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Even While It Was Happening, It Wasn't Happening

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Was there really such a year as 2020?

By Michael Lesher*

You know how it goes: if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, et cetera"?

Suppose an entire society goes to smithereens, while our media elites stubbornly refuse to notice. What then?

Suppose the reporters and the pundits and the "experts" ignore the coup that has trampled our basic freedoms since last March.

Suppose they all assure us that defending democracy is "anti-science," and preach to us that civil rights (except for Black Lives Matter protests) are nothing but a "death cult."

Suppose, after an "election" conducted mainly in the press, on the basis of a torrent of worthless propaganda, a notorious corporate whore is about to be installed in the White House as carnival-barker-in-chief for scantily-tested vaccines - drugs being peddled by a gang of profiteers who wouldn't even make the stuff until they were promised complete legal immunity for whatever they do to their victims.

Well? Does the murder of our liberties even make a sound?

Was there really such a year as 2020?

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 2005, the playwright Harold Pinter had this to say about every atrocity concealed by the Western press:

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn 't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest.

And so much never happened this past year!

Four-fifths of the United States of America suspended democracy and declared the Bill of Rights obsolete. The United Kingdom unleashed a new sort of "police" - faces masked, truncheons in their paws - to maul peaceful protesters for the crime of breathing. In parts of Australia, it becamea criminal offense to tell other people the time and place of a political demonstration. Germany outlawed political protest.

But none of that happened. It wasn't reported in the mainstream press. It was of no interest.

In just over nine months, economies in once-wealthy countries were reduced to ruin. Social media reeled under systematic thought-policing. Following a wave of "executive orders" that shuttered small businesses across the United States, an unprecedented number of Americans began to steal food to survive. In the U.K., UNICEF is distributing food to hungry children for the first time in more than 70 years. Around the world, people in need still can't get medical treatment. Cultural institutions have been shattered. The performing arts have been banned. Singing was deemed a public health risk.

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Republished from OffGuardian.  OffGuardian was launched in February 2015 and takes its name from the fact its founders had all been censored on and/or banned from the Guardian's 'Comment is Free' sections.

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