Bonus Content: Book review — The Bodies of Others, by Naomi Wolf
This may be the most comprehensive and engagée book yet about the tyranny of the past two and a half years. It conveys not so much new information as a new depth of urgency and outrage.
The Last Liberal Standing
Naomi Wolf’s new book about the Covid scam, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians. COVID-19 and The War Against the Human, makes me feel relieved and edgy: relieved because it replicates almost precisely my own responses to the obscenities of the past two and a half years; edgy because I long to feel normal again and read books that are made-up out of a writer’s imagination. Wolf is a fine writer, and this is an excellent book, but I long to find a book about reality that is neither so rawly real as this, nor as evasive as most — no, all — novels seem now.
I had once thought of Naomi Wolf as belonging to the other side. ‘Other side’ of what?, you might well ask, and I would probably venture something about ‘the war’ — stressing my recently confirmed sense that it was a pseudo-, orchestrated ‘war’ — between the sexes, one that seems so quaint and irrelevant now that the instigators have moved on from demonising men to attacking women and menacing children. She was a star of third-wave feminism, an ambiguous and arguably unnecessary development of the earlier phases, which might more plausibly be categorised as an unwitting exercise in divide-and-rule courtesy of the Combine than as an authentic plea for sexual equality.
Still, I have had considerable respect for Naomi Wolf. I dipped into her 1990 book, The Beauty Myth, and found it thoughtful and engaging. More recently, she has shown herself to be a woman of great courage in denouncing the drift of the US towards authoritarianism, early predictions that have come into their own in the Time of Covid. No matter where you stood on the instant issue of her commentary, she has always seemed honest, and not especially ideological, though perhaps a trifle myopic on some questions (for example fatherhood). Perhaps, like me, she had been drawn into some battles for personal reasons that suddenly became political — and then even more personal. When I heard she had come out about Covid, I was only mildly surprised. Actually, at the time — very early on, in fact — I was still expecting everyone to come out, having no idea that the ‘liberal’ community was going to be struck down on a near wholesale basis by Sudden Attitude Death Syndrome — SADS. As the Covid tyranny ploughed through 2021, I caught some of her early interviews with Steve Bannon and others, and was deeply moved as well as impressed.
Of course, we know now that most of those calling themselves liberals never really had any interest in freedom. What we have been discovering is that the presumed relationship between the words ‘liberal’ and ‘liberty’ had — perhaps long since — atrophied and shrivelled into nothing. On closer examination, it became clear that ‘liberalism’ had long been merely a mask for hatred of working people, ‘conservatives’ and ‘traditionalists’, which is perhaps why self-styled ‘liberals’ were so diligent in their defence of the Covid face nappies: mask fetish. The sole remaining feature of the ideology that harangued and harassed Western societies for more than half a century was the desire to alter mankind out of all recognition, to ‘reform’ the human so that it would no longer be human in any meaningful sense. Really, ‘liberals’ had never been interested in freedom, other than in the sense that they wished to destroy the moral power of such as churches and religious teachings. This it was that propelled the West on to its current disastrous path towards permissiveness and licentiousness, with even very young children no longer legally protected from the predatory urges of deviants and perverts. Beyond that, the main cultural function of ‘liberalism’ was as a kind of T-shirt slogan, an emblem of ideological chic that advertised to the world the allegiance and ‘sophistication’ of the exhibitor.
In a sense, what happened in the spring of 2020 was the replacement of a previously unnoticed post-Sixties form of mass formation — the creature of ‘liberal' agitation, especially of ‘liberal’ journalists — with a new, more discernible and less tolerant kind. Since those styling themselves ‘liberals’ had always sought to advertise their presumed virtue rather than necessarily adhering to a coherent belief system, they had long been fixated on how they appeared to the observer and to society at large, and in particular on rubbing the noses of ‘traditionalists’ in their ‘enlightened’ and ‘modern’ ideas. This phenomenon replicated precisely the conditions of a ‘groupthink’ or ‘mass formation’, in particular the craving to be approved of by an ideologically-primed mob, and the necessity for a detested ‘out group’ to stiffen the backbones within. In reality, most such people had never believed in anything at all, so that, when a new ‘mass formation’ insinuated itself at the outset of the Covid coup, most of them had no hesitation in shifting their ‘loyalties’ from one set of propositions to something close to the opposites of these. Having previously proclaimed their commitment to liberty, they now advocated the incarceration and enslavement of their fellows. Having purported to abhor coercive medical procedures (when performed by cartoon fascists), they now began to find such procedures entirely congenial. They threw out not merely the baby with the bathtub, but also the soap, the sponge and the rubber duck. Hence, the Great Liberal Silence of the early Time of Covid was followed by the more recent striking down of liberalism and liberal values by Sudden Attitude Death Syndrome.
The Bodies of Others is a fine book, but not necessarily because of anything it contains about Covid or the lockdowns that is particularly new. The title is a play on that of a 2006 movie by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck — The Lives of Others — about Stasi agents in Communist East Germany tasked with prying into the intimate lives of citizens. The Covid crime has turned us all into people who monitor — and anathematise — the bodies of others.
What is most recurringly striking about Naomi Wolf’s book is the tones of astonishment, incredulity and savage indignation that accompany her reprising of the progression of events that led her to realise that something unprecedented was happening. She knits together a chronology of the more shocking and contradictory episodes of the rolling out of the lockdown tyranny with brief tableaus from her own life, in which she observed emblematic or telling moments of human interaction which reveal the underlying pathologies and dissonances that have come to define the era. She has a sharp eye for odd connections, in which the whole becomes visible in the particular. But most of all there is her sense of outrage, which is oddly reassuring: I am strangely put at peace by the knowledge that someone like her, despite all our past notional differences, feels like I do, is as baffled as I am, as hurt as I have become. She understands freedom in its largest and tiniest dimensions — in the shape of conventions and constitutions, but — just as importantly — in the shape of gossip in a High Street café over a pot of tea and a plate of biscuits.
It is easily the most comprehensive and multi-tasking of the books that have yet emerged, taking us through virtually every facet of the ‘pandemic’ and the response, evaluating the consequences at an emotional depth that is both harrowing and unforgettable. It took me through the loops of my own feelings, into corners that I had barely looked into, fleshing out my outrage and dismay. One of the many new thoughts I had reading it was that never again can our supposedly ‘modern’ society look down upon in condescension or outrage at any past period of human existence, accusing it of wanton cruelty, barbarism or obscurantism.
The sole region of weakness in her book is her apparent easy acceptance of the idea that some kind of rather serious ailment arose under the rubric of Covid, whereas there is convincing evidence that what occurred was the weaponising of pre-existing ailments, with an added ‘injection’ of neglect, malevolence, cruelty, barbarousness, Remdesivir and constructed loneliness, which together killed hundreds of thousand of elderly people who might have lived for a little or a great deal longer. She gets the casual life-cheapening that arose with the pseudo-vaccines, but not, I feel, the slaughter of the elderly that occurred during the first year, when the imperative was to build a statistical death-profile that would terrify the world into obedience. But this is a mere passing irritant.
Wolf operated as a reporter through most of the Time of Covid (so far!), interviewing many of the dissident medical practitioners who were screaming blue murder — some shouting, almost literally, ‘Look! They’re committing blue murder!’ In her core commentary, though, she focuses not on medical or scientific issues but on aspects of the ‘pandemic’ (she only occasionally enquotes the word) that allow her to articulate the unique strangeness of the Covid event, its incoherence and contradictions, its gratuitous manifestations of multiple forms of official and inter-disciplinary corruption, its endless exhibitions of utter contempt for human beings. Having worked as an election adviser to two US DNC presidential candidates — Clinton (Bill) and Gore — she is able to provide acute insights into the imperatives of the powerful in matters of misdirection and self-protection, in order to bring about ‘a world-historical outcome, with no fingerprints.’ She relates how her Jewish congregation in New York State essentially ‘broke up’ with her, because she was constantly seeking ways for it to conduct in-person worship. The rabbi called her a ‘bad fit’.
She delves into the psychology of the murderous malefactors, the process of supplanting democracy with emergency provisions, the horrors of media fear porn, the diabolical nature of the face mask, the torture of American children in the name of ‘health’, and much more besides. Utilising her knowledge of ‘digital dashboard’ from her own prior tech-immersion, she outlines how the media doctored the data to exaggerate, falsify and terrify. She describes how the agencies supplying and managing the technology that created the data were in many cases interests standing to gain enormously from maintaining the lockdowns. ’[I]t bears repeating over and over again:,’ she writes, ‘the same Big Tech companies profiting by the billions from the “lockdown” and oppressive pandemic policies were tasked with presenting the data that drove and justified and sustained the “lockdown” and oppressive pandemic policies in the first place.’ This may be the most ominous and terrifying part of her book: where, drawing on her years of experience as CEO of a tech company, she paints a dark dystopia of a world without privacy, where a malicious but disqualifying smear can be written anonymously and permanently into a person’s record and CV, disqualifying that person from anything or everything for life — without recourse.
By her description, what occurred from March 2020 was a cultural coup on behalf of the top six Big Tech companies in the world, which looked jealously upon the wondrous processes of human contact, intimacy, experience, action, smiling — wishing above all else to replace all this with tech-based responses and ‘activities’. These sinister interests, which had the means during the ‘pandemic’ of controlling the public conversations at both the national and global levels, were also the chief beneficiaries of the past 30 months of cruelty and torture.
This, Naomi Wolf quickly understood, had nothing to do with public health. The true reason for what was happening, she saw, ‘is that, in the elites’ war against Western humanism, “restrictions” had become the weapon of choice. Why? Because historically “restrictions” disempower the restricted and leave them open to the theft of their lands and assets.
‘Restrictions endow the ruling class with unlimited power and reduce ordinary peoples’ power to that of medieval vassals. Presented as “public health necessity” the menu of restrictions was deployed largely without resistance, at least initially. But their imposition succeeded also because the peoples of hitherto free nations — in North America and Europe, Australia and New Zealand, for a long time did not recognize what they were losing, or why. Born and raised in free nations to presume the best of others, propagandized into panic and fear, they confronted a situation as unfamiliar as it was deeply disorientating.’ Those imposing the restrictions, she declares, ‘had human form, but they were traitors to humanity.’ Yes. Yes. Yes.
Her summings-up are themselves shocking in their clarity and succinctness. What confronts the world, she says, is no less than a project to destroy Western culture and replace it with a techno-fascistic culture — ’a culture in which we will have forgotten what free human beings can do’.
‘The end goal,’ she writes, ‘is something much darker than simply a dark enough world in which everyone is coercively vaccinated, whether they are at risk or not, whether they have natural immunity or not, a world in which "boosters for seven billion people annually are guaranteed forever.
‘The end goal, rather, is to ensure that our pre-March 2020 world disappears forever. Irretrievable. To be replaced with a world in which all human endeavor is behind a digital paywall, and a world in which all of us ask the permission of technology to gain access to the physical world, access to culture and access to other human beings.’
Naomi Wolf may now be the last liberal standing. Her intervention was courageous (she has been disowned by her former allies and traduced by the formerly ‘liberal’ press that once deified her). Her witness may yet prove crucial to any possibility of restoring something of the freedoms we have given away, for it stands out amidst the clamour of conflicting perspectives as an affirmation of the true spirit of liberalism, properly understood. If there comes a moment when the world looks around for a personage of stature and achievement to lead an international investigation into every facet of the Covid crime, then such a search already has a prime candidate.