After being told that the pandemic was our greatest challenge in a century, we are being urged to move on, forget the past, and return to a normal life. ‘Move on,’ they say. ‘There is nothing to see here. The crisis is over, no harm done.’ These are the words tyrants use and that is why, for me, there is a moral imperative to confront tyranny, even within our sacred halls of ‘democracy.’ Whether it is democracy or not, future historians will judge, if Western civilization lasts that long, which I doubt.
The fascists tell us now that new perils threaten the rights we happily tossed aside. We face a new enemy called ‘autocracy,’ whose national values we recently embraced, applauded, and celebrated for three years. The world may look on and see us condemn Russia for doing what we did in Afghanistan for two decades, but we hope they will all do as they are told, forget, and move on.
Many believe that the pandemic required an unfortunate, but necessary departure from our proud history of democracy, human rights, and freedom. I am not one of those people. The West has experienced its own existential crisis from which it may not recover. The fall of the Berlin Wall represented the end of the old Stalinist dream. Covid Hysteria represents the fall of the façade of Western democracy, or what’s left of it. The Russians lost Stalinism, and in the West, we lost democracy. It was never the case that Russia fell, but it fell first because everything does eventually, and only fools think that empires last forever.
Covid Hysteria marked the long, painful death of a temporary social contract, old representative liberalism, the preposterous and absurd notion that power can reside in the hands of ordinary people, instead of in the grubby and greedy grip of the rich and powerful. Driven by political malice, stupidity, and fear, democracies fell like dominos, behaving like clones, copying each other in a pattern of draconian policies, including martial law, suspension of democratic rights, and the demonization of a new class of people.
It was not the fall into authoritarianism or totalitarianism, whatever they mean, nor was it the warm embrace of socialism. It was the inevitable decline into fascism, the secret love of the West, a terminal cancer at the heart of the Liberal Project. Covid Hysteria was not an act of science, but it was a national science. It cultivated a petri dish brimming to the top of sterile fascist wannabes, producing only the form but not the flower of fascism.
The land Down Under, for example, lived up to its name. During Covid Hysteria, it fell as far as a society could into the gutter of neo-fascist insanity. During martial law, the military marched the streets of working-class Sydney to enforce curfews and in Melbourne, armed riot police were running around shooting rubber bullets at innocent people who gathered peacefully to protest.
This brutality was welcomed by the ruling class who rejoiced nightly to see punishment meted out to the transgressors, and each morning they could watch with bated breath the repetitive doctrines of the Satanic Mass of daily Covid briefings. This theatre was designed by politicians and bureaucrats who deliberately whipped up fear and regularly lied about Covid. Elected representatives in Victoria were banned from entering Parliament because they did not disclose their vaccination status. Straight out of Mao’s text for social harmony, the government encouraged families and friends to report neighbor’s and siblings if they broke the lockdown rules or gathered in illegal protests.
As do many in our society, I struggle with what it means to live out my faith in a world gone mad. For me, I am a Christian and as a follower of Jesus, I am aware that there are two dangers inherent when touching human morality. The first is of course abrogating moral principles. The second danger is inventing new moral standards. This has long been the playbook of the church. For example, for centuries the Western church supported perverse and unchristian segregationist policies that have no basis in even the most liberal reading of the New Testament. The evil of racial segregation as a moral principle was and remains an abomination. It has permanently, irrevocably scarred human relations and will take centuries to heal, if ever.
The Holocaust was perhaps the greatest evil in history, an inevitable product of fascist politics, and a deeply felt theological tradition that hated Jews, reinforced by over a century of so-called modern Biblical criticism in Germany that sought to delegitimize the history of the Jewish people and rob them of their identity. For over a decade, ordinary Germans loved to read ‘My Struggle,’ a book full of bile, hatred, and venom, written by an incredibly popular man who surfed a wave of hatred for a group of innocent people who had been refugees in Europe for almost 2,000 years.
While America’s post-war path was chequered, the overall direction has been the slow and torturous pursuit of the simple proposition that all people are created in the image of God and that all people are the same and deserve the same treatment. There have been regressions and battles, controversies, and crimes. All nations have been complicit in this sad, tragic, and awful war against freedom.
One would think, and it is quite reasonable to assume that nations with such an appalling and shameful record would…
Read full story: The Fight for Freedom is Not Over; It is Only Beginning ⋆ Brownstone Institute