Paranoia or perceptivity?

A book review by Paul Cudenec, who reads it here

In July, I mentioned in passing that the legendary counter-cultural artist Robert Crumb, now nearly 83 years old, had spoken out about possible industrial manipulation behind the Covid debacle. [1]

Further investigation led me to get hold of his new cartoon book (the first in 23 years), which in English is called Tales of Paranoia. [2]

Because I have the French version, Chroniques de la Paranoia, I cannot quote Crumb by absurdly trying to translate his translated words back into English, but I can describe what he says. [3]

As is apparent from the book’s title, the framing he chooses for his illustrated reflections is that he is questioning whether the dark suspicions swirling around in his head have any basis in reality.

He starts off by admitting to his own tendency to “join the dots” in an imaginative manner and wondering whether he has not inherited a certain something from his mother, who apparently once opened up the family TV set to search for the bugging device she thought her husband had planted in it.

But Crumb quickly moves on to the heart of the matter by suggesting that the “pandemic” was a scam conducted by Big Pharma and the medical-industrial complex.

Like all good Covid sceptics, he has done his own research. For instance, he cites an article from The New York Times in January 2018 warning of the threat of a global flu pandemic and calling for huge amounts of money to be invested in vaccine research.

Early in the book, we see Crumb facing the righteous wrath of a doctor friend in the USA, telling him that Covid was not a political issue on which it was possible to express a personal opinion, but a scientific one, in which his duty was to trust the experts.

This conversation keeps him awake half the night, tossing and turning, and he finds himself wondering whether he will be targeted in some way for challenging the official narrative.

While these fears and doubts do not completely disappear – especially the metaphysical doubts expressed in his one-to-ones with God – the series of cartoon strips shows an increasing certainty with regard to the Covid machinations.

The Rand Corporation appears to have helped in this process, with a report it issued in 2021 entitled Detecting Conspiracy Theories on Social Media. [4]

Analysing the language it uses, Crumb asks who exactly decides what information is “factual”, or what sources “reliable” or “unreliable”, and on what exact basis such decisions are made – he notes that we are again being told to trust the so-called experts.

He also describes how the report identifies four kinds of “conspiracy theory” [5] – those involving visits from extra-terrestrials, those about the dangers of vaccines, those about the origins of Covid and those warning of a planned genocide of the white race.

And he points out how questioning the Covid agenda is thus neatly sandwiched between “crazy” UFO theories and “far right” racial theories in a pincer movement aiming to discredit by association.

To illustrate the scope of the shadowy networks running our world from behind the scenes, he focuses in on one individual whom he names only as “Deep State Woman”, explaining that he does not want her to be able to sue him!

Having shown us how he was accused by the “trust the Science” crowd of having crossed over to the “dark side” by trusting his own brain instead, Crumb concludes by devoting a whole page to listing some of the many bodies that he says put fear in his belly and spread paranoia.

These include the CIA, Mossad, AIPAC, the Federal Reserve, the World Bank, Blackrock, the oil industry, the pharmaceuticals industry, the 5G industry, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, GAVI, the Wellcome Trust, the WHO, the WEF, [6] the Bill Gates Foundation, [7] the Carnegie Endowment [8] and the Rockefeller Foundation… [9]

Many years ago I was greatly struck by a cartoon that I came across in one of the American anarchist magazines that I used to devour at the time – I have no idea which one now.

This showed the gradual arrival of what is called “civilization” in a small corner of the USA: in 12 frames we see the transformation of an idyllic corner of countryside into an ugly mess of buildings, roads and overhead wires.

I always kept it in the back of my mind and it served as a visual underpinning of my personal understanding of the whole vile “development” agenda. [10]

I came across it again online when I was searching for an illustration for the mention of Crumb, because it turns out that it was he who drew it in 1979 – it is entitled “A Short History of America”.

What he did there was to take a huge step backwards from our society, from all the detail that clutters our minds and blocks our vision, to show with rare clarity what it all really amounts to.

Seeing this bigger picture behind “modernity” was no more crazy than seeing the bigger picture behind Covid.

It is not “paranoia” we are dealing with here, but perceptivity.