It’s been clear for some years now that the efforts made by our leaders to dumb us down have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams – try to talk about essential liberties to friends or family and watch as incomprehension or outrage dawns.
And as these conversations have taken place these last few weeks, I have noticed a profound correlation.
Those who believe C19 justifies the suspension of essential liberties, can’t name them.
Those eager for our freedoms to be infringed, don’t esteem them.
And they certainly don’t understand what human society looks like without it, despite their honeymoons in the Soviet Union and admiration for Venezuela.
Those of us that have claimed for years that the State, the Left and the liberal fascists have conspired to take over the world and subjugate it as Orwell warned, possess now the circumstantial evidence that this has been the case, as politicians, journalists and leftists the world over clamour for greater and greater intrusions on civil liberties, supposedly to combat C19.
It has become the excuse for all of their tyrannical whims, with some of them even admitting openly of their intention to use it this way.
This is the infantile object permanence of intellectual toddlers, unable to perceive a thing they have not personally experienced. You can see it on the beatific faces of Jeremy Corbyn, Paul Mason, Owen Jones or *trumpets please* Richard Murphy – a new species we might call Economus Homunculi.
And now as the developed world marches towards tyranny, those that have never endured it, cheer it on. And very uniformly do they treat those of us that dare to alert them to the loss of their essential liberties. We are treated as pedants.
As ever, the foundations that underpin our essential liberties owe their solidity to the comprehension of those that behold them – for someone who understands how essential these liberties are, these foundations go down to the very centre of the Earth. And for those who never understood them, they are completely dispensable technicalities. Fripperies even.
And I repeat – those who believe that our essential liberties should be suspended in order to maybe purchase some temporary safety, are those that never understood how essential those liberties were.
And let’s be clear about what calculation is being made on our behalf.
As Lord Sumption said recently…
Do we want to risk deaths from C19, or do we want to kill our countrymen in order to avoid that risk?
Sure, we might be able to save the NHS from overloading by shutting down the economy, but the shutdown will leave us unable to fund the NHS subsequently.
Polly Toynbee recently told us in the Guardian that austerity “broke Britain”
And this during a period when economic growth had been between reliably between 1% and 3%!
What breakage does she imagine we’ll see from shutting down the economy?
The collective hysteria that Economus Homunculi had been using to power the shrill climate change catastrophists has been successfully redirected, and we are in the process of taking the global cyanide pill they have prescribed.
The computer projections have told us that the world MIGHT end, so we must all kill ourselves.
Large numbers of us need to start sidelining, ignoring or mocking these Malthusians immediately, or we will wake up in Global Jonestown one morning soon.
And now being considered is to continue to confine the elderly in Europe after the general confinement for young people has been lifted, at least until the end of the year (is 31 Dec a magic date after which the virus will die?) or until a vaccine is found. This is to protect the elderly because it is a matter of life or death. Whose life? Can’t it’s owner decide the risk for themselves? But this highlights that confinement of the population doesn’t work, clearly it is believed the virus will be at large post-confinement. So how was the social… Read more »
Think of the market that will spring up for fake IDs showing you to be a year or two younger than you really are.
So, your freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to choose language, to due process, to a fair trial, privacy, freedom to vote, right for education, etc. etc.remain unimpaired. Your freedom of association and assembly has been briefly suspended so your health service, that you have paid for, can try its best to cope with a pandemic, hopefully without sick bodies lying on the floors of hospital corridors (Italy) or mass graves in parks (the Bronx); a policy adopted by right and left wing governments alike, all of whom are desperate to restore that freedom, so that economic life can… Read more »
That’s like saying the only freedom a prisoner has had taken away is freedom of association. Pure sophistry. And using extremes from Italy is equally fallacious. The evidence is clear – if you are under 65 and reasonably healthy, COVID is no riskier than 100s of viruses already circulating. If you are over 80 and have health problems, COVID appears to increase your risk of dying ever so slightly, if at all. It might shorten your life by a week or two. The rest have a similar risk to a bad flu. But we know for sure people are dying… Read more »
Freedom of speech. Right. Like doctors being sacked who decline to promote the panic. Desperate to restore that freedom, I admire your optimism. Economic life can resume, subject to stringent limits, if by miraculous chance the economy has not been ruined by the same wisely beneficent policy that you extol.
Alas, Alex, after the stasis of Theresa May’s hung parliament, I believe you are on the wrong side of public sentiment – people are tiring of democracy. Both left AND right want ‘strong leadership’, not broad-church compromise agreed in smoke-filled rooms. People need to understand that they should do what they’re told, critics silenced and the press brought to heel…libertarians rounded up and sent to re-education camps. Of course I could be misreading the public mood; or perhaps I’m mixing with the wrong sort of people.
You could be, they might well be more in favour of citizens’ assemblies than being told what to do :
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2020/0316/How-to-deal-with-the-climate-emergency-Ask-your-neighbor
The lockdown trade-off seems to be: Remove the death threat to the elderly, and transfer it to the population at large, given the massive effect lockdowns will have on the livelihoods of people who rely on a functioning economy