Coronavirus: Thread

[grarpamp]

The Age Of Amnesia

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-age-of-amnesia_4926465.html
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald

The main defense of Anthony Fauci in his legal deposition this month
was pretty simple: he forgot. He said that he couldn’t recall nearly
200 times and versions of that many more. He said that he was so busy
running his huge agency plus shepherding vaccines that he couldn’t
possibly remember this or that email implicating him in a censorship
scheme. He gets thousands of emails a day and there is no reason to
think any in particular would grab his attention.

It’s all a bit implausible because we saw him on TV several times a
day for the better part of three years. He was the hard-working actor
out there. I do TV and interviews several times per week but I try my
best to throttle them back and turn many down simply because they
truly drain away energy and focus from other work. In short, they are
all-consuming. The notion that he neglected issues of message in favor
of serious science is an incredibly obvious strain on credulity.

So what was the point of this line of answer? Yes, he wants to save
his skin. No question about that. But it occurs to me that there is
another point too. He wants to model for the nation and the world how
to think about the whole of the last three years. His view is that
everyone should forget about it.

You have surely noticed this happening ever since the opening
following lockdowns and the rest. We are all just supposed to forget.
We are supposed to move on. I’ve heard already a thousand times that
we never had a lockdown. There seems to be little in the way of
official memory of two years of school closures or the shutting of
churches on holidays.

We are being told to forget about the medical mandates that displaced
millions from their jobs. We had relatives die and we couldn’t attend
their funerals but we are supposed to forget about all that. I see
claims daily that the censorship never really took place or wasn’t
that bad really, so we should shut up already.

What about all the politicians who violated stay-at-home orders, went
on vacations or got hairstyles, or were photographed partying without
a mask even as they imposed them on everyone else? Hey, mistakes were
surely made but let’s not make too big a deal of it.

Indeed, it was amazing to me how the most egregious and global attacks
on human liberty in the name of public health were very quickly
memory-holed by the major media, which we now know was the answer to
public health agencies themselves the entire time. We all stood by in
shock and wondered if we were the crazy ones.

That, after all, is the whole point of Orwell’s Memory Hole, the
invention of an alternative history of the recent past that
contradicts our own memories and invites us to believe that we are
crazy or obsessed or otherwise thinking about things that truly do not
matter. This is why the Memory Hole was so important in Orwell’s book.
It becomes a means by which the population is controlled in its
thinking and therefore in its psychological capacity to resist the
next round of impositions.

This is why cultivating a solid memory is so crucial to the
preservation of the good and civilized life. The barbarians all around
us are constantly inviting us to forget so that we do not learn
lessons and do not apply the lessons we learn. Instead we become blank
slates for the ruling class to write on daily and then we are more
likely to believe them. Better to never learn lessons at all. If we
must learn something, it should be along the lines that we need more
control and more acquiescence in the future.

Movements that truly seek to prevent horrors of the past must also
seek to preserve memory. This is why there are Holocaust Museums, for
example, to help us understand experiences that were not ours but from
which we can still learn. Indeed, this is the whole point of learning
in general, to extract wisdom from people and events that have come
before in order that we can be better prepared to build a future.

People who invite us to forget are more than likely up to no good.
It’s not just that they want to replace a real narrative with a false
one. They want history to start over at any given moment so that we
are more easy to manipulate in the future.

Perhaps this is why basic memory skills have been so de-emphasized in
early childhood education for so long. It’s a true tragedy because
young people do have a remarkable capacity for memorization. They
might lack the ability to think abstractly or process difficult
strings of logic but they do have the mental power to hear and repeat,
which is why a classical education puts so much emphasis on this and
probably why modern education regards memorization as a waste of time.

The urge to forget plays out in strange ways in our time. When
accounts are banned on YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook, so too are the
archives of those accounts blown away so that we can longer access
information about the recent past. That is intentional, otherwise the
banning would be a mere blocking of new content. No, the whole point
is to wipe out what we know or think we know.

This is one of the tragedies of the Trump ban on Twitter, for example.
We lost a narrative record over years of important data points, making
even writing the history of our times more difficult. So when the
account came back, so too did our memories and then we could scroll
through and verify a version of events that is closer to reality
rather than the fake history we were being told to accept from on
high.

We’ve been through almost three years in which powerful elites have
done their best to wipe out history. I recall the chills I got down my
spine when major media organs began putting trigger warnings on links
older than a few months. The clear message was: this is no longer
valid or reliable because things have surely changed. This is also why
Fauci kept saying that the science has changed. It was a call for us
to forget all the statements that contradict his latest statements.

In this way, we have entered into an age of amnesia with a ruling
class that wants everyone to forget the wisdom of the past and even
the events of recent history, to forgive but mostly to forget and move
on like good little pawns in their game. Just do what we are told and
forget everything else.

We can all resist this little game. We can access Archive.org and,
more importantly, we can consult the wisdom of the ages through books
and poetry and religious teachings. If civilization is to survive the
onslaught, it will be because we choose to remember and act on those
memories in defiance of every demand that we forget.

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