The Gulag Archipelago is coming to a Western democracy near you, very soon.  Not content with closing down economies and societies, and suppressing freedom, governments and their fellow travellers are now coming for the dissidents.

The portents are not good.

It is one thing – an enormous thing, to be sure – for governments in so-called democracies to crush the freedoms of all in a vain attempt to suppress a virus.  It is another to start picking off selected individuals, those deemed enemies of the state because they are dissidents and oppose government policy through peaceful means. 

Yes, the democratic rule book has been thrown in the dust bin in 2020. 

We have had curfews, restrictions on local movement, interstate border closures, the spreading of fear, smearing dissidents, smashing up (selected) demonstrations, eliminating anything remotely approaching normal joyful experiences, overseas travel bans, quarantines, exhortations to wear face nappies, politicians virtue signalling, media propaganda, endless vacuous advertisements about pulling together, the destruction of tourism and much of retail, conscripting Karens to dob in non-mask-wearing recalcitrants, the printing of magic money to keep people happy … Where to stop?  Madness?  Yes, but also sinister mission creep by a simultaneously evil and incompetent, blundering state.

But now, it seems, the deep state is moving to phase two in its Covid suppression strategy.  Suppression not only of the virus, literally an impossibility, but also suppression of those who will not be easily bowed.  Silence all dissent.  Pick off enemies to enforce what is, in truth, nothing more than a political self-preservation strategy to enable governments to be able to say “we prevented Covid deaths”.  Woo-hoo!

This is Covid fascism 2.0.  The template was set up in freedom suppression stage one.  The strategies described below were piloted in the earlier phases of the “suppress the people” play, for full later roll-out.

The famous Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, coined the phrase the “gulag archipelago” to describe in stark terms the Soviet methodology of suppressing its people.

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions…

Ideology – that is what gives the evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. (H/T Toby Young, Lockdown Sceptics)

Doing evil to do good…  Ideology to crush freedom …

Speaking at a Harvard commencement ceremony in 1978, Solzhenitsyn caused a stir when he argued that the West was ripe for having its freedoms gutted in ways with which he was only too familiar, back home.  He called his address “A World Split Apart”. 

As one observer noted:

Solzhenitsyn's June 8, 1978, commencement address at Harvard was the most controversial and commented-upon public speech he delivered during his twenty-year exile in the West, for he critiqued the spiritual crisis of both East and West.

He feared that the West was ripe for its own impoverishment of spirit.  It was an arresting event.  He was correct and prescient, but in ways that he perhaps did not imagine.  New ideologies have emerged in the twenty-first century, and, horridly, new technologies for enforcing compliance and submission.

Well, it isn’t an exaggeration to say that we are now rapidly approaching a twenty-first century “Covid lockdown archipelago”, in which the state, under the guidance of technocratic expertise responding with crafty, though deeply sinister, strategic energy in the fight against a fairly minor virus, is nudging us towards a new version of Solzhenitsyn’s own lived nightmare.  And with suitably deployed field operatives, fellow travellers and useful idiots as part of the “destroy freedom” team.

Coming out of a still undecided US election in which blatant censorship of one side of politics, ideological warfare and dirty tricks have been the order of the day, the pieces of the Covid freedom crushing jigsaw are falling into place. Several examples will suffice:

• Silencing scientific and other dissidents;
• Labelling dissidents nutters and criminalising them;
• Restricting the freedoms of those who don’t comply with state orders, with things like health passports;
• Mandating certain behaviours, like wearing masks.

Make no mistake, it is game on for the creeping totalitarian state.  And those who wish to enforce conformism and double down on errant “covidiot” behaviour feel utterly empowered by the presumed (though far from decided) result of the US election.

First, there is the silencing of scientific dissidents. 

Peer reviewed journals are not publishing papers from those who dispute the official World Health organisation/state line.  The eminent authors of The Great Barrington Declaration can attest to the subsequent suppression of their views.

Sunetra Gupta has spoken out against the suppression of dissent, the refusal of scientific journals to publish dissenting views – right out of the climate science playbook – the personal vitriol, the name calling, the demonising and the effective de-platforming of eminent scientists proposing utterly mainstream and cogent views.  This is disgraceful, and testimony to the ideologising of science in the service of state power and crony capitalism (aka Big Pharma).  These aren’t clueless nut cases.  They are scientists at the top of their fields, deeply respected and widely published.  Guess who was at the head of the truth-suppression effort?  Google.  Of course.  Utilising all the tricks in the algorithmic book.  Those who obsess over control and controlling the preferred ideological narrative now mostly live and work in Silicon Valley.  And they have the tools to do it.

Fraser Myers explains:

Tech giant Google has decided that the view of these scientists should be covered up. Most users in English-speaking countries, when they google ‘Great Barrington Declaration’, will not be directed to the declaration itself but to articles that are critical of the declaration – and some that amount to little more than smears of the signatories.

Among the top results Google would prefer you to read is a hit-piece from the ever-conspiratorial Byline Times, which insinuates that the scientists have an ulterior, shady motive for challenging lockdown. Google is also happy for you to read about pranksters signing up to the declaration using fake names like ‘Dr Johnny Bananas’, as well as critical commentary from the Guardian and Wired. But it does not want you to read the declaration for yourself and make up your own mind.

Censorship of the declaration has also spread to Reddit. The two most popular subreddits for discussion of the coronavirus – r/COVID-19 and r/coronavirus – have both removed links to the Great Barrington Declaration. The moderators of r/coronavirus, a forum with 2.3million members, have declared it to be ‘spam’.

Joanna Williams at Spiked has noted:

Last month, following the Whitty and Vallance fear-fest, a group of 32 scientists – led by Sunetra Gupta and Carl Heneghan from Oxford University and Professor Karol Sikora, former chief of the World Health Organisation’s cancer programme – penned an open letter calling on the government to reconsider its approach to suppressing the virus. They warned that lockdowns led to ‘significant harm across all age groups’ and asked the government to focus instead on more targeted measures. In response, they were accused of ‘spoiling for a fight with the establishment’. Sections of the media were criticised for giving their views a platform and for having ‘a tendency to amplify minority positions, particularly if they appear to confirm the right-libertarian worldview’. Challenging the apparent consensus was a ‘dangerous distraction’, which would do ‘damage to public discourse’.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/10/13/a-lockdown-on-dissent/

Then there is the criminalisation of dissent. 

Let us lock up (not lockdown, this time) those who “spread disinformation”.  And, of course, we get to define what counts as “disinformation”.  This is one of the most sinister words in the techno-fascist lexicon.

The Royal Society in the UK, once respect but now merely a shill for the establishment, has signed on for the suppression of dissent and taken it to the next stage – smear, then criminalise, dissent.

There are two strategies here – make anti-vaxxing an offence.  And call all dissidents “anti-vaxxers”.  The scientific establishment and its enforcers (see VicPol) believe that they are onto a winner with the conspiracy theory-anti vaxxer-alt right-extremist smear of anyone who questions the Covid fascist state.

Sarah Knapton of the London Telegraph:

It should be made a criminal offence to spread anti-vaxx myths and the public should report offenders, the Royal Society and British Academy have said amid concerns that baseless fears over a coronavirus vaccine will damage uptake.

A rapid review on COVID-19 Vaccine Deployment has called for people to be “inoculated” against misinformation, which can spread rapidly on social media.

Several countries already have laws against disseminating information that is harmful to public health, and Singapore has recently carried out four prosecutions for coronavirus offences under its Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA).

Under the same legislation, companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter are also legally required to correct or remove misinformation.

Professor Melinda Mills, the Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford and the lead author of the review, said it was critical to address genuine concerns about the vaccine while preventing misleading facts from spreading on the internet.

“This information can be really damaging, and it’s clever how they spread it through memes and memorable things,” she said. “These groups are very skilled. They feed on fear, that little grain of truth, and they amplify it.

“It’s not very interesting when the Government produces passive web pages that say vaccinations are safe. The anti-vaxxers turn everything into a show – they put out things that are engaging, that are visual to their members.

“Social media channels try to capture this misinformation, but they can’t get everything and so it’s important that the public can spot it so that they don’t share it. Most people aren’t bad, they just don’t realise they are sharing a whole load of misinformation.”

Experts are concerned that uptake for a Covid vaccine will fall short unless more is done to address misconceptions on social media. Recent research has shown that around 36% of people in Britain say they are either uncertain or very unlikely to be vaccinated against the virus.

Toby Young concludes:

So Professor Melinda Mills, in support of her argument that anti-vaxxers should be jailed, cites the treatment of “rumour-mongers” by the totalitarian Chinese Communist authorities – when precisely this approach resulted in the suppression of information which, had it been more widely known, could well have stopped SARS-CoV-2 in its tracks.

Had it just been Mills who came up with this hare-brained argument, that would be one thing. But her paper has been “peer reviewed” by SAGE and given the stamp of approval by the Royal Society and the British Academy.

Totally insidious, of course, but simply part of the playbook of the public health-industrial complex.  The new game is to get everyone vaccinated, at all costs.  For this is the get-out-of-gaol-free card for politicians.  The only card they have left to play.

Then we have the health passport regime as a means of control and suppression.  Paul Joseph Watson explains:

Behavioral experts advising the British government have suggested giving people who test negative for coronavirus wristbands that would allow them to travel and enter venues, while those who didn’t have the wristband would remain under lockdown.

https://summit.news/2020/11/11/government-advisers-suggest-giving-corona-free-brits-permission-wristbands/

As the economist Richard Thaler opined, this is called “nudging”.  Carrots and sticks, to enforce North Korean level compliance with the state.

I should advise that Google tells us that :

Paul Joseph Watson is a British right-wing YouTuber, radio host, writer, anti-feminist, conspiracy theorist and political extremist. 

Glad to quote him, then. 

What he points to is evil, nothing more and nothing less.  It is criminalising dissent, in what is only a logical extension of the core philosophy of the Branch Covidians, after all.  They have been saying it all year.  Lockdowns only don’t work because the idiots don’t follow it.  Masks would save us – if only everyone wore them!  The fault of the dimwit punters.  Same with safe distancing.  All those bogans at the beach and in the pubs.  They are spoiling our fascist party.  Vaccines will do it.  But only if we make everyone take it.  Way not to lose an argument!

The problem exposed by Watson is, of course, a good example of the Big Tech/deep state strategy.  It is a four stage strategy. 

• First, label any dissidents as nutters, with all the usual facile insults, in order to use ridicule ahead of more sinister tactics. 
• Second, de-platform critics to render them silent, and therefore non-existent.  This is an old trick opf leftist controlled cultural institutions.
• Third, deny rights to those daring to push back against the state. 
• Fourth, criminalise opposition.

Finally, there is the Biden mask mandate.

The President elect elect elect elect elect (as Mark Steyn calls him) has already put down his totally expected Covid markers, with his support for a mask mandate.  Biden, pathetically, attempted the line that “masks are not political”.  Blind Freddy again.  The economist Tom Woods has eviscerated the whole masks scam, noting repeatedly that masks were introduced in most countries in the northern summer when Covid had totally receded.  They have had no documented impact on Covid health.  They are virtue signalling in the age of public health fascism.  Yet Biden has jumped in, suggesting that every state should mandate wearing masks outside the home. 

This can only have one possible motive – control.  Control behaviour, and control the narrative.  There is not the remotest medical justification for such a mandate.

So, we have it. 

Stage Two Covid totalitarianism is nearly upon us.  With the criminalisation of dissent, the suppression of scientific debate, internal passports, mandated vaccines and masks, and the rest.  Forever.

The Covid archipelago, with all the elements of the Soviet gulag so hideously explained by Solzhenitsyn.  I wonder what all those crushed, poor Soviet citizens would be thinking of our pathetic Western willingness now to simply write off our freedoms in the cause of public health risk aversion.  That, coincidentally, advances the power of the technocracy that now rules us, entrenching the power of the state. 

Just write me another Jobseeker cheque, Scotty.  She’ll be right.  We don’t really understand freedom, in these parts.