Many of the tyrants who promoted the COVID madness have been begging for amnesty for some time, and we should only expect that their numbers will grow as more evidence surfaces.  

But we should make no mistake -- there needs to be a reckoning in the West when it comes to COVID.

I used to wonder as a child how extreme fanaticism, such as Nazism, could gain footing among any educated population.  I am now convinced that the internationally coordinated propaganda campaign around COVID that we all recently witnessed for nearly three years makes the Nazis look like amateurs.

Please don’t take this as a typical “this thing I don’t like is Nazism” kind of comparison, but rather, think honestly about this for a moment.  It took decades of propaganda to inflame the German people’s hatred of European Jews such that they’d become second-class citizens unworthy of the simplest of rights, such as dining in a public restaurant, and eventually unworthy of even receiving medical care. 

In a matter of only two years in the supposedly free West, we had mass swathes of people (or, at least the appearance of mass swathes of people on social media) openly wishing hardship and death upon their countrymen that simply chose not to inject a new, frantically concocted, unproven drug into their bodies to offset a risk that was and is, for the vast majority of people, scarcely more dangerous than the common cold or flu.  Not only did restaurants refuse service to these people as a matter of policy in places like New York City, but these people were fired from their jobs, and hospitals in some places began openly refusing life-saving services to patients if a particular individual had the audacity to not have goosestepped to the local pharmacy for not eins, but zwei doses of the new drug.

As with the Nazis, it doesn’t matter whether the majority of the population actually agreed with any of that, or whether the incredible visibility of an endless sea of propaganda posters and pamphlet circulars (the modern equivalent of which is Twitter and Facebook’s algorithmic bias) was just falsely presenting to the public that this was the case.  What matters is that the government, media, and corporate powers, in both cases, all acted as one symbiotic organ with a clear purpose and message designed to demonize anyone guilty of wrongthink and punish them for a lack of fealty to the ideological imperative.

The truth has only begun coming to light, and already it has all but buried the COVID narrative as it once stood, though a few remaining werewolves are still demanding that we mask up in supermarkets, and there are a few remaining policies which cling to the madness of the past, such as America’s refusing the top tennis player in the world entry into the country based upon his having not been injected with the COVID cartel’s preferred drug. 

But those in charge, particularly those who knowingly misled the public to generate unfounded fear and orchestrated what was arguably the greatest and most widespread policymaking calamity in human history, must be held accountable in the biggest, boldest, and most symbolic manner imaginable to assure the world that this will never happen again in the West.

What we need in order to assure that outcome is something to rival the Nuremberg Trials in scope and sensationalism.  Nuremberg was selected as the location for those trials because it was there where annual propaganda rallies were held and the sickness of Nazism began.  It was symbolic to have Nazism’s end take place at the site of its beginning. 

I’m hopeful that we will one day have the similarly symbolic Milan Trials to prosecute those government officials who orchestrated the lockdowns, school closures, and general human suffering that the West endured after the Lombardy region of Italy, where the city of Milan is located, followed China’s lockdown protocol without the slightest historical precedent suggesting any efficacy of the practice, and the rest of the West simply followed suit (for reasons that the Milan Trials might hopefully reveal).

Though China is likely the primary culprit in unleashing COVID upon the world, and it might be perhaps more appropriate to have these trials in Wuhan, it is difficult to imagine ways in which China's ruling Communist Party can be held to account for their obvious role in all of this, outside of an armed conflict in which we are victorious.  The Chinese clearly do not respect the international authority of the United States or other Western powers any more than they respect their own innocent and healthy citizens whom they are willing to incarcerate in their homes en masse by welding the doors to their homes shut, and they are clearly withdrawing from the international dialogue while signaling alliances with the West’s adversaries.  This withdrawal may be occurring less dramatically than Japan’s storming away from the League of Nations in 1933 when the League attempted to hold it accountable for invading Manchuria, but efforts to hold China accountable for the Wuhan virus have been similarly met with Chinese disregard.

Here's what is now supported by evidence as the likeliest series of events leading into the Western lockdowns, though only a year ago these would have been the ravings of a conspiracy theorist. 

The Chinese government conducted gain-of-function experimentation with bat coronaviruses in an American-funded lab in Wuhan, and this mutated virus either escaped or was purposefully released.  The communist Chinese government subsequently locked down areas affected by the outbreak while hiding the actual ravages of the virus and presented to the world the efficacy of lockdowns and the destruction of one’s own national economy in the interest of public health.

That the communist Chinese would do all of this out of desperation in order to jockey for a better economic position on the world stage would have shocked no one, even in early 2020.  But, prior to 2020, we in the West imagined ourselves to be citizens of nations freer than that. 

That fantasy crumbled in March of 2020, and Milan, Italy, was where it began.

Milan, a city of 1.2 million people, was the European ground zero for COVID lockdowns.  On March 8, 2020, the streets were silent in Milan.  Residents “woke up [that] Sunday to the news that it had been locked down by the Italian government in a bid to contain the coronavirus outbreak.”

Initially, it was just 16 million supposedly free citizens on lockdown in the Lombardy region of Italy.  By March 10, it was expanded to all 60 million Italians, becoming the “first democratic nation since World War II to announce a nationwide lockdown.” 

By March 14th, Spain was nationally locked down. By the 17th, so was France.  By the 23rd of March, both the U.K. and Germany were under national lockdown.   By April 1st, the majority of European countries were under national lockdown.  And, as we all know, the United States had already begun instituting localized lockdowns (based upon national guidance) so widely that, by mid-April, 300 million Americans (more than 90%) were living under some form of lockdown.

What too few know, however, is that the West had flung its citizens into liberty-strangling lockdowns far more readily than even Asia, despite the fact that there had never been any modern evidence that such interventions as lockdowns could contain a respiratory viral outbreak.

For example, some very early, more reliable data emerged from South Korea.  By March 27, the Center for Strategic International Studies was heralding its response, which included much coordination of health agencies and ample availability of testing, but the term “lockdown” which was being bandied about with increasing regularity in Western media didn’t appear.  Indeed, as the West was instituting nationalized lockdowns at breakneck speed, South Korea never did more than issuing national recommendations, much like Sweden did at the time, and as did Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.  In fact, few more than a handful of Asian nations had instituted national lockdowns by April 1, 2020.  By that same date, more than three in four European nations had indiscriminately locked down their entire nations. 

This South Korea data was discussed by Dr. David Katz in the New York Times on March 20 of 2020 as an appeal to not commit to lockdowns in the United States. He recognized that reports from South Korea showed that deaths were “mainly clustered among the elderly, those with significant chronic illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease, and those in both groups.”  Prophetically, he warned our nation of the dangers that laid ahead if we remained committed to the lockdown strategy in order to “flatten the curve” as had already, by that time, been prescribed by Dr. Anthony Fauci:

A pivot right now from trying to protect all people to focusing on the most vulnerable remains entirely plausible.  With each passing day, however, it becomes more difficult.  The path we are on may well lead to uncontained viral contagion and monumental collateral damage to our society and economy.

Indeed, monumental collateral damage has been inflicted upon society and the economy in these past three years, along with the effects of uncontained viral contagion.   Thankfully, we’ve reached a point where the former is discussed more commonly than the latter.

Lockdowns have been a disaster on a global scale, but there has never been any convincing evidence to substantiate their efficacy in the first place.  The sober, rational people who were saying that at the time were heavily censored by early April 2020, if not erased totally in the interest of promoting preferred digital propaganda of the government, media, and corporate interests. 

Why did Western nations commit to this unproven non-pharmaceutical intervention which stole irreplaceable time and experience from our children, destroyed countless small businesses while propping up corporate empires, commanded unprecedented powers for the government while stirring social unrest, and reshaped the balance of power between the citizen and the political class?  Why did they silence people who were speaking the truth?  Did they mean well and just get it wrong, or was there something more nefarious involved?

We need answers.  And we demand justice, which can only come from identifying and adequately punishing those involved.  That is the only way to ensure that nothing like the COVID madness we witnessed in 2020-2022 is ever inflicted upon the world again.

Image: Pietro Luca Cassarino, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 4.0