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A Big Picture Look at the Disastrous Public Health Response to COVID-19

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An underlying principle of public health is, or was, to provide the public with accurate information so that they can make good health choices for themselves and their community.

The past 3 years have seen this paradigm turned on its head, with the public’s money being used to deceive and coerce them, forcing them to follow public health dictates. The public has funded their own incarceration and impoverishment through their taxes, with public funds driving the unprecedented nonpharmaceutical, and then pharmaceutical, response to a virus that kills mainly old sick people near the end of their lives.

Children have had their education downgraded, and economies have been mangled, ensuring future generations will also pay. So, what did the public actually pay for?

COVID-19 was not novel, but a variation on previous respiratory disease.

Most healthy people infected with SARS-CoV-2 recover without any intervention, gaining natural immunity which, in the absence of vaccination, generates a more robust and long-lasting protection with less risk for reinfections as compared to individuals protected by vaccination alone. Globally, the infection fatality rate (IFR) of SARS-CoV-2 is about 0.15% and comparable to seasonal influenza (IFR 0,1 %). The IFR of those under twenty years was only 0.0013 %, and highest for those beyond 70 years. The IFR of COVID-19 among community-dwelling elderly is lower than previously reported in elderly overall.

A higher IFR was found in countries with many long-term care facilities, perhaps because exposure tends to occur through other immune-suppressed elderly, rather than immune competent children with lower viral loads. An aging population goes through the process of immunosenescence and increased incidence and severity of infectious diseases is expected.

Severe COVID-19, or COVID-19 Associated ARDS, is a syndrome within the known ARDS spectrum. Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) and associated cytokine storm has been recognized for more than 50 years. It occurs when a diverse array of triggers causes acute, bilateral pulmonary inflammation and increased capillary permeability leading to acute hypoxemic respiratory failure.

Although supportive care improved the prognosis, mortality and disabling complications in survivors in intensive care are still high, and have remained relatively unchanged in the last 20 years. In 2013 an estimated 2.65 million deaths worldwide were attributed to Acute Respiratory Tract Infection.

As with other ARDS etiologies, people suffering from (COVID-19) ARDS are mostly elderly people with comorbidities including being overweight, hypertension, Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, often using multiple medications. Other restrictions on the immune system, such as vitamin D deficiency, put people at increased risk.

As of July 2022, WHO reported over 601 million confirmed cases and over 6.4 million deaths associated with COVID-19 globally. More than half (3.5 million) died after the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines, though 67.7 % of the world population has received at least one vaccination. The WHO estimates a total of 14.9 million excess deaths in 2020-2021 associated with COVID-19 directly due to the disease or indirectly due to the impact of the public health response on health systems and society.

Footing the bill for the disposal of orthodox public health

Since COVID-19 was recognized in Western countries in early 2020, expenditures on public health in many of them have more than doubled, imposing over $500 billion in monthly costs on the global economy. Some trillions more have been spent on compensation and stimulus packages for those left without income due to the public health response, whilst economies, and therefore future employment opportunities, have been heavily damaged. This is nearly all funded by taxpayers, or borrowed to be funded with interest by the taxpayers of the future.

Politicians and various experts have claimed that the coercive COVID-19 public health policies are the only way to curb COVID-19, though such measures were advised against by the WHO in its pandemic influenza guidelines of 2019. They would increase poverty and inequality, whilst having (still) unproven efficacy.

Citizens have paid the bill via taxes for novel nonpharmaceutical interventions (lockdowns, mask mandates and frequent testing) and repeated vaccinations of immune people with rapidly waning vaccines, whilst seeing their own incomes reduced. The increase in the money supply to cover relief for forced unemployment has driven inflation, contributing to increased food, water, energy, health and insurance costs. These responses have disproportionately harmed low income families.

Governments take over medical management

Early in the pandemic it became clear that intubating a COVID-19 patient could increase long-term harm and mortality. Unfortunately, many hospitals continued a low threshold for the use of ventilators for the fear that other methods of oxygenation would spread the virus. In 2020 the US spent billions of dollars stockpiling unused ventilators.

In many countries a relatively new antiviral drug, remdesivir, developed with State funding, became the first choice of treatment for hospitalized people with COVID-19. The safety and toxicity of the expensive remdesivir was widely disputed. Yet even after the first results of the WHO’s Solidarity study found little or no effect on reducing hospital stay or Covid deaths, the EU continued a €1.2 billion agreement with Gilead for 500,000 treatments and it continued to be prioritized for use in the United States.

Final results of the Solidarity study confirmed the finding of little or no effect. In contrast, the use of cheaper drugs with antiviral activity, like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, was suppressed. Although ivermectin is now included in lists of the US National Institutes of Health in August 2022, governments are silent on its use, preferring to transfer funds to Pharma for newer on-patent drugs.

Expanding lockdowns from prisons to society

Lockdowns may prove to be one of the gravest governmental failures of modern times. A cost-benefit analysis of the response to COVID-19 found lockdowns to be far more harmful to public health (at least 5-10 times) in terms of well-being than COVID-19. Significant collateral damage is not unexpected, as mass business closures and restricted movement have affected billions of people globally through poverty, food insecurity, loneliness, unemployment, educational interruption, and interrupted healthcare. What did not make media headlines is the more than 3 million children who have died from malnutrition in the first year of the pandemic. Together with increasing malnutrition, the world is facing rising burdens of child marriage and child labor, developmental and mental problems, poverty, suicide and chronic disease.

Reviews of the effects of lockdowns on COVID-19 mortality concluded there is no broad-based evidence of noticeable COVID-19 benefit. Pandemic models that guided poverty not only overestimated COVID-19 impact but failed to take into account the collateral damage of lockdowns. The sense of fear, anxiety and helplessness brought to families and 2.2 billion children around the globe with removal of future earning capacity and limited access to healthcare will impact lives in an unprecedented manner for generations.

A recent study analyzing the 50 states of the US, with 10 states that had no lockdown impositions, strongly support the hypothesis that lockdowns place a sudden and severe stress burden on vulnerable demographics and were associated with significant increases in death in those states that used lockdowns as a disease control measure.

Mental health problems, noncommunicable inflammatory diseases, cancer and sudden deaths have increased in people across all age groups, indicating millions of people may now have more compromised immune systems. The links between stress/anxiety, ill-health and early death have long been recognized.

Within Western countries, the most deprived people and neighborhoods have higher risks for severe COVID-19, and higher mortality rates. The underprivileged in society are disproportionately affected by infectious diseases due to poverty, malnutrition, chronic stress, depression and anxiety, a deprived immune system and poor access to health-care. Rather than enhancing the resilience of these populations, the public health response has compounded their poverty, removed education opportunities, and so increased their vulnerability to this and future pandemics.

Testing for sake of testing

State investments were made for COVID-19 diagnostics: PCR tests and point-of-care tests including rapid antigen tests. While billions of tests have been used, they are poor in distinguishing infectiousness and inaccuracy provides a false sense of security, with positive results unnecessary driving fear and sick leave.

The WHO had previously, sensibly, advised against contact tracing once extensive community spread is present – people will be infected eventually, and gain immunity. Spending resources to find a small proportion, not possibly sufficient to stop transmission, is epidemiologically pointless. No reason was provided for reversing this orthodox and logical advice.

Hiding faces to pollute the environment

While there is no sound scientific support for the effectiveness of face mask mandates in the community, including children, state governments invested in the availability of free face masks for all citizens. The two published randomized controlled trials of face masks during COVID-19 showed minimal or no impact, while meta-analyses of previous studiesshow no significant efficacy. Yet in the first half of 2020 importation of face masks in the EU grew 1,800 % to €14 billion, while the industry in 2021 was worth $4.58 billion globally. Face masks with microplastics and nanoparticles are now polluting the environment, and potentially increasing the risk of impaired immune systems.

Getting an awkward technology past the regulators

Despite severe COVID-19 being highly concentrated in elderly people since early 2020, with significant comorbidities and strong evidence of effectiveness of postinfection immunity, the WHO stated in early 2021 that vaccinating the global population against COVID-19 is the only long-term strategy to contain the coronavirus crisis; “No one is safe until everyone is safe”. Rising vaccination rates were said to be necessary to improve healthcare, job prospects and future educational plans.

Unfortunately, the peak efficiency of 97% and 96% respectively claimed for the Moderna and Pizer COVID-19 vaccines against COVID hospitalization waned rapidly after vaccination. The 6-month follow-up reports showed no reduction in all-cause mortality. The COVID-19 adenovector vaccines from Astra-Zeneca and Johnson & Johnson showed better protection against mortality but aren’t used for booster vaccinations in most countries due to the risk of vaccine-related side effects.

A recent peer-reviewed article by Fraiman et al. noted excess risk of serious adverse events analyzing the trial data of both mRNA vaccines that points to the need for formal harm-benefit analyses, particularly those that are stratified according to risk of serious COVID-19 outcomes. The authors request the public release of participant level datasets from the sponsoring drug companies, which is still not openly available.

Moreover, the vice president of Pfizer, answered the question of Rob Roos, a Dutch Europarlementarier during the European Commission on October 11, 2022, concerning whether the mRNA vaccine of Pfizer had been tested for prevention of transmission of the virus before the release of the vaccine in 2021. She said no, thus indicating the vaccine promotion and coercion was based on false arguments.

For authorization to use medical interventions the benefits need to outweigh the risks. These mRNA vaccines don’t clearly meet this bar for people under 70 years of age. A recent study by nine health experts from major universities found that per COVID-19 hospitalization prevented in previously uninfected young adults, between 18 and 98 serious adverse events were observed. In Scandinavian countries the use of the Moderna mRNA vaccine has been restricted for the potential risk of heart inflammation in adolescents

Although official reports on the side effects of the COVID-19 vaccines by Public Health Institutes have been limited, there is growing data on myocarditis, menstrual irregularities or the excess of all cause mortality and severe outcomes in vaccinated groups. The recent leakage of Israeli safety data and release of US CDC V safe Data show serious safety problems with COVID-19 vaccines that deliberately need further investigations.

Countries with the highest vaccination rates and strongest coercive measures have experienced high numbers of hospitalization and deaths, while some with a low vaccination rate, including many sub-Saharan countries maintained low Covid-19 mortality. Antibody responses are shown to be lower in elderly people while decreased responses or higher infection rates have occurred after repeated vaccinations. The CDC disclosed just how fast mRNA boosters can fail.

This calls into question the mass all-population vaccination and boosting strategy. Pascal Soriot, the CEO of Astra-Zeneca, has suggested that “booster jabs for healthy people on a yearly basis are a waste of tax money.

A temporary reprieve

On August 11, 2022, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stated that the virus now poses significantly lower risk due to high levels of immunity from vaccines and infections. On August 19, it changed its recommendations to reflect this, no longer differentiating between vaccine status or post-infection immunity. President Biden declared in September 2022 “The pandemic is over,” though it remains unclear what this means with ‘emergency’ measures remaining in place.

While the global economy has suffered, this is only clear from a specific standpoint. In contrast to the mass of the population, private companies are involved in the response, particularly in the pharmaceutical, biotech and web-based sectors. These companies have increased their wealth by hundreds of billions of dollars in 2020 and 2021, as did high-net-worth individuals, many of whom were advocating for the response that ensured this.

The beguiling vision of fleecing taxpayers to benefit the private sector

The current COVID-19 response has wiped out the gains from decades of global progress in health and income, especiallyfor women and has exacerbated persistent inequities. Unfortunately, a world that is facing the most serious health crisis in a century and the most serious economic and social crises since the second World War is now also on the hook to fund those who would repeat this.

Together with the WHO, world leaders have now called for a global pandemic preparedness treaty to make this state of affairs more readily repeatable. They justify this call for further diversion of public funds through the harms, financial and other, accrued during the COVID-19 outbreak.

This is driven by a vision that health is a political choice based on solidarity and ‘equity’ to be established in a centralized global response delivered via international organizations including the WHO, UNICEF, Gavi, (a global Vaccine Alliance) and the public-private partnership Coalition for Economic Preparedness Information (CEPI), launched in 2017 at the WEF by Bill Gates, the Wellcome Trust, Norwegian Government and others. Finance institutions, including the World Bank, have now stepped in to accelerate the growth of this burgeoning pandemic industry. A new World Bank-hosted Financial Intermediary Fund (FIF) for pandemic prevention, preparedness and response was installed at the G20 Health Ministerial Meeting in June 2022.

A real concern is growing that the new vision of drug and vaccine approval by the FDA and EMA will expand a commercialized market driven by drug manufacturers at the expense of rigorous independent scientific and regulatory review. This risks irreparable harm for many people while boosting the profits of pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Prescribed medications are already estimated to be the third most common contributor to death globally after heart disease and cancer.

Despite their stated intent, the investments in COVID-19 vaccinations and nonpharmaceutical interventions of the past three years have not improved human capital, economic and societal performance. Moreover illnesses, disabilities and mortality show steep rises in the working age group (25-64 years) as observed by insurance companies. Predictions by consultancy firms of the support Covid-19 vaccinations would provide to the economy have been unrealistic. Countries are now facing shortages of healthcare workers in part due to vaccine mandates, reducing healthcare access to people with ill-health who have paid insurance and tax money for healthcare. It might even result in bankruptcy of hospitals.

Good Health, the most precious asset of life 

The CEO of CEPI stated in an interview with McKinsey that “The emergent issue of waning immunity and the threat posed by the evolution of the virus tell us that we need to produce broader and more enduring immune responses.” Mass surveillance, lockdowns, wearing face masks and poorly effective COVID-19 vaccines have contributed to chronic stress, fear and anxiety that reduce the resilience of immunity. Unfortunately, when the immune system (immunosenescence) is weakened vaccinations are also less able to generate effective protection.

More state investments in frequent vaccinations, mass distribution of vaccines, developing new vaccines within 100 days, development of simulating models, and more clinical trials will be poor alternatives to strengthen the underlying immune systems through a life in freedom with high social capital, a healthy diet, education, sports, play, social interactions, equity in decision-making and fair earnings.

Health is key for resilient economies worldwide. The relationship between health and the economy is bidirectional, whereby economic growth enables funding in investments that improve health; and a healthy population contributes to and enhances an economy. Therefore, public and private investments in health for all needs to transform from maximizing value for money to positive cumulative impacts on people’s lives.

Optimizing health is the ultimate goal and a human right. The global response to the coronavirus pandemic has revealed an ethical crisis in public health, in which the pre-pandemic norms of public health ethics have been cast aside.

This has wrecked health, human rights and economies, whilst the people public health was supposed to serve it had to pay for its implementation, and will pay for its harms. It will be a long way back, and recovery will require public health to return to its servant nature, and leave the limelight where it caused such disaster.

Authors

  • Carla Peeters is founder and managing director of COBALA Good Care Feels Better. She obtained a PhD in Immunology from the Medical Faculty of Utrecht, studied Molecular Sciences at Wageningen University and Research, and followed a four-year course in Higher Nature Scientific Education with a specialization in medical laboratory diagnostics and research. She studied at various business schools including London Business School, INSEAD and Nyenrode Business School.

    David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is the former Program Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland.

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Brownstone Institute

If the President in the White House can’t make changes, who’s in charge?

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

By Jeffrey A TuckerJeffrey A. Tucker 

Who Controls the Administrative State?

President Trump on March 20, 2025, ordered the following: “The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”

That is interesting language: to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” is not the same as closing it. And what is “permitted by law” is precisely what is in dispute.

It is meant to feel like abolition, and the media reported it as such, but it is not even close. This is not Trump’s fault. The supposed authoritarian has his hands tied in many directions, even over agencies he supposedly controls, the actions of which he must ultimately bear responsibility.

The Department of Education is an executive agency, created by Congress in 1979. Trump wants it gone forever. So do his voters. Can he do that? No but can he destaff the place and scatter its functions? No one knows for sure. Who decides? Presumably the highest court, eventually.

How this is decided – whether the president is actually in charge or really just a symbolic figure like the King of Sweden – affects not just this one destructive agency but hundreds more. Indeed, the fate of the whole of freedom and functioning of constitutional republics may depend on the answer.

All burning questions of politics today turn on who or what is in charge of the administrative state. No one knows the answer and this is for a reason. The main functioning of the modern state falls to a beast that does not exist in the Constitution.

The public mind has never had great love for bureaucracies. Consistent with Max Weber’s worry, they have put society in an impenetrable “iron cage” built of bloodless rationalism, needling edicts, corporatist corruption, and never-ending empire-building checked by neither budgetary restraint nor plebiscite.

Today’s full consciousness of the authority and ubiquity of the administrative state is rather new. The term itself is a mouthful and doesn’t come close to describing the breadth and depth of the problem, including its root systems and retail branches. The new awareness is that neither the people nor their elected representatives are really in charge of the regime under which we live, which betrays the whole political promise of the Enlightenment.

This dawning awareness is probably 100 years late. The machinery of what is popularly known as the “deep state” – I’ve argued there are deep, middle, and shallow layers – has been growing in the US since the inception of the civil service in 1883 and thoroughly entrenched over two world wars and countless crises at home and abroad.

The edifice of compulsion and control is indescribably huge. No one can agree precisely on how many agencies there are or how many people work for them, much less how many institutions and individuals work on contract for them, either directly or indirectly. And that is just the public face; the subterranean branch is far more elusive.

The revolt against them all came with the Covid controls, when everyone was surrounded on all sides by forces outside our purview and about which the politicians knew not much at all. Then those same institutional forces appear to be involved in overturning the rule of a very popular politician whom they tried to stop from gaining a second term.

The combination of this series of outrages – what Jefferson in his Declaration called “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object” – has led to a torrent of awareness. This has translated into political action.

A distinguishing mark of Trump’s second term has been an optically concerted effort, at least initially, to take control of and then curb administrative state power, more so than any executive in living memory. At every step in these efforts, there has been some barrier, even many on all sides.

There are at least 100 legal challenges making their way through courts. District judges are striking down Trump’s ability to fire workers, redirect funding, curb responsibilities, and otherwise change the way they do business.

Even the signature early achievement of DOGE – the shuttering of USAID – has been stopped by a judge with an attempt to reverse it. A judge has even dared tell the Trump administration who it can and cannot hire at USAID.

Not a day goes by when the New York Times does not manufacture some maudlin defense of the put-upon minions of the tax-funded managerial class. In this worldview, the agencies are always right, whereas any elected or appointed person seeking to rein them in or terminate them is attacking the public interest.

After all, as it turns out, legacy media and the administrative state have worked together for at least a century to cobble together what was conventionally called “the news.” Where would the NYT or the whole legacy media otherwise be?

So ferocious has been the pushback against even the paltry successes and often cosmetic reforms of MAGA/MAHA/DOGE that vigilantes have engaged in terrorism against Teslas and their owners. Not even returning astronauts from being “lost in space” has redeemed Elon Musk from the wrath of the ruling class. Hating him and his companies is the “new thing” for NPCs, on a long list that began with masks, shots, supporting Ukraine, and surgical rights for gender dysphoria.

What is really at stake, more so than any issue in American life (and this applies to states around the world) – far more than any ideological battles over left and right, red and blue, or race and class – is the status, power, and security of the administrative state itself and all its works.

We claim to support democracy yet all the while, empires of command-and-control have arisen among us. The victims have only one mechanism available to fight back: the vote. Can that work? We do not yet know. This question will likely be decided by the highest court.

All of which is awkward. It is impossible to get around this US government organizational chart. All but a handful of agencies live under the category of the executive branch. Article 2, Section 1, says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”

Does the president control the whole of the executive branch in a meaningful way? One would think so. It’s impossible to understand how it could be otherwise. The chief executive is…the chief executive. He is held responsible for what these agencies do – we certainly blasted away at the Trump administration in the first term for everything that happened under his watch. In that case, and if the buck really does stop at the Oval Office desk, the president must have some modicum of control beyond the ability to tag a marionette to get the best parking spot at the agency.

What is the alternative to presidential oversight and management of the agencies listed in this branch of government? They run themselves? That claim means nothing in practice.

For an agency to be deemed “independent” turns out to mean codependency with the industries regulated, subsidized, penalized, or otherwise impacted by its operations. HUD does housing development, FDA does pharmaceuticals, DOA does farming, DOL does unions, DOE does oil and turbines, DOD does tanks and bombs, FAA does airlines, and so on It goes forever.

That’s what “independence” means in practice: total acquiescence to industrial cartels, trade groups, and behind-the-scenes systems of payola, blackmail, and graft, while the powerless among the people live with the results. This much we have learned and cannot unlearn.

That is precisely the problem that cries out for a solution. The solution of elections seems reasonable only if the people we elected actually have the authority over the thing they seek to reform.

There are criticisms of the idea of executive control of executive agencies, which is really nothing other than the system the Founders established.

First, conceding more power to the president raises fears that he will behave like a dictator, a fear that is legitimate. Partisan supporters of Trump won’t be happy when the precedent is cited to reverse Trump’s political priorities and the agencies turn on red-state voters in revenge.

That problem is solved by dismantling agency power itself, which, interestingly, is mostly what Trump’s executive orders have sought to achieve and which the courts and media have worked to stop.

Second, one worries about the return of the “spoils system,” the supposedly corrupt system by which the president hands out favors to friends in the form of emoluments, a practice the establishment of the civil service was supposed to stop.

In reality, the new system of the early 20th century fixed nothing but only added another layer, a permanent ruling class to participate more fully in a new type of spoils system that operated now under the cloak of science and efficiency.

Honestly, can we really compare the petty thievery of Tammany Hall to the global depredations of USAID?

Third, it is said that presidential control of agencies threatens to erode checks and balances. The obvious response is the organizational chart above. That happened long ago as Congress created and funded agency after agency from the Wilson to the Biden administration, all under executive control.

Congress perhaps wanted the administrative state to be an unannounced and unaccountable fourth branch, but nothing in the founding documents created or imagined such a thing.

If you are worried about being dominated and destroyed by a ravenous beast, the best approach is not to adopt one, feed it to adulthood, train it to attack and eat people, and then unleash it.

The Covid years taught us to fear the power of the agencies and those who control them not just nationally but globally. The question now is two-fold: what can be done about it and how to get from here to there?

Trump’s executive order on the Department of Education illustrates the point precisely. His administration is so uncertain of what it does and can control, even of agencies that are wholly executive agencies, listed clearly under the heading of executive agencies, that it has to dodge and weave practical and legal barriers and land mines, even in its own supposed executive pronouncements, even to urge what might amount to be minor reforms.

Whoever is in charge of such a system, it is clearly not the people.

Author

Jeffrey A Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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Brownstone Institute

The New Enthusiasm for Slaughter

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

By David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute David Bell  

What War Means

My mother once told me how my father still woke up screaming in the night years after I was born, decades after the Second World War (WWII) ended. I had not known – probably like most children of those who fought. For him, it was visions of his friends going down in burning aircraft – other bombers of his squadron off north Australia – and to be helpless, watching, as they burnt and fell. Few born after that war could really appreciate what their fathers, and mothers, went through.

Early in the movie Saving Private Ryan, there is an extended D-Day scene of the front doors of the landing craft opening on the Normandy beaches, and all those inside being torn apart by bullets. It happens to one landing craft after another. Bankers, teachers, students, and farmers being ripped in pieces and their guts spilling out whilst they, still alive, call for help that cannot come. That is what happens when a machine gun opens up through the open door of a landing craft, or an armored personnel carrier, of a group sent to secure a tree line.

It is what a lot of politicians are calling for now.

People with shares in the arms industry become a little richer every time one of those shells is fired and has to be replaced. They gain financially, and often politically, from bodies being ripped open. This is what we call war. It is increasingly popular as a political strategy, though generally for others and the children of others.

Of course, the effects of war go beyond the dismembering and lonely death of many of those fighting. Massacres of civilians and rape of women can become common, as brutality enables humans to be seen as unwanted objects. If all this sounds abstract, apply it to your loved ones and think what that would mean.

I believe there can be just wars, and this is not a discussion about the evil of war, or who is right or wrong in current wars. Just a recognition that war is something worth avoiding, despite its apparent popularity amongst many leaders and our media.

The EU Reverses Its Focus

When the Brexit vote determined that Britain would leave the European Union (EU), I, like many, despaired. We should learn from history, and the EU’s existence had coincided with the longest period of peace between Western European States in well over 2,000 years.

Leaving the EU seemed to be risking this success. Surely, it is better to work together, to talk and cooperate with old enemies, in a constructive way? The media, and the political left, center, and much of the right seemed at that time, all of nine years ago, to agree. Or so the story went.

We now face a new reality as the EU leadership scrambles to justify continuing a war. Not only continuing, but they had been staunchly refusing to even countenance discussion on ending the killing. It has taken a new regime from across the ocean, a subject of European mockery, to do that.

In Europe, and in parts of American politics, something is going on that is very different from the question of whether current wars are just or unjust. It is an apparent belief that advocacy for continued war is virtuous. Talking to leaders of an opposing country in a war that is killing Europeans by the tens of thousands has been seen as traitorous. Those proposing to view the issues from both sides are somehow “far right.”

The EU, once intended as an instrument to end war, now has a European rearmament strategy. The irony seems lost on both its leaders and its media. Arguments such as “peace through strength” are pathetic when accompanied by censorship, propaganda, and a refusal to talk.

As US Vice-President JD Vance recently asked European leaders, what values are they actually defending?

Europe’s Need for Outside Help

A lack of experience of war does not seem sufficient to explain the current enthusiasm to continue them. Architects of WWII in Europe had certainly experienced the carnage of the First World War. Apart from the financial incentives that human slaughter can bring, there are also political ideologies that enable the mass death of others to be turned into an abstract and even positive idea.

Those dying must be seen to be from a different class, of different intelligence, or otherwise justifiable fodder to feed the cause of the Rules-Based Order or whatever other slogan can distinguish an ‘us’ from a ‘them’…While the current incarnation seems more of a class thing than a geographical or nationalistic one, European history is ripe with variations of both.

Europe appears to be back where it used to be, the aristocracy burning the serfs when not visiting each other’s clubs. Shallow thinking has the day, and the media have adapted themselves accordingly. Democracy means ensuring that only the right people get into power.

Dismembered European corpses and terrorized children are just part of maintaining this ideological purity. War is acceptable once more. Let’s hope such leaders and ideologies can be sidelined by those beyond Europe who are willing to give peace a chance.

There is no virtue in the promotion of mass death. Europe, with its leadership, will benefit from outside help and basic education. It would benefit even further from leadership that values the lives of its people.

Author

David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute

David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. David is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.

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