Our friend’s humanity seems irrepressible
As social craziness and corporate-state propaganda twine themselves together in a killer virus-themed graveyard tango, our friend NP dutifully donned her surgical mask and went shopping in a branch of “Tesco” – the company that receives about an eighth of all the money spent in the British retail sector. Being an observant sort, she couldn’t help but notice that among the other mask-wearing customers about half had omitted to cover their nostrils. Deciding that at least in most cases this choice was neither a conscious act of resistance nor a semi-conscious gesture of passive aggression, she formed the opinion that the behaviour, when it really boiled down to it, was about as sensible as trying to scratch your chin by knocking your elbows together.
Never one to take such an affront lightly [1], after arriving home and stowing her groceries she therefore wrote to the company’s customer services scum to put them in the picture, helpfully explaining that “one of the main points of these masks (which generally speaking provide protection to lower than N95 standard) is to protect other people from infections that might be carried by the wearer.” Since “(m)ost of us breathe out mostly through our noses,” NP continued – fully aware that the person reading her missive might be “subnormal”, or at least might have been classed as such, pre-smartphones – “wearing a mask only over the mouth is defeating the purpose”. She concluded her communication with the suggestion that the company should “put up a sign saying ‘Please ensure you wear your face mask PROPERLY – covering both nose and mouth’.”
A few hours later she received a reply from Connor “Fool” French, who signed himself as working for Tesco’s “Customer Service” and “Customer Engagement Centre”. “Thank you for getting in touch”, he wrote, ending his sentence with a comma. Great start, thought NP. “I understand your concerns regarding this matter,” Mr French then typed (or pasted) patronisingly, before compounding his offence by addressing NP by her first name. “I just want to inform you that we’re asking customers in our Scottish and English stores to wear a face covering and we’ve signs around our stores to let customers know the rules about it.” A true case of “nobody home upstairs”, felt our intrepid researcher NP at this stage.
“I will fed [sic] back your comments regarding Customers [sic] not wearing their face mask over there [sic] noises [sic]” was the next sentence from semi-literate Mr French, followed by “If there anything [sic] else I can do to help, please get back in touch.”
Not known for her propensity to allow halfwits multiple chances to take the piss out of her, NP next wrote to the press office that is maintained by the fictitious person called “Tesco” – or would be, if a fictitious person could actually maintain a press office. Referring to the earlier correspondence and observing that Mr French hadn’t understood what she had written, she spelled the issue out in toddler language. The issue wasn’t whether or not there were signs up advising shoppers to wear masks. Nope. It was that masks weren’t being worn to cover all three breathing-holes. Yes, that was it.
She then received a second email back, this time from Hannah “Cardboard-Brain” Galley, who signed herself even more flamboyantly as “Media Manager” at “Group Communications”.
Ms Galley is doubtless paid considerably more than Mr French, but she seemed just as thick in the ‘ead. Her effort simply contained the words “Thanks for your email”, followed by “As background”, followed by a probably cut-and-pasted section that you may like to read in full. (We’re not making this up.)
“In line with Scottish government guidelines, customers need to wear a face covering when visiting our stores. There is signage at the front of our stores explaining this. We have provided free face coverings for colleagues throughout the coronavirus outbreak and given guidance on how to wear these correctly. There are a number of situations where a face covering will not be required. We have a legal responsibility to ensure that all customers can access our stores, including those with visible and invisible disabilities which mean they may not be able to wear a face covering.” [2]
So these are the statements that “Tesco” makes when it “learns” that around half of the mask-wearing customers in one of its shops are happily breathing in and out through nostrils they choose not to cover. We have no reason to think the same is not also occurring at the company’s other 4000 stores. (Got any reports? Write to us!) And since nobody, not even a “Media Manager”, would seriously believe that as many as half of shoppers suffer from disabilities that prevent them from covering their noses, the company’s message is essentially this: “Fuck off.”
Euthanasia, with propaganda against the “anti-social”
At this point we should make clear that we have no intention of playing the rulers’ game, nor of encouraging others to engage in it. In 2020 so far, most of those who have been officially reported as having died in Britain afflicted with the influenza-like symptoms collectively labelled “Covid-19” that are associated with a new strain of the SARS coronavirus – whether or not they were ever tested for this virus, and disregarding the false positive rate among those who were – have been elderly, aged over 65. They include many inmates of “care homes”, poor isolated souls whom ambulances no longer attend to when they fall ill with respiratory problems, and who wouldn’t be treated anyway in any of the many hospital wards that have now lain shut for several months. This is while the government and media gee the population up to stand clapping on their doorsteps once a week, cheer-led by a far-right nationalist prime minister, to express how “grateful” they are to a mystic trigram of three alphabetic characters: “NHS”. This, one of the weightiest of all of the British state’s acronym brands [3], signifies “National Health Service”, not “No Help for Seniors” which would be far more accurate.
Other patients who haven’t yet died of pneumonia or other illnesses and who do not reside in “care homes”, including some who are younger, have been urged to allow their cards to be marked with a trigram that is less well-known: “DNR”. These are the men and women who have received letters from “general practitioners’ surgeries” urging them to authorise the signing of “Do Not Resuscitate” forms. [4] [5] (When they get such letters, we have to wonder how enthusiastic they feel about participating in the next ritual of grateful applause.) Still others have had “DNR” noted in their “records” without even receiving the “courtesy” of a notification. The total number of the DNR’ed is unknown.
In short, the rulers’ policy on the “health” service is one of “euthanasia”, including “involuntary euthanasia”. That is, of course, an enemy phrase if ever there was one, but even such a truly obnoxious euphemism is far too accurate to be used in today’s Britain, either in the media or in any other area of “respectable” discourse.
We further observe that this murderous policy harmonises with the whipping up of hatred and visceral fear in the Powellite gutter press against certain groups: black British people who hold street parties (“Brixton”), gypsies (who “shatter tranquillity”), the Pakistani Muslim British (“Leicester”), and the disobedient in general (“beach”, “litter” [6]), all of whom are presented – sometimes openly, sometimes less so – as anti-social elements whose simply being themselves jeopardises public hygiene.
Our methods, and the prospect we are up against
In this reality, and in these conditions of wall-to-wall fascistic propaganda and lies, we are not seeking to raise a fuss over whether customers in supermarkets should be wearing face-coverings right now. For all we know, shoppers could wear masks properly, or they could prance along supermarket aisles maskless, and there might be little effect on most people’s health one way or the other at the moment. At the moment.
We are trying instead to poke a hole in one little part of the mindfuckery by leaving the slaughter on one side in order to consider the instruction “Thou shalt wear masks in shops” on its own terms. There are many other points at which one could seek to breach the armour worn by the oppressive monster in this, the early stage of bio-techno fascism. If you want to find your own pressure point to attack, just look out of your window or consider the past day or two of your life. (And, again, get in touch!)
It is both literally and metaphorically as plain as the nose on your face that supermarkets are locations where human beings inhale a lot of other people’s exhalations that contain not just carbon dioxide but also bacteria and viruses. Wear masks and you reduce the germs’ scope for body-jumping. That’s not rocket science – it’s a simple, obvious truth. Humans breathe through our nostrils and our mouths, not just through our mouths. In fact we mostly breathe through our nostrils. If a person wears a mask and leaves their nose uncovered, it’s probably because they want to have a good suck of air in through their nose and a good blow of carbon dioxide out, also through their nose, unhampered by a piece of tissue, card, or cloth. The reason is unlikely for most people to be because they suffer from a disability that prevents them from pulling their mask up. [7]
Like the government which helps it rake in such huge profits, Tesco is barefacedly coming into its own as it takes the mickey out of us – out of our health, whether we live or die, and our sanity. Such psychopressure, exerted on billions of people around the world in 2020, is by no means a minor feature of the rulers’ ongoing advance.
Blinkeredness; not calling lies lies and stupidity stupidity; not applying simple logic; intellectual passivity that rests on the feeling that breaking out of it is more than one’s equilibrium (or is it one’s social status?) is worth; refusing to admit even to oneself that the utter shit talk spewed out by bureaucrats, by “experts” and by Tesco isn’t custard; just basically giving up hope – who does all that benefit? Where does it lead? We’ll tell you where it leads.
If a virus pandemic were genuinely looking as though it could lay low a huge swathe of the population, then those who run organisations such as Tesco – the largest member of Britain’s supermarket cartel and the biggest private-sector employer in Europe – would be assisting the rest of the ruling class, and its governments, in the murder of many, many people. The level of killing that has already occurred would be exceeded by a number of orders of magnitude.
And that is precisely what may well – and soon – be the actual position.
For that, they need our minds numb.
Notes
1) NP tells us she may send a link to this article to both of the Tesco employees with whom she communicated. We advised her not to bother, but we don’t know whether she will follow our advice. In any case, a big thank you to NP for sending us a copy of the correspondence she initiated. We’ll publish anything that anyone at the company sends us in response, at least if we want to.
2) “Colleagues” is what this company calls its employees, whether managers or workers. One of the other big supermarket companies in Britain – we forget which one – went and probably still goes one step further and calls its customers “visitors”. Perhaps they’ll call shelfstackers “curators” next?
3) The only Brit-state acronym brand that rivals and may exceed “NHS” for heft is the two-letter “UK” signifying the monarchist regime that currently prevails in the country. In three letters, “NHS” encapsulates the notion that the majority of the population should be grateful to confident, posh-accented authority figures for not demanding money in return for keeping them from dying in the gutter when they’re ill. In one of the British ideology’s biggest examples of mind rape, even questioning the arrangement’s structure and trying to get a handle on it – let alone laying into it with a vengeance – is almost universally rejected as tantamount to opening the door to precisely such a pre-World War 2 horror. There is as little collective opposition to the medical-industrial complex’s “NHS” face as there is to the monarchy. It is to be noted, though, that the royal family, although they engage in co-branding insofar as they pay formal visits to “NHS” institutions and “allow” some to have “Royal” in their name or to be named after specific family members, generally do not involve themselves much in propaganda that lauds the “NHS” as an entity. They have only occasionally, for example, taken part in the clapping rituals. The line in the lickspittle media has been that the royal family members are “applauding key workers”, or sometimes “frontline workers”, just as they might honour their kingdom’s armed forces or its police. Even in these insane times the royal family saying “Thank you, NHS” might be considered a hypocritical step too far. The monarch and her husband don’t even bother hiding the fact that they themselves, like most of the rest of the rich, prefer to get treated privately – in their case in “King Edward VII’s Hospital”, described in its marketing as “London’s foremost private hospital” and located in what is now branded “the Harley Street Medical District”.
4) “General practitioners” at the Llynfi “surgery” in Maesteg near Port Talbot in South Wales sent letters to patients telling them “we would (…) like to complete a DNACPR (Do Not Attempt Cardio-pulmonary Resuscitation) form for you”, and that one of the “several benefits” [sic] would be that “friends and family” wouldn’t have to call 999. (You can read a copy of their letter at the link we included in the main text.) In contemporary Britain, you should always be on your guard when you hear the prepositional phrase “for you”. In more straightforward language, they’re saying “Just agree, okay, that if you have a heart attack nobody will try to help you – and rather than selfishly put the people you’re close to through the tiresome inconvenience of summoning an ambulance, let them do something else instead with their valuable time while you lay there croaking in extreme pain, something such as watching adverts on their smartphones.” Note the use of “friends and family” rather than “family”. We will return to this kind of usage in a future article.
5) We should say something about “GPs”. They are the non-specialist local “gatekeeper” medics that many in Britain are forced to contact first of all when they require attention. They almost all work in the “state” sector, but that doesn’t stop them demanding money from patients when they refer them “privately” to specialist medics who, as it happens, also accept referrals on the “state”, which they process much slower. Britain having the kind of ultra-deferential culture it does, almost nobody in the country calls these payments “bribes”. For the past several months, “GPs” have been doing a lot less work than usual, having told their receptionists to chase many of their patients away as potential germ-spreaders. But if you think their incomes have decreased, think again.
6) As if enjoyment of the beach necessarily implies a penchant for the antisocial action of dropping litter! Most who go to the beach are fine about clearing up after themselves. But in the world of the Daily Mail any kind of fun or socialising by members of the groups in the lower orders of society against whom they direct their disgust and hatred must unquestionably be tied up with the spreading of litter and germs.
7) One should acknowledge that sharing with each other the air we breathe, including by breathing in what many other humans breathe out, is natural and mostly beneficial. And one can make the further point, which anybody who wishes to generalise about infection should make, that each of us has an immune system that ideally we should keep fighting fit. That’s something we haven’t heard a single peep about from any politician, “journalist”, bureaucrat, or “expert” when they have been gobbing off about “public health”. Yet it is fundamental to both individual and collective health, because it’s crucial to our resistance to harmful bacteria, viruses, and fungi. Ask why the omission. Many who have been infected with the SARS-CoV2 virus have defeated it with antibodies. Some have fought it off even before it caused any symptoms, and it is not just children who have been physically able to do this. The ruling class wants those of us whom it allows to survive to be reliant on vaccines (regularly repeated or “boosted”) for our “protection” from harmful germs, just as it wants us to rely on microwave-emitting “smartphones” (constantly tracked using continually “updated” programs) for our “socialising”.