THE HEXAGON OF TYRANNY - FROM A KIWI ANGLE

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"We are facing a six-headed monster of tyranny.  Freedom is on the line, as Western, so-called democratic governments have trashed our basic human rights.  How much do we know, or care?" asks Paul Collits.

At Te Hauke in Hawke's Bay, a roadside sign at an organic vege grower's reads: "WHEN INJUSTICE BECOMES LAW, RESISTANCE BECOMES A DUTY". That organic vege grower (who by the way, has deserted the Greens) would have something in common with Sydney writer Paul Collits, as he has with me. 

In the interests of resisting tyranny and injustice, at St Mary of the Angels Wellington in the Archdiocese of Mordor (Wellington) where Cardinal call-me-John Dew has banned Communion on the tongue, at the Vigil Mass for the March for Life I presented at the end of the Communion queue for Holy Communion, on my knees, before the celebrant, Bishop Michael Gielen. 

Bishop Michael Gielen 

I've heard good things of Bishop Gielen, the 'baby bishop' of the NZCBC, and I had a presentiment that he wouldn't deny my right to the Sacrament. He gave me just the hint of a smile, and with that, Our Lord. Thank God for good bishops! Pray for good bishops! 

What's more, this morning once again at SMOA, where the parish newsletter announced sternly that there would be no Communion on the tongue, my daughter and I presented (I went first) again on our knees, to Father Peter McAfee SM. 

Once again, I had hopes. I'd prayed myself, and asked a holy friend to pray, for the priest who would say Mass this morning, and was privileged to hear a jolly good sermon on the beginnning of all the Gospels - St Mark's; a history lesson and solid orthodox doctrine too, bidding us to repent and confess our sins before Christmas. 

But as I'm still in Welly, I'll yield the floor now to my good friend Paul. 

The West now faces a hexagon of tyranny.  “Demonic” tyranny as Laura Perrins has called it.  For it is evil.

In full view, with no attempt by the ruling class to hide it.  And faithfully implemented by elected governments, ...

Like Ardern's Labour Government. 

... with only a few scattered voices raised in opposition to the emerging autocracy.  The great oppression of 2020 seems to have been welcomed by the masses ...

Half NZ's population (if the votes were counted and reported accurately - one still may hope that not 50% of Kiwis are 'useful idiots'.  

 ... with the only demur coming from those who argue that governments should have been more oppressive, earlier, and for longer.

Jean Jacques Rousseau famously (if misogynistically) said:

Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.

Paraphrasing Rousseau, we might say in 2020 that we were born free and everywhere now we live in the chains of Covid.

A hexagon of tyranny?  A hexagon is a polygon with six sides.  There are six dimensions to our newly arrived Covid-driven totalitarianism.  They are:

• Ignoring science;
• Lockdowns;
• Propaganda;
• Making protest illegal;
• Censorship of alternate views ...

Ahem. I think the word is 'alternative'.

• Freedom (vaccine) passports.

They may grow, of course, to even worse, perhaps octagonal, proportions, in time. 

Every one of these is a real and significant attack on freedom and fundamental rights.  In an informed and engaged liberal democracy, any one of these would normally give rise to popular unease, social protest, media pushback and vigorous political opposition.  You would think, but you would be wrong.

It would be bad enough if we had even one of these six forms of oppression.  But we have all six at once.

We do not have much resistance, either.

Instead, we have had from the state and its surrogates what Ivor Cummins has termed the “hysteria machine at full rev”.  And from a duped populace, we have had inexplicable ignorance, naivete, compliance, submission, a madness of crowds.  In short, the behaviour mostly associated with lemmings, or children in thrall to the Pied Piper.

Jonathan Barr has reported on the UK Government’s declaration that British families can actually meet for Christmas, with rules of course:

As the Mail on Sunday‘s political columnist Dan Hodges pointed out on Twitter, 12 months ago the idea that the Government would be “allowing” us to spend Christmas with our families and loved ones would have been unthinkable. Have we really been so cowed by the Government’s lurch into authoritarianism that this is good news?

One intuits that it would be welcomed as such in NZ, by Ardern's propagandists at TvOne 'News' at least. 

What would normally be thought of as unthinkable attacks on basic freedoms – speech, movement, association and responsibility for our own health – have been visited upon us with minimum outcry.

Shall we take a look at them in more detail?

Ignoring Science

Governments have been insisting (endlessly) that they are simply “following the science”. 

This is rubbish.  It is disturbing that “science” has been invoked in the cause of a quack science, crass political power grab.

It has been a double whammy.  Governments have been accepting without challenge bogus science, while ignoring real science.  All in the cause of politically driven medicine.

Apart from the fact that the very notion of “the science” (singular) is an emblematic disavowal of the scientific method, the evidence is in that governments are ignoring good science.  They are ignoring evidence that their policies are misplaced.  On masks.  On distancing.  On mass testing.  On vaccines.  On the efficacy of locking people up in their homes. 

Whatever the reasons for the initial March 2020 panic, ...

Like in NZ, serving as camouflage for the Abortion Legislation Act, which so many voters still don't know about, because they're kept in the dark by Ardern's media. 

... governments have NO excuse for ignoring the ample evidence about Covid that has since emerged.  Governments have ignored evidence in favour of self-protection.  Governments lied.  People died (not from Covid).  Economies died.  Freedom died.

Scientists who have presented contrary evidence and questioned the official line have been silenced, cancelled, ignored and insulted, by the state and its cheer squads in the legacy media and Big Tech.  World leaders in the fields of virology, immunology and cognate disciplines.  Carl Heneghan.  Mike Yeadon.  Sunetra Gupta.  Sucharit Bakdi.  John Ioannidis.  Karol Sikora.  These guys have forgotten more about coronaviruses than the politicised goons advising Western governments will ever know.

This is simply a disgrace.  As RJ Quinn has noted:

What if I told you that thousands of lives could be saved during this pandemic if we followed the science?

Instead of following the science, governments around the world are implementing the exact opposite of effective measures to combat the pandemic.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-greatest-scandal-of-our-lifetime/

The rejection of contrary evidence, repeatedly presented in compelling fashion by world experts in peer-reviewed journals, that the official approach is wrong and dangerous, speaks to an anti-science approach.  Governments are merely circling the wagons, while claiming that they are being scientific.  Public health officials on the government payroll, paid to toe the line, simply echo the party position.  This is what public officials do.  They are embedded.  If they question anything, they will be sacked or silenced.  Whatever this is, it ain’t science.

Ivor Cummins has belled the cat.

https://thefatemperor.com/ep77-is-lockdown-science-based-ivor-cummins-on-mark-dolans-talk-radio-show/

Governments have endlessly rolled out their “scientific” advisers.  They have led press conferences.  They have become minor media celebrities.

What do you mean, 'minor'? You can't get more major as a media celeb than Jacinda Jackboot Ardern.  

 This has created an impression of science leading policy.  A veneer of evidence-based decision-making.  Claiming that we have faced a global emergency and claiming that policy has “followed the science” have together amounted to a hoax perpetrated on the peoples of the Western world.  What has been foisted upon us is safetyist ideology, not science.

Lockdowns

Lockdowns have been one of the greatest attacks on freedom in history.  All done on our watch.  We should be ashamed of ourselves for letting this happen.

Panicked governments followed China.  It is as simple as that.  According to the Dubai Medical Journal:

China’s Response to the COVID-19 Outbreak [is] A Model for Epidemic Preparedness and Management

 

Ardern makes a deal with China's Premier Li Keqiang

There you have it.  We all followed China, the source of the outbreak and the country that enforced a brutal lockdown (a lockup) of its citizens as only China can.  A lockdown that would make Belt-and-Road man Daniel Andrews salivate.

All countries except the heroic Sweden and a couple of others have followed the Chinese Pied Piper. 

Lockdowns are an act of totalitarianism.  They are an attack on freedom.  That they have been proven (by science) to be totally ineffectual has not made a jot of difference to those committed to it.  Indeed, as Ivor Cummins has repeatedly pointed out, for forty years till March 2020 world public health experts (representing “the science”) have preached the uselessness and the harms of lockdowns.  Including the much fawned-upon World Health Organisation.  They were pressured by China to change their tune, but fortunately medical experts around the world have continued to publish papers demonstrating, despite the Sweden-haters among us, that lockdowns make no difference whatsoever to Covid outcomes.

https://www.aier.org/article/lockdowns-and-mask-mandates-do-not-lead-to-reduced-covid-transmission-rates-or-deaths-new-study-suggests/

Lockdowns have included curfews, restrictions on movement, the crushing of businesses through regulatory mandates, border closures, overseas travel bans, imprisoning students at universities, bans on exercise, household detention, banning Church services, cancelling weddings and funerals and ...

 Introducing ...

sinister contact tracing.

Worryingly, the media have only become interested in lockdowns when they are seen to go “too far” or when they have involved government bungling.  The imposition of Victoria’s severe and prolonged tyranny has gained attention the world over. 

 

Victorian fuzz arrest Zoe-Lee Buhler for posting online about a lockdown protest

 

But every other state of Australia has done similar, worthless things, only to have escaped media scrutiny.  Forty-three US States have locked down.  Some leaders, like the talentless NSW Premier, have even attracted praise simply for not being as bad as some of her peers.  Media observers wrongly believe that governments can suppress viruses, and that some are just better at it than others.

There has been no analysis by governments of the impacts of lockdown, despite evidence that lockdowns cause catastrophic harm to individuals, families and communities.  None whatsoever.  Why would they?  It might be embarrassing.

It has been up to investigative journalists to quantify systematically (and using government statistics) the impacts of the disastrous lockdowns of 2020.  One such example has occurred in the UK Daily Mail, and not before time.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8975765/The-true-cost-Covid-19-Read-RUTH-SUNDERLANDs-terrifying-dossier-economic-damage.html

In addition, the excellent Ross Clark has called out some of the lies told by government about the health threats of Covid and the state’s response to them.  Ross Clark is one of the world’s greatest fact checkers in relation to lockdown.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8971669/What-DONT-tell-Covid-facts-twisted-strike-fear-hearts.html

The British Government has simply ignored this story.  One government tweet called it “misleading”, then they took down the tweet.  Perhaps they are the ones doing the misleading.

Far too few Australians have beaten the drum.  Too few Australians even see lockdown as a freedom issue.  Yes, they, like Americans and Britons, do work-arounds and ignore the rules selectively, where and how they can.  But where is the public anger in the democratic West at the greatest threat to our rights in anyone of our lifetimes?

Propaganda

Governments have been at pains to create a Covid “narrative”, to press that narrative whenever and wherever possible, to enlist surrogates to press their messaging home, and always and everywhere to seek to suppress dissident views.  We could call it “project fear”.  And it has been beyond successful, with people who have been scared witless begging for ever greater, longer lockdowns.

The use of propaganda to enforce the destruction of our freedoms is beneath contempt.  It is also alarming.  It is something that Western countries often criticise China for doing.

 

Supermarket shopping in the UK

While the state has clamped down on the free speech of its citizens (see below), and sought to stop people from telling the truth about Covid, the willingness of the state and its surrogates to tell lies has been breathtaking during the Covid epidemic.  Let us be generous and call the government propaganda we have witnessed “misleading”.  They have:

• Massively exaggerated the scare;
• Kept important information from the public;
• Politicised bureaucracies and weaponised them;
• Used soft-sell advertising to nudge citizens in the direction of fear – ‘we are all in this together”;

In NZ, we're a 'team of 5 million'. Make that 4999999.  

• Used statistics selectively;
• Normalised the abnormal;
• Used language to embed messaging, e.g. “you will die”, you will “kill granny”, “stay at home and save lives”;
• Accused people of being “selfish”, being the problem if they disobey the rules, aka gaslighting;
• Denied instances of their own incompetence and maladministration;
• Used words like “crisis” and “pandemic” in order to create fear; and
• Insisted that there is no alternative to lockdowns. 

Information kept from the public includes the fact that there is no evidence that either masks or lockdowns work, that cases are not the same as infections, that the idea of a “second wave” is bogus.  They have failed to disclose the true economic and health costs of lockdowns.  They have failed to acknowledge that many more will die from non-Covid causes as a result of lockdowns.

The propaganda from governments has been relentless, and often subtle.  Taxpayer funded, and billed as “Government Information”, of course.  And supported religiously by the legacy media and by the global elites.  The media have been useful idiots, ...

 In NZ they're paid to be. To the tune of $50m.

... the elites much more.

It works a treat with the low-information citizen.  Lord Sumption in the UK has been a constant critic of the UK Government’s approach.

By using “propaganda”, he said, the government had “to some extent been able to create its own public opinion – fear was deliberately stoked up by the government”.

The infomercials, the carefully orchestrated corporate messaging everywhere you go, ...

In NZ, even on motorway signs 

... the media compliance, the endless reporting of the casedemic at the top of the news, the press conferences with premiers and their ubiquitous officials, the guilt tripping of “covidiots”, the nightly reporting of death counts.  Big brother would be proud of the messaging, the narrative. 

1984 with Big Tech.

Peter Hitchens has argued that “all politically important statistics are fiddled”.  Well, it has certainly been the case with Covid.

The propaganda has worked.  The punters believe we face an existential crisis, and that conformism is required. 

Lord Sumption again:

The British public has not even begun to understand the seriousness of what is happening to our country. Many, perhaps most of them don’t care, and won’t care until it is too late. They instinctively feel that the end justifies the means, the motto of every totalitarian government which has ever been … The government has discovered the power of public fear to let it get its way.

If the Gummint says it is true, then it must be true.  The hysteria machine has been brilliantly effective.  In the meantime, our rights and freedoms have eroded beyond that which those watching events closely could ever have feared.

Making Protest Illegal

Making protest illegal has been a masterstroke of the Covid state.  It has been achieved on the flimsiest of constitutional grounds, through ministerial fiat barely recognisable as belonging in a liberal democracy, and on the pretext of guaranteeing public safety.  For the sake of protection from a virus which will cause no harm – I am sorry but this must be endlessly repeated till it sinks in – to ninety-nine per cent of the population.

And chillingly, this is all done under the cover of protecting us all from “disinformation”.  Physical protest and online dissent are fundamental democratic rights.  Crushing them on the back of safetyism has been a core strategy of the Covid autocracy.

How better to silence dissent?  All on the back of constitutionally questionable, but unquestioned, authority.  Make it out to be war, then dissidents can be conveniently portrayed as quislings.  Covid quislings.

The Brits implemented ten thousand pound fines.  Made high profile arrests.  Employed brutal police enforcement to crush resistance.  The Victoria Police are now world famous for arresting pregnant mothers, for wrestling protesters to the ground with extreme force, for harassing grannies in parks, for confiscating mobile phones, for strutting their totalitarian stuff on Mainstreet, for turning up unannounced at the homes of dissenters.

Political and police enforcement has been selective, of course.  Mysteriously, polite lockdown meetings and marches are deemed to be sinister while non-socially-distanced, neo-marxist protests are fine.  The police will even take a knee with you.  Stopping marches by people who merely believe in freedom and fining organisers with steep fines is ok, though, in a free society.

Worryingly, one British lockdown opponent has voiced the view:

I suspect any ban on protesting will remain after lockdown …

This has been real, and successful.  The Covid thuggocracy.  Smashing opposition to the Covid state. 

As we know, the most successful dictatorships in history – many of them in the twentieth century – have survived through the silencing of dissent.  The greatest freedom fighters have been those, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who have called this out, often at risk to their own lives.  Others, like the late Sir Roger Scruton, did similar heroic work by actually organising dissent, in Scruton’s case, behind the Iron Curtain.  Those who have been opposing the tyranny of lockdowns may, one day, come to be seen in a similar light.

Censorship of Alternate Views

 Um, 'alternative', Paul.

Big Tech has been an effective ally of the Covid state in enforcing the official narrative.  Platform companies have censored dissenting Covid views, routinely and with intent.  Government has watched on, without lifting a hand to support freedom of speech.

This Covid censorship crushes views that challenge the official narrative.  That governments have simply disregarded this censorship suggests that they have ignored it in order to profit from it.  This is repugnant to those who cherish freedom.

This has been death by algorithms for scientific dissent.  Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg call this “fact checking”, “community standards guidelines” and “misinformation”.  Hence world experts in epidemiology, pathology and other Covid-relevant disciplines have been silenced online.  The eminent authors of the Great Barrington Declaration were deemed persona non grata, and cancelled.  Silenced.  Anyone suggesting a “cure” for Covid other than that promised by Big Pharma and Bill Gates in the form of mandated vaccines. 

Anti-lockdown Facebook pages have been taken down.  Google has buried dissenting views, deliberately.  This has been demonstrated time and again.  As has YouTube, whose tools of suppression including shadow banning and the actual removal of video posts.  Just ask Dr Mike Yeadon, who recently had an interview taken down.

Dr Mike Yeadon has argued that the British government is using “lethally incompetent” scientific advice in its Covid-19 response. YouTube has mysteriously taken down a video in which the immunologist explains his point.

https://www.azerbaycan24.com/en/youtube-takes-down-lockdown-sceptical-interview-with-renowned-immunologist-dr-mike-yeadon-for-violating-terms-of-service/

Professor Carl Henighan of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (an irony here) is merely the latest.  He and a colleague wrote an article about the recent landmark Danish study, itself suppressed until a week ago, and this was the result:

Here’s what happened when I posted our latest @spectator article to Facebook – I’m aware this is happening to others – what has happened to academic freedom and freedom of speech? There is nothing in this article that is ‘false’.

The article is here.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/do-masks-stop-the-spread-of-covid-19-

The article and the study concluded that there was “no significant effect [on Covid] for mask wearers”.  Masks, along with distancing, mass testing, QR tracing and confinement, and (coming) compulsory vaccines, are core elements of the state’s Covid oppression.  Anything or anyone suggesting that any or all of these are bogus must be stopped, at all costs.  These messages might get out.  They might cause cynicism among the citizenry.  Dissent.  We cannot allow that.

One noted lockdown critic on British Talk Radio has advised that he is now being “followed” on Twitter by one of the UK’s police forces.  There is no evidence, so far, that they are physically following him.  He is merely a person of interest.  Problematic.  Concerning.

There has been not a murmur from Western governments against this censorship of scientific truth.  Of course not.  The censorship has worked in their favour.  It is yet another ace for governments to play.  This has been perhaps the greatest threat to freedom of expression in the West in our lifetimes.

Some political parties merely want to go in harder to kill freedom of speech and freedom of conscience.  Like the UK Labour Party, which wants to force social media companies to remove anti-Covid vaccine content:

Anti-vaccination content on social media is “poison” and “garbage” and should be “stamped out”, Labour has said.

With hopes rising of a COVID-19 jab being rolled out by the end of the year, the opposition has called for emergency legislation to remove “dangerous anti-vax content”, such as posts against the use of vaccines.

The party wants the government to bring forward laws that would include financial and criminal penalties for companies that fail to act against such content.

Shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth told Sky News’ Sophy Ridge on Sunday that “dangerous nonsense” is being spread on social media by people who are against inoculations and it “erodes trust” in vaccines.

There is “poison, garbage (and) conspiracy theories” online and “it’s all nonsense”, he added.

Mr Ashworth said Labour wanted to work with the government to tackle the issue.

Then there is the UK’s top counter terrorism cop calling for a “national debate” on whether expressing doubts about Covid vaccines should be “criminalised”.

https://www.rt.com/uk/507207-vaccine-hesitancy-terrorism-question-basu/

Would the claim by Ivor Cummins that vaccines for Covid are simply “a placebo” be criminalised under British Labour?  Most people would think, I hope, that social media censorship has already gone way too far.

Vaccine Passports

Perhaps the most chilling development of all this year is the one to have emerged most recently.  You only get to go anywhere if you are Covid-free. 

This is the ace in the hole for Covid tyranny.  Despite the fact that the emerging Covid vaccines are the ultimate “placebo fix”, a “magic talisman” as Ivor Cummins has aptly described them.

The suggestions of freedom passes, aka internal (or international) passports linked to having tested negative for Covid or to having taken a Covid vaccine – when and if one becomes available), are coming to every Western country.  We will decide where you can go.  End.  Of.  Story.

From the UK’s Mail Online:

Britons are set to be given Covid ‘freedom passes’ as long as they test negative for the virus twice in a week, it has been suggested. The details of the scheme are still being ironed out by officials in Whitehall, who hope it will allow the country to get back to normal next year.   

To earn the freedom pass, people will need to be tested regularly and, provided the results come back negative, they will then be given a letter, card or document they can show to people as they move around. 

The certificate would be stored on a phone, according to sources, and would allow people to live a relatively normal life until the Government’s vaccination programme gets up to the speed.  It would even allow Britons to get away without wearing a mask, it is thought, and visit family and friends without the need to socially distance. 

A source told the Telegraph: “They will allow someone to wander down the streets, and if someone else asks why they are not wearing a mask, they can show the card, letter or an App.” 

So much for our once cherished freedom of movement.

And it is not only Britain.  We have been living with totally useless, yet freedom crushing, border lockdowns in Australia for most of 2020.  There are two alarming new developments.  Seemingly Qantas and probably other airlines are about to ensure that no one can travel internationally in the future without a Covid vaccine. 

https://summit.news/2020/11/23/qantas-airways-ceo-says-covid-vaccination-will-be-mandatory-for-travel/

A more sinister form of tyranny in twenty-first century liberal democracies is hard to imagine.  And then there are our Chinese friends.  They want a global track and trace system for travel.  China, of course, was the (possibly deliberate) source of the virus that has transformed the world.  Bringing this off would complete the virtuous circle for a sinister country known to have spent the past several decades infiltrating every other country they could.

Chinese Communist President Xi Jinping wants travelers to adopt a global QR code system to help determine their health status and travel “permissions” in a post-coronavirus pandemic travel reset.

https://www.breitbart.com/health/2020/11/23/china-wants-passenger-tracking-system-for-global-travel-coronavirus-reset/

Note the use of the term, “global travel reset”.

As Breitbart also notes:

QR codes are bar-codes that can be read by mobile phones that are a common tool of tracking and control in Communist China.

Here is Kenneth Roth:

Beware of the Chinese government's proposal for a global QR code system. An initial focus on health could easily become a Trojan Horse for broader political monitoring and exclusion, akin to the dangers associated with China's social-credit system.

The broadest smile in the world at these developments must surely be on the face of Bill Gates, Mr Vaccine International, and all his Davos friends.  A wet dream of global control.  With Trump all but gone, what is to stop all this?  Who will prevent global tyranny?

 

Self-explanatory

 

And if Trump goes, and we get global tyranny, it will be cold comfort for his few defenders in NZ to say to those 'I loathe Trumpers', "I told you so". 

Yes, friends, this is all real, and coming to a polity near you.  Exciting, isn’t it!  The coming Orwellian state.  Corporates are actively joining in.  They are on board.

Making freedom of movement subject to state-imposed crackdowns on non-compliance is as totalitarian as it gets.  The Covid state is complete.  The ultimate control over us.  Big Brother rules.

Taken together, the tyrannies outlined here impose catastrophic impacts on our freedom.  It all looks like a plan.  They all interlink beautifully.

Given that 99 per cent of the population is not at any risk, one must ask – why are they doing this?   

Each of the six pillars of totalitarianism has delivered progressively ever more diabolical restrictions upon us.  It is, as if emboldened by the success of the previous tyranny, governments have then proceeded on to the next tyranny.  Tiptoeing towards autocracy.

So, how should we respond to the six big tyrannies of 2020? 

Protests (illegal, though, they are)?  Civil disobedience?  Just wait till an election (though this would be unlikely to deliver anything different)?  Write endlessly to MPs (the Peter Hitchens strategy)?  Quietly ignore government orders?  Form a new party?  Form local resistance groups?  Persuade through argument?  Online campaigns?  Simply become better informed?

Stop listening to RNZ and reading the 'newspapers'?

A number have already done at least some of these things.  It must be said, if the polls (and election results in New Zealand and Queensland) are to be believed, with precious little effect.  The limited protests – admittedly rendered illegal – have had nil impact on the direction of ideological travel.

Or should we just remain beaten into submission, ill-informed, bovine in our demeanour, content in our ignorance, disdainful of our rights, just happy to be receiving cheques (if, indeed, we are receiving cheques)?

Clearly, many in the community believe we have nothing to worry about, in relation to our lost freedoms.  They believe either that government actions are both needed and justified, that whatever (admitted) harms come from lockdowns, the potential for mass deaths from Covid demand the sort of actions taken, that the freedoms lost aren’t that important, that the lockdowns (at least in Australia, outside Victoria) haven’t much impacted our daily lives.  Perhaps the majority believe ALL of these things.  They see little that is sinister in the state’s advances of 2020.

If this is correct – and I suspect that much of it is – then we do really have problems in our increasingly less liberal democracies.

For the less sanguine among us, the key question to have arisen is this – what do the governments of the West and their surrogates know about the Covid epidemic?   In other words, what exactly are they up to?  Or again, just how culpable are governments for the mischief they have caused, for the destruction they have sown?

The question should be asked repeatedly if our liberal democracies are to survive in a form that is even vaguely recognisable. 

There are only three possible answers to the question:

• They sincerely believe that lockdowns and the rest work, and that the hexagon of lost freedoms is worth it, even necessary, and most certainly noble; or
• They know that lockdowns and the rest (masks, social distancing, mass testing, mandated vaccines) don’t work but cause harm – as surely they must, from “the science” that is freely and widely available, certainly to those in government – but are too scared to admit this, reverse course and beg the electorate’s understanding and forgiveness; or
• They have deliberately imposed and maintained Covid tyranny for reasons other than protecting our health.

If the most accurate answer is the third, one must surely ask two further questions.  If so, what reasons and why? 

Experts and lovers of freedom constantly shake their heads in disbelief at the actions of governments and the flaccid responses of the subjugated as 2020 has worn on, and we have learned much more about the Covid virus.  Even if lockdowns were justified in March, they certainly aren’t now, given the knowledge we have gained.  Even if this knowledge is, clearly, very unevenly dispersed.

A much repeated refrain is – it is impossible for governments and their advisers not to know that lockdowns don’t work, that masks are ineffective, that mass testing is a waste of time, and that vaccines are not needed (and, in any case, will arrive way too late). 

 

self-explanatory also

More than this, governments must know the damage their decisions are causing, every single day. In which case, what the hell is going on? 

Almost no one who has considered this question actually accepts that they could all be so damned stupid.  Even if, patently, every government has done stupid things, either through commission or omission.  Just look at Victoria.  Yet many of us cling to the safe middle ground – that a stuff-up always beats a conspiracy.

Even to ask these questions is to suspect that all is not what it seems, that there is something that is hidden from view in play.  Governments couldn’t be that dumb (or at least ignorant), even if suffering from rampant noble cause corruption and even if only listening to a narrow range of invested views.  Or could they?

To attempt to answer them, one necessarily must wade into murkier waters where the evidence is less clear, and where one will inevitably endure vicious debates, charges and counter-charges.  Acknowledging the existence of “convergent” opportunism, that is, the fact that all sorts of groups are taking advantage of the Covid mania to further various agendas at every spatial scale from the local to the global, the question remains – what does government know? 

It is government, after all, that has enacted  - or, in the case of Big Tech censorship, allowed – each of the six areas of tyranny and oppression.  At whose behest have governments engineered the hexagon and unleashed the beast?  We know from our democratic theory – in whatever form – that governments don’t do things in a vacuum.  They respond to pressure.

As Lord Sumption has noted – “this is how freedom dies”.  William Pitt the Younger stated once:

… necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. 

Well, our leaders claim necessity.  They are tyrants and we are slaves.  Much of our freedom lies in ruin.  Before ...

or under? 

... the onslaught of a six-headed monster.