When the peace deal was reached, the goal was to have 8,600 troops left by July. There are fewer than 10,000 left right now, and officials say that the 8,600 goal could be reached in just a few weeks. More cuts are expected after that.
The US never set a date to be out of Afghanistan at the time of the peace deal, but with Trump wanting out there seems to be a good chance that the level is just going to keep going down for the time being.
Trump had wanted cuts before the 2020 election, and cemented that this was going to happen with the Taliban peace deal. Even though post-deal progress has been slowed by the Afghan government’s lack of prisoner releases, the US is continuing the cuts.
In the midst of so much social hysteria and propaganda of fear, it is a pleasure to find some serenity and common sense in the statements of some doctors about the benefits of tobacco. According to recent studies, smokers may be more resistant to the new plague. This is a wonderful discovery for tobacco lovers, who have suffered decades of jihadist prosecution for their virtuous vices.
Many doctors recoil in shock when checking the statistics of those infected, whether the patients are smokers or not. We are already with the mathematical strip-tease: “Statistics are like bikinis: What they reveal is suggestive but what they conceal is vital.”
In the New World, a paradise without a mania for overdressing, the pantheistic Indians already knew about the healing powers of tobacco and considered their holy smoke a communion of man with the divine. The art of smoking soon spread throughout Spain, thanks to Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis de Torres, who had accompanied Christopher Columbus. In England the smoking ambassador was Sir Walter Raleigh, gallant pirate and man of letters who lost his head with that first anti-tobacco Taliban that was James I. In France Catherine de’ Medici (always curious about poisons and elixirs) was tobacco’s great supporter, thanks to the wise advice of doctor Jean Nicot, who considered the new plant a panacea and patented alkaloid nicotine with his name.
Since its American export to the rest of the planet, most artists, priests, and doctors have been great fans of tobacco. Only in the Anglo-Saxon world did it go from love to hate. During Victoria’s long reign, tobacco was so frowned upon that the French ambassador had to lie down on the floor and stick his head into the fireplace in order to take a drag. Then came her son Edward, who fortunately was a bon vivant, a lover of peace and the joys of life. His first order was a generous “Gentlemen, you may smoke.”
“Perhaps the American president should surround himself with more smokers and fewer housewives.”
Recent studies by La Pitié-Salpêtrière French hospital refer to the fact that cells impregnated with nicotine can fight more effectively against the coronavirus. If only Donald Trump would have recommended a good smoke or a powerful whiskey instead of disinfectant to his compatriots, he would have proved to be up to date with science and would have gained popularity as well as a bonus for the next elections. Perhaps the American president should surround himself with more smokers and fewer housewives.
Of course, the international medical community has screamed bloody murder for studies favorable to tobacco. It is a revolution! (But it may be a gentle one for once.) Anti-smoking campaigns have invested billions on hysterical slogans. Progressive governments (which often have little to do with progress) have violated the private ownership of bars and restaurants, placed the most aberrant advertising in tobacco packages, and demonized smokers as creatures without rights for their bad habits.
But it was not always like this. For centuries, tobacco has been praised not only by doctors but by the best poets, painters, and musicians throughout the world. (In a recent interview on ABC, David Hockney confessed that he has had four doctors younger than he is, and all of them warned him about the evils of smoking. Now they are all dead while Hockney continues to smoke and paint wonderfully at 82.)
The actual war began with greed and too many tobacco companies adding artificial ingredients to their cigarettes, making them much more addictive than nicotine. Such additives are very harmful, but have nothing to do with the sacred plant.
Today merciful doctors and scientists who honor the truth rather than dogma have dared to highlight data that shows a positive quality to tobacco, and they are starting to test nicotine patches as a possible preventive. They even consider the tobacco plant as fundamental to the discovery of a vaccine.
Perhaps this will change the fashion of demonizing tobacco. Make your vices work for you.
(The article in its original Spanish immediately follows.)
Doctor Nicotina
En medio de tanta histeria y propaganda del miedo es un placer encontrar algo de serenidad y sentido común en las declaraciones de unos médicos galos sobre las bondades del tabaco. Sus investigaciones indican que los fumadores podrían ser más resistentes a la nueva peste. Eso es algo maravilloso para los amantes del tabaco, que llevan decenios de persecución yihadista por sus virtuosos vicios.
Muchos doctores se llevan las manos a la cabeza al comprobar la variante estadística de enfermos, según sean fumadores o no. Ya estamos con el strip-tease matemático: “Las estadísticas son como un bikini: muestran algo importante pero esconden lo más interesante.”
En el Nuevo Mundo, paraíso que no pecaba de ir demasiado vestido, los indios panteístas ya sabían de los poderes curativos del tabaco y consideraban su fuma como una comunión del ser humano con los divinos elementos. El arte de fumar se extendió muy pronto por España, gracias a Rodrigo de Jerez y Luis de Torres, quienes habían acompañado a Cristóbal Colón. En Inglaterra su gran embajador fue sir Walter Raleigh, pirata galante y hombre de letras que perdió su cabeza con ese primer talibán anti-tabaco que fue Jacobo I. En Francia fue Catalina de Médici (experta en venenos y elixires) su gran valedora, gracias a los consejos del médico Jean Nicot, quien consideraba al tabaco como una panacea. Por cierto que el Dr. Nicot patentó con su nombre el alcaloide nicotina.
Desde su exportación americana la mayoría de artistas, sacerdotes y médicos del resto del mundo fueron siempre grandes aficionados al tabaco. Solo en el mundo anglosajón se pasaba del amor al odio fácilmente. Durante el largo reinado de Victoria, el tabaco estaba tan mal visto que el embajador francés tenía que tumbarse en el suelo y meter la cabeza dentro de la chimenea para poder echar una calada. Luego vino su hijo Eduardo, que afortunadamente era un bon-vivant amante de la paz y los placeres de la vida. Su primera orden fue un amable permiso: “Caballeros, ya pueden ustedes fumar.”
Los recientes estudios del hospital La Pitié-Salpêtrière hacen referencia a que las células impregnadas con la nicotina pueden luchar con más efectividad contra el coronavirus. Ah, ¡si Donald Trump hubiera recomendado a sus compatriotas una buena fumada o un potente whisky en lugar de desinfectante! Hubiera demostrado estar al día de la ciencia y habría ganado un plus de popularidad irresistible para las próximas elecciones. Tal vez el presidente americano debiera rodearse de más fumadores y menos amas de casa.
Por supuesto que la comunidad médica internacional ha puesto el grito en el cielo por tales estudios favorables al tabaco. ¡Es una revolución! (pero una amable, para variar). La campaña anti-smoking lleva invertidos miles de millones con histéricos eslóganes. Los gobiernos progresistas (a menudo poco tienen que ver con el progreso) han vulnerado la propiedad privada de bares y restaurantes, colocan la más aberrante publicidad sobre su consumo en los paquetes de tabaco y demonizan a los fumadores como criaturas sin derechos de salud por sus malos hábitos.
Pero no siempre fue así. Durante siglos el tabaco ha sido cantado no solo por médicos sino por los mejores poetas, pintores y músicos a lo ancho del mundo. (En una entrevista a ABC el pintor David Hockney cuenta que ha tenido cuatro médicos, todos más jóvenes que él, recomendándole dejar de fumar. Hockney los ha sobrevivido a todos y sigue fumando y pintando a sus 84 años.)
La guerra se inició al descubrir la codicia de demasiadas compañías tabaqueras que añadían a sus cigarrillos ingredientes artificiales mucho más adictivos que la nicotina. Tales añadidos son muy dañinos, pero nada tienen que ver con la sagrada plata solanácea.
Y ahora unos médicos misericordiosos, científicos que hacen honor a la verdad antes que al dogma, se atreven a dar unos datos que resaltan una cualidad positiva del tabaco. ¡Ya empiezan a probar parches de nicotina como posible preventivo! ¡Ya consideran a la planta del tabaco como fundamental en el descubrimiento de una vacuna!
Tal vez así cambie la moda que demoniza al tabaco. Make your vices work for you.
And that’s my point, really. We have a system in Washington that couldn’t be more lawful and yet, by any definition, the class of ’86 represents one giant conflict of interest (and they don’t stand alone). Alums from that year are now ensconced in every level of the national security state: from the White House to the Pentagon to Congress to K Street to corporate boardrooms. And they have both power and a deep stake, financial or otherwise, in maintaining or expanding the (forever) warfare state.
I’m sure you still remember them. The president regularly called them “my generals.” They were, he claimed, from “central casting” and there were three of them: retired Marine Corps General John Kelly, who was first appointed secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and then White House chief of staff; Army Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, who became the president’s national security advisor; and last (but hardly least) retired Marine Corps General James Mattis, whom Trump particularly adored for his nickname “Mad Dog” and appointed as secretary of defense. Of him, the president said, “If I’m doing a movie, I pick you, General Mattis, who’s doing really well.”
They were referred to in Washington and in the media more generally as “the adults in the room,” indicating what most observers (as well as insiders) seemed to think about the president — that he was, in effect, the impulsive, unpredictable, self-obsessed toddler in that same room. All of them had been commanders in the very conflicts that Donald Trump had labeled “ridiculous Endless Wars” and were distinctly hawkish and uncritical of those same wars (like the rest of the U.S. high command). It was even rumored that, as “adults,” Kelly and Mattis had made a private pact not to be out of the country at the same time for fear of what might happen in their absence. By the end of 2018, of course, all three were gone. “My generals” were no more, but the toddler remained.
As TomDispatch regular, West Point graduate (class of 2005), and retired Army Major Danny Sjursen explains in remarkable detail today, while the president finally tossed “his” generals in the nearest trash can, the “adults” (and you do have to keep that word in quotation marks) didn’t, in fact, leave the toddler alone in the Oval Office. They simply militarized and de-militarized at the same time. In fact, one class from West Point, that of 1986, from which both Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo graduated, is essentially everywhere in a distinctly militarized (if still officially civilian) and wildly hawkish Washington in the Trumpian moment. Tom
“Courage Never Quits”? The Price of Power and West Point’s Class of 1986
By Danny Sjursen
Every West Point class votes on an official motto. Most are then inscribed on their class rings. Hence, the pejorative West Point label “ring knocker.” (As legend has it, at military meetings a West Pointer “need only knock his large ring on the table and all Pointers present are obliged to rally to his point of view.”) Last August, the class of 2023 announced theirs: “Freedom Is Not Free.” Mine from the class of 2005 was “Keeping Freedom Alive.” Each class takes pride in its motto and, at least theoretically, aspires to live according to its sentiments, while championing the accomplishments of fellow graduates.
But some cohorts do stand out. Take the class of 1986 (“Courage Never Quits“). As it happens, both Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are members of that very class, as are a surprisingly wide range of influential leaders in Congress, corporate America, the Pentagon, the defense industry, lobbying firms, Big Pharma, high-end financial services, and even security-consulting firms. Still, given their striking hawkishness on the subject of American war-making, Esper and Pompeo rise above the rest. Even in a pandemic, they are as good as their class motto. When it comes to this country’s wars, neither of them ever quits.
Once upon a time, retired Lieutenant General Douglas Lute (Class of ’75), a former U.S. Ambassador to NATO and a senior commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, taught both Esper and Pompeo in his West Point social sciences class. However, it was Pompeo, the class of ’86 valedictorian, whom Lute singled out for praise, remembering him as “a very strong student — fastidious, deliberate.” Of course, as the Afghanistan Papers, released by the Washington Post late last year, so starkly revealed, Lute told an interviewer that, like so many U.S. officials, he “didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking in Afghanistan.” Though at one point he was President George W. Bush’s “Afghan war czar,” the general never expressed such doubts publicly and his record of dissent is hardly an impressive one. Still, on one point at least, Lute was on target: Esper and Pompeo are smart and that’s what worries me (as in the phrase “too smart for their own good”).
Esper, a former Raytheon lobbyist, had particularly hawkish views on Russia and China before he ever took over at the Pentagon and he wasn’t alone when it came to the urge to continue America’s wars. Pompeo, then a congressman, exhibited a striking pre-Trump-era foreign policy pugnacity, particularly vis-à-vis the Islamic world. It has since solidified into a veritable obsession with toppling the Iranian regime.
Their militarized obsessions have recently taken striking form in two ways: the secretary of defense instructed U.S. commanders to prepare plans to escalate combat against Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, an order the mission’s senior leader there, Lieutenant General Robert “Pat” White, reportedly resisted; meanwhile, the secretary of state evidently is eager to convince President Trump to use the Covid-19 pandemic, now devastating Iran, to bomb that country and further strangle it with sanctions. Worse yet, Pompeo might be just cunning enough to convince his ill-informed, insecure boss (so open to clever flattery) that war is the answer.
The militarism of both men matters greatly, but they hardly pilot the ship of state alone, any more than Trump does (whatever he thinks). Would that it were the case. Sadly, even if voters threw them all out, the disease runs much deeper than them. Enter the rest of the illustrative class of ’86.
As it happens, Pompeo’s and Esper’s classmates permeate the deeper structure of imperial America. And let’s admit it, they are, by the numbers, an impressive crew.
To go back to Blunkett’s points, it really does seem that the over-70s are at greater risk from Covid-19 than younger people. That doesn’t mean it necessarily makes sense to keep them under house arrest and separated from their families indefinitely. That’s a judgement that involves questions of physical and mental health, autonomy, pleasure and much more.
Science is not some grand tome we can consult to get the ‘right’ answer.
Rob Lyons
Columnist
According to David Blunkett, a former senior cabinet minister in Tony Blair’s governments, attempts to have a blanket lockdown on the over-70s are discriminatory. He believes that the current ‘shielding’ rules are too crude and need to be more nuanced. Whatever the merits of his ideas, his comments on the scientific advice that the government is receiving are interesting.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s The World at One on 28 April, Blunkett argued that the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) has a problem. Drawing on Matthew Syed’s book, Rebel Ideas, he said that ‘major mistakes in the recent past have been made by people of similar ilk, similar ideas, similar background, similar thinking being considered the only experts that you could draw down on. And I’d like RAGE – a Recovery Advisory Group – that had a very much broader swathe of advice and expertise to draw down on.’
The dangers of listening to a small pool of experts with orthodox thinking was also pointed to by a former chief scientific adviser, Sir David King. Reacting to reports that Boris Johnson’s senior adviser, Dominic Cummings, may have pushed SAGE to back the current lockdown, King told Bloomberg: ‘There is a herd instinct in all of us – we call it groupthink. It is possible that a group is influenced by a particularly influential person.’
Other leading scientific figures have criticised the idea that the government’s policies are based on science. Professor Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, told the Guardian: ‘As a scientist, I hope I never again hear the phrase “based on the best science and evidence” spoken by a politician. This phrase has become basically meaningless and used to explain anything and everything.’
The same article quotes Professor Mark Woolhouse, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh: ‘I do think scientific advice is driven far too much by epidemiology – and I’m an epidemiologist. What we’re not talking about in the same formal, quantitative way are the economic costs, the social costs, the psychological costs of being under lockdown. I understand that the government is being advised by economists, psychiatrists and others, but we’re not seeing what that science is telling them. I find that very puzzling.’
All these comments and more point to one of the most striking aspects of the Covid-19 crisis. For many years now, politicians – largely bereft of any wider purpose or philosophical principle – have claimed that they are pursuing ‘evidence-based policy’ and being ‘led by The Science’. In reality, science is a process of trying to draw together tentative conclusions driven by experiment and observation. Claiming authority from The Science – as if there were a grand tome you could simply open up to find the correct answer – is just wrong.
As Professor Brian Cox told Andrew Marr this week: ‘There’s no such thing as The Science, which is a key lesson. If you hear a politician say “we’re following The Science”, then what that means is they don’t really understand what science is. There isn’t such a thing as The Science. Science is a mindset.’
With widely publicised disagreements about everything from computer models to the use of face masks, it is clear that we need to move beyond the idea that we can rely on scientists coming to a cosy consensus. Science works – at its best – through the accumulation of evidence, an openness to new theories, and a willingness to challenge and be challenged.
It’s great that these principles are being restated. Funnily enough, though, this wasn’t the reaction we saw over Michael Gove’s much-half-quoted comment during the EU referendum – that the public has ‘had enough of experts’. (In fact, he said: ‘I think the people of this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying they know what is best, and getting it consistently wrong.’) The trouble with politicians, we were told by Remain-supporting types, is that they don’t listen to the cool, rational views of experts nearly enough. Now that it seems that experts might be blamed for the deaths of tens of thousands of people, the expertise cheerleaders are reversing out of that position, pronto.
Actually, the public never gave up on experts. We’re only too happy to find out about the latest scientific understanding of the virus, how soon we might have a treatment or a vaccine, and so on. What some have taken issue with is the politicisation of expertise. An unholy alliance of politicians and a selected band of experts, whose views suit the current needs of government, have often in recent years told us what ‘The Science says’ and urged critics to just shut up – over issues from passive smoking to climate change. To disagree with the experts was, and is, to be a ‘denier’, and should lead to the perpetrator’s expulsion from public life and even private career.
Even giving a platform to a critical voice is beyond the pale. For example, when the former chancellor of the exchequer and climate-change sceptic, Nigel Lawson, appeared on Radio 4’s Today back in 2017, it was Cox who tweeted: ‘Irresponsible and highly misleading to give the impression that there is a meaningful debate about the science.’ Cox certainly seemed to believe that there is a thing called The Science three years ago.
We need to get beyond a simple black-and-white view of science and expertise. The question is not whether we should believe experts, but how we understand expertise. Each and every claim needs to be treated with scepticism (not cynicism) and we need to be clear about the limits of each claim.
To go back to Blunkett’s points, it really does seem that the over-70s are at greater risk from Covid-19 than younger people. That doesn’t mean it necessarily makes sense to keep them under house arrest and separated from their families indefinitely. That’s a judgement that involves questions of physical and mental health, autonomy, pleasure and much more.
Carbon dioxide may be heating our planet. But the wilder claims about an overheating planet and eco-geddon need to be understood in the context of, for example, the assumptions made by computer models – some of which are actually very overheated themselves. Moreover, even if we are heading for a much warmer world, abandoning fossil fuels for a ‘Net Zero’ future seems to many people (including me) very likely to cause much more harm than global warming. These are matters for public debate. They should not be closed down because of The Science.
In the midst of a health crisis, hopefully we are now developing a proper and very healthy scepticism towards experts.
In Florida, the State receives $132,000 for each reported case of corona.
In Nebraska, Minnesota and Montana, the State receives over $300,000 for
each reported case of corona. The difference in the amounts received is
based on some weird government bureaucrat-created voodoo Medicare
formula. The point is, hospitals are being financially rewarded for
identifying people as contracting or dying from corona—whether they
actually contracted the virus or not.
By now, most thinking people realize that the numbers being circulated by the Medical/Pharmaceutical/Industrial Complex and their Big Government hacks in the media of people being infected and killed by the coronavirus are grossly exaggerated.
In Florida, the State receives $132,000 for each reported case of corona. In Nebraska, Minnesota and Montana, the State receives over $300,000 for each reported case of corona. The difference in the amounts received is based on some weird government bureaucrat-created voodoo Medicare formula. The point is, hospitals are being financially rewarded for identifying people as contracting or dying from corona—whether they actually contracted the virus or not.
In the meantime, however, most hospitals are literally sitting empty. There is no mad rush of corona patients lining up for treatment. For example, in one of the so-called COVID-19 hot spots, Seattle, Washington, an army field hospital on loan to the city was returned after only nine days, because it never saw a patient:
Gov. Jay Inslee’s office on Wednesday announced that the state will be returning a field hospital deployed to CenturyLink Field Event Center to the U.S. Department of Defense.
The 250-bed facility, for which setup began on March 30, was intended to help Washington state’s health care system tend to non Covid-19 patients in the event of a hospital surge.
But just three days after announcing the facility was ready to receive patients, officials say they’re returning the hospital to the federal government.
The action is aimed at helping another state with a more significant need for hospital capacity at this time, according to the Governor’s Office. The facility did not see any patients during the time it was slated to operate in Seattle.
A local hometown newspaper where I live published this story a few days ago:
Kalispell Regional Healthcare announced today that it will furlough roughly 600 employees beginning April 15 due to steep revenue declines resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hospital executives, physicians and executive directors will also take reductions in their salaries, effective immediately.
KRH officials say the actions are necessary because revenue losses are projected to exceed $16 million per month, “which could jeopardize the organization’s ability to serve the long-term health needs of our community.”
The hospital didn’t immediately specify what types of employees or departments will be impacted by the furloughs.
An April 13 press release noted that KRH, like other health-care organizations across the country, has strengthened COVID-19 clinical teams, support staff and resources “needed to deliver life-saving care and ensure patient and staff safety as a result of the pandemic.” But the pandemic response has also led to the halting of many services “for the health and safety of our community,” the hospital stated.
In other words, people who need all sorts of medical care unrelated to corona are deliberately being denied treatment, as hospitals gear their entire operations to treat a mad rush of nonexistent corona cases. This is called medical rationing, by the way. But instead of admitting this pandemic was a complete and total exercise in government-created manipulation and hysteria—and allowing hospitals to reopen to the REAL medical needs of their communities—they continue to parrot the Fauci/CDC-authorized fear and paranoia over corona, while hospitals sit empty and must layoff untold numbers of employees in order to stay solvent.
Say it yet another way: The only thing keeping hospitals financially afloat right now is government corona money—and it’s not enough, as the numbers of corona cases just aren’t there. So, doctors and hospitals are diagnosing everyone they can as being infected or killed by COVID-19 just to keep government dollars flowing into their coffers. And still, untold numbers of medical workers are losing their jobs.
Besides the obvious usurpation of our Natural liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights, we can expect an all-out push from the mad scientist Anthony Fauci and his billionaire Frankenstein Bill Gates to coerce the federal and State governments to mandate forced vaccinations. Go ahead: Take a quick guess who will profit from this little act of government tyranny.
From the very beginning, this has never been about OUR health and safety; it has been all about THEIR money and power. That’s what manufactured crises like this are always about.
Speaking of money: You and I both know that our economy cannot withstand this massive explosion of national debt without dire consequences. It seems almost certain that this corona scam is the perfect storm for recession and hyperinflation.
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As with almost every government “emergency,” follow the money—and keep an eye on yours, because those miscreants in Washington, D.C., will take every penny they can, by hook or by crook.
This is the same Lindsey Graham who, in the wake of a 2017 insurgent ambush that killed four American soldiers in Niger, admitted to NBC’s Chuck Todd that he had only recently learned that there were 1,000 U.S. troops in that country. Two years later, the Senator has decided that West Africa is a vital American interest.
America spent two decades, thousands of lives, and over $6 trillion in failed nation-building efforts in places once deemed vital to U.S. interests. If France wants to relearn past lessons in a place that is decidedly unimportant to Americans, let us wish her luck.
As the coronavirus swept through American cities in early March, a small group in Congress focused on a different threat. For these lawmakers, despite the clear magnitude of the crisis, distant conflicts in West Africa – not pandemic preparations at home – were the priority. To make their point, the bipartisan band introduced legislation aimed at restricting the Pentagon from removing U.S. troops from the region this year.
The most fervent among them, Senator Lindsey Graham, threatened Secretary of Defense Mark Esper if he follows through with a widely reported AFRICOM drawdown, which Esper and other officials believe is necessary to refocus the Pentagon’s resources on China. “I can make your life hell,” Graham reportedly told Esper.
This is the same Lindsey Graham who, in the wake of a 2017 insurgent ambush that killed four American soldiers in Niger, admitted to NBC’s Chuck Todd that he had only recently learned that there were 1,000 U.S. troops in that country. Two years later, the Senator has decided that West Africa is a vital American interest.
The truth is the opposite. The Sahel is troubled, violent, and fascinating – but it contains nothing of strategic value to the United States. Its nations, which include Mali, Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso, and Mauritania, have a combined GDP smaller than that of North Dakota. Extremist groups there fuel a regional insurgency that threatens the sovereignty of these states, but even the top American general for Africa could not say last year that the rebels pose a threat to the American homeland.
Many of the several thousand U.S. troops in the region support an ongoing French military effort to combat insurgent offshoots of al Qaeda and the Islamic State. But after a 2013 intervention in Mali that was forecasted to last mere months, France is bogged down in the Sahel, and the violence has worsened. Several weeks ago, Boko Haram militants killed nearly 100 Chadian soldiers in a pre-dawn ambush, and another insurgent assault in Mali last week took the lives of dozens of government troops in that country’s restive northern region.
There is strong pressure in Washington to support France ‘s counterinsurgency campaign. Hawks on both sides of the aisle seem anxious to expand the African front of a never-ending war against Islamic militancy. Other members of the D.C. foreign policy establishment see a longer list of boogeymen on the continent. “The U.S. is losing the competition in Africa against China, Russia, al Qaeda, and the Islamic State,” an analyst from the American Enterprise Instituterecently told The New York Times.
While the Sahel is unimportant to the average American, it does have real value to the U.S. foreign policy community – as a perfect illustration of the futility of nation-building in poor, corrupt, and fractured states. Although those lessons pre-date our own misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, they went ignored in the decade after 9/11. An examination of the French experience in Chad in the 1970s and 1980s would have shown us how counterinsurgency tactics eerily similar to those attempted in Afghanistan and Iraq failed to deliver long-term success in structurally similar states.
♦♦♦
In 1968, France intervened in Chad for the first time. An uprising in the country’s northern provinces had spread throughout the country and threatened to topple the government. The tribes of the north rebelled against what they saw as a corrupt and hostile state controlled by a political elite that disrespected Islam, overtaxed their villages, and directed economic investment according to ethnic loyalties.
Over the ensuing three years, the French military executed a textbook counterinsurgency campaign to defeat the rebels and prop up the Chadian government. Hard-nosed Legionnaires and expeditionary troops pushed into the lawless expanse of northern Chad, winning skirmishes and providing medical aid and supplies to a wary civilian population.
In the meantime, French military advisors rebuilt the rag-tag Chadian Army, employing many of the same techniques used by American and French Special Forces troops in the Sahel today. They labored to transform the military from an instrument of tribal power to an organized, representative defense force. Embedded French captains and sergeants worked to stamp out abuses of the civilian populace by the army, which was comprised of recruits from the dominant Sara ethnic group in the south.
French diplomats also worked to rebuild the Chadian state. Civilian advisors directed aid money into development projects and navigated the tricky propensity of powerful Chadian politicians to siphon cash from initiatives meant to improve the economy.
Despite these challenges, by early 1971 the violence abated. The rebellion splintered and disillusioned fighters sought refuge in neighboring Libya and Sudan. For a relatively small price tag in blood and treasure, France had purchased time and space for the warring sides to find a political solution.
Peace in Chad proved to be fleeting, however. Like their American counterparts in Iraq some thirty-five years later, French generals had expressed optimism that given the opportunity for reconciliation, the Chadian state could be reborn. That stability proved elusive. The generals watched in horror as Chadian officials committed a series of unforced errors that provided much-needed oxygen to the insurgency.
The rebels also gained the support of an ascendant Muammar al-Gaddafi in Libya. The presence of foreign troops in Chad presented Gaddafi with the wedge he needed, and destabilizing Chad became a goal of Libyan foreign policy. Like the Iranian regime in the years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Gaddafi saw a weakened Chad as key to his own regional ambitions and sought to turn rebel groups into Libyan proxies. Gaddafi’s involvement increased the insurgents’ lethality, much to the dismay of French soldiers on the other side of this firepower. The insurgency also gained support in the wider Arab world once the militants learned to portray Chadian elites as puppets of Western neo-colonialism.
In 1978, rebels again swept southward from the rocky outcrops of northern Chad. The national army, trained for years at great cost to the French taxpayer, disintegrated. Reluctant officials in Paris once again committed ground forces in a costly intervention. Though the operation stopped the rebels, a political solution continued to be elusive. In the ensuing power struggle, France, desperate to prevent Libyan control over Chad and frustrated with the Sara-dominated political elite, backed a former rebel commander in a coup.
France mounted serious operations to protect the Chadian government twice more during the 1980s, each time relying more heavily on airstrikes and less on ground troops. Counterinsurgency fell out of favor as twenty years of investment in Chad yielded little in the way of return. Frustrated French politicians called for a more pragmatic approach, but the military ardently opposed abandoning Chad. This may sound familiar to contemporary U.S. lawmakers, who suffer annual assurances by American generals that the Afghan war effort is “turning the corner” while setting new records each year for airstrikes and drone attacks.
♦♦♦
Twenty years ago, as we prepared to mount our own counterinsurgency campaigns, Washington’s foreign policy establishment ignored France’s painful past failures in the Sahel. As we contemplate deepening our involvement in that region today, failing to study this history would be inexcusable. Yet to survey Washington is to encounter a deeply unserious U.S. foreign policy establishment that still will not do the reading.
Some of this is unsurprising. The authors of our counterinsurgency strategy in large part examined history to justify fighting the Long War, not to explore whether it was a good idea in the first place. Led by celebrated soldier-scholar General David Petraeus, counterinsurgency proponents assembled a library of “small wars” that supposedly yielded a recipe for curbing the violence in Afghanistan and Iraq. A bit of the Brits in Malaya, a dash of France in Algeria, a heavy helping of Vietnam as a cautionary tale – and voilà– a doctrine was born in the form of U.S. Army Field Manual 3-24 Counterinsurgency. It mattered little to the authors that these cherry-picked episodes bore little in the way of resemblance to Afghanistan and Iraq or that more relevant stories, like France’s long war in Chad, lay ignored or undiscovered.
Although the recipe failed to deliver long-term security in either Afghanistan or Iraq, it did create a profitable industry in Washington for its architects. Though General Petraeus pivoted to private equity, many of his adherents remain in the Beltway. The generals who brought us “government in a box” have launched consulting firms, flooded airport bookshop shelves, and become think tank presidents. Uncowed by their failures, they lurk in the boardrooms of the defense-industrial complex, hawking new wars of choice and the weaponry needed to prosecute them. When we articulate concern for the human and financial costs of it all, they castigate us for our weakness.
In the face of a global pandemic and a potentially unprecedented economic freefall, pacifying West Africa should be the last thing on the minds of U.S. policymakers. America spent two decades, thousands of lives, and over $6 trillion in failed nation-building efforts in places once deemed vital to U.S. interests. If France wants to relearn past lessons in a place that is decidedly unimportant to Americans, let us wish her luck.
The ranchers have already decreed masks mandatory in several states and – weirdly – more people seem to be wearing masks even though not yet mandated in other areas. Which is weird given that by now it is obvious – or ought to be – that WuFlu is a much greater threat to our liberty than our health.
…as a condition of being allowed to “reopen” – oh, thank you, massa!
At all costs – fines, arrest even – do not wear the Fear Mask. And thank every person you see who isn’t wearing one, for not wearing one.
Unless you don’t mind being required to wear one – and more to come.
Will you Moooo like a good Corona Cow when the ranchers who are “the government” decree that businesses may reopen provided the workers – and customers – mask up?
The ranchers have already decreed masks mandatory in several states and – weirdly – more people seem to be wearing masks even though not yet mandated in other areas. Which is weird given that by now it is obvious – or ought to be – that WuFlu is a much greater threat to our liberty than our health.
Except for a few concentrated areas of population – and stupidity – such as New York, where Rancher Cuomo ordered oldsters with WuFlu to be housed with other oldsters (already weak) in nursing homes, assuring lots of oldsters would die from WuFlu – the number of people who’ve died from WuFlu is so low it would have gone unnoticed in normal times.
In Virginia, for instance, fewer than 500 over the past four months. This in a state with a population of nearly nine million people. The hospitals in Virginia and many other states are dying . . . for customers. They are going broke from lack of patients – and billing. See, for example, this plea to Rancher Coonman from the Virginia Hospital and Health Care Association, which speaks for 125,000 people employed by Virginia hospitals. They beg the Coonman to allow – such servile, despicable verbiage – hospitals to resume treating other than the Corona’d, of which there are far too few.
Beds are empty; thousands of surplus respirators collecting dust – while people without Corona wait to get a date for their knee surgeries and so on, which have been put on indefinite hold by the Coonman.
A thoughtful brain might ask: If the hospitals aren’t “overwhelmed” with the Corona’d – as was promised in the direst manner imaginable by the Coonman and the “experts,” including the Billy Kristol of epidemiology, Dr. Fauci – then why are more people joining the masked herd?
People not wearing masks a month ago are now wearing them – even though they haven’t yet been ordered to wear them.
Why?
In part, because more and more businesses appear to be anticipating the order to insist on mask-wearing as a condition of being allowed to “reopen” – oh, thank you, massa! – and are being “proactive.” They understandably do not want to go broke, though that is probably already inevitable for the majority of them. And they intuit that “reopening” will be conditional on their compliance with Sickness Pantomime . . . in the form of must-wear-masking.
This, in turn, applies pressure on customers to mask-wear, in order to be allowed – that vile word, again – to shop. To get food.
This is how the ranchers are conditioning the head-bowed, mooing servility of the cattle – who after all, need to eat.
Most people will do as they are told, even when they shouldn’t – out of mortal terror of . . . raising a stink. Americans have been conditioned to such a state of passive poltroonery that is almost impossible to accept it as fact. And yet, look around.
If authority – even just the authority of the door minder at a big box store – says boo, most of them say mooo!
Stand there! Wait here! Walk in between the taped lines!
What degradation imposed as a condition of being allowed to live will they not accept?
Mask wearing means accepting the lie that WuFlu means death – as Rancher Cuomo says it does. Except it doesn’t – even in the hottest of WuFlu spots. Most – more than 99.5 percent – of the nearly 10 million people who live there haven’t died, although their lives have been taken away.
Accepting the lie that WuFlu equals death rather than a bad cold for some and not even symptoms for most (85 percent of “cases” are asymptomatic, according to Rancher Fauci himself) means accepting that dressing up like Michael Jackson is reasonable, sane – and vitally necessary.
For WuFlu – for any flu.
Forever, probably.
Well, until a vaccine is available – courtesy of Rancher Gates – which everyone will be forced to submit to as a condition of being allowed to live – allowed to buy food – on the same basis as mandatory mask-wearing.
Which is why – if it is allowed to get any traction – mask wearing will be the death of the mask-wearers’ freedom to say no to anything the ranchers demand of them in order to be allowed to live. But not just their freedom – which would be ok, if that’s the way they like it.
In a free country, people have the right to live as quavering poltroons – as gimps in old crates, if they wish. They have every right to be free to submit to mask-wearing, ear tagging and anything else that eases their anxieties.
BDSM – golden showers, even – is every free person’s right.
The outrage – which must be fought, ferociously, before it becomes the “new normal” – is permitting these poltroons, addled by Sickness Psychosis – to rescind our freedom for the sake of their anxieties.
To force us, via the rip-tide effect, to play Sickness Kabuki, too.
At all costs – fines, arrest even – do not wear the Fear Mask. And thank every person you see who isn’t wearing one, for not wearing one.
Unless you don’t mind being required to wear one – and more to come.
Tom Holland has written a book: Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. At some point, I will read this book and write something about it; I have heard enough from him in interviews that the book seems very worthwhile.
This post is based on one of these interviews, conducted by Glen Scrivener. Glen Scrivener is an ordained minister and evangelist. My following notes pick up at the 29-minute mark; however, the entire interview is worth listening to.
GS: There are many humanists who say Christianity played a part in Western liberal values, but even without Jesus Christ we would have got to where we are.
TH: (chuckling) No. and it’s so odd because it tends to be people who valorize science and Darwin and the theory of evolution… [prior to Christianity] there is nothing at all about the emergence of the qualities or the values or the teaching of Christianity at all.
I don’t recall if it was earlier in this interview, or in another interview with Holland, but Holland describes the Roman world into which Christianity was born. Anyone not a male Roman citizen demanding any sort of rights would be sent to death. Any male Roman citizen had the right to have sex with anyone of any age in any orifice of his choosing. Things like this.
All of this was considered right, and good. It was only in Christianity where the slaves were given equal dignity in God’s eyes, where women had the same rights in marriage and sex as men.
GS: You cannot get these from other sources?
TH: If you want a sense of what the world might have looked like without Christianity you can look at India, where you have very rich philosophical tradition, a very rich tradition of worshipping gods, you don’t have something that emerges and wipes that out.
Certainly Christian-like values did not emerge from India.
TH: I can absolutely imagine a world where Christianity doesn’t emerge, where what the Jewish Scriptures offers to Gentiles remains highly appealing, so there’s a kind of churn of conversion. But because the difficulty of becoming a Jew is such, it could never become universalist on the scale that Christianity does.
It didn’t before Christ; there is no reason at all that it would have been different after Christ.
GS: Could we, though, have generated some sort of human rights [absent Christianity]?
TH: I don’t see why you would. Why would you? The idea that human rights kind of hangs in the ether waiting to be discovered is as theological as believing that the Lord Jesus Christ was raised from the dead and sits at the hand of God the Father. It requires a leap of faith.
It is interesting: we consider that natural rights “hang in the ether waiting to be discovered,” and this is true enough. But I think it is only true enough if one first accepts that man is made in God’s image and that God, in Jesus, gave us the means by which to understand proper virtues.
TH: The difference is that Christians recognize the divinity of Christ requires belief, whereas lots of people just assume that human rights exist, but they do not. They are a result of various legal developments in medieval Christendom. It doesn’t just spontaneously emerge.
Prior to and outside of Christianity, societies didn’t thrive by practicing what we today consider proper (i.e. Christian) ethics. Societies thrived via violence and brute force.
TH: The idea that humanists propagate, that science “proves” [the value of liberal values] is grotesque. Science is a mirror in which you see reflected what you want to see. The Nazis used science to justify racial genocide, liberals use it to justify “let’s hug the world.” But both of them reflect the cultural prejudices of people who are looking in that mirror of science.
Holland then describes his view of the fall from Christianity, which he says happened as a result of the two World Wars and people realizing the evils of the Holocaust. I will only say, that the fall happened long before, and Nietzsche’s madman saw this. Holland even references Nietzsche’s “Death of God,” so I do not follow his thinking here at all. He continues:
TH: We no longer needed the devil, because we had Hitler. We no longer needed hell because we had Auschwitz. So, whenever people want to do what is right, what is good, they look at the Nazis and do the opposite of what the Nazis did. The worst insult you can give anyone is that they are a racist or a Nazi.
This kind of [modern liberal] thinking sucked everyone in – universities, politicians, and churches. Therefore, the church no longer determines what people think. Whereas humanism is a kind of a Christian heresy, humanism has become so hegemonic that it has made the church kind of humanist.
This is why church attendance in the west is shrinking – who needs the church when all they do is regurgitate what is offered everywhere else?
GS: So, what would you like to see Christians preach?
TH: I see no point in bishops, preachers or evangelists just recycling the kind of stuff that you can get (chuckling) from any kind of soft left-liberal, because everyone is doing that. If I want that, I will get it from a liberal-democratic counselor.
Holland then describes the incomprehensible truth of Christianity:
TH: If you are a Christian, you think that the entire fabric of the cosmos was ruptured by this strange singularity where someone who is God and man sets everything on its head. To say its supernatural is to downplay it. If you believe that, then it should be possible to dwell on all the other “weird” stuff that becomes part of the Christian package.
Really, no one else is offering this. It sounds like a pretty good product differentiation strategy.
TH: I don’t want to hear what bishops think about Brexit; I know what they think about Brexit and it’s not very interesting. If they’ve got views on original sin, I would be very interested to hear that.
Original sin is a perfect example: if you are a woke liberal, you think “how awful, how terrible; Augustine was a terrible guy.” But watching the kind of shrillness of people convinced of their own virtue, howling down “sinners,” you realize that the concept of original sin keeps us all honest – we are all sinners.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn would write that the line separating good and evil passes right through every human heart. Every single one. Original sin; we are all depraved.
TH: Without original sin, you get a horrible hierarchy of virtue. You get exactly what atheists tend to criticize Christianity for. Christians always have a sense of their own sin; it keeps them honest.
And this is what we see around us today. The hierarchy of virtue is upside down. The greater the evil and the more depraved, the higher up the ladder it goes.
When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet… Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands.
Do you remember what Holland said about the ethics in pre-Christian Rome? There is nothing that keeps us from this.
Unfortunately, we live in a world today where the fearful are empowered by the powerful to mob the non-compliant. COVID-19 isn’t the plague folks. If you think it’s the crisis you should be fearful of I urge you to seek therapy not the false security of a government tracking app.
Matthew Gould also disclosed plans to log the location of whenever two or more people are in close proximity for minutes at a time.
That will disturb privacy campaigners. Very Stalin-esque
Contact Tracing? Really? That’s the next big government program to push for total surveillance over our lives. Now the real fallout from the Coronapocalypse comes to light.
The very people who created a fake pandemic out of faulty statistics, media fear-pimping and the rankest of propaganda are now pushing the total surveillance state to protect us (them?) from the next crisis.
James Corbett from the Corbett Report just published an excellent video discussing ‘contact tracing’ as promulgated by (who else?) the Clinton Global Initiative to create an army of new Brown Shirts to assist our wise and benevolent leaders in managing us like livestock.
James is urging us not to use their Orwellian term, and I agree with him. But the best way to do that is to make fun of it and them.
I propose just looking at them and saying, “Don’t Trace Me, Bro.”
As always when they want to herd us towards a terrible idea they first have to come up with a harmless sounding euphemism for it. Either that or just call it a war that we’re going to fight and win together, you know, for kids!
But this was always the plan with this virus. We can speculate as to why this has been done, why it was directed from the commanding heights of our society but, in the end, that speculation is irrelevant.
This is happening, it’s here and they are now working to square the circle. The goal is to finish off the last vestiges of anonymity and individuality started with the destruction of financial privacy during the Clinton Adminstration, which was wrapped in the classic government phrases “Know Your Customer” and “Anti-Money Laundering”
Now those sets of rules which got ramped up after 9/11 dominate the global financial landscape.
But, let’s look at what’s happened with COVID-19 step-by-step.
The gold standard remains the ABC News report according to which intel collected in November 2019 by the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), a subsidiary of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), was already warning about a new virulent contagion getting out of hand in Wuhan, based on “detailed analysis of intercepted communications and satellite imagery”.
An unnamed source told ABC, “analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event”, adding the intel was “briefed multiple times” to the DIA, the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, and even the White House.
Next China, the gold standard for the Orwellian Panopticon, proceeds to use that Panopticon to prove to the world how effective government can be in containing a deadly plague.
That model, which runs fundamentally counter to billions of years of evolution and basid immunology, is then propagated around the Western world to combat COVID-19, a disease which has a mortality rate similar to the annual flu, to shut down those economies exacerbating a financial crisis already fully underway.
This destroys the lives of hundreds of millions of people. It creates economic dislocations that make the Great Depression look like a mild recession.
In places like Italy, France and Spain where youth unemployment has been in double digits for more than a decade, the lock down was used as a way to tamp down social unrest, as they were hot beds for opposition to inept and increasingly fascistic governments.
In the U.S., a country ruled by old, ideologically-possessed and corrupt Boomers who have been in a heightened state of fear since Donald Trump was elected saw the opportunity to create the worst possible outcome in places like New York and California.
Governors in blue states seized power they didn’t legally have and cried for help they didn’t need.
And the confusion and disinformation about the virus created so much fear people willingly huddled in their homes hoping the angel of death passed them by with nothing more to do than be glued to the death counter in a desperate bid to stay informed about the science.
But there weren’t two million dead in the U.S. There’s around 50,000 and those death statistics are very speicous since the people reporting them have motive, means and opportunity to inflate them to get Federal aid, advance their political agendas now on full display and cover their asses.
So, now ‘contact tracing’ which is just a euphemism for total surveillance. But they are admitting that they can’t do it themselves. They need help. In totalitarian governments like the U.K., they’ll have an app in a couple of weeks.
Matthew Gould also disclosed plans to log the location of whenever two or more people are in close proximity for minutes at a time.
That will disturb privacy campaigners.
Ya think?
Mr Gould told the Science and Technology Committee the app would be “technically ready” for deployment in “two to three weeks” – but made it clear it was only one part of the strategy to emerge from lockdown and would involve a none-too-subtle marketing campaign.
“If you want to protect the NHS and stop it being overwhelmed and, at the same time, want to get the economy moving, then the app is going to be part of an essential part of a strategy for doing that,” he said.
China already has this. All across the enlightened West countries will now recruit tens of thousands of ‘contact tracers’ to go out and build their network for them, just like Gavin Newsome and Andrew Cuomo discussed with Bill Clinton in the video linked above.
And since there are now tens of millions of people out of work desperate for a job of any sort finding recruits will be easy.
See how this works?
First you destroy people’s lives, then you print trillions in funny money to bail out the inept and continue paying the enforcers, ensuring they are fed. And then when desperation reaches its peak you create a new government program and turn people into snitches to ensure compliance.
We’re going to empower the worst busybodies who are already insane with fear to run around collecting data for the government.
All in the name of getting the economy back up and running!
I’m pretty sure when I read The Scarlet Letter in high school we didn’t consider Hester Prynne to be the bad guy. Because the person who is COVID-19 positive will now have a big red “CV” on them which will limit their ability to partake in society.
The next stage will be to force them to lock themselves down in isolation or face the depredations of the State. And even if we begin to ignore such insanity the next step will be to look the other way when the contact tracers become belligerent.
This is all about keeping everyone in a heightened state of fear at all times. The Karens will bee worried about a stupid germ and everyone else will be worried about what the Karens will do.
Because what good is this app if it doesn’t report you to the authorities who know where you are.
So the solution to a virus and the incompetence of our governments is to turn busy bodies into brown shirts and COVID positives into social pariahs.
Do you realize what happens when you don’t pay a parking ticket now? Eventually your licence gets suspended, then your car insurance gets canceled. If you don’t turn your tag in for not having insurance then you are risking jail time when you get stopped by the police. They arrest you for driving on a suspended licence, impound your car, and the entire ordeal becomes a bureaucratic nightmare.
The moral of the story? Pay your parking ticket, obviously.
But not because you were a bad person or committed a heinous crime. But because you broke the rules. If you don’t follow the State’s rules, no matter how petty, no matter how asinine you will be punished to the full extent of the law.
Do you really think this ‘contact tracing’ system won’t end up in the same kind of hell?
Now you’re a documented threat to other people’s lives! You’re an evil spreader, man! Think of the children!
The State is only good at two things. Killing people and creating perverse incentives. And if this isn’t a classic case of creating the perverse incentive of destroying civilization in order to save it I don’t know what is?
This is the real danger of 5G technology. It isn’t China having a backdoor embedded by Huawei, it is the State having the ability to blanket the world in high bandwidth snooping devices everywhere that people congregate.
Their system is failing before our eyes. It’s a system born of corrupt money begetting ever greater institutional corruption. They wouldn’t be pushing for this total surveillance if they weren’t uniquely paranoid about our readiness to throw them overboard.
They want us snitching on each other and suspect of each other. This is the most pernicious form of social control ever devised, to distrust basic human contact and interaction because there are germs in the world.
It’s time to end the mass hallucination that we’ve never dealt with something like this before. The mass branding of this COVID-19 as the plague is laughable and the push for global surveillance is pathetic.
Unfortunately, we live in a world today where the fearful are empowered by the powerful to mob the non-compliant. COVID-19 isn’t the plague folks. If you think it’s the crisis you should be fearful of I urge you to seek therapy not the false security of a government tracking app.
The U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, created by the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, cites three “legacy systems” holding back adoption of AI-driven technologies: cash and credit/debit card payments, individual car ownership, and receiving medical attention from a human doctor. In their place would come financial transactions done only with smart phones (and computers), ride-sharing driverless cars, and AI robotic medical care. Plus, authoritarian technocrats would have us stop shopping in stores (many of which are going bankrupt in the lockdown) and buy everything online, enabling them to more easily track our purchases.
My wife and I began the new year completing a two-week holiday cruise to Hawaii on the Star Princess, sister ship to the Diamond Princess, returning to Los Angeles on January 3. Our flight home was uneventful. All seemed well. In February, the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit an all-time high (29,551 on Feb 12). Nothing to worry about.
Then came a virus virologists name “SARS-CoV-2” (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-CoronaVirus-2) which causes “Covid-19” (Coronavirus disease, beginning in [November?] 2019). On January 20, a man in the Seattle area who had recently returned from visiting family in Wuhan, China had a fever and dry cough and was found to be infected with Covid-19.
Mortality
As of April 28, 2020, in the U.S., 1,011,6000 people have tested positive for Covid-19 (Covid) with 58,343 deaths.
The 1918-1920 influenza pandemic (Spanish flu) killed 675,000 Americans. One of them was my grandmother Mary Ashby Warden Williams. Several weeks before she fell ill and suddenly died, her stepmother, Mary Lyde Hicks Williams (my great grandmother), a professional portrait painter, painted this portrait of Mary Ashby with her 18-month old daughter Charlotte (my mother) standing next to her. Mary Ashby died in January 1920 at the tail end of the pandemic, age 23. Her daughter endures and will be 102 in July.
My wife’s grandmother Agnes Posten, an Irish immigrant, also died in that pandemic, age 26.
More than 30 million Americans had the Spanish Flu in a population of 105 million and with 675,000 deaths, a 2.3% fatality rate. “Fast forward” to today. The Director-General of the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Ghebreyesus, an Ethiopian politician (and former leader of a terrorist group)—the first non-physician to head this body—declared that Covid-19 has a 3.4% mortality rate. With a rate this high Covid could kill many millions of people worldwide. This spawned a global panic. The Director-General, however, left out people who become infected with this virus, did not get tested and didn’t get sick. Up to 80% of people who test positive for Covid either have no symptoms or only mild ones imitating a cold. Counting them in the equation, the mortality rate for Covid in Wuhan, China would be closer to 1.4% than 3.4%.
The 1918-20 influenza pandemic killed between 15 and 100 million people worldwide, 0.8% to 5.6% in a population of 1.8 billion (see here). Now, with the population 7.8 billion, one of comparable lethality could kill between 60 to 430 million people.
The “Spanish” flu started in Kansas. It spread in 3 main waves. The first one, from March to June 1918, was relatively mild. Soldiers called it “the 3-day flu.” It was seldom fatal, with a mortality rate near 0.5% (5 deaths in a thousand cases), close to seasonal flu of 0.1%.
The second wave, from August to December, was more lethal. One observer noted, “While the first wave of flu in 1918 was relatively nonlethal, the second made up for it in spades.” Two million American soldiers were shipped to Europe to fight with the Allies (France, Britain, and Russia) in World War I against the Central Powers (Germany and its allies). More soldiers died from the flu than in battle. Laura Spinney, in Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World writes:
“[Flu] Patients would soon be having trouble breathing. Two mahogany spots appeared over their cheekbones, and within a few hours that color had flushed their faces from ear to ear… [If it turned blue] the outlook was bleak indeed. Blue darkened to black. The black first appeared at the extremities—the hands and feet, including the nails—stole up the limbs, and eventually infused the abdomen and torso. As long as you were conscious, therefore, you watched death enter at your fingertips and fill you up.”
The Spanish flu targeted healthy young adults. People between age 20 and 40 were the high-risk group. Their robust immune systems would launch a “cytokine storm”—a cellular (macrophage)-induced severe inflammatory reaction, both against the virus and oneself. Flooding one’s lungs, this “storm” could kill a person within 24 hours after the onset of symptoms.
(The nations fighting in World War I censored any mention of this pandemic, which laid waste to both sides. Spain remained neutral and did not censor its newspapers, thus the name “Spanish flu.”)
Debate continues over Covid’s case mortality rate. The number of Covid deaths is falsely high in jurisdictions where people who die with the virus (test positive for Covid) in actuality die from a pre-existing condition (heart disease, cancer) and get included with people who die from the virus. And there are Covid-positive people who remain asymptomatic that are not counted, which also makes the case mortality rate falsely high. To remedy that everyone in a given population must be tested. Read the rest of this entry »
