The Global Protection Racket
The Public Health Revolution, Part 2
Read Part 1: Our Lady of Public Health
In the nineteenth book of The City of God Augustine enquires further into the question as to what a man is, and into what makes for the peace of man. Man is more than a rational soul with a body in his service. He is also a social animal, a point Augustine thinks Christians can make with greater force than the Platonists or Stoics with whom they share some affinity. He then considers our sociality in expanding concentric circles. At the centre, the domestic sphere; after that the polis or republic, the community of nations and, finally, the community of all rational beings, angelic or human. He touches on the goods and the evils of each sphere, before going on to consider the peace of the well-ordered man in a well-ordered creation—the new creation that is to come, wherein all will enjoy God and one another in God and the whole cosmos will be at peace.1
One of Christianity's most crucial political principles appears in this schema: the principle of subsidiarity.2 The domestic sphere, where man becomes with God a co-creator and co-nurturer of human life, lies at the heart of human sociality, naturally considered. It is indeed, as St John Paul II said, the school of personhood. Sacramentally or supernaturally considered, the family can even be spoken of as the domestic church. A polis that does not serve and support the family, then, but seeks rather to sublate and supplant it, is a minacious construct, a fraudulent attempt to realize a form of sociality that belongs only to that kingdom in which perfected humans will no longer marry or be given in marriage, nor procreate.3 Likewise, a nation that does not serve and support its poleis, leaving them room, within agreed limits, to handle their own affairs. Or a league of nations that does not serve the peoples of those nations but seeks instead to dominate them.
Today there is much talk of the global community. In so far as it has this characteristic, however—presuming to rule and regulate more intimate spheres—the global community is no community at all. It does not even know what community is. It lies at the periphery of authentic sociality, yet fancies itself the centre. It is a return, not to Eden, but to Babel.
The subsidiarity principle is essential to Augustine's critique of Power (alias Empire) in book four. It demands respect for the differences between peoples, as well as their right to organize for themselves the affairs closest to their own interests. Small is beautiful, he insists, a point creatively re-articulated by Tolkien, from the opening line of The Hobbit to the closing line of The Return of the King, and more abstractly by John Paul II in Centesimus Annus §48:
A community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.
Now, the larger the scale of government, the more likely it is—nay, the more certain it is—that the subsidiarity principle will itself subside. Or, to put it the other way round, the more determined men are to increase their own wealth and power at the expense of others, the more motivated they are to expand and exploit the bureaucracy of governance as an instrument of domination.4 The principle of subsidiarity would dictate that decisions about your health are taken by you, with those near and dear to you, in consultation with your own physician. So would the personalist principles of bodily autonomy and informed consent. In the Public Health revolution, however, and especially in the One Health idea, the concern is less and less with support for your health, more and more with the health of everyone and everything but you. The subsidiarity principle is put into reverse.5
From Your Health to Public Health to One Health
Since you yourself are embedded in a physical and social environment, your health is relative to the health of others and has an impact on those others. Yet it is not the case that your health can only be assessed in relation to others, even if the distribution of health resources should be. Moreover, so long as we are speaking of your health, you remain a quite formidable expert, however ignorant or confused you may be regarding certain points. But what happens when consideration of your health is subordinated to consideration of the health of all creatures great and small? Suddenly you cease to be much of an expert at all. What is required is the opinion of a council of experts, who will determine who is or isn't healthy, who is safe or unsafe, who is sufficiently supplied or properly treated, and who must be protected from whom. And this council will be nested within some higher council, with still more authority, extending as far as a politburo for planetary health, at rarified heights only the most exalted experts can inhabit, demanding measures only they can grasp.6
This is no flight of fevered imagination, at least not of my fevered imagination. It is what was called for by Joe Biden and Boris Johnson and other world leaders when all things covid had been brought to fever pitch. A joint statement published on 30 March 2021—after invoking the collective memory of world war and of countries coming together "to dispel the temptations of isolationism and nationalism and to address the challenges that could only be achieved together in the spirit of solidarity and co-operation, namely peace, prosperity, health and security"—included the following credimus:
We believe that nations should work together towards a new international treaty for pandemic preparedness and response. Such a renewed collective commitment would be a milestone in stepping up pandemic preparedness at the highest political level. It would be rooted in the constitution of the World Health Organisation, drawing in other relevant organisations key to this endeavour, in support of the principle of health for all. Existing global health instruments, especially the International Health Regulations, would underpin such a treaty, ensuring a firm and tested foundation on which we can build and improve.
The main goal of this treaty would be to foster an all of government and all of society approach, strengthening national, regional and global capacities and resilience to future pandemics. This includes greatly enhancing international co-operation to improve, for example, alert systems, data-sharing, research and local, regional and global production and distribution of medical and public health counter-measures such as vaccines, medicines, diagnostics and personal protective equipment.
It would also include recognition of a “One Health” approach that connects the health of humans, animals and our planet. And such a treaty should lead to more mutual accountability and shared responsibility, transparency and co-operation within the international system and with its rules and norms.7
What do we have here? First and foremost, the association of health primarily, if not exclusively, with safety and security. That is crucial because it makes health, even your health, an affair of state. It allows the authorities to take an "all of government and all of society" approach. It permits total mobilization of resources and a universal abrogation of rights. It may even implicate the former holders of rights in the threat to be addressed, construing them as vectors of disease or pollution or misinformation. Thus do their rights and liberties pass over to the state.8
Second, a call for inter-agency accountability. States, not individuals, go to war, and marshal the resources for fighting it. This war, however, is not—or is not acknowledged as—a war between nations. Rather, it is a war of nations against a common enemy, the pathogen with pandemic potential. That such a pathogen is a very rare occurrence is ignored or denied, for the object is to make the fighting both urgent and iterative. That will obligate national agencies to parties higher than their own parliaments or electorates. They will be accountable only to each other, if "accountable" is still the right word.
Third, the One Health approach, an approach that permits appeal to criteria unrecognizable as health-related at all, to mysteries concerning "zoonoses, ecosystems, and human well-being" that flow in and out of one another like currencies in Peter Daszak's pockets.9 Who can penetrate these mysteries? Certainly not the ordinary person, who can however be inundated daily with reminders that the rangers and wizards are on watch.
Climate-change watch, for example; for what is the point of fighting pathogens if the planet that hosts them is becoming uninhabitable? So dramatic is global warming that even the wizards' books get cooked.10 As for the remedies they propose, those also are mysteries: baking or freezing in one's own home; losing one's vehicles or farm; watching the extinction of one's local economy and community; going broke and going hungry, while abandoning all rights and liberties and power of self-determination. In the war for possession of the planet, the barrage of lies about anthropogenic global warming never stops, nor do the unpayable bills that keep rolling in.11 Not exactly a recipe for good health, but excellent for speeding up the process of expropriation!
In sum, if health means wholeness, wholeness means planet-wide security. Who then can speak to it with authority other than a High Council of planetary experts, effecting their decisions through regional instruments such as the Department of Homeland Security or the United Kingdom Health Security Agency? Democracy is bypassed, peoples are bypassed, families are bypassed. Subsidiarity flows in the opposite direction. Only what cannot be determined and done at a higher level will be determined and done at a lower.
Advancing technology is steadily reducing what cannot be done at the higher, even as it expands what might be done at the lower. As soon as the Internet of Things is fully up to speed, we are told, with universal access and the requisite safeguards, all will indeed be secure, while each will be in control of whatever is his own.12 Rumour has it, mind you, that before long what is one's own will not be much. Perhaps not even one’s liver.13 There are sacrifices still to be made for the sake of planetary health and security. When they say, "reimagine our health, reimagine our society, reimagine our economy," we must take them seriously, though that will mean reimagining our lives with many more “upstream interventions” and many fewer downstream options for self-determination.14
Let's be honest. What we are dealing with looks very like a global protection racket. A manufactured crisis becomes the occasion for a predetermined solution. We know how this works. We have experienced it at first hand. A man-made virus became the occasion for a "pandemic" designed to produce maximum fear, disruption, and insecurity. Comfort was offered in exchange for permitting the ruling classes to take charge of our lives and our bodies. To put us at their disposal, and to accustom us to accept the arrangement, was the point of the exercise, as of all the mapping and gaming that for twenty years preceded it. “Sorry to hear your place got busted up, old chap. But don't worry, we can help."
The whole routine is now to be repeated by turning to other pathogens, to putative climate disasters and actual food shortages, to cyber attacks and bank failures; that is, to a larger arsenal of threats, each of which can be contrived and all of which can be orchestrated to set new precedents for draconian countermeasures. Centralization, and the kleptocracy it serves, is to proceed apace. The deep state will rule, the globalist Mob reign, while Our Lady of Public Health blesses and hallows.
Meanwhile, Marxist and Maoist tactics are being used to capture the youth. Capacity for resistance is breaking down as communities disappear or are artificially rearranged through intentionally divisive policies and strategic immigration overload. Surveillance is increasing and, with it, the crushing of dissent.
In the offing is not peace, however, but more war. Protection rackets always lead to war, turf war. Only the turf now is the entire world and the war promises to be apocalyptic.
© D. B. Farrow 2023
Read Part 3
In Catholic social thought, subsidiarity is one of four principal pillars alongside personalism, solidarity, and the common good.
It is no accident, as I explained in Nation of Bastards (BPS 2007), that same-sex marriage lies at the heart of the legal and political battle to bring the polis of which we are speaking into being, or that its official flag is the "Pride" flag. What else could it be? Pride is exactly what founded the anti-city, the city of Satan.
See Public Impoverishment, Private Wealth (February 2023) for my treatment of both sides of this dialectic.
The CA+ treaty tells us (in section 1.f) that One Health "means an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals and ecosystems. It recognizes the health of humans, domestic and wild animals, plants, and the wider environment (including ecosystems) are closely linked and inter-dependent." This approach has been pushed for years by none other than Peter Daszak and his EcoHealth Alliance, the same that brought us SARS-CoV-2.
Have you noticed that well-funded advocacy for such "high impact" thinking is proliferating in the universities under the auspices of a School of Population and Global Health? Or that the European Council has been pushing it hard?
See No government can address the threat of pandemics alone. For details, see also the WHO document, Global Strategy on Digital Health 2020–2025, the first drafts of which appeared in early 2019, though the final version appeared only in 2021. Strategic Objective 3, conveniently highlighted in orange, deserves attention: STRENGTHEN GOVERNANCE OF DIGITAL HEALTH AT GLOBAL, REGIONAL AND NATIONAL LEVELS. Strategic Objective 4, I note, incorporates some personalist language, but only by way of promoting "the use of population health management and gender-equality approaches through digital health applications to move health and well-being from reactive care models to active community-based models." The artistic but eery image at p. 44 (see above) nicely captures what is meant by "active community-based models."
When the state means to protect you from a threat, or merely to remind you that threats exist, it issues a health alert. When it deems you to be the threat, it declares an emergency, which licences it to lock you down or to pen you up. While an alert points you to a problem that could affect your health, or that someone would like you to think could affect your health, an emergency informs you of a unilateral decision to take charge of your health. The former you are free to ignore; the latter is the end of your freedom. When that harsh bell tolls on your phone or radio or television, it tolls for thee.
See Cunningham, Daszak, and Wood, "One Health, emerging infectious diseases and wildlife: two decades of progress?" Philosophical Transactions B (June 2017).
See Paul Homewood, The Climate Scaremongers, and similar articles such as those at wattsupwiththat.com or The Daily Sceptic.
The Internet of Things is "a system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals or people that are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to computer interaction" (Global Strategy, 42). As with vaccine hesitancy, there is a certain thingness hesitancy, to be sure, but it too can be overcome. "Peace of mind in the digital age? It’s possible!" announces the Digital Identity White Paper released the other day by info-industrialists in my part of the world. Don't worry, they advise. Digital identity is not a revolution but an evolution. And it's about me, not about them. It will put me in full control, protecting my autonomy. I should see it as both desirable and inevitable (p. 5; cf. 14). The relation between autonomy and inevitability is not explained, just as it is not explained to those encountering non-consensual biometric technologies at the airport. The most obvious explanation is that, once digital identities and digital dollars have fully evolved, autonomy will have fully devolved. That devolution is what the U.N.'s Global Digital Compact—an Open, Free and Secure Digital Future for All (Our Common Agenda Policy Brief no. 5, May 2023) really aspires to.
“Our health depends on our planet, just as its health depends on us. Our overall well-being, including the health of our livers, is intertwined with the health of the planet around us. The WHO is calling for a #HealthierTomorrow and for us to create societies focussed on well-being.”
The further upstream the upstream interventions are, the more effective they will be at exercising narrative control downstream, whilst all this reimagining is going on. But we will think for ourselves about the narrative in Part 3.
Update on the WHO treaty (Nov. 2023): https://merylnass.substack.com/p/why-is-everyone-concerned-about-the
Another angle of approach, reaching the conclusion that "this Is Organized Crime": https://reportfromplanetearth.substack.com/p/anatomy-of-a-protection-racket