Frightened people will buy whatever COVID-19 lies they are told says FREDERICK FORSYTH
OVER a span of 60 years as a journalist, covering mainly general news in a dozen countries I became intrigued by a study of how humans are actually governed.
At the optimum end is the elective parliamentary democracy, which Britain once was. At the worst end is the ruthless dictatorship into which we are slowly converting, weirdly, with the shivering consent of an apparent majority of our people. In this transformation there are always five steps.
The community taking over all the arms of government is always numerically tiny. Stage two is the creation of a nationwide campaign of fear or terror. This pan-national fear was gifted to those now ruling us in the arrival from the Orient of a disease called Covid-19.
Though little understood at first, it has now become plain that Covid, though of blisteringly fast contagion, has a very low lethality rate, but too late.
Stage Three. When people are badly frightened they're extremely gullible. They will believe whatever they are told. We have all lived through seven months of unrelenting propaganda on radio, TV, speeches from on high and placards and the press to convince us that death stalks at our side. Figures are cooked, statistics cobbled, research stultified, to endorse the death-is-everywhere message.
Out of this comes Four - the assurance from the tiny group that they and only they can save us from a horrible fate, but only if we all abide by and obey a tidal wave of rules and regulations - no matter if these destroy the nation we once knew and loved. Fear, deliberately inspired fear, rules supreme.
There will always be dissenters, who must be dealt with, as I witnessed years ago in my year in East Berlin. We have just witnessed the imposition of Stage Five - creation of a sort of secret police to spy, pounce and punish. Back then it was estimated a full third of East Germans spied on and informed on neighbours for the Stasi. This Boris Johnson has now encouraged us to adopt as a lifestyle.
He has created the untrained army of Covid marshals and threatened that he will use the police and the army, created and sworn to protect us, to persecute us. That is why I can now no longer, ever again, under any circumstances, vote for him.
He has become, by his own volition, the obedient servant of a blitheringly incompetent corps of pseudo-scientists whose only record is of having got everything wrong and equally useless bureaucrats who have spent many billions of our money failing to set up even a moderately usable test-and-trace regime.
Thousands of offers of help from some of the most successful private-sector sources in Europe have been contemptuously rebuffed, often with their calls not even given the courtesy of an answer.
Of this be certain: unless our elected parliamentarians, who listen to their constituents, act and act fast the tyranny of our new and useless masters will never be broken. But broken it must be if we are ever to be a free people again.