I read The Diary of Anne Frank more than half a century ago. At the time, I was about the same age that she was when she wrote it—somewhere between thirteen and fifteen. I remember wondering how she would have felt had she known that her most private thoughts would be someday available to millions of strangers—including an American teenager who was coming of age in the 1960’s. The fact is, most of the details she might have begrudged me are now faded from memory, while my reaction to the book has solidified into a petrified monolith.
She wrote each entry as if it were a letter to a friend. “Dear Kitty” was the one she like best. As I followed her stories about life in “The Secret Annex”, it was easy to think of her as a long-distance pen pal. Many of the tales she shared with Kitty/me were similar to my intimate conversations with my best girlfriend, Toni. Others were very, very different. I had never been forced into hiding, never been hunted by human monsters who hated me.
I developed a kind of loyalty to Anne—not as strong as my loyalty to Toni, of course, because I saw Toni every day at school and talked with her for hours on the phone. Anne had been dead for a long time—since before I was born. I knew her fate before I opened the book. What she had not known as she wrote her last entry on August 1, 1944 was that the monsters would find her and her family. They would send her to a concentration camp where she would finally die at the age of fifteen.
Loyalty led to outrage. She had been punished for no reason! She had done nothing wrong! How could they have taken an innocent girl—just like me in so many ways— separated her from her parents, thrown her into prison, and stolen her life. How could they do that?
Upon the double foundation of loyalty and outrage, ideas began to form and then solidify into basic principles. Here are a few that survive in my heart today.
Every human is precious.
No human is expendable.
Do not obey orders without question.
Ask questions, seek answers.
Respect human diversity.
Be open to opposing arguments.
Do no harm.
Monsters are real, don’t let them get the upper hand
The last rule is problematic because you must come up with a definition of the word “monster”. Was Hitler a monster? The society I live in says “Yes!!!!”. To Hitler and his followers, however, each and every Jew—young, old, male, female, rich, poor, butcher, baker, candlestick maker—was a monster.
Who controls the definition of monster?
Today we are living in what I will call COVID TIMES. During the past 18 months we have gone through several permutations of the monster meme. It all began, so we are told, in December of 2019 when a new virus appeared in Wuhan, China. It became clear that a monster virus had evolved because it was killing so many people that the Chinese had to quarantine the entire city. The monster, COVID-19, quickly spread around the world as could be seen day after day on the red and black “Worldometer” conveniently provided by Johns Hopkins University.
But suddenly a new monster appeared on the scene—The INFODEMIC
The World Health Organization’s director-general said last month that disinformation is as dangerous as COVID-19. During an address at the Munich Security conference on Feb. 15, almost a month before the WHO officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said “We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic. Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus, and is just as dangerous.”
Today, according to official dictates, the virus monster is no longer our worst enemy. The real monsters are humans who question or challenge any part of the COVID story as told by The World Health Organization, The World Economic Forum, The Centers of Disease Control, and other private organizations with huge budgets and important-sounding names. According to them, the worst monsters are those who refuse to take the miraculous vaccines provided by private pharmaceutical companies like Physer, Moderna and Johnson&Johnson. These human monsters harbor the COVID virus as “Asymptomatic Carriers”. They are incubators of the next pandemic.
I don’t agree with the official definition of monster. I have other definitions and, as you might guess, they have everything to do with Control.
Control is the monster. We have a Controldemic, and this blog is now officially dedicated to revealing all its hideous manifestations. Hopefully, humans will wake up in time to stop it, but I fear that it has already gotten the upper hand.
In honor of Anne Frank, who began her diary on June 12, 1942 at the age of 13, I dedicate this thirteenth Control Savvy post and solemnly promise that I will do everything in my power to fight the Monsters of Control, those who use propaganda and other tactics to institute obscene abuses of power over the innocent.
Control Savvy 
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