The Covid Class gets furious when freedom fighters like George Christensen and others with spine and morals compare Covid totalitarianism with Nazi Germany and similar "papers please" regimes. One recent example of the vitriol in print occurred in The Australian. The journalist involved displayed all the typical attributes of someone without a leg to stand on.
First, they came for the anti-vaxxers …
The Covid maniacs seem to be especially triggered by comparisons between the current totalitarianism and that practiced in central Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. And the suggestion that the unvaccinated are discriminated against in similar ways to other groups that have been persecuted. There is something especially annoying to these types about those who will not take the jab, and complain about the Covid State. Not content with the actual discrimination going on, they seem to want to go out of their way to pick fights with Covid dissidents.
Some great examples of this have occurred recently. George Christensen triggers lots of people. He triggered the whole of the Australian Parliament some months back for daring to buck the Covid establishment, which consists of all major political parties, the political left (unaccountably), the health bureaucracy, the corporate media and (of course) Big Pharma and Big Tech.
There is an emerging literature in the alternate Covid observer class about the nascent totalitarianism that has emerged since early 2020 and that has accompanied the pandemia. Phrases like the “papers please society” have become common across many alt-media outlets, and comparisons with Nazi Germany are growing. This has been helped, no doubt, by Germany’s own (and Austria’s) recent re-descent into fascism. A headline from The Summit News (Paul Joseph Watson) cuts to the chase:
Austria Hiring People to “Hunt Down Vaccine Refusers”.
https://summit.news/2021/12/21/austria-hiring-people-to-hunt-down-vaccine-refusers/
For at least some in Germany, there is grim irony here. Those who hold this view – that we are truly living in totalitarian times – have gone to some lengths to highlight the similarities with more formally fascist (and communist) regimes. George Orwell (1984 and Animal Farm) is appealed to routinely, as is Aldous Huxley (Brave New World). Some, though by no means not all who subscribe to the totalitarian thesis, point to those advocating a new world order as proof of the pudding. The CIA is often mentioned by the likes of Robert F Kennedy Junior. They are endlessly derided for their troubles as “conspiracy theorists” and worse. They are fact-checked to within an inch of their lives by Covid State lackeys. That is when they are not being made to disappear altogether. Despite the vitriol that greets those who are making this case, to many of us it is all blindingly obvious. We believe that those who haven’t caught on are living, effectively, in a cult, and/or have their heads buried in the sand.
Claire Lehmann argues in The Australian (15 December 2021) that “no, we’re nothing like Nazi Germany”. That such a piece was published by a Murdoch outlet comes as no surprise to those of us who have been smeared, belittled and ridiculed routinely by an organ that I prefer to think of as The Daily Vaccinator.
Naturally the article is accompanied by a photo of the said Christensen, who, I presume, Lehmann thinks – in synch with the Prime Minister – should simply “go quietly” into retirement, never to be heard of again.
Whatever else Lehmann’s ersatz research reveals, it certainly confirms that millennials haven’t been taught history properly. Without knowing anything about Lehmann’s schooling, one might be tempted to conclude that she suffered profoundly for the modern curriculum’s fondness for all things Indigenous, generally at the expense of European history. Logic is missing, too, from Lehmann’s education, in view of all the fallacies on display here – ad hominem assertions, category errors, attributing views to people that they do not have, the straw man fallacy, and drawing false inferences from things that opponents have said.
A whole raft of authors and thinkers with far greater knowledge of German history between the wars than Lehmann have concluded that the emergence of the Covid totalitarian state, on display more deeply in Australia than any other Western country – perhaps bar Austria, the country of Hitler’s birth, and Germany, the country he adopted as his own – does, indeed, bear uncanny parallels with the nascent movement in Germany in the early 1930s.
One of the most insulting errors in Lehmann’s piece is the assertion that what Australians have gone through these past eighteen months is mere “inconvenience”. Rubber bullets in the back? Grannies slammed to the ground and pepper sprayed? Aborigines carted off to vaccine camps from the outback? Borders shut to families separated from their loved ones for months on end? Patients forcibly prevented from receiving treatments for Covid that might have saved their lives? Pregnant mothers handcuffed for putting a post on social media about a protest march? Medical apartheid? Perfectly healthy citizens being locked out of shops? Australians, like (only) North Koreans and Cubans, being prevented from leaving the country? (For much of the 1930s, Jews could actually leave Germany freely. Indeed, they were encouraged to do so. Many prominent German intellectuals did, like Herbert Marcuse, Henry Kissinger, Hannah Arendt and Hans Morgenthau). The use of fear and imposed hysteria to ensure supine compliance? The emergence of bio-digital tracking of people’s movements?
Inconvenient? No, I think I have spotted a category error. I think I might also have spotted a member of the laptop class. People like Claire have had a very good Covid, I am guessing. This is the unavoidable conclusion when one reads her using the word “inconvenience” in relation to Covid fascism across this wide brown land.
I suggested there were other errors. I will mention only a few of them.
That the Nazis were soft on vaccine mandates and discriminatory in the disbursement of vaccines is entirely beside the point in the context of this debate. I have simply no idea why it is in the article. It is risibly irrelevant. She simply has no idea what the argument of her opponents is.
Lehmann also seems to have swallowed whole – along with the Covid Kool-Aid – the massively inaccurate vaccines narrative pushed by her employer. In particular, she claims that “boosters are required to keep the virus in check”. When the vaccines don’t work – take yet more vaccines! Omicron, aka OmiCON, has already defeated the vaccines. Game over. Where is the medical evidence that the boosters will work any better? And against a variant of the virus that is even less dangerous than the previous strains. Were she to read the emerging international evidence on the efficacy of vaccines (Israel, Iceland, Gibraltar, USA, UK, just for a start), she might not be quite so willing to issue these glib generalisations that are utterly misleading. These are vaccines that are unapproved (except for an emergency that does not exist), experimental, indemnified, woefully ineffective (at doing the job required of them), dangerous for many and unnecessary for most. Who is being sinister here? Self-fact-checking would also help.
What of her implied pejoratives? Some things she gets doubly wrong. “Anti-vaxxers at protests”? Many people at the protests, described by some as the biggest in Australia’s history, are not anti-vaxxers, that is opposed to any or all vaccines that have been used effectively over many years to control disease. They are very specifically anti the Covid vaccine. Or another distinction that exists, namely between anti-vaxx and anti-vaxx mandates. Many people at the protests, certainly those at protests near where I live, have taken their shots and are not anti-vaxx. Making relevant distinctions is the first rule of critical analysis. Convenient labels and appalling scapegoating might make for good journalism – even in a newspaper considered by Steve Waterson to be read only by the most intelligent ten per cent of the people – but it doesn’t win arguments. Yes, I know, rational argument has gone out the window with Covid.
Questioning the claim of the unvaxxed that we are a “beleaguered minority” is in the territory of Blind Freddie. However else could one consider a state of medical apartheid based on not a scintilla of rational medical science? Apartheid that has real consequences for those who take principled decisions not to submit to a flawed policy. Like losing one’s job. Losing future career prospects. Being ostracised. Being prevented with force from seeing one’s children and grandchildren. In States ruled by so-called liberals. Excluded from the economy. Daniel Andrews’ phrase. Being treated as second class citizens. Jacinda Ardern’s phrase. I wonder what Claire Lehmann thinks a beleaguered minority looks like.
Suggesting that Nazism was time and place specific and therefore that the totalitarian instinct is far away from Oz and only down to certain circumstances beggars belief. There is a fine line between good and evil that not only runs through societies but also through men’s hearts. Power corrupts … As Lord Acton reminded us. Nazi power was built slowly, deliberately, strategically, cannily, and utilising the democratic process to the max.
To suggest that it was only Germans of a certain era that could fall for totalitarianism and myriad evils, some of which are time and place specific, others not, is facile in the extreme. And to suggest that those in our own society crushed by vaccine mandates and various useless non pharmaceutical interventions should simply suck it up and not insult victims of the Holocaust tells us far more about Lehmann’s sense of history and reality than those she thinks she has put in their place. What she has done is just as insulting to victims of Covid statism as the wrong she (incorrectly) believes has been done by us to the Jews in Nazi Germany. Here is what one child survivor (Vera Sharav) of the Nazi holocaust thinks about the current state of affairs:
Government-dictated medical interventions undermine our dignity as well as our freedom.”… “Medical mandates are a major step backward, down the slippery slope toward a fascist dictatorship and the equivalent of crematoriums. The stark lesson of the Holocaust is that when doctors join forces with government & deviate from their personal and professional ethical commitment to “do no harm” to the individual – medicine can be weaponized. A eugenics-based racial ideology perverts the healing profession into a murderous apparatus.
In 2019, New York State eliminated the legal status of religious exemptions … This is a dictatorial process; it is eerily reminiscent of the infamous 1935 Nuremberg racial Laws that eliminated the rights of citizenship to Jews. Orthodox Jewish children and their parents who refused to comply with the vaccination schedule were vilified and ostracized from public places as “disease spreaders”. That was the very tactic the Nazis used against the Jewish people.
Some of Sharav’s work can be sourced here:
Sharav even calls the Covid vaccine a “Nazi experiment”.
https://twicemodern.wordpress.com/2021/10/29/vaccine-is-a-nazi-experiment-you-decide/
Holocaust victims of all people might be thought of as qualified to speak on the parallels between today’s medically driven totalitarianism and elements of Hitler’s Third Reich. Some self-awareness is needed urgently among the Covid class.
Seeing patterns and causes is the day job of the historian. Ascertaining the factors that allow totalitarian movements to emerge and to gain popular traction takes effort, intellectual endeavour and deep and broad research. The latest, current push towards totalitarianism has been examined by professionals in a range of disciplines – public policy, political science, economics, media studis (see Mark Crispin Miller from New York University), psychology, history (of course), philosophy, and, indeed, theology (see Douglas Farrow from McGill University). Lehmann needs to leave the work of scholars to, well, scholars. She would profit from wider reading and from consulting the work of the Belgian psychology professor, Mattias Desmet, on mass formation.
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/jerm-warfare/id1475255493?i=1000534319370
The latter is critical to understanding both Nazi Germany, the present political environment and the totalitarian traits they share. The shared ideologies and practices are, not to put too fine a point on it, uncanny. A familial resemblance at the very least. The renowned American playwright and satirist CJ Hopkins has written eloquently and persuasively on this, but he is not alone.
And what a phenomenally fascist year it has been!
I’m not talking amateur fascism. I am talking professional Class-A fascism. Government and corporate sanctified fascism. Bug-eyed, spittle-flecked, hate-drunk fascism. I’m talking mobs of New Normal fascists shrieking hatred and threats at “the Unvaccinated” as they are dragged off “Vaccinated Only” trains, painting Nazi-era messages on their windows of their stores, leaders of government fomenting mass hatred, TV commentators literally quoting sadistic Nazi SS doctors, leftists going full-fascist on Facebook, concentration camps, Goebbelsian propaganda, censorship of dissent … the whole nine yards.
Here in Europe, things are particularly fascist. One by one, New Normal countries are rolling out social-segregation systems, ordering “lockdowns” of “the Unvaccinated,” and otherwise persecuting those who refuse to conform to official New Normal ideology. Austria has made “vaccinations” mandatory. Germany is about to follow suit. “Covid passes” have been approved in the UK. Greece is fining “Unvaccinated” pensioners by reducing the amount of their state-pension payments. Swedes are “chipping” themselves. And so on.
In New Normal Germany, “the Unvaccinated” are under de facto house arrest. We are banned from society. We are banned from traveling. We are banned from protesting. Our writings are censored. We’re demonized and dehumanized by the New Normal government, the state and corporate media, and the New Normal masses on a daily basis. New Normal goon squads roam the streets, brutalizing pensioners, raiding barber shops, checking “papers,” measuring social distances, literally, as in with measuring sticks. The Gestapo even arrested Santa Claus for not wearing a mask at a Christmas market. In the schools, fascist New Normal teachers ritually humiliate “Unvaccinated” children, forcing them to stand in front of the class and justify their “Unvaccinated” status, while the “Vaccinated” children and their parents are applauded, like some New Normal version of the Hitler Youth. When New Normal Germany’s new Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, announced that, “for my government there are no more red lines as far as doing what needs to be done,” apparently he wasn’t joking. It’s only a matter of time until he orders New Normal Propaganda Minister Karl Lauterbach to make his big Sportpalast speech, where he will ask the New Normals if they want “total war” … and I think you know the rest of this story.
https://consentfactory.org/2021/12/16/the-year-of-the-new-normal-fascist/
Lehmann and other members of the New Normal class might also take a deep dive into cults and cultish behaviour. It appears she is a member of one. A great source, again, is CJ Hopkins.
https://off-guardian.org/2021/09/03/the-covidian-cult-part-iii/
And also those of a Lehmann-like sensibility might look into the role of nudging, popularised though not invented by Richard Thaler, with all of its sinister (that word again) behavioural psychology methods. These have been rolled out in every State of the Commonwealth and in Canberra, in order (unashamedly) to control and to subjugate whole populations.
No, sadly, the totalitarian instinct is not confined to particular times and places. And all of them, the Germans’ and ours included, are based on fear. What totalitarian regimes have in common is far more important than their individual differences. A lesson that Lehmann would do well to imbibe.
As for asserting that Covid dissidents – a much more accurate and polite term than anti-vaxxer or conspiracy theorist, so beloved of Lehmann’s cohort – genuinely believe that being forced to wear a mask is on a par with the Holocaust, I wonder if she has ever actually asked one of us about this. By the way, the Holocaust didn’t start with the gas ovens. That is where it ended. This is called, Claire, the fallacy of the straw man. Attributing to people views they do not have. Trivialising an opponent’s arguments. Call it what you will.
On masks, even the now Governor of Queensland and wife of one who has profited from his relationship with Pfizer, has admitted that their purpose is not medical, but to instill fear. It worked.
Ironically, isolating and insulting enemies of the State is a classic strategy in the Orwellian tradition. Emmanuel Goldstein was probably an anti-vaxxer. And in the tradition of the goolag (misspelling is intended) of the Soviet Union under Stalin. This is precisely what Claire Lehmann herself is doing, albeit with a velvet pen and not with quite the same level of spittle flecking as Jack the Insider. She is lining up as a prosecution witness in the show trial of George Christensen. The tools of oppression, indeed of spousal abuse – what has come to be termed gaslighting – have been rolled out ad nauseum across the West in the Age of Covid. It is one thing for an analyst of some repute to have missed all this. It is quite another to join in yourself.
That Lehmann is able to get this material published speaks volumes for both the decline in editorial standards in Australia’s mainstream (legacy) media, and also, perhaps more alarmingly, the extent to which the Covid State’s interests and those of its chief propagandists, of which the Murdoch press rank very highly. There is little doubt that the lies (of both omission and commission) perpetrated on a daily basis in Government have only gained a receptive audience – if you believe the polls – through corporate media compliance and social media censorship.
There are many ironies brought forth from Lehmann’s writing. One is her use of the word “sinister” to label those of us who have read our Hannah Arendt. Her magnum opus was called The Origins of Totalitarianism. Look it up. There is much to be learned from it on the ways in which the state acquires power by stealth, never to return freedoms stolen and only ever ratcheting up. Lehmann probably sneers at slippery slope arguments. Perhaps also take a look at her Eichmann in Jerusalem, on the banality of evil. It turns out that most of the Gestapo were careerists and not even Nazis. You know, just following orders and all that.
I am very much afraid that we are, alas, living through the end of the beginning in relation to creeping totalitarianism. It is alarming how many international observers now automatically look at Australia, with a mixture of pity and incredulity, when sizing up the extent of the slippage into fascism. Wilfully covering one’s ears, while singing loudly that all will be well, and dismissing the very legitimate concerns of the relatively few of us who HAVE learned from history, is a recipe for disaster. It also bespeaks intellectual and moral laziness. Ironic too, that Lehmann, in passing, accuses her opponents of historical illiteracy. Real journalists, like the now-pariah of the Covid establishment, Alex Berenson, question narratives. Including those they are, at least initially, inclined to accept. As George Pell once said, “test everything”.
I look forward to The Australian offering George Christensen the opportunity of a rebuttal.
