1984: Thread

[grarpamp]

Authoritarian Madness: The Slippery Slope From Lockdowns To Concentration Camps

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/authoritarian_madness_the_slippery_slope_from_lockdowns_to_concentration_camps

https://www.newsweek.com/utah-newspaper-pushes-national-guard-block-unvaccinated-socializing-1670051
https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2022/01/17/europe-kicks-off-some-of-the-worlds-most-sweeping-vaccine-mandates-and-fines/
https://thehill.com/policy/international/590701-austria-approves-europes-first-vaccine-mandate-for-all-adults
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/01/21/global-fines-unvaccinated/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-59864266
https://www.yahoo.com/now/video-chinese-covid-19-patients-003833211.html
https://www.the-sun.com/news/4440705/china-quarantine-camps-toughest-lockdown/
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-camps
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/prisoners-of-the-camps
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/01/17/unvaccinated-covid-italy/
https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
https://www.ushmm.org/remember/international-holocaust-remembrance-day
https://www.amazon.com/Battlefield-America-War-American-People/dp/1590793099/
https://www.amazon.com/Erik-Blair-Diaries-Battlefield-Dead/dp/1954968027/

Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    “All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens,
the Buchenwald, the Auschwitzes—all of them. They must remain standing
because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided
to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their
reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their
conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be
haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers.”

    - Rod Serling, Deaths-Head Revisited

In the politically charged, polarizing tug-of-war that is the debate
over COVID-19, we find ourselves buffeted by fear over a viral
pandemic that continues to wreak havoc with lives and the economy,
threats of vaccine mandates and financial penalties for noncompliance,
and discord over how to legislate the public good without sacrificing
individual liberty.

The discord is getting more discordant by the day.

Just recently, for instance, the Salt Lake Tribune Editorial Board
suggested that government officials should mandate mass vaccinations
and deploy the National Guard “to ensure that people without proof of
vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.”

In other words, lock up the unvaccinated and use the military to
determine who gets to be “free.”

These tactics have been used before.

This is why significant numbers of people are worried: because this is
the slippery slope that starts with well-meaning intentions for the
greater good and ends with tyrannical abuses no one should tolerate.

For a glimpse at what the future might look like if such a policy were
to be enforced, look beyond America’s borders.

In Italy, the unvaccinated are banned from restaurants, bars and
public transportation, and could face suspensions from work and
monthly fines. Similarly, France will ban the unvaccinated from most
public venues.

In Austria, anyone who has not complied with the vaccine mandate could
face fines up to $4100. Police will be authorized to carry out routine
checks and demand proof of vaccination, with penalties of as much as
$685 for failure to do so.

In China, which has adopted a zero tolerance, “zero COVID” strategy,
whole cities—some with populations in the tens of millions—are being
forced into home lockdowns for weeks on end, resulting in mass
shortages of food and household supplies. Reports have surfaced of
residents “trading cigarettes for cabbage, dishwashing liquid for
apples and sanitary pads for a small pile of vegetables. One resident
traded a Nintendo Switch console for a packet of instant noodles and
two steamed buns.”

For those unfortunate enough to contract COVID-19, China has
constructed “quarantine camps” throughout the country: massive
complexes boasting thousands of small, metal boxes containing little
more than a bed and a toilet. Detainees—including children, pregnant
women and the elderly— were reportedly ordered to leave their homes in
the middle of the night, transported to the quarantine camps in buses
and held in isolation.

If this last scenario sounds chillingly familiar, it should.

Eighty years ago, another authoritarian regime established more than
44,000 quarantine camps for those perceived as “enemies of the state”:
racially inferior, politically unacceptable or simply noncompliant.

While the majority of those imprisoned in the Nazi concentration
camps, forced labor camps, incarceration sites and ghettos were Jews,
there were also Polish nationals, gypsies, Russians, political
dissidents, resistance fighters, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.

Culturally, we have become so fixated on the mass murders of Jewish
prisoners by the Nazis that we overlook the fact that the purpose of
these concentration camps were initially intended to “incarcerate and
intimidate the leaders of political, social, and cultural movements
that the Nazis perceived to be a threat to the survival of the
regime.”

As the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum explains:

    “Most prisoners in the early concentration camps were political
prisoners—German Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats—as well as
Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and persons accused
of ‘asocial’ or socially deviant behavior. Many of these sites were
called concentration camps. The term concentration camp refers to a
camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh
conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and
imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.”

How do you get from there to here, from Auschwitz concentration camps
to COVID quarantine centers?

Connect the dots.

You don’t have to be unvaccinated or a conspiracy theorist or even
anti-government to be worried about what lies ahead. You just have to
recognize the truth in the warning: power corrupts, and absolute power
corrupts absolutely.

This is not about COVID-19. Nor is it about politics, populist
movements, or any particular country.

This is about what happens when good, generally decent
people—distracted by manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and
fighting that divides the populace into warring “us vs. them”
camps—fail to take note of the looming danger that threatens to wipe
freedom from the map and place us all in chains.

It’s about what happens when any government is empowered to adopt a
comply-or-suffer-the-consequences mindset that is enforced through
mandates, lockdowns, penalties, detention centers, martial law, and a
disregard for the rights of the individual.

The slippery slope begins in just this way, with propaganda campaigns
about the public good being more important than individual liberty,
and it ends with lockdowns and concentration camps.

The danger signs are everywhere.

Claudio Ronco, a 66-year-old Orthodox Jew and a specialist in
18th-century music, recognizes the signs. Because of his decision to
remain unvaccinated, Ronco is trapped inside his house, unable to move
about in public without a digital vaccination card. He can no longer
board a plane, check into a hotel, eat at a restaurant or get a coffee
at a bar. He has been ostracized by friends, shut out of public life,
and will soon face monthly fines for insisting on his right to bodily
integrity and individual freedom.

For all intents and purposes, Ronco has become an undesirable in the
eyes of the government, forced into isolation so he doesn’t risk
contaminating the rest of the populace.

This is the slippery slope: a government empowered to restrict
movements, limit individual liberty, and isolate “undesirables” to
prevent the spread of a disease is a government that has the power to
lockdown a country, label whole segments of the population a danger to
national security, and force those undesirables—a.k.a. extremists,
dissidents, troublemakers, etc.—into isolation so they don’t
contaminate the rest of the populace.

The world has been down this road before, too.

Others have ignored the warning signs. We cannot afford to do so.

As historian Milton Mayer recounts in his seminal book on Hitler’s
rise to power, They Thought They Were Free:

    “Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and
never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful,
fundamental things to think about—we were decent people‑—and kept us
so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated, yes,
fascinated, by the machinations of the 'national enemies', without and
within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that
were growing, little by little, all around us.”

The German people chose to ignore the truth and believe the lie.

They were not oblivious to the horrors taking place around them. As
historian Robert Gellately points out, “[A]nyone in Nazi Germany who
wanted to find out about the Gestapo, the concentration camps, and the
campaigns of discrimination and persecutions need only read the
newspapers.”

The warning signs were there, blinking incessantly like large neon signs.

“Still,” Gellately writes, “the vast majority voted in favor of
Nazism, and in spite of what they could read in the press and hear by
word of mouth about the secret police, the concentration camps,
official anti-Semitism, and so on. . . . [T]here is no getting away
from the fact that at that moment, ‘the vast majority of the German
people backed him.’”

Half a century later, the wife of a prominent German historian,
neither of whom were members of the Nazi party, opined: “[O]n the
whole, everyone felt well. . . . And there were certainly eighty
percent who lived productively and positively throughout the time. . .
. We also had good years. We had wonderful years.”

In other words, as long as their creature comforts remained
undiminished, as long as their bank accounts remained flush, as long
as they weren’t being locked up, locked down, discriminated against,
persecuted, starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed or killed, life
was good.

Life is good in America, too, as long as you’re able to keep cocooning
yourself in political fantasies that depict a world in which your
party is always right and everyone else is wrong, while distracting
yourself with bread-and-circus entertainment that bears no resemblance
to reality.

Indeed, life in America may be good for the privileged few who aren’t
being locked up, locked down, discriminated against, persecuted,
starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed or killed, but it’s getting
worse by the day for the rest of us.

Which brings me back to the present crisis: COVID-19 is not the
Holocaust, and those who advocate vaccine mandates, lockdowns and
quarantine camps are not Hitler, but this still has the makings of a
slippery slope.

The means do not justify the ends: we must find other ways of fighting
a pandemic without resorting to mandates and lockdowns and
concentration camps. To do otherwise is to lay the groundwork for
another authoritarian monster to rise up and wreak havoc.

If we do not want to repeat the past, then we must learn from past mistakes.

January 27 marks Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the liberation of
Auschwitz-Birkenau, a day for remembering those who died at the hands
of Hitler’s henchmen and those who survived the horrors of the Nazi
concentration camps.

Yet remembering is not enough. We can do better. We must do better.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the
American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair
Diaries, the world is teetering on the edge of authoritarian madness.

All it will take is one solid push for tyranny to prevail.