Is there a readily available and simple diagnostic test to confirm ones credentials as a critical thinker? Something you can shove up your nose, send to a lab somewhere and wait for your phone to ping .
Perhaps not, but in Westminster Hall on April 17th, approximately 1 hour 40 minutes into the WHO Pandemic Prevention and Preparedness Parliamentary debate, we were gifted with the perfect assessment tool.
To take the test, read this short passage, courtesy of the member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Labour/Co-operative Party), Preet Kaur Gill:
Climate change and globalisation mean that natural biological threats are becoming more common…
The lesson of the pandemic was that no one is safe until everyone is safe, and that global health is local health, so global co-operation on pandemic preparedness and biological threats clearly needs to be strengthened.
That is why the Opposition absolutely supports the principle of a legally binding WHO treaty.
If, as you read these words, you feel your blood pressure rising and the vessels in your neck pulsating with rage, then congratulations, your reaction is appropriate. You are clearly immune to the dark art of modern sophistry and rest assured, your critical thought processes are finely tuned.
If, on the other hand, her words reassure you, reconfirm your faith in humanity and fill you with a warm fuzzy feeling, then sadly you have succumbed to the propaganda; you may be a lost cause.
Those who fail to elicit a strong response may be forgiven for questioning the test’s validity. They may perceive the passage as banal or idle rhetoric, innocently drafted figurative speech that washes over you harmlessly.
But make no mistake, these words are pernicious and carefully crafted to achieve a specific outcome. What we are being exposed to here are the new variants of political sophistry, engineered to seem superficially plausible, but they are incorrect and aim to deceive you.
Put on your double-thinking cap, because now you must accept that “global health is local health” and “climate change and globalisation mean that natural biological threats are becoming more common”. These statements are at odds with the facts.
First UNICEF, followed by GAVI, the WHO, the UN, the Council of Europe, the BMJ, the Guardian, the Financial Times, Save the Children and now the Labour Party have all told you:
“No one is safe until everyone is safe.”
This slogan is designed to garner ideals of equity and togetherness and induce a warm, fuzzy feeling whilst in actual fact it is cold and calculating.
The ultimate purpose of this slogan is to diminish the range of your thought and to perpetuate the state of emergency.
Its teaching is a top-down imposition with no grounding in reality, amplified with mantra-like repetition by many (seemingly) independent voices until it is no longer questioned by the masses.
This is an insidious form of indoctrination.
The techniques employed by these sloganeers are not new and echo those of totalitarian regimes. Unless we are able to comprehend the power of this manipulation then we cannot safeguard ourselves from the danger that it poses.
In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote:
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist…
Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.
The slogans of the ‘One Health’ propaganda merging pandemic and climate emergencies now crop up everywhere. Here is Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance and Chair of the UN IPBES workshop on ‘Escaping the “Era of Pandemics’“:
There is no great mystery about the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic – or of any modern pandemic.
The same human activities that drive climate change and biodiversity loss also drive pandemic risk through their impacts on our environment…
This is the path to pandemics.
And listen to the people at the Health and Environmental Alliance (generously funded by the EU) describing the science of the ‘One Health’ philosophy:
The impacts of climate change on human health are not limited to the increase in average temperatures and the melting of glaciers.
Climate change is also the cause behind human and animal migration, the increase in extreme weather events, the emergence and spread of vector-borne and waterborne infectious diseases, and rises in allergens, air, water and food pollution.
Denying ‘climate change’ is akin to blasphemy and with the conflation of climate and pandemic policy, the legally binding terms of the pandemic treaty will become unquestionable.
‘One Health’ is the amalgamation of two disparate perceived threats: ‘climate change’ and pandemics.
Like sharks combined with tornados, ‘One Health’ is a fictional creation and just like the ‘Sharknado‘, it belongs in a B movie, not in the real world.