Why “Public Health” is the Health of the State

 

Why “Public Health” is the Health of the State

By Thomas DiLorenzo

April 14, 2021

 

One of the most remarkable articles written about the growth of government during the twentieth-century is “War is the Health of the State” by Randolph Bourne.  Published in 1918, Bourne’s essay explained how it is human nature to mostly ignore the state because the state during peacetime has “almost no trappings to appeal to the common man’s emotions.”  War, however, is the all-purpose tool of the state to stir up the public’s emotions in a way that motivates it to hand over to the state virtually unlimited powers, abandoning all constitutional constraints – and to subsequently relinquish most of their supposedly cherished freedoms.

But the state has other tricks up its sleaves in its never-ending quest for totalitarian control of society.  And do not delude yourself:  All states aspire to become totalitarian by nature – it’s only a matter of time.

Wars are very expensive; they generate antiwar movements, fierce political opposition, and sometimes assassinations.  And they can go very, very badly.  As both Napoleon and Hitler learned when they foolishly invaded Russia.

Immuneti - Advanced Im... Buy New $18.50 ($0.31 / Count) (as of 04:58 EDT - Details) Other kinds of less risky (to the state) “emergencies” will often suffice as totalitarianism’s propaganda/brainwashing strategies.  As the world has learned in the past year, a “public health emergency” (or the perception of a fabricated and phony one) can do the job just fine without the messiness and expenses of war.  The reasons for this can be understood by reading the following passages from Randolph Bourne’s famous essay where I have substituted the words “pandemic” or “public health” (in brackets) for the word “war”:

“The republican state has almost no trappings to appeal to the common man’s emotions . . . .  The moment a [pandemic] is declared, however, the mass of the people . . . with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives . . . .  The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to government, identifies himself with its purposes . . . and the state once more walks . . .”

Every single word of this is a perfectly accurate description of how Americans have behaved ever since the “public health” bureaucrats declared a pandemic.  It was shocking how immediate millions of people so immediately agreed to be regimented, coerced, and deranged in all aspects of their lives.  Of course, the fact that all of the dictates by the local government mini-Mussolinies were enforced by armed police also helped to “convince”  Boobus Americanus that he must genuflect to the state.

Bourne continues:

“[Public health] is the health of the state.  It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the government coercing into obedience the [numerical] minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.  The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties; the minorities are either intimidated into silence . . . .  Minorities are rendered sullen . . .”

The Problem with Linco... DiLorenzo, Thomas J. Buy New $29.99 (as of 11:50 EST - Details) Those Americans who “lack the herd sense” regarding the Hitlerian dictates of Anthony Fauci and his ilk have been fired from their jobs, canceled from Facebook, Twitter, etc., and generally demonized as enemies of human civilization.  “Minorities” have been literally silenced by the “Tech giants” with no “persuasion” at all involved.  Well-known drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine that could have saved untold numbers of lives were effectively banned, and the common sense approach of boosting one’s immunity with vitamins D and C and zinc (and a half hour of vitamin D-generating sunshine a day) were either ignored or denounced as snake oil by the state, the television networks, the laughingly-called “media” in general, and many others who have prostituted themselves to the pharmaceutical industry.

Once the “public health” bureaucracy declared a pandemic, millions of Americans instantly turned into mental infants, eager for the D.C. bureaucracy to become their real mommies and daddies and protect them from the big bad coronavirus wolf.  As Bourne explained:

“There is . . . in the feeling toward the state a large element of pure filial mysticism.  The sense of insecurity, the desire for protection, sends ones desire back to father and mother . . . .  It is not for nothing that one’s state is still thought of as Father or Motherland.  The [pandemic] has shown that nowhere under the shock of danger have these primitive childlike attitudes failed to assert themselves . . .”

Anthony Fauci, who went to medical school sixty years ago; never actually practiced medicine himself; who has been a tenured federal bureaucrat for more than half a century; and who parades around in public wearing two masks despite having been vaccinated, became every American’s all-knowing, protective “father.”  His Stepford wife-ish, half-body scarf-wearing sidekick, Dr. Deborah Birx, became everyone’s stand-in for “mother.”  Every state and local government in America did exactly what these two bureaucratic weasels demanded that they do.  “Listen to Dr. Fauci,” Joe Biden has repeatedly demanded.  Anyone asking for a second opinion was either ignored or smeared as an enemy of society.  There are myriad stories of doctors who did offer second opinions who were fired or punished in other ways.  (For giving a speech in which she argued that the CDC death count numbers were not reliable since they conflated death with COVID and death from COVID, a physician friend of yours truly was banned from referring her patients to the hospital she had been associated with.  Today, the CDC admits that only 6 percent of the half million or so “COVID” deaths in the U.S. can be legitimately called death from COVID).

As with war, the state attempts to crush all dissent when it comes to its “public health” emergencies.  As Bourne further wrote: When Politicians Panic... Tamny, John Best Price: $22.34 Buy New $21.09 (as of 03:04 EDT - Details)

“[D]issent is like sand in the bearings.  Any difference with ‘unity’ turns the whole vast impulse toward crushing it . . . .  the herd becomes divided into the hunters and the hunted, and the [pandemic] becomes not only a technical game but a sport as well.”

Ah, “unity,” the new mating call of the Party of Biden.  Dissent from Unity’s Official Truth, and you will in fact be hunted down, possibly lose your job, or have your life destroyed.

Now, for any readers who still believe the government lie that “we are the government” and, therefore, the government would never manipulate us in these ways, I recommend another online essay, this one by economic historian Robert Higgs entitled “The Song that is irresistible.”  In that essay Higgs states the truism that:

“States, by their very nature, are perpetually at war – not always against foreign foes, of course, but always against their own subjects.  The state’s most fundamental purpose, the activity without which it cannot exist, is robbery . . .  which it pretties up ideologically by giving it a different name (taxation) and by striving to sanctify its intrinsic crime as permissible and socially necessary” (emphasis added).

Or as yours truly has written on numerous occasions:  The purpose of government is for those who run it to plunder those who do not.

The state also “sanctifies” mass murder, by the way, thinly disguised by calling it “war” and by enlisting legions of intellectual prostitutes to dream up myriad excuses and rationales for its mass murdering sprees.  Mainstream “Lincoln scholarship” would be the most egregious example of this kind of intellectual whoremongering (and warmongering).

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