In Hitchcock’s Notorious, an American spy (Ingrid Bergman) marries a German agent (Claude Rains) to get the goods on the German uranium smuggling operation. She is discovered; her mother-in-law, who has never liked her, devises a plan of slow poisoning to get rid of her without alerting the other Nazis to their intelligence failure. The husband and his mother act as her caretakers while poisoning her. After a stunning transformation from ravishing beauty to nearly comatose invalid, her mother-in-law promises ‘We’ll get you a doctor, a good one, who will take care of you’. This is of course a death warrant, or would be if her associate (Cary Grant) had not rescued her.
Hitchcock often depicted doctors, especially psychiatrists, as evildoers masquerading as do-gooders. But even the great movie director could hardly have imagined doctors and scientists intentionally producing diseases that have sickened and killed millions, all while posing as benefactors of humankind. Role reversals like this have proliferated. Federal police and prosecutors set criminals free while jailing the innocent and locking down whole cities. Teachers and professors indoctrinate students in ideologies of race hatred and sexual perversion, while disdaining the most elementary common-sense method of discerning the truth — observing with your own eyes and ears. The news media censor the news and perpetrate an endless series of hoaxes. Chris Bray, over at ‘Tell Me How This Ends’, writes:
‘It’s becoming impossible to exaggerate the degree to which government in America is mostly like having a fire department that sends a crew around in a big red truck to light things on fire.’
And
‘The news media exists to control information, pharmaceutical regulators exist to protect the ability of pharmaceutical companies to market dangerous and ineffective products, and local governments exist to pay rioters and arsonists for burning down cities.’
He concludes:
‘Our government institutions aren’t failing to prevent harm to us; they’re actively working to cause us harm, unambiguously and persistently.’
Why this is happening is the subject of a forthcoming essay that will soon be posted here. Perhaps you’ve heard that ‘politics is downstream of culture’, meaning that by the time something reaches government and becomes official policy, it has already been tried out in less visible precincts. The malevolent character of today’s government is no accident, comrade. This merely means that it has antecedents, precedents, causes, not necessarily that it was planned in all its particulars. In philosophy, the arts, and spycraft — three areas of endeavor remote from political economy — abusive relationships became legitimate, fashionable, worthy of emulation, and then commonplace. After smoldering awhile, they spread like wildfire (to adapt Chris Bray’s metaphor) and coalesced into the present conflagration. It scorches all institutions. Perhaps digging into what is fueling the wildfire will bring some paths of escape into view.