The New Plague

The new Mexican strain of swine flu is part of a globalist plot to depopulate the planet and place the whole world under martial law. Actually, it's a hoax, but it provides the New World Order with a pretext to put the world under martial law. But no: the right-wing conspiracy community itself is whipping up a hysteria to further its own agendas, say left-wing conspiracists. Conspiracy theory is a kind of virus in its own right. It mutates under aggressive treatment into more resistant strains. A few years ago SARS or bird flu was going to be the pretext for the Bush administration declaring martial law. Naturally, some people now see Obama poised to do the same thing. For some people it's just a partisan reflex, believing now what they denied then, or vice versa, while others are consistent in their anxieties, convinced that Bush and Obama answer to the same shadowy masters. Few irrational observers seem to consider that the news media might have their own mercenary if not malevolent reasons to inflate the threat of the new flu. Instead, there's a compulsion to see higher powers behind everything. The difference between now and two thousand years ago, when something like swine flu might have been blamed on Zeus or Jehovah, is that now people at least believe they can fight back against the malevolent powers -- even if they still are phantoms. Whether that's a healthy form of evolution is debatable.