A pandemia como pretexto para impor um apartheid sanitário

(cartoon de Brian Wang, respigado daqui)

Aviso prévio: este é um post sem 'paninhos quentes' ou 'papas na língua'.

A pandemia está a ser usada como pretexto para diabolizar ou ostracizar os 'impuros' e 'egoistas' não-vacinados pelo (pretenso) moralismo de um novo fascismo sanitário, imposto através dos chamados 'passaportes sanitários' ou 'certificados de vacinação' - ver p.ex. aqui ou aqui. Trata-se de um mecanismo reconhecido pela psicologia e usado recorrentemente por sistemas hegemónicos ou totalitários que é brilhantemente desmascarado em mais um lúcido exercício de pensamento crítico do autor norte-americano Charles Eisenstein - 'Mob morality and the unvaxxed' (Ago 2021) -, cuja leitura recomendo e do qual seleccionei alguns excertos:

(…) defying left-right categorization is a promising new scapegoat class, the heretics of our time: the anti-vaxxers. As a readily identifiable subpopulation, they are ideal candidates for scapegoating. It matters little whether any of these pose a real threat to society. As with the subjects of criminal justice, their guilt is irrelevant to the project of restoring order through blood sacrifice (or expulsion from the community by incarceration or, in more tepid but possibly prefigurative form, through “canceling”). All that is necessary is that the dehumanized class arouse the blind indignation and rage necessary to incite a paroxysm of unifying violence. More relevant to current times, this primal mob energy can be harnessed toward fascistic political ends. Totalitarians right and left invoke it directly when they speak of purges, ethnic cleansing, racial purity, and traitors in our midst. Sacrificial subjects carry an association of pollution or contagion; their removal thus cleanses society.

(…) To prepare someone for removal as the repository of all that is evil, it helps to heap upon them every imaginable calumny. Thus we hear in mainstream publications that anti-vaxxers not only are killing people, but are raging narcissists, white supremacists, vile, spreaders of Russian disinformation, and tantamount to domestic terrorists. These accusations are amplified by cherry-picking a few examples, choosing hysterical-looking photos of anti-vaxxers, and showcasing their most dubious arguments.

(…) The mechanisms that generate the illusion of unanimity operate within science, medicine, and journalism as well as among the general public. Some conform enthusiastically to the orthodoxy; others complain in whispers to sympathetic colleagues. Those who voice dissent publicly become radioactive. The consequences of their apostasy (excommunication from funding, ridicule in the media, shunning by colleagues who must “distance themselves,” etc.) serve to silence other potential dissidents, who prudently keep their views to themselves.

(…) Many if not most people get the vaccine in an altruistic civic spirit, not because they personally fear getting Covid, but because they believe they are contributing to herd immunity and protecting others. By extension, those who refuse the vaccine are shirking their civic duty; hence the epithets “filth” and “assholes.” They become the identifiable representatives of social decay, ready for surgical removal from the body politic like cancer cells all conveniently located in the same tumor.

(…) The fear operating in the ostracism of the unvaxxed is mostly not fear of disease, though disease may be its proxy. The main fear, old as humanity, is of a social contagion. It is fear of association with the outcasts, coded as moral indignation.

(…) The science on the issue [of vaccine safety and efficacy] is so clouded by financial incentives and systemic bias that it is impossible to rely on it to light a way through the murk. The system of research and public health suppresses generic medicines and nutritional therapies that have been demonstrated to greatly reduce Covid symptoms and mortality, leaving vaccines as the only choice. It also fails to adequately investigate numerous plausible mechanisms for serious long-term harm. Of course, plausible does not mean certain: at this point no one knows, or indeed can know, what the long-term effects will be. My point, however, is not that the anti-vaxxers are right and being unjustly persecuted. It is that their persecution enacts a pattern that has little to do with whether they are right or wrong, innocent or guilty. The unreliability of the science underscores that point, and suggests that we take a hard look at the deadly social impulses that the science cloaks.

(…) The foregoing analysis is not meant to invalidate other explanations for Covid conformity: the influence of Big Pharma on research, the media, and government; reigning medical paradigms that see health as a matter of winning a war on germs; a general social climate of fear, obsession with safety, the phobia and denial of death; and, perhaps most importantly, the long disempowerment of individuals to manage their own health.

(…) Whether the totalitarian program is premeditated or opportunistic, deliberate or emergent, the question remains: How does a small elite move the great mass of humanity? They do it by aggravating and exploiting deep psycho-social patterns such as the Girardian [ref.ª às teses do filósofo René Girard sobre o sacrifício social de ‘bodes expiatórios’]. Fascists have always done that. We normally attribute pogroms and genocide to racist ideology, the classic example being antisemitic fascism. From the Girardian perspective it is more the other way around. The ideology is secondary: a creation and a tool of impending violent unanimity. It creates its necessary conditions. The same might be said of slavery. It was not that Europeans thought Africans were inferior and so thus enslaved them. It was that thinking them inferior was required in order to enslave them.

(…) The us of fascism requires a them. The civic-minded moral majority participates willingly, assured that it is for the greater good. Something must be done. The doubters go along too, for their own safety. No wonder today’s authoritarian institutions know, as if instinctively, to whip up hysteria toward the newly minted class of deplorables, the anti-vaxxers and unvaccinated. (…) The campaign against the unvaccinated, garbed in the white lab coat of Science, munitioned with biased data, and waving the pennant of altruism, channels a brutal, ancient impulse.

(…) I don’t want to reduce our current acceleration toward techno-totalitarianism and a biosecurity state by just one psycho-social explanation, however deep. Yet it is important to recognize the Girardian pattern, so we know what we are dealing with, so that we can creatively expand our resistance beyond futile debate over the issues – and most importantly, so we can identify its operation within ourselves. Any movement that leverages contempt in its rhetoric fits the Girardian impulse. Elements of scapegoating such as dehumanization, rumor-mongering, stereotyping, punishment-as-justice, and mob mentality are alive within dissident communities as they are in the mainstream. Any who ride those powers to victory will create a new tyranny no better than the previous.

Aproveito para declarar que não me vacinei e não tenciono vacinar-me, apesar de toda a chantagem mediática, social e psicológica à minha volta. Tal como o autor do artigo que partilhei, não sou 'anti-vaxxer' e reconheço a validade e utilidade de diversas vacinas. No entanto, considero que a natureza desta doença não justifica a campanha de vacinação planetária e recuso-me a ceder ao clima de terror e à propaganda que estão a ser lançados sobre as pessoas a reboque desta pandemia - ofuscando outras abordagens à sua mitigação, censurando qualquer posição não conforme à narrativa oficial e causando danos psicológicos e sociais tremendos e potencialmente irreversívies. Oponho-me igualmente à imposição de passaportes ou certificados para aceder a serviços, equipamentos ou eventos. Nalguns países onde foram instituídas este tipo de restrições, como a França ou a Itália, têm ocorrido protestos contra aquelas medidas discriminatórias - ver p.ex. aqui ou aqui. 

P.S. Vale também a pena ler os dois posts anteriores da mesma série (inspirada no pensamento do filósofo René Girard):

https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/girard-series-part-1-the-death-of-the-festival/

https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/girard-series-part-2-fascism-and-the-antifestival/

P.P.S. Um outro artigo de análise que também defende que os não-vacinados são os 'bodes expiatórios' da narrativa dominante do fascismo sanitário foi escrito por Connor Kelly em Julho (como segmento final de um artigo mais longo em três partes) - excerto:

(...) The unvaccinated are the ‘natural’ scapegoat for this crisis for both the state, and for large sections of the public. Not because they represent physical danger, nor because they are ‘variant factories’ but because they didn’t get with the programme. (The dehumanisation has already begun with such terminology as variant factories!) The truth is that there are millions of unvaccinated people who are healthy, normal people... The existence of healthy unvaccinated people is an affront to the new regime – an impermissible transgression. Their existence, and their defiant posture seems to make a mockery of all that people have suffered through. They remind us that the madness of the last year and a half was based on so many lies, on manufactured fear, on psychological abuse. If society is populated with healthy, normal unvaccinated people then the public might begin to question what the last year and a half was all for. And that would mean deeply questioning themselves, their narratives, their own desires and the nature of the society they inhabit – a traumatic event.