Originally published via No College Mandates:
In political discourse – and perhaps this is an inexorable feature of human tribalistic psychology — there exists a dichotomy between what Noam Chomsky and others have described as “worthy” and “unworthy” victims of state violence and other forms of oppression.
(I would be remiss, although it is not the focus of this article, to not note that vaunted leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky became one of the most hardline COVID authoritarians on the planet. He descended so far morally as to advocate starving out the unvaccinated by locking them in their homes until they complied with mandates.)
Returning to the topic of “worthy” and “unworthy” victims, the Palestinians, as can be seen in recent college protests, are very much in vogue as “worthy” victims.
(Let’s not get sidetracked; this is not a treatise on the Palestine vs. Israel conflict. I bring up this example of a “worthy” victim because it is timely and apropos.)
On the other hand, college students (along with everyone else in the population at large) who were forced to receive unnecessary and often extremely damaging experimental medical treatments with no public health benefit are very much placed in the latter category (“unworthy victims”) by the same ideological cohort that champions the Palestinian cause.
Accordingly, the victims of COVID tyranny get no sympathy from the mainstream academic institutions nor the students and faculty who outsource their critical thinking to them.
Instead, anyone who asks questions about vaccine mandates – and even anyone injured by the shots – is subject to ridicule by the mainstream media and the mainstream culture it fosters.
(On the hypocrisy of bodily autonomy, which is tangentially related to this topic, I will only note in passing, although it could constitute an entire article, the “my body, my choice” hypocrisy of pro-choice activists who suddenly have nothing to say about needle rape with an experimental drug as a requirement to attend school. When a woman is denied access to an abortion by the state, she is a “worthy” victim of coercion. When that same woman is required to submit to an injection with a product she doesn’t want, she is an “unworthy” victim.)
Perception influenced by media and academic bubbles and the resulting ideological possession inform the level of outrage of activists over any given issue, and who constitutes a “worthy” victim and who does not. Such ideologues have no reservoir of sympathy for, or solidarity with, their own peers who have been forced to suffer for many years at this point for the sake of pharmaceutical profiteering and technocratic social control.
Please do not misunderstand: this is not to equate the explosive latent war in the Middle East and COVID-19 vaxx mandates. One is obviously geopolitical and millennia-old and highly ripe for sensationalism in the media. The other is a domestic policy matter and relatively new and slow-burning.
The caveat of unfair comparisons aside, allow me to briefly make the case that the COVID crimes of the past few years dwarf, by any metric, what is currently unfolding in the Middle East – the main difference between the two, in terms of media presentation, and hence public perception, being that the COVID crimes do not convey scenes of bombings and bloodied children and therefore do not have the same visceral impact on the viewer or reader.
This might engender criticism as hyperbole, but I believe that history will regard the COVID-19 crimes by the Public Health™ authorities and the pharmaceutical industry – first, the creation of SARS-CoV-2 in the in a dingy communist lab using money funneled to it by Anthony Fauci’s NIAID through EcoHealth Alliance; second, the resulting mRNA gene therapies deceptively marketed as “vaccines” and authorized under fraudulent premises; third, the forced uptake of said mRNA gene therapies by way of unconstitutional and unethical vaxx mandates and weaponized lockdowns – as the greatest crime in human history, with a death toll in the millions and climbing. The final tally of dead victims may exceed a billion when the totality of the truth emerges, as it will one day, about the vaxxes’ adverse side effects, the mass starvation induced by global lockdowns and demolished supply lines, the wrecked mental health induced by the same, etc.
We need justice. We need an end to brutal vaxx and masking mandates on college campuses and throughout civil society. After the immediate injustices are remedied, we need Nuremberg 2.0 to ensure nothing like the crimes of the past three years are ever permitted to occur again.
Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
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