By
Edward Curtin
Two
categories of propaganda must be
distinguished. The first strives to
create a permanent disposition in its
objects and constantly needs to be
reinforced. Its goal is to make the
masses ‘available,’ by working spells
upon them and exercising a kind of
fascination. The second category
involves the creation of a sort of
temporary impulsiveness in its objects.
It operates by simple pressure and is
often contradictory (since contradictory
mass movement are sometimes
necessary).” – Jacques Ellul,
The Technological Society
March 20, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - The French-Algerian
writer Albert Camus’
great 1947 novel, The Plague, is a warning
to us today, but a warning in disguise. When he
died sixty years ago at the young age of forty-six,
he had already written The Stranger, The Fall,
and The Plague, and had won the Nobel
Prize for Literature.
The outward story of The Plague revolves
around a malignant disease that breaks out in a town
that is quarantined when the authorities issue a
state of emergency. After first denying that they
have a problem, the people gradually panic and feel
painfully isolated. Death fear runs rampant, much
like today with the coronavirus. The authorities
declare martial law as they warn that the situation
is dire, people must be careful of associating,
especially in groups, and they better obey orders or
very many will die. So the town is cordoned off.
Before this happens and the first signs that
something is amiss emerge, the citizens of the town
of Oran, Algeria remain oblivious, for they “work
hard, but solely with the object of getting rich.”
Bored by their habits, heavily drugging themselves
with drink, and watching many movies to distract
themselves, they failed to grasp the significance of
“the squelchy roundness of a still-warm body” of the
plague-bearing rats that emerge from their
underworld to die in their streets. “It was as if
the earth on which our houses stood were being
purged of their secret humors; thrusting up to the
surface the abscesses and pus-clots that had been
forming in its entrails.” To them the plague is
“unthinkable,” an abstraction, until all their
denials are swept aside as the truth emerges from
the sewers and their neighbors and families die from
the disease.
“Stupidity has a way of getting its way;” the
narrator, Dr. Rieux tells us, “as we should see
if we were not always so wrapped up in ourselves
…. plagues and wars take people equally by
surprise.”
The American people are wrapped up in
themselves. Nor do
they recognize the true rats. They are
easily surprised; fooled would be a better word.
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Camus uses a physical plague to disguise
his real subject, which is the way people
react when they are physically trapped by
human rats who demand they obey orders and
stay physically and mentally compliant as
their freedom is taken from them.
The Plague is an allegorical depiction
of the German occupation of France during World War
II. Camus had lived through that experience as a
member of the French Resistance. He was a writer
and editor of the underground Resistance newspaper
Combat, and with his artist’s touch he
later made The Plague a revelatory read for
today, especially for citizens of the United States,
the greatest purveyor of the plague of violence in
the world.
We are all infected with the soul-destroying evil
that our leaders have loosed upon the world, a
plague of killing that is now hidden behind the
coronavirus fear that is being used to institute
tight government controls that many will come to rue
in the months ahead, just as happened after the
attacks of September 11, 2001.
Coronavirus is a perfect cover-story for the
occupation of the public’s mind by a propaganda
apparatus that has grown even more devious over the
past 19 years.
Ask yourself: Where is the news about U.S.
military operations in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen,
Iraq, eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia,
etc.? There is none in the corporate mainstream
media, and little in the alternative media as well.
Have those operations ceased? Of course not. It’s
just that the news about them, little that it was,
has disappeared.
Now it is all about us and the coronavirus
panic. It is about how many of us might die. It is
about stocking toilet paper. For the rich, it is
about getting to their second or third houses where
they can isolate themselves in splendor. As I write,
150 or so Americans are said to have died of
Covid-19, and by the time you will read this the
number will have climbed, but the number will be
minuscule compared to the number of people in the
U.S.A. and those numbers will be full of
contradictions that few comprehend unless,
rather than reacting in fear, they did some
comprehensive research.
But arguments are quite useless in a time of
panic when people are consumed with fear and just
react.
For we live in plague time, and the plague lives
in us. But to most Americans, Covid-19 is the
plague, because the government and media have said
it is. Like the inhabitants of Oran, the United
States is “peopled with sleep walkers,”
pseudo-innocents, who are “chiefly aware of what
ruffled the normal tenor of their lives or affected
their interests.” That their own government, no
matter what political party is in power (both
working for “deep-state,” elite interests led by the
organized criminals of the CIA), is the disseminator
of a world-wide plague of virulent violence, must be
denied and divorced from consensus reality.
That these same forces would use the fear of
disease to cow the population should be no surprise
for those who have come to realize the truth of the
attacks of September 11, 2001 and the anthrax
attacks that followed, both of which were used to
justify the endless “wars on terror” that have
killed so many around the world. It is a shock for
so many people who can’t countenance the thought
that their own government could possibly be
implicated in the death of thousands of U.S.
citizens and the release of the deadly anthrax,
which
we know came from a U.S. lab and was carried out
by a group of inside government perpetrators.
When it comes to the plague-stricken deaths
visited on millions around the world for decades by
the American government, this must be denied by
diverting attention to partisan presidential
politics, and now the coronavirus that engenders
fear, loathing, and a child-like tendency to believe
Big Brother. The true plague, the bedrock of a
nation continually waging wars through various means
– i.e. bombs and economic and medical sanctions,
etc. – against the world, disappears from
consciousness. As U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright said to 60 Minutes Lesley Stahl in
1996 when Stahl asked her if the U.S. sanctions on
Iraq that had resulted in the death of 500,000 Iraqi
children were worth it: “We think the price is worth
it.”
For “decent folks must be allowed to sleep at
night,” says the character Tarrou sarcastically; he
is a man who has lost his ability to “sleep well”
since he witnessed a man’s execution where the
“bullets make a hole into which you could thrust
your fist.” He awakens to the realization that he
“had an indirect hand in the deaths of thousands of
people.” He loses any peace he had and vows to
resist the plague in every way he can. “For many
years I’ve been ashamed,” he says, “mortally
ashamed, of having been, even with the best
intentions, even at many removes, a murderer in my
turn.”
The rats are dying in the streets. They are our
rats, diseased by us. They have emerged from the
underworld of a nation plagued by its denial.
Unconscious evil bubbles up. We are an infected
people. Worry and irritation – “these are not
feelings with which to confront plague.” But we
don’t seem ashamed of our complicity in our
government’s crimes around the world. For decades
we have elected leaders who have killed millions,
while business went on as usual. The killing didn’t
touch us. As Camus said, “We fornicated and read the
papers.” He knew better. He warned us:
It’s a wearying business being
plague-stricken. But it’s still more wearying
to refuse to be it. That’s why everybody in the
world looks so tired; everyone is more or less
sick of plague. But that is why some of us,
those who want to get the plague out of their
systems, feel such desperate weariness.
Yet the fight against the plague must go on.
Tarrou puts it thus:
All I maintain is that on this earth there
are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s
up to us, as far possible, not to join forces
with the pestilences. That may sound simple to
the point of childishness; I can’t judge if it’s
simple, but I know it’s true. You see, I’d heard
such quantities of arguments, which very nearly
turned my head, and turned other people’s heads
enough to make them approve of murder; and I’d
come to realize that all our troubles spring
from our failure to use plain, clear-cut
language. So I resolved always to speak – and
to act – quite clearly, as this was the only way
of setting myself on the right track.
These days, I keep thinking of an incident that
occurred when I was a young investigator of sexually
transmitted diseases, working for the U.S.
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare through
the Public Health Service as an epidemiologist. My
job was to track down sexually transmitted diseases
by finding links of sexual contacts. One day I went
to interview and take a blood sample from a poor
woman who had been named as a sexual contact. I
knocked on her door on the third or fourth floor of
a walkup apartment building. She looked through the
peep-hole and asked who it was and I told her my
name and what government agency I represented. I
could tell she was very wary, but she opened the
door. She stood there naked, a very heavy woman of
perhaps 300 pounds. She nonchalantly welcomed me in
and I followed her as she padded down the hall where
she took a housecoat off a hook and put it on.
There is, as you know, an old tale by Hans
Christian Anderson called “The Emperor’s New
Clothes.” Although the emperor parades around naked,
the adults make-believe he is clothed. Only a child
sees the obvious. I was 23-years-old naïve young man
at the time of this unforgettable incident, but it
echoes in my mind as a reminder to myself that
perhaps that woman was unconsciously teaching me a
lesson in disguise. The year was 1967, and when I
went out to get into my government car with federal
license plates, a white man in a white shirt in a
white car in a poor black neighborhood, a hail of
bricks rained down toward me and the car from the
roof opposite. I quickly jumped in and fled as the
ghettos were exploding. Soon the National Guard
would be called out to occupy them.
Intuition tells me that although the emperor has
no clothes and a vast PSYOPS occupation is now
underway, too many are too grown-up to see it.
It’s an old story continually updated. Like
The Plague.
Edward Curtin, educated in the
classics, philosophy, literature, theology, and
sociology, Teaches sociology at Massachusetts
College of Liberal Arts.
http://edwardcurtin.com/
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