastically reduce its workforce, or to cut production in ways that reverberated through the supply chain, thereby causing unemployment in the manufacturing or shipping industries? 

There is no doubt that during an epidemic, particularly one getting a huge amount of media attention, many people will reduce their social outings, either due to illness or to fear of catching the virus, which means many businesses in the service industry will suffer financial losses. Cafes and restaurants, for example, will inevitably take a hit during a bad flu season.

But what about all the factories and small businesses that have been summarily closed indefinitely during this outbreak, either due to legal action in response to some positive tests for the virus — not fatalities or waves of hospitalized employees, but mere positive tests, with or without symptoms — or, as is more typical throughout many countries today, due to direct government edict, i.e., so-called “lockdowns” or “stay-at-home orders”? 

In other words, service industry struggles and other understandable illness-related financial losses notwithstanding, it is obvious that the vast majority of business failures and unemployment claims over the past few months, worldwide, have resulted not from the new coronavirus, but from tyrannical government overreach in response to the outbreak. That is to say, very few if any large-scale employers have been so deeply affected by the illness itself that they have had to close down or severely reduce workers. The job losses, by and large, have been caused by government restrictions on freedom of association and property rights, and violations of constitutional protections for self-determination and the basic principles of self-government.

Consider that the death toll from this pandemic, however overhyped, statistically padded, and, in all likelihood, medically exacerbated it may be, has been mostly — almost entirely, statistically speaking — taken from among the elderly population, which is to say that the majority of the dying and critically ill are people who have already surpassed the usual retirement age, and therefore have little impact on the daily workings of the economy, except as consumers. And even in their economic role as consumers, the real numbers of the seriously or fatally ill are simply too small, in and of themselves, to have resulted in any devastating effects on the overall economy. In short, this illness, as it has actually played out in real, life-and-death medical terms, has not proved to be severe enough to cause a major economic slowdown, let alone the kind of catastrophe we are seeing — millions of newly unemployed people, thousands of failed businesses, trillions of dollars in national-debt-exploding government “relief” funds, and so on.

We all know this. And we all know why millions of people are suddenly unemployed, why thousands of businesses are failing, and why governments are leaping in with massive new debt in the form of so-called relief for the unemployed and financially devastated. The reason is as obvious as the barrel of the gun that is being pointed at the nose on your face: Governments around the world, and especially in the “freedom-loving Western nations,” have coercively, indefinitely, and artificially shut down the global economy for no legitimate reason. (If you are tempted to knee-jerkingly reply to my phrase “no legitimate reason” by shouting, “To save lives!” then I will politely ask you to turn off your CNN thought-support system, aka your “Fauci-Brain,” sit alone in a quiet room for a change, and crank up your own rational machinery for a while, before it gets too rusty to function independently.)

Several weeks ago, when the United States of America was still in the early stages of its full-throttle race into the abyss, a dear American friend of mine, who happens to be both a retired medical doctor and also the most serious amateur (i.e., non-profiteering) historian I know, with a breadth of knowledge spanning from the careful study of Thucydides in Greek to detailed analysis of the causes and results of World War II, and pretty much every Western thing in between (though he might bridle at my ill-defined use of the term “Western”), commented on the current state of things in a way that cut right to the heart of the matter: This is the first time in history that civilization has shut itself down voluntarily during a pandemic, i.e., has chosen to decimate itself in the face of an illness that was not forcing any such collapse due to its own severity.

There have been pandemics in which normal social and economic life have been disrupted due to the actual health conditions among the general population, most notoriously the Black Death, which killed perhaps more than a third of Europe’s entire population over the span of a few years, in the mid-fourteenth century. During such an outbreak, to state the obvious, extreme measures to avoid the contagion are not merely necessary but inescapable. There is little else one can do when people of all ages and health conditions are dying left and right by the tens of millions, when every other family is losing young men, healthy mothers, and two or three children to the virus, when every cargo ship from abroad may arrive manned by a crew of ghosts.

Here is part of a firsthand account of that time, by a chronicler from Siena, Italy:

It was a cruel and horrible thing; and I do not know where to begin to tell of the cruelty and the pitiless ways. It seemed to almost everyone that one became stupefied by seeing the pain. And it is impossible for the human tongue to recount the awful thing. Indeed one who did not see such horribleness can be called blessed. And the victims died almost immediately. They would swell beneath their armpits and in their groins, and fall over dead while talking. Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another; for this illness seemed to strike through the breath and sight. And so they died. And none could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship. Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could, without priest, without divine offices. Nor did the death bell sound. And in many places in Siena great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead. And they died by the hundreds both day and night, and all were thrown in those ditches and covered over with earth. And as soon as those ditches were filled more were dug.

And I, Agnolo di Tura, called the Fat, buried my five children with my own hands. And there were also those who were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city. There was no one who wept for any death, for all awaited death. And so many died that all believed that it was the end of the world. And no medicine or any other defense availed. And the lords selected three citizens who received a thousand gold florins from the commune of Siena that they were to spend on the poor sick and to bury the poor dead. And it was all so horrible that I, the writer, cannot think of it and so will not continue.

That is what a genuinely debilitating pandemic looks and feels like. If you think your experience today resembles that in any way at all, you are lost to reason and human decency forever. The worldwide news media, along with their totalitarian administrative state masters, are doing their damnedest to persuade you that we are living through similar times today, of course. And many so-called “people” around us — irrational cowards all — are choosing to be persuaded, and to live as the walking dead, because in their permanent state of indoctrinated infantilism, the pleasure of hiding is more attractive to them than the pride of living.

There is, however, absolutely nothing in our current coronavirus outbreak that vaguely resembles the Black Death, or any of the other well-documented society-paralyzing plague pandemics in history. The social and economic life of our communities has not been shut down by people “stupefied by seeing the pain,” half the town “falling over dead while talking,” or the horror of seeing corpses dug up and dragged through the streets by dogs. In our case, relatively few people in the prime of life are experiencing even a bad case of the flu, let alone mortal illness. Most of those infected will never even notice they have the virus. Most families, from toddlers to great-grandparents, remain essentially unaffected by the illness altogether, let alone by deadly illness. The relative few who are dying with this disease come mostly from among those members of society who are already weak and ill, and may reasonably have been expected to die soon from other causes, regardless of COVID-19. 

And yet, in spite of all this, governments have determined — or rather have decided to pretend — that the situation warrants such extreme measures as universal lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, overt and complete suspensions of both legally-protected human rights and basic politico-ethical norms of self-determination and individual liberty. Human beings have lost even the last veneer of living as independent, self-governing adults, under the fiat governance of paternalistic authoritarians and their administrative state “experts,” aided and abetted in their global usurpation of modern civilization by an international mass media motivated by the perfectly evil mixture of progressive subversiveness and conscienceless greed. 

There is no “COVID-19-related unemployment.” There is no “coronavirus recession.” There is no “COVID-19-related rise in mental illness.” There is indeed a virus going around, luckily not that devastating a virus, all things considered. But then there is tyranny, which has infected our souls since childhood, and is now, at last and sadly, proving quite devastating.

The rise in jobless claims is the direct result of government coercion in artificially shutting down businesses that would have survived a bad flu season very well otherwise. The recession is the direct result of government lockdowns and police-state restrictions on normal social interaction. The real and severe increase in serious cases of “depression,” anxiety, hopelessness, and suicidal thoughts — an epidemic certain to grow in the coming months, and to reach levels far more damaging to society in the long run than this coronavirus has any chance of being — is not caused by COVID-19, but by totalitarianism and its ever more deafening drumbeat of terror-inducing propaganda from the hysteria merchants who have chosen (as usual) to align themselves with the forces of political evil currently on the ascendancy.

“COVID-19-related” is pure euphemism. It is the emperor’s new phraseology, cleverly exploiting today’s media-induced panic to cover the loins of tyranny with imaginary causes for all the shame and devastation being wrought upon the material and spiritual life of mankind by a naked monster unleashed.


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