A pox of lies.

Hi, Anticitizen.

Throughout history, fear has been used as the ultimate tool for controlling a population. It was used on us to great effect just a few years ago… is it about to happen again?

Read more in today’s letter → 

📖 ESTIMATED READ TIME: 5 min 50 seconds

Freedom, sacrificed.

In the year 541 AD, during the height of the Byzantine Empire, a shadow fell upon the mighty city of Constantinople.

It was not the shadow of an invading army or a rising rebellion, but something far more insidious—an invisible enemy that no sword could cut down, which crept into homes unnoticed, spreading despair and death: The Plague of Justinian.

Named after reigning emperor Justinian I, the plague moved like a vengeful ghost through the streets, striking down rich and poor alike, leaving the gutters filled with the stench of decay. The people, terrified and confused, looked to their emperor for salvation.

But they would not receive it. Instead, Justinian, desperate to maintain control over his crumbling empire, cast a veil of deceit over the city.

In the palaces of power, where marble halls echoed with the steps of anxious advisors, Justinian devised a plan. He knew that the truth, raw and unfiltered, would be fatal to the empire’s already fragile stability.

The government downplayed the severity of the situation and misrepresented the number of deaths. Official records were manipulated, and the true scale of the disaster was often hidden from the public.

In addition, the emperor implemented severe measures to control the spread of the disease. These included quarantines, restrictions on travel, and even lockdowns in certain areas. For those who refused, severe punishments were imposed: imprisonment, public shaming, and confiscation of property.

Markets emptied, homes became cells, and the emperor’s decree became law: freedom must be sacrificed to ensure the empire’s survival.

Survive it did, but at immense cost. In the end, some 30 to 50 million people perished as a result of the Justinian Plague, wiping out nearly half the estimated population of the world at the time.

As the plague’s fury eventually subsided, what remained was a city not liberated but scarred—its people, once proud, were now burdened with a deep distrust of Justinian and his leadership. The emperor's efforts to downplay the disaster and the resulting economic and social turmoil embedded in his people a sense of betrayal and abandonment that would last for generations to come.

Agents of fear.

We don’t have to look as far back as Justinian's plague to know what it was like to experience a society-wide health crisis; we lived through one just a few short years ago.

Most importantly, we now know that like Emperor Justinian, our leaders knowingly lied to us for years in order to keep us under control. Something that many of them have now been forced to admit to the public.

But there’s a huge difference in this comparison.

Justinian deceived his people to maintain calm and order, and to downplay the severity to keep his citizens from outright panic. In contrast, our leaders knowingly lied to make C-19 seem worse than it really was, to spread anxiety, dread and worry.

Lying to your people is still lying.

But lying to keep them fearful, while taking away their rights? Most of us will agree that’s a much more despicable act. However, that’s exactly what our governments did to us.

Unfortunately, it might be happening again.

You might have heard that just few days ago, the WHO announced Monkey Pox (Mpox) as a global health emergency.

A day later, the first case was detected in Sweden. Two days after that, the Australian state of NSW announced that MPOX was “increasing” in the region, without really going into any specific detail. Just yesterday, Bavarian Nordic announced it was preparing to produce tens of millions of doses of the Mpox jab.

Here we go again?

If we are on the verge of round two, now is a good time to remind ourselves of how much our lives and basic freedoms were impacted between 2020 and 2022.

Let’s specifically look at the example of Australia.

You probably heard about how Australia was one of the most locked down places on the planet during the ‘VID-demic.

Checkpoints were set up at state borders as interstate travel was banned. Purpose-built quarantine camps were raised where citizens were forcibly interred for weeks against their will. A pregnant woman was arrested in her own home, simply for sharing an event on Facebook promoting a protest against the lockdowns.

Citizens were banned from freely entering and leaving their own country, something the United Nations directly warned was against international human rights conventions. A warning the Australian government ignored.

The military was even deployed in Sydney’s suburbs to force an unwilling population to remain in their homes.

These are the kinds of actions you’d have expected from a third-world dictatorship. Not from Australia; one of the planet's most “free” nations.

Australia was one of the best examples of disingenuous fear being used to implement unreasonable control.

But it was far from the only nation guilty of this. The UK, China, Bulgaria, New Zealand, Canada, Russia, the Philippines, and many others were just as bad—in some cases worse.

Look, I’m not saying our leaders shouldn’t have taken action. Especially in the face of a legitimate health crisis.

But at the same time, they shouldn’t overreach, lie, deceive, and effectively imprison their own people without reasonable cause. Which is exactly what they did.*

*The article above is linked from an archive, as it’s paywalled for much of the world on The Australian website. I’m linking elsewhere to ensure maximum visibility.

Mpox may not become as big of a deal as C-19 was. Even if it doesn’t, there are two things we can be certain of:

Firstly, that we will likely live through a similar scenario at some point in our lifetimes.

And secondly, that our governments—in collusion with the media and big business—will almost certainly use excess deceit, propaganda, and outright lies to take away our fundamental human rights.

They won’t act as arbiters of calm and order. They will once again become agents of fear and control.

Because that’s exactly what they did last time.

Next time, you may find yourself lucky to be living in a country like Sweden or Tanzania, where life was relatively free and open, where people didn’t buy into the fear.

Or, you may find yourself living under a regime that adopts the Australian or Chinese model of absolute totalitarian control. If you do, chances are you’ll want a backup plan or way out.

One thing is for sure: it’ll almost certainly be too late to plan your way out of your restrictive home country during the event itself. You need to start preparing before. Ideally, long before.

I’d start by doing these three things:

→ Get a residency permit in another country before you need one, in case you ever need to escape your home government’s authoritarian restrictions.

→ Ensure you have an offshore bank account or assets stashed in another nation. This is useful in case a situation arises like what the Canadian government did in 2022, where you find your bank accounts frozen for speaking up against the overreach of your leaders.

→ Do whatever it takes to start yourself down the path of acquiring at least one additional passport as part of an ultimate backup plan.

Hopefully, you’ll never need to use these options. But just like you can’t buy car insurance once you’ve already had an accident, you shouldn’t wait until the next C-19 comes along before you start preparing a plan to deal with that scenario.

Act now. Prepare yourself.

And remember, your freedom is a choice.

Oftentimes however, it’s a choice defined not by your actions in a certain moment, but by those taken long before.

Written by Leon Hill.
Founder, Anticitizen.

This newsletter is for educational purposes, and is not financial advice. Please do your own research, and consider risks involved with investing or purchasing any asset.