Writers Abandon Their Role as Social Critics
1. Cognitive Dissonance and the 1918 Flu
In a recent interview with DRUTHERS magazine, author John C.A. Manley noted that he knows a number of Canadian authors who are writing novels, but any of them set in the present are pretending we live in a world where Covid-19 does not exist. This is their snivelling response to a pandemic that for multiple reasons has decimated our world, not least due to the Orwellian suppression of constitutional freedoms. It reminds me of Gina Kolata’s book on the 1918 Spanish Flu, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It, in which she tries to solve several mysteries about that flu that remain unsolved to this day. Kolata recalls historian Alfred W. Crosby’s attempts to research his own book on the Spanish Flu being met with a conspiracy of silence. Almost nothing had been written about a devastating pandemic that infected 500 million globally and killed between 20–50 million[1]—10 times more than Covid-19:
“Crosby, puzzling over the epidemic’s impact, went to the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature from 1919 to 1921 and counted the column inches devoted to the influenza epidemic as compared with other topics. There were, he wrote, 13 inches citing articles on baseball, 20 inches on Bolshevism, and 47 on Prohibition. Just 8 inches of citations referred to the flu… the flu was expunged from newspapers, magazines, textbooks, and society’s collective memory.”[2] (Just in case you thought the media’s fixation with trivialities and red herrings was a new or recent phenomenon.)
When Crosby examined the biographies of medical authorities who had been responsible for the government response to the 1918 flu, for example Dr. William Henry Welch, incredibly, he found often only a single line entry mentioning the pandemic.[3] And then just as now, the news media and politicians were worse than useless: “It was an affair that showed how scant knowledge and real fears can be magnified in a political arena,” writes Kolata, “transmogrifying into certainties that no scientist could defend and pronouncements that were based more hype than on fact. It eventually demonstrated the unerring ability of the press to ratchet coincidences into causal relationships and spark a panic.”[4]
What accounts for such a conspiracy of silence about a pandemic that killed as many as 50 million people? Well, for a start, medical incompetence and self-delusion. Remember, in 1918 science still lacked the tools to tease apart the constituents of the virus at a microscopic level. Yet that didn’t stop them from creating a “vaccine” for Spanish Flu even though they knew nothing about the virus. Oh, and we can thank medical authorities of 1918 for introducing the superstition of masking as a preventative to transmission. Except their masks were made mostly of cheesecloth, an even more porous material than today’s still-useless masks. In 100 years our medical authorities have learned nothing despite repeated studies showing little evidence of the benefits of masking.
As part of its research, the US Army in 1918–19 used healthy volunteers as test subjects, deliberately trying to infect them with the flu. “To be sure that the healthy man had had a full exposure to the sick man’s disease, the sick man was to exhale deeply while the healthy man drew the sick man’s breath directly into his own lungs. Finally, the flu victim coughed five times in the volunteer’s face,” writes Kolata. The result? “Not a single healthy man got the flu.”[5]
All of which only underlines a stark fact about viruses and pandemics: even with today’s advanced technologies, we are still essentially at their mercy. After tracking the efforts of several scientists in the decades since the Spanish Flu, Kolata concludes: “The mystery of the 1918 flu was beyond the powers of science and medicine to solve.”[6] This reminds me of Daniel Defoe’s similar conclusion, writing in A Journal of the Plague Year about the 1665 bubonic plague in London: “But from the whole I found that the nature of this contagion was such that it was impossible… to prevent its spreading from one to another by any human skill.”[7] Despite the outmoded 20th century progress narrative of “newer is always better” and the self-promoting rhetoric of science and medicine as an ever-upward trajectory, in the 21st century Defoe’s 17th century conclusion remains true.
For example, as more and more data is proving, the Covid-19 mRNA “vaccines” do not prevent either transmission or infection. And is a mild reduction in symptoms really worth the potential life-altering or fatal adverse reactions? Social distancing, masks, hand sanitizers and lockdowns have also proven statistically to make little or no difference. Just the same as killing all the cats and dogs in London in 1665, or burning bonfires of fragrant herbs, or firing off cannons in the streets of Philadelphia in 1793 to clear the air of “miasma” made no difference. Zero. There are some things science and medicine are powerless to prevent or ameliorate. We are in the hands of God and Nature.
So again, we have to ask: How is it that the entire medical profession refuses to shake off their blinders and see the light of day? A Midwestern Doctor writes on Substack of his colleagues that they often suffer from “medical blindness,” an inability to diagnose iatrogenically induced conditions such as vaccine injuries. What doctors don’t understand they often blame on the patient; for decades, those suffering from fibromyalgia—now a recognized condition—were told they had a psychiatric condition.
“Because of this medical blindness, it frequently results in patients being “gaslighted,” which is a terrible experience for them to endure… From an outside observer’s perspective, it seems absurd that someone could use their repeated unwillingness to recognize an injury as proof the injuries never occurred. However, from the doctor’s perspective, this is an internally consistent argument and because of that, they have no reason to question it… Blaming anxiety for an iatrogenic injury… is one of the most common tactics that has been done for centuries, but as time has moved forward… has gotten more sophisticated.”[8]
There’s a strong element of cognitive dissonance at work in the medical profession, says A Midwestern Doctor. “In medicine, I feel there are two major forms of cognitive dissonance that affect doctors. The investment they have made to become physicians and the unwillingness to believe they could have harmed a patient.”[9] That this doctor has to write under an anonymous pseudonym itself speaks volumes about the repressive state of 21st century medicine.
Which brings me to our dear ‘departed’ writers. Depending on which school of thought you subscribe to, you either see writers as social critics and defenders of free speech (surely in their own best interest), or as straightforward entertainers, as Lewis Mumford wrote in Technics and Civilization: “So important was the function of popular literature as escape that many modern psychologists have treated literature as a whole as a mere vehicle of withdrawal from the harsh realities of existence...”[10] Representing the former view, John Ralston Saul in Voltaire’s Bastards put it this way:
“The wordsmith—prophet, singer, poet, essayist, novelist—has always been either the catalyst of change or, inversely, the servant of established power. He breaks up the old formulas of wisdom or truth and thus frees the human imagination so that individuals can begin thinking of themselves and their society in new ways, which the writer must then express in new language.”[11]
Yet this is what he observes about modern writers—and this was already 30 years ago: “Most citizens still see our contemporary wordsmiths as an independent voice given more to criticizing the established powers than to praising them. And yet it is hard to think of another era when such a large percentage of the wordsmiths have been so cut off from general society and when language has been so powerless to communicate to the citizens the essence of what is happening around us and to us.”[12]
Part 2: Writers’ Union Unwilling to Defend Free Speech
This week I’ve decided to republish an article I originally released on my chameleonfire1 blog at WordPress on June 14, 2021, titled, “Writers’ Union of Canada Not Interested in Defending Charter Rights.”[13] This was in response to my attempt as a Union member to have a motion aired at the 2021 Annual General Meeting calling for a statement of solidarity with Canadians having their free speech censored online and at public rallies. My request was met with the utmost reluctance to even consider such a motion, and ultimately it was not aired at the AGM. Here is the majority of the original text:
George Gordon, Lord Byron. Ernest Hemingway. George Orwell. Samuel Beckett. Emma Goldman. What did these writers have in common? All of them risked their lives to fight for freedom. Byron fought with the Greeks in the war of independence from Turkish rule in the 1820s, also using a generous portion of his own wealth to fund their navy. Ernest Hemingway risked life and limb by volunteering for the Red Cross ambulance corps during World War I. George Orwell, determined to support the Spanish resistance to fascism during their Civil War, took a bullet in the neck for the cause. Samuel Beckett worked with the French Resistance fighting the Nazis during World War II, and was nearly caught by the Gestapo several times. Emma Goldman went to prison in 1917 in an attempt to prevent young men from entering the military in the biggest bloodbath in history.
Whatever we may believe about the lethality of coronavirus, the example of these courageous writers confronts us with some critical questions: Is it appropriate—for a virus with an average survival rate of 99.97%—to shut down not only the entire country but the Charter of Rights and Freedoms? What are WE prepared to do to preserve those rights? Remember the letter-writing campaigns for Amnesty International to help free political prisoners in other countries? Well, we’re ALL political prisoners now. Do we honestly believe it’s an appropriate response to send a SWAT team to shut down a Calgary church? Taser children for playing pond hockey? Fine dissenters thousands of dollars for exercising their Charter right to free speech in public? Prevent families from holding public funerals? To name only some of the abuses our governments have doled out in the name of “protecting” us. Remember: Just over a year ago, all that was being asked of us was a single, short-term voluntary quarantine lasting 90 days. Since then the totalitarian creep has become more evident by the day.
Why is it that not a single major writer in Canada has spoken out for the protection of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms? Why is it that the Writers’ Union has remained silent about these increasingly draconian restrictions? Do we as writers stand for freedom of expression or not? History teaches us that this kind of restriction of freedoms tends to move in only one direction: further and further away from what political philosopher Karl Popper described as “the open society” we’ve taken for granted in Canada until now. Two centuries ago, Thomas Paine warned: “The greatest tyrannies are always perpetuated in the name of the noblest causes.” Whether the excuse is coronavirus, terrorism, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (remember that debunked threat?) or anything else, the net effect is the same. Any excuse will do for the tyrant seeking total power. George Orwell summed up the principle of power politics: “… no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”
As early as July 2020 a coalition of 11 pro-democracy groups released an alarming report on the rollback of democratic protections under Covid measures, with 100 organizations as signatories. In its accompanying statement, “A Call to Defend Democracy,” the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) elaborated: “…even some democratically elected governments are fighting the pandemic by amassing emergency powers that restrict human rights and enhance state surveillance without regard to legal constraints, parliamentary oversight, or timeframes for the restoration of constitutional order…”[14] etc. (Emphasis mine.)
It pains me deeply to have to say that if there are freedom leaders in our country right now, clearly it’s not our writers, with a few notable exceptions. The true Canadian heroes today are the whistleblower nurses, doctors, emergency medical personnel and police who have formed associations such as Police on Guard for Thee, [15] Canadian Frontline Nurses, [16] Canadian Physicians for Science and Truth [17] and others. These courageous souls are prepared to risk their careers in order to speak truth to power and defend the Canadian tradition of a constitutional democracy. Are today’s Canadian writers singularly lacking in such backbone? History, sadly, is likely to record just such a verdict.
Thus, I offer as a motion for consideration at the AGM the following:
That the Writers’ Union of Canada fully supports Canadians’ rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and condemns any official action that violates this constitution in the name of Covid rules and regulations; and that we will support in principle any advocate who is prepared to fight for these rights through lawful, peaceful means.
Sincerely,
Sean Arthur Joyce
WRITERS’ UNION RESPONSE:
Dear Mr. Joyce,
National Council discussed your email and your attached letter and has decided this is not a matter for the Writers’ Union of Canada. You are welcome to contact the Union on future matters directly pertaining to writers and writing in Canada.
My response via email came in one word: “Pathetic.”
MAY 2022 UPDATE: Given the Cone of Silence that has descended over the entire writing community in Canada, what can we expect next? A McCarthy-style witch-hunt that results in writers being blackballed, as many Hollywood scriptwriters were, having to write under pseudonyms in order to pay the rent? Though these days a more passive-aggressive approach would likely be used, refusing grant applications and literary submissions. Canadian writers are overwhelmingly dependent on federal and provincial government grants, since only what I call the One Percent of internationally known authors can actually earn a living by their writing alone. So it doesn’t surprise me they’re lining up behind the government’s shutdown of free speech. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
That said, we can be grateful to those lonely souls writing in the night of Covid darkness with the courage to say what needs to be said, to be the one who shouts that the Prime Minister has no clothes. Here’s a good place to start with a reading list of such authors; note however that most of these writers are not ‘literary’ authors. Because the list is so embarrassingly short I include American writers; please let me know if I’ve missed anyone:
• Much Ado About Corona by John C.A. Manley (CDN fiction)
• My Choice: The Ethical Case Against Covid-19 Vaccine Mandates by Dr. Julie Ponesse (CDN nonfiction)
• Autopsy of a Pandemic by Julius Ruechel (CDN nonfiction)
• Dispatches from the Vaccine Wars by Dr. Chris Shaw (CDN nonfiction)
• Words from the Dead: Relevant Readings in the Covid Age by Sean Arthur Joyce (CDN nonfiction)
• Diary of a Pandemic Year by Sean Arthur Joyce (CDN poetry)
• United States of Fear by Dr. Mark McDonald (US nonfiction)
• The Truth About COVID-19 by Ronnie Cummins and Dr. Joseph Mercola (US nonfiction)
• The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (US nonfiction)
• The Courage to Face Covid-19 by Dr. Peter McCullough and John Leake (US nonfiction, new title)
[1] “1918 Pandemic (H1N1 virus),” US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, estimates 50 million dead: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-pandemic-h1n1.html The US Sun estimates a death toll of between 20–50 million: https://www.the-sun.com/news/184/spanish-flu-pandemic-1918-death-toll/
[2] Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, New York, 1999 (2000 hardcover ed.), p. 52.
[3] Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It, ibid., p. 51.
[4] Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It, ibid., pp. 122–23.
[5] Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It, ibid., p. 58.
[6] Gina Kolata, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It, ibid., p. 65.
[7] Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year, Sea Wolf Press edition, 2020, p. 176.
[8] “Why Do Doctors Close Their Eyes to Medical Injuries?” A Midwestern Doctor, Substack, May 7, 2022:
[9] “Why Do Doctors Close Their Eyes to Medical Injuries?” A Midwestern Doctor, Substack, May 7, 2022.
[10] Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, Harcourt, Brace & World Inc., 1934 (First Harbinger Books ed., 1963), pp. 314–15.
[11] John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards—The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Penguin Books Canada, Toronto, 1992, p. 537.
[12] John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards—The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Penguin Books Canada, Toronto, 1992, p. 538.
[14] “Global Democracy and Covid-10: Upgrading International Support,” Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), July 15, 2020, Stockholm, Sweden: https://www.idea.int/news-media/news/new-report-covid-19-and-democracy-calls-urgent-measures-governments-and-civil
[15] Police on Guard for Thee:
https://policeonguard.ca
[16] Canadian Frontline Nurses:
https://www.canadianfrontlinenurses.ca
[17] Declaration of Canadian Physicians for Science and Truth:
https://canadianphysicians.org
Great article! Unbelievable that the Canadian writers union told you it’s not a matter pertaining to them and that you could contact them about matters directly related to writers and writing. Thanks for sharing this!
What a shame the the MSM are dependant on government handouts (bribes) to be able to survive and now are joined by the previously brave observers of the human condition in taking back-handers! All attempts at reasonable and well reasoned appeals are given short shrift; but what's the alternative? Surely not compliance! It seems that the general intelligence of the majority of humanity has taken a steep dive from Tweedledum to Tweedledummer!