The WHO’s Road to Totalitarianism

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Commentary

Several articles on the proposed amendments to the World Health Organization’s international health regulations have appeared on Brownstone, such as this excellent introduction. Consequently, there is no need to repeat this information in a similar format. What I would like to do instead is to pursue the question of what the implications would be for people worldwide if this organization were to be successful in getting the representatives of member countries to accept the proposed amendments. More specifically, what are the likely consequences in terms of the concept and practice of totalitarianism?

To understand this, one has to get to grips with the mode of rule called totalitarian government, of course, but I doubt whether most people have an adequate grasp of full-fledged totalitarian rule, despite recently experiencing it to a certain degree under “pandemic” conditions. Should the amendments proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO) be accepted in May, the citizens of the world would be subjected to unadulterated totalitarianism, however, so it is worthwhile to explore the full implications of this “anonymous” mode of governance here.

This is done in the hope that, if representatives of the people—which is what they are supposed to be—in legislative bodies around the world were to read this article, as well as others related to the same topic, they would think twice before supporting a motion or bill that would, in effect, grant the WHO the right to usurp the sovereignty of member nations. The recent developments in the state of Louisiana, which amount to the rejection of the WHO’s authority, should be an inspiration to other states and countries to follow its example. This is the way to beat the WHO’s mendacious “pandemic treaty.”

On her website, called Freedom Research, Dr. Meryl Nass has described the WHO’s notion of “pandemic preparedness” as a “scam/boondoggle/Trojan horse,” which aims (among other things) to transfer billions of taxpayer dollars to the WHO as well as other industries, in order to vindicate censorship in the name of “public health,” and perhaps most importantly, to transfer sovereignty regarding decision-making for “public health” globally to the director-general of the WHO (which means that legally, member countries would lose their sovereignty).

In addition, she highlights the fact that the WHO intends to use the idea of “One Health” to subsume all living beings, ecosystems, and climate change under its own “authority”; further, to acquire more pathogens for wide distribution, in this way exacerbating the possibility of pandemics while obscuring their origin, and in the event of such pandemics occurring, justifying the development of more (mandatory) “vaccines” and the mandating of vaccine passports (and of lockdowns) globally, thus increasing control (the key term here) over populations. Should its attempt at a global power grab succeed, the WHO would have the authority to impose any “medical” program it deems necessary for “world health,” regardless of their efficacy and side effects (including death).

In the preceding paragraph, I italicized the word “control” as a key term. What should be added to it is the term “total”—that is, “total control.” This is the gist of totalitarian rule, and it should therefore be easy to see that what the WHO (together with the World Economic Forum and the United Nations) strives for is total or complete control of all people’s lives.

No one has analyzed and elaborated on totalitarianism from this perspective more thoroughly than the German-born, American philosopher Hannah Arendt, and her monumental study of this phenomenon—“The Origins of Totalitarianism” (1951, and in enlarged format, 1958) still stands as the authoritative source for the understanding of its historical manifestations. The latter, focused on by Arendt, are 20th-century Nazism and Stalinism, but it is not difficult to perceive its lineaments in what we have been living through since 2020—although a strong case could be made that 2001 marked its identifiable beginning, when (in the wake of 9/11) the Patriot Act was passed, arguably laying the authoritarian groundwork for totalitarian rule as clearly perceived by Henry Giroux.

Arendt (p. 274 of the Harvest, Harcourt edition of “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” 1976) singles out “total terror” as the essence of totalitarian government and elaborates as follows:

“By pressing men against each other, total terror destroys the space between them; compared to the condition within its iron band, even the desert of tyranny [which she distinguishes from totalitarianism; B.O.], insofar as it is still some kind of space, appears like a guarantee of freedom. Totalitarian government does not just curtail liberties or abolish essential freedoms; nor does it, at least to our limited knowledge, succeed in eradicating the love for freedom from the hearts of man. It destroys the one essential prerequisite of all freedom which is simply the capacity of motion which cannot exist without space.”

Reading this evocative characterization of totalitarianism in terms of “total terror” makes one realize anew, with a start, how fiendishly clever the perpetrators of the so-called pandemic emergency were—which was no real pandemic, of course, as the German government recently admitted. It was the thin edge of the wedge, as it were, to insinuate “total terror” into our lives by means of curtailing our access to free movement in space. “Lockdowns” are the signature tool for implementing restrictions on free movements in space.

It may not, on the face of it, appear to be the same as or similar to the incarceration of prisoners in the concentration camps under Nazi rule, but arguably the psychological effects of lockdowns approximate those experienced by inmates of these notorious camps in the 1940s. After all, if you are not allowed to leave your house, except to go to the shop to buy food and other essentials before you hurry back home—where you dutifully sanitize all of the items you bought (a concrete reminder that venturing out in space is “potentially lethal”)—the imperative is the same: “You are not allowed out of this enclosure, except under specified conditions.” It is understandable that the imposition of such strict spatial boundaries engenders a pervasive sense of fear, which eventually morphs into terror.

Small wonder the pseudo-authorities promoted—if not “commanded”—“working (and studying) from home,” leaving millions of people cloistered in their houses in front of their computer screens (Plato’s cave wall). And banning meetings in public, except for a few concessions as far as the numbers of attendees at certain gatherings were concerned, was just as effective regarding the intensification of terror. Most people would not dare transgress these spatial restrictions, given the effectiveness of the campaign to instill dread of the supposedly lethal “novel coronavirus” in populations, exacerbating “total terror” in the process. The images of patients in hospitals, attached to ventilators, and sometimes looking appealingly, desperately at the camera, only served to exacerbate this feeling of dread.

With the advent of the much-hyped COVID-19 pseudo-“vaccines,” another aspect of generating terror among the populace manifested itself in the guise of relentless censorship of all dissenting views and opinions on the “efficacy and safety” of these, as well as on the comparable effectiveness of early treatment of COVID-19 by means of proven remedies such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. The clear aim of this was to discredit contrarians who raised doubts over the official valorization of these supposedly miraculous cures for the disease and to isolate them from the mainstream as “conspiracy theorists.”

Arendt’s insight into the indispensable function of space for human movement also casts the World Economic Forum’s plans to create “15-minute cities” worldwide in a disturbing new light. These have been described as “open-air concentration camps,” which would eventually become a reality by prohibiting movement outside of these demarcated areas, after an initial period of selling the idea as a way of combating climate change by walking and cycling instead of using carbon-emitting motor cars. The World Economic Forum’s and the WHO’s “concern” with climate change as a putative threat to global health offers further justification for these planned variations on prisons for the thinly disguised incarceration of millions of people.

The pertinence of Arendt’s thinking on totalitarianism for the present does not end here, though. Just as relevant as the manner in which it cultivates terror is her identification of loneliness and isolation as prerequisites for total domination. She described isolation—in the political sphere—as “pre-totalitarian.” It is typical of the tyrannical governments of dictators (which are pre-totalitarian), where it functions to prevent citizens from wielding some power by acting together.

Loneliness is the counterpart of isolation in the social sphere; the two are not identical, and one can be the case without the other. One can be isolated or kept apart from others without being lonely; the latter only sets in when one feels abandoned by all other human beings. Terror, Arendt sagely observed, can “rule absolutely” only over people who have been “isolated against each other” (Arendt 1975, pp. 289–290). It therefore stands to reason that, to achieve the triumph of totalitarian rule, those promoting its inception would create circumstances where individuals feel increasingly isolated as well as lonely.

It is superfluous to remind anyone of the systematic inculcation of both of these conditions in the course of the “pandemic” through what has been discussed here, particularly lockdowns, the restriction of social contact at all levels, and through censorship, which—as remarked earlier—was clearly intended to isolate dissenting individuals. And those who were isolated in this way were often—if not usually—abandoned by their family and friends, with the consequence that loneliness could, and sometimes did, follow. In other words, the tyrannical imposition of COVID-19 regulations served the (probably intended) purpose of preparing the ground for totalitarian rule by creating the conditions for isolation and loneliness to become pervasive.

How does totalitarian government differ from tyranny and authoritarianism, where one may still discern the figures of the despot, and the sway of some abstract ideal, respectively? Arendt wrote (p. 271–272):

“If lawfulness is the essence of non-tyrannical government and lawlessness is the essence of tyranny, then terror is the essence of totalitarian domination.

“Terror is the realization of the law of movement; its chief aim is to make it possible for the force of nature or of history to race freely through mankind, unhindered by any spontaneous human action. As such, terror seeks to ‘stabilize’ men in order to liberate the forces of nature or history. It is this movement which singles out the foes of mankind against whom terror is let loose, and no free action of either opposition or sympathy can be permitted to interfere with the elimination of the ‘objective enemy’ of History or Nature, of the class or the race. Guilt and innocence become senseless notions; ‘guilty’ is he who stands in the way of the natural or historical process which has passed judgement over ‘inferior races,’ over individuals ‘unfit to live,’ over ‘dying classes and decadent peoples.’ Terror executes these judgements, and before its court, all concerned are subjectively innocent: the murdered because they did nothing against the system, and the murderers because they do not really murder but execute a death sentence pronounced by some higher tribunal. The rulers themselves do not claim to be just or wise, but only to execute historical or natural laws; they do not apply [positive] laws, but execute a movement in accordance with its inherent law. Terror is lawfulness, if law is the law of the movement of some suprahuman force, Nature or History.”

The reference to nature and history as suprahuman forces pertains to what Arendt (p. 269) claimed to have been the undergirding beliefs of National Socialism and communism, respectively, in the laws of nature and history as being independent, virtually primordial powers in themselves. Hence, the justification of terror being inflicted on those who seem to stand in the way of the unfolding of these impersonal forces. When read carefully, the excerpt paints a picture of totalitarian rule as something predicated on the neutralization of people, as human beings, in society as potential agents or participants in its organization or the direction in which it develops. The “rulers” are not rulers in the traditional sense; they are merely there to ensure that the suprahuman force in question is left unhindered to unfold as it “should.”

It takes no genius to perceive in Arendt’s perspicacious characterization of totalitarian domination—which she relates to Nazism and Stalinism as its historical embodiments—a kind of template that applies to the emerging totalitarian character of what first manifested itself in 2020 as iatrocracy, under the subterfuge of a global health emergency—something well known to all of us today. Since then, other features of this totalitarian movement have emerged, all of which cohere into what may be described, in ideological terms, as “transhumanism.”

This, too, fits into Arendt’s account of totalitarianism—not the transhumanist character, as such, of this latest incarnation of the attempt to harness humanity as a whole to a suprahuman power but its ideological status. Just as the Nazi regime justified its operations by appealing to nature (in the guise of the vaunted superiority of the “Aryan race,” for example), so the group of technocratic globalists driving the (not so) “Great Reset” appeals to the idea of going “beyond humanity” to a supposed superior (nonnatural) “species” instantiating a fusion between humans and machines—also anticipated, it seems, by the “singularity” artist called Stelarc. I emphasized “idea” because, as Arendt observed (p. 279–280):

“An ideology is quite literally what its name indicates: it is the logic of an idea. Its subject matter is history, to which the ‘idea’ is applied; the result of this application is not a body of statements about something that is, but the unfolding of a process which is in constant change. The ideology treats the course of events as though it followed the same ‘law’ as the logical exposition of its ‘idea.’”

Given the nature of an ideology, explicated here, it should be evident how this applies to the transhumanist ideology of the neo-fascist cabal: The idea underpinning the historical process has supposedly always been a kind of transhumanist teleology—allegedly the (previously hidden) telos or goal of all of history has constantly been the attainment of a state of surpassing mere Homo and Gyna sapiens sapiens (the doubly wise human man and woman) and actualizing the “transhuman.” Is it at all surprising that they have claimed to have acquired god-like powers?

This further explains the unscrupulousness with which the transhumanist globalists can countenance the functioning and debilitating effects of “total terror” as identified by Arendt. “Total terror” here means the pervasive or totalizing effects of, for example, installing encompassing systems of impersonal, largely AI-controlled surveillance and communicating to people—at least initially—that it is for their own safety and security. The psychological consequences, however, amount to a subliminal awareness of the closure of “free space,” which is replaced by a sense of spatial confinement and of there being “no way out.”

Against this backdrop, reflecting on the looming possibility that the WHO may succeed in getting compliant nations to accept the proposed amendments to their health regulations, yields greater insight into the concrete effects this would have. And these aren’t pretty, to say the least. In a nutshell, it means that this unelected organization would have the authority to proclaim lockdowns and “medical (or health) emergencies,” as well as mandatory “vaccinations” at the whim of the WHO’s director-general, reducing the freedom to traverse space freely to ironclad spatial confinement in one fell swoop. This is what “total terror” would mean. It is my fervent hope that something can still be done to avert this imminent nightmare.

From the Brownstone Institute

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.