I'd been outside standing on my front porch staring out into the street, under some distinct stress and mental malaise in the background. It was late December 2021, and the daily dissolution of UK society and my everyday peer group's total lack of concern about this was playing on me, compounded by my general loneliness, the humiliating destruction of my 'new' family at the hands of an unquestionable State, and my father's insistent visit from Ireland to rearrange the house, bully our dog, and "cheer me up." This tender loving care amounted to stomping up to our bedroom every night and barging in with a glass of water and a tablet, demanding me to swallow it, and lingering attentively in the doorway to make sure I didn't neglect this fresh mandate or spit anything out. I had humoured him once or twice as a distant elderly guest, a glaring mistake all in all as this initial capitulation got his foot in the door and added a sanctimonious intensity to the furious, aghast spite he flung at me once I did try to successfully tell him “No.”
Raised voices echoed back and forth for over a week and slim détente was only established by keeping out of his way, sequestered into my corner library workstation as he blundered about the downstairs rooms of someone else's house, or repeatedly burst the toilet door open as I was sat naked reading in the bath and attempted to turf me out on the false assumption that Ozzie the dog desperately needed to urinate in the garden. The back door would be flung open to the Winter darkness and Ozzie would be dragged out despondently by the collar, yelping up the steps of the decking in startled confusion so he could circle the bushes a few times, glancing back down at Dad for approval, not urinate, and then charge back in towards his bed half a minute later, only to be shouted at by Dad for not urinating and thus failing to obey the commanded obligation.
I got dressed once or twice to go and tell my father off to his face with more authority than a startled, naked, dripping wet man can muster, and to physically retrieve Ozzie, who was by now very old, and soft in 4 temperament as a gentle, intelligent, good natured Border Collie with a deep, dedicated trust for the family he lived to support and comfort, the purest innocence, wondering always if it was him at fault, and considerably more patience than me in the face of advanced idiocy. Too much patience really.
Nothing made a difference to Dad's stubborn, erroneous conviction though, having set his mind fully to establishing the success of this new ritual no matter the cost, so after a while I just lay there sat back in the water and barked up at him like a drill sergeant to get the hell out and have some respect. Repeating this multiple times in subtle variations in a campaign of steady attrition produced some eventual chink in his obtuse and indominable mental armour and in the bitter end one could train him to storm out grumbling in livid defeat, and even to knock first on return. I had no time to reap the benefits of further training as there was a grand interruption to my schedule soon afterwards and, in the interim, he got on a plane and disappeared back to Northern Ireland, taking his personal supply of emergency medication with him.
I was about to walk down to the local shop that evening. I had a small stick in my hand, a snapped branch which one of my stepchildren had picked up on our woodland walks, and in absent-minded fashion used it to prod my neighbour's BMW's front-right tyre. Dad spotted me from the open doorway. "Stop it. Stop it, Benjamin. You're bringing shame on the entire family!" He had adopted the vocal tone of my obtrusive grandmother, late into her troubling senescence, all cold cynicism, and reprimands. I didn't really have the time to mourn quietly and rage with undying black hatred, in a column of sharp, boreal flame, as I do when not in acute, toxic hyperstress, so I just took his advice.
Later that evening I was arrested. The three policemen looming over me told me that the fat feminist woman next door had made a complaint that I "swung a wooden club at her car". They didn't mention her weight problem or her obnoxious vulgar temperament but it's easily observable and you can hear her common-as-muck, ear-splitting screeches from quite far off, as doors are slammed from their hinges, furnishings broken, and her boyfriend driven about by slanderous waves of sound until he gives in and tells her she's lovely. Despite all this she carries an air of snooty, enforced respectability about with her, strolling down to the shops in her dressing gown sometime in the late afternoon, or blasting out of the front door in a figure-hugging white skirt, wide hoop earrings, and that particularly indulgent application of cosmetic makeup popular with the denizens of the queues of late night city bars, and zooming off to another important day of imposing her liberated magnificence on the world. I’ve never seen her smile, not even in the early days of her communal weed smoking in their back garden.
She's also a marvellously adept informer, to a Stasi degree, and will fling you to the wolves at the drop of a hat if it gives her a chance to offload her frustrations and then peek out from behind her blinds in bloodthirsty vindication at the joy of having successfully encouraged sterner agents of unmitigated brutality to fight her battles for her. I notice she doesn’t take this approach with her own raucous family disputes, turning a blind eye also when her friends kick off, or when the houses a few doors down come out and squabble in the street, shouting and swearing in the manner of the feral British underclass, the obscenest insults, and the vilest language, in that abominable tone of the worst of Essex’s boors. She made up a claim once that I had a flamethrower primed ready to torch the neighbourhood, and that her children were in mortal danger, as I sat in the garden reading and fiddling with an air pump. I was appalled when they believed her and charged in, knocking down the back fences and simultaneously battering through the front door, tearing the house apart, my one little private space, my only refuge from this horrible, ghastly world, like gang-rapists bloodily bursting a hymen. They seem to despise me. I can't believe, given their attitude, that there's not an element of genuine contempt, something cold, and brutish, and feral behind the official formalities.
Another fine, upstanding citizen of the year doing her civic duty. It seems from my partner's wide-angle camera observations that she also presented them with her house-broom as evidence, passing it off as a weapon she had pulled from my hands as I threatened her and sabotaged her vehicle. I protested that that was nonsense, as our front-door security camera proved quite adequately later, but was taken off regardless, dragged naked from my book (The Nameless War by Archibald Maule Ramsay, a valuable read in places) and my warm bath, hogtied with reinforced straps, carried out under their arms, still in the nude, and locked in the clinical steel holding cell at the rear of their vehicle, like a hunter's trophy-kill, a small white towel draped over my shivering skin. My father, frail and sick from prostate cancer and devastating vasculitis, had stepped in to complain about the unexpected entry and to inadvertently shield me, but they just knocked him out of the way. It was nice that he defended me with his small, wiry body.
They were a little unpleasant in the Clacton cells, as seems quite common, not providing any toilet paper and refusing to look away as I sat down to relieve myself. I was brusquely handed a Police-issue sweater and a pair of jogging bottoms and slip-on footwear. They refused to turn the cell light on despite me subtly nudging them that I have a fear of the dark. It wasn’t cynicism or spiteful humour exactly, and I sensed that coldness to them, like there was an unbridgeable void between us. I noticed a small drying bloodstain high up on the wall and wondered what had happened before I’d got there. It's not the first time I've been temporarily stored there. It's not the first bloodstain I've spotted either.
They all had very strange hands. Very smooth and with the hair shaved, or otherwise non-existent. I noticed what seemed to be a slight dysgenic element to their fingers and wrists, and a subtle asymmetry to their odd, podgy faces, devolved from European racial cohesion biologically by long years of Angle error. Also, I'm never quite sure how to genetically explain this adequately, but you could easily discern that these were the faces of liberals. Not that liberals are anything but totally illiberal by modern principle, having been operant conditioned into hostile progressive radicalism long-term from a baseline of gormless optimism and ignorance, all vacant, self-serving cheerleaders for astro-turfed tyranny. Secular zealots.
A political reading of this phenomenon, however, though superficially explanatory, is not quite true, and not quite enough. The term “Neochristian” is perhaps most appropriate, a slightly different consideration that takes European racial history into account in detail beyond mere latter-day political manipulation and propagandizing, an understanding that does not pass off this issue as mere leftist ‘brainwashing’. After all, liberalism itself, and its factional development into the likes of Marxism, Bolshevism, Fabian Socialism, and Fourierism is merely a repurposing of Christian ethical values, the ‘catholic’ i.e. universalist dogmas of egalitarianism that inspired Boasian anthropology, and the genuflection, self-abnegation, and self-abasement that function as necessary prerequisites for spiritual purity, the public display of self-hate coupled to penitent virtue-signalling, the Christian doctrine of original sin synonymous with modern white guilt and the moralizing over privilege, and political correctness no different to judgements of heresy, witch-hunting, and excommunication, with government replacing God as an omnipotent benefactor. Even as the original religious belief in a supreme Jewish deity and an afterlife dies, the inverted value system remains, self-policing and condemning other tribal kin as heretics and infidels, and working against their own family interests, a meek, self-defeating, pacifist transvaluation of traditional moral values, replacing the pre-Christian aristocratic values that inspired love of strength, pride, honour, loyalty, family, tradition, and race with weakness, mediocrity, conformity and vulgarity, stripping all self-worth, severing connections to ancestry and genetic memory, rendering intellectual curiosity and critical thinking a sinful threat and stimulating a culture that holds contempt for learning, a learned helplessness and conditioned group obedience, the slave-like underclass of society weaponized to resent, judge and police the behaviour of the warrior and aristocratic castes, and a hyper political polarization. Christianity itself has always been an institutionalized, self-regulating millenarian slave-morality system promoted as a religion, shaping the evolutionary group strategy of Europeans for almost two thousand years, these values handed down from parents to children, and all modern patterns of perception, logic, speech, thought, action, and emotional response operate subconsciously within the dynamics of this system, irrespective of an increasingly anti-theistic secularity since the 18th Century.
When they spoke to each other, it was in brief staccato snippets of banal information, in dulled flat monotone, as if they were on radio chatter, and otherwise were unable to maintain a normal conversation, a pall of post-speech with all the resonance and timbre of a censor-bleep. I couldn't shift the sensation that they were like awkward sixth-form schoolchildren separated from the regular classroom for inherent malevolence, only to be adopted independently by the ambitious postmodern training program of a persistent supply teacher and intensively tutored into the dusk from the disquieting privacy of a locked side-room. A mixture of forlorn ineptitude, presented daily with the soft, intermittent siren-sense of their fundamental wretchedness, and fat, blocky, matter-of-fact sadism, delivered with a compensatory laddish camaraderie, having failed the Turing Test of the heart. That's not a good metaphor. I'll return to this later. They were talking about a mixture of what new external training programs presented the best financial benefit in the long run, and how to perform new takedown techniques. Very odd people. I felt like the only human in there.
Eventually, deciding they couldn’t charge me with anything, they made some phone calls with the local hospital. I delivered a frustrated argument to the Sergeant to impotently plead my final case, keeping my voice at reasonable volume and struggling in exasperation to remain polite, but was ignored on principle, swiftly interrupted, and argued back at with less politeness from a uniform position of firm, antagonistic inculpability bordering on the infallible, again with the feeling of the schoolyard and its petulant, touchy smart alecs. I was decisively dragged back into the squat clinic gloom of the reinforced travelling pen, knocked together from cheap, white-painted steel and slotted plexiglass like the facades of an inverted post-war tower block, and reminiscent of the sterile mass-produced lab containers that shelve toxicology research beagles prior to their painful death by injection with flesh-stripping parasites.
The pen juddered along, rumbling with each bump of the interminable road, sat there artificially curled up on a bare, brutalist cast-metal bench perpendicular to the sealed doors, stress-induced nausea and travel sickness rising in me as the tiny, feeble circle of a recessed light a foot above my head blinked in the tight airless gloom. Britain these days comes across as a dilapidated coastal amusement park tailored to the theme of Orwell, complete with a fresh team of enthusiastic method acting regulars, and a persistent staff and management well-versed in background lore, the full environment meticulously hell-scaped, and every formless object, structure or tool blankly ruined down to the last oppressive, inhumane detail, functioning, barely, and easily replaced, more as a soul-sapping abstract warning policy to the rest of us than as any meaningful act of hobbled creation. It’s clear we’re financially bankrupt as a society, much as our native culture did not survive the conclusion of the Second World War.
An hour later I was again opened to the light, and force-led, tired, stumbling, and reluctant, like a chained pit-bear, into a freed-up alcove chunked out of the public A&E. An adult social worker was called to analyse my mental health, as they are fond of doing. I told him about the police sadism, and my neighbour's on-going one-sided feud, suggesting their total overreaction. With a high-pitched whining voice, he utterly dismissed me, and pressed on with questions about how I felt, with the implication that he was trying to arrange me a psychiatric hospital stay, whether I liked it or not, as he decided that I was under the weather, and evidently confused. He had noted with some concern that I was an “anti-vaxxer”, and that I had refused a PCR test.
My position on the matter is one of scientific investigation, and consent, and somewhat more complicated than that easy Newspeak claim. I give other, regular vaccine ideas the time of day, and was merely vaccine hesitant, and increasingly so for quite early on. I came to that conclusion from the evidence itself, and not the other way around i.e. I didn’t have a pre-pandemic bias. Though I have spent much time evaluating terrain theory, ultimately, I view it as an inconclusive pseudoscience. Also, I’m not one of these people who is convinced that conventional vaccines are the cause of autism (and am more in favour of the Bruno Bettelheim understanding of autistic psychogenesis; I don’t think it’s true at all to brush it off with an irate, face-saving “oh, but we know now that that research for the 50s and 60s is totally discredited, and besides, it’s offensive to the rights of beautiful neuro-divergent people!” – in reality, no, we do not “know now” in the slightest, and there’s simply been a paradigm shift away from case history studies and aetiological analysis, probably for the same reason that home life child abuse testaments are neglected in formal bio-psychiatric responses: it’s taboo, and embarrasses parents too much, and indeed stimulates much angry denial all round, and in their offspring also, not a great many people having engaged in rigorous autobiographical self-analysis, and, at a baseline, no one ever very good at accepting responsibility for anything these days. Good academic research is not motivated by a primary desperation to be inoffensive at the expense of truth.)
However, that acknowledged, the rushed, faulty, experimental mRNA products promoted so heavily by governments during the pandemic still did not match my expectations of how a legitimate vaccine in generally considered to operate, and what one should, and can, expect. I can’t help but notice that they didn’t offer a great protection against catching the virus, and indeed seemed to make that outcome significantly more high-risk at times, if one peruses enough of the 2-week data sets released on the British government’s website. For example, there’s a Scottish result showing a 4:1 ratio for the triple-jabbed outcomes matching to positive tests/hospital admissions/deaths parameters, compared with the unvaccinated, in the first two weeks of January 2022. Norman Fenton (known for his empirical software engineering books on causal models and Bayesian analysis) and Martin Neil run a very good risk assessments blog on Substack titled Where Are The Numbers? showing rigorous statistical analysis for the categories of vaccine efficacy and vaccine safety, excess deaths, and virus infectivity and lethality, and a lot more highlighting, among other things, statistical paradoxes, flawed studies, and the cheap tricks of bogus research.
More worrying than that, I had inquired before in musing that if parliament jested in some worrying seriousness – with a genuine fear-for-your-life stress-level in the midst of an anxiety-inducing climate of punitive lockdown madness, and hasty decision-making paranoia, and conflicting data sprouting up by the second all over the place – about employing the likes of Wayne Couzens to effectively rape you, murder you, and stick you in their fridge, would you genuinely let them do that purely on account of their uniform and authority status? Given the high long-term vaccine inefficacy, let alone the prevalence of crippling side-effects and the appalling unaccounted-for death rates, and the government’s absolute reluctance to show medical transparency over this, the notion of being forced into a casualty or fatality by those ‘just doing their jobs’ was too much for me.
Given that on November 1st, 2019 Alberto Giubilini submitted a paper to the National Institute of Health’s National Library of Medicine arguing for compulsory vaccination and describing ‘illegal’ vaccine refusal as analogous to tax evasion, and that on November 5th, 2000 Julian Savalescu submitted a paper again justifying mandatory vaccination and suggesting a further range of coercive policies targeting financial security and freedom of movement, I knew that vaccine mandate discussions had at least been put forward by mainstream academics.
As reported by Sky News, on the 8th December, 2021 Boris Johnson, despite initially presenting as being against mandatory coronavirus injections, remarked in a Number 10 news conference that “there is going to come a point” where “we are going to have to have a conversation about ways in which we deal with this pandemic” and “I don’t believe we can keep going indefinitely with non-pharmaceutical interventions, restrictions on people’s way of life, just because a substantial proportion of the population, sadly, has not got vaccinated”, these comments swiftly played down by Downing Street. Indeed, Jordan King’s article in Metro on December 26th, 2021, highlighted a new country-wide campaign by the government, following a month-long trial in Ipswich, that would send public health teams door-to-door among the unvaccinated to offer vaccines from a bus touring the area, and free transport to local vaccination centres, this news supported by Geraldine Scott’s Independent article of the same day. Had it not been from the bad press and party-fracturing that accompanied the distraction ‘scandal’ of Partygate damaging their public reputation, I still wonder how far the Conservative government under Boris Johnson would have comfortably been able to go regarding compulsory vaccinations. I knew that if full mandates were passed rendering vaccine-refusal illegal at the same time as public health teams were in action in the community, one could potentially be placed in a tricky situation.
What would happen if you still refused their offer? Surely they’d end up involving the Police as enforcers. After all, modern mental health teams and social workers regularly bring Police with them by policy, so it wouldn’t be entirely beyond the realms of their standard practice, and it’s not unreasonable to imagine this belligerent escort being extended to vaccination healthcare workers.
In general, none of these people have any respect for castle doctrine concerning a citizen’s private property, or any true English Law moral theory principles of self-defence justification and objectively reasonable force (i.e. proportionate – equal at upper limit) on a genuine subjective belief of imminent attack (as stated in R v Owino (1996) 2 Cr. App. R. 128 at 134, although pre-emptive self-defence has also been considered, in R v Beckford (1988) 1 AC 130), and they’re especially inconsistent and ignorant over an understanding of duress and coercion, that defence “sitting in dismay across the criminal law” in the words of Susan S. M. Edwards (from her report Recognising the Role of the Emotion of Fear in Offences and Defences, available from the University of Buckingham’s E-Archive), remarking that the standard is “formulated on a male model of what men are considered able and capable of resisting couched in a notion of the resilience of “human will,”” much as my own case is an example of that domestic interpretation writ large, and with their position ignorant on the mitigating factor of fearing “death or serious injury,” and the emotional impact of conditioned panic and repeat anxiety, especially under unusual circumstances, or as a victim of State terror, and with the lot of them operating without integrity, and often policing ‘laws’ that do not exist yet.
The Police in the UK function in general these days like a private paramilitary task force implementing the State sanctions and thought re-education doctrine of an increasingly authoritarian plutocratic government and their running of a soft dictatorship. Then there’s that face of attentive concern they always pull as they push their way into your upstairs bedroom and loom over you asking, “how are you today? Is there anything you’re worried about?” The Police, for a while now, and worse by the week, have begun to approach the ordinary British public as a whole – even non-dissidents – in the manner of those of the British Army conducing Operation Detritus against the IRA in Northern Ireland, 1971. One hopes it doesn’t echo history to the 1 Para civilian massacre point, but that’s increasingly hard to decide, observing them in action. Their fundamental attitude of anti-civilian hatred is certainly firm enough, that’s for sure. Everyone’s a suspect these days, and I pity those they brutalize. I’m certainly not against the idea of an official organised Police Service on principle, but I’ve never met one of them who hasn’t let me down in some way, much as a few of the younger ones are slightly more amenable, and not entirely malevolent.
I am reminded of the surveys conducted on the American population by The Heartland Institute and the Rasmussen Report during the height of the pandemic in 2022 showing in their results that 55% of Democrats wanted the unvaccinated to be fined, 60% wanted them placed on permanent house arrest, and 45% called for the government to form imprisonment camps so they could be detained and vaccinated by force, a forced concentration already implemented in the Australian government’s Covid-19 quarantine facilities, citizens forcibly transferred by the Australian military and arrested if they tried to escape. All this for a subjectively debilitating yet relatively mild, flu-like virus with what, on collected meta-analysis, suggested most deaths to be in those over the age of 65, and indeed around a 99% survival rate for those under the age of 35, deaths negligible in those under 18.
I agreed that it had to be treated, but I found the government’s public presentations unconvincing, with insufficient data to support claims of their new vaccines’ safety and efficacy, the most important metrics missing from government-released data, a certain arrogant self-righteousness to the ‘expert’ interpretations of the orthodox scientific elites, paternalistic and condescending, unwilling to answer the public in debates, or to merely accept the immutable finality of what is informed non-consent, and non-consent regardless, and a faulty, neglected, often obscured vaccine damage reporting system than was not even highlighted to the newly vaccinated from the outset, leaving them unaware for many months that they could officially lodge reports of their side effects, and leading to underreporting, and this lack of transparency was common to all government institutions, let along the manipulative conflation of symptomatic and asymptomatic cases and the hasty blurring of deaths ‘with’ and from covid-19, the negligent care home Midazolam overdoses and DNR orders, and a insincere downplaying of fatal co-morbidities, affecting the figures of virus infection and death and increasing the sense of danger. There were certainly deaths, most regularly among the elderly, and I’d noticed the terror in Wuhan quite early on, but, across the West in general, I couldn’t understand why so much effort was put into smearing and ridiculing early interventions with safer treatments promising more optimistic results such as Hydroxychloroquine, and in combination with standard practice Vitamin D supplements and Zinc, or ignoring them altogether.
The ONS data on the age standard mortality rate for non-covid deaths per 100,000 people over the full period January 2021 to May 2022 show a 60% increase in non-covid deaths in 2022 among the unvaccinated and a 5% drop in non-covid deaths among the vaccinated, suggesting that the unvaccinated were dying at a much higher rate from non-covid illnesses. Seeing as the non-covid mortality rates for ages 60-69 in weeks 1 to 38 of 2021 peak at the same time as the first vaccine rollout, we must take into account that these unusual anomalies are a result of the standard ONS procedure of categorizing vaccine recipients as ‘unvaccinated’ for 20 days from the administering of the first dose, as thus categorizing deaths shortly after vaccination as unvaccinated deaths.
Doctors themselves have been extremely reluctant to properly investigate claims of serious adverse reactions from covid-19 vaccines made by patients or their relatives, even when deaths have been reported to the VAERS or Yellow Card systems. As a result, only a tiny minority of cases have been subject to formal medical verification. It is these cases alone which the government is keen to promote, in order to maintain its assertion that these vaccines are safe, or at least that the benefits far outweigh the harms. Consequently, as of the 3rd of March 2023, only 52 such deaths are officially classified as being due to covid-19 vaccines despite the fact that, as of the 29th of September 2022, 2272 covid-19 vaccine deaths had been reported to the Yellow Card scheme. Fewer than 10% (at conservative estimate; Jessica Rose and the OpenVAERS team calculate a figure of 1 in 41, i.e. 2.4%) of the covid-19 vaccine deaths and other adverse events ever get reported to the VAERS and Yellow Card systems, much as just under 30% at most of the death reports can be ruled as likely to have not been caused by the vaccines (again at conservative estimate; a January 2023 extended analysis from a sample of 250 reports published by Scott MacLachlan of Kings College London and Martin Neil of Queen Mary University concludes than less than 15% can be dismissed as invalid), but, at 10% reporting rate, the estimated UK death figures directly caused by covid-19 vaccination between December 2020 and 29th September 2022 are 16,000 with an additional 35,000 indirect vaccine early deaths subsequent to acknowledgment of serious adverse reactions. A vastly underreported minimum of 51,000 British citizens is a hefty price to pay, given the paragraphs above, and completely avoidable. Indeed, this means that deaths caused directly or indirectly by the vaccines account for roughly half the excess deaths in the UK since January 2021.
Unfortunately, in March 2023 the UK government decided to stop updating the Yellow Card figures, and also to remove any easily accessible ability to search for the proportion of reports that are classified as serious.
I didn’t like seeing videos of the British Police beating and manhandling the citizens for failing to wear masks even as their victims backed up their decision with official academic studies from the likes of MIT, and realistic evidence that could at least be reviewed, or for being in the wrong public place, or ‘looking suspicious’, or for protesting against forced house arrests, business closures, and the partitioned isolation screens which prevented them from comforting dying elderly relatives, and I didn’t like the feral, vindictive moralizing of the pro-vaccine mob majority, always compliant, and totally devoid of empathy, baying for blood, or gloating over misfortune or tyrannical violence, viciously chastising their neighbours simply for questioning the decisions and policies of their government.
I personally ended up gathering large data sets, stretching across many hundreds of PDF entries, extensive research papers, reports, studies, and epidemiological journal references to keep myself informed, to critically evaluate, contrast and compare, and to double-check as much as to draw any tentative conclusions from the more compelling evidence. I wasn’t pretending I had all the answers. I just felt uneasy about the proclamations of the mainstream narrative, often inexplicably illogical in their overreach, and contradictory, and preferred to judge for myself, and to learn about the topics, to make better decisions. It didn’t do me any good though, when it came to the public, including my own family, and all the authoritarians of the system.
I’d regularly lament their terrible pride and arrogance over this. If someone, by their own ignorance put my life at terminal risk, effectively trying to main me without realising it, I’d indeed hope I could draw the line and stop them from doing that, a last-ditch defence enacted from within the privacy of my own home, and that they would not consider me a monster for thinking so. I had wished so much that I could see more clearly exactly what the government officials were planning month by month, to assuage this terror. I am reminded of the two published volumes of horrifying and damning articles written by Simon Elmer in 2020 and 2021 on the UK Biosecurity State, and Laura Dodsworth’s thought-provoking discussions in A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During the Covid-19 Pandemic.
My own response, though deathly-afraid, and often exacerbated by my underlying fragile health and long-term emotional worries is best understood as a reluctant, hesitant - very much ‘just-in-case’ - prepping and family home defence mentality, expecting friction and breakdown, unsure of the future, aware of historical parallels, and pondering the conscionable, finely considered philosophical arguments presented by Jason Brennan in When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice. I felt for the people of the UK, and I worried they would be hurt in the ensuing chaos, a chaos I could not plot accurately by 2021. It crossed my mind to wonder if I could prepare them too, in mass. A terrible naivety on my part, but not reckless. A nationwide civil defence ‘militia’, just regular citizens, not of an ideological nature or political message of any sort more than the defence of innocent life. A neighbourhood watch parallel with the attitude of America’s Second Amendment, or a proxy Maginot Line to protect the boundaries of our community, and then a rear echelon support with long-term food and water supplies, spare clothing, and medical aids. I brainstormed casualties and riots and refugees from city chaos and criminals and hoodlums and factional power-grabs thinking back to what had happened historically in the Balkans. Would a country in chaos be prone to foreign military attack or invasion, especially given stress over Taiwan at the time, or indeed a threat from Russia? Where would the people be safe? It occurs to me these days that I was about a decade and a half premature on these sorts of ideas, a little more perhaps. Such is the nature of high anxiety stress, a genuine terror for my life, and for the lives of others.
New options on the official table each day, dispassionate, nonchalant mentalities, suggesting that nothing was off limits to them to consider, my mind filled with the fear that once gripped Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s folk, as they hid from the anarchic mobs on the streets and the Bolshevik bloodshed, waiting for the SMERSH agents and the heavily armed KRU political police of the NKVD to drag them out and dispose of them, interrogated without due process, tortured and coerced, show-trialled, and imprisoned in long-term psychiatric facilities or pitiless gulag prison camps. I longed to have some consolation against this, some piece of mind. It was not to be the case. My country’s own cruel, credulous citizens appalled me, a disappointment and surprise I had never yet expected, the dark beneath the surface, always ready to erupt. Watching them, aghast, I lost my faith in European humanity.
As for PCR tests, my only problem came from an understanding that they are by nature unreliable, a consequence of their high cycle counts, and known to regularly produce inaccurate readings, and I could do without the extra stress of home quarantine or solitary segregation. Knowing well the abrupt, indelicate busyness of NHS staff in public hospitals I also wasn’t prepared to have them clumsily jab at my sensitive nasal tissues for the sake of fulfilling a hysterical rote behaviour offering fundamentally inconclusive, yet easily manipulated, results.
I would have thought it obvious in this regard that I try to approach from quite an ethical perspective, and utilize a genuine conscience, and a desire to protect my loved ones, and am simply afraid of totalitarianism, even as it’s in their daily interests for them all to dismiss the underlying rationalism of my concerns, much as they were then exacerbated beyond realistic danger, and to downplay, and claim sensationalism on my part, rather than to acknowledge that society has reached that stage. I have the strategic mind of a self-sufficient pioneer, with all the hard pessimistic realism of a survivalist prepper, and do not go in for activists or political groupies or conspiracy theories, much as, distinct from that, I have a lot of curiosity, and am occasionally waylaid briefly by a stupid hypothesis, less and less as time goes on, better evaluated at all, surely, when not stressed beyond compare.
The attendant nurse went to do the PCR test anyway a few times, mocking me verbally in the process for being 'silly', bolstered by the steady chorus of Police catcalls, grumbles and headshaking, all friends in full agreement, but I was insistent. The social worker returned and came up close to me, announcing happily to my face that the local psychiatric doctors had agreed to section me following his phone call, and that I was now effectively in pre-detention under the mental health act, a matter-of-fact statement, non-negotiable. I grew impatient, and annoyed, deeply frustrated, and 19 powerless, having had enough at what I considered to be a grossly unfair railroaded situation, and leaned forward and punched the social worker in the face, bloodying my knuckles on his cheek. I have bad psoriasis on my hands, and it was my own blood, the thin, red welts of damaged skin scraped off the back of my hand. He shrieked at me like a seaside Vaudeville entertainer. "Ooo, sucker punch, Benjamin! Violence is unacceptable!"
A sucker punch is generally delivered to the back of the head, as far as I remember, whereas he got, at least, to see this coming. I regret it; my cortisol was through the roof at the time, my limbic system in overdrive, nerves shot. Later, they suggested I’m a danger to others on account of this incident of violence, especially to my partner’s children. Surely one has the power of choice over that. I’m completely against corporal punishment and have never physically disciplined a child in my life. By this same logic, professional soldiers do not generally shoot down the rest of their own squads, and a man does not act to his beloved friend or his cherished dependents like he would his threatening enemy. It’s a pity that wasn’t obvious to them.
State employees in the UK are notorious for endlessly provoking people and escalating the situation to maximize their potential for the sole response they have been trained to eagerly provide, and then doubling down in sanctimonious pig-headedness if anyone resists or calls them out on their hypocrisy. I'm not condoning the punching of social workers, but I often hope these public service people would have some basic understanding of human psychology, and the responses one could expect if they keep someone under constant pressure in a high-stress environment and then continue to torment them. Yes, he was correct in some sense. I was indeed thoroughly stressed at the time, a deeply debilitating toxic stress, worry, and hopelessness, as a basic aetiological analysis of official conduct throughout the entire disproportionate fiasco could explain with a satisfactory simplicity, let along placing it in the context of the previous months, a grim prognosis hanging over me, and an unrelentingly painful domestic environment. They are often blind to the obvious though, as it gets in the way of targets and dogmas. I have never quite decided if this is a conscious deployment of pure wilful spite or if there is merely something wrong with them, some blinker on their natural compassion.
Observably, and long documented by those who study the historical dynamics of crowds, mobs, and group behaviour mechanics, considered in tandem with evolutionary psychology and an analysis of demographic patterns, general intelligence, and the intergenerational impact of shoddy families and poor breeding, and from before any unscrupulous ideology is applied and subsumed, there seems to be something quite wrong with the majority of people, as if their soul has been casually bred out from multiple angles and the very memory of it laser-cut from the ancestral vellum of our folk consciousness in order to develop more safe, secured storage space for surveillance drone images of Polar Bears in captioned distress.
The Police standing guard around me growled in their ingrained middle-class manner, appalled at my unacceptable violence, the usual knee-jerk reflex and ‘right then’, and threw me hard to the floor regardless, damaging one of my ribs on the right side, and dislocating my left shoulder. My partner later informed me that she knew the social worker was an open homosexual. His face reminded me of my teenage East London friend's popular social worker dad, who loved to rape her with his work buddies at private parties, right under the nose of her mother. She did tell a psychiatric team back then, a few times, regularly enough, and in some distress, but they ignored her story, and routinely laughed at his jokes and aura of witty charm as he was handed custody each weekend. She swallowed broken glass in the end, washed down with bleach, although did survive, in something of agony. An interesting coincidence. It's not why I hit him, and I didn’t literally think it was the same person, but I do know the type.
In retrospect, it's lucky I wasn't charged on the spot with a hate crime. However, I was placed in a doubled-over crouch position, wrenched to my feet, with my arms dragged up behind my back and locked in the grip of their interlocking forearms, and with my head simultaneously pushed down by their palms, putting enormous stress on my legs, neck and back, and pulled out at double-pace, as they power-walked me over to the neighbouring psychiatric assessment unit. I fell to the ground at one point, collapsing in vocal exhaustion and pain, and grazing my elbows, knees, and cheeks on the tarmac, leaving small red stains, however I was yanked up again and the process continued. An enthusiastic aggressive deployment of coercive hyper-militarized pain restraints. It seems their superiors have trained them well.
If they see any distinction between helpless, psychologically vulnerable patients they find bad taste, and fugitive war criminals and assorted enemy combatants then they're keeping this firmly out of their active responses. I’m surely some form of dissident academic, but I remain academic about it at least, and feel better as a studious aesthete with sweeping ethical worries and a vast, genuine interest in society, and not some activist hooligan with a megaphone waving placards and banners in a huge swarm of ideologically possessed protesters, or the thuggish initiate of an inner-city drug gang, or indeed a psychopathic anti-white paramilitary warlord, like something dreamed up by ISIS, the MK, or the Baader-Meinhof Group, clutching an AK-74, ready to torture hostages, hijack a flight, or take down a school building. A sensitive ethicist with a European worldview of far better days. There is a disgracefulness to unprincipled fundamentalism. The best I could err was to be overprepared, and worried about the lives of others, more Holodomor than Mad Max, although I could see a naivety to my early disaster planning in that regard, eccentric, trying too hard to act the part, unrealistic in my capabilities, no pioneer of self-sufficient prepping perfect from the get go, no one quite perfect at it even now, given the complex uncertainties and vicissitudes beyond control. I take it I’m seen as closer to a Theodore Ted Kaczynski archetype, a criminal anarchist of some form, that anarchism taken in its colloquial interpretation, someone on the side of destruction, a terrible, galling misinterpretation on their part, a life-ruining category error judgement. Any European they ‘take a shine to’ in this manner is basically a new Anders Breivik for them, a bizarre exaggeration of concern on their parts.
At the unit, I was thrown like a worn sandbag into a small, bright, barren white room, whilst they stood guard. The social worker tittered about in the background. I thought for a moment that they were going to let him in to have his revenge, as he had rolled up his sleeves. However, an Indian psychiatrist arrived on the other side of a clear glass panel to the left of me, and his curt, metallic voice rasped out of a Tanoy system on the ceiling, as he interrogated me via the camera high up on the right wall. I was given a full mental assessment, one sided, lasting all of 4 minutes, and judged to be mentally unwell, in no small part based on my Covid-19 vaccine views, the rest drawn from my shivering, shaking, exhausted presentation of strung-out toxic stress and physical pain, by now far greater than the zoned-out mental tiredness I had been recuperating from effectively enough with the aid of privacy and a warm bath, them unable always to accept the sort of manner an exhausted, deeply depressed, broken down person in chronic agony will naturally present with instead of leaping in with their 'born with broken brain genetics' theory response, so was interned in barren isolation in their cold, spartan, predominantly immigrant-staffed facility for two weeks whilst they patronised me to death, degraded me, and forced me to take their grim medications on threat of indefinite further confinement. I had to 'admit' on camera before a panel of glaring suits that my sceptical vaccine stance was wrong as a primary condition of release, as if that sole vaccine technology was the only medical means by which they could have handled the pandemic. Ultimately, I was let go back to their community team. I wasn't having any of that.
A blond, 40-something female walked in to analyse me. I told her forcefully at the front step that she was unwelcome in my house, but she was not deterred. With weary mischief in mind, I asked her if she felt lucky. These people have tormented me for many years, and I desired a playful irreverence. I pulled out my vaporizer slowly, turned it and pointed it at her head like a pistol, keeping her in my sights, and then 'cocked' it with my other hand, and pulled the 'trigger', making a double tap "pew pew" noise with my mouth. She screamed and jolted backwards with her hands up to protect herself, as if literally shot, then scampered back out the front door to her car, accelerating off down the hill. It appears she had less grasp on objective reality than me. I have never seen her again.
Soon after a male walked in with a clipboard. Quite tall. Greying hair. A little beard. Smiling of his own accord without external prompting. He sat down. I loomed over him and scowled as he broke the ice. "Hello Benjamin, I'm Sean!" I was unimpressed. "Tell me Sean, do you like Feminism?" "Oh yes Benjamin, I think it's marvellous. It's so great that we can empower women!" "Get out of my house, Sean, and take your sweet mother face and your pathetic underground railroad for self-destructive female supremacy with you. Are you actively trying to obliterate the future of our people?" He remained smiling, or at least frozen, with his little teeth and cuddly grey hamster cheeks locked into a display of inert and submissive cheerfulness. A little scold of “oh, that’s not a very nice thing to say.” Something vacuous. I'm not sure what he was thinking. I knew I was dealing with an idiot. The moment lingered. In his own good time, he got up and left, but not before quietly ambushing my partner on the step outside for a brief parting exchange, like any good paparazzi. I have not seen Sean since.
Now an older woman named Theresa has been coming around, and her similarly aged replacement Elaine, arriving late each time, and sometimes without appointment, and haranguing me about med-taking before she asks how I am, listening to a single line of my response, no matter what it is, and anticipating no more, then immediately turning to Abby and asking, "is this true?" Theresa seems quite a patient person compared with Elaine and a line-up of the usual suspects, with the vocal tone of a typical Essex girl Statist, if slightly sarcastic, which can be grating in a care professional. She exaggerates the emphases of her speech to jolly sing-song tones and carefully enunciates each slow syllable, employing simple words and repetitive language, as if responsibly shepherding a drooling, partially deaf schoolchild with severe learning difficulties. I'm surprised she doesn't put a Sesame Street puppet on her hand or award me a bouncy ball to play with. She coped with me calling her kind "loveless subhuman zombie drones for a kakistocratic dystopia", and suggesting they were "closer to a journalistic cult of moral-police survey-takers than a team of genuinely compassionate and involved medical practitioners", describing her and her colleagues to her face as "salary-driven Avon ladies for the millionaires of the pharmaceutical industry," and she notes this down, with a weary facsimile of strained politeness, remarking to me that I appear to be more than a little "anti-authoritarian."
Don't they usually complain about authoritarianism? It's not automatically the same concept as the neutral word "authority." There have been good authorities in prior ages. The flourishing decades of peace in European before the First World War, for example, or the Republic of Rome, prior to Imperial decay, or indeed the short-lived Italian Renaissance under the Medici that spread to the rest of Western Europe. A patrician's authority, at the head of a household. Hitler's solid rejuvenation of the ruined society of post-Versailles Germany springs to mind, in the face of the terrible postwar constraints imposed upon the destitute, fracturing German nation with the international pressure from the American central banking system and from key European nations outside Germany, still gripped by the economic depression of the 1920s and 1930s. Again, it's Bolshevism and this liberal totalitarianism that I have a problem with. A great, understandable dislike of their Statism and its levelling mechanisms. A homegrown Law of Jante. Hate-bound, envious groupthink, able to love things they like or want, but not to love.
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