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Anti-Empire

Anti-Empire

offsite link The Wholesome Photo of the Month Thu May 09, 2024 11:01 | Anti-Empire

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Anti-Empire >>

Human Rights in Ireland
Indymedia Ireland is a volunteer-run non-commercial open publishing website for local and international news, opinion & analysis, press releases and events. Its main objective is to enable the public to participate in reporting and analysis of the news and other important events and aspects of our daily lives and thereby give a voice to people.

offsite link Julian Assange is finally free ! Tue Jun 25, 2024 21:11 | indy

offsite link Stand With Palestine: Workplace Day of Action on Naksa Day Thu May 30, 2024 21:55 | indy

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offsite link Hamburg 14.05. "Rote" Flora Reoccupied By Internationalists Wed May 15, 2024 15:49 | Internationalist left

offsite link Eddie Hobbs Breaks the Silence Exposing the Hidden Agenda Behind the WHO Treaty Sat May 11, 2024 22:41 | indy

Human Rights in Ireland >>

Lockdown Skeptics

The Daily Sceptic

offsite link Judges Told to Avoid Saying ?Asylum Seekers? and ?Immigrants? Fri Jul 26, 2024 17:00 | Toby Young
A new edition of the Equal Treatment Bench Book instructs judges to avoid terms such as 'asylum seekers', 'immigrant' and 'gays', which it says can be 'dehumanising'.
The post Judges Told to Avoid Saying ?Asylum Seekers? and ?Immigrants? appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link The Intersectional Feminist Rewriting the National Curriculum Fri Jul 26, 2024 15:00 | Toby Young
Labour has appointed Becky Francis, an intersectional feminist, to rewrite the national curriculum, which it will then force all schools to teach. Prepare for even more woke claptrap to be shoehorned into the classroom.
The post The Intersectional Feminist Rewriting the National Curriculum appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link Government Has Just Declared War on Free Speech Fri Jul 26, 2024 13:03 | Toby Young
The Government has just announced it intends to block the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, effectively declaring war on free speech. It's time to join the Free Speech Union and fight back.
The post Government Has Just Declared War on Free Speech appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link I Wrote an Article for Forbes Defending J.D. Vance From Accusations of ?Climate Denialism?. Forty Ei... Fri Jul 26, 2024 11:00 | Tilak Doshi
On July 18th, Dr Tilak Doshi wrote an article for Forbes defending J.D. Vance from accusations of 'climate denialism'. 48 hours later, Forbes un-published the article. Read the article on the Daily Sceptic.
The post I Wrote an Article for Forbes Defending J.D. Vance From Accusations of ?Climate Denialism?. Forty Eight Hours Later, Forbes Un-Published the Article and Sacked Me as a Contributor appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link Come and See Nick Dixon and me Recording the Weekly Sceptic at the Hippodrome on Monday Fri Jul 26, 2024 09:00 | Toby Young
Tickets are still available to a live recording of the Weekly Sceptic, Britain's only podcast to break into the top five of Apple's podcast chart. It?s at Lola's, the downstairs bar of the Hippodrome on Monday July 29th.
The post Come and See Nick Dixon and me Recording the Weekly Sceptic at the Hippodrome on Monday appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Lockdown Skeptics >>

Voltaire Network
Voltaire, international edition

offsite link Netanyahu soon to appear before the US Congress? It will be decisive for the suc... Thu Jul 04, 2024 04:44 | en

offsite link Voltaire, International Newsletter N°93 Fri Jun 28, 2024 14:49 | en

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offsite link Will Israel provoke a cataclysm?, by Thierry Meyssan Tue Jun 25, 2024 06:59 | en

Voltaire Network >>

The REAL reason behind China’s “Zero Covid” policy

category international | arts and media | other press author Wednesday December 07, 2022 22:40author by 1 of Indy Report this post to the editors

This article from the https://off-guardian.org/ explains why we are still seeing reports of severe lockdowns from China and they role they have played in the narrative over the last three years.

From the opening days of Jan 2020 when the West was flooded with videos from China of lockdowns and people dropping dead, it has all seemed a bit strange. The dropping dead videos are clear enough as they were a way to prime people into the idea of people dropping dead which is exactly what is being seen now as a consequence of vaccines injury deaths and the reported dramatic increase in excess mortality since 2021 in those countries where large sections of the population were vaccinated.

However the images of utterly over the top and draconian lockdowns where people welded into their homes in China, remains unexplained until now.
china-beijing-airport-covid-1381x900.jpg

From the Off-Guardian...

Most of the Western world is no longer in lockdown, some vaccine mandates are being loosened, mask wearers are distinctly the minority everywhere you look.

For now at least, and for want of a better phrase, we have largely “gone back to normal”…except, you know, now with a totally broken economy, more centralised financial power, dozens of alarming precedents set up for future deployment and millions upon millions of people injected with poison under false pretences.

But on the lockdown front at least, we’re normal…mostly.

Lockdowns are quickly becoming one of those embarrassing things that were only ever supported by other people, like wearing flares or voting for Thatcher. Politicians are feverishly passing the buck back and forth, claiming to have never wanted lockdowns in the firstplace.

…but not in China.

As the rest of the world “lives with Covid”, people in Chinese cities are still subject to dystopian levels of control and surveillance. Up to and including being welded inside their own homes.

Why?

Well, we can certainly rule out a few mainstream “explanations”:

  • We know it’s not because Covid is a real disease or uniquely dangerous in any way whatsoever. The data has spoken on that.
  • We know it’s not because lockdowns work to protect the health of the public or prevent disease outbreaks. The data has spoken on that too.
  • We know it’s not because the Chinese government holds the lives of their citizens as more precious than their Western counterparts.
  • And we know it’s not because they were the victim of some bio-engineered viral attack by the West. That idea was always absurd.

…so what’s the real explanation?

Well, there are really several answers to that, all of which come back to our old friend the fake binary.

1. Heel vs Face

If you accept that the Covid “pandemic” was in fact a global psy-op, carried out by most of the governments of the world working in concert at the behest of supra-national financial, corporate and political interests, then it de facto follows that any apparent differences in approach or attitude between those co-operating governments serve a role in the narrative.

In short, someone has to play “the bad guy”.

In this case, China’s brutal “zero-Covid” approach allows the Western governments to claim the “moderate” label simply by virtue of not being so cartoonishly “evil” as China.

Of course, this works in both directions.

“The West” can say to their citizens, “look how brutal China’s lockdown was, we would never go that far, because we care about your rights”.

Meanwhile, China can say “look how lax and disorganized the West’s Covid response was, we would never be that careless, because we care about your health”.

It is – and here’s that phrase again – a fake binary.

Each side serves as the good guy in their own narrative, and the bad guy in the other, and in that fashion they actually support each other whilst corralling each other’s dissidents into a controlled “alternative opinion”.

2. Promoting vaccines

In The Guardian two days ago, the now-ubiquitous Devi Sridhar actually defended China’s “tough decisions” on Zero Covid, coming at it from the angle that China has to be that harsh because their vaccines don’t work as well as ours do:
China’s population has a lower vaccination rate, with vaccines that appear less effective, than in most other countries. And many people don’t have any immunity gained from a previous infection either. If China gives up on containment and allows a large wave of infections, the country will take a huge loss of life given current vaccination levels

The entire column is really just a way of shilling “safe and effective” mRNA vaccines (as well as other agenda we’ll deal with below):

Rising concerns about the low effectiveness of the non-mRNA Chinese vaccines were also a concern: studies indicated that protection faded fast and was undetectable after six months […] China takes, it needs to improve its vaccines. But to do this it will need access to mRNA technology, and this has been stuck at an impasse. Moderna has refused to transfer its technology to Chinese firms for manufacturing, instead eager to sell directly to a large market. China has instead worked to develop a homegrown mRNA vaccine but this has caused delays in rollout […] China need to get mRNA vaccines to the biggest priority groups quickly

Again, the twin-sided narrative.

The West says, “see, we don’t need these brutal lockdowns, because we’ve got magical vaccines”, with the inevitable unspoken corollary of this being “we’ll need to go into lockdowns if you don’t get vaccinated enough” .

Meanwhile, China gets to lay the blame for their own lockdowns on Western selfishness, “the only reason we have these lockdowns is the mean selfish Western companies won’t share their technology”. This neatly turns ALL pro-Chinese voices in Western alternate media voices into pro-vaccine voices too.

3. Feeds the lie that “lockdowns work”

Lockdowns do not work to halt the spread of diseases and, before 2020, were never suggested or used in that manner. Then, in the spring of 2020, almost every world government seemingly simultaneously took the unprecedented decision to go into lockdown to fight Covid. To justify this the mainstream narrative was in need of some evidence lockdowns work. Enter China.

Over and over and over again you will read apparent “condemnation” of China’s lockdowns alongside the qualification of their supposedly low Covid death numbers.

In mainstream sources, the clear implication is left unspoken, but prominent alternative voices are happy to say it out loud: “These lockdowns may appear unethical, but they saved millions of lives.”

Since ALL Covid “cases” are entirely the product of PCR testing programs, and ALL “Covid deaths” are subject to ludicrously tortured definitions, we can conclude China’s Covid statistics are a contrivance designed to sell the idea that lockdowns actually work.

More than just lockdowns, an undercurrent of the pandemic narrative has been a softening of the public attitude to authoritarian governence in general, usually through compliments to China.

As early as March 2020 we had “experts” on Channel 4 praising China’s approach, we had Neil Ferguson lamenting the UK government didn’t have the power to follow China’s gameplan, we had western news outlets claiming China had “triumphed” over Covid.

The message was clear, and not at all subtle: “Man, obviously having no regard for individual rights is bad, but that approach really does seem to work, doesn’t it? Clearly, we would never do that, but you can’t deny it’s effective, can you?

That messaging still carries on today, and it has nothing to do with China per se, and everything to do with the slow-burn legitimisation of tyranny by virtue of the ends justifying the means.

Conclusion

To sum up, China’s “zero covid” approach forms a vital piece of the overall pandemic narrative, working in conjunction with Western governments as a deliberately stark contrast:

  • It promotes the idea that vaccines work and helped prevent further lockdowns here.
  • It shines a flattering light on Western governments, who appear less draconian by comparison.
  • It serves as an argument for the effectiveness of lockdowns and other authoritarian measures.

Perhaps most importantly, the supposed difference works to corral and control public debate.

Traditionally leftwing critics of Western capitalism are forced to defend vaccines and lockdowns by their ideological loyalty to China.

Conversely, right-wingers have China’s “socialist” practices to point their fingers at, whilst praising Western capitalist pharmaceutical innovation for saving us from the need for tighter lockdowns.

Each side is controlled by their ideology, not realising their loyalties are being used to position them inside the permissible spectrum of opinion.

All the while, both sides claim the virus is real and dangerous, both sides use the same PCR tests and both sides shill vaccines made by the same companies. The superficial “differences” serve only to sell their many points of agreement.

In other words, the divide over Covid tactics is as real as the fight over Ukraine. It all serves the same purpose, promoting the great reset and the global technocratic government. A system neither communist nor capitalist, but absorbing the worst vices of whilst purging the virtues.

Zero Covid is just China working as the other side of the scissors.

Related Link: https://off-guardian.org/2022/12/01/the-real-reason-behind-chinas-zero-covid-policy/
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