Portent of the Present Hell
Some 20 months ago, I voiced something I did not understand, which now reveals its ineluctable trueness: Those on whom we have relied to reclaim us from sickness are mostly no longer to be trusted.
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In April 2019, I suffered an extreme viral attack, which had left me extremely incapacitated well into the summer. As a result, I found myself during those months in various hospitals in Ireland and Spain, barely able to walk due to the loss of my vestibular functions.
The treatment I received in these hospitals was almost invariably professional, attentive and kindly, especially in the hospital at Vélez Málaga, which I attended multiple times in May and June that year. What this article seeks to describe is not a judgment on any of the individual doctors or nurses who assessed or sought to treat me. My condition was in many respects unusual, and therefore unfamiliar to many doctors, and there did not appear to be any established or tried treatment, apart from bombarding me with anti-virals. But that kind of thing happens not infrequently, and is invariably not down to any malign factor. None of it is the point of this article.
The feeling I seek to describe was sparked by something else, in fact a combination of factors. One aspect, for sure, was that, having a goodly part of the previous two years — from late 2017 to the middle of 2018 — engaged in and reflecting upon the highly public battle to prevent the erasure of the constitutional guarantee of the right to life of the unborn child, I was no longer as convinced in my faith in medicine as I had been just months before, when I was operated upon for kidney cancer in St Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin. That experience had been remarkably positive — had in fact blown me away with the sense of, yes, affection I had felt from my consultant, the nurses and almost everyone I encountered.
A rather different feeling had somehow risen up in me more or less from the time of the May 2018 referendum on the 8th Amendment. For no explicit reason, I developed a growing intuition of some baneful change occurring in medicine and the medical profession. In part, I have no doubt, it was provoked by contemplation of the fact that, in our beloved country, the slaughter of innocent children was now to be deemed a ‘medical procedure’, to take place as a routine matter in Irish hospitals. It was a reality I had been unable to avoid on each of the multiple occasions I had occasion to enter an Irish hospital in the aftermath of that referendum of May 2018: the apprehension that those medics I might have occasion to deal with — or to be treated by — might themselves be engaged in the practice of abortion, might be aware of my public opposition to their actions, and might adopt in this regard the kind of intensely hostile attitude that I had provoked over many months in public, via social media, in my neighbourhood, even within my own broader family context. I do not say that this went as far as a loss of faith in the professionalism of these medics, but it was something that disturbed and concerned me.
A second factor related to the general response I had encountered concerning my protracted illness. The viral attack of April 2019 — a dormant chickenpox virus waking up to ravage my nervous system — had left me extremely unwell and incapacitated well into the summer. As a result, I found myself during those months in various hospitals in Ireland and Spain, barely able to walk due to the loss of my vestibular functions. For many months afterwards, I was a shadow of my former self: emaciated, half deaf, warped about the face and staggering around the place. I was not especially seeking or expecting sympathy, but I did notice that, almost invariably when the subject of my illness came up with people I met, the response was to skip over the topic, to avoid it as though it were something embarrassing, like I had just been released from prison or something, or to make little of it, to pretend that I never looked better. This seemed to me to represent a dramatic change from the solicitude I had observed In Irish people around illness all my life. It was almost that, by falling prey to sickness, I was pooping the party, revealing to people the frailty they sought to avoid in themselves. This fear-of-illness seemed to go beyond the reaches of the natural, to be of an almost ideological type, in which the sick person was in some sense guilty of something that was better left unmentioned. The net effect was as though to imply that illness is something that threatens to come between us, that it is the duty of the sick person, in the interests of sensitivity, to pretend to be well.
And these factors combined with another to create something deeper than unease. Some kind of ominous sense had gradually been rising up in me over the course of this odd, appalling, though — in some senses — comical illness. The feeling derived, I believe, from a series of impressions, some registering as mere intuitions, others more concrete, accumulated in my various hospital visits and stays. One was the sense that older people, being wheeled along hospital corridors were no longer being looked at as full human beings. I believe the feeling had to do with the way these old people were being processed — the word is about right — by those moving them about for the purposes of various forms of treatment. I noticed, for example, that these old people were not being addressed. They were being transported but not communicated with. Invariably, they lay there on a gurney, being pushed along by one, two or more orderlies, but their demeanour was almost that of condemned persons being taken to a place of execution. Not only was there no communication between them and their attendants, but, as they moved through the corridors — ill, weak, in some cases very old — they did not make eye-contact with the people invariably milling about, but stared straight ahead. I watched them and asked myself what I saw. Then it dawned on me: I was observing a combination of terror and a form of shame. Then something else bubbled up in me: a memory from childhood, when I was about nine years old and in hospital with suspected appendicitis, watching a similar phenomenon of internal transportation, but in my flashback the old people on the gurneys were always laughing and joking with their transporters, and, seeing the young boy from St Patrick’s Ward ambling down the corridor, would call the caravan to a halt so they could ask me where I was from and what age I was. They were full human beings — no, eminent human beings. They were counted, esteemed, beloved. This, it dawned on me, was no longer to be seen in our treatment of the old.
As it happens, I wrote all this down at the time, so that I am now able to look back and demonstrate to myself and, where relevant, others that it is not some kind of post hoc contextualisation or rationalisation of what we have since been experiencing and observing with increasing consternation in the age and context of Covid.
The circumstance of my recording of my observations and intuitions arose from an invitation I’d received to deliver a speech at a medical conference in October 2019, out of which arose a short article that was published in advance in the Irish Catholic newspaper. These thoughts, then, were written down and spoken several months before the words ‘Covid-19’ were first heard.
The speech from which the article was extracted, titled Integrity and Trust in Ideological Public Spaces, was delivered to the annual conference of the Irish Catholic Doctors Learning Network, which took place in the Emmaus Retreat Centre in Swords, Co Dublin, on October 5th 2019. I had received the invitation to speak as far back as July, and due to illness was at first uncertain that I would be able to accept. I was just about match-fit when the day came.
The article, written in advance of this event, was titled ‘Living in the Ideological World’, a strange and in retrospect off-point title, which I chose myself. Because the organisers wished to publish an advance extract from my speech in the Irish Catholic, this part was written in early September, precisely six months before the Covid debacle descended upon us, and published prior to the conference.
I make no claims for the article other than to say that it seems to carry at its core a kind of premonition of what we are now going through. I do not say that I was gifted with some foresight or wisdom unavailable to others — merely that I felt something that I did not understand and was persuaded by circumstances to write down. I do not fully understand it. What I tried to capture in the short article that appeared in the Irish Catholic was a feeling rather than a fact, or facts, a feeling I had never had before, and desperately wish I did not have it now. I was somewhat anxious at the time I wrote this article that it probably seemed melodramatic, but now it reads as fairly axiomatic. I elaborated on the content somewhat in the speech I made to the doctors’ conference, but largely on an extempore basis. I have no record of what I said at the conference.
Stumbling recently on a copy of the article, I realised that I had tripped across something happening deep within the culture of our societies. (I say ‘societies’ because I had the same feeling in Spain as I did in Dublin.)
Here are a few brief extracts, amounting to the bones of the Irish Catholic article, written a good six months before the ‘pandemic’ began, offering a kind of anticipation, if not prediction, of where we have fetched up. It did not emerge from my intelligence or my will, but simply came to me and left some kind of awareness behind as though I were witness to events just before a crime but had gone on my way without knowing.
When you stand up to be counted on what have become the era’s most ideologically-mobilised questions, you find yourself encountering disfavour almost every place you go. A certain coolness in a shop assistant, a muttered epithet by a passer-by that you convince yourself you’re not quite sure you heard right — these are just a couple of the symptoms of a condition that gradually puts you on high alert all the time. No doubt, this leads to over-defensiveness and misreading of signs, but it also allows one to avoid blundering in with an affable word only to be met by a chill sufficient to facilitate a multiple tooth extraction.
‘In the past couple of years, I have had occasion to present numerous times at hospitals as a patient or out-patient. Here, when this same syndrome rears its head, it is obviously decidedly more worrying than in the great outdoors. The fact that we now live in a society highly ideologised by social media and rogue journalism makes inevitable that, on encountering someone in a medical context for the first time, a question will unaided formulate itself to the effect: Is this person a friend or a foe? Until recently, such musings would have been self-evidently unworthy.’
. . .
‘And there is a further related syndrome that I have begun to notice more or less simultaneously, which sometimes strikes me in hospitals when I am waiting to be seen or scanned or x-rayed. I would call it a premonition rather than a mere intuition or feeling. It is, to coin a phrase, triggered by the sight of a gurney being pushed along a corridor carrying an elderly person to an operating theatre or scanning room. A decade ago, such a sight would have been unremarkable, carrying no ominous portent. Now, however, the duck having been broken on the phenomenon of legalised-death-by-doctor, one finds oneself involuntarily asking: How much longer will such sights be seen? For how much longer will our society continue to support the right of an elderly person to live out his or her days for as long as God and Nature decree, and avail of the medical care our society offers those whom it considers worth preserving?
‘My sense is that our culture is already preparing us for this next phase, by 'training' us to see sickness as a form of self-indulgence and the old as a separate category of the human. And, because the old are increasingly hidden away from everyday society — in purpose-built ‘nursing homes’ — when we happen upon such a person, we are already beginning to look away from their frailty, and therefore their humanity.
‘I cannot predict exactly how all these signs will continue to converge and unfold, but already I can feel a change in the air that tells me that, by the time I myself become elderly (not far into the future), even some of my fellow geriatrics will have been recruited to the mission of breaking down our last taboos in this regard. I also sense that, should I persist in my tendency to oppose what is called progress, our mysterious new culture of death will find ways of ensuring that I become the enemy of my death-desiring fellows’
The condition I sketched out of no more than a nagging hunch is now, some 20 months later, very far advanced. Over the past few months I have been as though under an avalanche of accounts of the maltreatment and neglect of old people in the context of the ‘pandemic’. Many of the accounts I have heard relate to the treatment of elderly people in nursing homes, where they were subjected to stress and cruelty beyond anything I have every heard tell of in this society hitherto. Some aspects of this I have already written about here: https://johnwaters.substack.com/p/the-year-of-merciless-killing
Many of those affected, too, were people who simply became ill, as human beings have done since the beginning of time, but now found themselves in a system that did not care for them, because, being justified by an allegedly higher claim on its compassion, it had ceased to value them.
A couple of months ago, to take one random example, I was in communication with a woman from County Kerry, whose sister — in her early 70s and in perfect health — died of a twisted bowel, because the system, currently focused solely on Covid, did not detect her condition. As her sister told me, she ‘did not die of Covid, but because of Covid, only one of thousands of deaths, and serious complications, wrought on our citizens by Covid paranoia heightened by the relentless fear porn of media and government.’
Just before Christmas, her sister experienced vomiting and stomach cramps. She thought it might food poisoning and called her GP. She never got to see the GP in person due to a reluctance — related to the ‘pandemic’ — to see patients in person. She was remotely prescribed a tablet for nausea.
Over that weekend her symptoms continued. Her husband took her to an emergency clinic, where she was given an injection and sent home. Her husband was not allowed to accompany her into the clinic — due to Covid restrictions. In the small hours of the morning the woman’s condition worsened. Her husband called the clinic and was told to call an ambulance. The ambulance came quickly, but the orderlies spent an hour in the driveway subjecting the woman to precautionary procedures relating to Covid. Her sister says that she died on the way to hospital, but ‘they kept her going on machines’ until her husband was contacted and arrived. A routine operation would have saved her life.
Over the past 15 months we have seen and heard of many such dreadful things — things we could not have anticipated from our experience of life up to March 2020. We have watched open-mouthed as a profession that was purported to exist to protect and defend the health of humanity become a massive instrument of bullying, exploitation and lying, and latterly seeking to compel human beings, unwell or well alike, to succumb to untested vaccines (that were not vaccines, but experimental gene therapy) and threatening to cast them out of the systems constructed with their taxes if they refused.
During the period of the ‘pandemic’ I have had to forego numerous prior medical appointments either because the hospital in question was unable to accommodate me or because I myself decided that I would not subject myself to the tyranny of face masks and all the other contrived compulsions being enforced on all systems-users, itself a kind of portent of an age in which the human person would be treated as a festering mess of pathogens rather than a creature comprising an embodied soul made in the image of his Creator.
In the past Year From the Annals of Hell, we have observed a medical profession that, with the exception of a minority of noble souls, seems dedicated only to the accumulation of profit and the furtherance of some unspoken agenda that involves the weaponising of illness to some ultimately malign objective. We have been burlesqued by TikTok dance videos — choreographed, produced and directed by nurses and doctors who were supposedly being run off their feet by a pandemic. Doctors and nurses, at whose feet we had hitherto placed our very lives in reverence, seemed to retreat behind a corporate veil of lies, lying to our faces and then, when we dared to question the lies, declining to answer but instead dancing maniacally, pausing only to utter further threats, before recommencing perhaps the most unspeakable campaign of lies the world had ever seen. All the time, it has been clear that many people have been dying unnecessarily due to, in effect, the all but total closure of health systems to anything but Covid cases. Yet, until recently, almost no whistle-blowers emerged from hospital systems to indict or explain what has been happening therein, and now they emerge primarily, it appears, merely to protect themselves from the consequences of what they have hitherto administered without question.
This is only one among many ominous portents in our world now. The period since the present globalised deception erupted in March 2020 has put on parade the grotesque corruption of the institutions — all of the institutions — we depended on for our security, well-being and peace-of-mind concerning the everyday facts of our existence. Our political systems have revealed themselves to be rotten to the very pips. We looked to the judges but they have feigned ignorance of what has been happening. The priests and bishops ran to their beds and have remained there. The media, our supposed watchdogs, have remained on duty but refused to bark. For the most part, our profoundly corrupted media — bought off by Big Pharma or their governments out of ‘pandemic funds’ — continues to turn blind eyes to these developments.
But overseeing all of this corruption — there is no avoiding the word — was the medical profession, which not merely orchestrated the entire deception and mostly implemented it, but failed to throw up even a single significant whistleblower to confirm what an intelligent dog in the street could see at a glance.
It is true that a significant number of doctors and scientists have raised their voices in concern and objection. I have named many of these doctors before, and here list again a representative sample: Dr Gerard Waters, Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, Professor Sucharit Bhakdi, Professor Michael Levitt, Dr Shiva Ayyadurai, Dr Rashid Buttar, Dr Scott Jensen, Professor Jay Bhattacharya, Professor John Ioannidis, Dr Scott Atlas, Professor Sunetra Gupta. I write their names in this short list as a token of acknowledgment of the minority courage and Hippocratism that still exists.If these events can in time be steered towards some kind of benign ending, their names, and those of others, will be remembered wherever scrubs are worn. The list is nowhere near exhaustive, but I set it down as a gesture of acknowledgement that what I have divined here is by no means universal. There is, then, some residual hope.
But we must remember too, that those who have spoken out have almost invariably been thrown under the bus by the medical professionsq as a whole. What I want to emphasise is that there has been no significant eruption of whistle-blowing from within the medical systems themselves, where these obscenities are being orchestrated on a daily basis, and which, had it occurred, might have provoked a deep soul-searching. Without warning, what seemed like the overwhelming majority of members of the medical professions turned rogue and engaged in a sustained attack on the freedoms and way-of-life of those it existed to protect, while happily basking in the ingenuous applause of those it had imprisoned on false pretences.
I have watched the events of the 21 months since I wrote that article and delivered that speech and have finally come to the realisation that the medical profession, generally speaking, is now more interested in making money and wielding power than in helping the sick, and that the effects of that change have now begun to seep into the very bones of our societies. We gain some insight into why this is so from observing the treatment meted out to the rare brave exceptions — people like, here in Ireland, Dr Gerard Waters and Dr Martin Feeley — who are invariably professionally eviscerated for daring to question the pandemic narrative. As for the rest, they seem willing not merely to remain silent in the face of industrial lying but, when called upon to do so, to join enthusiastically in with the filleting of their more courageous colleagues.
It becomes increasingly clear that our world has been visited by some kind of diabolical force. Until recently, that might have seemed a metaphorical observation, but gradually, over recent months, the idea that Evil is on the march has acquired an escalating sense of solidity.
What it means for me, personally, is that I have become a chronic sufferer from nosocomephobia (fear of hospitals) and latrophobia (fear of doctors). In practical terms, this means that, absent radical reform of the medical profession generally, I am no longer able to trust virtually any of its constituent members — solely than those I have known for some time and in a reasonably deep sense in terms of ideology, values and thought processes. It means that I shall in the future attend at hospitals only in extremis, when I have no other option. I shall not be going to doctors either, though in fairness I have tried not to trouble them much through most of my life. I say these things without malice, more in sorrow than in anger.
I conclude in the same way I concluded 20 months ago:
‘I cannot predict exactly how all these signs will continue to converge and unfold, but already I can feel a change in the air that tells me that, by the time I myself become elderly (not far into the future), even some of my fellow geriatrics will have been recruited to the mission of breaking down our last taboos in this regard. I also sense that, should I persist in my tendency to oppose what is called progress, our mysterious new culture of death will find ways of ensuring that I become the enemy of my death-desiring fellows.’