Covid, 9/11 & Forever War

Kit Knightly

The war was not meant to be won. It was meant to be continuous.
George Orwell, 1984

Our 9/11 coverage this year, the 20th anniversary, has been focused on viewing the attacks of 2001 through the lens of the Covid “pandemic” rollout.

The point is not that both Covid19 and 9/11 are necessarily part of the same grand plan, were carried out by the same people, or were in any way directly connected. Rather, they are thematically connected, on the meta-level.

They spring from the same collective urge all rulers and governments harbour, and are employed to the same end.

They are different tools designed to achieve the same end. Different approaches to the same problem. Different evolutionary stages of the same animal: The decades-long change in the core aims of warfare and even the very meaning of “war” itself.

War has always been vital to the preservation of the state. Wars make rulers rich, and people scared. They unite nations behind leaders, and distract from domestic political issues.

But, as nations become more powerful, weapon technology more advanced, and global power centralises in giant corporations rather than nations, war – in the traditional sense – becomes more expensive, more dangerous, and largely meaningless.

Essentially the old-fashioned motivations for warfare no longer apply, but the ancillary domestic benefits of war-like policy remain. While the state, and their corporate backers, no longer need to take part in pitched battles over the best farmland, they do still need their subjects to believe they are under attack.

In short, by necessity, “war” has gradually shifted from genuine inter-state conflicts over control of resources, into a top-down tool of psychological manipulation.

And the first stage of that evolution was 9/11.

9/11 and the war on terror

9/11 was an inside job. Any objective examination of the evidence can only lead to that conclusion. (I’m not going to lay that out here, we have dozens of articles detailing that. That’s not what I’m writing about today.)

The US government blew up their own buildings, killed their own civilians, terrified their own people. The ruling class engaging in what Orwell called “war against their subjects”, in a very literal sense.

Much like the Reichstag fire in Nazi Germany, this staged “attack” was done to create a war-like mentality. To make people believe they were under threat, and serve as the basis for new “temporary emergency powers” for the government.

But 9/11 went further, serving as the casus belli for a war: “The war on terror”.

The War on Terror was a new kind of war, yes it was used as a starting point for more traditional wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then proxy wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen, but its main target was actually domestic. A nationwide psy-op war designed to keep 350 million people in a semi-permanent state of fear.

It was the natural next step in the Orwellian redefinition of “war” as a concept.

If the primary aims of your war are a) To maintain domestic control of your population, and b) To funnel tax-payer money into bloated contracts with the private sector, then do you really need to declare war on a foreign country?

In fact, do you need an actual physical “war” at all? Isn’t the idea of a war just as good?

And if all you need is the idea of a war, what better way than to declare war on an idea. Why not make your enemy an abstract concept?

Because the great thing about going to war on an abstract concept is you can’t ever lose, and you never have to win. The war can go on forever.

This idea was first trialled with “the war on drugs”. But that didn’t work because a) people actually quite like drugs and b) Drugs are a vital income stream for the deep state. So it fizzled.

The war on terror is better. Since “terror” is an abstract noun with no solid reality, it can mean anything you want it to mean. “The war on terror” can be domestic or foreign, political or military, overt or covert or both. It can’t be won, it can’t be lost, and it only ends when you say it does.

It’s perfect.

Well, almost perfect.

There are still a few issues.

For example, it’s actually quite difficult to keep people afraid of an abstract concept. You need real-world reminders. Essentially, for the war on terror to continue, you need to keep reminding people terror is out there. Which means terrorism needs to happen. Which means either letting it happen or making it happen (the vast majority of the time it’s the latter).

If you’re staging terror attacks they either have to be real, resulting in real victims and real grieving families asking real questions…or they’re fake, meaning paying actors. Either way is logistically complicated, difficult to control and potentially embarrassing.

There’s also the problem of the terrorists themselves. You’ve publicly declared war on them…but they’re also very useful. There’s a reason you’ve funded them for decades. The inevitable result is you end up with “good terrorists” in country A, and “bad terrorists” in Country B. And when they are revealed to be essentially exactly the same, well that looks bad.

But the biggest problem, really, is that it caps your ambition.

You may have chosen an abstract concept as the target of your war, but that concept needs to take human form somehow. And any human enemy can only be so scary, and can only do so much damage. There’s no way you can frighten everyone at once that way.

Plus, picking a human enemy – along racial, national, ethnic or ideological lines – is inescapably divisive. You can’t ever unite everyone behind that flag.

In short, a war on terror and terrorists is fine if you want to rule a country, but what if you want to rule a planet?

Well, what you need then is a new enemy. An enemy that can be anywhere and everywhere, and that definitely isn’t human.

The war on Covid

The Covid19 “pandemic” has been pitched to the public as a war from the beginning.

As early as March 2020, the UN Secretary General was urging countries to “declare war on the virus” and already calling Covid “the greatest threat since World War II”. A sentiment UN spokespeople have repeated. A lot.

National leaders were just as eager to equate Covid as a new grand cause, in line with the fight against fascism.

Italy’s Prime Minister referred to the nation’s “darkest hour”. New South Wales premier Gladys Berejiklian told the press “this is literally a war” just last month.

In the UK, the government made numerous transparent attempts to instil a Churchillian “spirit of the Blitz” atmosphere. Unashamedly working World War II parallels into all their Covid messaging, the Queen’s cloying public speech of shamelessly using the line We’ll Meet Again.

In America, ever the hub of military metaphors, Trump called himself a “wartime President” fighting an “invisible enemy”. Former Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo referred to healthcare professionals as “soldiers” in the battle against Covid.

Worldwide, pundits frequently compare Covid to the war on terror, and Covid to terrorists. The war metaphor has been ubiquitous in speeches, headlines and TV spots.

The message is clear and simple: The virus is our enemy. We are at war.

And this war really is perfect.

It has all the benefits of a real war, and none of the drawbacks. All the ephemeral malleability of the “war on terror”, and none of its potential complications.

Think about it…

In the name of Covid we have seen taxation, censorship, surveillance, state expenditure to the private sector and state powers all increase. These are all the cliche “emergency powers” the state seeks out in wartime.

And they’ve achieved it with a simple three-stage trick.

First, take a virus, give it a name and attribute to it the exact same symptoms of every other cold and flu virus. You just created a new disease.

Second, take a test that can “find anything in anybody”, run it on everyone who goes into hospital (especially the terminally ill) and change the legal definition of “cause of death”. You just created “deaths” from your new disease.

Third, start running that same test on everyone, multiple times a week. You just created millions upon millions of “asymptomatic cases”.

Combine these three, and you have created a “pandemic”.

They created an enemy out of thin air, through a wave of propaganda and statistical manipulation. “Covid” is nothing but a filter, a lens placed in front of the public eye that distorts reality without actually changing anything at all.

Just as with the “war on terror”, the real threat is almost entirely imaginary, but this time the optics are so much better. Instead of worshipping the troops, we now pay homage to “healthcare heroes”, the “soldiers on the frontline against the virus”. No bombs, no violence, just dancing nurses.

And what can’t happen with Covid? Simple, anything they don’t want to happen. Because of the very nature of the manufactured pandemic, they have total control of the narrative.

They can control the “cases” through the tests. They can control the “deaths” through the definition of “cause of death”. They can just tweak the meaning of a word here and there, and start and stop the “pandemic” on a whim. They can slow down the “spread”, or speed it up. Introduce a new test or treatment or “cure” it, then create a new variant to bring it back.

This war doesn’t even really exist, so it never has to end and they definitely can’t lose.

Meanwhile, every new law that passes expands the power of the state over the citizen, and every step of the way there new bloated private sector contracts up for grabs. Testing and tracing and PPE. Vaccines and ventilators and quarantine hotels. Public money is pouring into private hands.

And the best part? It’s all being done in the name of “helping people”.

Following 9/11, the Patriot Act empowered mass surveillance, detention without charge and huge infringement of civil rights, because people might be terrorists.

Now, allegedly anti-Covid “public health measures” are allowing the exact same things…because people might be sick.

The state has transformed. What was once considered paranoid and aggressive, is now simply beneficent and paternalistic.

That’s the genius of the War on Covid.

The real forever war

So…how are Covid and 9/11 linked?

One flows directly into the other. They form a continuum of control narratives designed to frighten people into accepting draconian limitations on their freedom, whilst justifying a permanent society-wide warlike mentality.

“The war on terror” and the “war on Covid” are twin psy-ops that show the transformation of “war” from a foreign policy into a purely domestic one.

Orwell described it perfectly in 1984:

In just the last two years we have all seen the truth of this. Covid has shown us supposedly enemy nations suddenly come to an accord and demonstrate almost total unity of purpose to spread one big lie.

The global capitalist hegemony doesn’t need to conquer land or steal resources anymore. They already own everything worth owning, all they need now is to control their workers and preserve the inequality they have created.

That’s the real war being waged here. Not the ridiculous war on terror. And not the laughable war on Covid. No, the real “forever war” is what Niels Harrit calls the vertical war, waged by the very top against everyone below them.

Covid is the most recent and most overt expression of this, but for years now the corporate media has been the spokesperson of the authoritarian heart of the state.

I have written before that we are entering the era of “progressive” statism. Where tyranny is sold as a regrettable inevitability and our leaders are portrayed as a new breed of reluctant dictators, sculpting dystopian political landscapes out of necessity, and with only the purest intentions.

We’re told that our caring masters aren’t controlling or dictatorial because they want to be, but because they need to be, for our sake.

The “great reset” is not a malign “conspiracy theory”, it’s just our kindly overlords child-proofing the world to protect us from ourselves. Tearing our society down so they can build back better into a neo-feudal utopia, where nobody owns anything and everyone is happy and everyone does what they’re told…or else.

This “pandemic” is the thin end of a rapidly widening wedge. Next comes the flu and obesity and global warming. No more meat. No more sugar. No more vacations. They’re bad for you, and bad for the planet, and bad for the polar bears.

Ban homeschools and protests and misinformation. Ban the wrong kind of books and the wrong kind of speech and the wrong kind of thoughts.

Wear the mask and take the jab and live in the pod and eat the bugs.

Global hegemony isn’t going to come about via traditional warfare or Imperial conquest, instead it is being shaped by a conglomeration of restrictions on individual freedom.

That’s the war that links 9/11 and Covid. The real war, and it’s not against drugs, or terrorism or even Covid…it’s against us.

*** This article has been archived for your research. The original version from OffGuardian can be found here ***