Responsibility and Choice

The Catastrophic New Zealand Covid Experience

If there is a silver lining to the catastrophic Covid experience for us here in New Zealand it is the very clear and indisputable exposure of the political establishment.  The green clean smiling benevolent face of the New Zealand government is nothing more than a mask – yes, a mask – behind which is the harsh dictatorial mien of a government that feels no need to answer to the people it purports to govern.

During the brief but compelling and compellingly beautiful gathering of the people at Parliament in early 2022, repeated calls for governmental officials simply to meet and simply to discuss issues of import, such as their imposed mandates and the societal apartheid that resulted from them, went blithely and purposefully unheeded. Not one single politician from the Prime Minister’s office on down fulfilled their good-faith political obligations by engaging with those from whom they derive their political power.

Furthermore, on the eve of the brutal and unnecessary invasion of Parliament grounds to clear the protesters, it became clear that those in office never had a wish to engage. I was a member of a small task force who, the afternoon before, at 1:30 PM to be precise, had gathered in Wellington to negotiate a settlement of the impasse. The police representative who was to join us cancelled at the last minute.

Later that same afternoon I sat as an observer at a meeting of the Human Rights Commission as a number of petitioners presented evidence of the harm against fundamental human rights, evidence of police abuses and other poignant testimony about the harsh consequences of the mandates. An honest Human Rights Commissioner would have taken up the mantle of protecting those whose rights had been violated and would be violated further by violence. He didn’t.

These past two and a half years have seen ‘essential workers’ who had been lauded and thanked during that first harsh lockdown, terminated from their roles as physicians, nurses, midwives and other health-care practitioners for deciding personally and for their own reasons of health and conscience that a hastily concocted genetic inoculation masquerading as a vaccine was not for them.

As a psychiatrist who worked within the system in the general Wellington region and saw firsthand the tenuous nature of mental health services – services characterised by endemic staff shortages, variable levels of skill, and a form of management style emanating from the top which I can only describe as peculiarly vicious, corrupt and inept – the termination of much-needed and highly competent colleagues was a strange, sad and ironic testament to irrationality and a cold heedlessness of the public weal.

I remember working as a psychiatrist during the first lockdown, making home visits, volunteering time at a local primary care facility when I was on leave, and generally carrying on as one would expect a doctor to do: it was no big deal, and I bristled at the division of society into ‘essential’ and ‘non-essential’.  This division, however, was a template for the later division of New Zealand into a veritable apartheid society comprised of the jabbed and the unjabbed or, psychologically speaking, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’, the ‘clean’ and the ‘unclean’, remnants of which we may see among those who mask and those who don’t.

I note, in looking at the past, that no-one in government provided any actual evidence that could justify the extraordinary measures imposed upon the entire country: lockdowns, distancing or masks. Nor have they provided any evidence to justify their demand that all healthcare workers be inoculated to be able to work face to face with clients. Nor, of course have they been able to justify, nor can they justify or explain rationally, the imposition of an inoculation that circumvented laborious and necessary trials over time, and that have already produced an astonishing legacy  of adverse events, including death. There is not nor can there ever be a substitute for time in the testing and approval of a medical intervention. Heaven knows what will transpire among the inoculated in the years to come.

Physicians who have from the beginning set about to explore the treatment of those who were afflicted by Covid found themselves in very lonely terrain, and worse. The New Zealand government, its Ministry of Health, and allied organisations such as the Medical Council, never once encouraged prevention or treatment. When I brought the issue of treatment up at my local hospital, I was referred to a specialist who told me, simply, that there was no evidence that any treatment worked. When I took the effort to send him quite a lot of substantive evidence, he was silent.

Over these past two and a half years the foundational principles of Medicine have been obliterated by our official organisations and our Ministry of Health: principles of informed consent, individualised treatment and doing no harm. When physicians attempted to act in accordance with these principles they were hounded, derided and officially sanctioned, losing their licences and their jobs.  When physicians attempted to discuss natural immunity, the irrationality of attempting to eliminate a respiratory virus, the necessity of early treatment; when physicians attempted to engage with public officials to discuss pertinent matters of science and medicine – they were persecuted and rebuffed.

As of today there are nearly thirty thousand doctors in the Medical Council’s register. Of those thirty thousand a pittance have joined with New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out for Science (www.nzdsos.com) to stand up for these foundational principles of our profession.  I am certain that if a mere ten percent of practising physicians in New Zealand publicly affirmed the basic principles of Medicine we would not be living through the hell of the tyranny imposed by the government in the name of what they call ‘Medicine’ but which every physician understands is merely an Orwellian caricature.

Our government’s Medicine is a world where suffering patients go untreated, where a one-size-fits-all jab that neither prevents infection nor transmission of the pathogen for which it was engineered is safe as water, where informed consent is unnecessary and where masks, despite their inefficacy, should be worn to safeguard health regardless of the absurdity of how they have instructed people to use them, and regardless of the consequences of eliminating personal identity and depriving people of their quintessentially human features and means of emotional and expressive communication.

I am repeatedly asked how so many people can participate in cruelties and absurdities, how so many people can be persuaded to overlook what their eyes and ears and hearts tell them, how so many people can go along with what is so obviously destructive to us all.  The comprehensive answer might require a long essay or a book to elucidate. But here I will offer an abbreviated response.

Psychological operations like Covid work successfully by creating shock and awe, instilling fear, and inducing a response akin to something that is supernatural, that draws upon our emotionally regressive attitudes towards the miraculous, which transcends the laws of common sense or reason. The origins story of Covid and the incessant and inescapable drumbeat from mainstream media about deceptive case counts and death worked wonders on a mainly gullible and trusting population. The inclusion of ‘supernatural’ elements, clearly seen by any analysis of the ridiculousness of the rituals of masking, are purposeful, for it is just these supernatural elements that grip us unconsciously.  Masking is itself a propaganda tour de force; and propaganda is, at bottom, an act of violence.

I will conclude my ruminations with two quotations, which may help to frame my remarks.  The first is from Freud who, in his work on group psychology, wrote:

“ … in a group the individual is brought under conditions which allow him to throw off the repressions of his unconscious instinctual impulses. The apparently new characteristics which he then displays are in fact the manifestations of this unconscious, in which all that is evil in the human mind is contained as a predisposition.”

The second is from Goldhagen, who, referring to perpetrators of antisemitic cruelties in Hitler’s Willing Executioners, wrote:

“ … any explanation that fails to acknowledge the actors’ capacity to know and to judge, namely to understand and to have views about the significance and morality of their actions … cannot possibly succeed in telling us much about why the perpetrators acted as they did.”

The State, as all collections of Power tend, would like nothing better than absolute control over a faceless and masked citizenry of submissive digital peasants marching in lockstep to their pronouncements.

Many people, perhaps the great majority, relatively ignorant of history and politics, are primarily occupied with eking out an existence amidst the harsh realities of daily living. Trusting in government, they will accept the pronouncements of mainstream media and authorities as Gospel.

There is another group who see quite clearly through the captivating irrationalities and the Siren song of propaganda, and who willingly participate in falsehoods and cruelties not only to save their skins but also to derive pleasure and profit at the expense of others.

And then there are those who speak out.

We, as inherently free and autonomous individuals, are blessed with the responsibility of choice.

Emanuel E. Garcia, M.D.

(This is a slightly revised version of an article that first appeared in Global Research in July 2022: https://www.globalresearch.ca/responsibility-choice/5787009)