OPINION
NEW ZEALAND DOC
Philadelphia-born psychoanalyst, psychiatrist and author who emigrated to New Zealand in 2006. He retired from psychiatric practice in 2021, refusing to be inoculated, after working in the public sector in New Zealand.
Yesterday I decided to break routine and take a trip along the coast northwards, outside the clutches of the bureaucratic matrix that is Wellington, once comedy central for the single source of truth, to listen to a little poetry and music.
The village I landed in is kinda nowhere, save for a beach the reveals the vastness of the Pacific, and the people who gathered in the converted church hall were content to do nothing but listen to the words and sounds. One of the poems and one of the piano compositions had emerged from the 2020 New Zealand lockdown, that insanely unjustifiable imprisonment of the healthy; but for the two hours of an afternoon, as the light slowly changed, and as the art came to an end, our small group of reverent listeners felt a little freedom from the fetters which, since 2020, seem merely to be lying in wait.
Notwithstanding the quiet joy of congregating and sharing, we could not help but be reminded, on this unusually sunny day, that just these kinds of events had, by government decree, been forbidden. Would the hammer come down again, and when, and would we all meekly accept another death blow to our intrinsic rights?
Nobody voiced these concerns but everybody was, I’m sure, aware — the crowd had that look I’ve come to be familiar with among the denizens of the ‘freedom movement’ here: colours, glow, geniality, saying nothing much in the aftermath of the performance because what, after all, can be said as we absorbed its nourishing repercussions?
When I strolled along the beach and peered out at the Pacific I was reminded of things maritime and of a visit I had made to a submarine moored in Philadelphia’s naval shipyard. As I descended into the bowels of the machine I was struck not only by the confined spaces, but by the realization of the reduction of the submarine’s inhabitants, whoever they may have been, to mere machines themselves serving the greater god of a strange mechanical beast. The purpose of every seaman, sleeping as they did in the narrowest of bunks, was geared to ensuring the efficient propulsion and mission of a metal monster. Once beneath the waves there was no way out, of course, and to think of trusting myself to such a contraption made me shudder. When I climbed out to land that day long ago, it was with a vastly more profound recognition of the insignificance of human life in relation to the compelling States that exploited it.
We are each of us born into a world whose roads, services, telecommunications, transport and comforts give the impression of a vast benign governing being, an organization of human accomplishment that might as well be God, for all we know or feel, holding our small souls in its embrace. We accept it, we trust implicitly and wordlessly in it — until something happens to jolt us out of our sleepy acquiescence.
Well, perhaps the only good arising from the devastating crisis that was — and is — the not-quite-finished covid psyops, has been the thunderous destruction of illusions. Those institutions we assumed were there to have our backs, the ones in place to safeguard our health, to protect the rule of law, to honour our inborn rights, to ensure the integrity of professional medical practice — they’ve all been exposed as criminally fraudulent.
For example, the few doctors here in New Zealand who took it upon themselves to practice in consonance with their professional principles are still be hounded and persecuted by a corrupt Medical Council. These colleagues who dared to treat patients suffering from covid and/or the Jab, who dared to advocate for informed consent, and who dared to remain faithful to the Hippocratic Oath they swore when they received their medical degrees — they have lost licences to practice and are being hauled before kangaroo court tribunals as if they were criminals.
You see, in these past few years we have been slowly conditioned to accept the once unthinkable: that natural immunity counts for nothing, that genetically-altering inoculations which prevent neither transmission nor infection of the pathogen it was manufactured to protect against are wonderful, and that sudden deaths in the young and excess deaths overall are just ordinary features of life, nothing here to see!
There are many ways to kill: slow or quick, silently, insidiously and by imperceptible degrees — or cataclysmically loud, as in open battle. And we are seeing all of them play out across our stricken globe.
Since 2020 we’ve been living under a kind of martial law in this war being waged against the better parts of humanity. Censorship, coercion and murder become the norm, whether the war has been declared or not, whether the war is prosecuted by armies on the killing fields of Europe and the Middle East or, vastly more cleverly, by an invisible hand pushing a phony pandemic to exterminate our rights, followed by an injection that maims and eliminates our very selves.
I am not sanguine about the nature of human nature, seeing the addiction to destruction as a fundamental aspect of our species. The emergent properties that characterize our institutions tend mainly in the direction of control. The quest for knowledge is mostly a disguised quest for power.
But there is human good, as the small gathering in a seaside village can confirm from time to time when poetry and music are in the air.
As we prepare for the next onslaught I think our greatest challenge will be to make comrades of those who in their naivete or ignorance or carelessness or, perhaps, their opportunism, accepted the impositions of the Real Enemy, that coterie of people who, embalmed by their riches and lust to rule, succeeded in shutting down a world while convincing those shut down to praise them — and to carry on their work with smug virtuousness.
How brilliant, how shrewd! But how devoid of anything to aspire to.
As I drove back along the ocean road yesterday I thought that going nowhere and doing nothing couldn’t be better, and I knew that we would have to fight tooth and nail to preserve this right. So be it, it’s up to us, it’s always been up to us, and the fight never ceases.