The Government, My Enemy, The Daily Sceptic, 21 July, 2021.
By Ramesh Thakur.
Medically idiotic, economically ruinous, socially disruptive and embittering, culturally dystopian, politically despotic: what was there to like in the Covid era? Billions, if you were Big Pharma. Unchecked power, if you were Big State. More money and power over the world’s governments and people, for the WHO. Template for action for climate zealots. Dreamtime for cops given free rein to indulge their inner bully. Anguished despair, if you were a caring, inquisitive reporter. In Australia Breaks Apart, John Stapleton, a retired journalist with over 25 years’ experience with the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian, chronicles the collective madness that suffocated Covidian Australia, but also the resistance movement that began hesitantly and grew organically. It is a tale of the many villains complicit in tyranny and the few heroes of resistance. “What will you tell UR kids? Did you rise up or comply,” asked a sign during the Canberra protests. It’s a story of venal, incompetent politicians and brutish police – thugs in uniform – acting at the behest of “power drunk apparatchiks”.
If you want to know or recall what happened, read the book. If you questioned and resisted from the start, take heart at the documentation for the record. If you belong to the Covid class in slow retreat from the wastelands you created and now leave behind, take evasive action. An extract was published in the Weekend Australian. Among more than 900 online commentators, one quoted Tony Abbott that in two World Wars, many risked their lives to protect our freedoms, but in the last three years, so many gave up freedoms to prolong lives. Some took Stapleton to task for failing to thank our great and good leaders and public health authorities for keeping us safe through the terrifying ordeal of the ‘rona wars. The persistence of the last attitude justifies the book’s publication. It’s an effort to chronicle and, if possible, come to terms with how an entire population was terrorised into fearing a virus and complying with arbitrary and draconian rules. Stapleton laments this is not the Australia he knew and loved. There evolved a co-dependency between the über-surveillance state and a Stasi-like snitch society in which “we are all guilty until proven uninfected”. The unleashing of state violence on peaceful protestors included militarised responses on the streets and in the air that drew gasps of disbelief from around the world. State over-reach included “an insane level of micromanagement”. All was done without providing any evidence and cost-benefit analyses in support. It’s all here in grim detail, possibly with generous dollops of hyperbole. But who can blame Stapleton, writing amidst the “height of totalitarian derangement” syndrome?
Stapleton uses the narrative device of a fictional character called Old Alex who watches what is happening with detachment and growing disenchantment. In 444 pages divided into 19 chapters, he provides a comprehensive catalogue of the milestones, lies and obfuscations on the relentless march to medical tyranny and vaccine apartheid. He puzzles over the Left’s embrace of the Pharma-state’s over-reach. Struggles for words strong enough to convey the depth of contempt for the “shameless”, “odious” and “loathed” Scott Morrison, whose name became synonymous for some with the act of defecation as shouts were heard from inside a lavatory: “I’m doing a ScoMo, I’m doing a ScoMo.” Readers will encounter many writers from the Spectator Australia and Brownstone stables, which clearly sustained Stapleton through the dark Covid years with emotional connections to many of the world’s leading fellow dissidents. They will be reminded of many characters whose horror stories were illuminated briefly during the long darkness, such as Anthony and Natalie Reale who run the Village Fix café in Shellharbour, NSW. I wrote about them in the Speccie on January 15th 2022. We encountered the big-hearted and generous family on the drive up from Canberra to our new home in the Northern Rivers in December 2021.
Australia broke apart most obviously in the way in which the Morrison Government was complicit in the fracturing of the federation into mini-fiefdoms run by wannabe warlords a.k.a. Premiers and their palace courtiers of CHOs and Police Commissioners, some of whom have since been pushed upwards into Governors’ mansions. But it was more. Trust was also broken, perhaps irreparably, with respect to parliaments, the judiciary, human rights machinery, police, medical establishment, experts and the media. The significant switch to independent media reflects disillusionment as much with social media’s Big Tech platforms that turned into narrative enforcers as with the legacy media that turned into fear-mongering Big State mouthpieces and Big Pharma shills.
It was important for someone to write this instant history under time pressure, an accessible work of record, lest we forget. Or rather, lest they be allowed to forget and move on. This is neither a book by nor for academics. Therein lies some of its failings and much of its strength. “The Government is my enemy,” laments a disillusioned citizen. Do not trust politicians and bureaucrats. “They lie for a living,” says the cynical reporter. In the years to come a flood of scholarly tomes can be expected, analysing in excruciating detail the excesses of lockdowns, masks and vaccines and systematic assessments of their successes and failures. Given the paucity of critical journalism, it’s useful to have a record of contemporaneous events before memories fade and stories are conveniently rewritten. The journalistic strengths include on-the-ground reporting from protests like the Canberra Convoy, observation skills, an eye for the human interest story, jargon-free writing and analysis uncluttered by theoretical explorations. His stories of the personalities encountered during the massive Canberra protests in early 2022 bring out vividly the electric atmosphere, energy and camaraderie of what became a festive, exultant celebration of shared emotions and commitments to securing the freedoms of future generations of Australians.
This is a book to read, display prominently on the coffee table or discreetly on the bookshelf, recommend for purchase to the public library, and spread awareness by word of mouth. It contains many literary quotations and allusions. It’s appropriate therefore that I am left at the end recalling these lines from Dylan Thomas that apply very much to ‘Old Alex’: “Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rage at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Ramesh Thakur is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy and a former UN Assistant Secretary-General. This article was first published by Spectator Australia.
SOME OF THE COMMENTARY
2 hours ago
A cowardly part of my mind tries to rationalise the evil of the last three years out of existence. ‘Nah! It was a bad dream!’ Memory fades and trauma tries to bury itself. Being a freelancer and a long term ‘libertarian wing of small ‘c’ conservatism’ man, I’m scarred for life by what happened. I had the virus at the end of 2019. There was no need for the lockdowns. I actually consider what happened to be a physical and psychological manifestation of Evil. What we experienced was on the spectrum of Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and others.
Just because we didn’t get as far as people being put in camps in the UK, didn’t mean we weren’t hearing about what happened in Australia or Canada. Everywhere, people were snitching on each other and talking up horrifying plans such as detainment camps for people refusing the jabs. I remain terrified of what the state in the internet age has shown itself capable of. I would read the news and think ‘Can’t you see what you’re advocating? Can’t you see the parallels?’
‘Anger’ doesn’t come close to how I feel: it’s elevated to a sense of repugnance and agonised sadness. People I’ve broken bread with have advocated imprisoning people like me, because they ceased to think of the individual. If we needed evidence of how a loon like Hitler can easily seduce a country, we had it in spades from 2020. I worked out and built myself up in 2020, because I honestly thought the public would break and there would be civil conflict. I was preparing myself for potential civil war and I had poorly elderly parents to look after. Instead, to my eternal disgust, the public rolled over and exposed their yellow bellies!
I haven’t changed my mind that I don’t want to live in the UK anymore: the UK I hoped for post Brexit was strangled at birth when the lockdown was declared. I now have a UK passport that I despise. Our EU rivals behaved obscenely, but authoritarianism has long been part and parcel of Europe and its Roman-Napoleonic Law. At least they were consistently authoritarian. Britain’s totalitarianism was on account of there being no laws: politicians and the police made them up as they went along.
The oncoming storm of a Labour Government terrifies me, because that evil cabal of communists and Satanists will lock us up again in a heartbeat, will look to Sturgeon, Morrison and Trudeau for inspiration on authoritarianism and use wealth and property taxes to fund another lockdown. I don’t know where to go that wouldn’t force this behaviour on its citizens another time, though.
I’m angry and I’ll bloody well stay angry. I want to live to be old and angry enough to hobble on a zimmer frame to Matt Hancock’s grave and urinate on it, then drink a lot of water so I can urinate on Boris Johnson’s grave too. They don’t deserve to live to an old age, but they almost certainly will. I intend to live longer and freer!
I might well buy the book. It will be tough to read. But after the lockdowns, The Gulag Archipelago is something you read in a completely different light too.
2 hours ago
I’m not so sure that we should have it in the rearview mirror. It:
Created previously unthinkable precedents, easily repeated.
Provided whoever did it with a database of political dissidents and where they live.
Poisoned or at least compromised the health both mental and physical of the overwhelming majority of the population of the collective west.
Lead to a “Pandemic Treaty”
The globalist juggernaut rolls on
5 hours ago
If I’m honest, I find it hard to relive any part of the covid madness, be it ina book, seeing video footage of the time, or pretty much anything that takes me back to it.
It makes me angry and anxious and it.makes.me also despair of the human race, which I don’t want to do.
77
0
4 hours ago
Reply to stewart
Me too. Chatting to an acquaintance just now that I haven’t seen for years, and some of her friends. They were full of complaints about how lockdowns were over the top, terrible that people died alone etc, one is vaccinated 3 times but just got covid. But absolutely no connection to why and how it happened, how it could have been done differently, who is to blame, how to stop it happening again. It just happened to them, like a rain shower, and they’ve moved on. Utterly baffling.
53
0
3 hours ago
Reply to transmissionofflame
I think that many people have not moved on to the extent that they appear to. It’s cognitive dissonance at play in many cases. If they are to start realising that their Government and the other PTB lied to them and do not have their best interests at heart, then it opens a whole can of worms they are just not ready for. Will they ever be, is the question!
I bounce between not wanting to relive the experience and becoming obsessed by it and reliving every detail. Either way, it’s not healthy.
33
-1
3 hours ago
Reply to Valerie_London
Probably a combination of things – some are pretty dozy people, others don’t want to face the horrible truth, or a combination of both.
I don’t relive it, and I am trying to enjoy my life, but neither do I intend to “forgive and forget”. I suppose I am mildly obsessed by it because I now realise it’s part of an ongoing drift that is the destruction of our civilisation, which I want to try and understand so I can try to slow it down.