Studying 20th century history at university, I often wondered what it must be like to watch everything around you slide into the “Dark Valley” of totalitarianism.
I wonder no more. Because I’m living it.
Of course, it’s not on the scale of a Chinese in 1949 watching the Communists come to the village and the “speak bitterness” meetings and “struggle sessions” begin. It’s something much more subtle but none the less sinister.
The rise of health fascism – for our own good of course.
A friend of mine who lived in England during the “Diana mourning” craze said later, “I got an inkling of what fascism must have felt like”. There was something deeply alarming in the way millions were swept up in a craze of ostentatious, public “grief” – and how anyone who didn’t join in was treated with suspicion and hostility.
But that was nothing compared to the past year of health fascism.
If there is anything we have learned with absolute certainty over the past year and a half it is this: power-hungry rulers will use a crisis – or if need be, create a crisis – to keep the masses in complete subservience. They will take away their basic liberties and human rights, but seek to assure them that all this is for ‘their own good.’
Every dictator has sworn, hand on heart, that they were only concerned with “the greater good”. Which is their licence for tyranny.
It also makes for a fantastic excuse for every petty bureaucrat to become drunk on sudden, unearned, absolute power.
In the name of keeping us safe we have seen all sorts of health officials who delight in pushing tyranny on the masses. Consider just two more recent examples of this from – you guessed it – the state of Victoria. The first is this:
The state’s coronavirus commander has been slammed for telling Victorians they should “call out” people who have the sniffles – and tell them to get tested. It comes as Victoria recorded one new case of Covid overnight — a primary close contact who was already quarantining during their infectious period[…]
Yesterday Mr Weimar controversially said people should ask strangers if they have been tested if they were “walking around sniffling”.
The irony of someone named Weimar asking citizens to snitch on each other needs no elaboration.
Speaking of Weimar…
The Andrews government is secretly negotiating with three crossbenchers to introduce specific pandemic laws that would permanently replace controversial state of emergency powers and significantly change the way the state manages COVID-19 this year[…]the government is designing the new laws to cover all future pandemics, not just the coronavirus pandemic.
At the risk of hyperbole, the parallels with other elected dictators who first declared a “state of emergency” and then used political chicanery to make their emergency powers permanent should alarm all citizens of an erstwhile democracy.
The 2014 film I, Robot had almost nothing to do with Isaac Asimov’s actual stories, but it certainly has some things that reflect an alarming light on COVID fascism.
As they were rounding citizens up and telling them to get off the streets, [the robots] told them things like this:
“Please remain indoors – this is for your own protection.”
“Please return to your homes.”
“We are attempting to avoid human losses during this transition.”
“You have been deemed hazardous – will you comply?”
And then we have these words uttered by VIKI (Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence), the central artificial intelligence computer of U.S. Robotics:
“You cannot be trusted with your own survival.”
Bill Muehlenberg
You’d best start believing in science-fiction dystopias and health fascism – because you’re living in one.
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