Hong Kong Flu vs. Covid: Descent into Hysteria

[We’re working on our next big piece; today's is in response to a reader request.]

 

Any of our ancestors who lived through the Spanish Flu would have likely qualified the worldwide reaction to Covid-19 last year  as a ‘mass hysteria.’

 

The 1918-19 pandemic touched one third of humanity and felled millions in the prime of their life—its peak mortality age was 28. 

Image source  

 

CoronaVirus Disease 2019, a.k.a Covid 19, however, is its mirror image: it kills almost exclusively the very old or the very obese. Yet due to this virus whose under-70 fatality rate is .05% (that’s one-twentieth of one percent),  the entire Western world simply shut down its societies wholesale.

Image source  

 

Not only cinemas and stadiums, but shops, schools, factories, construction sites: all shuttered. In France, one could no longer volunteer at an animal shelter or give blood. All non-GPs—dentists, gynecologists, dermatologists—were forced to close. Courts ceased to function. Airports shut down. Parliament went virtual.

Piazza del Duomo, Milan, 2020

No one had seen anything like it in the whole of human history--not even in wartime.

One may look back at our forebears in 1918 with awe: The young people who managed to avoid being massacred in the grisliest war in human history then dropped like flies in the ensuing worldwide pandemic, whilst the older generation survived unscathed. Has humanity ever seen such an immense killing field of its youngest and strongest in such a short span of time?

Battle of the Marne  

And yet the world still turned. While large public gatherings were discouraged, the word ‘lockdown’ was never pronounced or even imagined. Farming, factories, trade, construction, commerce all buzzed along as they always had. Schools and hair salons and parks remained open. The hecatomb of the Spanish Flu is barely remembered today.

Spanish Flu: Fresh air was thought to help  

‘Indeed,’ you may argue, ‘but of course one has to go back a hundred years to find a people hardy enough to weather a viral pandemic with equanimity.’

 

As it happens, one does not.

 

While Covid raged throughout 2020, curious French researchers snuck a peek into the medical archives. They were astonished at what they found: Only 50 years ago, in 1969, a Covid-like flu had swept through the Western world-- but in newspapers of the time it barely merited a mention. There was no state of emergency, no daily death count, no mass shutdowns. 

No panic.

 Daily panic-o-meter  

 

The gravity of the enigmatic ‘Hong Kong Flu’ had entirely escaped French historians because at the time, no statistical agency (of which France had many) thought to tally up its deaths. It took until 2005 and researchers inspired by SARS for the French authorities to even remember that there had been an epidemic in 1969. 

Covid re-awakened our taste for all things pandemical, and last year led historians to fine-tune the numbers even more. 

That’s when they realized that at 2020 population levels, the Hong Kong Flu would have been nearly as deadly as Covid-19.

 

So how could the outcome of such a virus have gone from ‘blip on the radar’ to ‘planet-wide pants-soiling’ in the space of just fifty short years? A French documentary crew from LCP  News Channel aimed to find out. 

We share their discoveries with you here.

 

Rock'n'Roll in the time of Corona   

 

So take a walk with us down memory lane, to a time, within living memory, when an epidemic virus could tear through a first-world country and earn barely a shrug in response. Visit the less-feminized world of our recent forebears, and marvel at how our society has in the space of two generations become hystericized to the point of total paralysis.

 

Accompagnez-nous into another world.  

 

The Slow Pravdaization of Our Press

(We are offline due to a much-needed research period at the moment, so we've decided to re-publish some earlier pieces you might have missed the first time.)

'We will get from the virgin soil a rich harvest!

From the O.C. Register:

In legal news, CNN recently settled what is being described as a multi-million dollar defamation lawsuit filed by Covington Catholic High school student Nick Sandmann over its false and misleading coverage of a viral confrontation with a Native American elder that left viewers with the impression that the teenager and his pals were being racist provocateurs.

Turns out that Sandmann’s group had been taunted with racially charged, profane rants by the Black Hebrew Israelites. 

...Thanks to Google and shoddy memories, Sandmann will forever be known as the racist kid who harassed a Native American elder, even though there’s absolutely no truth to it whatsoever.

What could push 'the most trusted name in news' to commit such eye-wateringly expensive folly, all in the name of a narrative?

It's a question worth asking. We invite you to have a look at this piece from a few years back, in the hope that you will find it enlightening.

[Re-post, original post here.]

Reacting to Spree Killings, Progressively

[Please excuse this brief detour; we are still hard at work on our 'Re-colonization' series.]

Of the many things Progressives are known for, number one is being on the right side of history.

So in the wake of this latest U.S. spree killing, we turn to our leading leftist voices to help us make sense of the madness.

Having studied their recent corpus on the question of the spree-killer-for-a-cause, we believe we've found some progressive principles to light our way.


I. Do not make generalizations about his group

Bring low the enemy of Multiculturalism

 'Comrade, come to our kolkhoz!'

We have seen how the free press in a liberal democracy can spout the reigning dogma in ways that call to mind the old Pravda or Izvestya.

The parallels do not end there.  Many Westerners today have the growing sense their children's schools as well as pop culture are becoming propaganda fountains, and that questioning the orthodoxy entails real risk.  Are we mad to make such comparisons?  To orient ourselves, it can be helpful to look back at examples of overt scholarly and artistic indoctrination in the U.S.S.R.  How near are we to them? How did we get here? What comes next?


1) From the time a child can toddle

Images of industrious Soviet children

W.H. Chamberlin in 1934:

From the time when a child can toddle, a red flag is pushed into its hand; it learns the new Soviet songs and is taught in nursery and kindergarten to lisp Soviet slogans. The stream of propaganda, all directed to the purpose of making a new type of man and woman, entirely devoted to Soviet and Communist ideas, becomes intensified as the child grows older.  

No one can visit a Soviet school without being impressed by the thorough manner in which the pupils are taught to hate "capitalism" and the "bourgeoisie" and to regard the Soviet system as the best in the world.  (1) 

In today's West, Great Britain has led the charge in punishing Wrongthink in its youth:

The mother of a seven-year-old boy was told to sign a school form admitting he was racist after he asked another pupil about the colour of his skin.  Elliott Dearlove had asked a five-year-old boy in the playground whether he was ‘brown because he was from Africa.’

‘I was told I would have to sign a form acknowledging my son had made a racist remark which would be submitted to the local education authority for further investigation,’ she said.  ‘I refused to sign it.' ... '[Elliott] kept saying to me, “I was just asking a question. I didn’t mean it to be nasty” and he was extremely distressed by it all.’

British thought criminal Elliott Dearlove, seven

Five-Year Plan in Four Years

'We will get from the virgin soil a rich harvest!

Two weeks before Walter Russell Mead of The American Interest decided to shut down commenting at his blog, on a post about an Arab riot in France the following exchange took place:

'PC is intellectual Stalinism. It is also a betrayal of Liberalism in all its historical incarnations...'

'Intellectual Leninism might be a better way to characterize PC than intellectual Stalinism....Stalin just follwed suit.'

     '… like reading TASS and PRAVDA, one learns to interpret what is unsaid by what IS said.'

To Right-Thinking Americans, these comparisons might sound laughable.  We're a liberal democracy, after all, with the strongest free speech protections in the world.  What could we have in common with an iron-fisted one-party totalitarian state whose dissenters were sent to die in massive slave camps?

A better question might be, how is it possible that a liberal democracy in the 21st century is home to phenomena that so readily call to mind those of an iron-fisted one-party totalitarian state?

'Absurd,' you may say. We'd be tempted to say it ourselves. To all such people, we here at Those Who Can See can only ask: Won't you take our hand, Comrade, and come with us to the back of the four-hour toilet-paper queue as we seek out just where the parallels may lie?