The Great Amnesty

Politics International Politics
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Some of you have probably read this, or at least have heard of its existence:

Now, I’ve put this in IP rather than start yet another COVID thread because IMO most of what happened during 2020-2022 had absolutely nothing to do with COVID and everything to do with politics, and I think it’d be interesting to have a discussion about it from that viewpoint. Certainly the topic of “amnesty” is a political issue, not a health-related one.

The idea of “forgive and forget” is gaining some traction on social media. I believe it has some merit, simply because the prospect of building international legal accords that would result in prosecutions for literally thousands of officials (at minimum) is just impractical. Even if there were any prospect of powerful people submitting to trial and punishment, it would most likely cause more social division and more problems. It would also absolve those who participated in small ways from any responsibility, by creating the impression that it was all the fault of a few bad actors, and that the rest of us were just dragged along for the ride. That isn’t what happened, as several commentators have pointed out. I think Neil Oliver makes a good case:

Oster’s article is full of weaselly reasoning, implying that the people who called it correctly back in 2020 were basically just idiots who got lucky (as opposed to highly-qualified people with the expertise to analyze sparse information and spot official lies) and that those who were wrong (like herself) acted from the highest motives and should therefore be congratulated, not excoriated. That isn’t going to wash. The teaching community - to which Oster belongs - and their unions were prime drivers of the mass abuse of the children and young people in their care. They should be on their knees begging for forgiveness, not making snide remarks about bleach-injectors somehow reaching the right conclusions “for the wrong reasons”, spinning threadbare excuses, and saying “we didn’t know”. If educators “didn’t know”, while plenty of other people did know, that’s an indictment of the intellectual bankruptcy of their profession, not a get-out-of-jail-free card.

If there is to be an amnesty, then, as Oliver describes, it should be accompanied by contrition and correction. The suggestion from the main players is rather different: apparently, all we need is a big rug to sweep everything under, and they should be allowed to keep doing what they’re doing.

Thoughts from the peanut gallery?

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For me the spectacular wrongness of people like Oster isn’t the main issue, it’s how that wrongness was policed. Medical ethics were completely abandoned. An entire generation’s education was fucked up, by educationalists. It’s been a morally bankrupt three years.

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Contrition, from Latin contritus ‘ground to pieces’, i.e. crushed by guilt, is repentance for sins one has committed (1)

I doubt that any of those who made such decisions feel shame, guilt, or penitent. Why would they? I didn’t see that any of them were particulrly genuine religious types, or even that they feel obligated to society, or the masses as a whole. Towards whom would they feel guilt or contrition? God? The general peeps?

[Inserted doubt meme]

As far as I can tell, the people responsible have all been concerned with personal profits, either in the form of money directly, and/or position, and so on.

The idea of contrition is really alien to such people. To them, it’s unnecessary. What’s the point? Contrition isn’t required for them to advance up their respective ladders. If they ever relied upon forgiveness, then I’m sure some of them could give a decent performance of it, to fool the masses momentarily, for the cameras, for political gain, etc. But really, they do as they please these days.

Them asking for forgiveness means that they would have to render themselves submissive to those that they have offended and mistreated. That requires great humility, and also turns the power relations between the elite and the unwashed, upside down. Since they spend their entire lives endeavouring to pretty much enslave humanity for their own purposes, I’d state with a far degree of certainty that we’ll never see it happen. It’s simply not in their interests to do so.

Without wanting to overdose on the WEF and Uncle Schwabby, he did say something about “reflection,” and it seems that the type he and his ilk have in mind isn’t the sort that leads to introspection and feelings of remorse:

“The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.”

So, for those in the upper seats of the theatre, the only “personal growth” we’re likely to see from them is their own monetary wealth.

A remorseful person is said to be contrite. No remorse, then clearly no contrition. Who has been remorseful? Chen? Tsai? Ardern? Trudy? BoJo? Gates? Bourla? They don’t give a sheet about any pain and suffering they’ve caused. And they’ve caused enormous amounts of damage, which we’ve all detailed here ad nauseum - the poverty created, the pollution, the overall trauma, the childrens’ mental health, etc. I won’t go over it again. Those who want to know, who have empathy, have some sympathy, know the extent. The rest, they are happy with the end result, as their latent and dormant desires to exploit others, to abuse others, to bully others, has been ignited. Once again, they feel alive. They are thus grateful to those that enacted the whole despicable tyranny on the world. They feel seen. I’m sure they’ll be enthusiastic and eager for the next stage of totalitarianism.

Sure, one may even then want to forgive the perpetrators, but all that really does is play into their hands. Those guys laugh at such a suggestion. The elite see the ‘forgivers’ as weak, easily exploited.

If there’s no change of heart, no genuine contrition, then they’ll just continue on their merry way, as we are seeing right now with Cop27. There’s been no slowdown in pace towards the WEF, UN and WHO 2030 agendas. It’s actually speeding up. All business as usual.

‘Amnesty’ means something like an official pardon. Since they are ‘the officials,’ I think they’ve already pardoned themselves :laughing:

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I seem to recall there were posters on forumosa calling for totalitarian responses to those who didn’t even wear masks, never mind get injections.

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There was definitely that incessant “You’re going to kill old and sick people” bollocks.

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I wonder how those calling for amnesty feel about these comments?

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“They are of a particular kind; these are the soldiers that any army of light wishes to have in its ranks.”

Not if you’re American. I don’t want to drift too far OT, but Bret Weinstein did an interview a while back about the ongoing madness in the US military. Well worth watching.

Anyway, pretty surprised to see comments like this coming from the French Establishment. What the hell happened? It wasn’t that long ago that les flicailles were patrolling coffee shops checking people’s right to drink coffee in polite society. Are they just messing with people’s heads or is this a genuine backtrack? Does he represent the position of the French military, I wonder, or is he expressing his own opinion?

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Why would they be backtracking? Nothing has happened to them? Most people don’t care.

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Hmmm why was it bollocks?

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Indeed, although I had in mind various classes of people with various motivations for their behaviour. I think a majority of them are basically “normal” and - for various reasons - were seduced into doing and saying things which (one day) they will be ashamed of. The police, for example, who went around berating people for sitting on park benches during “lockdowns” or harassing the unvaccinated must surely be starting to realise what a load of nonsense it was, and that they did something that was (at best) stupid and nasty. It might take them a while, but I have hope that they’ll eventually figure out that something awful happened, that they were complicit in something too big to just forget about, and they need to say sorry to those they’ve harmed.

The kind of person you’re referring to here is a completely different animal: the psychopath, the unrepentant abuser, the narcissist who simply doesn’t care who suffers as long as he himself gets what he wants. And I agree that the one thing you can’t do with such people is forgive them, because they just laugh in your face and carry on where they left off.

So the question arises: in the case of people like that - and there seem to be several of them in positions of power - what then is to be done? Personally, I’m not a believer in “revolutions”. That almost always ends badly. And yet … the justice system in most countries has been completely undermined. Nobody is likely to bring the really dangerous people to trial. Neither are they likely to acknowledge what they’ve done and atone for it. They know that there is no force behind the public indignation - at least none that they can’t put down with a State-sponsored response. But if the disease is not diagnosed and named, it cannot be cured.

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Because viruses can’t be controlled that way. Watch China.

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If an amnesty is to happen then public health experts will need to admit that everything they’ve spent their life training for failed when a pandemic eventually happened. Pretty embarrassing.

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Still if you use vaccines theoretically the risk of getting infected is lower and the symptoms that help spreading the virus (coughing, sneezing) are lower and the viral load is too. So the chances or infecting other people, including the elder, are lower indeed.

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That was the argument used after the vaccinated herd immunity argument fell apart.

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Sorry, how is it wrong?

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Don’t send me an entire article. What part of what I said is wrong?

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I didn’t say anthing you posted was wrong.

Granny is going to catch Covid. Vaccinating children or keeping them out of school isn’t going to stop that eventuality. Just like she’s going to catch a cold, although catching Omicron is more likely. Vaccinating everybody won’t stop granny from catching Covid.

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It seems to reduce the chances. Even some of the studies quoted in that article pointed it out. I agree and I always thought it would be like that, that eventually this would become another cold, but obviously it was better to slow down the transmission and mitigate the symptoms in the population until that happened

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You’re talking about flattening the curve? OK, I didn’t understand that from your posts. I thought you were talking about not killing granny.

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