The Cone of Silence

Some years back, there was an unusual film.  There was no dialogue.  In a three-hour movie.  It was called Into Great Silence, a portrayal of the monks of the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps.  A beautiful film about transcendence and about extraordinary men who give their lives, still, for God, in extraordinary and counter-cultural ways.  The only thing missing was great lines …

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Great_Silence

Those who attended a Christian liturgy this Good Friday just passed must have noticed the silence experienced after the veneration of the Cross and Communion.  Worshippers on this most solemn of days were requested – sad that they needed to be requested – to leave the church in silence.  Which we did.

Such silence commemorated the great silence of Golgotha on the first Good Friday.  The silence that followed the crucifixion of the three “criminals” on Calvary.  As the body of The Christ was removed from that Cross and placed by Joseph of Arimathea in the tomb nearby.  Then the silence of Easter Sunday morn.  Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ portrayed a silent family in Nazareth.

Silence is golden, it was once said.  Mothers of readers of a certain age used to intone, “if you can’t say something nice about someone, say nothing”.  A great idea.  Those wonderful mothers could not possibly have anticipated our age of constant noise, insult and abuse.  With just about everyone armed with the megaphone of social media.  The platform that reduces us all to expressing anger at perfect (and imperfect) strangers.  This is the age of meaningless noise.

That great comedy of the 1960s, Get Smart, portrayed American spooks and their enemies as buffoons.  Don Adams, Ed Platt, Barbara Feldon and Bernie Kopell, entertained us with sharp wit, faux enmity and great one-liners.  They were all in it together, an accurate and ironic reflection of the emerging, modern American Deep State.  One of the great sight gags on Get Smart was “the cone of silence”, where the Chief and Agent 86 used to press a button that would release a device that would cover them and so ensure no one could hear what they what they were talking about.

Well, we have reached a stage in the degeneration of liberal democracy where there is an entirely new, and not so benign, cone of silence.  Not all silence is golden, these days.  Now silence is often deployed as an instrument of totalitarianism.  Silence has been weaponised.  It is deployed strategically.  See under cancel culture.

Jeffrey Tucker, oft quoted in these pages (with good reason), had this to say about the Trump download following his indictment on those “trumped up charges”:

When Donald Trump returned from his theatrical and ridiculous indictment on nothing in New York, he flew immediately back to Mar-a-Lago where he told his story to people gathered in a pastiche-baroque ballroom. He told of the fake news, the attempted impeachments for Russia and Ukraine, the plots and schemes, and onward to the fake ballots and the FBI raid on his home, and now this preposterous new thing. 

It was a solid narrative overall. But his story left out a hugely important detail. He said not one word about Covid lockdowns and Operation Warp Speed that was supposed to be the great fix for the virus but flopped. This was a rather important detail to leave out since it wrecked the economy, the Bill of Rights, education, and led to a massive demographic upheaval in addition to the continuing fallout in terms of culture, economics, and everything else. 

It also caused him to lose the presidency, whether because the shock resulted in mass demoralization (this was certainly not a path to making America great again) or because of the mail-in ballots made possible by Covid restrictions, or probably both. However you look at it, it was the most disastrous decision of his presidency or possibly any presidency in history. 

How in the world are we just supposed to pretend that this did not happen? And yet he is playing along simply because he does not want to admit error. 

https://brownstone.org/articles/dont-let-them-memory-hole-this/

There are many Covid-related silences:

·         The great Covid policy lies of omission, all of the things we were never told, things that decision-makers and other knew at the time;

·         The silence of governments and public health officials about alternate treatments during the plandemic;

·         The criminal silence and cover-ups of Big Pharma manufacturers and their various collaborators about vaccine harms during and after the clinical trials;

·         The silence in the media about the extent of Covid dissent, seen, for example in the near total non-reporting of a half-million (at least) strong mass of protesters in Canberra;

·         The silence of the churches and their leaders in the face of the State’s greatest attack on them in modern history;

·         The silence of the political left on the loss of freedoms during the fiasco;

·         The silencing by Big Tech of anything and anyone that questioned “the narrative”;

·         The post-Covid silence of the political class and the absence of an apology;

·         The silence of the voters in four post-Covid elections, voters who were happy to have Covid not even mentioned;

·         The “quietly dropped” Covid measures, despite the fact that the virus is still out there, now endemic;

·         The dead silence of the duped classes, the Covidiots, the mad vaxxers, too humiliated now even to whimper “what the heck?”

Let us explore some of these.  The silences have been both opportunistic and strategic.  They have been implemented by a broad range of bad actors.  They have taken on different forms.  They have been both planned in advance and have involved post-hoc cover-ups.

The great post-Covid Silence is something to behold.  It isn’t only a silence of embarrassed governments, though it is that.  It is strategic silence to bury the evil that men did.  Trump is but one example.  The great Covid silence implicates just about everyone.  Everyone has had a stake in going quietly.  If there is a Nuremberg Two, we might get caught!

As Tucker notes:

And yet hardly anyone wants to speak about the topic frankly. It is too upsetting. There is too much at stake. We cannot risk being canceled, the single greatest fear of every aspirational professional in today’s world. Plus too many powerful people were in on it and don’t want to admit it. It would appear that the whole subject is being memory-holed in ways of which they all approve. 

For nearly two years, or longer, respectable intellectuals knew not to dissent from the prevailing norms and challenge the whole machinery. This was true of Washington think tanks, which went on their merry way from March 2020 either celebrating the “public health response” or just remaining quiet. The same was true of the leadership of major political parties and third parties. 

Most religious leaders stayed quiet too, even as their doors were padlocked for as long as 2 holiday seasons. Civic organizations played along. If you thought that the job of the ACLU was to defend civil liberties, you were wrong: they one day decided that lockdowns, mandatory masks, and forced shots were essential to their mission. 

So many were compromised over 3 years. These same people now just want the whole subject to go away. 

We just want it to go away!  As Daniel Andrews said, Covid exceptionalism is over!  Just move on, y’all.  Memory-hole is a verb invented by George Orwell, we all know in which novel. 

Those familiar with James Thurber’s The Day the Dam Broke will know the story of an idiotic panic over something that didn’t happen in Columbus Ohio, that was then literally never spoken of again in the city.  The great run.  A local journalist admitted:

There was a silent agreement among us on the paper that the panic run was best forgotten (emphasis added).

https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2019/12/the-day-dam-broke.html

Just as with post-Covid.    

Silence from the media.  The Big Pharma criminals.  The sheepish vaccinated.  The politicians facing re-election.  Their opponents, with whom they have created a conspiracy of silence.  The university “experts” wheeled out to help the fear program.  If you don’t mention Covid, well, I won’t.  The sadly non-faceless bureaucrats who appeared daily on the airwaves.  The employees and contractors who knew it was a con but thought, hey, what the heck?  The mask wearing goons who roamed over the earth in silence.

I mentioned one of post-Covid’s most used terms, “quietly dropped”.  Another is “without explanation”.  And this doesn’t just cover unexplained excess deaths.  Stanford University has just announced the ending of vaccine mandates for on-campus students.  Tom Woods notes:

One thing the past few years has shown is that Stanford University is one of the most bizarre places in the United States.

But now it's just announced that as of Monday of next week, its Covid vaccine mandate will expire.

Just like that.

No explanation, and certainly no apology.

They ruined careers and lives and forced people to receive injections they neither needed nor wanted. This was all supposed to be because of the grave danger everyone faced, and which a "safe and effective" vaccine could eliminate.

So which part of this story is no longer true, or was never true in the first place? They're not even going to bother to tell us (emphasis added).

Much better for Stanford just to do it and not explain either “why now” or “why not before”.  Just like all the others who just suddenly end Covid policies and “move on”.  The WHO, governments, corporates, and the rest.  All Branch Covidians who inflicted all sorts of draconian, often spiteful, demands on their subjects, and who are now loudly silent.  Yes, you can hear the silence.

Then there is “quietly discontinued”.  Here is the Daily Mail:

The AstraZeneca Covid vaccine, linked to a very rare but serious side-effect, has been quietly discontinued from use in Australia (emphasis added).

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11935971/AstraZeneca-Covid-vaccine-no-longer-available-Australians-Coronavirus-jab-discontinued.html

What about “quietly shelved”, as noted by Nature?

The World Health Organization (WHO) has quietly shelved the second phase of its much-anticipated scientific investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00283-y

You might say that our basic human rights were “quietly shelved”.  There has been aa awful lot of “quietly” going on. 

The great Covid silence isn’t only silence about what idiots, what sheeple, we have been.  There is, too, a great silence about vaccine harms.  There is silence about lockdown harms.  About excess deaths.  About Covid treatments denied.  About ventilator deaths.  About mental health.  About suicides.  About the deaths of those wickedly denied treatments for Covid.

The cancelling search engines and Twitterers, with which we all go along, meekly.  They are all silencing dissent.  Silencing truth. 

They have erected a cone of silence.  Like the go-along-to-get-along Germans in the 1930s.  We have been no better.  Hitler had numbers in the 90 per cents at the end of the 1930s.  We re-elected Daniel Andrews, Mark McGowan and the Unspellable Premier in Queensland with thumping majorities.

Worse, we accept, no, we actually cheer on, those who continue to silence us.

Worse still, perhaps, is the Covid silence of the self-styled “public intellectuals”, those who strut the stage of public life and regularly inflict their brilliance upon us, on all sorts of subjects.  Their work is sometimes found in airport bookshops.  They feel that they can impose their wisdom on us any time.  Except now.  Naomi Wolf has spoken of this:

The staffers at the Brooklyn branch of McNally Jackson Bookstore, an independent bookstore which had for years been a stalwart outpost of free-thinking publishing, were still masked, against all reason. I walked in with some trepidation. 

Peacefully, faces covered, three years on, they stacked books on the shelves. 

I was astonished, as I wandered the well-stocked aisles. Independent bookstores usually reflect the burning issues in a culture at that given time. 

But — now — nothing.

It takes about two years to write a book, and about six months to publish one. It was surely time for the new important books from public intellectuals, about the world-historical years through which we had just lived, to appear.

But — no.

In the center of an altar to literate culture, it was as if the years 2020-2023 simply did not exist and had never existed.

This can’t be possible, I thought. This all — the “pandemic,” 
lockdowns, denial of education for children, forced masking, forced vaccinations, “mandates” — a crashed economy — globally — this all, as an aggregate, was of course the most important thing ever to have happened to us as a generation of intellectuals. 

I kept on searching the stacks. Nothing.

I checked the Top Ten Nonfiction Books in Time. 

None had to do with the pandemic policies or the “lockdowns” or the mandated mRNA injections into billions of humans.

I surveyed the lanes lined with books, perplexed and saddened. 

https://brownstone.org/articles/tragedy-of-brooklyn-literary-scene/

In other words, yet more silence, this time from those charged with, or who themselves assume, the task of chronicling the times. 

Silence has been turned into a lethal weapon.  The Covid silences killed people.  Many, many people.  And the silences took aim specifically at truth, silence’s new enemy.  Not quite the vision of the Grande Chartreuse monks.

There was a 2015 adaptation of JB Priestley’s 1940s play, An Inspector Calls?  It is an uncomfortable morality tale about how selfish actions can have evil, unintended consequences.  Priestley was a socialist and so his tale was aimed specifically at capitalists, he and many of his audiences thought.  But, really, his tale was about bad actors.  And what their actions beget.  It was a story of strategic silence and its discontents.  It ended in a girl’s suicide.  Priestley’s villains said, in turn, surely not I?  Their crime was not to speak up.  To resist the temptation to keep schtum.  To protect their reputations from scrutiny of their actions.

I wonder what Priestley would say about the great Covid silence.

Jeffrey Tucker notes:

This silent treatment is filtering down to every aspect of our lives and becoming entrenched in the political culture too.

Strategic silence for self-protection is now endemic.  It bespeaks a soulless, dystopian culture from which few of us have any idea how to escape.  Where self-interest trumps principle.  Silence now is not so golden.  Which of us would, upon reflection, wish that the Covid generation be remembered for … our baleful, cringing, embarrassed silence?  When we all conclude (as per Tucker):

We cannot risk being canceled, the single greatest fear of every aspirational professional in today’s world.

And so, silence …

Paul Collits

11 April 2023