In The Rape of the Mind, chapter 14 (“The Turncoat in Each of Us”) Joost Meerloo describes his encounters with traitors in The Netherlands during the Nazi occupation. He then goes on to say:
Many of our native traitors were spineless people, ready to accept almot any new idea or elaborate theory. Their suggestibility was their greatest liability. […] After the German invasion and occupation these people confronted their defeated countrymen with triumphant I-told-you-so’s. They boasted proudly of their wisdom in having bet on the right horse. They gained a tremendous feeling of self-imporance, and their newly acquired blown-up self-assurance, backed by the enemy’s armed force, made them hard and contemptous of their compatriots.
In an effort to justify their own behavior and tgheir greed for power, they tried to convert others to their new way of life. They were possessed by a compulsion to become propagandists for the invader. Turncoats always try to soothe their own bad consciences by persuading others to share their crime.
It is not much of stretch to see the Covidian Cult in these words, despite the different historical circumstances. Most of us probably have friends, acquaintances, or family members who, having joined the Cult, suddenly became propagandists for the cult. It seemed that they had finally found their calling in life. They attempted to coerce us into joining their cult, and then shamed, ostracized, segregated, fined, snitched, and censored us for our non-compliance. They invented new “rules” that had no basis in law or science, but were enforced as if they were laws, in the name of a fake Science™. All this was done in the service of an illegitimate invasive and occupying power, the New Normal Reich (to use C. J. Hopkins’s term). This occupying power destroyed many of our previously treasured freedoms, including (but not limited to) the right to free speech, the right of assembly, the right to privacy, and due process under the law. Hence the actions of the cult members can be seen as treason.
Further on in chapter 14, Meerloo expresses his deep concerns about loyalty oaths, which were a characteristic of the Red Scare fear campaign of the 1950s, when the book was written. Here are some of his comments about these oaths:
Our insistence on official expressions of allegiance actually discredits and devalues the basic personal sense of voluntary and self-chosen identification with the community which is the essence of loyalty; it certainly does not either create or insure loyalty. […]
The oath compulsion can easily grow into a childish magic strategy, a form of mental blackmail. There are some oriental religions in which devotions are performed through the use of a prayer wheel. When the wheel is set in motion by a flip of the hand, the worshipper has done his job. The practitioners of these religions no longer have any awareness of the content of their prayers. They are blind subscribers to a ritual whose meaning they have long since forgotten. […]
Both in demanding an oath and in taking it, we perpetuate the ridiculous illusion that enemies can be kept out through this prayer-wheel system.
Again, it is not much of a stretch to see the rituals of the Covidians in these words. The masks, the six-foot distancing, the one-way arrows, the plexiglass barriers, the elbow bumps, the lockdowns, the flattened curve, the unsafe and ineffective gene therapy slurries — all of these can be seen as loyalty oaths or spins of the prayer wheel. If you partake of these expressions of loyalty, you are a good, loyal person who can be allowed to continue to participate in society. If you disagree with any of these expressions of loyalty, you are a terrible, no-good, bad, awful person who should be shunned, and if Noam Chomsky gets his way, isolated and starved.
But the Covidian Rituals are even worse than the loyalty oaths of the Red Scare, because, as I mentioned before, they are mandated by The New Normal Reich. This is an illegitimate totalitarian power, which has taken over what, in previous eras, we naively might have thought of as the legitimate government. In other words, the Covid Cult is demanding our loyalty to an invading and occupying power. As such, our only reasonable response is to resist this power.
Great book and post. Thank-you. One thing that continues to bedazzle my small brain is how the "turncoats" justify their own suicidal mania.