'Bill Gates? Klaus Schwab? WHO Treaty? Nothing To See Here!' Says Dan Hannan
Dan Hannan has written another piece reminding us how heroically outspoken he was during lockdown.
He writes in the Sunday Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/27/britain-will-repeat-covid-lockdowns-unless-we-finally-reck/
“A handful of columnists - and it really was a handful, you could count us on your fingers - had argued from the beginning that the restrictions were excessive. We were almost universally howled down as murderers who wanted to cull the population…”
I’m sure many of us will remain eternally grateful for Lord Hannan’s selfless courage. But rather than resting on his laurels over what he may or may not have written three years ago, might not the noble lord more usefully direct his talents towards addressing the much more real and pressing problems of the present?
Foremost among these problems, I would suggest, are the looming WHO Pandemic treaty and the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005). If implemented they would give the World Health Organisation unprecedented powers over sovereign states. These powers would include the right to mandate all manner of highly restrictive measures: lockdowns, masks, quarantines, border closures, travel restrictions, medication of individuals including vaccination and medical examinations.
For full details I recommend the excellent summary by Dr Elizabeth Evans of the UK Medical Freedom Alliance, published by TCW under the headline ‘Fight this sinister power grab by the unelected, unaccountable WHO.’ https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/fight-this-sinister-power-grab-by-the-unelected-unaccountable-who/
What becomes clear if you read the article and follow the links is that the threat posed by the WHO is very real. If its plans are implemented - as currently appears more likely than not - then it will represent arguably the most egregious assault on human freedom in the history of the world.
Never before, after all, has an unelected, supranational body been given such power over the lives of pretty much every single person on the planet. The WHO won’t just be able to decide on their freedom of movement (whether, for example, it is permissible to keep them under house arrest, or in quarantine camps, as happened during lockdown) but even whether or not they live or die or spend the rest of their days as cripples as a result of a compulsory ‘vaccine’ programme.
So let’s read what that doughty freedom fighter Dan Hannan has to say on the subject, shall we?
Here he is, further down his hero-of-the-lockdown article:
“Even more incredibly, some leaders would suggest we set up an international ‘pandemic treaty’, potentially giving the World Health Organisation binding powers on such matters - almost as if they were trying to validate the conspiracy theorists.”
Hmm. I’ve read that sentence a number of times and still I can’t quite make sense of what he is saying here. Does he mean ‘political leaders’ or leader articles in newspapers? And either way, why is he trying to turn a real problem into a merely theoretical one?
What I mean is that it is surely, verifiably, unquestionably the case that the World Health Organisation IS pressing ahead with its treaty, and that sovereign nations around the world will probably sign up to it.
Yet, instead of acknowledging this fact, Hannan has chosen to dress it up as something highly improbable - ‘incredibly’ - being mooted by certain, unidentifiable silly politicians or newspaper columnists. Then, as if completely to pull the rug from under the possibility that this nonsense should ever come to pass, he adds that curious, distancing phrase ‘almost as if they were trying to validate the conspiracy theorists.’
This sentence tells us something curious about Hannan’s mindset. It suggests - or certainly seems to suggest - that the thing that upsets him most about a potential binding pandemic treaty giving the World Health Organisation powers to do what the hell it likes is not that it will take away all our freedoms and reduce us to the state of slaves….but that it threatens to make ‘conspiracy theorists’ more credible.
Well, yes, indeed, it would unarguably make ‘conspiracy theorists’ more credible because they have been warning of this threat for quite some time. But would their being proved right really be such a bad thing? In Hannan’s view, it appears, yes it would because - as he hints in a subsequent paragraph - he has a bit of an axe to grind on this score.
“Two people I know have been pushed by all this into conspiracist paranoia. They went from asking (perfectly reasonably) why young people needed to be jabbed for a disease that posed no danger to them to doubting the efficacy of all vaccines. Then they started muttering about Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab. Now they are parroting the Kremlin line on Ukraine.”
I’m not quite sure what the relevance of Ukraine is to an article about lockdowns. But I think what Hannan is telling us from his lofty Adlerhof in the House of Lords is that there is a right way to think about things and a wrong way to think about things - and that he, Lord Hannan, clearly knows which is which, whereas these paranoid conspiracists are so away with the fairies that their every argument can be dismissed without the need for even the most cursory consideration.
But are these paranoid conspiracists really so demonstrably wrong? On the subject of vaccines, for example, there is a perfectly lucid and reasonable case to be made that they are not the medical miracle but a gigantic con trick which has done far more harm than good to the health of the public. You might disagree with it but to do that you’d first need to look at the evidence, which I’m not altogether convinced Hannan has bothered to do, so sure is he that it’s just a paranoid conspiracy theory.
As for the dismissive line about Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab, this is plain dishonest. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the second biggest funder of the World Health Organisation after China. Klaus Schwab wrote and published a book in 2020 called Covid-19: The Great Reset, spelling out how the global pandemic was a beneficial crisis which political leaders groomed by his World Economic Forum could use to create a new world order in which we would own nothing and be happy. Using a dismissive word like ‘muttering’ doesn’t magically vanish these men away into a paranoid fantasy world where they pose no threat to our real one. Rather, it suggests a writer who is using rhetorical tricksiness to lead his readers away from the truth.
Hannan’s article is headlined: ‘Britain will repeat Covid lockdowns - unless we finally reckon with their ruinous consequences.’ I don’t think anyone could disagree with this part of his thesis. But I do think there’s lots to dispute about the integrity of his argument and the validity of his conclusion.
On the lockdown, he concludes:
“It would be comforting to pin the responsibility on someone: autocratic politicians, cowardly bureaucrats, sensational broadcasters. But the horrible truth is that, as a country, we did this to ourselves; and, in all likelihood, we would do it again tomorrow.’
The weaselly deception here is worthy of Iago. Sure, it might be trivially true that the British public would happily settle for another lockdown. But only because of the very types of people Hannan absolves in that first sentence (with the help of those inappropriate, Straw Man adjectives).
‘Politicians’ pushed the lockdown and vaccine agenda not because they were ‘autocratic’ but because they were corrupt, spineless and under the thumb of supranational institutions like the World Economic Forum and the WHO. Bureaucrats pushed it not because they are cowardly but because as Deep State functionaries that was precisely their job. Broadcasters - and newspapers like the one Hannan writes for - pushed it not out of sensationalism but because they were either bought and paid for - or bullied and cowed - by the government to push out relentless Covid propaganda while suppressing inconvenient truths such as vaccine injury.
At no point in his piece - ‘incredibly’, as the author might put it - does Hannan address the fact that the primary driver responsible for all those things he so laments about lockdown Britain (‘taped-off playgrounds’, ‘power-crazed coppers’, ‘listless moody teenagers’) was the massive-military grade, state-orchestrated propaganda campaign designed to brainwash the public into believing that a fairly routine flu bug was in fact the worst thing since the Black Death. The public would never have overreacted in the way it didn’t if it hadn’t been bullied, cajoled, bribed, blackmailed and tricked into doing so by the political class of which Lord Hannan is a card carrying member.