'Healthcare' Tyranny in South Africa

I often imagine how awful it would have been to live in medieval times, before government and corporate healthcare.

Imagine the horror of spending time in such a place as this, in Barcelona:

Or in this hospital, built in 1443 in France (with its own well and wine cellar):

Modern hospitals are obviously cleaner and more beautiful than this…

I am not suggesting that the past was a golden age. There was filth and poor hygiene for many, as there is now. There were no anaesthetics.

But, contrary to popular opinion, there was healthcare, and lifespans, especially after childhood, were reasonably long. The average peasant had a decent diet of milk, cheese, beer (without hops), and meat, and significantly more leisure time than the modern office-worker, whose leisure time is dominated by subscription streaming services.

Part of our great modern hubris is this belief that things like government/industrial healthcare (replete with some of the most awful architecture and hospital food imagineable) redeemed us from centuries of darkness and superstition.

Ask yourself, in the midst of the great leaps forward of weight-loss drugs, mRNA vaccines, and mental health awareness, do people around seem like they are getting healthier, happier, fitter, or thinner?

And, as I have explained before, most of the decrease in childhood mortality had nothing to do with healthcare (or vaccines) anyway, but rather engineered improvements in hygiene, after massive urbanization had created vast cities of slums and cholera.

And yet, in a regime whose self-justification is ‘health and safety’, it must necessarily follow that healthcare becomes a kind of religion.

Think of the Opening Ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics, during which the sacred NHS defeated Voldemort, in a bizarre choreography that honestly seemed like some kind of pre-programming for the events of 2020:

Think of the ritual clapping for healthcare workers during the ‘pandemic’; the images of nurses’ faces lined with mask indentations; or the videos of those same nurses dancing in the wards (during their… free time?)

Healthcare takes on this sacredness in our liberal age because any opposition to the structure of the regime can then be painted as anti-science, superstition, and hatred of the sick and the poor.

If the government and its corporate partners are the great benefactors and patrons of your very life, how dare you oppose them? And if lockdowns would save one granny, how dare you be so heartless as to go to the beach without a mask on?

Certainly never point out the death so much of this healthcare brings, the chronic sickness, the debt, the tax.

No, accept the ever-encroaching state, the leviathan that keeps the darkness at bay, love Big Brother, and slowly, slowly, watch your culture, your freedom, your ability to breathe, be squeezed…

This all serves as context for the latest political development in South Africa, where, mere weeks before a crucial national election, ANC leader and State President Cyril Ramaphosa signed into a law a revolution in South African healthcare, the National Health Insurance Act.

The law is murky and opaque, but it amounts to ever-increasing government domination of healthcare, as it seeks to become the single purchaser of all medical goods and services for all citizens, with the eventual abolition of private health insurance.

When he signed the bill, Ramaphosa said, “For those who would like to see their privileges continuing, sorry, you are on the wrong boat. The boat we are on is about equality… Believe me, we will have equality, whether people like it or not.”

Interestingly, military hospitals and healthcare for security services will be exempt from the NHI. Where does Ramaphisa get his healthcare?

Whilst it is easy to bemoan this legislation as being motivated by the ANC’s Marxist roots, or by crude electoral populism, it is important to note that there has been little pushback against the underlying aim of the revolution by private health insurers and providers.

Adrian Gore, of Discovery Health, responded to the NHI by saying, “Upfront it is important to state that we unequivocally support universal health coverage and believe that a workable NHI is central to achieving this. However, in its current form, the NHI Act is not feasible as it rules out private sector collaboration.”

For years he dithered on the issue. Even now, he supports it in principle. All of these executives are deeply intertwined with the state and with NGOs around the world. Their aim is not freedom, or your health; no, it is a seat at the table and a share of the profits.

But should anybody be surprised considering the world in which Gore operates:

This is of a piece with the origins of the law. For would the likes of Gore ever muster the principles or courage to defy the global NGO behemoth?

Mundel is a South African and a former Pfizer executive. The CEO of the entire Gates Foundation is also a white South African, a former UN apparatchik called Mark Suzman.

And then there is this confirmed leak of a draft NHI bill, via Wikileaks:

Why the strong links between South Africa and the likes of the Gates Foundation?

It is because South Africa remains the laboratory of a multinational regime, a regime which is neither communist nor capitalist (like the ANC), but managerial and bureaucratic, exercising a power that depends on an alliance between elites and the masses who have been conditioned to rely on and be satisfied with crumbs from their table.

The opposition in this arrangement is ‘the aristocratic middle’, those who are neither interested in being grey bureaucrats in the machine or dependent on that machine for their identities and livelihoods; in other words, the enemies of the permanent revolution, a revolution aptly described by French political theorist, Bertrand de Jouvenel in his book On Power:

Where will it all end? In the destruction of all other command for the benefit of one alone - that of the state. In each man's absolute freedom from every family and social authority, a freedom the price of which is complete submission to the state. In the complete equality as between themselves of all citizens, paid for by their equal abasement before the power of their absolute master - the state. In the disappearance of every constraint which does not emanate from the state, and in the denial of every pre-eminence which is not approved by the state. In a word, it ends in the atomization of society, and in the rupture of every private tie linking man and man, whose only bond is now their common bondage to the state. The extremes of individualism and socialism meet: that was their predestined course.

Our enemies are not simply ‘the communists’ or the African nationalists - it is a global regime made up of managers whose reason for being is to manage, to consolidate, to attack rival centres of power, and thus to attack freedom, health, and endeavour, until the world is one gigantic Human Resources department, where even the carbon in your body is regulated.

The promise of ‘universal healthcare’ provided by the mass state is an important weapon for this revolution, as is the promise of free education as passage into the middle classes.

It is no wonder then that Ramaphosa also recently signed a major education bill, that will strip schools’ governing bodies of their right to set admission and language policies, while also seeking to regulate home-schooling.

Private education, like private health, is an aristocratic ‘castle’ that must be sacked.

As is land ownership and private farming.

The Expropriation Bill has also recently passed through South Africa’s dual houses of Parliament, and now only awaits the presidential signature, which would allow land to be expropriated by the government without any compensation, if deemed to be in the national interest.

It is important to note that the ANC’s recent strength in public polling began to take a dive immediately after the NHI was signed into law. Are their supporters who are on medical aid jumping ship?

But it is also important to note that this loss of support would go either to Jacob Zuma’s MK Party, whose manifesto is virtually identical to that of the EFF’s (with fewer rainbows and more witchdoctors), or to the opposition party, the DA, whose fervour for vaccinations and sex change pride outmatches anybody.

This DA can best be summed up by the fact that they want to replace BEE legislation with… UN Sustainability Goals…

No political party, no state mechanism, can provide the way out.

In the midst of so much ugliness, the ‘aristocrats’ will need to become ‘creators’ again.

Revenge of the Aristocrats