Laurent Mucchielli: “Totalitarianism is much more than a political regime, it is a project of total domination over the body and the mind”

BY HENRI-MICHEL THALAMY for Epoch Times, March 18, 2023 Updated: January 14, 2024 1

Source : https://www.epochtimes.fr/entretien-avec-laurent-mucchielli-la-doxa-du-covid-peur-sante-corruption-et-democratie-2243287.html

Laurent Mucchielli is a sociologist, research director at the CNRS and teacher at the university. In 2022, he published La Doxa du Covid (volumes 1 and 2 ) with Éditions éolienes and is preparing to publish a new book entitled Defending Democracy: An Engaged Sociology. He also regularly publishes articles on his blog .

Epoch Times: Why did you decide to write this book La Doxa du Covid ? How is the management of the health crisis of interest to sociology?

Laurent Mucchielli: Let me start by thanking you for the invitation. I am censored in all traditional media, so I take with even more pleasure the opportunity you give me to talk about my work.

The two volumes of my book are the result of an investigation that I began from the start, somewhere towards the end of February 2020. And I launched this investigation for two reasons. The first is that, having memory and archives, I remembered the H1N1 crisis that occurred 10 years earlier, and the report of the Senate commission of inquiry at the time. It is established that the WHO had unduly dramatized the importance of the threat, that the pharmaceutical industries had hastened to try to sell off their stocks of antivirals then to claim to very quickly develop a vaccine, and finally that governments had wrongly panicked, spending enormous sums of public money to supply these drugs which were of no use and were ultimately largely destroyed. History seemed to be repeating itself.

The second reason is that I did not understand the government's decisions regarding the epidemic, that I found them not only inappropriate but also dangerous for the population. Two things in particular seemed odd to me. The first was to pretend that there was no pharmaceutical solution to the epidemic and therefore to give as a general health instruction to doctors and the population the famous “stay at home, take paracetamol in case of fever and call the SAMU if it gets out of hand.”

However, many doctors quickly said that they had effective solutions, provided that infected people were treated early. This instruction to do nothing therefore seemed to me as stupid as it was deadly. The second thing that seemed aberrant to me was the eagerness to imitate a dictatorship (China) by claiming that it was imperative to impose general confinement on the entire population. Unheard of in the history of the republic.

Finally, you ask me what sociology is doing here. The answer is simple: evaluating public policy is typically a social science object. I had done this, for example, a few years earlier by evaluating video surveillance and its promise to revolutionize the fight against delinquency (see my 2018 book). And by showing that the promise was not kept in practice, despite the marketing of security industries and the speeches of politicians. Whether the topic is a security issue or a health issue (and many other topics) makes no difference. The argument that was put against me (I would have “gone out of my field of research”) was purely rhetorical, it was just to avoid having to seriously discuss what I was saying.

How can we talk about doxa regarding the Covid crisis? What are the main pillars on which it is based?

Doxa is an old philosophical concept that was imported into sociology by the famous French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. It designates the discourse of the elites dominating society, the way in which they write history to their advantage and impose their narrative as an indisputable truth. In the case at hand, I show that the official narrative revolves around 4 central assertions: 1) a new virus has emerged and it constitutes “a mortal threat to all humanity” (in the words of the Director General of the WHO), 2) there is no medical solution, 3) the only thing to do is to confine the entire population while waiting, 4) the pharmaceutical industry will manufacture a vaccine which will to save us.

This discourse was imposed on us in the name of Science and presented as brooking no contradiction (hence the ostracization of all critical voices like mine and many others). However, from a scientific point of view (and this has been my job for 25 years), these assertions must in principle be considered questionable and potentially refutable. Otherwise, it is because we are not on the scientific register (which is that of doubt, free contradictory discussion and empirical verification) but on the register of dogma.

But dogma has nothing to do with science, it is even its mortal enemy I would say. But under the pretext of "war" and "state of emergency", the government and all the people who put themselves at its service (starting with health agencies such as the High Authority of Health, the High Council of Public Health , the National Medicines Safety Agency or even the “Covid-19 Scientific Council” created ad hoc to give an illusion of scientificity to political decisions) have trampled on the most basic rules of science. They “outraged science” as my Bordeaux colleague Jean-Paul Bourdineaud says in his recent book.

What is your opinion on the way the media covered the health crisis? Do they participate in a form of consent manufacturing, in your opinion? Is the crisis we are going through also an information crisis?

Yes, and it is a major crisis from which journalism will not emerge unscathed. I devote a large chapter to it in volume 2 of the Doxa, and another also very detailed and illustrated in my next book. The Covid crisis has not invented anything but it has accelerated history on many levels, including this one.

Let's be clear: there is almost no journalism anymore. The latter was in fact based on inquiry and investigation which makes it possible to really produce information and teach us something, but which also takes a lot of time and therefore costs money. For more than 99% of people who have a press card, it does not correspond to the job they do. Strictly speaking, this profession should no longer be called “journalism” but “communication”.

Since they no longer carry out investigations, journalists no longer produce information, they only comment on information produced by others. They are therefore commentators and communicators. And as long as we experience a crisis (whether it is a security crisis like with the attacks, a health crisis like with Covid or an international crisis like the war in Ukraine), n Having no perspective and no ability to investigate on the ground, they resume without any real critical examination the communication of the powerful of this world, thus becoming propagandists, whether consciously or not.

See for example the way in which the former “reference” newspaper, Le Monde , covered the Covid crisis. It’s a caricature of soup served to political power. Whether it is the headline, the arguments used, the figures put forward or even the "experts" interviewed, almost all of the "information" delivered by this newspaper was in reality only an extension direct from government communications. I can testify to this myself: in three years of crisis, when I have published two books, dozens of articles by scientists and doctors whose existence journalists are well aware of, and when I have moderated forums having collected several thousand signatures from researchers, academics, lawyers and doctors, it never occurred to the editorial staff of this journal to ask us even 2 or 3 questions to understand what we were telling. The only time I received an interview request from a journalist from Le Monde , it was because its editorial staff wanted to create a “portrait gallery of conspiracy theorists” to better make fun of them. And I took the best-known French daily newspaper as an example, but the same thing happened in almost all other media.

How can we understand this disaster? There are obviously several factors at play but probably the most important is the fact that journalists have lost all financial independence. They are now totally caught in a triple dependence on not only 1) the billionaires who buy up press titles one after the other, but also 2) the governments which subsidize them (in France, it is the Ministry of Culture which manages the large budget for “press aid”) and 3) the digital giants (Google and Facebook in the lead) who invest more and more in the media, which has consequences on the substance (and not only on the economic question of sharing advertising revenue). This arrival of digital technology raised great hopes 25 years ago for the renewal of the profession and the development of collaborative journalism involving citizens, whistleblowers, etc. Alas, these illusions fizzled out.

The main consequence of these partnerships which are flourishing almost everywhere in the world of media, is the development of the online press and the growing editorial space taken by so-called “fact-checking” sections almost everywhere (until radio and television). The irony is that some people quietly applaud what is nevertheless a catastrophe for the profession, because “fact-checking” is in reality a type of low-cost journalism , a caricature of in-room journalism in which men and women without any particular qualifications and who never leave their office claim to sort fact from falsehood on any issue in 24 hours. What a deception! So yes, we are experiencing a very serious information crisis and it would be urgent to put it on the table to discuss it seriously because it is a challenge for democracy.

A few months ago, the Secretary of State for Citizenship announced that a meeting on sectarian excesses and conspiracy would be held in 2023. What is the name of conspiracy? What does its increasingly frequent use say about the evolution of public debate? Should we be worried about the future of freedom of expression?

Let's be clear here too: even if political leaders have always been obsessed with the idea of ​​a plot hatched by their rivals to overthrow them, the notion of "conspiracy" is a relatively recent invention. It is basically used by governments and their main agencies to try to discredit criticism of their actions. One such modern usage is typically the CIA's communication to the United States regarding the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 in Dallas. The accusation of “conspiracy” is therefore from the start a weapon of political communication allowing the powers in place to brush aside some of the strongest criticisms of their action. And the fact that journalists have completely taken it up on their own during the Covid crisis confirms the diagnosis made previously: many journalists have become nolens volens propagandists since they directly take over the content and form of the rhetoric. of the power in place.

In reality, there are of course secular or religious conspiracy ideas on many subjects, but which concern very few people and do not pose any particular social problem. This concerns beliefs and opinions that everyone must in principle be free to have in a democracy. But presenting the “development of conspiracy” as a new socio-political problem and assimilating it to a “sectarian phenomenon” is madness, or rather political manipulation. Intellectually it is laughable, but politically it presents a certain efficiency.

Basically, in the past, those in power could physically get rid of their opponents. Nowadays, the political assassination or arbitrary imprisonment of an opponent is almost impossible in our European countries. But there are other ways to silence the naysayers. Under the five-year term of Mr. Macron (which here directly extends that of Mr. Sarkozy), I would say that these two main means are on the one hand police violence for what concerns protest "in the street" (like the inhabitants of the so-called neighborhoods). “sensitive”, the Yellow Vests and now potentially any demonstrator have understood this well), on the other hand the blocking of communication with regard to the protest “on paper” (the public debate).

The first method is classic but it is also risky for political power: police violence is difficult to hide, it leaves traces. The second is booming, with the complicity of many journalists as well as that of GAFAM which are now official “partners” for governments like that of France.

In the end, you are right, it is freedom of expression that is at stake, one of the most important public freedoms and one of the central elements of the democratic ideal. And this is why my work ultimately questions the functioning of representative democracies.

The weight of influence peddling and corruption organized by players in the pharmaceutical industry is one of the central themes of your book. How does the Covid crisis illustrate the systemic nature of this corruption and who are its main actors?

The first thing to say in my opinion is that corruption of industrial origin is considerably underestimated in the West. Each time a case of corruption is revealed, it is treated as an individual case, an “affair” or a “scandal” which would testify to a simple individual drift. The contrast is striking with the political-media treatment of “classic” criminal news items (murders, rapes, etc.) in which commentators are, on the contrary, quick to utter idle generalities such as “insecurity continues to increase », “the delinquents are increasingly young and violent”, “there are no longer any benchmarks”, etc. There is therefore a sort of incapacity to question the behavior of elites, as if the latter were virtuous in principle, breaches of probity can therefore only be the work of deviant individuals.

Likewise, it is striking to see how systemic corruption is presented in the West as a characteristic of poor countries, particularly African ones. In my eyes, it is a post-colonial prejudice which basically perpetuates the belief in a form of moral and intellectual superiority of the white man and his “civilization”. Reality does not correspond to this old prejudice. In many sectors of political and economic life, there are forms of corruption that must in fact be described as “systemic” insofar as they are the consequence of ordinary social functioning and not of individual excesses. We saw this for example in the automobile sector a few years ago through the “  Diesel Gate ”, which revealed how most manufacturers in the sector were cheating on anti-pollution tests to continue to sell engines running on diesel. , and how this cheating was known and accepted within the companies concerned.

The pharmaceutical sector is also experiencing forms of systemic corruption which are commensurate with the colossal financial stakes in what now constitutes one of the most profitable sectors of the economy. Manufacturers and their financial partners (like Bill Gates' foundation in the vaccine sector) cheat to overstate the effectiveness of the drugs they manufacture and hide their undesirable effects. The priority targets of their influence peddling are, on the one hand, organizations managing public health policies on an international scale (i.e. the WHO but also the European Union, as the affair brought to light). Pfizer/von der Leyen), on the other hand the national health steering and control agencies (we are trying to corrupt the sector policeman).

Furthermore, this corruption policy also aims to retain the loyalty of influential people, whether national elected officials or media personalities. Finally, it is also exercised within research in the biomedical sciences through direct or indirect funding of researchers and their institutions, their research, their conferences or even their journals. We have reached a point where we are now looking for people and institutions that do not work with manufacturers, because they become the exception that proves the rule.

The result of this systemic corruption is what we witnessed during the Covid crisis. First a series of lies about the origin of the virus (the fable of the bat and the pangolin to conceal the laboratory accident and the nature of the genetic manipulations that had been carried out there for several years). Then a series of lies about the effectiveness of drugs, on the one hand to overvalue patented products bringing in a lot of money (here Remdesivir initially, then obviously the new gene therapies incorrectly called “vaccines”), on the other hand to discredit generic drugs that no longer bring anything to the industry (like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin).

Also a series of lies about the nature of the epidemic and its seriousness that we will exaggerate as much as possible in order to create panic and lead States to rush into the arms of manufacturers. All while generating as many publications as possible in major medical journals in order to maintain the illusion that all this is “validated by Science”. What a joke! You should read the statements of the directors or former directors of the most famous Anglo-Saxon medical journals (Richard Norton for the Lancet , Marcia Angell for the New England Journal of Medicine , Drummond Rennie for the Journal of the American Medical Association ) themselves admitting Their helplessness in the face of this organized corruption considerably degrading the quality of the publications for which they were responsible is edifying.

You also analyze the political management of the health crisis and you explain that it has highlighted “an authoritarian drift in executive power”. How does the management of the Covid crisis demonstrate an authoritarian drift by the French state?

In my new book, I discuss the growing malaise of our representative democracy. It is primarily due to the institutions of the Fifth Republic which hypertrophied the presidential function and, more broadly, unbalanced the separation of powers in favor of the executive. Then, it is due to the way of practicing these institutions adopted by the successive cliques which seize power. But what is at stake here is not only the fact of appropriating institutions and administrations as if one were the owner, nor the persistence of corruption, nor the authoritarian temptation and other abuses in the exercise. of power which regularly cause media “scandals”.

The problem is even deeper, it lies in what I have called for years the Achilles Heel of modern democracies. The general idea is this. Firstly , while in ordinary times we respect as best we can the principles of political and legal organization which underpin the rule of law and representative democracy, as soon as a serious crisis occurs we panic and seem ready to deny these same principles. . Second , during these crises we get into the habit of suspending certain democratic operations, and this never completely disappears when the crisis ends: so that each (political management of) crisis leads us to degrade democracy a little further.

I became aware of this phenomenon when, during the 2000s, the security obsession embodied by Nicolas Sarkozy led to laws being piled on top of each other, ever more restricting fundamental rights and freedoms, ever more increasing the tools of control and general surveillance of the population under the pretext of “guaranteeing your security”. The 2010s were then dominated in France by the so-called "Islamist" terrorist wave and, once again, the states of emergency and the legislative arsenal hastily passed in the name of the "war against terrorism" undermined many general principles of law. Little by little, a dangerous “paradigm of exception” emerged. However, it is clear that governments are making increasingly repeated, intensive and extensive use of it which, moreover, never resolves any of the problems taken as a pretext for imposing these so-called “exceptional” laws and measures.

The height was reached between 2020 and 2022 when, under the pretext of an epidemic, we lived in an almost permanent state of emergency, all powers being placed in the hands of the executive and completely unprecedented measures to restrict freedoms. fundamental being imposed by constraint. If such democratic denials are now possible with each series of attacks or each epidemic, not to mention other "crises" to come (notably climatic), should we expect the progressive death of what was nevertheless conquered from terrible struggle by the generations that preceded us?

Professionals in health and medico-social establishments who refused to subscribe to compulsory vaccination have been suspended since September 15, 2021. A few months ago, the Minister of Health declared that their reinstatement posed “a health problem and a problem of professional ethics. What do you think ?

It's simple, it's a pure political-ideological arbitrariness, a fact of the Prince that I discuss in the epilogue that I gave to Elsa Ruillère's book on suspended caregivers. This persecution of non-consenting victims of compulsory vaccination is only one aspect of a broader process of ostracization of all those who challenge this or that aspect of the official narrative of the epidemic and its political-health management, whether it concerns all the doctors prosecuted by the Council of the Order or even all the scientists insulted, defamed and sometimes administratively sanctioned. What is the basis for such ostracism from society?

Officially, “anti-covid vaccination” is compulsory for certain categories of professionals because they must not risk contaminating their colleagues or the public concerned. The moral (“altruistic”) principle thus stated is easily understood, and no one disputes it. However, it would still have to correspond to reality. However, it has been epidemiologically clear since the summer of 2021 that the said “vaccines” do not protect against infection by the virus or its transmission, the first countries to have vaccinated their entire population having experienced exactly the same epidemic outbreaks as the others (see volume 2 of La D oxa du Covid ).

The main manufacturer concerned (Pfizer) ended up recognizing (before the European Parliament, in October 2022) that its product had never been tested in this sense. The vaccination obligation is therefore based on nothing other than political arbitrariness. Better yet: in real life, an unvaccinated nurse regularly doing PCR tests to check that she is not infected will not represent a danger for hospital patients, while a vaccinated doctor believing himself to be wrongly protected from infection and contamination could be truly dangerous for its patients.

Let's be clear: there is neither scientific nor medical rationality behind all this. Those suspended for non-vaccination are only the scapegoats or expiatory victims of a vaccine ideology that has become a sort of state religion as a result of massive collusion between Western political elites and economic and financial elites. mainly American companies involved in the new big vaccine business . Finally, this ideology imposes itself thanks to propaganda that is all the more effective as it can rely on the often active complicity of almost all of the media.

In a chapter entitled “The rape of crowds by political propaganda”, you study the mechanisms used to obtain the support and participation of citizens in the measures taken by the executive power in the fight against the epidemic. How can we speak of “crowd rape”? What were the main techniques used to amaze people and gain citizen support for health policy?

Here I take the title of an old book by Serge Tchakhotine ( The Rape of Crowds by Political Propaganda ) which constitutes a classic in the study of propaganda. The Covid crisis was in fact an opportunity to observe the implementation and large-scale deployment of all the manipulation techniques allowing almost total control of information by governments. Particularly when they wanted to have their full population vaccination campaigns accepted.

The first technique is the use of “medical experts”, hand-picked doctors who are constantly appearing in the media to spread the “good word”, that is to say that of the government and the pharmaceutical manufacturers. I give a list at the end of volume 1 of La D oxa du Covid , each time indicating the institutional positions of the “experts” on TV shows and the links and conflicts of interest that they have had for years with the pharmaceutical industry.

I also talk about the “scalded frog” technique which made it possible to gradually extend compulsory vaccination to the entire population: starting with “people at risk”, then gradually extending it to the entire population. the entire population, including children and adolescents who nevertheless risk nothing from Covid, and then pregnant women who are usually never vaccinated because the potential risks are great and the effects in the short as well as medium and long term unknown. If this somewhat totalitarian program had been clearly stated from the start, it would probably have provoked some outcry. But by proceeding in successive stages, the pill is much easier to swallow.

We should also mention the technique of “rigged choice” which is also a classic of propaganda. It consists of putting people before an impossible dilemma, a pseudo choice in which one of the two terms is even more unacceptable than the other. One of the best examples is Oliver Véran's formula, at the end of summer 2021, addressing the French: “So, vaccinated or re-confined? » This is mental manipulation. Alongside the permanent exploitation of figures (which my statistician colleague Pierre Chaillot also clearly demonstrated in his recent book), these propaganda techniques were in full force during the crisis.

You also mention the reflections of the philosopher Michel Foucault on biopower and biopolitics as well as those of the historian of science Dominique Pestre on the government of technosciences. Does the management of the epidemic mark the advent of a form of biocracy?

During the second half of February 2020, when everyone was starting to talk about the coronavirus, I was struck and annoyed by the frequency of references to The Plague by Albert Camus, made by journalists, writers but also academic colleagues. What annoyed me had nothing to do with the quality and interest of this classic of French literature, but was primarily due to the snobbish use made of it: for many, it was then necessary to reread Camus and place a small quote making it seem intelligent and cultured.

Then, basically, noting what was happening in China and understanding that our so-called democratic countries were preparing to imitate it by reinventing general containment measures for populations that had disappeared for several centuries, it seemed to me that, if it was necessary rereading a classic author, it was not Camus but Foucault. The latter described what he calls "the political dream of the plague", which is a dream of absolute disciplinarization of bodies and minds in the name of medical Reason ("  the penetration of the regulation down to the finest details of the "existence and through a complete hierarchy which ensures the capillary functioning of power ", in his words).

A central axis of Foucault's thought revolves around this constitution of the State and then of capitalism through the desire to dominate and discipline not only minds but also bodies. The incredible political and health management of a virus that is in reality infinitely less dangerous than most of the major infectious diseases of the past would undoubtedly have both fascinated and appalled Foucault.

With the global Covid crisis, we are experiencing a sort of culmination of this “biopower” that the philosopher-historian has strived to highlight throughout his life, and which for him was a form of totalitarianism to combat. Hannah Arendt also showed for a long time that totalitarianism (whose etymology is “totality”) is much more than a political regime, it is a project of total domination over the body and mind of citizens in order to transform them. into an undifferentiated “mass”, “a system in which men are superfluous”.

In this sense, successful totalitarianism is the society imagined by another great thinker of the 20th century : George Orwell. To simplify, the characteristic of totalitarianism lies in its way of conceiving and managing society as a monolithic whole, an undifferentiated mass, a herd, human livestock. In fact, what we witnessed during the Covid crisis is the provisional culmination of a long process of total industrialization of health, at the end of which humans disappear.

From now on, industry and the State will tell the doctor what to prescribe, his professional individuality will no longer exist, his knowledge acquired through experience will no longer be worth anything, any doctor will have to prescribe the same thing in the parameters defined by the political-industrial system. The relationship between the doctor and the patient will also disappear, the patients having also become interchangeable, they will have no history, they will not have any individuality at all (thus, we uniformly administer 100% gene therapy of a population). We are here at the antipodes of humanism.

You also wonder about the future of democracy in view of the perspectives opened up by the development of digital technologies in terms of control and surveillance of populations. Should we fear the emergence of a form of social credit in France and Europe?

The desire to control populations is obviously not new, but modern digital tools give it unprecedented power which also questions democracy. During the Covid crisis, several countries implemented unprecedented and sometimes illegal population control and surveillance systems. In France, no one seemed surprised that a telephone operator like Orange could geolocate citizens and indicate to the government where they had gone to confine themselves in March 2020. No one seemed to be shocked by the suddenly commonplace use of drones either. by the police, completely illegally, nor by the installation in the Paris metro of software to detect the wearing of masks or by the installation of cameras equipped with systems for measuring the temperature of people in schools, airports and public buildings.

In April, the government announced the launch of a first application called “Stop Covid” which carried obvious risks of breaking anonymity and general surveillance of citizens. Let us add to this a major risk of discrimination depending on whether or not people have a smartphone and have or not downloaded an application, again akin to a stopgap and a technological diversion even though the most important screening tools (the tests) and protection for people at risk, caregivers (masks, gel, gowns, etc.) were sorely lacking. Later, the government will entrust a private company ( Francetest ) with collecting the results of screening tests, without worrying about the confidentiality of this health data as noted by the CNIL.

Finally, the ease with which the French government imposed an incredibly discriminatory “health pass” devoid of any scientific basis is confounding both in the intention and in the lack of reaction from almost all the institutions supposed to protect individual freedoms. and collectives in France. In this great berezina of fundamental freedoms and rights that was the “Covid crisis”, only one institution (the Defender of Rights) belatedly issued significant criticism. In a press release dated October 14, 2021, she expressed her concern “that exceptional measures are long-term and recalls that any measure affecting freedoms must be adapted, necessary and proportionate to the objective pursued”, and she alerted us to measures (such as the dereimbursement of tests) which “are similar to a disguised vaccination obligation”. A few weeks later (November 30, 2021), the CNIL recalled for its part that the government had never provided it with proof of the effectiveness of all the health surveillance and control systems put in place since March 2020. And for good reason …

It is also more than worrying to see a number of Western politicians committing themselves without restraint to the path of digital identification, like these French senators writing an entire report ( Health Crises and Digital Tools: Responding Effectively to regain our freedoms , Senate, Information Report No. 673 , June 2021) to explain that the experience of certain Asian countries would show that digital technology constitutes the “key element for exiting the health crisis”, by praising tools whose “effectiveness is directly linked to their intrusiveness”, while discrediting criticisms attributed to “legal conservatism” and “costly and misplaced sensitivity”, thus taking up all the language elements of political-industrial propaganda.

However, who does not understand the intellectual fraud (and the oxymoron) of the idea that we need more digital surveillance and control to better guarantee our freedoms? Shoshana Zuboff has well analyzed this new surveillance capitalism and its growing collusion with the neoliberal governments of Western countries (see her book). I also showed this in my investigation into video surveillance, the success of which is due not at all to its effectiveness (which is very low), but to the alliance of well-understood interests between manufacturers doing good business and elected officials playing politics with the theme of security.

Since then, we have witnessed a continued decline in democracy as well as the establishment of new administrative and technological tools for surveillance and population control. Health now extends security to organize an increasing control of minds and bodies, the result of which is already visible in China with the Social Credit system. And when we see that this system is attracting more and more elected officials in Europe, with experiments already being carried out in certain large cities in Italy, we can unfortunately only be very worried about the future.