The Burden of Command
The Burden of Command
The Thrill Of Playing God With Other People's Lives
This is a screenshot from Gary Grigsby’s War in the East, a historical strategic wargame centered around the German-Soviet conflict of the Second World War from 1941-1945. It is mid-November 1942, the Blitzkrieg is in full swing, and we are looking at the area just Northwest of Moscow, in the hotseat as Joseph Stalin, attempting to fight off Hitler’s invasion of the Motherland. All of these little squares represent units composed of hundreds, even thousands of fighting men and their terrifying war machines, from the T-34 main battle tank to the MG-42 machine gun.
Now, we know how this war ended - the Red Army heroically turned the tide at Stalingrad in brutal street-to-street fighting in the dead of winter before forcing the fascist menace all the way back to Berlin, driving Adolf Hitler to suicide. However, in this grand strategy simulation, victory isn’t guaranteed. No matter what decisions we make, it’s guaranteed that countless Russians will die. As the battle reports feed into your desk, you see casualty counts in realtime, in a purely abstract, numerical form.
In reality, people like Ivan, the alcoholic potato farmer turned T-34 tank driver, died a horrific, painful death, because you sent him off on a doomed mission to try and buy time for the rest of the Red Army to come together in 1943 and beat back the Wehrmacht to turn the tide. He didn’t get to dial your office and beg for his life, you never even knew who he was, or was ever aware of his existence. Ivan simply followed orders and made the ultimate sacrifice for the Soviet Union. In chess, when you intentionally sacrifice a piece as part of a larger strategy, the noble Bishop doesn’t turn around and beg for your mercy. You simply hope your enemy doesn’t realize your plan, praying your master strategy works out as lives are being lost on the battlefield.
What does any of this have to do with COVID, you ask? Everything, actually. The Soviet Union was facing an existential crisis as the Third Reich was storming across the Motherland - and countless people were dying and being dismembered, daily. The struggles of logistics and battle plans created endless internal strife at the highest levels of the Red Army. Stalin and his NKVD Secret Police was ruthless in punishing failure, which inevitably led to the rise of Field Marshal Zhukov, famously portrayed by Jason Issacs in The Death of Stalin (2018) - Zhukov would go on to personally accept the Nazis’ surrender.
The Koch/Tucker funded “Great Barrington Declaration” likes to present themselves as the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic’s wasted opportunity to have America’s own Field Marshal Zhukov, that if only Martin & Smilin’ Jay and were in command from the very beginning, we could have ended the pandemic in a matter of a few months… by rapidly mass infecting the population, somehow driving the virus to evolve into a harmless common cold - because of an old wives’ tale that viruses become harmless over time.
To this very day, these viral perverts & their pestilence sycophants continue to propagandize and justify this position by openly rewriting history and peddling conspiracy theories, that maniacal doctors were laughing wildly as they jammed ventilators into mildly unwell patients, killing them in droves. The SARS-CoV-2 virus? Pretty harmless. Any attempt to prevent or treat infections? Worse than Hitler, actually. No, seriously - these sadists are openly calling for mob violence and a “second Nuremberg,” in which many Nazis stood trial for crimes against humanity and were brutally executed.
Surviving a Viral Blitzkrieg
In New York City during the winter of early 2020, countless doctors and nurses lost their lives in the fight against SARS-CoV-2, as hospitals were overwhelmed by patients suffering from a new & deadly virus. Frontline accounts make it clear this was no cold or flu. Some healthcare heroes were so overwhelmed that they were driven to take their own lives. By all first-person accounts, it was hell-on-Earth. Extreme measures had to be taken, including stay-at-home orders and remote education, as American doctors and nurses were truly flying blind through hellfire. As of now, the nationwide count of dead healthcare workers numbers in the thousands.
For a nation drunk on the emotional poison of hyper-individualism, this inconvenience was too much for the comfortable and well-off to bear. Parents forced to actually raise their own children, wealthy academics being asked to wear PPE during an airborne pandemic, Libertarian billionaires being asked to actually care about non-wealthy Americans, and so on. Before long, rightoid billionaires were generating their own propaganda to justify mass infection, long before a vaccine was made available - most notably the Great Barrington Declaration (Koch/Tucker), and the bullshit artist turned celebrity economist Emily Oster. (Zuckerberg/Thiel/Koch)
Martin Kuldorff and Jay Bhattcharya of the Great Barrington Dickweeds have made a name for themselves by presenting an alternative history: when SARS-CoV-2 first arrived, the federal, state, and local governments should have forced everyone who was “healthy” and “low-risk” from SARS-CoV-2 infection to go out and get infected - one proposal included using the police to round up young, “healthy” people, and lock them overnight in a gym with someone that was infectious with SARS-CoV-2. At the same time, those who were “high-risk” would be permitted to isolate and protect themselves from the virus, under the guise of “focused protection.”
Of course, Kuldorff and Bhattcharya never bothered to explore what this would fully entail or how it might work in real life - they didn’t even bother to model or simulate their hypothetical masterplan. All these chucklefucks said was, “we have protected the vulnerable” in fascist Desantis’ Florida, and then a bunch of kids died. Great work!
In fact, their crusading against childhood vaccination for SARS-CoV-2 helped make COVID-19 the leading disease killer & crippler of children. Their ideas got out into the real world, including their “natural immunity” fetish, and countless American children paid the ultimate price for their arrogant incompetence, backed by wealthy billionaires who were more than happy to throw working-class American families into a viral meatgrinder, regardless of the cost in American lives.
Of course, we also learned what mass infection of a population results in - nothing more than a mountain of dead and disabled, with a precious new variant of the virus generated and spreading throughout the population, causing countless reinfections, (with some children on their fifth & sixth COVID infection, and their health isn’t doing great) - known as Delta and Omicron. Here is a recent variant map of viral evolution courtesy of Nextstrain.org:
Of course, the facts don’t get in the way of Smilin’ Jay’s agenda as a Stanford health economist who has his bread buttered by a libertarian Billionaire that believes in child labor and teenage smoking.
Thanks, Walker! In truth, what the Great Barrington Jackasses are jockeying towards is a crusade against the very concept of public health itself, in a libertarian delusion that there is “no such thing as public health,” only the “private health” which you can personally afford. This meme has been repeated for years now and is popular on rightoid media networks such as the UK’s “GB News.”
Understand, we’re talking about this in the context of SARS-CoV-2, a socially transmitted, airborne virus that is spread from person to person via exhaled aerosols. We are all members of the public, of a larger society. Nearly everyone who has died, or been disabled by COVID-19, was infected by their fellow citizen. Denial of basic scientific reality, and inciting violence under the banner of “we must fight back” against any attempt to protect individuals’ health from a deadly and disabling virus… is utterly delusional fiction, that is straight-up anti-American.
In fact, during the American Civil War, the leader of the Continental Army, General George Washington, actually committed a horrific act of tyranny by mandating smallpox inoculation for all of the soldiers under his command in 1777. Public health was a founding pillar of the United States of America - in 1798, President John Adams established national public health policies with the Act for the Relief of Sick & Disabled Seamen who suffered from Yellow Fever, which was crucial before the War of 1812. Unless you wish to be speaking the Queen’s English, you’d best be thanking your Founding Fathers for weaving mandates and public health policy into the very fabric of the United States of America.
Fog of War
These hard decisions, made in a time of extreme crisis, like when the Revolutionary Army was at its weakest and the fates of countless lives were to be decided, represent the burden of command. General Washington didn’t rashly come to a quick decision on Smallpox inoculation, and struggled with the challenges of keeping this program secret from the British forces before American soldiers were combat ready. Much like public health decisions made in early 2020, as leaders in the hotseat watched the carnage unfolding in New York City hospitals and realize we were flying through catastrophic hellfire, with zero visibility of what lay ahead.
This “fog of war” is never factored into any of the Great Bullshitterton Diatribe’s revisionist history. Their plan for the next pandemic is to mass infect the population with whatever new pathogen arrives upon our shores, and whomever dies or is maimed in the process? Well, those losses were simply inevitable. Nothing to be done, Marty & Smilin’ Jay have fully washed their hands of any responsibility for negative outcomes of their own pestilent fantasies. You see, they actually believe that the mass death which would have resulted was actually a positive - reducing the burden on Social Security checks, eliminating “useless eaters,” and eradicating children cursed with pre-existing conditions from becoming adults that would be a healthcare burn on the nation.
In fact, there’s still a great deal we’re struggling to understand about the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its lingering effects. This compilation from November 2022 features over a hundred different health complications caused by COVID-19, and in the several months since then, we’ve learned a great deal more, including about the disabilities commonly referred to under the umbrella term “Long COVID.” In truth, right now we are operating as if there is no fog of war, and we have repeatedly infected American children with a virus we are still struggling to wrap our head around. Hundreds of thousands of kids aren’t doing great - maybe over a million now - and thousands died. The fact is that COVID is now the leading killer and disabler of children, and here is what GBD’s Jay Bhattacharya has to say about it:
A new study from May 10th shows 12-16% of children infected with Omicron experience Long COVID issues at 3 & 6 months, which includes cognitive and neurological impairment. This fact has never factored into the Grand Bollocks Drivel’s guidance, in fact they engage in outright denial about Long COVID even existing or mattering in any significant way, because it throws all of their delusions out the fucking window as just that - unhinged, fictional delusions not at all grounded in reality. What Bhattacharya and his viral sycophants are openly declaring, is that massive amounts of children need to die or be crippled by whatever new pathogen arrives in the future, guaranteed by manmade climate change’s worst consequences beginning to kick into high gear.
The Fantasy of Command
What this all comes down to is simple: Stanford “Health Economist” Smilin’ Jay fetishizes playing God with other people’s lives - but instead of doing it quietly in the privacy of his own home, he publicly fellates himself for the entertainment of his deranged, eugenicist fanatics. He sells them a grand fantasy where we all grind our teeth, forcibly grinning through a horrible pandemic, getting horribly sick, maimed, and dying in a fruitless crusade for “natural immunity” like noble little soldiers marching off the edge of a cliff. We would all hail the Grognard Bustin’ Degradation’s supreme thinkers as noble generals, just like Field Marshal Zhukov, and bury them in countless medals.
Of course, anyone with half a brain would realize this would lead to little more than catastrophe; you would drive civilized society into complete and total collapse. If not from the immediate catastrophe, then from the fury you would face from the public as SARS-CoV-2 reinfections begin to take hold. “Focused protection” would quickly be revealed to be a sham, as the wealthy afford to isolate themselves, and the “vulnerable” die in droves. Doctors and nurses are driven to their breaking point and leave already understaffed hospitals in droves - something that is happening now, as a matter of fact. In truth, the Great Barrington Declaration is designed in such a way that it simply cannot fail, it can only be failed.
In the real world, a cohesive unit can only sustain so much pressure at once before it hits a breaking point and collapses. Training, preparedness, and discipline can only do so much. This was precisely the key to the Blitzkrieg strategy of the Third Reich - with rapid, overwhelming force to shock and drive the enemy into disarray, dislocating the defenders and driving them off-balance. To steal a quote from Dr. Jonathan Howard’s We Want Them Infected:
“…in reality, no one had ever tried to stop a virus by spreading that virus, and humanity had never before achieved herd immunity through the mass infection of unvaccinated, young people.”
No battle was ever won by immediately surrendering to the enemy, either. What the GBD and its sycophants are peddling is an elaborate fantasy, enforced by harassment and abuse of anyone who actually engages with their theories in a serious and critical manner. The problem we face, in allowing this absurdist fantasy to take root, is that as we fail to resolve the current pandemic, we will find ourselves completely unprepared and unable to respond to the next pandemic.
All so chronically incorrect pestilence perverts can play at fantasies of being brave commanders, leading noble soldiers through a crisis. Sadly, it seems we may be looking at the possibility of this delusion being forced on the American population being more likely than ever.