COVID and Collective Amnesia

“Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.” – George Orwell, English novelist, essayist, and journalist and critic (1903-1950)

It is testament to both the powers of propaganda as well as the inherent limits thereof, that today, the term “COVID” is no longer used to denote any kind of rapacious, bat-borne respiratory virus—a virus, experts assure us, which has claimed the lives of over 1.6 million Americans alongside some twenty million worldwide—but serves rather as euphemistic shorthand for a fundamental shift in the West’s civilizational consciousness.

The reader has likely experienced this rupture more acutely than most. The lockdown years, after all, were a period which exposed not only the scale of the government’s technocratic ambitions and murderous opportunism of their corporate co-conspirators, but more unsettling still, the mindless conformity, reflexive obedience, and venomous imbecility that lay dormant in many of our fellow citizens. It was the carefully orchestrated convergence of these traits which culminated in the still-shocking images of playgrounds wrapped in police tape and churches padlocked shut, drones barking curfews over empty streets and people arrested for unmasked walks on the beach. And yet, while the darkest days of COVID theatre will forever remain etched in the minds of the unvaccinated, for much of the population—those who first accepted and then internalized the official narrative—the tragically absurd, bleakly comedic details of the ordeal seem to have retreated into the hazy, increasingly inaccessible corners of memory.

This, in many respects, may well represent the most dispiriting realization of all. Certainly, among those who can still recall, in vivid, embittered clarity, the sight of muzzled children and shuttered businesses, of conversations conducted through plexiglass and grandparents left to die in lonely hospital beds, it is almost inconceivable how the rest of society can forgive, let alone forget, the ignominies we were subjected to. On the surface, this appears the most abject form of cowardice imaginable. But while neither individual servility nor collective compliance can reasonably be overlooked, the public’s willingness to simply “move on” from COVID—and thus, absolve the perpetrators of their crimes—has been facilitated, not by any political reckoning or epidemiological breakthrough, but by a series of psychological responses both organic and engineered.

Repression, Trauma, and the Desire to Forget

Perhaps the most potent driver behind this COVID-era amnesia is the well-documented phenomenon of repression. First articulated by famed plagiarist, pervert, and psychoanalytic pioneer Sigmund Freud (though significantly refined by his equally dogmatic daughter, Anna), this defense mechanism, among the mind’s most primitive, seeks to banish intolerable thoughts and recollections from conscious awareness in order to evade feelings of regret, shame, grief, and threats to one’s self-conception. The most common trigger, however, is fear.

There seems little need to remind the reader of the role this played during the earliest days of the WHO’s pantomime apocalypse. Given the news coverage at the time—rapidly inflating death tolls and doomsday predictions from well-credentialled doctors, mass graves dug in preparation for the disposal of untold thousands—it is not difficult to see why the fear was, for many still transfixed by the MSM puppet show, borderline unendurable, vast numbers left so traumatized by the state-sanctioned terror campaign, that they were reduced to hysterical, housebound hypochondriacs. Add to this the grinding isolation of lockdowns, the intentionally dehumanizing effect of masks, as well as the performative humiliation of following arrows around Walmart, and ambient conditions were perfect for what Brooklyn-born psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton dubbed “psychic numbing.” Writing in his 1968 publication, Death in Life, the author describes the strange emotional flatness he observed in the eyes of many Hiroshima residents in the aftermath of the atomic bomb, clinically yet compassionately asserting:

“Human beings are unable to remain open to experience of this intensity for any length of time, very quickly—sometimes within minutes or even seconds—'Hibakusha' [Japanese term for survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki] undergo a process of ‘psychic closing-off’; that is, they simply ceased to feel. They had a clear sense of what was happening around them, but their emotional reactions were unconsciously turned off… Psychic closing-off could be transient or it could extend itself, over days or even months, into more lasting psychic numbing. In the latter case it merged with feelings of depression and despair.”

Admittedly, as brutal and as brutalizing as the COVID Hoax was, neither does it compare, at least in terms of immediate and observable consequences, to the devastation caused by an atomic bomb. Indeed, throughout Lifton’s depictions of men who cremated mountains of corpses with brisk, unruffled efficiency, or city officials who attended to their duties still speckled with the liquefied flesh of their wife and child, it remains virtually inconceivable how anyone (save maybe bona fide psychopaths) could ever endure such horrors in a cognitively present yet emotionally vacant state. But as the psychiatrist takes pains to emphasize, this detachment represented the only viable way for the citizens of Hiroshima to continue the task of living amid their hellish new reality: an anesthesia of the soul which allowed them to eat, sleep, care for the injured, and ultimately survive. And yet, so too did it come at an incalculable cost—the repression self-reenforcing for weeks, months, and even years after the blast, as the Hibakusha sought to psychologically distance themselves from the apparent callousness and outward inhumanity with which they themselves had acted.

Analogies to the Plandemic must surely be obvious. After all, while the bureaucrat-imposed fear offensive has undoubtedly left its mark upon the psyches of millions, for a majority of former jab enthusiasts, the most distasteful reminders of that wretched chapter in human history remain the knowledge, now largely suppressed, of their own unquestioning acquiescence. Whether it was diligently disinfecting Amazon packages or crossing the street to avoid a lone pedestrian, what COVID forced many on Team Science™ to confront was the deeply unpalatable realization that, when the rubber hit the road, they proved far from the rational, evidence-led individuals they imagined themselves to be. More ego-obliterating still are the self-styled skeptics who embraced CDC diktats with a sense of moral fervor—a fervor sure to curdle into crippling, all-consuming shame if they ever allowed themselves to contemplate that time they reprimanded a stranger over a misaligned mask or cheered on the demise of some alleged “anti-vaxxer.”

But of course, they contemplate nothing. Rather than reckon with the chasm between their own behavior and their far more virtuous self-perception, most lapsed Covidians (as well as society at large) have instead chosen to diminish or deny any memory which might attest to it, engaging in no introspection, acknowledging no inner shortcomings, and inevitably, experiencing none of the personal growth such reflection would precipitate.

Memory, the Self-Justifying Historian

Although conducted under the pretext of “stopping the spread,” “flattening the curve,” alongside a host of similarly asinine three-word mantras, it seems all but self-evident that the now-defunct cult of COVIDism exhibited a decidedly ritualistic component. At times, this resembled nothing short of a mass initiation ceremony, complete with purification rites (in the form of chronic hand-sanitizing), hermetic isolation (quarantines and social-distancing), and perhaps most galling of all, the secularized worship of public health officials. As the Scottish anthropologist Victor Turner explained, such liturgies are integral to allowing a people to undergo sudden and dramatic shifts in consciousness—effectively a mode of collective ego death—society emerging into an unfamiliar political and ethical paradigm (or as in the case of COVID, “The New Normal”) without any real memory, much less understanding, of how it had gotten there.

Unsurprisingly, such cultural whiplash also incites within the targeted population a widespread outbreak of cognitive dissonance. Posited by psychologist Leon Festinger as “the existence of nonfitting relations among cognitions which creates a state of tension or discomfort,” this compels sufferers to seek resolution, seldom through intellectual inquiry or sustained self-analysis, but more often via motivated reasoning, selective consumption of information, and the eager adoption of harmony-restoring narratives. Today, Festinger’s theories remain foundational to how we understand humanity’s immense capacity for irrationality, however, it was in fact his student Elliot Aronson who delved most deeply into the distorting effects that cognitive dissonance can have upon the accuracy of one’s recollections:

“[M]emory becomes our personal, live-in, self-justifying historian… But whereas a totalitarian ruler rewrites history to put one over on future generations, the totalitarian ego rewrites history to put one over on itself. History is written by the victors, and when we write our own histories, we have the same goals as the conquerors of nations have: to justify our actions and make us look and feel good about ourselves and what we did or failed to do. If mistakes were made, memory helps us remember that they were made by someone else. If we were there, we were just innocent bystanders.”

This dynamic, already palpable, is becoming only more blatant the further COVID recedes from the ideological landscape. In all likelihood, the reader is acquainted with at least one reformed Fauci-ite who, refusing to reconcile their past support for school closures or full-throated vilification of the unvaccinated, has subconsciously altered their perceptions of the period in order to comport with prevailing zeitgeist, claiming that they “always had doubts” or merely complied out of duress. It is this revisionist tendency—driven less by deceit than the ego’s need for coherence—which has enabled both genocidal empaths and inclusivity-obsessed segregationists, liberty-minded lockdowners as well as quadruple-jabbed believers in science, to maintain a stable self-image even in the face of their flagrantly contradictory behavior.

Not that such memory manipulation is limited to the hoi polloi. By now, just as every COVID dissident anticipated, the entirety of the mainstream propaganda apparatus has abandoned the once-sacrosanct diktats of its Big Pharma benefactors in favor of deflection, gaslighting, tactical half-truths, and the all-purpose escape hatch of “given what we knew at the time.” Needless to say, there has been precisely zero acknowledgment of their role in the contemptible charade. There has been even less accountability for the misery it enabled, media outlets rewording headlines, politicians airbrushing voting records, and celebrities deleting poorly-aged (if not nakedly homicidal) tweets. In effect, this post facto reframing has erected a mnemonic barrier around the whole COVID fiasco—a barrier which few among the public, particularly those with experimental mRNA technology coursing through their veins, show any interest in dismantling.

Institutionalized Amnesia and the Machinery of Forgetting

But while individuals and societies might either repress or rescript the past in order to preserve their self-identity, when it comes to globalist governments, borderless mega-corporations, and shadowy supranational entities, this constitutes a far more coordinated form of amnesia—a strategy some scholars have called “organized forgetting.” Yes, this encompasses all the usual book-burnings and cultural purges you expect from authoritarian regimes, but so too does it go further, seeking not only to erase inconvenient truths from civilizational consensus, but to cast them in an altogether more positive light.

Among the most explicit examples comes from the USSR. Spearheaded by the “propagandist-in-chief” Andrei Zhdanov, the Soviet policy of Zhdanovshchyna was at the time, arguably the most sophisticated attempt to rewire the brain circuitry of an entire nation (in this case, how citizens remembered WWII) so that it might more effectively serve the needs of the state. Naturally, this entailed plenty of heavy-handed suppression, most notably of writers and historians, but at its core, Zhdanovshchyna amounted to an unprecedented process of psychological redirection. Over time, the selective commemoration of tragedies and veneration of carefully curated heroes fostered within the Soviet mind what has been called “positive memory,” the grim realities of war first sanitized then filed away as an unambiguous triumph of socialist valor—a victory drained of grief, moral complexity, and Zhdanov’s overarching concern: hunger.

As goes without saying, such techniques have developed immeasurably since then. As psychologist Stanley Cohen outlined in States of Denial, modern democratic institutions are now peerlessly adept at producing not just lies, but lies fitted with inbuilt deniability—mechanisms by which populations can both “know and not know” at the same time:

“In totalitarian societies, especially of the classic Stalinist variety, official denial goes beyond particular incidents (the massacre that didn’t happen) to an entire rewriting of history and a blocking-out of the present. The state makes it impossible or dangerous to acknowledge the existence of past and present realities. In more democratic societies, official denial is more subtle – putting a gloss on the truth, setting the public agenda, spin-doctoring, tendentious leaks to the media, selective concern about suitable victims, interpretive denials regarding foreign policy. Denial is thus not a personal matter, but is built into the ideological façade of the state. The social conditions that give rise to atrocities merge into the official techniques for denying these realities – not just to observers, but even to the perpetrators themselves.”

In this regard, it must be considered a colossal feat that in the end—indeed, far sooner than the corporate hegemon ever envisaged—these megalomaniacal controllers were left with little option but to pull the deniability release valve on the most expansive psyop ever conducted. Through our combined vigilance and no small measure of grit, the tyranny imposed under the veil of “temporary measures” was quietly rolled back well before it reached the levels laid out in the Great Reset and Agenda 2030, the fear porn picked apart so mercilessly that even CNN viewers began to roll their eyes. By now, the official narrative lies in ruins. COVID, once proclaimed as the defining catastrophe of our time and a disaster of near-biblical proportions, has since been rebranded as a “complex period” or the yet more mealy-mouthed “public health challenge,” its grotesque abuses of power now spoken of, if they are spoken of at all, in softened tones and vague, diminished euphemisms.

On this front, regrettably, it seems we may have already lost the battle. Today in July 2025, just five years after the COVID power grab was launched (and a little over two since the “emergency” was officially ended), a sizeable portion of those around us seem to have lost sight of the indignities, anxieties, and, often, the physical injuries which were inflicted upon them. Even if they have not forgotten, they appear conspicuously unwilling to contend with either their emotional impact or the political implications, let alone summon the requisite anger to bring the instigators to justice. But even if we never see Tedros in chains or Albert Bourla approaching the dock, retaining the memory of COVID as it was—rather than as the yet-to-be-written textbooks will render it—comprises a no less epochal task.

Because as the reader well knows, the establishment’s objectives remain utterly unchanged. No matter whether the next technocratic onslaught comes under the guise of war, cyber-terrorism, or climate change; financial collapse, civil unrest, or a slow-burning poly-crisis of “misinformation,” mass immigration, and another pandemic, we are all aware of what their solutions will look like. Their projected world of digital IDs and carbon-based social credit systems, CBDCs and 15-minute prison ghettos, biometric surveillance and algorithmic governance, is a future almost too hellish to fathom and yet, so too is it the world which awaits us if ever we allow the memory or the magnitude of its architects’ crimes to be expunged from our collective consciousness.