Return of the Mask Stasi

When the shop girl who works in A-Z Fashions tested positive for COVID-19 last week, the first the other tenants knew of it was when the TV cameras parked up outside on High Street, with reporters asking how they felt about sharing facilities, such as bathrooms, with a person who is stricken.

With so many people these days being avowed leftists, quite a number of the building’s occupants would have been captivated, like stoned teenagers with ADHD, repetitively scanning and re-scanning bar codes, and uploading the minutiae of their lives and movements to Government Central via Big Brother’s tracer app. Imagine, then, their smugness and self-satisfaction evaporating as they waited in vain for the authorities to contact them; but the call never came.

If the app’s purpose isn’t to contact and warn those who have been exposed to COVID, then what is it for? Why are New Zealanders volunteering in droves to record their most personal details on a government database for an unclear purpose?

A-Z girl lives in an apartment on Vincent Street in the city, works in the city and attends neo-Marxist brain-washing sessions at former polytechnic AUT. All of these places are within a kilometre of each other and, from what we know of Miss COVID’s activities, she moves about them on foot – excepting that A-Z Fashions is now closed and her contagious personage has been bundled off the streets by the people who run the government’s medical gulags.

Public transport did not play a significant role in this case, and it probably played no role at all. So why has the Ardern government responded to the latest community ‘outbreak’ by introducing face masks on public transport under COVID Alert Level 1? And why is it that Cabinet, rather than legislating the change through the debating chamber, has chosen to rush it out as a Public Health Order, thus evading due democratic process and scrutiny?

The reason is two-fold. Firstly, narcissist Ardern simply isn’t getting enough attention under Alert Level 1, which for most people has become the ‘new normal’. Under Level 1’s relatively modest restrictions the populace has been largely successful in getting on with life without undue government interference.

Ardern craves attention like a naughty child and insists upon visibly impacting her subjects’ lives whether they like it or not. Although most, apparently, do. Mask wearing provides her with psychological sustenance in the same way that compulsory civilian attendance at one of Kim Jong-un’s military parades would please the North Korean authoritarian maharishis.

Second, and more important, is the advancement of the slow social revolution otherwise known as the great communist take-over. JC wrote an interesting piece in The BFD this week describing further gaslighting by University of Canterbury academics who accuse Ardern of being ‘centrist’ and promoting a continuity agenda, rather than being ‘transformative’ by directly attacking the means of production.

The reason that such sentiment, commonly expressed by our left-wing media, is whitewash, is that communists no longer operate by striking at capital. Look at the People’s Republic of China. It operates on a semi-private business model with the Maoist State in umbrella control and openly promoting capital flows through cronyism.

The Chinese Communist Party changed direction more than 30 years ago, preferring to maintain its machinery of command at the social level. This it achieves through personal surveillance and direct intervention in the lives of the plebiscite. While ‘direct intervention’ includes violence when necessary, the preferred method is actually via ‘encouragement’ and ‘education’.

Is it any wonder, then, that Hipkins’ roll-out of masks, and his touting of the government tracer app to become compulsory, is being achieved using exactly these same two words. Masks ‘will be required,’ says Hipkins, but ‘we’re not expecting bus drivers to … police the measures.’ Instead, police will be ‘out and about’ taking an ‘educate and encourage’ approach which ‘will not at this stage be punitive’. And here’s the threat: at the next stage, at a time of the authorities’ choosing, it likely will be.

Masks are expected to be rolled out nation-wide. Meanwhile Auckland Transport has literally jumped on board, ‘suggesting’ that they also be worn at bus stops while waiting for public transport, and by people transiting through its facilities. Auckland Council would, of course, like masks to be worn by all pedestrians on all city streets.

This amounts to nothing less than a silent cultural revolution in which our rulers assume control of the personal aspects of daily life through the vehicle of COVID, using public safety measures as a pretence. Individual responsibility for wellbeing is abrogated and passed to the state in a manner never seen before outside of wartime, and with this abrogation comes a stripping away of personal autonomy in what is in fact a seizure of power without blood.

This government has already given us, in the most Orwellian terms possible, ‘tax is love’. Now with ‘Unite Against COVID’ we have its equivalent: masks are kindness. ‘Reading between the lines’ of this double-speak we know, though, that it cannot be true. Masks are actually the fascist instrument of a new totalitarian regime.