The Zones of Interest

Reflections on the Daily Telegraph's Recent Feature on the Effects of Lockdowns. Where Being Alive Takes on a Whole Deeper Meaning.

The Daily Telegraph reports that a growing body of evidence shows that the impact of lockdown continues to affect every generation and will do so for decades to come. Rosa Silverman’s article, How Covid Destroyed our Lives, From Newborns to Pensioners, is a wearily predictable catalogue of harms and damage that is heart-breaking and exasperating in equal measure. Exasperating because so much of what happened might have been prevented had we as a nation simply followed the protocols we already had in place rather than jumping on board a highly speculative and dubious bandwagon led by billionaire chancers and their friends. Hindsight may now have opened this up for some – but sadly, not enough for the level of critical interrogation needed. Those who blindly followed government orders will have to face up to the catastrophe with which they participated at some point. Wherever you stand on this, it was surely obvious to some conformists that the longer the shutdown persisted, the worse things would become.

Inevitably we arrive at the point in the article where it is claimed that the “debate continues” as to whether or not lockdown “saved lives” and whether the “trade-off” was worth the collateral damage. If only there could be a proper debate with the evidence laid out. The Telegraph’s article was offering something in the right direction, but it strangely bracketed Britain off from the rest of the world as if no other countries had also made this terrible decision, and nothing we had done affected anyone but our own people. This was not true.

The article’s title is the first sly indication that the Telegraph continues to steer the dominant narrative trajectory carefully. It was clear to many writers of the “under the line” comments that followed that “covid” was not the culprit, rather it was the devastating decisions taken by government that led to the multifarious problems that the article outlines. My own brief comment about the virus being in retreat before the lockdowns began was removed by the Telegraph, which was very telling as this was one factor that did make it to the public domain in those terrible times. Telling the truth is what will get you punished, cancelled or deleted in today’s Britain.

Returning to the events of 2020, I was struck then by Professor Sunetra Gupta’s pleas for a calm and more thoughtful approach. For her efforts, alongside her colleagues, professors Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorf, she was vilified and cancelled. When taking her case directly to the then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, Professor Gupta’s advice was roundly ignored. The resulting fallout is what we are now discussing, because what followed in the article demonstrated how correct she had been.

Responses from Telegraph readers to the article were mixed. Many made their exasperation with both the piece and the covidian response abundantly clear. As always with below the line comments, one garners the greatest pleasure from those opinions one shares. It was gratifying to read the many anti lockdown remarks carefully honed over the years of covid mythology. Some raised their heads above the parapet to venture comment about “getting on with it” (that’s the spirit!) and that it was, “not that bad,” and the frustrating, “we did not know then what we know now,” kind of remark. This type of comment is utterly maddening and frighteningly out of touch. This irresponsible and immoral lack of awareness is inexcusable given all we have learned to date.

The remarks that evoked the most bitterness on my part were the innocent sounding yet dreadful descriptions of idyllic lockdowns. This happened to be one of the reasons I stopped reading the Telegraph at that terrible time. I remember an article about someone famous (I recall not whom) who described his lockdown as “idyllic” which infuriated me then but horrifies and disgusts me now. This sort of remark transports me back to that time when stupidity and malevolence were rife, and amongst one’s friends to boot.

The idyllic lock-downers speak about having time to ponder, to potter, more time with children or grandchildren. One commentator below the line wrote that she “had the time of her life during lockdown,” because there was no traffic noise, no aircraft noise and she had time to catch up with cleaning and housework, painting, yoga and meditation. She continued with a description of the sounds of the birds and the buzzing bees and being with nature, and more romantic inanity. “Being alive” she said, “took on a whole deeper meaning.”

Indeed.

Now I realise that there are many who would resonate with that. I had friends and acquaintances at that time who also sank into a life of luxury lockdowns with the implied permission to relax and spend time in ways they secretly craved during the pre-covidian cult days. However, their perceptions of events were highly mediated via television and internet. And, by definition, these perceptions completely excluded everyone else’s experience which they were unable to see or share, let alone empathise with. This was acutely dangerous in my view because it gave some middle-class people a pleasant and carefree experience at the expense of others – “others” that had to keep working, ostensibly to deliver to those same people their Amazon or Internet orders and grocery shopping. The luxury set were literally insulated from reality – quite deliberately as I see it now. This kind of person now remembers their “idyllic” pleasures when recalling memories of lockdown in a self-reinforcing repetitive loop. You can almost hear their impatience.

What are people complaining about? Why don’t they want lockdowns to continue forever? Why don’t we live like this always?... With our gardens and everything we need just brought to us by other people…

Ah yes, people that don’t really matter, the working class, the people that we don’t know and actually want to be permanently socially distanced from.

To add insult to injury, in some cases, the luxury lockdown set were getting paid for it. Work could be hidden within the world of the computer, and if you wanted time away from the desk, one only had to fiddle a PCR test with something like orange juice or cola to get the necessary holy covid status, thus giving oneself further permission to sloth off.

This set of affairs served to reinforce the language of the covidian cult, the unholy trinity of the hands, face and space mantras designed to keep an illusion intact. Meanwhile, people who were not having luxury lockdowns were screaming for help, losing livelihoods, homes, businesses and getting nowhere. Worse, we now know that many starved in other countries because “we” locked down. Adding insult to injury, dissenters were turned upon, not for some greater good as was assumed, rather to prevent the fanciful “luxury” bubble from bursting.

Whilst the middle classes enjoyed their time with children, the garden, the excuse for an extended holiday at home, it was the sounds of buzzing bees and lofty butterflies, the sights and sounds of nature that they had hitherto missed with all their normal busy-ness. Yet commensurate with that seemingly real but highly illusory trance, you may feel a little sobered to learn that in Britain, fifty women were battered to death because the women’s refuges had been closed due to the holy covid.

Get that into your head. That’s fifty lives lost because of lockdown not covid.

But if it saves one life….

And suicides were up. The British Transport Police attended a plethora of railway suicides the news of which was kept under wraps and rarely, if ever, reported in the mainstream press. More lives taken – and it may well be that mental illness was behind these episodes. However, it would not be possible to claim that lockdowns had no part to play given that everyone was affected by them. In India, where people live on subsistence wages with no welfare state and no furlough to speak of, many, many starved and some died from malnutrition.

1.3 billion people. A 21-day lockdown. Can India curb the coronavirus? | Science | AAAS

As Thomas Fazi and Toby Green wrote in The Covid Consensus, in India, 230 million people had been pushed into poverty in 2020, and the Indian middle class shrank by 32 million people. They write about the starvation and hunger in both Africa and India, the effects upon the elderly here, there and everywhere. Frequently isolated, many of whom were found dead and decomposing in their homes. One of my own neighbours perished (in part) due to lack of available medical care. And this, in Britain in the twenty-first century.

But if it saves one life….

Sadly, no. It cost many, many lives. The luxury lockdown set just did not see them. Would not see them. Still will not see them.

Gupta’s predictions had inevitably come to pass. Yet rather than being publicly praised or honoured she was accused of putting out misinformation. She was accused of being (that sin of all sins these days) “right wing,” an accusation that forced her to reveal her own private politics which were, and are as it happens, decidedly left leaning.

The image of people enjoying their garden sunshine, their families and a slower pace of life, all supported on the back of utter misery, sacrifice, illness, pain, suffering, death, all for the sake of transnational globalist whims, puts me in mind of the film adaptation of Martin Amis’s book the Zone of Interest. The film, directed by Jonathan Glazer, adapted only certain aspects of the book, focused on real life figures of Rudoph and Hedwig Höss and their family residing just off the camp we know as Auschwitz.

The film focuses almost entirely on their domestic life. In doing so, it explores the everydayness of evil by highlighting the contrast between their mundane, idyllic home life and the horrors occurring just beyond the garden wall, with little direct focus on camp atrocities or other viewpoints. The style of the film is restrained and sombre with a minimalist approach. It is intensely visual with a deeply uncanny sound design that resonates throughout. With the shift of focus upon the Höss family, the film takes on the characteristics of an historical drama with the immediacy and specificity this brings. However, the conventional narrative qualities are subtly different, and the viewer is obliged to piece together the fragments in order to comprehend the whole.

The sounds of the camp make their way over the wall that separates and insulates the Höss family and their staffs from the horror that grinds on sometimes only feet away. The human groans, the sounds of shootings, screams, the mechanical sounds, (David) Lynchian murmurs and discordant trammelling of human feet populate and sometimes prevent the dialogue from reaching the viewer. The characters are seen brushing away ash. Ashes to ashes. Such a chore. The viewer is thus positioned as both voyeur and impotent bystander, compelled to watch the unfolding of cold, detached psychological horror.

Perhaps it was too much of a coincidence that I had watched this film only days before that Telegraph article with that small selection of obnoxious below the line comments. I could only picture the Höss family with their own idyllic lockdown of sorts whilst Papa works next door in a factory for the ostensible production of human fat, hair for U-Boat blankets and all those ubiquitous ashes to ashes.

And here and now, not just there and then; whilst some enjoyed idyllic lockdowns (For heaven’s sake, lockdowns! Do people no longer hear the terribleness of that prison word?) others were literally murdered, starved, left to die alone, deprived of human contact, desperate and lonely and all of this for a lie, a lie that served only to enrich the richest in the world and to compel others to be coerced into medical procedures they did not need and might never have chosen. The Nuremberg and Helsinki codes, compiled in the wake of Höss’s project, now smashed to smithereens.

The horror continues with modest calculations, courtesy of Bret Weinstein’s extrapolation of leaked New Zealand data, that show one in eight hundred are severely injured and many millions dead due to the injectables. As I write, Northern Ireland is seriously considering compulsory vaccination for the “next” pandemic, no doubt eagerly awaited by those whose current projects, funded by a computer geek philanthropist, will come to fruition.

I muse. Will there be another “Event 201?” Perhaps it will be “Event 202” for “Pandemic 2,” following on from Billy Goat Gates’s loftily named “Pandemic 1.” Because the prophet Gates knows it is coming...And how could that be if not planned? Like another one of his computer games in series. Event 201 was the desktop simulation event to rehearse the narrative for a planned-emic and to decide all manner of final solutions, not for the management of disease, but rather the control of people. I think I prefer to call Event 201 the twenty-first century Wannsee Conference.

Given all that we have been through, and the narrative we have been fed, it is bizarre to see an astonishing shift in priorities given the supposed deadly nature of the holy covid. We are witnessing the sackings of all kinds of people who are replaced with machines. There are more and more electronic barriers in supermarkets and train stations. There is talk of an internet of “things” where all of your appliances are monitored. More and more machines, more technology consuming energy and requiring power. The amount of energy required to facilitate the shiny new thing of artificial intelligence is colossal. You can get a good idea of the priorities of our world by looking at what the powers that be are doing and getting done in earnest. Why are we manufacturing and installing more and more unnecessary energy hungry technology and machines if the earth is really boiling?

To add to the strangeness, the mantra “if it saves one life,” has well and truly gone. Euthanasia is on the up throughout the western world. Countries are moving quickly now to legislate in favour of an efficient state death machinery. We are already slipping down the slope which has been well and truly oiled by celebrities and secular rationalist technocrats.

The WEF’s favourite philosopher speaks of the “useless eaters” and asks what are we to do with them? See that question in the context of Klaus Schwab’s ominous command that “everything that can be digitised must be,” thereby transforming more human beings into useless eaters.

The Great Reset is just another of the WEF’s hollow euphemisms. It is really the great revolution and, in common with the Chinese revolutionary destruction of the “Olds,” in our case, it is the old and elderly that must be done away with. If this is not a Malthusian depopulation agenda, then what is it? Everything they do to kill and maim will be made to look like something else. Something safe and effective.

By now, it must go without saying that the most powerful of the “Olds” to be destroyed is of course, the Judeo-Christian tradition with its message of love and redemption, the family, and tradition along with its cherished texts.

How we shall miss God’s instruction to Moses to “choose life,” when it is too late to call upon Christian values that value each and every person as made in the image of God. In the Judeo-Christian sphere, there is no such thing as a “useless eater.” In a world hell bent on amassing and controlling resources, one that sees everything and everyone as merely resource to be used or not, you can see why biblical texts and their values, carefully honed over many centuries, are increasingly marginalised and frequently attacked.

Do we even recall Kierkegaard and the leap of faith as we take the great leap forward into destruction, and all to save, well what exactly?

As you ponder these things I have written (or told you) do take heed of our Telegraph’s below-the-line lady when she writes that: “Being alive took on a whole deeper meaning.” Because she was right about that even she was blind to the reality of those whose lockdowns were abysmal or deadly. The zones of self-interest laid bare you might say.

Because after 2020, nothing will ever be the same again. And that was the whole point. As Naomi Wolf has said, the whole point of the covidian episode was to change the way we live forever. That really does make for a whole deeper meaning.

It just remains for me to point out that you are the viewer that is obliged to piece together the fragments in order to comprehend the whole.

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