On Mass Deception and Tyranny
What does history tell us about mass hysteria and deception?
Yes it happens: the masses can be easily deceived and carried away with evil. Closely related to mass deception is mass hysteria. That these things happen – and far too often – is clear enough. Why they happen is another matter. There are various ways we can try to answer this.
One could come up with psychological explanations. One could look at the power of media and modern technology. One could examine history and see what it tells us. It will be that last means that I will run with here. But let me first explain what has led me to pen this piece.
I take it as more or less a truism that if you have not lived in Melbourne, Australia this year, you cannot fully comprehend just how bad things have been with our interminable lockdown. I have discussed this repeatedly, mentioning the economic devastation, the mental health spike, the growing numbers of those suiciding, etc.
But something keeps shocking me and puzzling me. Various polls and surveys keep informing us that many Victorians – sometimes even the majority – are fully supportive of Premier Dan Andrews. This in spite of the obvious fact that it is he who is directly responsible for our devastating second wave which has obliterated the state.
Because of his utter incompetence with the hotel quarantine fiasco, and his inability to get contact tracing right, we have been devastated here, not only with 800 dead Victorians, but 1200 jobs being lost every day, and who knows how many who have taken their own lives.
The worst and the longest lockdown madness in the world, and people still think Andrews is doing a great job? Really? There is no other way to explain this than mass deception or mass hysteria. Sure, Victoria may be the most leftist state in the nation, with far too many unionists, lefties, Labor Party hacks, and public sector workers who have no probs at all with what has been happening.
They are not the ones losing their jobs, their careers, and their livelihoods. It is the private sector with all the small business owners, retailers, hospitality industry workers, etc., who have borne the brunt of all this. But still, there are so many mindless wonders, Danbots, zombies, and sheeple here in Victoria. It really is mind-boggling!
Indeed, there is something very, very wrong with Victoria. In any other normal locality, the masses would have long ago risen up and revolted over the seven months of lockdown insanity, internment camp conditions, and this megalomaniac who is acting like dictator for life.
Ignorance and evil
But we find this happening often in history. On a much more sinister level, but still, not unparalleled, we think of how a civilised and democratic nation like Germany last century managed to see mass deception run amok, resulting in the Nazi menace unleashed on the world. How this occurred I discuss here: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2020/10/15/statism-and-crises-learning-from-20th-century-germany/
And, plenty of books and scholarly articles have been written to look at why this happened. Just how did the Germans fall so far, with so many ordinary citizens seemingly enthralled with Hitler and his grand plans? How could so many have just winked at the Holocaust?
Sure, many of them later claimed ignorance. ‘We did not know what was going on.’ ‘We were not aware of what was happening in the camps.’ Really. The putrid smoke rising up from the chimneys every day gave nothing away? All the boxcars full of screaming victims did not provide any clues?
Whether or not most German civilians really did know what was going on, when the Allies entered Germany, defeated Hitler, and liberated the concentration camps, one of the first things they did was force ordinary Germans to go check out the camps for themselves.
Consider these shocking paragraphs from the 1966 book, The Last Battle by Cornelius Ryan:
In recent days, what would prove to be the greatest hidden horror of the Third Reich had begun to be uncovered. All along the front in this tremendous week of advance, men had recoiled in shock and revulsion as they encountered Hitler’s concentration camps, their hundreds of thousands of inmates, and the evidence of their millions of dead.
Battle-hardened soldiers could scarcely believe what they were seeing as scores of camps and prisons fell into their hands. Twenty years later men would remember those scenes with grim anger: the emaciated walking skeletons who tottered toward them, their will to survive the only possession they had saved from the Nazi regime; the mass graves, pits and trenches; the lines of crematoriums filled with charred bones, mute and awful testimony to the systematic mass extermination of “political prisoners”—who had been put to death, as one Buchenwald guard explained, because “they were only Jews.”
Troops found gas chambers, set up like shower rooms except that cyanide gas instead of water sprayed from the nozzles. In the Buchenwald commandant’s home there were lampshades made from human skin. The commandant’s wife, Ilse Koch, had book covers and gloves made from the flesh of inmates; two human heads, shrunken and stuffed, were displayed on small wooden stands. There were warehouses full of shoes, clothing, artificial limbs, dentures and eyeglasses—sorted and numbered with detached and methodical efficiency. Gold had been removed from the dentures and forwarded to the Reich finance ministry.
How many had been exterminated? In the first shock of discovery no one could even estimate. But it was clear as reports came in from all along the front that the total would be astronomical. As to who the victims were, that was only too obvious. They were, by the Third Reich’s definition, the “non-Aryans,” the “culture-tainting inferiors,” peoples of a dozen nations and of a dozen faiths, but predominantly Jews. Among them were Poles, Frenchmen, Czechs, Dutchmen, Norwegians, Russians, Germans. In history’s most diabolical mass murder, they had been slain in a variety of unnatural ways. Some were used as guinea pigs in laboratory experiments. Thousands were shot, poisoned, hanged or gassed; others were simply allowed to starve to death.
In the camp at Ohrdruf, overrun by the U.S. Third Army on April 12, General George S. Patton, one of the U.S. Army’s most hard-bitten officers, walked through the death houses, then turned away, his face wet with tears, and was uncontrollably ill. The next day Patton ordered the population of a nearby village, whose inhabitants claimed ignorance of the situation within the camp, to view it for themselves; those who hung back were escorted at rifle point. The following morning the mayor of the village and his wife hanged themselves.
Along the British route of advance, the discoveries were equally terrible. Brigadier Hugh Glyn Hughes, the British Second Army’s Senior Medical Officer, had been worrying for days about the possibility of infectious diseases in a camp he had been warned about at a place called Belsen. Upon arrival there, Hughes discovered that typhus and typhoid were the least of his worries. “No photograph, no description could bring home the horrors I saw,” he said, years later. “There were 56,000 people still alive in the camp. They were living in 45 huts. There were anywhere from 600 to 1,000 people living in accommodations which could take barely 100. The huts overflowed with inmates in every state of emaciation and disease. They were suffering from starvation, gastroenteritis, typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis. There were dead everywhere, some in the same bunks as the living. Lying in the compounds, in uncovered mass graves, in trenches, in the gutters, by the side of the barbed wire surrounding the camp and by the huts, were some 10,000 more. In my thirty years as a doctor, I had never seen anything like it.”
I wrote about other such accounts in an earlier piece. Let me quote just a little from that article. I spoke about how General Eisenhower had toured the Buchenwald extermination camp:
During the camp inspections with his top commanders Eisenhower said that the atrocities were “beyond the American mind to comprehend.” He ordered that every citizen of the town of Gotha personally tour the camp and, after having done so, the mayor and his wife went home and hanged themselves. Later on Ike wrote to Mamie, “I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world.” He cabled General Marshall to suggest that he come to Germany and see these camps for himself. He encouraged Marshall to bring Congressmen and journalists with him. It would be many months before the world would know the full scope of the Holocaust — many months before they knew that the Nazi murder apparatus that was being discovered at Buchenwald and dozens of other death camps had slaughtered millions of innocent people.
General Eisenhower understood that many people would be unable to comprehend the full scope of this horror. He also understood that any human deeds that were so utterly evil might eventually be challenged or even denied as being literally unbelievable. For these reasons he ordered that all the civilian news media and military combat camera units be required to visit the camps and record their observations in print, pictures and film. As he explained to General Marshall, “I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda’.” https://billmuehlenberg.com/2014/08/25/make-them-watch/
My point here is not to equate the situation in Victoria and elsewhere today with what was found back then in Germany. It is to suggest however that for various reasons, the masses can be led astray – often quite easily and quite willingly.
As such, the lessons of history must always be heeded. Germany last century was a civilised and cultured nation, that slowly but surely moved into deadly tyranny. It was not the first nor the last nation to do so. We must remain vigilant.
[1655 words]
Sadly too true. Good Christians who think Daniel Andrews has done an excellent job. Politicians, health bureaucrats and media who flatly deny the evidence that hydroxycloroquine is effective against Covid-19 if used early with known safe treatment regimes. Despite India, where social-distancing is virtually impossible and with what our media delight in telling us has the highest Covid infection rate in the world, yet their death rate from Covid infections (1.5%) is less than half that of Dictator Dan’s Victorian 4% death rate. Add to that the stupidity of Climate Alarmism, the damage to the poor, to the economy, and to mental health is nothing short of criminal negligence.
I’m wondering if God is allowing all this to discipline us for being ineffective witnesses.
When you get key political commentators such as Keith Olbermann with his recent diatribes, you realise that pre-war Germany may not be that far off.
Here’s a snippet of his recent tirades
“Trump can be, and must be, expunged…….
So, let us brace ourselves. The task is two-fold: the terrorist Trump must be defeated, must be destroyed, must be devoured at the ballot box, and then he, and his enablers, and his supporters, and his collaborators….must be prosecuted and convicted and removed from our society while we try to rebuild it and to rebuild the world Trump has destroyed by turning it over to a virus. Remember it, even as we dream for a return to reality and safety and the country for which our forefathers died, that the fight is not just to win the election, but to win it by enough to chase, at least for a moment, Trump and the maggots off the stage and then try to clean up what they left.”
Trump’s “enablers and supporters” would include those who voted for him or at least registered Republicans, who, according to Olbermann and his supporters are, like the Jews of Europe, less than human (maggots and viruses) and must be “removed from our society” . How? Certainly not by due process such as innocent till proven guilty, but “prosecuted and convicted.” Not tried and found guilty or innocent.
Then, maybe as you remove maggots and viruses- exterminate them?
Olbermann may represent a minority view today but then so did Hitler and the NAZIs prior to them coming to power.
My dad’s cousin died in Ravensbruck concentration camp just before the end of the war. She was in the Dutch Resistance and captured for hiding Jews. Sadly there is almost no record of her existence bar a few cursory notes recording her name, and death on a file.
People only believe what they want to believe.
Sheeple we may be but whilst we follow the Shepherd there is hope. DA’s actions may be criminal, most likely they are ill advised, and he is responsible for many deaths that could certainly have been avoided.
Comparisons with other states, obviously with better controls, show Victoria is way out of hand.
Seems DA is scared, if not power hungry, wanting another term in office at all costs. The problem is, he does not have the party that can even start us on the road to financial recovery. We must not give him power to put us in penury, with more credit cards to max-out, throwing our businesses to wolves, the overseas ‘banks’.
As a nation we must maintain our Christian identity, examples of individual actions may help – be kind and welcoming to guests but carry on with blessing the food, if we don’t drink alcohol then ask them to leave their wine in the car, go to church on Sunday and bring the sermon home in our hearts to remember and live towards. Love Christ and follow Him, try to be like Him, all the time asking ourselves to obey His rules for living, His glorious gospel.
The recent story about police spending 2 hours examining an anti-lockdown bus in Melbourne before deeming it unroadworthy because of trivial and highly debatable causes was interesting. Police do not usually check the road to see if there’s (dry) oil on it, nor do they check to see if seatbelts have fluff on them, nor do they check to see if tyres have any imperfections. Indeed there’s plenty of vehicles travelling around with visible defects – faulty lights, drooping mufflers, or crash damage, yet police rarely deem them unroadworthy, So why dedicate so much time to a vehicle that isn’t showing faults? Is there any explanation other than tyranny and politics?
Stockholm syndrome is the only way to comprehend the support of so many Victorians for their persecutor. Victorians have grown used to Chairman Dan and have completely swallowed what is increasingly acknowledged by eminently respected people in the scientific and medical fields across the world as being the covid ‘HOAX’ – action against which is being prepared by international lawyers right now as ‘a crime against humanity’.
Flu cases across the world have been very significantly lower this year.
It has been said that ‘the good news this year is that no-one has died of old age during the past six months’.
We all ought to be enormously concerned for our country that so many have shown themselves to be sheeple, completely swept in by politician and media disinformation – that has caused so much personal and economic devastation.
Hopefully this brief clip may motivate, entitled ‘When the sheep wake up!’ Enjoy!
https://twitter.com/tafkag/status/1317110540729225221
I understand. We have a governor in PA, the state I lived in before His last name is Wolf and it is very descriptive. He allowed his HHS secretary to put known Covid positive patients in with the healthy ones. After said HHS secretary got his/hers (transgender) out of the nursing home of course. Yet they blame President Trump for the deaths, and many still follow and love Wolf. It boggles the mind
Thanks Bill, I certainly didn’t know much about the atrocities, that they were that bad. There are even holocaust deniers which reminds me of abortions – how many pro-abortion believers have seen how an abortion is done on the internet? If they did, I’m sure some of them would change their minds but others would just say, we kill animals for food so what is the difference?
A superb read Bill – albeit depressing.
As an American, I would love to believe that this virus hype, and the draconian measures being implemented from it, is all about defeating Trump in the upcoming presidential election. But, this is a world-wide agenda that’s being implemented. Something much larger, and much scarier, is unfolding before us. And, you’re correct, the majority of people are swallowing the propaganda hook, line & sinker. “Those who refuse to learn from history, are destined to repeat it.”
Is it just me or there seems to be a surge in unholy revolts in just the past few days?
In Poland, the prolife cause just won a spectacular victory with that country’s Constitutional Court outlawing abortions for foetal defects. This has triggered a public revolt, including many women, against their government and Catholic Church. And for all the hard work that the Polish prolife cause has done, they have reportedly received few congratulations and support, effectively being left on their own:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/pro-aborts-attack-polish-churches-in-revenge-for-historic-pro-life-supreme-court-ruling
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/exclusive-defender-of-polish-churches-describes-blasphemous-pro-abortion-attacks
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54694968
Meanwhile in Chile, the citizens just voted overwhelmingly (78%) to change their constitution. The thing is, correct me if I’m wrong, the people driving this change seems to be the same sort of people that burned down several Chilean churches whilst apparently chanting ‘Death to the Nazarene’ and ‘Long Live Che Guevara’…
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-54687090
https://uk.reuters.com/news/picture/chile-anniversary-rallies-turn-violent-a-idUKRTX83J4W
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/rioters-torch-destroy-centuries-old-churches-in-chile
And in the wake of the Pope’s recent support for homosexual civil unions, some politicians are taking the hint..
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/venezuelas-far-left-leader-uses-pope-francis-backing-of-gay-civil-unions-to-push-for-same-sex-marriage
The last paragraphs of the article, about recording evil, forcing people to see it – does it apply to abortion too? Because I can’t watch things like that it’s too horrific. Do we need to force ourselves? Perhaps it’ll compel us to make changes?
Thanks Matt. I tie in viewing the results of abortion with viewing the results of the camps in this piece (which I linked to above): https://billmuehlenberg.com/2014/08/25/make-them-watch/
Take a stand:
https://www.binary.org.au/independent_inquiry_needed_to_protect_our_young_people
It’s sad knowing how cruel, oppressive and inhumane people can be to their fellow humans. It’s also important that we are vigilant because the next mass deception and tyranny event awaits us all in the global context. What remains to be seen is how our leaders will force us to abandon cash, to receive micro-chip implants, to force us to accept a one world religion, a one world government and introduce us to the ‘first horseman of the apocalypse’ – the antichrist.
I liked this reference linking lockdown to Narnia under the White Witch- maybe C.S. lewis saw it coming.
https://www.theblogmire.com/always-covid-never-christmas-breaking-the-spell-that-holds-us-in-its-grip/