Israel Shamir (Unz Review) Wed, Jul 15, 2020 | 1800 words 1,850 37

The relentless advance of coronavirus terror has been broken. Recalcitrant Serbs rebelled against their President when he ordered them back under house arrest. After two days of street battles with dozens of policemen hospitalised, the sturdy protesters won; the authorities surrendered and gave up their plans to lock Belgrade down. Shops, pubs and restaurants in Belgrade will have an early evening curfew; but this is much better than the full lockdown they intended. Prime Minister Ms Brnabic complained that she could not understand why her people were protesting. She must be uncommonly dense, this lady, if after two days of protests she could not understand that people do not want lockdowns. This is a rare reversal by the authorities, said the BBC correspondent in Belgrade. This is an understatement in the best English manner. I think it is a precedent.

Until now, there were countries that avoided lockdown altogether (Japan, Sweden, Belarus), but there wasn’t a country where people demanded and then obtained their freedom. Serbia is the first one. This small (pop. 7 million) country in the Balkans has a long history of resistance – they fought the Turks for centuries; they resisted Nazi Germany longer than France; they had the strongest guerrilla movement outside of Belarus, and yes, they fought mighty NATO for quite a long time. The Germans bombed Belgrade in April 1941, followed not long afterwards by America (aided by the British of course). In 1944, on Easter Day, six hundred American bombers carpet-bombed Belgrade, destroying its palaces, theatres, railway stations, and hospitals. That was America’s Easter Bunny gift to the Serbs.

In 1999 Bill Clinton bombed Belgrade again, for three months, killing a lot of Serbs and causing immense destruction. The Serbian president was seized and murdered in the court cells underneath The Hague. My American friends, if you are in the mood to apologise, you can “take a knee” for the Serbs, for the crimes more recent and more tangible than the 18^th century horrors of your ancestors. The US chose to lob bombs at the Serbs for good reason: Serbs do not surrender easily. These strong-willed giants have guts, more than the rest of the Balkans put together. No doubt today many of the evil geniuses at Coronavirus HQ are regretting that Serbia wasn’t completely erased from the face of the earth, so that it would not have become such a troublesome example to a rather pliable and docile global populace.

But it’s too late; we have absorbed the lesson. The only way to avoid a renewed lockdown is a popular uprising, for nothing less will convince our authorities to refrain from locking us up. Like a boy who finds the candy jar, they just can’t help themselves. Lockdown makes life too easy for our rulers: the subjects stay indoors; they fearfully venture out only for shopping; they are obedient; they are on the dole and so they are dependent on the good will of the state. Unemployment rises steadily with every week of lockdown. Small companies go down. Only the digital giants will survive the deluge. People are disposable, a burden on the economy. Even their labour is no longer needed. Soon, independent, hard-working folk will be replaced by a new species dependent on government subsidy and demanding only more entertainment; a modern version of the panem et circenses (bread and circuses) mob the proud Romans were reduced to, as Juvenal wrote circa 100AD.

Why did the Serb government decide to lock their people up? Ostensibly, it’s because of 13 deaths “linked” to the Covid. That’s 13 too many, the President recited piously. Bear in mind that hundreds of people die every day in a country of millions like Serbia, and that this is perfectly normal. What’s so special about 13 people who died of pneumonia and may have been carriers of a new coronavirus? It was only a few years ago that thousands of Serbs fought and died for their freedom – that’s what they were fighting for, at least. Now their rulers do not think so much of freedom. Good thing that the people (as opposed to their rulers) are made of different, sterner stuff.

The Serbs I spoke to do not think this was an independent decision of their president; rather, an order sent down from some obscure Covid HQ, probably via the WHO. There is a covert guiding hand that devises new hardships and pressures governments to lock down economies and people. The authorities are naturally keen to return to the lockdown. It’s inertia, the great force of inertia. After they, and so many bureaucrats enacted the global culture of coronavirus, established ZOOM-based education, painted spots for 2 m distance, ordered millions of masks with a decent profit for themselves, trained an army of civil servants and disciplined the people, they are loth to drop it. They are used to it now and enjoy its fruit.

Peter Hitchens wrote about this in his column: “When this madness began, I behaved as if a new and fanatical religion was spreading among us. Be polite and tolerant, I thought. It may be crazy and damaging but in time it will go away. Now it is clear that a new faith, based on fear of the invisible and quite immune to reason, has all but taken over the country. And it turns out to be one of those faiths that don’t have much tolerance for those who don’t share it. Its evangelists will not leave you and me alone, but constantly seek to force us to join. This is why I make such a fuss about the demand to make us all wear muzzles. This is not about health. This is about power and freedom, and has less and less to do with Covid-19. This obsession with telling us how to look, and turning us from normal humans into submissive, mouthless flock animals all decked out in a compulsory uniform is, in my view, part of an unprecedented assault on our personal liberty in general. Stay at home. Stop working. Don’t see your friends or relatives. Submit, submit, submit. Get used to being told what to do. It seems we really have become a nation of surrendered masochists.”

In the US, a new wave of the alleged Covid pandemic is supposed to remove President Trump, after RussiaGate and the impeachment fiasco failed to do the job. They manufactured the new wave without ‘re-seeding’ the country (as Larry Romanoff suggested) by the simple expedient of newspaper reporting. “New Cases in the U.S. Soar Past 68,000, Shattering Record” – screamed The New York Times. They do not tell you that this number means nothing. The new cases are not sick people: it is predominantly perfectly healthy people who by faulty and dubious methods were declared Covid carriers. The more you test for a virus, the more positive results you will get. George Floyd carried the new virus; still he was healthy enough to fight the police.

A Russian virologist correctly said: if we were to test healthy people for any flu virus, we would get enormous numbers of ‘infected’ results. Everyone carries some virus, this or that. But we never check healthy people because we never, until now, had the need to create the illusion of a pandemic. In 2020, the need for such an illusion became paramount, for the Covid operators intend to destroy the world economy, break our stamina and unseat Trump. It is worrisome that Texas and Florida, previously Trump bastions, gave in and began to enforce the masks because of these spurious tests.

There is nothing new about the disease. The first husband of Scarlett O’Hara, Charles Hamilton, died of pneumonia, and nobody checked him for the new coronavirus. Perhaps if they had checked Sherman’s army for viruses it would’ve never gotten to Atlanta, let alone Savannah.

The only novelty is the insistence of its promoters. The imagery of the Covid adepts grows more and more military. “The ring of steel” is how Australians proudly describe the quarantine around Melbourne. You’d believe that their dead were lying in the streets, but nothing of the sort! It is the same threat of “new cases”, meaning nothing at all – but it is enough to compel Aussies to agree to this tyranny.

I would be despondent and broken, if not for the Belgrade Uprising. What Serbs can do, we all can aspire to. There is an urgent need for rebellion against Covid dictatorship, the need to revolt until we are free.

To my brethren free of spirit, I’ll say: fear none but God. Distrust the mass media for they sell fear. They invented “homophobia” so that homosexuals will fear normal folks and rush into the arms of their Uncle Sam. They invented “male chauvinism” and “battered wives” so that women might be afraid of their menfolk and seek government-sanctioned shelter. They invented “racism” so that every ethnic minority might cower beneath the guardianship of Big Brother. They created the myth of “abused children” so that wives will distrust their husbands. These are myths. There is no “homophobia” – we really do not give a damn what you do in your bedroom, as long as you don’t frighten the horses. Men are naturally protective of children and chivalrous towards women. White folks actually like blacks being jolly and playing their banjo, as long as it is not all night long. I tell you: we all are minorities apart, and together we are The People. We get along very well together without the oppressive superintendence of Big Brother. The fear of Covid has been manufactured so that we might fear every fellow human being, and we must reject it.

And to covid-believers I’ll say, do not despair! This is not the last disaster we shall witness. There are still locusts, asteroids, Carrington events, and newer and better diseases. There are still chances for mankind to follow the dinosaurs to oblivion. Don’t be in such a hurry!

P.S. Lockdown leads nowhere, as the Israelis discovered. Sprinters by nature, Israeli men are as notorious for jumping the gun as they are to finish up early and brag of their feats to their friends, saper le-hevre, in Hebrew. Israelis were first to lock down; they thought they would win by blitzkrieg like they won in the 1967 war. They celebrated their victory (as they had very few deaths), but very soon they discovered that there is no possible victory, no shock-and-awe triumph against a ubiquitous virus. It is a long-running campaign, and lockdown is the doomsday device – this is the conclusion of Israelis who tried it. You do not deploy the weapon of last resort as long as you can survive without it!