In March of last year as the coronavirus panic was starting, I wrote a somewhat flippant article saying that the obsession with buying and hoarding toilet paper was the people’s vaccine. My point was simple: excrement and death have long been associated in cultural history and in the Western imagination with the evil devil, Satan, the Lord of the underworld, the Trickster, the Grand Master who rules the pit of smelly death, the place below where bodies go.
The psychoanalytic literature is full of examples of death anxiety revealed in anal dreams of shit-filled overflowing toilets and people pissing in their pants. Ernest Becker put it simply in The Denial of Death:
No mistake – the turd is mankind’s real threat because it reminds people of death.
The theological literature is also full of warnings about the devil’s wiles. So too the Western classics from Aeschylus to Melville. The demonic has an ancient pedigree and has various names. Rational people tend to dismiss all this as superstitious nonsense. This is hubris. The Furies always exact their revenge when their existence is denied. For they are part of ourselves, not alien beings, as the tragedy of human history has shown us time and again.
Since excremental visions and the fear of death haunt humans – the skull at the banquet as William James put it – the perfect symbol of protection is toilet paper that will keep you safe and clean and free of any reminder of the fear of death running through a panicked world. It’s a magic trick of course, an unconscious way of thinking you are protecting yourself; a form of self-hypnosis.
One year later, magical thinking has taken a different form and my earlier flippancy has turned darker. You can’t hoard today’s toilet paper but you can get them: RNA inoculations, misnamed vaccines. People are lined up for them now as they are being told incessantly to “get your shot.” They are worse than toilet paper. At least toilet paper serves a practical function. Real vaccines, as the word’s etymology – Latin, vaccinus, from cows, the cowpox virus vaccine first used by British physician Edward Jenner in 1800 to prevent smallpox – involve the use of a small amount of a virus. The RNA inoculations are not vaccines. To say they are is bullshit and has nothing to do with cows. To call them vaccines is linguistic mind control.
These experimental inoculations do not prevent the vaccinated from getting infected with the “virus” nor do they prevent transmission of the alleged virus. When they were approved recently by the FDA that was made clear. The FDA issued Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for these inoculations only under the proviso that they may make an infection less severe. Yet millions have obediently taken a shot that doesn’t do what they think it does. What does that tell us?
Hundreds of millions of people have taken an injection that allows a bio-reactive “gene-therapy” molecule to be injected into their bodies because of fear, ignorance, and a refusal to consider that the people who are promoting this are evil and have ulterior motives. Not that they mean well, but that they are evil and have evil intentions. Does this sound too extreme? Radically evil? Come on!
So what drives the refusal to consider that demonic forces are at work with the corona crisis?
Why do the same people who get vaccinated believe that a PCR test that can’t, according to its inventor Kary Mullis, test for this so-called virus, believe in the fake numbers of positive “cases”? Do these people even know if the virus has ever been isolated?
Such credulity is an act of faith, not science or confirmed fact.
Is it just the fear of death that drives such thinking?
Or is it something deeper than ignorance and propaganda that drives this incredulous belief?
If you want facts, I will not provide them here. Despite the good intentions of people who still think facts matter, I don’t think most people are persuaded by facts anymore. But such facts are readily available from excellent alternative media publications. Global Research’s Michel Chossudovsky has released, free of charge, his comprehensive E-Book: The 2020-21 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup D’Etat, and the “Great Reset.” It’s a good place to start if facts and analysis are what you are after. Or go to Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s Childrens Health Defense, Off-Guardian, Dissident Voice, Global Research, among numerous others.
Perhaps you think these sites are right-wing propaganda because many articles they publish can also be read or heard at some conservative media. If so, you need to start thinking rather than reacting. The entire mainstream political/media spectrum is right-wing, if you wish to use useless terms such as Left/Right. I have spent my entire life being accused of being a left-wing nut, but now I am being told I am a right-wing nut even though my writing appears in many leftist publications. Perhaps my accusers don’t know which way the screw turns or the nut loosens. Being uptight and frightened doesn’t help.
I am interested in asking why so many people can’t accept that radical evil is real. Is that a right-wing question? Of course not. It’s a human question that has been asked down through the ages.
I do think we are today in the grip of radical evil, demonic forces. The refusal to see and accept this is not new. As the eminent theologian, David Ray Griffin, has argued, the American Empire, with its quest for world domination and its long and ongoing slaughters at home and abroad, is clearly demonic; it is driven by the forces of death symbolized by Satan.
I have spent many years trying to understand why so many good people have refused to see and accept this and have needed to ply a middle course over many decades. The safe path. Believing in the benevolence of their rulers. When I say radical evil, I mean it in the deepest spiritual sense. A religious sense, if you prefer. But by religious I don’t mean institutional religions since so many of the institutional religions are complicit in the evil.
It has long been easy for Americans to accept the demonic nature of foreign leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. Easy, also, to accept the government’s attribution of such names as the “new Hitler” to any foreign leader it wishes to kill and overthrow. But to consider their own political leaders as demonic is near impossible.
So let me begin with a few reminders.
- The U.S. destruction of Iraq and the mass killings of Iraqis under George W. Bush beginning in 2003. Many will say it was illegal, unjust, carried out under false pretenses, etc. But who will say it was pure evil?
- Who will say that Barack Obama’s annihilation of Libya was radical evil?
- Who will say the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombing of Tokyo and so many Japanese cities that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians was radical evil?
- Who will say the U.S. war against Syria is demonic evil?
- Who will say the killing of millions of Vietnamese was radical evil?
- Who will say the insider attacks of September 11, 2001 were demonic evil?
- Who will say slavery, the genocide of native people, the secret medical experiments on the vulnerable, the CIA mind control experiments, the coups engineered throughout the world resulting in the mass murder of millions – who will say these are evil in the deepest sense?
- Who will say the U.S. security state’s assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, Jr., Robert Kennedy, Fred Hampton, et al. were radical evil?
- Who will say the trillions spent on nuclear weapons and the willingness to use them to annihilate the human race is not the ultimate in radical evil?
This list could extend down the page endlessly. Only someone devoid of all historical sense could conclude that the U.S. has not been in the grip of demonic forces for a long time.
If you can do addition, you will find the totals staggering. They are overwhelming in their implications.
But to accept this history as radically evil in intent and not just in its consequences are two different things. I think so many find it so hard to admit that their leaders have intentionally done and do demonic deeds for two reasons. First, to do so implicates those who have supported these people or have not opposed them. It means they have accepted such radical evil and bear responsibility. It elicits feelings of guilt. Secondly, to believe that one’s own leaders are evil is next to impossible for many to accept because it suggests that the rational façade of society is a cover for sinister forces and that they live in a society of lies so vast they the best option is to make believe it just isn’t so. Even when one can accept that evil deeds were committed in the past, even some perhaps intentionally, the tendency is to say “that was then, but things are different now.” Grasping the present when you are in it is not only difficult but often disturbing for it involves us.
So if I am correct and most Americans cannot accept that their leaders have intentionally done radically evil things, then it follows that to even consider questioning the intentions of the authorities regarding the current corona crisis needs to be self-censored. Additionally, as we all know, the authorities have undertaken a vast censorship operation so people cannot hear dissenting voices of those who have now been officially branded as domestic terrorists. The self-censorship and the official work in tandem.
There is so much information available that shows that the authorities at the World Health Organization, the CDC, The World Economic Forum, Big Pharma, governments throughout the world, etc. have gamed this crisis beforehand, have manipulated the numbers, lied, have conducted a massive fear propaganda campaign via their media mouthpieces, have imposed cruel lockdowns that have further enriched the wealthiest and economically and psychologically devastated vast numbers, etc. Little research is needed to see this, to understand that Big Pharma is, as Dr. Peter Gøtzsche documented eight years ago in Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare, a world-wide criminal enterprise. It takes but a few minutes to see that the pharmaceutical companies who have been given emergency authorization for these untested experimental non-vaccine “vaccines” have paid out billions of dollars to settle criminal and civil allegations.
It is an open secret that the WHO, the Gates Foundation, the WEF led by Klaus Schwab, and an interlocking international group of conspirators have plans for what they call The Great Reset, a strategy to use the COVID-19 crisis to push their agenda to create a world of cyborgs living in cyberspace where artificial intelligence replaces people and human biology is wedded to technology under the control of the elites. They have made it very clear that there are too many people on this planet and billions must die. Details are readily available of this open conspiracy to create a transhuman world.
Is this not radical evil? Demonic?
Let me end with an analogy. There is another organized crime outfit that can only be called demonic – The Central Intelligence Agency. One of its legendary officers was James Jesus Angleton, chief of Counterintelligence from 1954 until 1975. He was a close associate of Allen Dulles, the longest serving director of the CIA. Both men were deeply involved in many evil deeds, including bringing Nazi doctors and scientists into the U.S. to do the CIA’s dirty work, including mind control, bioweapons research, etc. The stuff they did for Hitler. As reported by David Talbot in The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, when the staunch Catholic Angleton was on his deathbed, he gave an interviews to visiting journalists, including Joseph Trento. He confessed:
He had not been serving God, after all, when he followed Allen Dulles. He had been on a satanic quest….’Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars,’ he told Trento in an emotionless voice. ‘The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted…. Outside this duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it.’ He invoked the names of the high eminences who had run the CIA in his day – Dulles, Helms, Wisner. These men were ‘the grand masters,’ he said. ‘If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.’ Angleton took another slow sip from his steaming cup. ‘I guess I will see them there soon.’
Until we recognize the demonic nature of the hell we are now in, we too will be lost. We are fighting for our lives and the spiritual salvation of the world. Do not succumb to the siren songs of these fathers of lies.
Resist.
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Marty says:
Another good column. Don’t let the criticism get you down. There are many who pretend they are left ,but are anything but. Don’t waste your time on them.
The original critics of the Warren report were people like Bertrand Russell and M.S.Aroni. -
Louis N Proyect says:
“I have spent my entire life being accused of being a left-wing nut, but now I am being told I am a right-wing nut even though my writing appears in many leftist publications. Perhaps my accusers don’t know which way the screw turns or the nut loosens. Being uptight and frightened doesn’t help.”
You don’t seem to get that you are a conspiracy theorist. As for being a left-wing nut, the real question is your utter lack of familiarity with a Marxist class analysis. Off-Guardian has pretty much evolved into a wing of the Trumpist right, following its propaganda on COVID-19. By writing for it, you are helping to shore up Tucker Carlson and all the other nut-jobs that helped make it possible for a half-million Americans to die from the illness. It could have been a much lower number if Trump hadn’t been saying the same thing as the dingbats who put out Off-Guardian. “It was just a cold…” “Masks don’t work…” “Our liberties are being suppressed…” Blah-blah-blah. Do you think that your articles don’t line up with the far right? Then, you need to develop a sense of self-awareness that is typically absent in tenured professors.
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I, too, think that Ed and some others on the more radical left have gotten this pandemic wrong. A long string of deep state/mass media deceptions from the killing of JFK to and through the World Center Atrocity created a comfortable framework in which the pandemic was understandably viewed, at least at first, as just the latest plutocratic plot to entrench and expand their interests. And there was indeed evidence that could be marshalled in this direction. At some point in the pandemic’s progress, however, it should have become apparent that we were dealing with a real phenomenon that threatened the entire world including the plutocrats, who while exploiting the pandemic to get ever more obscenely rich and powerful, were also scared shitless on a personal level that they too (or their loved ones) could get sick and die. That said, I think you’re being disrespectful to a man who has stuck his neck out for a lifetime in telling us the truth (as he saw it) about the machinations of entrenched evil in our midst, so often doing its dirty work behind the scenes. With regard to the Off-Guardian, you are engaging promiscuously in guilt by association, a favorite way in which the left has eaten its own since its inception. The real tragedy here IMHO is that the pandemic and the neoliberal destabilization and paralysis it has brought (and will likely continue to bring) may well offer a genuine revolutionary/evolutionary opening, one which the marginalized radical left could never have generated on its own. Thus many who should be at the forefront of “seizing the time” are instead missing it entirely and unwittingly lending credence to reactionary forces, who want nothing more than a speedy end to the pandemic so that we can return, pedal to the metal, to exploitative and ecocidal neoliberal capitalism.
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Lorie says:
I don’t know much about Karl Jung, but his idea of the shadow includes the notion that if you don’t recognize your own shadow, if you don’t develop “an imagination for evil” then you project it outward (as Sanjoy said above), and you remain innocent, but your very “innocence” (which is really just denial) enables the shadow, or the evil, to take hold in bigger ways. Paul Levy says it better than I just did:
“We still go on thinking that we are “simplex and not duplex,” to use Jung’s words. We thus imagine ourselves to be “innocuous, reasonable and humane.” We don’t deny that terrible things are happening, but since we regard ourselves as harmless, Jung points out, “it is always ‘the others’ who do them.” When we are not in touch with the potential evil that dwells within us, we project it outside of ourselves in a futile attempt to disown it, thereby falling prey to and unknowingly acting out in the external world the very evil that we are turning away from within ourselves. Evil thrives on our turning a blind eye towards it.” https://www.awakeninthedream.com/articles/carl-jung-imagination-evil
This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t put the billionaires etc on trial for crimes against humanity (they absolutely should be on trial) or that we can’t organize (oh except we can’t because everyone’s afraid to come out of the house), but I think it’s important to realize that each of us has a kind of totalitarian inside, and we need to understand that. Or we’ll never defeat the madness. That’s not at all a popular stance in a world view without shade (or shadow).
It reminds me of Father Zossima in _Brothers Karamazov_ who said something like (i’m paraphrasing) Everytime there’s a crime, tell yourself that YOU are responsible for that crime. That’s also not a popular stance because it’s seen as defeatism, or “acceptance”. But it isn’t.
Anyway, obviously your article resonated a lot–this is something I’ve been thinking about recently–calling evil what it is. But not thinking that I’m particularly innocent.-
ALBERT L ROSSI says:
Well said, Lorie. Whether inflected through Jung or Dostoevsky, or Sartre’s _mauvaise foi_, we are indeed all guilty. The very bad faith which lay unacknowledged, or better, purposely suppressed, in my own daily armchair criticism (perhaps whining is more precise), was one of the realizations that shook me to the core when reading «Seeking Truth». And yes, an examination of conscience is only the first step, as all lapsed Catholic atheists like myself know.
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ALBERT L ROSSI says:
Brilliant and powerful, even moving––everything I have come to expect since I discovered Ed’s writing. «Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies» was a real highlight of my pandemic year reading list.
I just wanted to address one particular thing Ed brings up in this essay: the way critics who once classified him as a left-wing nut now call him a right-wing nut.
This hits solidly home. It has long been for me a struggle to reconcile (at least for my dogmatic colleagues) my own progressive-to-radical views (if those labels truly denote anything, or ever did) with those I hold concerning the assassinations of the 60s, let alone the more recent instances of “pure evil” noted here. How, indeed, did claiming JFK was assassinated by the National Security State come to be a specifically “right-wing” conspiracy theory?
But this is nothing compared to how that label has been weaponized to shut down discussion of the pandemic among a broad sector of the populace.
I have been saying for some time now that this was, among other things, an ingenious ploy to get the “opposition” (the “so-called Left”, as Douglas Valentine would say) on board. You can’t really fool them too much any more with the threat of Islamic terrorism (though many of them seem to be lapping up the China/Russia b.s.). But a humanitarian crisis? Perfect! In the interest of humanity, we will simply look the other way when it comes to corporate malfeasance and profiteering, and totalitarian strictures, even censorship. (Don’t be distracted by conspiracies: we need to fight the system as a whole. That has to be one of the most hackneyed false oppositions in political and social science.)
And isn’t it funny how the “anti-science” shibboleth, once aimed at supporters of the megalithic fossil-fuel industry, is now aimed at critics of the megalithic pharmaceutical industry?
It has long been a goal of our intelligence community to build an “acceptable”, controllable Left. Seems like that goal has finally been achieved.
Allen Dulles is laughing his burning ass off in hell.
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Barbara says:
Condolences from another former left-wing transformed to a right-wing nut. It’s really laughable once you stop crying.
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ab says:
I’m trying to get into this but I’m not getting anywhere. What does it do for us to think of this regime as evil instead of criminal? At war crimes tribunals you don’t get hanged for evil. You don’t get nuked for evil. You… go to hell? I do not see these assholes shaking in their boots. Angleton’s just bragging.
They’re certainly unencumbered by ethical or moral structures. But to avoid the fundamental attribution error we ought to look for a circumstance that elicits that sort of misbehavior. And one jumps out at you right away. Impunity.
They do what they want because they can get away with it. In this case crime pays.
That’s the way the outside world sees this. Bolton, certainly one of the poster boys, carried out a massive neoSoviet obstruction campaign to keep the word impunity out of the relevant sections of the World Summit Outcome Document. He would have loved to substitute evil because that’s not a term of art. Impunity is. Arbitrary conduct is. Hostis humani generis is.
This government’s the enemy of everyone on earth. When we depose them and make a pyramid of their skulls, that will be why.
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Andy says:
Hi ab, I love your post. As an atheist I tend to agree with your premise:
“What does it do for us to think of this regime as evil instead of criminal?”
One answer, perhaps overly simple, is that the concept of “crime” is often created by criminals. The Gulag Archipelago has hundreds of stories of innocent civilians getting arrested by the police for “crimes” against the Soviet. They would then spend ten or twenty years getting worked to death in a labor camp for their “criminal” behavior.
It’s interesting that organized religion, for all its faults, at least offers meta-governmental view of morality. The American founding fathers recognized this and tried to create a government free *from* religion, not because they were atheist (although some were) but because they knew the dangers of ascribing moral authority to government. -
Skip Scott says:
The problem with using the word criminal instead of evil is that it implies that we have “rule of law” that punishes criminals. In fact for the evil ones who have all the power, there is no justice; it’s JUST US. Raw power is all they react to or understand. Although the word “evil” has religious connotations for some, I believe it is more accurate. To be a criminal there has to be effective “rule of law” for them to violate. In fact for the truly powerful evil ones there is no effective “rule of law.” They will never face prosecution by the current system. My hope is that Karma is real, and they will engender their own punishment by the evil ways sometime soon. “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”- MLK.
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Gary Weglarz says:
I quite agree Skip. Sadly over the last 500+ years of the West’s rule over the entire planet, much of the absolute barbarity and genocide and plunder undertaken has all been completely – “legal” – rather than being considered – “criminal” except by those on the receiving end. I find that the concept of “evil” touches more closely the presence of an amoral abyss so vast that it can defend bringing about the “legal” deaths of a half-a-million Iraqi children as worth it – and then today claim concern for the welfare of Syrian children in order to justify yet another – “legal” – “humanitarian regime-change war” – while simultaneously facilitating the mass starvation of children in Yemen all in the same breath. The West is now basically a large interconnected criminal enterprise desperately attempting to retain power over the planet.
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