26 June 2023
I’ve been thinking about war a lot lately. As I mentioned in Academia and the new dark age: Part 4, I believe that we are currently embroiled in a global war – the War Against Us. To quote independent journalist James Corbett,
“We are in the middle of a world-changing war right now… A war that is taking place everywhere on the globe, even as I speak, and that involves virtually everyone on the planet, young and old, male and female, military and civilian. It is the war of every government against its own population and every international institution against free humanity.
Your Guide to 5th-Generation Warfare
This is no ordinary war, however. Most of the victims of this warfare aren’t even able to identify it as war, nor do they understand that they are combatants in it.
It’s called fifth-generation warfare.”
As Corbett explains, there are two key differences between earlier forms of warfare and 5th generation warfare: Firstly, 5th generation warfare “is not waged against either standing armies of nation-states or guerrilla insurgents but against everyday citizens”; and secondly, “this war is not being fought in a battlefield somewhere, but in the mind”.
However, there’s also a key similarity between all the disparate forms of warfare, and that is the centrality of propaganda to the war effort.
As Edward Bernays – who quite literally wrote the book on propaganda in 1928 – observed, the creation and distribution of propaganda is pivotal to the operation of the modern democratic state:
“Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.”
Propaganda, p. 20
States, and the corporations and organisations with whom they negotiate the exercise of power over the citizenry, utilise propaganda to influence, as Bernays put it, “the organized habits and opinions of the masses”. Anything that the invisible government wants the public to buy into, in order to further its own aims, falls under the rubric of propaganda:
“The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine.”
Propaganda, p. 20
Manipulating the public into believing whatever the invisible government wants them to believe, so that they voluntarily cooperate with its agenda, is actually far more efficient and far less costly than compelling them through the modern state’s monopoly on violence. Even the putative tyrant Napoleon was exquisitely sensitive to the mood of the people he supposedly ruled with an iron fist:
“Emil Ludwig represents Napoleon as ‘ever on the watch for indications of public opinion; always listening to the voice of the people, a voice which defies calculation. “Do you know,” he said in those days, “what amazes me more than all else? The impotence of force to organize anything.”‘”
Propaganda, p. 18
When it comes to war propaganda though, the “particular belief and doctrine” that is most crucial for the warmongering state to disseminate is the identification, and ‘othering’, of the enemy.
Behind our civilised veneers, we modern humans retain the primitive tribal impulse of our ancient ancestors to define an ingroup of ‘people like us’, and an outgroup of ‘people not like us’. The point of difference that distinguishes those ‘like us’ from those ‘not like us’ may vary, depending on context, from ethnicity, to religion, to political affiliation, to social class, to gang membership, to educational alma mater, to sporting team fandom, and even to random assignment based on arbitrary criteria (see Jane Elliott’s infamous blue eyes, brown eyes classroom experiment for a bone-chilling example).
The only necessary characteristic for a point of difference to generate ingroup-outgroup dynamics is that a social identity can form around it, through which individuals define themselves as being, in some way, superior or inferior to members of another social group.
Ingroup-outgroup dynamics can be quite benign, as in the good-natured rivalry between fans of opposing sporting teams, epitomised by the standard conversation-opener among Victorians: “So who d’ya barrack for?”
But ingroup-outgroup dynamics are also the basis for all the heinous acts of barbarity ever perpetrated by humans against each other. The prejudice legitimised by outgroup bias can, and all too frequently in human history has, metastasised into infrahumanisation and dehumanisation, which pave the way for enslavement, unpersoning, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
The simple fact is that the powers-that-shouldn’t-be cannot secure public buy-in to their wars without first cultivating outgroup bias. It takes a lot to persuade most humans to kill fellow humans; hence, war is always waged on an outgroup, whether that outgroup be an enemy of long standing, or a synthetic creation of the warmongers.
Traditionally, we think of war propaganda as generating outgroup bias against a foreign enemy, as epitomised in these World War I posters that crudely typecast Germans as ‘the Hun’: uncivilised, brutish and psychopathically bent on world domination:
But in 5th generation warfare, the outgroup against whom bias is stoked is just as likely to be within the society targeted by war propaganda.
During the manufactured COVID crisis, people who questioned ‘public health’ policies often found themselves at the pointy end of outgroup bias, especially if they declined the experimental transfection agents. Remember this?
While all these thoughts of 5th generation warfare, propaganda and ingroup-outgroup dynamics were swirling around in my head, I happened to re-read a paper that I had tucked away in the file where I keep ideas for future articles.
Its subject matter is crisply summarised by the title: ‘Discriminatory attitudes against unvaccinated people during the pandemic‘. And, unlike the sloppy, stupid, anti-science papers that I’ve discussed in my Academia and the New Dark Age series (Part 2, Part 3, Part 4), it’s thorough, thoughtful and determinedly neutral with respect to its subject matter. You know, like scientists are supposed to be.
The authors utilised the YouGov and Ipsos survey agencies to conduct three separate surveys, between 3 December 2021 and 28 January 2022, of public attitudes toward people who had, and had not, received a COVID [so-called] vaccine.
Study #1
The first survey involved 10,740 respondents from 21 middle- and high-income countries that “had widespread access to vaccines against COVID-19”. Countries from all inhabited continents, with widely varying governance structures and cultural norms, were selected in order to identify both commonalities and differences in the feelings, attitudes and beliefs that facilitate discriminatory behaviour between vaccine ingroups and outgroups.
Respondents were asked questions about how they would feel if a close relative were to marry an unvaccinated vs a fully vaccinated (according to definitions at the time) person, and further questions intended to elicit the degree to which fear of infection, and perceptions of untrustworthiness and lack of intelligence, contributed to prejudicial attitudes.
As you may remember, the articles I discussed in Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 of my Academia and the New Dark Age series dutifully regurgitated the medical misinformation that near-universal uptake of the so-called COVID vaccines could ‘end the pandemic’, by contributing toward community immunity. In stark contrast, the authors of this article freely admit that harbouring greater fear of getting infected by an unvaccinated than a vaccinated person made zero sense at the time they conducted their survey*:
“Note that, during the collection of these studies, the vaccine-evading Omicron variant was dominant35, and vaccine-induced immunity against infection spread was waning36 in most societies; this increased the chances of being infected by vaccinated people and therefore decreased the risk of interacting with unvaccinated individuals relative to vaccinated individuals.”
Discriminatory attitudes against unvaccinated people during the pandemic
Despite clear evidence that the much-vaunted COVID ‘vaccines’ were miserably failing to deliver, the survey results demonstrated a startling degree of antipathy directed against the unvaccinated by the vaccinated, but not vice versa. In the figure below, dots to the right of the grey vertical line signify that respondents expressed more exclusionary attitudes to their respective vaccine outgroup i.e. vaccinated people toward the unvaccinated, and unvaccinated people toward the vaccinated. ACM stands for ‘average marginal component effects’, essentially a measure of difference in attitudes. The black dot represents the average (across the 21 nations) of exclusionary attitudes toward immigrants from the Middle East, a group subject to high levels of discrimination in many Western countries.
In their own words, they found that:
“Vaccinated people express discriminatory attitudes towards unvaccinated individuals at a level as high as discriminatory attitudes that are commonly aimed at immigrant and minority populations3,4,—5. By contrast, there is an absence of evidence that unvaccinated individuals display discriminatory attitudes towards vaccinated people, except for the presence of negative affectivity in Germany and the USA… Exclusionary attitudes towards unvaccinated individuals among vaccinated people (13 percentage points) is two and a half times greater than exclusionary attitudes towards Middle Eastern immigrants (5 percentage points, 95% confidence interval = 5–6, χ21 (n = 54,054) = 23.83, P < 0.001)… Unvaccinated targets face significantly more exclusionary reactions compared with immigrants in 11 out of 21 countries, whereas immigrants do not face significantly more exclusionary reactions in any of the countries.”
Discriminatory attitudes against unvaccinated people during the pandemic
Fear of infection was the biggest contributor to the exclusionary attitudes of the vaccinated toward the unvaccinated – again, despite the fact that it was publicly acknowledged by health authorities, at the time the survey was conducted, that the ‘vaccines’ were not effective at preventing infection or transmission. The perception that unvaccinated people were incompetent and unintelligent for not having accepted the magic shots that failed to deliver on any of the promises made for them, also made major contributions to exclusionary attitudes. How ironic.
Study #2
For the second survey, 3045 respondents from six countries – Germany, India, Indonesia, Morocco, South Africa and the UK – were asked to rate fictitious individuals that vary in terms of vaccination status, and other attributes, on a seven-point like–dislike scale. The comparison group for this study was switched from Middle Eastern migrants to a set of four groups subject to high levels of prejudice: drug addicts, ex-convicts, people with mental illnesses and atheists.
As you can see from the figure below, vaccinated people expressed high levels of antipathy toward unvaccinated people whereas, with the exception of Germany, unvaccinated people did not evince dislike of vaccinated people. Furthermore, on average, the level of antipathy that vaccinated people expressed toward the unvaccinated was higher than that directed at atheists, people with mental illness and ex-convicts, and comparable to the level of dislike for drug addicts.
(Why were unvaccinated Germans outliers in terms of actively disliking the vaccinated? I don’t know for sure, but here are a couple of clues provided by American playwright and satirist [and long-term resident of Berlin], the inimitable C.J. Hopkins:
Study #3
The third survey aimed to discover whether discriminatory attitudes extend into the domain of publicly recognised rights, and hence was conducted in the US, a country founded on the recognition of fundamental rights and freedoms. 1448 respondents were asked questions to elicit their degree of antipathy toward the corresponding vaccine outgroup, along with their attitudes toward the outgroup’s freedoms of movement, residence and speech, and access to citizenship and unemployment benefits (if eligible).
As the figure below shows, vaccinated people expressed marked antipathy toward the unvaccinated, and strong support for abrogation of their constitutionally-enshrined rights and legally-established entitlements. In stark contrast, unvaccinated people expressed mild dislike of the vaccinated, and no desire to curtail their rights and freedoms.
To sum up, people who had complied with the authorities’ advice, exhortations, bribes, and in many cases, mandates to accept an experimental injection with no long-term safety record, harboured discriminatory attitudes toward people who had not complied, and were in favour of curtailing their fundamental human rights… even at a point in the manufactured crisis at which it had become glaringly obvious that the so-called vaccines were utterly failing to stop infection, transmission, serious illness and death, no matter how high the take-up rate or how many booster shots were added to the definition of ‘fully vaccinated’.
The vaccinated continued to view the unvaccinated as an infection risk, and also as untrustworthy and unintelligent… even when the latter group’s reluctance to take these inadequately tested shots had been thoroughly vindicated by rapidly-accumulating evidence that they were neither safe nor effective. Let that sink in.
Where do discriminatory attitudes lead?
The authors of this study hail from the Department of Political Science and the Centre for the Experimental-Philosophical Study of Discrimination at Aarhus University in Denmark, and the Democracy Institute of the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. Their analysis of COVID vaccine policy is hence shaped by concerns about its impact on social cohesion and public trust in government, rather than the public health establishment’s myopic focus on the quixotic attempt to limit the spread of a single respiratory virus, regardless of broader societal impacts.
The degree of prejudice against unvaccinated people that their surveys unearthed, and its implications for social cohesion, clearly alarmed them:
“Research on political polarization warns that, if sociopolitical disagreement—even if based on legitimate grievances—permeates interactions between citizens, it can contribute to the entrenchment of conflict21. Here we show that individuals who are vaccinated against COVID-19 express negative attitudes against unvaccinated individuals in the form of antipathy, stereotypes, support for exclusion from family relationships and support for removal of political rights. In total, these four forms of discriminatory attitudes are consistent with the observation of prejudice according to standard definitions in social psychology.”
Discriminatory attitudes against unvaccinated people during the pandemic
They cautioned governments against enacting vaccination policies that foment prejudice and discriminatory attitudes, given the likely sociopolitical ramifications of such policies:
“Although moralistic communication of collective responsibilities may be an effective strategy to increase vaccination uptake8, such strategies may have unintended negative consequences in the form of eliciting prejudice51, especially in cultures with strong cooperative norms. Research on prejudice towards minority groups warns that experiences of prejudice and discrimination may have negative long-term effects, hurting well-being52, eroding identification with majority society53 and driving mistrust of the state, including health authorities54. If the consequences of prejudice towards unvaccinated individuals resemble the consequences of prejudice against minority groups, they may exacerbate the mistrust and alienation that led to vaccine refusal in the first place13,20.
In the short run, prejudice towards unvaccinated individuals may complicate pandemic management. In the long run, it may mean that societies leave the pandemic more divided than they entered it… the authorities should seek to avoid fuelling deep animosity between citizens. Indeed, as moral condemnation is often easily and spontaneously activated among the public during a crisis11, the authorities and politicians should consider tempering social animosities as an important part of their mandate, especially when societal conflict becomes more entrenched.”
Discriminatory attitudes against unvaccinated people during the pandemic
These are wise words of counsel for governments that want to foster social cohesion within their populations.
But what if some, most or all of the world’s governments – or perhaps the “invisible government” which Bernays told us is “the true ruling power” – don’t want social cohesion?
What if, instead, their interests are best served when populations are divided against each other?
Divide et impera
Divide and rule
Or, as the meme would have it:
In that case, portraying the unvaccinated as selfish, dangerous, unintelligent and untrustworthy would actually be highly effective 5th generation war propaganda. Watch Matt Orfalea’s astonishing compilation of clips of politicians, media talking heads and celebritards gratuitously attacking, smeared and scapegoating the unvaccinated one more time, and tell me if you think I’m overstating this:
And if this demonising of the unvaccinated and valorising of the compliant is, indeed, 5th generation war propaganda, the intriguing possibility arises that the authors of the papers I discussed in Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 of my Academia and the New Dark Age series are, in fact, not dimwits or acolytes of the Holy Church of Vaccine Scientism, but war propagandists.
The World War I propagandists who invented stories of Hun soldiers cutting Belgian women’s breasts off and bayoneting their babies knew they were lying. But, presumably, they justified their calumny on the grounds that it served the greater good: ensuring a steady stream of military recruits and popular support for the war against Germany and her allies.
Nayirah Al-Sabah knew she was lying when she testified before the US Congress that Iraqi soldiers had removed scores of Kuwaiti babies from incubators and left them to die. But, presumably, she justified her false testimony on the grounds that it served the greater good: galvanising the American public into supporting the Gulf War against Iraq.
If the authors of the profoundly unscientific, rabidly pro-vaccine articles that I dissected previously are indeed war propagandists, what is the greater good that they believe they are serving? A superficial answer to that question would be that they actually believe that near-universal vaccination would improve public health.
But what if the real greater good that they believe in, is that the generation of discriminatory attitudes, prejudice and intense antipathy against the unvaccinated – in other words, turning them into a vilified outgroup – will facilitate the divide et impera strategy that is currently undermining liberal institutions of governance, and tiptoeing so-called Western democracies toward totalitarianism? What if the ‘greater good’ that they’re working toward, is the recruitment of an army of militant ‘pro-vaxxers’ who can be mobilised by the state, at will, against ‘anti-vaxxers’? What if the vaccine war propagandists want to “fuel… deep animosity between citizens”, because it serves their true purposes? What if they already know that this…
… is barely a step away from this:
… and they have no intention of modifying policy and messaging in order to “temper… social animosities”?
If that were the case, it would be up to us to break through the 5th generation war propaganda with our own messaging that emphasised our common humanity, and exposed the anti-human motivations of the war propagandists. I don’t pretend to know how to do that, but I think we could do a lot worse than to listen to a man who, impelled by family history and his own life experience, has thought deeply about how to heal the divides between people that are generated by warmongers of all stripes:
Are you confused by the scientific claims and counter-claims that you encounter through popular and social media? Would you like to learn how to read scientific research, assess its biases, and understand how it fits within the body of scientific literature? My EmpowerEd membership program is custom-made for you. Activate your free 1-month trial today!
* Thanks to a freedom of information request, we now know that there was never a time when the COVID injections could have ‘ended the pandemic’, and the ‘authorities’ knew this from the very beginning:
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