Conspirouettes…

…conspiracies & anti-conspiracies…

This is very much a work-in-progress to which many other aspects of this Covid epoch will be added and developed. It has no pretension to being finished, let alone “definitive”. Watch this space.

1: The automatic knee-jerk

“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought… Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?”

– George Orwell, 1984

The automatic knee-jerk reactive insult hurled at those who have the “arrogance” to question significant aspects of this Covid crisis as “conspiracy theorist!”, “conspiralooon!”, “anti-vaxxer!”, “Covid denier!” etc. ad nauseam has to be questioned as much as those who genuinely adhere to the simplistic idiocies immersed in conspiracy theories [ⁱ].

“Conspiracy theorist!” has become a put-down endlessly repeated, as an easy way of pushing away all questioning, a soothing mantra to push away the anxiety, to go back to sleep. One can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it – that is, with going through the complicated logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it, an examination of the contradictions of the facts, of how one selects the facts, of how they are interpreted. The concrete melts into an easy cliché and no one seems able to think of expressions that are not unearned received ideas, that are not a ready-made response to something that may well be far more nuanced than the usual either/or Manichean choices proffered by a servile media, or by their milieu. Such mechanization is essential for the repression of critique [^{ii] .}

Caricaturing someone’s position is often a way for people, fearful of their own doubts, to repress looking at the current forms of complicity between different sections of capital. This is because recognising the enormity of the lies and manipulations going on tends to release an uncontrollable anxiety, which also involves being seen as a tinfoil hat conspiraloon themselves. To even approach such questions is likely to make themselves vulnerable to the conformist unthinking contempt that so many have for those who dare question aspects of science, the automatic dismissal of them as being “anti-science” (and/or anti-vaxxer) – they fear being shoved into the same mad category as David Icke. So people repress and harden themselves, because the onslaughts of this epoch have already made them feel fragile and they don’t want to make themselves more vulnerable by exposing themselves to the easy put-downs of those they assume they’re closest to, such as their family, their milieu, their friends. Incapable of seeing something beyond the false choices of conspiracy “theories” v. anti-conspiracy ideologies, they claim themselves to be anti-ideological in their mostly unnuanced support for what science has become much in the same way as those who accept without question the necessity of the economy and of money also see themselves as anti-ideological when others critique the economy and money. Now no-one is immune from ideology, particularly in this unprecedentedly confusing epoch where those trying to make sense of things are confronted with aspects of life that they hadn’t had to think too much about before – it’s a question of striving to undermine the ideological aspects of oneself, the untested assumptions. However, the ideological core of anti-conspiracy theorists has similarities with conspiracy theorists insofar as they both express not a struggle for communication, but the need for separation, for a superior arrogance, an image of self-assured confidence involving putting down those who don’t accept their largely received and rigid ideas. The anti-conspiracy theorist may even go so far as to claim they’re critiquing hierarchy and capital but in the current context of Covid it’s pretty meaningless, largely abstract, a rejection of how hierarchy manifests itself in details. If the conspiracy theorist can’t see the wood for the trees, the anti-conspiracy theorist can’t see the trees for the wood.

In all this “reason” is instrumentalised, taking on a kind of blind positive obviousness: such an ideological transformation of rationality hides its historical choices and asserts itself as representing undeniable facts, an interpretation that doesn’t even seem to be an interpretation. It becomes an easy method of waving away all arguments, a method of repeating what society has proclaimed as being as taken-for-granted as the blueness of the sky without making the effort to get your head around what someone is in fact saying so as to contest it honestly. So, for instance, even the mere healthy suspicion about the safety of the vaccine is caricatured as “conspiracy theory” – “Israel’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign is meeting resistance due to conspiracy theories and fake news cropping up on Arabic-language social media, among other reasons…The main reason is fake news. They’re telling us that they want to wait and see what happens to the people who get inoculated,” said Fuad Abu Hamad, the director of the Clalit Health Services branch in Beit Safafa. “The rumors that two people died after receiving the vaccination didn’t help.” In fact, two people DID DIE after getting inoculated – whether this was due to the vaccine or not – so these were not “rumors”.

So if a criticism can’t be contested honestly it can only be utterly distorted to fit into something one has already found arguments against. This unthinking language is the ideological cage of the spectator who accepts without question being caged by the language of the consensus, the refuge of the ruling society. And acceptance of the language also becomes practical acceptance of the rules of this cage: follow the experts’ rules and you won’t get sick. When hierarchical power wants to avoid resorting to its material arms, it relies on dominant language, the language of domination, to guard the oppressive order. Concepts like “conspiracy theorist/conspiraloon/anti-vaxxer” become ‘streamlined’, rationalized, labor-saving manipulative tools. No need to try to think for oneself: thinking is thus reduced to the level of industrial processes, subjected to a tight schedule – a short cut which, in short, cuts off all chance of communication. As part of the reproduction of ideology, it contributes and intensifies divisions among those who potentially could contest this world, divisions reinforced because the working class has already been weakened by years and years of retreat from revolutionary perspectives.

2: In Germany

In Germany, during the first wave of the Coronavirus pandemic in March 2020, the Ministry of the Interior called in scientists from several research institutes and universities and instructed these scientific researchers to create a calculation model on the basis of which the authority of the Minister of the Interior would be able to justify the planning of “measures of a preventive and repressive nature”. In just four days, they developed in close coordination with the Ministry, the content of a document, which was declared secret, but was partly disseminated via various media in the following days. In this document, a “disaster scenario” was calculated, a so called “communication strategy” in which the authors pointed out how to induce a “shock effect” on the general public to make them accept repressive measures more easily. According to this document more than a million people in Germany could die of coronavirus if social life continued as before the pandemic. Apparently, emails between the Ministry and these scientists show the extent of the scientists’ collaboration and betrayal of the so called “autonomy of science” – which is, as we know, a myth anyway. See this in German – https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article225864597/Interner-E-Mail-Verkehr-Innenministerium-spannte-Wissenschaftler-ein.html and this in English – https://dialectical-delinquents.com/covid1984-latest/2021-2/february-2021/covid-19-strategy-paper-excerpts-translated/ [ⁱⁱⁱ].

In most of its aspects, this affair has been known by the general public in Germany since spring 2020 – without causing much of a scandal. Apparently the shock strategy worked so well that it was not dangerous for the German ruling class to reveal its fabricated nature later. It’s not hard to imagine that similar things have been going on in many other countries as well. The scientific councils that surround the various governments, many of whom have direct links with the pharmaceutical industry, have an intrinsic financial incentive to maximise the terror and to minimise basic cheap immune-boosting methods of resisting Covid, or other means of helping to cure people if they get it. And have a “scientific” ideology utterly complicit and compatible with the reduction of human beings to their use for the accumulation of capital.

3: Why mention this

Why mention this here? Because if you’d said this as a possibility back in March 2020 without the definite proof which was revealed later you would have been instantly dismissed as a conspiracy theorist, a nutter.

Apparently when people – about 10 years ago or so – started to point out the fact that Facebook and Google sell the information they get about what sites are being clicked on by whom or the comments and tastes of their customers, Facebook and Google hit back by calling these people “conspiracy theorists”. Since then it has become a dominant strategy. This is certainly not to deny that some people genuinely are ridiculous conspiracy theorists but this indicates how essential it is to be vigilant, discerning – to recognise the difference between a conspiracy theorist and a person pointing out basic mutual capitalist interests, whether those of a single business or state or national ruling class in the more general sense [^iv] or between different sections of capital usually seen as separate: in relation to Covid in particular, scientists and other “experts”.

The main philosophical critic of the “conspiracy theory of society” of the last century was Karl Popper who was possibly the most brilliant, if nauseating, exponent of positivism and liberalism during that epoch. In his 1963 book “Conjectures and Refutations” he wrote “The conspiracy theory of ignorance is fairly well known in its Marxian form as the conspiracy of a capitalist press that perverts and suppresses truth and fills the workers’ minds with false ideologies.”. There’s a certain irony in the fact that a version of his “critique” is now something that many people who claim to critique capitalism also espouse, albeit selectively. Popper saw this “conspiracy theory” in the Marxo-Hegelian dialectic. His was the philosophy of positivism, the cult of progress, of science, of open and pluralist democracy, of, in short, liberalism. This liberalism has now become neoliberalism – the vast imposture dominating materially and ideologically the world today: the “road to serfdom” and totalitarianism. Dominant mainstream perspectives now sometimes make a link between the critique of commodity science (based on the cult of exteriority, on the “objectivity” from which subjectivity has been expelled) and the current critique of the Covid-inspired pretext for social control as “conspiracy theory”. The end result of this dismissal of critique as “unscientific”or “anti-scientific” is the superficial and positivist glorification of appearances, seeking nothing beyond that which is endorsed by the ruling show backed by the reifiers of science and the media. But this time with the additional backing of “revolutionaries”.

When it comes from the Left or “libertarian-communists”, one can see the idiocy of this unthinking dismissal of any significant critique of the massive manipulation surrounding Covid: such logic, in another epoch, would have been enough to have made them dismiss Chomsky and Herman’s “Manufacturing Consent” or Debord’s “Commentaries on Society of the Spectacle” as conspiracy theory. There’s an irony in the fact that “consensus” is evoked as somehow “objective” to describe anyone who opposes the dominant consensus as a conspiracy nutter, whereas – when it comes to aspects of society that could be defined as “political” or “economic” or “military”, these libertarians are not at all complicit with the “consensus”. But because it’s scientists and doctors, they are somehow considered “objective”, despite their obvious interests either directly in the pharmaceutical industry &/or their ambitions to rise in the hierarchy of state advisers or just their fear of the consequences for not toeing the line [^{iv b}]. Politicians and the military have an interest in manipulating submission (in particular, via the media) but any critique of scientists and doctors outside of a rather obvious critique of the more modern developments in food-as-commodity production and distribution (the capitalist food industry) is reduced to purely subjective opinion at best. And the relatively small number of dissident scientists and doctors (especially in the anglophone world) have to be invariably associated with the Right, even when they’re not, and thus are claimed to have a secret agenda, even when they don’t. Apparently it’s the dissidents who are conspiring against the “objective truth”. These “libertarians” thus create a toxic atmosphere that automatically represses, censors and self-censors in advance any nuanced but fundamental critique as unscientific or loony-cum-conspiracist. Any little deviation from mainstream “logic” nowadays, to any critique of the vaccinations programme or of masks or of other aspects of this crisis are manipulatively linked to the miserable ideological form of such criticisms by the Right. Nowadays much of the so-called “libertarian” milieu adopts a classic amalgam technique, previously associated with Stalinism and other brands of Leninism, by attributing a “guilt-by-association” to critiques that have nothing to do with the so-called “libertarian” Right.

The term “conspiracy” evokes images of men in pointy tinfoil hats whispering to each other in dark and dank cellars. The dark web [^v ] is the modern equivalent of all that, but somehow the image of “conspiracy” still conjures up something rather cartoonish and absurd. But you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to recognise that the ruling class and those high-ups who identify with and see their interests in defending them, do not invariably make public their discourse and strategies, however much they pretend to be “transparent” (no more than their rivals for power, whether it be in the official opposition, rival states or rival would-be states). For instance, the Israeli state has kept secret most of its contract with Pfizer.

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to recognise that the state almost invariably takes advantage of crises that happen unintentionally but indirectly as a result of the logic of their political-economy in order to impose and reinforce social control. As Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff, said in 2008 “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. I mean, it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” Or as the foremost ideologist of neoliberalism, Milton Friedman, said, “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable”. Of course the fact that the rulers or someone else benefits from an event doesn’t automatically mean they must have caused it.

Usually capitalism “conspires” at a very different level from that which classical simplistic conspiracy theorists expound. For one thing, often the information is, as they say, “hidden in plain view”, like Edgar Allen Poe’s “Purloined Letter”. And nor is it really useful to research endlessly the possible events and evidence that aim, but are almost never able, to prove such things. We have to deal with how the state uses these things. But for those who are into it, conspiracy ideology becomes a strategy which mediates all of reality, where secrets are wrapped in a nebulous environment that seems to bring the mundane to life. “Facts are relevant only as details in the landscape which jive or don’t jive with what the believer wants to see…. Conspiracy ideology does not set out to demonstrate the real motive forces behind human practice (including the actual role, if any, of conspiracies within the development of events), but rather takes the conspiracy as beginning and end, the totality of its substance”. (Chris Shutes, “Two Local Chapters In The Spectacle of Decomposition”)

Conspiracy “theory” is usually an obsession which aims to sell the “theorist” as a particularly lucid opponent of political intrigue. And, as a possessor of esoteric knowledge, feel they’re making themselves especially interesting and unique for being able to propound their “secret facts”. Whereas in reality, it’s just a grandiose internet-fueled political version of what used to be seen as petty gossip. Substitute “Jerry’s sleeping with his ex-wife’s girlfriend” with “Xi Jinping hates Zhou Xianwang because…”. In the past the largest section of society objectively reduced to being spectators of history – women – often resorted to gossip as a form of manipulation substituting for direct ability to influence events (this is not to be moralistic by implying that gossip is worse than other consolations for being reduced to a spectator). But nowadays there are many who essentially remain spectators who feel that they overcome their separation from history by spreading conspiracy “theories”. And of course such pretension to something deemed powerful compensates for the fact that we live in a world which previously had far more extensive daily direct forms of communities of class struggle which were genuine expressions of the power of resistance in a far greater practical way than the simplistic reductionism of conspiracy theories. And compensates for an inability and unwillingness to strive to understand what contributed to the defeat of these struggles, defeats which are the basis for our current impotence and impasse. Conspiracy theory becomes a shortcut version of “critique” that ignores a genuine critique of the hard-to-see contradictions of hierarchical social relations and their history.

In many ways, conspiracy ideology is a reflection in ideas of commodity production: each new detail at once creates the need for more details and confirms the value of all previous investigation (just as in commodity production, each new product at once creates the need for more commodities and confirms the value of all previous commodity production). Each detail is a commodity in and of itself. The goal – discovery – is always a letdown, a pageant of bureaucratic tedium. The process is everything. And it remains an interpretation that leaves you passive in relation to what you think you have revealed. After all, if, in the eyes of the conspiracy theorist, the ruling society can conspire at such a delirious level it’s obvious we are impotent to change anything. ^[vi]

“Conspiracy theories offer us a false target, a distraction. The remedy cannot be to expose and take down those who have foisted these trends upon us. Of course, there are many bad actors in our world, remorseless people committing heinous acts. But have they created the system and the mythology of Separation, or do they merely take advantage of it? Certainly such people should be stopped, but if that is all we do, and leave unchanged the conditions that breed them, we will fight an endless war. Just as in bioterrain theory germs are symptoms and exploiters of diseased tissue, so also are conspiratorial cabals symptoms and exploiters of a diseased society: a society poisoned by the mentality of war, fear, separation, and control.” – Charles Eisenstein, The Conspiracy Myth.

Nevertheless, given the massive distortions and contradictions even amongst experts about everything surrounding this epidemic, it’s almost inevitable that people speculate about what they conveniently give massive publicity to, what is referred to only fleetingly, what they’re hiding and how much has been deliberately allowed to happen. Only those utterly credulous and compliant, those submissive to the authority of experts even if these experts are as consistent as an alcoholic on speed trying to walk a straight line, would repress any sense of doubt or skepticism.

You need to be very discerning not to take sides between conspiracy theories and anti-conspiracy theories, to try to make sides. Clarity demands steering a winding path between the frying pan of “conspiracy theory” and the fire of “anti-conspiracy theory” ideologies. Two ideologies, each containing a partially true critique, including critiques of each other, fall into various forms of reductionism, losing a striving for some attempt at a coherent unity of historical thought but instead setting themselves up as an ideological authority in competition with each other. In an age of confusion and uncertainty, “conspiracy theory” and “anti-conspiracy theory” function like other forms of dogma – as a way of affirming a fixed idea that seems to rise above the turmoil of confusion. But each dismisses what is true in the other and doesn’t question what is false in themselves. In a world that’s utterly insecure, those on the absolute margin of existence seek out fixed certainties that substitute for confronting the complexity of this increasingly chaotic world, that substitute for a more open ‘nuanced’ attitude towards people and ideas. If one were to follow conspiracy “theory” routes one would end up constantly researching – and often twisting – evidence with the sole aim of proving something that’s largely impossible to prove without having direct access to the hidden secrets at the centre of Power, something that would take a successful revolution to achieve (even now, some classified state secrets remain secret despite 30-year or 50-year or 70-year rules before being released). And almost invariably this would involve ignoring any evidence that may conflict with the conspiracy ideology: having decided dogmatically on the fact that a situation is a conspiracy, it would grate and be inconvenient to look at anything that might run counter to such a possibility. And likewise the opposite: anti-conspiracy ideologists ignore any evidence that may conflict with the anti-conspiracy ideology. Having decided dogmatically on the fact that a situation is not at all indicative of elements of a conspiracy in the slightest, it would grate and be inconvenient to look at anything that might run counter to such a possibility. Ideology unchallenged within oneself allows for a smooth and easy interpretation that isn’t compatible with a difficult struggle for the complex truth.

4: The Chinese origin

The Chinese origin of Covid is a good example of how conspiracy theorists and anti-conspiracy theorists relate to aspects of Covid.

Firstly, it’s necessary to be aware that the Chinese state deliberately destroyed evidence concerning Covid’s origins.

On 27^th December 2019 a Chinese lab found the new virus and then hid the COVID-19 genome sequence test result for 14 days: “Upon testing, a lab in Guangzhou found out that the genome sequence of the new virus was 87 percent similar to Bat SARS-like coronavirus. The lab shared the results with the China Institute of Pathogen Biology and Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention on 27^th of December. However, the National Health Commission issued a new regulation banning all the labs from sharing and releasing their test results in early January. China only allowed the release of the genome sequence of COVID-19 to the World Health Authority (WHO) on 11 January, two weeks after they got hold of the result.” A report about this on 3/3/20 was censored by the state, surprise surprise (see also this).

Subsequent events can be summed up like this:

The state began censorship of information about it shortly afterwards (end of December 2019). On 7^th January 2020 Xi Jinping admitted privately the severity of the virus : “… during a speech Xi delivered February 3, which was published by state media on Saturday [15^th February 202], he said he gave instructions on fighting the virus as early as January 7. It was not until late January that officials said the virus could spread between humans and public alarm began to rise.”

The WHO were informed on 11^th January 2020.

But it wasn’t until 22^nd January 2020 that Xi made a clear request that Hubei province impose control: “On January 22, in light of the epidemic’s rapid spread and the challenges of prevention and control, I made a clear request that Hubei province implement comprehensive and stringent controls over the outflow of people.” (here again).

Yet in early February Xi warned officials that efforts to stop the virus could hurt “the economy”. That is, their economy; the need for money, which is the basic form of misery that capital has expanded to every single need, continues as before. What was feared for the ruling class was above all the Chinese economy’s competitive edge on its rivals. In other words, either through incompetence or through conscious policy, the virus spread or was allowed to spread.

As against the dominant story of its origins, it seems pretty likely that the virus did not start in Wuhan’s wet market. “Experts have ruled out the idea that the pathogen was concocted as a bioweapon. They agree that it began as a bat virus that probably evolved naturally in another mammal to become adept at infecting and killing humans. But so far, after months of concentrated research at sites and laboratories in China and elsewhere around the globe, no clear intermediary has come to light. The first three of Dr. Lucey’s eight questions center on the Wuhan wet market — a sprawling marketplace that sold fresh fish and meat before being shut down. It was initially viewed as the viral point of origin. That idea was quickly thrown into doubt when a study by Chinese scientists reported that roughly a third of the earliest hospitalized victims — including the first — had never visited the market. In a May blog, Dr. Lucey quoted the head of China’s Center for Disease Control as ruling it out as the pandemic’s place of origin. The market, the Chinese health official said, “is just another victim.”…no direct evidence has come to light suggesting that the coronavirus escaped from one of Wuhan’s labs….Finally, Dr. Lucey asks the W.H.O. team to learn more about China’s main influenza research lab, a high-security facility in Harbin, the capital of China’s northernmost province. In May, he notes, a Chinese paper in the journal Science reported that two virus samples from Wuhan were studied there in great detail early this year, including in a variety of animals….” (from a 10/7/20 article here). In fact, the first publicly stated suspicion backed by some kind of evidence that it came from a lab seems to have been as early as February 2020 (see this and this).

Moreover, this says “It can also be revealed the Australian government trained and funded a team of Chinese scientists who belong to a laboratory which went on to genetically modify deadly coronaviruses that could be transmitted from bats to humans and had no cure”. This confirms the support and co-funding of the Australian government and adds that the People’s Liberation Army had been doing secret classified animal experiments in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Despite this, it’s 99.9999999999% unlikely that the virus was deliberately allowed to escape this lab so as to infect the world (I’m never absolutist about anything other than the obvious). The conspiracy theories, such as those which say that it was a deliberate Malthusian attack on the human race manufactured in a Wuhan lab designed to reduce what is commonly assumed to be the “overpopulation” of the planet, don’t make sense, not least because there are far more efficient methods of killing off masses of people, methods already happening – nuclear power-induced cancer, mass starvation, TB, malaria, air pollution, horrible work conditions etc. For anti-semites, this lab was inevitably one financed by George Soros, because it’s clear that Soros’ clones hide under everyone’s bed ready to come out at night to infect them with any hangover or belly ache they find themselves waking up with, obviously caused by him.

However, the cock-up theory of history is often just as simplistic as conspiracy theories ^[vii] , insofar as it ignores how the state can turn an accident to its advantage by elements of Machiavellian manoeuvering. In this case, not just to give the state the image of subsequently being the saviour, giving it a pretext for a “benevolent” intensification of social control, but also to manipulate the means of control so as not to ruin their precious economy. Hence all the contradictory state exigencies: as a Weibo user said “What’s the point of such lockdown measures if we are still required to go back to the office to resume work, where we are vulnerable to infections and human transmissions” – here. This latter, whilst being a basic implicit critique of the contradictions of wage labour and exploitation and social control in this Covid-epoch, is nevertheless the most obvious one to make, which often ignores and even suppresses others equally important.

The WHO investigation into the origins found that it was “very unlikely” it came from a lab, although how they can say this given the massive restrictive limitations imposed on them (see this March 4th 2021 open letter calling for a full and unrestricted international forensic investigation into the origins of Covid: “we wish to raise public awareness of the fact that half of the joint team convened under that process is made of Chinese citizens whose scientific independence may be limited, that international members of the joint team had to rely on information the Chinese authorities chose to share with them, and that any joint team report must be approved by both the Chinese and international members of the joint team. We have therefore reached the conclusion that the joint team did not have the mandate, the independence, or the necessary accesses to carry out a full and unrestricted investigation into all the relevant SARS-CoV-2 origin hypotheses – whether natural spillover or laboratory/research-related incident”) and the fact that the Chinese state refused to hand over vital data, is at best a mystery based on nothing but a hunch (see also this). More likely is that the essentially Chinese-dominated investigation was heavily leant on by the Chinese bureaucracy to state this. Some scientists say that it is highly likely – 90% certain – that it came from a lab (see this interview and this one). According to this interview, the People´s Liberation Army took over the virology institute immediately after the outbreak.

Here is an article by the interviewee in this last video laying out his views in detail:

“The closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2 is a virus sampled by Chinese researchers from six miners infected while working in a bat-infested cave in southern China in 2012. These miners developed symptoms we now associate with Covid-19. Half of them died. These viral samples were then taken to the Wuhan Institute of Virology—the only facility in China that’s a biosafety Level 4 laboratory, the highest possible safety designation. The Level 4 designation is reserved for facilities dealing with the most dangerous pathogens. Wuhan is more than 1,000 miles north of Yunnan province, where the cave is located. If the virus jumped to humans through a series of human-animal encounters in the wild or in wet markets, as Beijing has claimed, we would likely have seen evidence of people being infected elsewhere in China before the Wuhan outbreak. We have not. The alternative explanation, a lab escape, is far more plausible. We know the Wuhan Institute of Virology was using controversial ‘gain of function’ techniques to make viruses more virulent for research purposes. A confidential 2018 State Department cable released this month highlighting the lab’s alarming safety record should heighten our concern. Suggesting that an outbreak of a deadly bat coronavirus coincidentally occurred near the only level 4 virology institute in all of China—which happened to be studying the closest known relative of that exact virus—strains credulity.” “Gain of function” is research that deliberately makes viruses found in nature more virulent, more infectious to humans, more contagious and potentially more deadly. There are several labs around the world conducting this research with the aim of learning how to avert or diminish damage caused by hypothetical future pandemics. Apparently, it is possible, perhaps likely, that as is the case with many other aspects of this pandemic, the “cure” inflicted on the world by that holy alliance of medical science and the state is worse than the threat from nature ever was, and the whole world has literally become an experiment gone wrong. Which shows that nothing was gained from any of the “gain of function” research conducted by the lab in terms of learning how to avert a pandemic caused by coronaviruses.

Given the fact that the doctor (Li Wenliang) who originally discovered this virus was arrested and accused of “rumour-mongering”, speculations that the Chinese bureaucracy intentionally wanted this virus to spread abound. Some suggested that the CCP, faced with the possibility of having this crisis undermine its own global bid for world market supremacy (the effect of the virus was initially to weaken Chinese capital) decided to let it develop in order to infect its competitors and maybe also to help suppress the threat of internal subversion perhaps triggered by the limited revolts in Hong Kong, and Wuhan itself. Whilst there are too many incalculable risks that makes it unlikely that the State would have proceeded in such a Machiavellian manner and implies that the State is omnipotent and invariably in control of forces that are often beyond its control, it’s worth noting that the Chinese economy is the only major economy to have achieved growth in 2020. However, far more likely is that the ideology of the omniscience of the Chinese state (by which they delude the Chinese masses and also partly themselves) meant that they had to repress Dr.Li Wenliang and probably let him die when he contracted the virus. And, though this is pure conjecture, perhaps conveniently blame the local bureaucracy in Wuhan of gross incompetence so as to get rid of rivals in the CCP’s internal battles.

However, conjecture is the only way this works – one endlessly speculates about this and that without ever being able to come to a conclusion let alone a practical use of a conclusion. Whilst such skepticism is healthy as compared to just accepting the dominant narrative, it’s very limited going down this road of hypothesis-fantasy. After all, it’s how the state actually uses this “crisis” that’s the most important not constantly trying to track down the manipulations and manoeuvres that seem to be behind it. An endless task that, as said in the 3rd paragraph above, “is a reflection in ideas of commodity production: each new detail at once creates the need for more details and confirms the value of all previous investigation”, though one can overstate this comparison. After all, since the whole of the situation over the last year or more has been permeated by mass manipulation on an unprecedented scale, uncovering aspects of these manipulations is essential as part of the project of providing evidence for this manipulation.

5: The apparently more obviously delerious “conspiracy theories”

The apparently more obviously delerious “conspiracy theories” are a mixture of half-truths and one-and-a-half-truths, partial truths distorted by lies and ideology.

The most obvious one is the idea of vaccinations introducing microchips into the body of the vaccinated.

Let’s look at the contradictions of what at first sight seems utterly absurd.

In December 2019 this article in a mainstream French TV news channel and online news site shows that in fact a vaccination tracking device under the skin was already starting to be developed a year ago . It’s probably the basis for the silly conspiracy theories being put out. Whilst certain totalitarian tendencies may well be planning to put such technology into operation, dependent on whether or not they could pass a law to make it legal and/or compulsory, but certainly they couldn’t do it now without taking the enormous, and very costly, risk of being discovered, costly in terms of mass submissive confidence in these would-be Mengeles:

“TOMORROW’S WORLD – Researchers have developed a technology which, thanks to an invisible tattoo embedded under the skin, makes it possible to display a person’s health record via the camera of a smartphone. Enough to provide doctors, especially in developing countries, with proof that the person has been vaccinated…Subcutaneous technological implants, used all over the world for livestock and pets, are starting to spread to humans, as in Sweden where several thousand people already use them as a key, train ticket or bank card. In the field of health, this time, a team of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced that they had developed a revolutionary process: instead of implanting an electronic chip between the index finger and the thumb, nanoparticles are injected under the skin via a special syringe. These nanoparticles have the particularity of emitting a fluorescent light imperceptible to the naked eye, but visible from the screen of a smartphone. Concretely, the idea is to establish the proof of the vaccine in the body itself, especially in developing countries where paper vaccination cards are often incorrect or incomplete and where electronic medical records do not exist. So far, the technology has only been tested in rats, but researchers hope to test it on humans in Africa within the next two years….Scientists have spent a lot of time finding components that are safe for the body, stable and able to last for years. The final recipe is composed of copper-based nanocrystals, called “quantum dots”, measuring 3.7 nanometers in diameter. These nanocrystals are then encapsulated in microparticles of 16 micrometers (1 micrometer equals one millionth of a meter…)…. The implantation, which is done with a special syringe with a patch of microneedles 1.5 millimeters in length, is almost painless. Once applied to the skin for two minutes, the microneedles dissolve and leave small points under the skin, distributed for example in the shape of a circle or a cross. They appear under the effect of a part of the light spectrum invisible to us, close to infrared. Through the camera of a modified smartphone, pointed at the skin, the circle or the cross appears fluorescent on the screen. This symbol fluoresces on the screen when you point the smartphone camera…Researchers want the measles vaccine to be injected at the same time as these small dots. Because of this, a doctor could check if the person has been vaccinated years later. The technique is believed to be more durable than permanent felt markers. In the report of their work, the scientists indicate that they simulated five years of exposure to the Sun during laboratory tests. Another advantage of this device is that it requires less technology than an iris scan or the maintenance of medical databases. …The limitation of the concept is that the technique will only be useful in identifying unvaccinated children if it becomes the exclusive tool used. Also, will people accept multiple markings under the skin for each vaccine? And what will happen to the dots when children’s bodies grow older? The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which funds this project, is currently conducting opinion polls in Kenya, Malawi and Bangladesh to determine whether people will be ready to embrace these microscopic quantum dots or prefer to stick to old vaccination cards.” ^[viii]

What is dumb about the conspiracy theorists use of this is the belief that “they” will automatically make a secret use of this technological advance. The chance of the state or private interests putting a tracking device or nanotechnological softeware into people’s bodies without their consent or knowledge would be a very dangerous game to play, given the chances of them being found out. And besides, the technological means of totalitarian social control do not necessitate such crudely underhand methods. Conspiracy theories at that level take a truth and develop it into an absurdity that then makes any critique of the true situation also seem absurd (to the point where it would be no surprise to find out that in fact sections of the ruling society put out mad versions of real “conspiracies” in order to tar the real with the same brush as the crazy). Like with individuals who persistently exaggerate and blow out of all proportion something true, one ends up thinking everything they say is bullshit, even if it’s not. “In a world which really is upside down, the true is a moment of the false.” said Debord in relation to dominant ideology, but it’s also true of much of supposed oppositional ideology also. Such a conspiracy theory distracts from the real dangers of the vaccines.

6: And then there’s QAnon

And then there’s QAnon. Nowadays in the United States this conspiracy movement is expressing itself in the most delerious manner, though I’ve even heard of equally insane theories coming from a mixture of Biblical references and ideas about extra-terrestrials. All indicative of the vast intensification of irrationality. QAnon denounces an alleged conspiracy by Satanist paedocriminals, which Donald Trump is (or was) allegedly fighting. This would be a joke if the far-right demonstrators who invaded the Capitol on 6th January had not included some of the main spokespersons of this movement, including Jake Angeli, known as QAnon Shaman, whose clown outfit and buffalo horns did little to conceal the supremacist and neo-Nazi tattoos with which he is covered.

The more capitalism hurtles the world towards the abyss, the more those who avoid striving to oppose the hierarchical separations that are at the base of the intensified destruction of life and sense succumb to a mixture of religious and sci-fi delusions that give them comfort in their acceptance of such separations. In the absence of much significant and explicitly conscious opposition aiming to arm itself with the development of clear ideas, mystical distractions fill the void. Conspiracy becomes a form of response to the loss of bearings, despair, anguish, and a channel for the anger that more and more oppressed people feel in the face of capitalism – a short-cut simplistic explanation to the ongoing catastrophe, in a situation where those at the margin of society are tossed from one mad drama to another, and yet have to face this feeling of being a powerless victim largely on their own. Conspiracy theory is a false exit from the struggle to find a common genuine “exit”, thriving on the ruins of the workers’ movement.

For the right, conspiracy theories function as a method of not looking at their own complicity in the miseries inflicted on humanity, as well as not looking at the structural systemic reasons for these miseries and the interaction between the two. Reducing the source of such miseries to individuals or little clandestine groups of individuals is their method of such an evasive mentality. But more of this in a later text, one that focuses more on the left v. right politics of confusion that pervades this Covid1984 epoch.

Added 1/8/21:

“A lie repeated 1000 times becomes a truth”

According to this, this sticker, amongst innumerable others, has been produced by a French extreme right wing group connected to QAnon, though the name “la rose blanche” (“The White Rose”) is the name of a group of students who resisted the Nazis between July 1942 and February 1943 in Germany, distributing dissident leaflets. The students wrote pacifist and anti-fascist slogans on the walls, collected bread for concentration camp inmates and looked after their families. The actions of the White Rose were taken as an example from January 1943 by intellectuals in southern Germany and Berlin. The line “A lie repeated 1000 times becomes a truth” is taken from Goebells.

I suspect that most people reproducing this sticker have no knowledge of what the group “the white rose” is nor the history of where the name was taken from. If this group is, as the article states, a group of Trump QAnon supporters it’s also indicative of how recuperative the Right have become: the sticker – without the Covid references – could have been produced by anarchists in previous epochs. It’s also indicative of how this epoch is confusing to almost everyone and that trying to untangle the massively proliferating mystifications, and trying to grasp why people are disseminating these mystifications, these half-truths and one and a half-truths is one of the tasks of those who want to stop the movement towards totalitarianism and generalised madness.

7: Some events around which elements of conspiracy definitely existed

Some events around which elements of conspiracy definitely existed:

The Zinoviev Letter – a successful attempt by sections of the UK secret service to prevent the election of a Labour government, back in 1924.

The American state version of the Gulf of Tonkin incident – which became a pretext for vastly expanding the Vietnam war – turned out to be a total lie, surprise surprise.

The bombing of a bank in Piazza Fontana in Italy in December 1969, blamed on anarchists, was a bombing initiated by a section of the state with the intention of repressing the social movements that erupted in 1969 in Italy.

The Falklands/Malvinas War: clearly allowed to happen. Even though Galtieri was sabre-rattling about it being Argentina’s possession, threatening to invade, a major UK battleship was withdrawn from the island giving him the green light to put his money where his mouth was. John Notts, the Minister of Defence, during an emergency debate in the House of Commons the day after the Argentinian occupation and shortly before the fleet headed across the Atlantic, said “If we were unprepared, how is it that from next Monday, at only a few days notice, the Royal Navy will put to sea in wartime order and with wartime stocks and weapons? …preparations have been in progress for several weeks.” (see Hansard for April 3rd 1982). The reasons for this? Thatcher, following massive opposition including riots in 50 towns and cities throughout mainly England the year before, was way down in the polls as a repetition of the riots were being predicted for the summer of ‘82. She clearly needed a massive boost in order to win the next election which she did, on the basis of national pride and her image as an Iron Lady who’d won a war, so as to subsequently take on the miners, something that had long been planned by the right-wing of the Tory Party.

There are undoubtedly others – maybe Saddam Hussein was given the green light to invade Kuwait, resulting in the 1991 Gulf War (amongst other obvious capitalist oil interests, it gave the world a post-cold war alternative to the bogeyman of “communism”). Maybe Pearl Harbour was allowed to happen (the evidence is contradictory on this one, though it obviously enabled Roosevelt to sell the idea of joining WWII to a formerly reluctant American population and allowed the US state to make its bid for world’s most powerful imperialist.). There’s plenty of evidence that the East German Rostock race riots of 1992 were encouraged by lack of police action – the cops were told to hold back from going in so that these riots could develop to a very vicious level.

“Watergate, COINTELPRO, Iran-Contra, Merck’s drug Vioxx, Ford’s exploding Pinto coverup, Lockheed-Martin’s bribery campaign, Bayer’s knowing sale of HIV-contaminated blood, and the Enron scandal demonstrate that conspiracies involving powerful elites do happen” – Charles Eisenstein, The Conspiracy Myth.

And there are doubtless others as well – the obvious one being the assassination of Kennedy ^[ix]. But also some aspects of the 1980s AIDS epidemic may be worth looking at ^[x].

Footnotes