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Margaret Anna Alice: Strong Medicine for Today's "Good Germans"
The Covid/Vax Disaster Reckoning, Pt. 4
Have you read Margaret Anna Alice? She’s an interesting talent that’s emerged amid the substacks dedicated to vax-harm and related Covid-dissident issues. Her latest essay, “Are You a Good German, or a Badass German?” is some stunner, very tough-love medicine for all those who fell in with the official Covid/Vax Narrative and its mainstreaming of despotism.
A couple of months ago, I told a wise academic friend that the time had come for considering issues of Repentance, and Forgiveness. I was speaking with respect to what I call the Covid/Vax Disaster, as well as some of the other forms of Narrative-Think that took over everything 2020-2021. I believe I mentioned this book:
His response: “It’s too early.”
Wise, that man.
But Man is an impatient creature, and different ones of us run on different time-tables, such that there is a certain inevitability of some of us coming in, as Van Morrison put it: “A Few Bars Early.” Maybe that applies to this essay—maybe the time for it isn’t here yet. But it is here in any case, expressing quite a bit of what people like me feel but do not know if we should (yet) say out loud, or say so undiplomatically.
I don’t think, at the end of the day, that a “politics of repentance demanding” can work or be healthy, even if I sometimes slip into acting as if such would be possible. But it is also impossible that the politics of Reckoning that the coming years are going to bring—assuming the Borg doesn’t just win—can completely dismiss the need for Repentance, Punishment, and Apology, even if its leaders understand that these cannot become their movement’s central planks. Repentance and Forgiveness must in any case be worked out person by person. It has a political dimension in this case, but it almost always happens aside from actual politics. And history shows us it seldom unfolds anywhere close to the degree needed.
Anyhow, here’s a taste of Margaret Anna Alice’s piece, with links and embedded videos removed:
Times Up. Pencils Down
The first phase of the Obedience-Prison-Conformity experiment is over. How’d you do?
If you ever wondered how you would have behaved in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Mussolinian Italy, Ceaușescuian Romania, or China (Maoist or contemporary), now you know.
If you ever wondered how you would have reacted to the Milgram Obedience Experiment, now you know.
If you ever wondered how you would have fared in the Stanford Prison Experiment, now you know.
If you ever wondered how you would have the done on the Asch Conformity Test, now you know.
You can see where this is going, but like a Socrates after he has already won the main argument, who then proceeds to drag his poor interlocutor over all the remaining implications of his errant assumptions, Ms. Alice is relentless:
Did you: …Hate whom they told you to hate? Inhabit their manufactured illusion?Delegate your thinking to fact-chokers? Suppress your conscience? …. Go with the herd? …Fail to question? Pass their obedience test? Accept BigPharma into your heart? Become an experimental subject? …
I can’t convey with these bits how artfully Ms. Alice does it all, and how it transitions into a kind of opportunity for forgiveness, which includes an invitation to join her in going down the “rabbit holes” of opposition-to-the-Narrative, in the manner implied by her own pen-name, and of course, by the Matrix. (There’s a film whose simple images and ideas have mattered so much more over the long run than the overall impression made by the thing itself!) I join her in thinking that many who come to realize they’ve been lied to will be emerging out of the frying pan of denial, into a fire that has its own mental-health/spiritual-health challenges, although she uses the happier metaphor of an attempted-strangulation victim beginning to see more clearly as oxygen returns to her brain.
And I myself don’t really know how to talk about all this with those not yet ready to admit much of the reality at hand. A coming installment of this series will seek to lay out the seven main Sins of the (still-unfolding!) Covid/Vax Disaster, the things we most of all will need admission of, accountability for, and repentance from.
Overall, my series is seeking to grapple with a.) understanding what the Disaster is, and b.) what the necessary Reckoning with it should be. As hard as a.) is, given the thick fog-clouds of cover-up/uncertainty that meet us at every turn, b.) in some ways will be even harder, even at the apparently simple person-to-person level.
Ms. Alice embeds a very funny video by J.P. Sears about the kinds of apologies needed at the personal level into her essay, but it’s such a tough issue that I don’t know if such humor can help. The Sears-video detracts, I think, from the overall tone of her essay, by implying that things are more cut-and-dried than they are. That is, if a portion of the repentance needed really begins to happen, I don’t think it will feel or look like the parody-free version of this. The issues here go much deeper, as Ms. Alice shows, than people simply having treated others like jerks, which is kind of what Sears implies.
I would love to hear what some of our readers think about all this.
P.S. If you yourself remain in denial about the despotism-mainstreaming implications of all this, consider the claims recently made by the Canadian doctor Mel Bruchet, that he was arrested this January for voicing his judgment about vaccination harms, diagnosed as insane, confined in a mental institution, and forcibly given psychiatric drugs particularly dangerous for an elderly man like him. Margaret Anna Alice is right that taking stock of what is happening now us requires us to revisit all our studies of totalitarianism, and Naomi Wolf is right to be titling her forthcoming book on the vax-harms The Bodies of Others, after The Lives of Others, a film which I helped argue was one of the essential documents of modern tyranny.
Margaret Anna Alice: Strong Medicine for Today's "Good Germans"
Another well written thoughtful piece. We repent in leisure. But those of us who are reading in these SubStack spaces (and like MAA, I try too much) have less to repent. We will in the end need to forgive and that will be hard. Predicting anger over being mislead is not easy.
What a beautiful and provocative meditation, Carl, and I am grateful for your thoughtful attention to my essay.
“happier metaphor of an attempted-strangulation victim …” 😂
And wow, thank you for the book recs on totalitarianism, both of which sound fascinating (congratulations on your editing role on “Totalitarianism on Screen”). I’ve added books both to my wishlist as well as “The Lives of Others,” which I was not familiar with.