The Death-Rattle of Democracy

How a phony health threat has been used to destroy your freedom.

The Incubus of fear

Covid-19, a flu-like condition which for a tiny minority can be fatal, has provided authoritarian governments all over the world with the excuse to stamp out freedom and democracy – an excuse they have long sought.

Today we see governments in the West condemning China for its clear human rights abuses while themselves perpetrating appalling abuses. It is a classic bait and switch 'Look how awful the Chinese are, we are innocents by comparison.' Well the Chinese might well be awful but the modern West is only a hairsbreadth away from joining them.

Unacceptable Opinions

Protest convoys of truckers have occupied the Canadian city of Ottawa, the federal capital. Meantime, the soyboy-in-chief, Trudeau, an even more despicable specimen than his father, has gone into hiding. Apparently the truck horns keep him awake nights or something. This thing added to his culpability, by the way, by accusing the truckers of having 'unacceptable opinions'. What is one of those, exactly? He also said, in the Canadian joke Parliament, that 'individuals' were causing the problem, forgetting, perhaps that freedom of the individual is the premise upon which Western culture is built – and it is the abuse of that freedom which he and others condemn China for.

The pot calls the kettle black, oh wait, 'of being of colour'.

The Individual

The whole of Western culture is built on the individual and his freedoms. Jacob Burkhardt, the greatest chronicler of the Renaissance, made the point many times, that individualism was the foundation of that. That individualism was born in the ideas of antiquity, but it was disseminated because a German jeweller called Johannes Gutenberg invented the moveable-type printing press, which allowed a two-man team to produce 3,500 sheets a day. This meant that flyers and broadsheets could be printed and distributed in huge numbers.

The Catholic Church had, prior to this, been the sole legitimate fount of information and belief. It suppressed all others are heresy and burned thousands for it; witness the purge of the Cathars, a bloody genocide perpetrated because they did not accept the Church's ideas. Gutenberg’s press was literally a freedom weapon, as it allowed new ideas, those things that collectivists hate most, to circulate.

Back there

Well we are right back there again and unless we do something quickly, we will lose the culture we have fought to defend forever. What was the point of the war against Hitler and Mussolini, if seventy years later totalitarianism could be sneaked in through the back door? What was the point of the Cold War? We might actually have been better off allowing the USSR to take over in 1962, because by now it would certainly have failed – as it did in reality – and just as in the freed former Communist states today, nobody would tolerate a return.

The Ruse

Covid was only ever a ruse, a cover for the extension of government power. It is Project Fear all over again, straight out of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The classic ruse: scare the shit out of the schmucks, then pretend you’re there to help.

The Establishment was badly shocked in 2016 when Britain voted to leave the EU and the USA voted in Donald Trump as President. Ever since then, the Establishment has done everything it could to gain back the ground it lost to populist anger, and Covid was the perfect opportunity.

Do you really think it was an accident? Do you really believe someone ate a bowl of bat soup and the world was turned on its head? Don't be so naïve. If it hadn't been bat soup, it would have been something else. The Establishment needed some subterfuge to crush the growing sentiment towards freedom. It could have been anything; it just happened to be Covid. And this respiratory ailment was turned into a bogey-man to destroy the freedoms we had only just clawed back.

Are you going to let that succeed? Are you? Are you going to hide, like the poodle Trudeau, while everything the West stands for is destroyed?

It’s happened before, you know

Prior to the twelfth century, the Islamic world was a cradle of innovation. Certainly, not all the ideas attributed to this culture originated in it, but like all successful cultures, the Islamic one borrowed gleefully. And then it all stopped. Why?

Writing in the Winter 2011 edition of The New Atlantic, Hillel Ofek tells us. The assimilation of Greek ideas and philosophy was what fuelled the Islamic 'Golden Age'; and what caused its destruction was the rise of the anti-philosophical, anti-Hellenistic and most of all, anti-individualistic Ash'arites, whose most significant theologian was Hamid al-Ghazali. He viciously attacked both the Greek philosophers and the Hellenised Muslins who followed them; but the central thrust of his attack was on the freedom of the individual. For al-Ghazali, there was no freedom, for everything was pre-ordained by Allah. All one could do was to pray and wait for death. By the early sixteenth century, the last sparks of innovation in the Islamic world had been extinguished.

China

This was not unique; as Ofek points out, a tendency towards collapse in this manner is endemic to the cycle of civilisation. China almost became the most important global power before the Ming Dynasty ( 1368-1644) It was poised to expand its influence, through trade and military power, across the face of the globe (just as Britain, the European colonial powers and then the USA later did). And then it all stopped. By the time the British arrived in the 19th century, China was already culturally stagnant.

The Ming Dynasty embraced Confucianism, which regarded trade, commerce and science as undignified. The emperors closed off the country, all apart from a couple of southern sea-ports, and innovation came to an end. Confucianism was vehemently opposed to individualism, vaunting instead 'inner virtue, morality and respect for the community and its values.' Essentially, Confucianism was diametrically opposed to innovation, with the result that the latter died out; by the twentieth century, from being poised to take over the world, China had become a backwater, of no consequence in geopolitics.

All innovators are individualists

In both these cases, vibrant, innovative, just societies were destroyed by philosophical or religious movements that opposed individualism. We could repeat the exercise again and again and we would always arrive at the same sad end: when a culture puts collectivism over individualism, when it outlaws innovation – for all innovators are by definition individualists, ask Elon Musk – it stagnates and eventually withers on the vine.

We are facing a repeat right now: the engineered collapse of the finest, most advanced and most successful civilisation the world has ever seen. Why? Because it is the product of generations of white men who have worn their individualism like a banner, shouted 'Freedom' in the face of the grim collectivists — and died for freedom, even when it was not their own they were fighting for. And yes, they were white men. All of them. Every other culture succumbed to collectivism and failed. And our culture will fail too, unless we do something about it now.

The Government is not your friend. Like Tiamat, it must be slain.

The Establishment hates innovation, by definition. It always tries to suppress it. That was why Galileo was tried by the Inquisition. The whole basis of scientific method is change and fluidity; what is accepted today might not be tomorrow. That applies just as much to political Establishments as to understanding the movements of celestial bodies and they know it. The Establishment's reverses in 2016 shook it badly and it is determined to hang on to power however it can. What better way than by creating a bogeyman and setting itself up as the noble defender, Lord Marduk against the fearsome dragon Tiamat?

The Government is not your friend. It never was. It is your most deadly enemy and the Covid fiasco is just another weapon it has been using to control you.