Tessa, thank you for sharing your valuable Soviet experience. Unfortunately, we Americans know little of the true nature of life in the Soviet Union. Even the few things we were taught in school seemed so impossibly dismal that they couldn't possibly be accurate. Now, having known a few people who lived through the Soviet experience, I know how ugly it can really become. It's eerie that all ex-Soviets can IMMEDIATELY recognize the playbook and when they speak about the parallels with current events, the dead-serious look on their faces says it all.
They are, more than you may realize even. The US had it's own way of daaling withthosewho "stuck out" too, like a fair skinned natural redead in a predominantly Sicilian Italian and Polish neighborhood. I didn't even have to do anything weird to stick out like a sore thumb. But I was using a terrible secret too, which only added to my sticking out. So I understand what you mean. '50s America was not under an oppressive autocracy, oppression came in other ways, more subtle perhaps but there, none the less, even around the then most cosmopolitan city in the US: NYC. We didn't talk about things, to anyone, even other family members. We didn't mix with those "not our kind" ( I still haven't figured out who "our kind " are, all these decades later, but I sure know who they aren't!). The gov't was more subtle about their oppression still, back then, unlike today. I still remember the films that turned up n our news broadcasts, before Cronkite turned them into outright propaganda lies in Feb of '68, when he flat lied about the outcome of Tet, in Vietnam! They were films of lines of people standing for hours, often in snow and frigid cold, waiting to buy a pair of shoes, or a loaf of bread, or some potatoes, perhaps... many being turned away when whatever it was ran out before they reached the head of the line! I remember the film of Stalin lying in state at the Kremlin, and watching the people file by , the expression in all their eyes, young or old, male or female, well to do or impoverished mattered not an whit; I didn't understand it then, I was too young for that, at just 7.5 yrs old, but it made such an impression I never forgot it, and as a student RN I found out what it was and meant, while studying psychiatry for nurses. Today it makes perfect sense to me, for all I don't like that sense. You are correct, our nation is very like the USSR was, if not yet materially, certainly emotionally.
As a restaurant owner in California, I was protesting the mask mandâtes at a local board of supervisors meeting and there was a fellow restaurant owner who came from Russia. She was very distraught and was yelling that in the Soviet Union they had to slither and snake to get around and she came to America to live free and honestly. People I know got fake vaccine cards and got into events and on airlines, but I couldn’t live that lie. Rod Dreher’s book, ‘Live Not By Lies’ was very helpful for me.
Sorry to be late to the party. Just wanted to nudge past the fevered egos to say thank you Tessa, for a beautiful & spot on skewering one of the main platforms of the divide & conquer.
Unfortunately, scientific atheism has arisen in the US and the goal is to rid the world of those who cultivate a spiritual connection. Why? Because they believe that it is non-evolutionary thinking, and everyone who they deem UNevolved must be removed from the planet. If people knew that the father of mass inoculations was a complete psychopath, we wouldn't be subjecting our children to 70+ vaccines or any of these new, experimental mRNA injectables.
I encourage everyone to watch this analysis of Jonas Salk's book from 1972, Survival of the Wisest, to see that the ideology driving today's thrust into his technocratic nightmare, which they all adhere to, is nothing to be supportive of, rather it's to be exposed as the very-unscientific blather of a ruling class who really believe in survival of the most genocidal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C8haClASQI
Smiling! You need a license to do that. The Department of Smiles will issue a license to smile on an annual basis for $50 a year. Licensees will be carefully selected. Freemen and free women and children will not be issued licenses. Slaves of the state need no license because they never smile. The DOS will be a small department, but enforcement of policy will be onerous to the unlicensed happy free men and women. Smiling without a license will net the state billions of dollars, taken from the states enemies. Coming to a totalitarian regime neat you.
I was never afraid of COVID and I knew masks were a farce because of my work experience both in mining (wearing respirators in very dusty places) and in medical devices (I know what it takes to stop “a bug”. ) But what I did become afraid of was the mob and the local, state, and federal employees who were enforcing the craziness! I dreaded going to the store where I knew I’d be harassed for not wearing a mask. Sadly, I even wore a mask for a couple months at the store just in case I saw neighbors (yes, I even became afraid of my neighbors!). Luckily my husband and my sons didn’t give a crap what others thought and through them, I got the courage to take it off. But I’m actually grateful for the experience because it peeled off a lot of layers that I needed to be removed from my eyes and understanding. I lost (to a fault?) my cares of what “the neighbors think”. I stopped thinking any person or group held any answers to my life. I saw the church for what it was (compromised by spiritual evil). I realized our own government was behind so many horrific events. I see now how most of western medicine is not there to make us more healthy. The history I was taught was mostly propaganda....Now, I’m trying to learn as much truth as possible WHILE not falling into despair about “losing the religion” that America is the land of freedom. It IS filled with amazing people whom I love very much! But to move on it’s so important to remove the goggles of untruth, face reality square on, and believe that still, Creation is very good.
I appreciate that you and others like you had the insight and skill to give a name to what happened starting 2020. Naming “the thing” is way more than half the battle.
Yes, and thank you so much. I forgot it was you. Rewatching now and need to save it. Also I am watching him more now as soon as possible. His approach to helping solve this charade is most compelling. He just recently pointed out that Michael Yeadon was censored at invitation to speak in Germany I think.
This is very fine - it reminds me somewhat of Nietzsche’s ‘Morgenrot‘ but comes from your own lived experience. Don’t get bogged down by failed intellectual baggage, or even failed folk morality - maybe also Blake’s ‘Mind-forged manacles’. And yet I guess many of the people who have coped with the dreadful injunctions of the era have drawn strength and personal rebellion from religious faith.
Of course, Nietzsche en route from Spinoza no doubt said some very foolish things as well and also suffered a great deal despite his best attempts not to. But at least unlike the post structuralist generation it wasn’t formulaic, descending into nihilism and utter pointlessness - de Man, Barthes, Derrida are completely useless now. Perhaps Foucault has something to tell us.
How dare you think you deserve a life when you should be locked up at home, scared of other humans? Great essay. 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
Tessa, I believe that video you placed at the end is how I first encountered you. (Or maybe you made a few others like that early on in the plandemic and I saw another one?) Anyway it brings back that time on FB when I was looking for others who disagreed with what we were being told and speaking out. Glad we met!
Shame is an essential part of human existence and under ideal 'natural' circumstance helps us keeping social bonds strong. We strongly care about how other people perceive us. Unfortunately, as you so eloquently pointed out, shame is being exploited by the shameless. Shame has become institutionalized and managed over the generations by a myriad of religions and civilizations.
What few people realize is that even our everyday money is a shame based control mechanism. Money is debt and debt is guilt (shame as you will). The late David Graeber wrote a captivating book 'Debt, the first 5000 years' about this phenomenon explaining how this works.
When you think about it; there is no rational reason to repay odious debts, but our shame compels us to do so anyway. History shows us that people have sold themselves and their families into brutal debt slavery because of this overbearing feeling of guilt. One can argue that we still do so every day.
In a shame based social economic system like ours the sociopath and psychopath shameless few (who are really just a tiny minority) will inevitably float to the top of society and exploit this perceived weakness of the fast majority of people and use it to their advantage. As individuals we want to belong and get along, but when clinically insane people dictate the rules of conduct things quickly deteriorate.
And we still wonder why we live in such a seemingly uncaring world.
In the end we may not be able to quench our deeply rooted feelings of irrational shame. But we can learn to see shame for what is and we can refuse to be shamed by the shameless. Which would indeed be a perfect starting point to gently reconnect with ourselves and better the world in the process.
Wow, you posting this song has an unexpected consequence. I now know whom my teen rock hero (the only hero I really had during my life) was trying to sound like. I never got into the Beatles, and listened to only a few songs by them often (sometimes). He tried to be like many western music heroes but more than anything, he sounds like this song, now I know.
This is his performance on national television that transformed him from an unknown underground artist (an engineer for a living) to perhaps the biggest national rock star of all times, it came up in search and it's interesting to see. I loved him because his songs were philosophical. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_IMULfb75k&list=RDEM2RZVE1i34aJNwDfK7Az9xg&start_radio=1
I am watching his old videos and reevaluating my life. His art meant so much to me. Now I am looking at it and thinking, was the deep philosophy that my soul felt from his song in his songs? Maybe, maybe not. I may never know. I thank you for posting that song that compelled me to think about all those things!! :)
Miserable people hating happy people is a decidedly human trait that’s been going on forever. Anyone who’s ever worked with others for any length of time has undoubtedly come across this. It sucks. And pisses me off that me being happy puts a target on my back but, welcome to humanity.
Great article. I'm reminded of a few things that should be reminders or learning points for everyone: (1) With respect to the attempt to govern a society based on communist ideology, it can lead only to enforced joylessness. Now the Russian people may have had some predilections toward joylessness already before the Bolshevik revolution, but this would have simply made communism's principle that "property is theft" (perhaps the ultimate anti-human, anti-social concept in history) easier to enforce. (2) It may be somewhat inevitable that big business and big capitalism tend to appeal to the lowest common denominators, and thus national culture in a capitalist society tends toward porn culture (Porn in the broadest sense of that word, i.e. selling sex, selling instant gratification, etc.). And while I know you don't like ideological debates, Tessa, the stark fact is that western democracies' lurch toward national socialism (the WEF ideal) is the ultimate dehumanizing mix of both communism and porn culture ("You will own nothing and you'll be happy," which translated really means "You have no individual dignity or worth and you will be kept distracted with porn.").
Tessa, thank you for sharing your valuable Soviet experience. Unfortunately, we Americans know little of the true nature of life in the Soviet Union. Even the few things we were taught in school seemed so impossibly dismal that they couldn't possibly be accurate. Now, having known a few people who lived through the Soviet experience, I know how ugly it can really become. It's eerie that all ex-Soviets can IMMEDIATELY recognize the playbook and when they speak about the parallels with current events, the dead-serious look on their faces says it all.
Thank you Dyler!! The parallels are uncanny!
They are, more than you may realize even. The US had it's own way of daaling withthosewho "stuck out" too, like a fair skinned natural redead in a predominantly Sicilian Italian and Polish neighborhood. I didn't even have to do anything weird to stick out like a sore thumb. But I was using a terrible secret too, which only added to my sticking out. So I understand what you mean. '50s America was not under an oppressive autocracy, oppression came in other ways, more subtle perhaps but there, none the less, even around the then most cosmopolitan city in the US: NYC. We didn't talk about things, to anyone, even other family members. We didn't mix with those "not our kind" ( I still haven't figured out who "our kind " are, all these decades later, but I sure know who they aren't!). The gov't was more subtle about their oppression still, back then, unlike today. I still remember the films that turned up n our news broadcasts, before Cronkite turned them into outright propaganda lies in Feb of '68, when he flat lied about the outcome of Tet, in Vietnam! They were films of lines of people standing for hours, often in snow and frigid cold, waiting to buy a pair of shoes, or a loaf of bread, or some potatoes, perhaps... many being turned away when whatever it was ran out before they reached the head of the line! I remember the film of Stalin lying in state at the Kremlin, and watching the people file by , the expression in all their eyes, young or old, male or female, well to do or impoverished mattered not an whit; I didn't understand it then, I was too young for that, at just 7.5 yrs old, but it made such an impression I never forgot it, and as a student RN I found out what it was and meant, while studying psychiatry for nurses. Today it makes perfect sense to me, for all I don't like that sense. You are correct, our nation is very like the USSR was, if not yet materially, certainly emotionally.
As a restaurant owner in California, I was protesting the mask mandâtes at a local board of supervisors meeting and there was a fellow restaurant owner who came from Russia. She was very distraught and was yelling that in the Soviet Union they had to slither and snake to get around and she came to America to live free and honestly. People I know got fake vaccine cards and got into events and on airlines, but I couldn’t live that lie. Rod Dreher’s book, ‘Live Not By Lies’ was very helpful for me.
A ton of respect to you, Jacqueline!!! Thank you for being you.
Sorry to be late to the party. Just wanted to nudge past the fevered egos to say thank you Tessa, for a beautiful & spot on skewering one of the main platforms of the divide & conquer.
Thank you Andy!! Hugs
Unfortunately, scientific atheism has arisen in the US and the goal is to rid the world of those who cultivate a spiritual connection. Why? Because they believe that it is non-evolutionary thinking, and everyone who they deem UNevolved must be removed from the planet. If people knew that the father of mass inoculations was a complete psychopath, we wouldn't be subjecting our children to 70+ vaccines or any of these new, experimental mRNA injectables.
I encourage everyone to watch this analysis of Jonas Salk's book from 1972, Survival of the Wisest, to see that the ideology driving today's thrust into his technocratic nightmare, which they all adhere to, is nothing to be supportive of, rather it's to be exposed as the very-unscientific blather of a ruling class who really believe in survival of the most genocidal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C8haClASQI
Smiling! You need a license to do that. The Department of Smiles will issue a license to smile on an annual basis for $50 a year. Licensees will be carefully selected. Freemen and free women and children will not be issued licenses. Slaves of the state need no license because they never smile. The DOS will be a small department, but enforcement of policy will be onerous to the unlicensed happy free men and women. Smiling without a license will net the state billions of dollars, taken from the states enemies. Coming to a totalitarian regime neat you.
HAH
Fuk smile licenses & tear up any tickets. Smile away & think subversively for freedom's sake. ;-)
Better to be the one who smiled, than the one who didn’t smile back. — Mari Gayatri Stein
(author, artist, cartoonist & co-author of "The Buddha Smiles: A Collection of Dharmatoons"
I was never afraid of COVID and I knew masks were a farce because of my work experience both in mining (wearing respirators in very dusty places) and in medical devices (I know what it takes to stop “a bug”. ) But what I did become afraid of was the mob and the local, state, and federal employees who were enforcing the craziness! I dreaded going to the store where I knew I’d be harassed for not wearing a mask. Sadly, I even wore a mask for a couple months at the store just in case I saw neighbors (yes, I even became afraid of my neighbors!). Luckily my husband and my sons didn’t give a crap what others thought and through them, I got the courage to take it off. But I’m actually grateful for the experience because it peeled off a lot of layers that I needed to be removed from my eyes and understanding. I lost (to a fault?) my cares of what “the neighbors think”. I stopped thinking any person or group held any answers to my life. I saw the church for what it was (compromised by spiritual evil). I realized our own government was behind so many horrific events. I see now how most of western medicine is not there to make us more healthy. The history I was taught was mostly propaganda....Now, I’m trying to learn as much truth as possible WHILE not falling into despair about “losing the religion” that America is the land of freedom. It IS filled with amazing people whom I love very much! But to move on it’s so important to remove the goggles of untruth, face reality square on, and believe that still, Creation is very good.
I appreciate that you and others like you had the insight and skill to give a name to what happened starting 2020. Naming “the thing” is way more than half the battle.
Wow Beth, thank you. You described the experience so perfectly.
Thanks Tessa. I appreciate the encouragement!
Spot-on, Tessa. The performative art quality of all the virtue signaling is what drives me nuts. Thank you for being yet another voice calling B.S.
Please check out with an open mind Gigaohmbiological.com with JJ Couey.
Thank you, Cynthia. I interviewed Jay a few month ago, did you see that? I like his "infectious clone" theory quite a bit.
https://tessa.substack.com/p/jj-couey-virus-no-virus?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Fcouey&utm_medium=reader2
Yes, and thank you so much. I forgot it was you. Rewatching now and need to save it. Also I am watching him more now as soon as possible. His approach to helping solve this charade is most compelling. He just recently pointed out that Michael Yeadon was censored at invitation to speak in Germany I think.
This is very fine - it reminds me somewhat of Nietzsche’s ‘Morgenrot‘ but comes from your own lived experience. Don’t get bogged down by failed intellectual baggage, or even failed folk morality - maybe also Blake’s ‘Mind-forged manacles’. And yet I guess many of the people who have coped with the dreadful injunctions of the era have drawn strength and personal rebellion from religious faith.
Thank you, John!! And I agree. People are very mysterious in this way, and beauty finds its way no matter the cultural confusions!!
Of course, Nietzsche en route from Spinoza no doubt said some very foolish things as well and also suffered a great deal despite his best attempts not to. But at least unlike the post structuralist generation it wasn’t formulaic, descending into nihilism and utter pointlessness - de Man, Barthes, Derrida are completely useless now. Perhaps Foucault has something to tell us.
How dare you think you deserve a life when you should be locked up at home, scared of other humans? Great essay. 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
Tessa, I believe that video you placed at the end is how I first encountered you. (Or maybe you made a few others like that early on in the plandemic and I saw another one?) Anyway it brings back that time on FB when I was looking for others who disagreed with what we were being told and speaking out. Glad we met!
I am so glad we met, too!!!! Lots of love to you, beautiful soul
Great article. You don’t look old enough to have lived in the Soviet Union!
Tessa, I started watching www.theHighwire.com (Del Bigtree, Jeffery Jaxon about three years ago.
Wonderful, Larry!
What an excellent essay.
Shame is an essential part of human existence and under ideal 'natural' circumstance helps us keeping social bonds strong. We strongly care about how other people perceive us. Unfortunately, as you so eloquently pointed out, shame is being exploited by the shameless. Shame has become institutionalized and managed over the generations by a myriad of religions and civilizations.
What few people realize is that even our everyday money is a shame based control mechanism. Money is debt and debt is guilt (shame as you will). The late David Graeber wrote a captivating book 'Debt, the first 5000 years' about this phenomenon explaining how this works.
When you think about it; there is no rational reason to repay odious debts, but our shame compels us to do so anyway. History shows us that people have sold themselves and their families into brutal debt slavery because of this overbearing feeling of guilt. One can argue that we still do so every day.
In a shame based social economic system like ours the sociopath and psychopath shameless few (who are really just a tiny minority) will inevitably float to the top of society and exploit this perceived weakness of the fast majority of people and use it to their advantage. As individuals we want to belong and get along, but when clinically insane people dictate the rules of conduct things quickly deteriorate.
And we still wonder why we live in such a seemingly uncaring world.
In the end we may not be able to quench our deeply rooted feelings of irrational shame. But we can learn to see shame for what is and we can refuse to be shamed by the shameless. Which would indeed be a perfect starting point to gently reconnect with ourselves and better the world in the process.
This is such a great comment, thank you for adding more depth to the conversation!!! Made me think about a few things. Hugs!!
"A working class hero is something to be ..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMewtlmkV6c
Wow, you posting this song has an unexpected consequence. I now know whom my teen rock hero (the only hero I really had during my life) was trying to sound like. I never got into the Beatles, and listened to only a few songs by them often (sometimes). He tried to be like many western music heroes but more than anything, he sounds like this song, now I know.
This is his performance on national television that transformed him from an unknown underground artist (an engineer for a living) to perhaps the biggest national rock star of all times, it came up in search and it's interesting to see. I loved him because his songs were philosophical. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_IMULfb75k&list=RDEM2RZVE1i34aJNwDfK7Az9xg&start_radio=1
I found an interview with him https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3U2YbTvP_g
I am watching his old videos and reevaluating my life. His art meant so much to me. Now I am looking at it and thinking, was the deep philosophy that my soul felt from his song in his songs? Maybe, maybe not. I may never know. I thank you for posting that song that compelled me to think about all those things!! :)
We resonate with others that share our characteristics and goals.
;-)
I liked that, too, plus Dave Stewart was in it with him.
I liked that. He seems like a good guy. I just had a feeling from your words that evoked "Working Class Hero" from John Lennon.
Miserable people hating happy people is a decidedly human trait that’s been going on forever. Anyone who’s ever worked with others for any length of time has undoubtedly come across this. It sucks. And pisses me off that me being happy puts a target on my back but, welcome to humanity.
Tessa, you hit the nail on the head. Your understanding helps my understanding, accept my love.
Great article. I'm reminded of a few things that should be reminders or learning points for everyone: (1) With respect to the attempt to govern a society based on communist ideology, it can lead only to enforced joylessness. Now the Russian people may have had some predilections toward joylessness already before the Bolshevik revolution, but this would have simply made communism's principle that "property is theft" (perhaps the ultimate anti-human, anti-social concept in history) easier to enforce. (2) It may be somewhat inevitable that big business and big capitalism tend to appeal to the lowest common denominators, and thus national culture in a capitalist society tends toward porn culture (Porn in the broadest sense of that word, i.e. selling sex, selling instant gratification, etc.). And while I know you don't like ideological debates, Tessa, the stark fact is that western democracies' lurch toward national socialism (the WEF ideal) is the ultimate dehumanizing mix of both communism and porn culture ("You will own nothing and you'll be happy," which translated really means "You have no individual dignity or worth and you will be kept distracted with porn.").