I Don’t Enjoy Being a Part of this Experiment in Compulsory, Pseudo-Compassionate Patriotism

Written by Tom Penn

To what extent do you feel your Government values human life? If the stringent social-controls implemented throughout this protracted ban-demic are anything to go by – collective dismissal of their collateral damage aside – then you might be forgiven for thinking that we inhabit one of the most altruistic nations on earth, so painstakingly have we followed government advice and overhauled the minutiae of our behaviour to shield each other from peril.

Humanitarian Intervention (HI) is defined as a state’s use of force to end the human rights violations of another state. Sounds benign enough, yet it is a foetid, turd-filled bog of hoaxes and political conjurings that annihilates the lives of millions of vulnerable, shield-less civilians around the world. And we are masters at it. The death toll of our foreign policies is near-incalculable, although I suspect SAGE could have a good crack at it – ‘three, Neil?’
The Military will not invade the axis of all evil – that in all likelihood its own Government has covertly supported for decades, or even helped install – until the Establishment have first duped the domestic citizenry; persuading them of the moral justification for the imminent onslaught in the form of duplicitous, virtuous propaganda, and whilst concurrently creating schisms and rifts of allegiance within the target country itself – divide and conquer. (Note: They’ll invade regardless).

Many of us believe that the British Government are bumbling and tottering their way through the sham-demic, but always with the interests of the nation at heart. Yet their tactics resemble alarmingly those successfully utilised in HI missions around the world.

Covid is the enemy, whose threat has been amplified to induce terror. Saving the old and the sick is the moral justification, on human rights grounds, for the behavioural diktats imposed; strafed into our psyches via the usual propagandist mediums, and giving perhaps, a new meaning to ‘drone-bombing’. So where is all the oil? Where are all the resources, territory won or economies restructured – the real objectives of any overseas mobilisation?

We are in the midst of a Humanitarian Intervention, but this time directed at us, and by our own state nonetheless. Our minds are the oil-fields, our self-determination the ancient tribal lands whose borders have been redrawn with highly-flammable lines in the sand.

So why? What is the ultimate point of excavating our sovereignty as if it were the last coal mine on earth? And with such urgency and reckless abandon?
To get a sense of the answer we can use the New Old Bill’s very own website, on which one can read what is perhaps the most perturbing document I have ever come across: Global Britain in a Competitive Age, March 2021. Easy to read yet nauseating to digest, it outlines the vision for the UK up to 2030, and contains a plethora of ideological clues that help explain the politicisation of the virus and the violent ousting of our sensibilities.

Three salient points stand out above all others. First is the hammering-home that by 2030 we will have ‘secured our status as a Science and Tech Superpower’. This one is fairly straightforward to witness being played out in our day-to-day lives, with Covid passports, QR codes to access your old life, Zoom, and virtual classrooms; less face-to-face GP time and more cyber-appointments, test and trace, Peloton – somebody has to use all this useless crap, otherwise it’s just, err, a waste of money.

Second is the referencing to a ‘post-Covid international order’ that will be ‘increasingly contested and fragmented’, and one which the UK will ‘dynamically shape’ by, among other things, seeking ‘reform of the WHO’. I thought covid is a virus that we are supposed to begin attempting to live alongside. I don’t recall the BBC report that it is in fact the invisible trumpet heralding our entrance into an entire new epoch. And if this is life pre-WHO reform, then God help us all.

Lastly, and perhaps most worrying of all, are the multiple references to ‘national resilience’. As the Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy, one would expect a sprinkling of flag-waving claptrap, but I’m not sure I’m entirely at ease with the statement: ‘It will be essential to take a whole-of-society approach to resilience… to address challenges such as global health risks.’ I can’t say I’ve particularly enjoyed being a part of this inaugural experiment in compulsory, pseudo-compassionate patriotism so far. It’s felt less Dad’s Army meets Casualty, and more Full Metal Jacket. But according to the Integrated Review, I’d better start getting with the programme.

Replaying the now monochrome cine-reel of pandemic turning-points, I recall Professor Ferguson bringing the nation to its psychological knees with his half a million dead, Nintendo-style modelling. ‘We think the price is worth it… said US Ambassador Madeleine Albright, when asked if the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were a price worth paying for sanctions.’ [1] I’m betting there were tumbleweeds blowing down the corridors of Parliament that particular day, and many, many others like it. That’s called complicity with silence.

Your government don’t value life. They don’t value yours, and they most certainly don’t value those of your grandparents. They toss it around like a chewed-up, squeaky dog-toy, for the Rottweilers of the economy to maul. They only hold dear your ‘R’ number: your ‘Returns’ number – what they can mine from you while you still have a beating heart in your factory-assembled chest.

They want to trash your autonomy with a Public Health Humanitarian Intervention, and recycle it into artificial pellets for you to nibble at inside the cage-cum-office-cum-school-cum-outside world of your home – your ‘Life-Station.’ Why? Because the behemoth global events of the ensuing decades will demand your blind consent, horrific as they have the potential to be. No truly informed individual would ever give their backing to the pestilential suffering in store; that our government will no doubt instigate, and then revel in – as always.

Guilt-edged, enforced national resilience is just mass-frailty by stealth. It’s not about masks, vaccines and walking the correct way around a shop. It’s about reducing the risk of your children waking up in the year 2050 to yet another Year Zero, and to arbitrary, barked directives inspired by an Etonian Pol Pot who looked more like a bin-man; your brain, your children’s souls – the jingoistic sophistry – all still full of the same old priceless garbage that devalues us all.

[1] The New Rulers of the World, by John Pilger, chapter 2, page 1.

Tom Penn is also author of the short story The Palinopsia of National Resilience