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“This outbreak has emboldened every authoritarian-loving misfit with delusions of adequacy,” observes columnist Rita Panahi. She’s talking about the Andrews government in Victoria, but her piquant phrase might as well be the mission statement for the Ardern government’s response to the Wuhan Flu – and for politicians around the world.
Around the worlds, the incompetent and the two-bit despots (often both at once) are using the excuse of the Chinese pandemic to crush fundamental liberties.
One of the few positive aspects of this present crisis is that some politicians are finally revealing their true authoritarian colours. “Our liberties and human rights need to be changed, curtailed, and infringed – use whatever word you want”. Those are the remarkable words of London mayor Sadiq Khan just days ago.
What’s really remarkable, in fact, is that Khan’s naked authoritarianism isn’t really that remarkable at all, right now.
According to British journalist Peter Hitchens, governments all over the world are currently “resorting to risky, frantic measures”, including “the curfew, the presumption of guilt and the power of arbitrary arrest”.
Hitchens joins the growing chorus of dissent, warning that panic and official repression will do far more harm than good – as we’ve seen in past panics from Y2K to Fukushima. In each case, a real but manageable threat was blown out of all proportion by the incompetent and the power-hungry. The Chinese virus is no different.
John Ionnidis is the highly regarded professor of medicine, of epidemiology and population health, of biomedical data science, and of statistics at Stanford University in California[…]authoritatively stated: “Reported case fatality rates, like the official 3.4 per cent rate from the World Health Organisation, cause horror and are meaningless … The real rate, adjusted from wide age range, could be as low as 0.05 per cent and as high as one per cent”[…]
A very similar opinion is expressed by the celebrated Dr David L. Katz, who[…in] a significant article published in The New York Times in late March, Dr Katz contends that “our fight against coronavirus’ may end up being worse than the disease”[…]
By taking an “at war” approach to fighting coronavirus – widespread shutdowns and isolation of the entire population – rather than a “surgical strike” approach focusing on the truly vulnerable, Dr Katz believes that “we have set ourselves on the path of uncontained viral contagion and monumental collateral damage to our society and economy[…]the social, economic and public health consequences of this near-total meltdown of normal life – schools and business closed, gatherings banned – will be long-lasting and calamitous, possibly even graver than the direct toll of the virus itself. The stock market will bounce back in time, but many businesses never will. The unemployment, impoverishment and despair likely to result will be public health scourges of the first order”, he says.
Despite the protestations of leaders that their decisions are purely, unemotionally “science-based”, there has been an obvious pattern of oblivious complacency followed by blind panic – and draconian clampdowns. Just a couple of weeks ago, governor Andrew Cuomo was urging New Yorkers to go out, visit Chinatown, party on as normal. Jacinda Ardern spent six weeks refusing to close New Zealand’s borders or impose any more than the most cursory screening of arrivals. She also persisted, until the very last minute, with holding a planned mass indoor gathering in Christchurch.
Governments are acting less on a well-informed strategy and more on a panicked desperation to be seen to be “taking action”. As we see, for too many of them, “taking action” dovetails handily with their already barely-concealed authoritarian inclinations. The same government that was already overseeing uniformed police raiding private homes over legally-owned bunny guns has switched neatly to detaining citizens en masse in their own homes.
The same government which harassed citizens for perfectly legal free speech on social media has overnight created as Stasi-land style snitch culture. “Sadly”, writes Panahi, “There are plenty of mindless sheep who embrace every new restriction and can’t wait to dob in their fellow citizens for perceived wrongdoings.”
These draconian political measures provide a pretext for the authoritarian takeover of civil society that not only unleashes unprecedented economic mayhem, but it also threatens the very enjoyment of our fundamental rights and freedoms. We need to stop blindly trusting in whatever our governments say, and recover the old precautionary view that, indeed, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
More importantly, as Brendan O’Neill writes, we need to remember everything that is being said and done by these anti-democratic creeps. Because, when the virus crisis is over, there must be a reckoning.
“These people have got to go.”
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