Nothing New: Medical Tyranny During the Renaissance

Below is an excerpt from John Hale’s “The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance,” where he details the measures taken under the guise of concern for the health of the people in Italy during the Renaissance. It’s eerie how closely it resembles what started a couple of years ago. You would almost think the powers-that-be took their diabolical inspiration from this text, using COVID-19 as a cover for controlling us.

“…the most dramatic examples of successful interference with ways of life were achieved not by national but by civic governments, and in the sphere of public health. Methods of checking recurrences of the plagues involved, as we shall see, draconian measures. By the second half of the sixteenth century all large Italian cities had acquired permanent public health boards which revived previous ad hoc legislation and extended it. They closed off streets, barred houses with suspected men, women and children inside them, shut down shops and inns, drove stall-holders to distraction by forbidding the sale of a wide variety of goods in markets, determined where and how burials were to take place, forbade social gatherings and church attendance save for selected services of intercession.”

John Hale, “The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance” (Atheneum, New York, 1994) 478

One thing I did want to mention here is, note that Hale pointed out civic or local governments as the primary source of control. In our day that’s also true, with the caveat that the Federal government influences weak or colluding magistrates in the U.S. to adhere to whatever measures they want put in place.

While that can work against us, the locality we live in can do the reverse by resisting what is attempted to be forced upon us by national political leaders and government. We need to learn to think in terms of fighting things at the local, rather than the national level as a superior strategy to win the war.