Canadian military saw pandemic as opportunity to test propaganda techniques
ottawacitizen.com
ottawacitizen.com
I would hope that deploying the military against your own citizens is against more than just an executive branch policy that can be changed at any moment.
[edit] Posse Comitatus is more of an American thing - for the record the War Measures Act was subsequently replaced with the Emergencies Act [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Measures_Act
In fact Justin Trudeau considered invoking it for the first time since the replacement in the COVID situation.
[edit] Between that and the Notwithstanding Clause [1] there's a lot of latitude here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_33_of_the_Canadian_Cha...
> 9 (1) Nothing in a declaration of a public welfare emergency or in any order or regulation made pursuant thereto shall be construed or applied so as to derogate from, or to authorize the derogation from, the control or direction of the government of a province or a municipality over any police force over which it normally has control or direction.
https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/E-4.5/page-1.html#h...
[Provinces can request military help, but that's unrelated to either the emergencies act or the now repealed war measures act]
Its been a while since my high school history class, but i don't think that's correct. If i remember correctly, the military troops involved in the flq crisis were at the request and under control of the province of quebec, not the federal government (under the constitution of canada, law and order is a provincial responsibility). Trudeau did temporarily suspend some civil liberties, in particular the right to habeaus corpus. However the tanks were entirely provincial not federal, so had nothing to do with trudeau and their deployment did not involve the war measures act. In fact, as far as i know, the prime minister isn't even allowed to prevent the province from requistioning military help, at most they can charge them money for it afterwards.
IANAhistorian.
That's not reality
Without even talking of the most famous colonial wars during which these techniques were developed (Indochine, Algeria), the French army has repeatedly massacred its citizens during the Paris commune in 1871 (10-50k dead) [0] or during the may first demonstration in Fourmies in 1891 (9 dead) [1].
Nowadays the army is still used against the population but rarely with actual bullets. The police has a much bigger killing record (including during demonstrations), but at least two anarchists i know of were killed by explosive grenades thrown by the military police (gendarmerie) during ecological protests: Vital Michalon in 1977 (physics teacher) [2] and Rémi Fraisse in 2014 (botanist) [3].
Even more recently, during the Gilets Jaunes protests, the army's anti-terrorist patrols (Sentinelle) were redeployed by the government to defend key buildings/institutions from a potential revolution. That move was criticized both by soldiers who said it was not their role, and by opposition parties. They even deployed the Gendarmerie's armored tanks in Paris, which was a first. [5] Despite teargas being banned by the Geneva convention against chemical weapons, these tanks were equipped with stronger chemicals, which the government denied, before acknowledging its existence (they did not use this "powder" during the protests). [6]
On the countryside, especially in rural land occupations against GPII (Grands Projets Industriels et Imposées, or Grand and Imposed Industrial Projects), also known as ZADs [7], the Gendarmerie (military police) is heavily deployed, both regular "Gendarmerie Mobile" units as well as "PSIG". These units PSIG units, involved in fast deployment for crushing popular dissent on the countryside, were 37 in 1978, 138 in 1988, 310 in 2000 and 370 in 2015 [8], so we can say that aspect of counter-insurrection apparatus is growing. In Bure, where the local population is opposing the construction of an underground nuclear storage facility [9], there are more stationed gendarmes (both GM and PSIG) than there are inhabitants, and the operation has often been described as a military occupation [10] unseen since WWII. You have road blocks and mobile patrols doing ID checks on everyone, and the local forest has been privatized and is heavily guarded, and local residents have been regularly fined for just taking a walk in the forest. It is not uncommon for the local population to be ID-checked 3 times going to the supermarket and back. More information about this struggle against industrial capitalism can be found here [11].
This is just for France. In more democratic countries, the situation may be different. But i know in America (north and south) the situation is very similar with the national guard (or equivalent) called to crush popular insurrections against injustice, corruption police brutality, and privatization of public/indigenous land.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusillade_de_Fourmies [2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vital_Michalon [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9mi_Fraisse [4] https://www.francetvinfo.fr/economie/emploi/metiers/armee-et... [5] https://img.lemde.fr/2018/12/08/0/0/2000/1333/1872/1246/30/0... [6] https://paris-luttes.info/macron-pret-a-utiliser-des-armes-1... [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_to_Defend [8] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peloton_de_surveillance_et_d%2...
[9] The storage is not operational yet, and there has already been serious injuries and collapses, so the inhabitants are concerned that the engineers promising the facility will store nuclear content safely for >10K years have no clue what they're talking about.
[10] https://reporterre.net/Bure-En-Meuse-nous-vivons-sous-occupa...
Still, this is more or less the basic pattern of how nations and armies work together. For example, the fascist coup that started the civil war in Spain was originally stymied by the fact that many of the insurrectionary military units were stuck in Africa in the Spanish colonies.
The problem with armies is that even with the best of intentions, you end up using them, and if you use them, sometimes you win and end up having to do counterinsurgency in conquered territory. Then you get a whole load of people coming back home who started their professional career thinking of the population around them as the enemy, and have all the counter-insurgency methodologies as reflex and came of age in an enviroment where such things were normal.
From a UK perspective, it's always interesting to follow the careers of people in the early 20th century, as they move from one counter-insurgency to another, and they take techniques with them from one conflict to another, so you get guys who learned to torture people in Ireland ending up torturing people in post-war Greece, then they get jobs as police officers in the UK, and you can't help but wonder what they might have done there, what attitudes they brought to the job.
Indeed, but this is true of any colonial empire, including USA, Russia, China, Turkey, and the list goes on.
> Then you get a whole load of people coming back home who started their professional career thinking of the population around them as the enemy, and have all the counter-insurgency methodologies as reflex and came of age in an enviroment where such things were normal.
That's the history of modern french policing and the BAC, the "anti-criminal brigades" units patrolling in plain cloths and unmarked cars, often beating first then asking questions and regularly involved in trafficking/criminal schemes. They directly descended from the "Brigade Nord-Africaines" who were involved in controlling the north-african populations, as outline in Mathieu Rigouste books (if you speak french).
Also worth noting that unlike some other countries, France mostly did not have a denazification process after WWII, and the police officials (préfets) orchestrating political/colonial repression under De Gaulle were the same officials collaborating with the nazis. This history and culture of police continues to this day, despite many police officers blowing the whistle on the corruption and abuse of the entire apparatus.
It looks like the only way forward is a complete dismantling of the prison/police/military industrial complex (alongside MANY other social reforms, otherwise it'd lead to the formation of private militias, not community justice/accountability). This argument was of course common discourse in the anarchist circles since the 19th century, but gained notoriety in the 1960s/70s when many scholars (such as Angela Davis or Michel Foucault) refined those ideas and developed proper studies/explorations of the questions.
Not that these reflections have died, if anything they've been revived by the Black Lives Matter movement in the USA (and equivalent anti-police-abuse movements elsewhere), but it's sad to see the current State of mainstream media where social critique is no longer welcome... unless it's from a fascist perspective (for example, notorious french fascist Eric Zemmour was for many years daily on public television spreading ideas of hatred, before moving to private channels after he was condemned repeatedly for hate speech).
A remarkably opaque statement and I can't see where the description gets more detailed. Does anyone know what actually happened?
I could some opaque commentary on this whole situation in return: "At the moment when almost every aspect of international political life and a growing number of those aspects that count in internal politics are conducted and displayed in the style of the secret services, with decoys, disinformation and double explanations (one might conceal another, or may only seem to), the spectacle confines itself to making known a wearisome world of obligatory incomprehensibility, a boring series of lifeless, inconclusive crime novels. It is true that the realistic direction of a fight between black people, at night, in a tunnel, must pass for a sufficiently dramatic motive." [1]
[1] Debord http://www.notbored.org/commentaires.html
Plausible deniability. So, yes, sure, the generals decided to do this putting their careers at risk if/when discovered.
And when the civilian government found this out, where was the indignant outrage that we could expect for what was clearly military insubordination?
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorauseilender_Gehorsam
Sadly the article only exists in German because, well, the most well known example of it is how people acted under Hitler.
It is a cornerstone that marks the difference between an exec who can and an exec who cannot CYA.
This is also why "Can I get that in writing", or asking something outright in an email is a fantastic way to corner a squirrely exec.
Anyway, https://www.deepl.com/translator works perfectly via cut&paste from .de to English for this.
that sounds incredibly mundane
I just find it strange that people think one side has the high ground because they didn't lie to the public quite so much, according to people who lied to the public.
There is absolutely no precedent for putting entire countries under effective house arrest for months at a time, and for a disease with such a low mortality rate.
And another thing people engaging in prosocial mitigations have seen that they actually work and thus feel a sense of control over the situation. That in particular rankles political and public health leaders, and especially rankles covid denialists.
So, right: if that is factual (it is unfortunately possible), to arrive to such degree of irrationality and abuse against clean, linear thinking and good sense, social media can only have a relative weight.
It doesn't seem to be the case - during the Spanish flu pandemic, there was no central health authority and every municipality deal with it however they could, usually by shutting down everything non-essential and mandating masks. However the patchy response resulted in lots of deaths, and thus precipitated the creation of a federal health department.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-mandatory-mas...
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/1918-spani...
Yes, because usually up until present day they were used at the city-level, by city authorities. Why? Well, most epidemic-capable diseases came from trade, usually in port cities, hence quarantines and lockdowns of port cities. ( not to mention that countries and their administration were much less centralised, public health authorities didn't really exist)
But today, with air travel, and the much more connected nature of our existence ( people travel for leisure, a lot), combined with the specifics of the virus ( long incubation period, high chance of no symptoms whatsoever, high spreadability), made country-wide lockdowns a good idea.
Were they a bit too much in some cases? Of course. For instance in France, during the first wave there was a total lockdown, and public places like beaches and parks were closed. There were people complaining in the Brittany region, because they had zero cases ( apart from those transferred to their hospitals), and couldn't use their beaches which are huge and open air. Nonetheless, the risk that the virus "escapes" from hospitals, or that people from nearby regions travel there to use the regional exceptions, and spread the disease further was deemed to be too big. Because, again, many carriers are asymptomatic and the incubation period is rather long.
How did the "connected" nature of our existence make it necessary to shut down entire countries, as well as the air travel links? My local playgrounds were officially closed until late into 2020 (obviously, I ignored that), as well as all sorts of other places that were obviously harmless. In fact, the worst place to go was hospital, where the infection rate was pretty bad.
It became obvious quite quickly who was at risk of Covid, and I do not understand why patients were not sent home for bed rest with a portable low-flow oxygen kit (as that was found to be the most effective treatment), and the rest of us allowed to continue with life as we saw fit.
Wow. Yes, because while you might have zero symptoms, you still spread it, and will probably infect multiple other people ( the so called R), especially without masks and other such precautions. Those people will infect many more in their turn. Among those, some will develop symptoms, sometimes heavy, and it's highly probable there will be people with comorbidities who can die even with abundant care, which isn't a given if hospitals are full from all those with heavy cases.
> My local playgrounds were officially closed until late into 2020 (obviously, I ignored that), as well as all sorts of other places that were obviously harmless
The point of those restrictions was to stop people from meeting, at all. Of course parks are a better place to be than a store, Covid-wise, but not if you gather in groups.
> How did the "connected" nature of our existence make it necessary to shut down entire countries, as well as the air travel links
People travel between cities, all around the world, daily. Whereas before there'd be a few traders going from Milan to Geneva in the space of a few weeks, now you have multiple daily trains with hundreds of people each. Don't you see how that changes the equation and how that helps spread a virus which is usually without symptoms ?
So the idea of the citizen in these - sorry, _decadent_ - societies is not that of an educated, rational and reasonable (with voting rights) agent who will act responsibly and with appropriate proportionate care,
but that of an unreliable liability which will act with the property and wisdom of a problematic child. ("They could go in the wilderness but then they may mingle".)
A few of us will ask: so, where is dignified Society to be found nowadays?
>The point of those restrictions was to stop people from meeting, at all.
Yes, the insidious and damaging idea that meeting people at all is dangerous, as we are all disease-ridden carriers of death. When I made a complaint at work that the Covid policies were making the workplace demoralising and miserable, the head of the Health and Safety committe specifically told me that government guidance was to "eliminate conversations". How is this at all healthy for us as a society?
You're also still taking about planes and trains, when I was asking how does that justify being literally shut in my house. Saying that, I understand your point of view. Covid is so bad, that absolutely no risk of passing it must be tolerated, and policy should be set accordingly.
The IFR of Covid overall is very low (0.4%, by some estimates). If you are under 50, it's basically not worth worrying about. Is that the BS you are talking about? Find me some actual numbers on those things you describe, and not just fear-laden imagery spread in the media and online, or I'll stick to my opinions of who is spreading BS.
My local health district currently is at 75% capacity. It has also treated fewer patients than average every month since March 2020. In fact, my country turned out huge numbers of old folks into nursing homes where they all spread Covid and died while we were shut up in our houses to "protect grannie". Blindly following the "protect the hospitals" mantra has caused huge healthcare issues where I live (UK), and will possibly cause the failure of our socialised healthcare system as we know it. Hospitals currently have single-digit percentages of Covid patients, yet cannot get anyone else treated because of the absurd amount of Covid restrictions. In my principality (Wales), it was recently published that the backlog of cancer patients will take a decade to clear (obviously, those patients will just die).
It was quite quickly discovered that the most effective care for a Covid patient was fairly simple - bed rest, and low-flow oxygen. Healthcare was not limited by bed numbers or equipment.
So you think that the makeshift morgues and people dying in the streets was just a media operation? Hospitals were over capacity in many places, if you have a hard time believing this you really are trying to hard to ignore reality.
Here are the numbers for France, since March 2020 - https://www.data.gouv.fr/fr/datasets/synthese-des-indicateur...
All in French, but Google Translate should help you. The column you're searching for is TO (Taux d'occupation, occupancy rate). You can see it's over 1 many times, in many different regions, for weeks at a time. And this is in a country that did heavy lockdowns the first two times, and then very strict curfews (18h at one time). It doesn't matter that for people under 50 in perfect health the mortality rate is minimal - if the hospitals and emergency services are over capacity, those people can't get help for anything. And of course that's discounting the fact that even many U50s have comorbidities.
> It was quite quickly discovered that the most effective care for a Covid patient was fairly simple - bed rest, and low-flow oxygen. Healthcare was not limited by bed numbers or equipment.
And where do those beds and oxygen come from? Are they not "bed numbers and equipment"?
Your country is an unmitigated disaster managed by clowns. And even they realised that lockdowns are needed after weeks of insisting on the opposite. Why do you think that is?
>And where do those beds and oxygen come from? Are they not "bed numbers and equipment"?
Remember how I explained that the total number of patients treated every month in the UK since March 2020 is less than average?[1] It very clearly follows that we were not limited by beds.
>Your country is an unmitigated disaster managed by clowns.
Yet it has a Covid mortality rate per capita of around the same as most other developed countries. Admittedly a little on the high side, although the US has now overtaken the UK in recent months. Certainly about the same as France and Spain.
[1] https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/sta..., click on the link under "Provisional Monthly Hospital Episode Statistics for Admitted Patient Care and Outpatients Dashboard ", and then go to page 2 of the silly web app. Observe how the NHS runs at near 100% capacity, until March 2020, when it has run consistently less than that (and continues to do so).
https://statswales.gov.wales/Catalogue/Health-and-Social-Car...
To pick out two dates, roughly at each Covid peak:
16 Apr 2020: 3,033 general beds occupied, 3,200 general beds available. 190 ICU beds used, 204 ICU beds available.
25th Jan 2021: 7,840 general beds occupied, 1,459 general beds available. 218 ICU beds used, 49 ICU beds available.
The publicly-available statistics do not support the notion that our hospitals are in dire straights due to sheer numbers of patients, nor the idea that they were full to bursting with Covid patients. As I have said repeatedly, they were emptier than usual.
Further, denigrating anyone who disagrees with you as "shrill" does you no favours.
Edit: Hopefully you understand why I'm upset about this topic. I suffered with a very young family under effective house arrest for many months, and many further months of restrictions (some of which are ongoing), as well as the inevitable long-term effects on my country, all to "protect the NHS". As the figures clearly show, at the peak of the first wave, the hospitals were less than 50% full.
The immediate question is - what on earth else has gone wrong?
> Edit: Hopefully you understand why I'm upset about this topic. I suffered with a very young family under effective house arrest for many months, and many further months of restrictions (some of which are ongoing), as well as the inevitable long-term effects on my country, all to "protect the NHS
And many many others did, but don't bitch about it for months on end.
I thought you told me that we couldn't compare numbers between different countries, what with them being different and all? Wales is an especially interesting case, because we had significantly more onerous restrictions than England (and if I lived in England, I might not have such a strong opinion that the downsides of lockdowns outweigh the benefits).
As you absolutely insist though, here's the data for England:
https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas...
For the time period April-June 2020, overall occupancy was at 65%, compared to 90% for the same period in 2019. Some pandemic.
Also, the 2020 quarantines arrived at a time where global resource inequalities were at unprecedented levels in human history, and when popular insurrections were growing across the planet (Liban, France, Soudan, etc), so they were interpreted (in my opinion, rightly so) as a political repression measure more than a sanitary measure... which was confirmed by the lack of sanitary measures from most governments, including the French government who during the pandemic cut public hospitals budgets by 800M€, continued to shut down hospital beds while the bodies were piling up, and covered up their failures (such as destroying the national mask stocks before the pandemic) via heavy propaganda campaigns.
Finally, opposition to the quarantines was fueled by how unevenly the measures were applied. Government officials and rich people have been publicly documented eating in restaurants and throwing parties, while common people like you and me were routinely beaten up by the police, fined or detained, for daring to go out and breathe fresh air (which here in France was illegal by decree for most of the 1st quarantine, before that was relaxed).
I don't think social media is entirely responsible for the growing conspiracy theories (Qanon) and other forms of popular opposition to quarantines, but they sure played a role in giving more facts to the population to know for sure the government can't be trusted to protect the local population (at least here in France).
PS: For historical context on a previous epidemics, you may be interested to take a read at this article, which offers an anarchist perspective about the 1884 cholera epidemic: https://crimethinc.com/2020/05/26/the-anarchists-versus-the-...
Yes, previous epidemics were more deadly, but also easier to contain because:
1) cases were symptomatic
2) incubation period was lower
So the effectiveness of quarantines and lockdowns was much higher and easier to measure ( we have no more visibly sick people, and it's been like this for a week, everything is OK).
> Also, the 2020 quarantines arrived at a time where global resource inequalities were at unprecedented levels in human history, and when popular insurrections were growing across the planet (Liban, France, Soudan, etc),
I can't comment on Lebanon and Sudan, but in France you're flat out wrong.
There were the Gilets Jeunes, whose numbers were falling all through 2019 and were at less than 100k before the protests against the retirement reform, which were sometimes done in coordination [0]. In any case, the numbers for february are at 10-30k protestors, which is nothing for a country of 67 million inhabitants.
> which was confirmed by the lack of sanitary measures from most governments, including the French government who during the pandemic cut public hospitals budgets by 800M€, continued to shut down hospital beds while the bodies were piling up, and covered up their failures (such as destroying the national mask stocks before the pandemic) via heavy propaganda campaigns.
Again, you're flat out wrong. Hospital beds were reorganised and more emergency ones were added - this is why during the third wave hospitals in many regions were over "original capacity"; in Ile de France we got to ~140% if memory serves me right[1]. Mask stocks have been falling since 2009, so you can't pin that on the current government[2].
> Finally, opposition to the quarantines was fueled by how unevenly the measures were applied. Government officials and rich people have been publicly documented eating in restaurants and throwing parties, while common people like you and me were routinely beaten up by the police, fined or detained, for daring to go out and breathe fresh air (which here in France was illegal by decree for most of the 1st quarantine, before that was relaxed).
It wasn't illegal to go and breathe fresh air, there was just a distance limit from your home.
> but they sure played a role in giving more facts to the population to know for sure the government can't be trusted to protect the local population (at least here in France).
That's funny, because the government's approval was very high during the initial waves, and Macron's is still higher than before the pandemic[3]. Not only that, but he's the first one since Chirac to have such a high approval this late into his term.
Honestly i think the French government's action was among the best possible ( and obviously i'm not the only one if Macron's ratings are any indication); at any case, they were really trying to strike a fine balance. No lockdowns on the third wave, keeping schools open, financial help, etc.
0 - https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9roulement_du_mouvement_...
1 - https://www.data.gouv.fr/fr/datasets/synthese-des-indicateur...
2 - https://www.lemonde.fr/sante/article/2020/05/07/la-france-et...
3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_the_Emmanue...
Is that because you were relatively unaffected by the downsides of the various restrictions? It can't be because the overall Covid fatality rate is better in France, becase it's about the same as the UK.
And as i said, the approval rating of Macron and his PM during the initial waves, Édouard Philippe, are much higher then before the pandemic, and literally unprecedented for a French president since moving to the current system ( 5 year mandates, etc.). The last French president with a similar approval rating was Chirac, and he passed away last year.
Comparing fatality rates between countries is complicated for a number of reasons ( weather, organisation of cities and families, customs ( e.g. french people used to kiss each other on the cheek when meeting, even complete strangers), age distribution, hospital capacity, medical reserves, etc.)
It seems to me there is very little clear link between how a country responded, and the overall death count.
Also worth noting, while the richer classes were in their villas ordering food delivery service, the rest of us often had to wait in line for over an hour (the supermarket only took 5-10 people at a time) sometimes only to find empty shelves without toilet paper or pasta.
Then, because the hospitals didn't have any resources for the flow of patients, they actively triaged patients before they even reached the hospitals. There are many accounts of people dying or getting close to death because the emergency services refused to give them services, because they had strict directives to only care for people with specific symptoms.
Then of course, there's the "essential workers". The indispensable tiny hands of the capitalist machines. These have been the most exposed to the Covid and have ensured that private corporations such as Amazon profited more than ever during the pandemic, yet saw exactly 0 benefits from their hard and hazardous labor.
We could talk about food security. That official State-financed food banks (such as Les resto du coeur) closed their doors, at the same time that undeclared work came to a stop due to the confinement, leading the most precarious among us to actual famine. Many city halls and local non-profits had to improvise to deliver basic food for survival to millions of people, because the government and its vassals failed their job.
Finally, the government, to my knowledge, did not requisition the many resources at its disposal. I read that story about a clothing workshop from Paris who had to insist with the prefecture to be turned into a somewhat-official mask-producing facility.
So, what did the government do? Apart from tearing down our lives and profiting (in capital) from it? Apart from their theater plays on television to let us know there is no danger (yeah, they Chernobyled us again), masks are useless, and a strong racist police is the only weapon against the virus?
Edit: Not forgetting the financial repercussions, which I suspect as a helpless taxpayer, will burden my family for the rest of my working life. The UK has already imposed a whole new tax, to try and dig the NHS out of the hole it is in.
Agreed, that is a major difference, that affects both body count and popular perception of the virus.
> There were the Gilets Jeunes, whose numbers were falling
Yet many polls agreed the gilets jaunes were as popular as ever. And if you think that dozens of thousands is a low number, can you name any other protest movement that has gathered so many people weekly for over a year? There was also a growing uproar about the new pension reform, the last of which back in 2010 led to the almost-collapse of the government (many petrol stations across the country were already out of fuel).
So my case is not that there was an actual revolution taking place in France, but rather that there were epicenters of insurrection which cost the State en private sector billions of euros: the gilets jaunes, the anti-5G movement, the ZADs, riots against police abuse in popular districts, growing and more coordinated strikes across all sectors. The elites tried to ridicule those movements (such as pretending the gilets jaunes were antisemites), then tried to repress them (including deploying armored military vehicles on the streets of the capital), but nothing killed the ideas so they were growing afraid of an actual revolution. They seized the pandemic as an excuse to reinforce social control on every level and make "acceptable" totalitarian measures while disseminating propaganda that the danger to you and your loved ones is your neighbor, not the State or the bosses. Some kind of anti-social opportunism, as described by Naomi Klein's Shock doctrine.
> Hospital beds were reorganised and more emergency ones were added
Reorganization is a word like reform, which means very little in itself but works fine in the mouths of neoliberal apparatchiks to downplay their tragic actions and their human cost. Also, you seem to be acknowledging it's possible to cut beds and at the same time expand "emergency ones" to appear like you're doing something good when you're in fact tearing down public service, so my point stands. "Look at this pie i baked just for you (while i was robbing your house)"
There were many health workers protests and strikes before and during the pandemic, denouncing the hypocrisy of the government's measures and exposing their terrible working conditions and the (bad) effects it has on patients. Are you saying these people (who know best because they talk about first-hand experience) are wrong and the government propaganda is right? I'm tempted to believe the health workers i've met who were severely burnt out and depressed (yet did their best every single day), rather than the psychopaths in power.
> Mask stocks have been falling since 2009, so you can't pin that on the current government
Oh i'm not blaming it on the current government. When i say the government, i liberally mean "those who hold power, whatever their party is". This was indeed a problem with the previous Hollande-formed government, but may i remind you that most of LREM (including Macron himself) were key players of that previous government? Whoever the head of this monstrous hydra, the result for the common people is the same: hard labor and unlimited suffering.
> It wasn't illegal to go and breathe fresh air, there was just a distance limit from your home.
On this specific point, you are wrong. The "going out for under 1h and less than 10km from home" checkbox on the laisser-passer forms was added late into the first confinement. For over a month, maybe more, it was illegal to go out just to breathe fresh air, unless you had a pet to walk (another checkbox).
> Honestly i think the French government's action was among the best possible
Breaking news: according to the french government propaganda in various news outlets controled by the State or private billionaires close to the State (Dassault, Lagardère, etc) i just read, the french government is the best government in the world. /s
Sarcasm aside, the government's actions and hypocrisies have been widely criticized, but the most striking fact about this whole pandemic is that the president single-handedly decided the fate and civil liberties of millions of individuals behind closed doors (the scientific community at large was not consulted, and when it occasionally was, it was ignored): do you think having a single unskilled individual announce surprise securitarian measures every other week on television is what we can call a democracy? It sounds like the very definition of a dictatorship.
Related: why are cops the only civil servants exonerated from wearing masks and getting mandatory vaccines? Why then are reactionary media fixated on the fact that lawless (non-white) proles in the suburbs are not civilized enough to respect the quarantine, and not addressing the elephant in the room? (it's a rhetoric question) It's a feature of authoritarian regimes than their armed hand (the police) needs to benefit from some forms of privileges, in order to keep the status quo intact.
Overall, we may agree or disagree on specific points, but i would recommend you check out more independent media sources every now and then to get a different perspective on things. There's only a handful of nation-wide independent publications left and they're worth encouraging: Mediapart.fr, CQFD-journal.org, reporterre.net. If you're more interested in popular analysis/discourse than professional journalism, i'd recommend medialibres.org, a planet [0] of various self-organized outlets for social critique.
Happy reading
[0] A planet, for the younger among us, is an aggregate of different RSS feeds. It's sort of like Google News, but you can setup your own to track the news sources of interest to you. For example, Planet Debian has a collection of blogs from the Debian ecosystem.
The Canadian Forces had to launch an investigation after a September 2020 incident when military information operations staff forged a letter from the Nova Scotia government warning about wolves on the loose in a particular region of the province. The letter was inadvertently distributed to residents, prompting panicked calls to Nova Scotia officials who were unaware the military was behind the deception. The investigation determined the reservists conducting the operation lacked formal training and policies governing the use of propaganda techniques were not well understood by the soldiers."The investigation determined the reservists conducting the operation lacked formal training and policies governing the use of propaganda techniques were not well understood by the soldiers."
So that's a one-off versus some sort of ongoing plan and limited in any case due to it not even being an intentional release. This above attempt was from untrained reservists who weren't trained properly in the techniques and was accidental release in nature, not intended.
The following seems to imply more systematic, non-accidental information campaigns:
"Last year, the branch launched a controversial plan that would have allowed military public affairs officers to use propaganda to change attitudes and behaviours of Canadians as well as to collect and analyze information from public social media accounts.
The plan would have seen staff move from traditional government methods of communicating with the public to a more aggressive strategy of using information warfare and influence tactics on Canadians. Included among those tactics was the use of friendly defence analysts and retired generals to push military PR messages and to criticize on social media those who raised questions about military spending and accountability."
It would be nice to have a few examples of this intentional use of propaganda techniques versus the one "accidental release" and innuendo so we can see what is being alleged here as intentional information warfare.
It's like the NSA monitoring domestic comms in the States, that's not why they exist - leave it to the FBI.
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[1]https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/forged...
It always cracks me up when I meet a pr person and ask about Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays and they dont know anything about them. Some sort of sadly delicious irony.
“[George] Creel urged [Woodrow] Wilson to create a government agency to coordinate "not propaganda as the Germans defined it, but propaganda in the true sense of the word, meaning the 'propagation of faith.'"” à la https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congregation_for_the_Evangeliz...
"Creel later published his memoirs of his service with the CPI, How We Advertised America, in which he wrote:
“In no degree was the Committee an agency of censorship, a machinery of concealment or repression. Its emphasis throughout was on the open and the positive. At no point did it seek or exercise authorities under those war laws that limited the freedom of speech and press. In all things, from first to last, without halt or change, it was a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world's greatest adventures in advertising… We did not call it propaganda, for that word, in German hands, had come to be associated with deceit and corruption. Our effort was educational and informative throughout, for we had such confidence in our case as to feel that no other argument was needed than the simple, straightforward presentation of the facts.”"
Excerpt > “Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man's rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine.”- Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda
One word for people we like doing a thing, one word for people we don't
>The federal government never asked for the so-called information operations campaign, nor did cabinet authorize the initiative
Does this insinuate teh gov was informed and explicitly did not authorize or military acted independantly?
If the vaccines cause no harm, they have nothing to worry about. Right. Then why the liability waver?
Instead we allowed the government to shift all the risk onto the public. And the military wants to drum up propaganda. You can't fool all the people all the time.
I hope this raises awareness.