Liberals have pretty much taken the line that any form of tyrannical control is justified by the alleged coronavirus pandemic.
However, some are now looking at Australia and having second thoughts as to whether this maybe goes a little bit too far.
The Atlantic was taken over by extremist Zionists, and no longer resembles what it once was, instead being an aggressive neoconservative and liberal outlet on par with any other such tripe. But they do still occasionally publish things that are serious.
A recent piece in The Atlantic by Conor Friedersdorf is worth looking at, both because of the article itself, which contains a compact view of many of the details of the Australian lockdown (which we’ve been covering in endless individual news bits), and because it shows that even some liberals are starting to get nervous about where this is all headed.
The article is entitled “Australia Traded Away Too Much Liberty,” though I’m not sure he ever definitively reaches that conclusion.
He opens with an appeal to liberal democracy.
In a bid to keep the coronavirus out of the country, Australia’s federal and state governments imposed draconian restrictions on its citizens. Prime Minister Scott Morrison knows that the burden is too heavy. “This is not a sustainable way to live in this country,” he recently declared. One prominent civil libertarian summed up the rules by lamenting, “We’ve never seen anything like this in our lifetimes.”
Up to now one of Earth’s freest societies, Australia has become a hermit continent. How long can a country maintain emergency restrictions on its citizens’ lives while still calling itself a liberal democracy?
Australia has been testing the limits.
He then continues with examples of the tyranny.
After explaining that everyone is locked inside the country indefinitely, he gives an account of the most heinous infringement thus far, which is the tracking app that turns your home into a prison.
Intrastate travel within Australia is also severely restricted. And the government of South Australia, one of the country’s six states, developed and is now testing an app as Orwellian as any in the free world to enforce its quarantine rules. People in South Australia will be forced to download an app that combines facial recognition and geolocation. The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person. “We don’t tell them how often or when, on a random basis they have to reply within 15 minutes,” Premier Steven Marshall explained. “I think every South Australian should feel pretty proud that we are the national pilot for the home-based quarantine app.”
Then there is the curfew.
Other states also curtailed their citizens’ liberty in the name of safety. The state of Victoria announced a curfew and suspended its Parliament for key parts of the pandemic. “To put this in context, federal and state parliaments sat during both world wars and the Spanish Flu, and curfews have never been imposed,” the scholar John Lee observed in an article for the Brookings Institution. “In responding to a question about whether he had gone too far with respect to imposing a curfew (avoiding the question of why a curfew was needed when no other state had one), Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews replied: ‘it is not about human rights. It is about human life.’”
That’s one of the most frightening statements imaginable, as it declares that any freedom can be suspended if it is believed by the government – or if the government simply claims to believe – that suspending this freedom can save lives.
I’ve argued consistently that whether or not suspending freedom saves lives or not cannot possibly be a basis for whether or not the government is allowed to suspend freedoms. There are many different arguments there, and many different analogies – not least of which, pointing to the number of lives that would be saved by banning cars. We’ve been all up and down that.
What I do not think that opponents of the regime should be doing is making a big point of the fact that lockdowns don’t work. Maybe that is worth pointing out, but the underlying argument should always be that it doesn’t matter if they work or not, the government simply does not have a right – based on the foundational philosophy of Western Civilization – to strip you of your rights based on trying to protect you.
They will of course hop around on this, and claim that you are “putting others in danger,” and make various comparisons. But there was never any law that prevented people from sheltering in place in their homes out of fear of disease. If people want to lock themselves inside, they have that right – I don’t think anyone has ever claimed they don’t. But the government doesn’t have a right to force people to stay in their homes.
Friedersdorf goes on to talk about the outlawing of protests and the fact that the military is being deployed to arrest people en masse if they violate the lockdown rules, and then goes on to pose the question: can Australia continue to claim to be a “liberal democracy” and be taken seriously?
Australia is undoubtedly a democracy, with multiple political parties, regular elections, and the peaceful transfer of power. But if a country indefinitely forbids its own citizens from leaving its borders, strands tens of thousands of its citizens abroad, puts strict rules on intrastate travel, prohibits citizens from leaving home without an excuse from an official government list, mandates masks even when people are outdoors and socially distanced, deploys the military to enforce those rules, bans protest, and arrests and fines dissenters, is that country still a liberal democracy?
Enduring rules of that sort would certainly render a country a police state. In year two of the pandemic, with COVID-19 now thought to be endemic, rather than a temporary emergency the nation could avoid, how much time must pass before we must regard Australia as illiberal and unfree?
I don’t think it is an issue of “how long.”
Granted, there are certain “emergency powers” including martial law that a government can have in a free society, but they cannot be indefinitely extended, and there must be an immediate threat of a total collapse of the entire system of order. That is the only justification of “emergency powers” – an actual emergency that threatens the breakdown of the entire society. It cannot possibly be about providing extra safety to individuals – that is always going to be tyranny.
Even if you believe the coronavirus was originally an “emergency,” when Neil Ferguson and Anthony Fauci were claiming that 10% of those who were infected would die, we’ve known since at least April of 2020 that this is not the case. Even if it was the case, it would simply be a reality that people would have to deal with, and make their own decisions about. After the initial claims about the virus were proved false, it was clear that society would not collapse as a result of the virus, and therefore there was no longer any potential “emergency.”
It should be noted that historical regimes that are considered to be tyrannical never said “we’re taking your freedoms to control you.” They always said they were taking freedoms for the sake of offering some benefit to the population – in particular, safety.
Friedersdorf goes on about the issue of the length of the lockdown, suggesting that it wouldn’t have been so bad if they’d hurried up with their mass vaccination agenda and then let people return to normal. I do not agree with that at all, obviously.
He closes with this:
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