GOVERNMENT AUTHORITARIANISM

The following is my two-cents worth on the subject of government authoritarianism during COVID-19.

As you know, once you start talking about these things, you are immediately branded as some sort of “conspiracy theorist”, you know, like the one where creepy George Soros is up to no good again in the shadows, invisibly manipulating his puppet governments and their economies and all of that. Be that as it may.

Commando Memorial, Lochaber, Scotland

In the West, as in Australia, we live in a free society. Our freedoms are outlined in our constitutions upon which our laws are based, (Common Law, set precedents, etc.) Therefore, our freedoms lie within those guidelines upon which the people of our nation are agreed, i.e., the law of the land.

Whereas Conservatives, (please notice that I did not say “Tories”), believe that, perhaps a little paradoxically, it is the law of the land that gives us our freedoms, Socialists want an ever expanding government to control the nation. The former lets us breathe free, while the latter wants to strangle us – but only with red tape to start with.

Law-abiding citizens tend to take the law into their own hands during times of government overreach, such as things are today. Exhibit “A” is the State of Michigan, where the Governor told the folks that they could buy alcohol, but were forbidden from buying seeds for their gardens, among other bizarre rules – based on nothing but her Leftist authoritarianism. She ignored the Constitution. Therefore, the people exercised their 1^st Amendment rights and protested outdoors. Thus, the Governor unnecessarily agitated the free people and instigated a protest by her unwise and un-Constitutional actions.

Again, what we do in the West is voluntary. We had good common sense reasons from our rulers for self-isolating and social-distancing, it is scientific, it makes medical sense, etc. “Do you wish to catch this plague? Then keep on shaking hands and sneezing on each other.” That was enough for me to comply with their requests. However, when the authoritarians cannot give us a good reason for their restrictions, we freedom lovers push back. Then the government reacts by clamping down on our freedoms and our nation turns into a Socialist Utopia, or what we freedom loving Conservatives call a “Police State”. “Papers? You have no papers!”

Then there is the Fake News (useful idiots?), which reported, for example, that some of those Michigan protestors had swastikas. Stupidly, these were meant to show that the Governor of Michigan was being a Nazi with her totalitarian edicts. However, give the spin-doctoring Fake Media an inch, and they will take a mile and give you back a lie – wider than mile. As they say, truth is the first casualty of war, apparently even in a war against COVID-19.

Whether the Marxists are using Hegelian Dialectical Materialism at the moment to try to collapse the Western economy et al, i.e., cause a Socialist revolution, I do not know. However, it has crossed my mind, that the non-Conservative Rahm Emanuel (alluding to M.F. Weiner) has said, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

Good and evil are ever at each other’s throats. As a Conservative I see a lot of good in the midst of, and, coming out of, this coronavirus crisis. However, government authoritarianism is not one of them.