Interview with 'anti-vax' soldiers : "I'm a soldier but my country no longer wants me because I refuse the vaccine" (PART 2)

This interview is presented in two parts.

• You can read the first part here.
• There is also a French version here.

General Guillaume: 3 stars General

→ General, can you introduce yourself?

I am General Guillaume. I joined Saint-Cyr in the 1980s and then spent my entire career in the infantry (Mountain Troops, Marine Troops) and then in the general staff. I am now a General.

→ General, are you vaccinated? Why? What effect does it have on your career?

I am vaccinated, I made a personal decision to be vaccinated in good conscience because I am part of the population considered "at risk". I suffer from a respiratory disease that I have had chronically since Operation Daguet, a disease that damaged my lungs. Nothing serious in everyday life, but in case of complications due to COVID, my chances of survival are not guaranteed. So for me it made sense to vaccinate myself, I would have done it anyway.

However, I have encouraged my wife and my children and grandchildren not to do so. The vaccine is mostly for people like me. In fact, it is only for people like me. My 13-year-old grandson has absolutely no reason to get the shot. That is nonsense. I support a responsible approach to vaccination, based on individual responsibility: people who want to vaccinate because they are at risk (really at risk) should be able to do so.

But that is all. I think it is absolutely scandalous that French citizens are being forced, directly or indirectly, to be vaccinated against a disease that is, after all, benign, and in any case does not threaten them. My grandson, whom I have just mentioned, plays rugby in a club. He has a very good level of rugby, but now he cannot go to training because he has not been vaccinated. This is absolutely stupid. And it is even criminal.

The same thing is happening in the army and the gendarmerie: valuable soldiers are being pushed out because of their vaccination status. The army lacks resources, yet some young people are denied the opportunity to enlist, simply because they are not vaccinated... Similarly, the army lacks non-commissioned officers, yet the institution starts to hunt down these non-commissioned officers who refuse to be vaccinated. Or worse, those NCOs who refuse to act as health police in their combat group or platoon.

On a visit to a regiment, I had a lieutenant who challenged me in a rather direct and unusual way. We were talking about a number of subjects and we had come to the subject of vaccination and I suggested in a subtle way that I had a lot of misgivings about the policy of the government and the Chief of the Defence Staff, which was totally disconnected from the reality on the ground. The young lieutenant did not fail to ask me, full of candor: « But General, you are a general, why don't you do something, why don't you oppose these decisions? »

It's a legitimate question. But so naive. As a major general, I get paid more than this lieutenant. I also have more advantages. More seniority. More responsibility and authority too. But that doesn't mean I have more power than him. The way the military is structured, the higher you go, the more authority you have. But you never really have more power. You soon find that with each new level, the real decision-making power always eludes you. As military people, we know that power is pyramidal, hierarchical, vertical. We know that we will always have less power than the person above us. But we still naively believe that we will have a little more power at each new level than at the previous level. We believe that "power" is a kind of commercial company, where some people are majority shareholders with 51% of the shares, where others have only 30% and others 5%, 2%, 1%. The hope is that with each new rung you climb, you gain a few more shares of power.

This is totally false in reality. It is a totally false view. I have as little power today, after four decades in business, as I did yesterday when I was a 16-year-old cadet. Power is not pyramidal. Power is a single point of concentration. And it is not in the hands of the military. Our leaders have power without responsibility. We in the military have responsibility without power.

I don't know if you understand exactly what I am trying to explain. In fact, I am explaining to you that I am as helpless as a baker or a corporal in the present situation. I am telling you about my own helplessness. I am helpless, and so are all of my colleagues, no matter their rank. I think even the Chief of the Army Staff know very well that they have very little room to manoeuvre.

We have no power over the treatment of our subordinates. I personally tried to raise a voice of dissent, as did some colleagues, but it was useless. I have tried to raise the complaints I received from certain regiment commanders, but it was useless. I wrote several letters, passing on disconcerting testimonies that I received from several officers. I never received anything but silence.

And yet, the evidence I brought to the attention of my superiors was very worrying. Hundreds and hundreds of cases of soldiers who find themselves totally unfit after being vaccinated. In a letter I mentioned in particular the case of a young private in a mountain troop regiment: he enlisted at 19 years of age, he did his initial training and his speciality training, and was among the first three in his cohort. He had a very athletic profile and was clever, the kind with a full head and well made arms, typically the kind of young man that a good sergeant could have directed towards an elite unit. His platoon was vaccinated by the SSA and he was immobilized for several weeks after the vaccination. He developed symptoms of pulmonary embolisms, with quite severe breathing difficulties, which prevented him from even speaking without being out of breath. Do you know what happened to him? The kid got fired, the Army artificially extended his probationary period so they could break his contract, on the grounds that he "presented medical contradictions to the military profession." And that was it. That's it. This poor kid who would have made a great soldier ends up a civilian with irreparably damaged lungs.

I wrote to a colleague at the DRHAT about this particular case, which I was well informed about. Do you know what happened? It wasn't my friend who wrote me back. I received a letter from a superior, who explained to me that "I was totally out of my role" by taking an interest in this "secondary subject". I replied that my role as an officer is also to be able to think outside the box and alert my leaders when I see that political decisions are destroying the army I serve.

Because that is what is happening. There are thousands of cases like the one I just mentioned. I am not exaggerating. Thousands of young and not so young people with more or less serious symptoms. This vaccination campaign is causing more attrition and loss to the army than our last 20 years of operations in Africa... do you realise how stupid it is?

But the worst thing is not that. The worst thing is that the men realize it. Everyone in the army knows at least one colleague, an officer or a private, who is in bad shape after the vaccine. Rumours are circulating, people are talking and debating about it. The climate is all the more serious because we are reaching a form of paranoia, legitimate paranoia, where any sick leave or death in the army is linked to the vaccine. I am not saying that this is the case, the army has nearly 200,000 personnel, statistically there are bound to be sicknesses and deaths. But our men are so used to seeing their comrades suffer from side effects, they start targeting the vaccine for every little problem.

The problem with all this is that the consequences are extremely deleterious. Distrust and mistrust is growing in some units. The army does not communicate. The SSA doesn't communicate. The only thing the men see is that they have to get vaccinated, or they will be dragged through the mud and fired. And if they do get vaccinated, they see that some of their friends are suffering from complications. I'm sorry to say this, but even the most mercenary of men would never accept being treated with such disrespect.

It should come as no surprise that tens of thousands of soldiers decide to get out of this hellish loop by getting forgeries or not renewing their contracts. You can ask a lot of a soldier as long as you do it with authority, gravity and respect. But there are limits. This treatment of our military as an adjustment variable and a guinea pig is absolutely outrageous.

I believe that men would accept all this, if it were indeed the only way to protect themselves from an immense peril. And if they were asked straight out. Risk is part of being a soldier. But no, the risks they are taking today are for purely political reasons. I dare to say that at the end of the day, a 25-year-old corporal is not going to die or kill anybody if he refuses to get the vaccine. I dare to say that, and I challenge Mr Véran (Health Minister) to go and argue the opposite and explain to a platoon of corporals that if they are not vaccinated they are irresponsible people who are risking death and risking killing their loved ones.

I know that some of my colleagues will not agree with what I am going to say, but I will say it: this epidemic of COVID is above all a media epidemic. In the sense that it is purely manufactured by a kind of media hysteria. Usually, media-political networks agitate to influence the vote that one chooses to put in the ballot box: people will not vote for the candidate who has convinced them, they vote for the candidate that the media has convinced them to vote for. This is even the foundation of democracy. Today, these same political and media networks are being recycled to encourage people to vaccinate. People don't vaccinate because the vaccine has convinced them, but because the political-media networks have convinced them to vaccinate. That is all. The nuclear heart of the COVID pandemic is not the virus, or the vaccine. The nuclear heart of the COVID pandemic is the media and those who run it, who run it in a certain sense.

Do you doubt what I am saying? Ask yourself a simple question: if you didn't have access to the media and if there were no health measures, would you be able to say that the country was facing an epidemic? I mean, if you were walking around, if you were talking to your relatives, would you be able to say that there is an epidemic? I would not. I wouldn't. Because there is no such thing as an epidemic, or it's extremely marginal. During the Black Death, my village in Franche-Comté went from about 1700 inhabitants to less than 25. There were 6 families left. I can assure you that these 6 families did not need the public radio to realize that they were facing an epidemic. You did. Without the media and without government measures, our life would be exactly the same as it was 2 years ago. At most, some people would complain that the flu this year has been particularly aggressive. And that's about it.

This is for me the proof that this pandemic is, above all, a creation or a media-political exaggeration. In the French army's guidebooks or in NATO's documentation, all this is grouped in a very precise field of study, that of CIMIC, civil-military actions. In more understandable language, it is called PSYOPS, psychological warfare. The idea is simple: how, by non-military means, an army will win the hearts and minds of the population and get them to support it. In the Sahel, we have several programs of this type: distribution of equipment and gifts to the civilian population, campaign on social networks to change the perception of Malian civilians towards the French Army, etc. Not only are these techniques used, but they work very well, very very well.

This is why we have had full guidebooks on the subject in France since the 1970s, and why the Americans and the British have specialized units in this field. With enough resources, over the long term, PSYOPS can achieve exceptional results without having to deploy a single regiment on the ground. For me, the COVID pandemic falls exactly within the scope of PSYOPS. For me, we are in fact in a form of psychological warfare that is being waged against the French civilian population in order to make them believe :

• that it is facing a serious and existential threat (the virus)
• that the only way to deal with it is to sacrifice some freedoms to the government

I'm not saying there's some grand coordinated plan to wage psychological warfare on the French civilian population. I find that very hard to imagine. But I am saying that this is de facto what is happening, the French are being attacked by means of psychological warfare, the first of which is the media and its pornography of fear. Is this a conscious media treatment? Or is it totally unconscious and only guided by the will to make buzz, sell articles and get rich? I don't know, I'm not a journalist.

But what is certain is that the French population is under attack. Very clearly. In fact, it doesn't matter who is responsible and who is targeting what, I simply observe that our population is under attack, its mental representations are parasitized and attacked. And the effects of these attacks have been seen for two years: a total resignation of all moral and critical sense, an abandonment to the policies of the government.

That is what makes me say that our government is complicit and guilty. A government must have the foresight to see when its people are threatened and attacked, even when that attack is purely informational. And having noticed this threat, the government must act on behalf of the people. If it does not react, it is either incompetent or complicit. Our government does not react, but moreover it takes by itself to the attack. And it goes even further, not only does it contribute to bombing its own population. But it even sabotages its own army, by mentally bombarding its own army with the same messages. In naval parlance, this is called scuttling. In common parlance it is called a backstabbing. In universal language it is called treason.

I therefore accuse the political institutions of conducting a totally iniquitous health policy. A health policy that is deeply fracturing our army, destroying the confidence of men in their leaders, destroying our command culture, destroying regiments, destroying vocations. And above all, it is destroying men.

And this is as true in the military as it is in the civilian population. This way of doing things, these psychological attacks and this empire of lies is not only destroying the cohesion of regiments. It destroys the cohesion of families, the cohesion of couples, the cohesion of companies, the cohesion of groups of friends... The government is sowing the seeds of mistrust, sedition and war in its own country.

A soldier is a man who commits himself to fighting to return to a larger and more peaceful country. I can assure you that a soldier who returns today, in 2021, from a mission in the Sahel, cannot say that the country he returns to is more peaceful than it was a year ago. The military are men of peace, they want war today to have peace tomorrow. You are in the process of taking away this hope of peace and dividing the country for good. You are destroying the peace for which the military is fighting. This way of doing things is in any case very alarming. If it is unintentional, it is a sign of great irresponsibility. If it is voluntary, it is proof of a great darkness of soul. People who act in this way are hideous and vile, I dare to say it, knowing full well that I am talking about my superiors: you are hideous, vile, and if there is somewhere similar to Hell, believe me that your place there is already guaranteed.

I have only one final word to say, and I say it to military and civilian alike: this is a complicated situation. I am as lost as you are, as are many of my friends, colleagues, superiors and subordinates. I think we all feel the "winds of change", as the famous song of my youth says. But I cannot tell you where we are headed. Whether we are heading for a happy outcome or for even more difficult times. The only thing I can guarantee is that there are invariable facts: family, the values of work, friendship, love for your spouse and your children, all these little things will help you to cross the big waves and avoid being submerged. Do not succumb to divisions and diversions. Don't be overwhelmed by helplessness or indecision. You are still capable of making choices, and making the right choices at that. You just need to ask yourself the right questions. The right decisions are often hard to make. But they are worth it. So take care of yourself. And as they say in the paras: be and last (être et durer). Be what you are and have as your sole objective to get through all this, to leave something behind, to be stronger than the dark clouds that threaten us. Long live France.

Alice, military wife

→ Madam, can you introduce yourself?

My name is Alice, I am married with four children. My husband is a non-commissioned officer in the army in a RPIMa. Today, I would like to testify on my behalf, but also on behalf of other military wives. I think that some of them will recognize themselves in my words and I hope that I will convey their feelings as I should.

→ Madam, are you vaccinated? Why? What about your husband? What effects does the vaccination policy have on your family and your marriage?

I am pregnant with our fourth child. During my pregnancy, my husband and I did a lot of research, looking for testimonials from other pregnant women, to see how they handled it. What I saw really horrified me. I saw hundreds of women, testifying about miscarriages, for example. At first, I was not particularly opposed to vaccination, I was rather indifferent. But these testimonies made me and my husband have a lot of doubts. If a vaccine destroys the life of a little baby in the womb, it's probably not for our own good.

But at the same time I was also sensitive to the governmental campaigns and to what I heard in the media:

"If you are pregnant, you MUST be vaccinated otherwise you are an irresponsible mother who puts the health of her child in danger! »

During the ultrasounds at the hospital, I was entitled to guilt-tripping speeches like:

"What do you mean you're not vaccinated? You are aware that there is an epidemic and that your choices could kill your baby"...

I'm hardly exaggerating. This was a difficult time for my husband and me. All these contradictory injunctions were hard to handle.

In the end I was so pressured that I decided to give in. I made an appointment to be vaccinated, at that time the vaccination campaign was overloaded and my appointment was in two weeks. Except that during that time, two things happened that made me change my mind.

One day at noon, my husband called me from the regiment and said in a panic: «Cancel that appointment for the vaccination! Warrant Officer X's wife was vaccinated and she just had a miscarriage». She is the wife of a colleague of my husband, who was almost 6 months pregnant. I'll let you imagine what she went through and what her husband went through too...

Of course, this made me have a lot of doubts, but I refused to cancel my appointment, I told myself that I would wait and see, that I could always cancel at the last moment... I waited and I saw. Four days later, my cousin, who is a midwife, called me. We hadn't spoken in months, she just knew I was pregnant. She calls me and just leaves me this message: "Alice, I know you are pregnant, I hope the pregnancy is going well. I don't know if you've been vaccinated yet, but if you haven't, I think it's best that you don't. I just saw another miscarriage in a patient who just got vaccinated, maybe it's nothing to do with that, but it's the third one in ten days... Do as you please, but think about it."

Maybe it was just confirmation bias, but I took it as confirmation: I cancelled my appointment and my husband supported me. I decided that I would not get the vaccine, not during my pregnancy, not after. Neither would my children. And my husband didn't want to get the vaccine either. A vaccine that causes so much damage to destroy a virus that is almost harmless, it is not worth it.

My husband told his platoon commander, with whom he has a good relationship, that he did not want to be vaccinated. His platoon commander supported him by telling him that he was not the only one in this situation, but that vaccination was certainly going to become mandatory and that he would have to make a choice. Stay and get vaccinated or leave.

The lieutenant was right, because a few weeks later the news of mandatory vaccination for the military came out. My husband and his colleagues who were not vaccinated were pressured by their officers. The lieutenant tried to protect my husband, he tried to contact his friends at the SSA to see if he could find a dispensation for my husband, a medical exemption, even a fake one. In the end, my husband was summoned to the colonel of the regiment, who made him understand that if he did not give in, he would be discharged, without any benefits (i.e. without the retraining aid which is notably put in place for veterans who have done a long service). The goal was clearly to put a rope around his neck and make him give in. When my husband told his officers that he had a wife and four children to support, his CDU dared to say "all the more reason not to lose your job now". I found that horribly cynical, really.

But my husband followed a similar thought process. He doesn't want me to be vaccinated, he doesn't want our children to be vaccinated. But at the same time, we are both aware that a family of four children is no small thing... I suggested to my husband that he should get a part-time job outside of the army. I offered to do the same. But he refused. He said he would prefer our children to grow up with their parents, than between two nannies, in public school, surrounded by masked adults and raised by parents stressed out about not being able to make ends meet. We were at an impasse.

One morning, while I was taking care of the kids, I got a message from my husband who was at work. "I did it. I had to do it. Now it's settled. We'll talk about it tonight. I love you." I understood right away: he had taken the vaccine. At that moment I didn't know what to think. I didn't know if I should cry or thank him, or admire him, or curse him, or bless him. I didn’t know, so I did all that at once. In a way, I am very angry with him. But at the same time, I love him so much, I'm so grateful and so admiring of what he did. I really am. I'm more in awe of that tiny gesture he made for our family than I am of the fact that he jumped out of an airplane door several times... I knew I had an amazing husband, but this is another level.

My husband sacrificed himself in some ways. He put his health on the line and his morals on the line to protect me and the kids, to make sure we had everything we needed, to make sure we could get through this together. I think it cost him infinitely less to go to the Sahel than it did to reach out and get vaccinated. It may seem silly from the outside. But it's not just the medical issue, the risk of the vaccine. It's also the fact that he feels, by getting vaccinated, that he's selling his freedom, that he's letting himself be shackled, that he's participating in something infamous. He feels that he is surrendering and that he is a collaborator in some way. He feels that he is violating his word and his values. The risks he takes during a jump or an operation, he does it by choice, by pure will, he chooses to exercise his freedom towards a risky objective. In this case, it was the opposite, he felt as if he was abdicating his freedom.

He is a strong character, a Basque. He doesn't give up his values easily, he doesn't give in easily. But here he did it for us. I see more heroism and more love in this small gesture than in all our eleven years together.

So he sacrificed himself. So our life is back to normal, more or less. "The life before" as they say on TV when they taunt us by promising to give us back what they themselves took... But I am not stupid, I know very well that it is not exactly like before. My husband will never forget this. For him, it is a betrayal of the army and the state. He told me once: "You know, I did it, but one day I will clear my honor and take my revenge. I will find a way to make them pay for what they forced me to do and what they force people to do.» I don't know what that means. I don't want to know. I trust him, he's a strong family man and a good husband. He proved to me that he is responsible and will take care of us, I know he won't do anything stupid now.

But I know that for him, it will remain like a mark, like a wound. Like the tattoo of a slave. I know him well enough to know that he can live with it, but that he will keep his word and one day he will get his revenge, whatever form it takes. I've seen videos of my husband with his platoon at the shooting range, and I thought to myself, "Boy, I'd hate to be the wife of the Malian terrorist who's about to face my husband.» Now I'm thinking, "Boy, I wouldn't want to be the wife of the men who made those political decisions and made my husband angry»

What is certain is that our government has made a very bad decision in deciding to force people to be vaccinated. I am not a great philosopher, but it seems obvious to me that the issue has nothing to do with vaccines as a medical product. I think it's more a question of honour, values and freedoms. Of course, there is also the problem of the vaccine itself. But in the end, the real dilemma is that people refuse to submit to an imperative that they consider illegitimate and therefore illegal. It's as old as time, it's Antigone and it's Sainte Blandine.

By acting like this, the government has stepped on the tail of a sleeping lion. France has many faults, the French have many faults. But I believe that the French, and particularly French men, also have many qualities. And first of all, the first of them: a Frenchman loves his wife and children. To corner a father and a husband by threatening the center of his world is never a good solution. It's not a very clever idea. There are hundreds of thousands of families like mine who are pushed to the limit. In the army, of course. But in the whole of France too, in the civil service, among the little workers. Everywhere.

I do not know where this will lead. I think we're still a long way from seeing everything. Mandatory vaccination of military and caregivers may affect the entire population in my opinion. Or maybe not. I don't know. But I think the government has gone too far to back down. We're in a kind of death struggle now. Them against us. And as I said, when I see the strength of character of my husband, I would not like to be on the other side... I don't know what else to say, except that you have to stand firm. To the men, don't be afraid to be who you are and stand up for what you love. To women, remember that your first duty is to protect your children. If you have existential questions and moral dilemmas, maybe this will help you.

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CONCLUSION

We have chosen to let these men and women speak without taking away a word. We do not claim that these words represent a majority feeling in the population or in our armies. But these words represent a feeling and a state of mind that exists and that is far from anecdotal. It is a fact.

By giving a voice to these people, we wanted to give a platform "out of the box" to people who are not often heard to express themselves and yet whose voice is particularly important for the French. The French love their army. Or at least, they respect it and give it credit. The fact that our government and our media make a complete blackout on the movement of mistrust which agitates the army is problematic. The French have the right and the need to know how their army feels. Today, we allow them to have access to it.

Whatever one thinks of the views expressed in these little interviews, what emerges from all of this is easy enough to summarize: the vaccination policy desired by the French government is causing deep divisions and important moral dilemmas among people, pushing some to perform illegal acts, others to question their patriotism, and others to "submit" to the vaccination imperative while harboring bitter revenge ever since.

It is also clear that the issue of vaccines is now anything but a medical issue. In fact, it has become a purely political issue for a large part of the population. Opponents of compulsory vaccination have many reasons for holding this position. But for many, the main basis of their position is the realization that COVID is not a danger but a political pretext for social change, a political pretext that uses the vaccine as a symbolic means of dividing society into those who submit voluntarily, those who submit out of spite and those who refuse to submit.

This view can certainly be challenged for its oversimplification. But this view exists and is destined to become more and more widespread as the French government (and other governments) make a purely political response to a health problem. In doing so, they are feeding the vision outlined in the previous paragraph.

What is certain is that French society, like its neighbours, has never been so divided, with fractures that agitate families, professions and circles of friends. Is the government aware that this policy of polarization will have consequences that may be irreversible? Nothing is less certain. The French leaders seem to assume the logic of confrontation, and we see that civilians and soldiers seem ready to enter into this logic as well, to confront it. The time for national cohesion seems as far behind as the time for appeasement seems far ahead.

You can read the first part here.

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