Stolen Bodies (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) In Real Life

How a 1970s horror movie pretty well predicted what would come

Photo by Andrew Wulf on Unsplash

Do you remember that movie with Donald Sutherland and several other stars, where something came from outer space and began taking over the minds of people?

Invasion of the Body Snatchers has been made and remade a number of times, I think, but I remember that one, because it was scary for the very young me who shouldn’t have watched it on TV, through a late evening. I remember that scream, the infected would make when seeing someone not yet infected, along with an accusing pointed finger – directing everybody else’s attention towards the one that was still a human.

Many years later, another TV program, this time a documentary, took place in China. At some kind of tourist place visited mostly by Chinese, a Western journalist was there, showing us, the TV spectators, how China was like, really. And she asked one of the Chinese people there something quite innocent, such as “What would chairman Mao have thought of this?”

The one being asked looked immediately panicked, turned around and shouted at the other Chinese in the area: “This person is insulting our Chairman, she is insulting Mao!” – and they all looked shocked towards the poor journalist, who had to escape from the area to not get physically assaulted by the upset Chinese tourists.

I thought, when seeing that, how great it was that I lived in a part of the world where we could think and ask almost anything, in any situation. With a little bit of sense for not being overly rude to others, but not much of that required, as everybody was able to filter what was being said and understand that one wrong word wasn’t the same as a wrong person.

I will skip the next few years of this development, even though a lot has happened along the way, basically shaking me out of my faith in our society, and jump straight to today, where I experienced the culmination of something I have sensed more and more during the last few months – the silence of the trumped.

Some of what has led to this can be found in many comments from various state leaders during the time since Trump was inaugurated again as the president of the USA: indicating that one or the other person shouldn’t insult Trump, as he was very sensitive, and he didn’t like to be told that he was wrong in some belief.

What?!

It has happened again, and apparently he needs to be treated like a rotten egg, which nobody dares to treat just like most other people are treated – with respect for his intellect, trusting that he can figure out himself what was said out of bad will, and what was actually a result of his own bad behavior or misunderstanding.

Well, never mind Trump, but he does have a lot of influence on things these days, much more than his apparent rotten egg intellect can handle reasonably, so a lot of the things he does cause trouble.

One of those things is the tariffs. Import tax, which for some reason is not allowed to be called exactly that, and which – or so I thought – everybody on this planet is aware of, including why, apparently, he found that they were needed.

One of the very first words Donald Trump said on the inauguration day was “fentanyl”.

I had to look up in an encyclopedia what that was, but obviously, it was something that had flooded the USA, and it was the fault of China, Canada, and Mexico. So, these countries would now see a tariff put on their goods sent to the USA of 10%, no, let it be 20%.

Here is a link to an article that explains that, so that I do not need to state the obvious.

Or not so obvious.

At a discussion today in a forum for mandolin enthusiasts, where the overall topic was what the tariffs meant to the import and availability of mandolins, being such a product that is mainly produced in China, I mentioned that now when the tariffs had been lowered from 145% one way and 125% the other to 30% and 10% respectively, what would that mean to the mandolin manufacturers and importers?

The “other way” is interesting in this context, because some USA-based companies are sending materials to China, where a factory puts them together to become mandolins that are then sent back to the USA – leading to the tariffs being applied both ways.

Someone in the forum claimed that it was not 30%, instead it was 20% for fentanyl and derived products, and 10% for all other products. I kindly corrected him, referring to the reasoning for the first 20% being that illegal fentanyl was claimed to be distributed by China to the USA, and that the 10% was an additional tariff, so the two numbers should be added, hence, 30%.

Here comes then the amazement: people started arguing that fentanyl had absolutely nothing to do with mandolins.

I thought about that documentary, “He is insulting Mao!” but tried to explain kindly that fentanyl had been used as the reason for implementing the 20% tariff, while other reasons were used for the 10%, so I only mentioned fentanyl to explain that, not for any other reasons.

After which the owner of the forum deleted my posts and replaced them with a “You broke the rules of the forum, please refrain from commenting any further on this topic”.

This is a kind of censoring I have seen quite often with Americans recently. They are obviously afraid of being publicly connected with any criticism of Trump or what could be interpreted as this, and they want to remove any sign of having ever as much as thought of the value and consequences of anything this new administration of the federal USA is doing.

Also, the people in the debate demonstrated a level of lacking knowledge about what has being going on in the USA since January this year, that I hardly knew what to say. Even worse: they actively attacked any attempt of introducing them to a bit of the lacking knowledge, instead pointing their fingers at me and started screaming.

And this is not unique.

I know that when writing something like this article on Substack, there will be an amount of people here who will unsubscribe to my newsletter. For the same reasons as the Chinese tourists would start attacking the journalist who apparently had insulting the beloved leader, or for the mandolin forum to delete my posts that even just indicated a bit of real knowledge about the world situation.

Some people in the USA say that they are not interested in politics, making it somehow allowable for them to not know and not care about anything that shapes the life for themselves and everyone they know. Others are outspokenly or secretly afraid of what various government institutions and agencies could possibly think of doing to them if it became known that they were not marching along with everybody else, not believing in the official consensus belief about what was going on (all that about the world being evil to the USA, and now it is only fair that the USA is answering back, etc.)

Some people in other countries are caught by the same way of thinking, being afraid of either their own similar institutions and agencies, or indeed the USA ones. And for good reasons, because it has already happened that people have been rejected at the border when trying to travel to the USA, because they had expressed a negative feeling about Donald Trump on social media!

By locking out people who speak up, what was once the hallmark of the USA, the free speech, being the leader of the free world, and so on, is very quickly deteriorating.

There have clearly been some body snatchers entering the USA. The question is now how many humans are still left, and how many have, by now, been snatched by aliens – and if there is any hope of things returning to the better.