There’s been a lot of speculative theories as to where the COVID-19 has emerged from. Here is a list of some of them:
The most popular fact-free opinion is that Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, is behind the virus.
The second most popular is that 5G radio-waves weaken the body, causing us to succumb to COVID-19. This belief has resulted in 30 acts of arson in Britain against cell towers and the like.
The virus bio-engineered in a lab in Wuhan or the US brought it to China.
Alabamans thought, "black helicopters ferrying infected patients to the training center at night."
How did we end up here?
It sounds like a bad joke, but what do Donald Trump, Noam Chomsky and Muslims have in common?
All agree that the media can’t be trusted.
Before Donald Trump coined the phrase "fake news," Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman authored, Manufacturing Consent, about how the media works to create consensus in society. The media is not free and fair. It must pass through five filters before it gets to us. Firstly, the media is owned by the elites. Secondly, advertisers can cut funding if they don't like what you say. Thirdly, official sources won’t give you the time of day if you are critical of them. Fourthly, if you manage to get past these filters then, they will attack you. Lastly, you will be tainted as the “bad guy” of the day. In the 1980s, this Communism and today it’s terrorism.
Chomsky and Herman point out how we are conditioned to hate Communists who kill Polish priests. But when it comes to American client states killing four white American nuns? Well, that's not something to get worked up. So, the truth – killing religious people is wrong – is discarded when it comes to the US doing it instead of the Communists. Although it’s one example, it is multiplied by a million and it results in a society that has an impaired sense of reality. People really don’t know how to process facts. They only know how to consume propaganda.
The media also hides things. For example, Fox News was not held accountable for crushing a story on how Monsanto's bovine growth hormone (rBGH) was linked to breast/prostate cancer.
Then there was the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. The US claimed the country had to be invaded because of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). They were never found. The war was based on lies. A recent estimate puts the death toll at 2.4 million people. Think of the innocent men, women, and children all dead because of this lie. What does this undeniable truth mean? Nothing. It’s such a non-issue that the Democratic party is rallying around outspoken cheerleader for this war, Joe Biden:
Finally, there is Russia-gate. For the months leading up to the Mueller report, certain news outlets made it seem like the Mueller was going to indict Trump. That day never came. Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi summarized the media's manipulation as follows: "…Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is head[ing] home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.”
Citizens of Fantasyland
But that’s half the problem. The other issues that people have been encouraged to live in fantasyland:
“Millions of Americans now put on costumes and carry props and go out into the world to pretend for hours or days or a week at a time that they’re not exactly or remotely themselves, that they’re more interesting people living more extraordinary lives in more thrilling places or times—soldiers, comic book and movie characters, aristocrats, detectives, murderers, wizards, one-of-a-kind beings.”
In the book Fantasyland, Kurt Anderson traces this back to a core belief in Capitalism: “the great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, every individual free to believe anything she wishes, has metastasized out of control… swamp[ing] the sober, rational, empirical parts”.
Given this culture of living in fantasies and a deceptive media, is it any wonder that people are now acting on the "unreality" built-in their minds and burning down 5G towers?
The reality of COVID-19: Reality punching us in the face
The elite owned media has worked day and night to keep us away from reality. This way we will never question the system. But it also has robbed us of the basic rational thinking skills required to sift fiction from fact during a crisis like the one we are experiencing now.
Now the truth has come to hit us in the face.
We can no longer live in fantasyland. So, how do we assess whether this is real or some elaborate plan to 'shock and awe' people? It requires looking at facts and not opinions. Also, we must assess the facts and then conclude, instead of having a theory and then finding facts to back it up.
Fact #1: No evidence of a plan
The US and China are not acting as if they had a plan, e.g. none has a cure on the ready. China hid the outbreak. The US sought to buy Die Wielt, a German pharma company, to get exclusive access to the COVID-19 vaccine. They would have purchased on the cheap before the outbreak if they had planned to release it.
Fact #2: COVID-19 likely came from the wet markets of Wuhan, just like SARS
The commonly accepted idea is that this originally came from bats, transferred to a pangolin, which likely got transferred to a human in the wet markets of Wuhan China.
Could this theory be wrong? Yes. But that’s science, not a conspiracy. Understanding the origins of a pandemic requires detective work, e.g. talking to patients, consulting doctors, research (see Fact #3), etc.
Fact#3: No link to a previous virus
Also, scientific studies have shown that the virus was not related to a previous coronavirus. Human beings are limited so they can’t create a virus from scratch and need to start with an earlier virus:
“If someone were seeking to engineer a new coronavirus as a pathogen, they would have constructed it from the backbone of a virus known to cause illness. But the scientists found that the SARS-CoV-2 backbone differed substantially from those of already known coronaviruses and mostly resembled related viruses found in bats and pangolins.”
When I saw this, it reminded me of a challenge issued in the Quran to humanity:
“O people, an example is presented, so listen to it. Indeed, those you invoke besides Allah will never create [as much as] a fly, even if they gathered together for that purpose.” [TMQ 22:73]
That is, part of understanding the reality of bio-genetic weapons is to accept that human beings are limited: we can’t even build a virus. We can only engineer what Allah (swt) has already created.
The integration of these facts requires deep study. We must get beyond the sensationalist headlines, discard opinions and understand the underlying facts. But this is about how we survive in a fantasyland that manufactures consent. The real problem is overhauling the media system to produce information that we can rely on. And the elites are not going to let that happen anytime soon.
In sha Allah, in part 2 to this post, we will look at how the media failed in discussing the healthcare crisis that has made us more susceptible the coronavirus