Branded by the Combine (Part 2)

“We're caught in a trap, I can't walk out.”

Firstly I need to explain the title of this Traitor to the Combine series, “Branded by the Combine”. (You can read Part 1 here.) It is influenced by a TV programme I have been watching on and off called Yellowstone. This show has been running for several years, but I am only a few episodes into the first season. So I am way behind.

In Yellowstone Kevin Costner plays a modern-day rancher named John Dutton. Dutton lives in a remote part of the USA, Montana I think, where he owns a lot of land and a lot of cattle. Dutton is a powerful figure who treats his family, his employees, and everyone around him as flunkies who must do his bidding. Even state politicians defer to him. The impression is being fostered in the viewer’s mind that Dutton is like a medieval baron riding roughshod over the peasants; or maybe a Mafia kingpin whom everyone is afraid of. Tony Soprano comes to mind.

But now to the point.

Although there are lots of sub-plots in this entertaining series, there is one in particular I want to focus on here. A few of Dutton’s ranch-hands are being branded with the same ‘Y’ logo used to mark Dutton’s cattle. Not many are asked to submit to this awful ritual. (Yes, brandees must consent before the hot iron is applied.) It seems to be confined to loners who have some prison-time behind them. So far Dutton himself is not depicted doing any of this human branding. However it seems unlikely that it could happen without the big boss’s knowledge if not his outright approval. The implication is that, just like the branded cattle, these particular humans are owned by John Dutton.

The series came into my head as I was writing Part 1. As I argued last time, we are all ‘branded’ as soon as we enter the world. Not literally like in Yellowstone. But the result is the same. We are owned by the Combine just as those cowboys are the property of John Dutton.

There is one big difference though. Unlike the Yellowstone brandees a new-born baby like yours truly could not consent to being entered on the Combine’s register. In my case that was arranged by my parents, just like they were presumably registered by their fathers and mothers, and so on back through the family line.

But when did this start, and why? Surely there must have been a time when a woman could give birth without any ‘official’ record being simultaneously created? Yes there was, and not so long ago either.

By the mid-19th century this country had been well and truly absorbed into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. However we were not quite the same as Yorkshire or even Scotland. Although every part of the UK was ruled from Westminster in London, Ireland had its own administrative centre in Dublin Castle. The head man here was known as the Chief Secretary. He sat in the cabinet in London and was answerable to the British government

In February 1863 the Chief Secretary for Ireland was Sir Robert Peel (1822-1895), son of the famous Prime Minister of the same name. In that month Peel introduced the Registration of Births and Deaths (Ireland) Bill on the floor of the British parliament. The bill would extend a law already in place in the rest of the UK. Peel told the House that:

Ireland is almost the only civilized country in the world where no… system of civil registration of births and deaths exists.¹

But why did the State want to record details of every child born in Ireland? According to Peel “many” benefits would arise from this legislation, but he mentioned only one: the promotion of what he called “sanitary reforms”.² A month later, in March 1863, Peel explained what he meant by this phrase when he introduced a bill to tighten up regulations governing the vaccination of Irish children.

Within the last few years there had been a great falling off in the number of children vaccinated in Ireland, and he proposed to assimilate the law in Ireland to that in England, employing for the purpose the machinery of the Registration of Births and Deaths Bill, which had recently passed through the House.³

Both Acts, registration and vaccination, were designed to catch Irish parents in a pincer-like grip.⁴ By placing a legal obligation on them to register the birth of a new child, the State would have a list of future citizens whom it could vaccinate. It made the vaccination programme a lot easier to run. A modern commentator has described how the system worked:

The registrar was informed of all births in the district, and he gave parents and guardians written notice to immunise and details of where vaccination was available locally. He received vaccine certificates from doctors and used these to compile a register of successful vaccinations, kept alongside the civil register. He could compare the two registers to track non-compliance, of which he would inform the Poor Law guardians.⁵

That is how the Combine nobbled Ireland long before any of us was born. Around the same time a centralised register of new births was being foisted on the inhabitants of other countries, like the USA. But internationally ‘progress’ has been slow. According to a recent source:

Across the world more than 290 million children (or about 45 percent) under the age of five do not officially exist...most of those children live in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.⁶

Apparently a total of 1.1 billion men, women, and children are still unregistered in many Third World countries.⁷ But for how much longer? Since 1990 virtually every country on the planet has signed up to the United Nations’ ‘Convention on the Rights of the Child’, article 7 of which states that “The child shall be registered immediately after birth”.⁸

So is it too late for us, whether we live in Ireland or anywhere else in the First World? We have not only been figuratively branded through being entered on the Combine’s register. Most of us have been literally branded too, if we count the marks left on our arms by the various jabs we have received since childhood.

The good news is that we can rid our bodies of the poisons injected into us through vaccination. There are no magic potions or complicated steps to follow. It might take a while and it is actually quite boring, but a combination of plain food, moderate exercise, and fresh air (plus a dollop of self-belief) are all that is needed.

Believe it or not, that is the easy bit. What about actually de-registering from the system completely? Is that possible? Theoretically perhaps. But who in their right mind is going to voluntarily become a social outcast, unable to do any of the things open to those with an ‘official’ identity?

Perhaps a few women in our part of the world give birth in secret, never informing the authorities. Those children grow up in a world run by the Combine, a world that demands proof of registration before allowing them to go to school, get a job, leave the country, etc. When they reach adulthood would those unregistered people resent their parents for preventing them participating in society?

This is our dilemma. We are caught in a trap sprung before we could work out these things for ourselves. Now, as adults fully assimilated into the Combine, most of us don’t see any reason to leave. Even if we want to get out, we dare not exit the Combine’s clutches because we fear jumping “out of the frying pan into the fire”.

But life is not a metaphor. This is real. The Great Reset looms. A stark decision awaits us all. Will we stay or will we jump?

1. Hansard, HC Deb 9 Feb 1863, vol. 169, col 205.

2. Hansard, HC Deb 9 Feb 1863, vol. 169, col 204.

3. Hansard, HC Deb 23 Mar 1863, vol. 169, cols 1792-3.

4. You can read more about the history of vaccinations in ‘VIRUSES, VARIOLATION & VACCINES’, which you will find in Into the Memory Hole: Despatches from the “world of lies”, pp. 233-259. An earlier version is free to read in History in the Making.

5. Fiona Fitzsimons, ‘Kindred Lines: Registers of successful vaccinations’, History Ireland, 28/3 (May/June 2020).

6. Susan J. Pearson, The Birth Certificate: An American History (N. Carolina, 2021), p. 3.

7. Ibid.

8. UN, Convention on the Rights of the Child (1990), p. 3.