And 19 years later, in 2020, or just before 2020, there is a person who has described the current situation as COVID-9/11. (COVID-1984, as many people call it, is of course George Orwell's 1984)
James Corbett, a Canadian living in Japan, has been doing this for over 14 years, mostly as a podcast, but increasingly as a video version of it on YouTube.
Although he is a doctor of literature, he has never been a member of any research organization or media, and his style of research is open source research, where he builds his logic from sources that are all online.
So, all the sources I refer to are presented.
I don't agree with all of them, but I have changed my mind about many of them.
James Corbett had his YouTube account deleted in the spring of this year, 2021.
He was not a loud proponent of conspiracy theories like the famous Alex Jones.
He was simply assessing the situation rationally and sounding the alarm about the dangers of what has been happening in the world since the spring of 2020, not just the disease itself, but the social situation.
The year 2020 was an extraordinary year. With the US presidential election at its core, the series of events happening on the Internet and in the media, and the pandemic and what to do about it, I had the most disrupted sense of values and everything else in my 60 years of life.
I easily lost faith in international organizations, in academics who propagandize about medicine, in doctors, and mainly in the direction of epidemiology, bacteriology, biology, information technology, and social engineering. It's not that I was discredited, it's that they acted like I was discredited.
I never thought that I would lose faith in science (people) - well, there have been signs of this in me since 2019, but it would take too long to write about them, so I won't.
But I'm not an investigative journalist, I'm just a writer of fiction, and in 2020, I kept wondering what I could create anew under such circumstances.
I had stopped looking at Twitter directly, and the echo chamber of social networking sites was a little too close to home.
Since the turn of the year, I've been prepared for a situation like the one I'm in right now (mid-May), and even then, I can only think of fiction, and in my case, it can only have some symmetry and symbolism, even if it doesn't reflect reality itself.
First of all, I had an extremely gratifying conversation, which will be included in my forthcoming book.
I hope you will forgive the unusual content of this entry. However, I thought I should write about it here, otherwise people might not understand why I'm talking so passionately about anime from 20 years ago.
I'll end this article by saying that we have to keep our sanity so that we don't think later that 2001 was 2020.
