Toxic Positivity in a Time of War
“They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.”
Jeremiah 6:14
“Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.”
Luke 6:25
No, I am not referring to Ukraine.
I will be honest. Ukraine is too faraway for me, too shadowed in American power-politics, for me to care.
Here is a statistic which should alarm you:
In three weeks of war with Russia, approximately 600 civilians have died, according to the UN. In the same time, there have been at least 1400 murders in South Africa.
Who is truly at war?
Why is Russia some global villain when your own governments can lock you up, mask your kids, show them porn, and force you to get injections you don’t need for a disease which barely exists?
What I am referring to in the above title, along with the biblical quotations, is this morbid acceptance we have all embraced of our governments declaring war on us, on normal life, on families, on religion, on health.
Two years ago, Trump allowed his covid czar, Dr Deborah Birx to stand up and lie through her teeth when she advised the world’s superpower to lockdown for fifteen days to flatten the curve.
This mass quarantine, as the great journalist El Gato Malo points out, was not simply an unprecedented step into the unknown for the sake of safety, these health overlords were deliberately, knowingly, defying centuries of wisdom with regards to disease.
There were no pandemic plans on earth in any government or WHO policy that called for mass quarantine. All prior policy was clear that it cannot work, that it will cause chaos, and that its harms will easily outweigh any benefits. The same goes for masks.
Stop allowing people to say, the government had to do something, as a kind of defence for governments shattering millions, billions, of lives. One man in Sweden demolished all of the China hoax mania of lockdowns. Anders Tegnell, who is not some great hero, simply said that lockdowns and masks were not based in any scientific policy and he was not going to experiment now. The results are in. Sweden has one of the lowest overall mortality rates in Europe. Every lockdown leader who is not on his knees apologising, every media outlet not declaring sorrow for their complicity, perpetuates a deceit on a level hitherto unknown in human history.
Recently, the New York Times almost stumbled into a kind of confession:
Did Omicron spread less in the parts of the U.S. where social distancing and masking were more common?
The answer is surprisingly unclear.
How can this be surprising to anybody? It is only surprising to the ignorant, to newspaper readers, to the ones who derive some kind of dopamine hit from people covering their faces, particularly kids.
Many of us fail to connect the dots, to see the true story lurking beneath the stories of masks, forced vaccination, rising fuel prices, increased work hours, increased cancer and drug addiction, collapse of cities and infrastructure, destruction of art, sprawling roadside litter, and the propagandization of youth by sexual degenerates.
We are not living in a time of peace. We are a people whose own leaders are at war with us.
As economist Sergio Valentini has pointed out, the word ‘lockdown’ was, before very recently, a prison term - used to describe when prisoners were punished by not allowing them to leave their cells.
Yet for us, it is now an accepted policy for governments to use for the sake of our health.
In Valentini’s piece, ‘False Peacemakers’, for the online magazine, IM-1776, (or which I have written here) he chillingly recounts a conversation with his grandfather regarding his wartime memories:
I personally asked my father who lived throughout WWII in Northern Italy – thus enduring not only the war, but also the German Nazi occupation and US-UK air bombing raids – about the conditions he lived in as a teenager, and he said to me that curfews in 1940s’ Italy were enforced only during night hours, and that the population was completely free during the daytime. My teenage son, in other words, had a worse deal in 2020 than my father who lived through WWII.
Valentini concludes: ‘If we are living ‘peaceful times’, it must be a strange kind of peace indeed.’
Peace, peace, where there is no peace.
It is no good in such times being cheerful all the time, pretending everything is fine.
We hear about toxic negativity often, but the reverse is probably more insidious and more of an obstacle to true joy and meaning.
GK Chesterton wrote that life is a miserable truce but a happy fight.
Do not be a false prophet of positive thinking. The war is raging and the stakes are nothing less than the eternal souls of everybody you love.
Günther Anders (1966):
“There are times, days, moments when it really seems impossible not to become hysterical—for the simple reason that we are asked to rebel against too many things at once.
They must have been happy times—I am no longer able to remember them—those when we could be outraged by one, only one infamy at a time; when we could still “get emotionally involved”.
And today? In the short period of time in which we flip through a newspaper, we are hit by genocide on the first page, calumny on the second, hypocrisy on the third, and so on.
—Today we talk about overstimulation; I’ve been writing about it for years, too. Today, however, the most frightening excess of stimuli is of a moral order, since we must rebel at the same time for Hiroshima, for Auschwitz, for Algeria, for Vietnam.
How difficult it is to impose: “Calm down!”, to force oneself to silence and engagement. To barely make a dent, perhaps, in the sum of the atrocities that might occur tomorrow.”
Wonderful insights, as always. Thanks for the great work. God's truth for all of life!