In Hannah Arendt’s report on Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust, Arendt concludes that Eichmann was no unique monster but rather a very bland individual who never developed any moral center outside of the groups to which he belonged, and had been motivated primarily by blind dedication to the goals and incentives of the Nazi regime. Arendt coined this “the banality of evil.”
In our own time, “the banality of evil” could just as easily be “the banality of intelligence failures.” As Dr. Scott Atlas, former advisor to the White House coronavirus task force, observed:
And this is very frightening because if I were China—and I’m not a foreign policy person, but this is so obvious to me—anyone, North Korea, if they release a virus or even say there’s a virus, ‘Look, it’s killing our people,’ the United States shuts down immediately… There is no American strength in my view of its people to say no. We can’t even say no to having a five-year-old being mandated to have a mask on his face for eight hours a day.
In this short quote, Atlas summarizes a gaping national security hole that, to this day, appears to elude our leading think tanks and officials. For all the trillions of dollars that NATO spends on military and cybersecurity hardware, much of which is meant to protect us from China, those in charge of our response to Covid have shown a staggering credulity in swallowing data and information about the virus—and about the effectiveness of totalitarian mandates in combating it—from our chief geopolitical adversary.
Worse yet, not only did the Chinese Communist Party exploit this fact during Covid, but they appear to have spent years deliberately boring this hole in our national security bureaucracy prior to doing so. The CCP carefully cultivated the World Health Organization over a decade, and there’s a growing mountain of evidence that they made significant headway in cultivating the health and security bureaucracies of many member nations as well. The fact that the pandemic plans of these nations were simply discarded to make way for lockdowns—and the public was neither consulted nor informed of this decision—suggests that the corruption may have run quite deep.
In fact, across institutions, the closer one gets to centers of power during the response to Covid—in government, media, and academia—the more likely the institutions and individuals have been to toe the CCP’s Party line by insisting that China’s farcically-forged Covid data is real. As a reminder, this is the narrative on which officials like these have been basing their guidance: A supervirus emerged that was so deadly only Chinese totalitarianism could stop it; it caused mass death in Wuhan (but nowhere else) until Xi’s two-month lockdown of Wuhan eliminated it from all of China (but nowhere else), where a steady stream of “variants” now demand indefinite restrictions. And this is the data that officials like these have been instructing the world to try to emulate:
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