2 Years On: The vital lesson Covid can teach us about Ukraine

Kit Knightly

Yesterday marked exactly two years since the UK went into our first lockdown, just “three weeks to flatten the curve”. Several months later the lockdown stopped. Then it started again around Christmas.

There was never, ever, any justification for the lockdown. Lockdowns don’t work to halt the spread of disease, even if they did “Covid” was never enough of a threat to justify one, and the destructive knock-on effects on public health and the economy make the cure worse than the disease.

We don’t need to go into the details of that now. It’s all well-established at this point.

More importantly – it was well-established before the lockdowns began.

From the moment Covid was first mentioned in the press, it was obvious it was more smoke and mirrors than anything else.

As I wrote in January of 2020, when the press was in a frenzy over only 800 global cases and 26 deaths:

Longer-term, there is vaccination to consider. Medicine you have to take even if you’re not sick is a goldmine for pharmaceutical companies, and if the government makes them mandatory well, then that’s even better.

The coming agenda was that obvious, even then.

Surveillance. Censorship. Vaccine mandates. Big profits for big pharma. It was all there to see in January of 2020.

By March 13th 2020 it was even more blatant, as I wrote at the time:

It turns out in order to best deal with the coronavirus we need to ban large public protests, introduce martial law, stop using cash, vote digitally or by post, leave our borders wide open, censor the major social media networks and start enforcing compulsory vaccination. Which is very fortunate, because they wanted to do all of that anyway.

The day before the UK’s lockdown was put in place, a spokesman for Italy’s Institute of Health admitted [emphasis added]:

The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals WITH the coronavirus are deemed to be dying OF the coronavirus

From at least March of 2020 it was perfectly clear that the data was being manipulated and that the bureaucratic machinery was being put in place to create a “pandemic” through nothing but the magic of cultivated statistics.

This was not just an important issue, it was the ONLY important issue.

They revealed their agenda, and then began falsifying data to justify that agenda, and were doing it from the very beginning of the “pandemic”.

It was the only story that mattered, and still matters.

That the mainstream media never discussed this is not surprising. The mainstream are a lost cause, they live in a pretend world they think they can build with their fake headlines about non-events. They have sold themselves completely, and there will be no reaching them. They talked about mask mandates and R0 numbers and hand sanitisers and the panic-buying of toilet paper. Carefully examining the bark on every tree, whilst meticulously ignoring the forest.

But that is to be expected.

The alternate media sphere, however, is still full of people who want to tell the truth and do the right thing. And yet, on Covid, there were major failures.

Somehow even alternative voices began echoing the mainstream, repeating falsehoods as if they were facts, reinforcing the foundational myths of the “pandemic” narrative.

As Catte wrote in April 2020, many high-profile independent outlets were caught up in the hysteria. Either rallying behind the police state, happily cheering on authoritarianism because it was “in the public interest”, or diverted into talking about side issues that never came close to examining the true heart of the matter.

Whether these failures were borne of poor research, fear, ego or ideology, in the end, doesn’t really matter. The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it. We’re all subject to that weakness of the human condition.

Ivermectin and “lab leaks” and natural immunity and “variants” and the dozen other deck chairs so many people spent two years assiduously re-arranging were not the issue.

The agenda was the issue. The lie used to sell that agenda was the issue.

In the end, the government didn’t care whether you thought masks worked, or exactly how long you self-isolated. They didn’t care if you thought they were incompetent, or heavy-handed or supported them wholeheartedly.

All they cared about was that you believed the pandemic was a genuine threat, and that something had to be done to combat it.

All they wanted was your participation in that one lie. And any story that helped promote this one lie was acceptable.

Anything short of questioning the most basic assumption underpinning the narrative can be tantamount to supporting it – maybe accidentally, maybe with good intentions – but supporting it nonetheless.

This is true of Covid and just as true of every headline, every other piece of breaking news. Including the war in Ukraine.

And it doesn’t just apply to Western establishment narratives either. All official stories need to be equally interrogated.

Yes, Russia has been on the right side of history before now – in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Crimea.

Yes, Putin’s government rescued the Russian state from the brink of collapse in the early 2000s, and likely saved millions of lives as a result.

Yes, the US empire, through NATO, has been ruthlessly expansionist and underpinned by a brazenly hypocritical monopoly on “legitimate” violence.

And yes, there are Nazis in Ukraine.

All of that can be true, without changing the fact Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may be illegal, or that it doesn’t appear to make tactical sense. Or that Western sanctions on Russia may have a more detrimental impact on their own economies than Russia’s. Or that Russia and China are pursuing the same globalist agenda being promoted in the West.

Russia (and China) have thrown their complete support behind the Covid narrative, and the globalist agenda it served. You can’t wave that away with “they didn’t mean it” or “it’s OK when they do it”.

This isn’t about – or shouldn’t be about – taking sides, and doing so is detrimental. We’ve seen how bi-partisan conflicts can serve to bolster the most harmful aspects of a narrative.

Ivermectin vs vaccines, Sweden vs China, lab leak vs zoonosis. These are surface level disagreements whose very existence only reinforces the underlying establishment narrative.

Just as hard binaries were tolerated, even encouraged, during the pandemic, the same pattern emerges in Ukraine. No-fly zone vs sanctions, Nazis vs ‘no-Nazis’, Zelenskiy vs Putin, East vs West.

These are belligerents supposedly opposing one another, yet built upon the same foundational preposition: The geopolitical conflict is entirely as simplistic and total as presented; just pick your hero and villain, and all the economic hardship, censorship, groupthink and loss of personal freedom that results from this conflict is an (un)happy by-product of the war, not an aim.

But there are plenty of good reasons to question that assumption, and plenty of evidence supporting other, more complex, interpretations.

Even Tucker Carlson, of all people, has pointed out the convenience of switching from Covid to Ukraine without missing a beat. A different problem, and different reaction, but requiring an almost identical solution.

The agenda was obvious in January 2020, and it wasn’t about Covid.

The same agenda is just as obvious today…is it likely that this time, it’s really all about Ukraine?

It’s a simple truism of war that you can never win if you are fighting entirely on your enemy’s terms. If you let the opposition choose when and where and how to fight, pick the ground and the rules of engagement, you will lose. Every time.

The same is true of debate and argument – information warfare, if you like – if you let your opponent set the a priori assumptions, they will win. They will pick the unquestioned “truth” at the heart of the matter, and force you to argue within the bounds of a reality they have created to suit their own ends.

The moment you let any government-backed, mainstream ideas become sacrosanct, unassailable “truth” you have lost the argument. You’re letting other people choose the rules of the game.

We don’t need to choose who to believe, we don’t need to believe anyone.

It is the responsibility of alt media to act as a check on the mainstream. To refuse to take part in the establishment games. To maintain a detached focus on the truth, no matter what it is. When we fail to do so, we can end up supporting the very machinery of state and corporate power we’re meant to be opposing.

Covid should have taught us that if nothing else.

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