Two years ago, how many people would have predicted that tennis's number one ranked player would be banned from competing in Australia and France for refusing to allow their governments to decide what is injected into his body?  How many people would have predicted the construction of internment camps to house citizens who similarly refuse to comply?  How many would have predicted that national leaders of "democratic" countries would demand censorship of dissenting points of view?  How many would have predicted that tech and media companies would eagerly jump at those calls for censorship by actively deleting from the public square any voices contrary to the official narratives sanctioned by those in power?  

Whatever threat to human health the China Virus poses, it has been dwarfed by the threats to peace, stability, and freedom caused by two years of government tyranny run amok.  For people who either never experienced the authoritarianism practiced by dictatorships abroad or stubbornly believed that the "leaders" of "free" nations would be somehow immune to the corrupting influence of power, these two years have hopefully been a wake-up call.  If and when we get on the other side of this COVID-1984 war against citizens, "never again," must take on a new, additional meaning that includes peoples' resolute promise never to allow their governments to embrace totalitarianism in the names of "health" and "security."  Take this shameful moment in the history of nation-states once committed to liberty and use it to advantage by teaching your children and grandchildren how quickly freedom can be smothered by politicians and bureaucrats with "the best of intentions." 

All of this leads to a damning question: why have so few people with power stood up during these last two years to call out this COVID-1984 madness for what it is — the greatest and most organized attack on human freedom in nearly a century?  Yes, voices have been censored in ways once unthinkable in the West.  Sure, companies have worked hand-in-glove with governments to intimidate, punish, and mock dissenters.  It is true that part of the reason for the success of Wu-Flu totalitarianism is that a large portion of the population actually clamored for governments to strip them of their rights and dominate their lives in a "bargain" for personal survival as shortsighted as any ever made with the devil.  What is sometimes overlooked, however, is that no system created by humans is capable of protecting freedom without constant pushback from the people whose freedom is at stake.  Even people still in possession of some lingering virtue find it difficult to sustain a sense of right and wrong in the halls of government.  Political bureaucracy, by its nature, drains morality from its workforce.

Human life as just a number

Every human life matters.  The problem is that government work teaches the opposite lesson — that life is just a numbers game.  Consider a small-town mayor in rural America.  Far from the swamp in D.C., that official is still forced to make decisions that will statistically lead to someone's death.  Perhaps the choice of how to spend limited local tax dollars is between adding a traffic light and celebrating the harvest in the town square.  Choosing the latter may one day lead to an unnecessary automobile death, while choosing the former may diminish the mayor's re-election hopes.  Government actors learn quickly that small decisions have unintended life-or-death consequences.  

Once human life is seen as nothing more than a number, though, most political actors find it easier to bury their consciences beneath statistics.  What kind of a monster would trap people in their homes, close their churches, and deprive them of any means of making a living?  Well, for some of those monsters, case totals and transmission rates outweighed the reason, rationality, or restraint required to protect human rights during a potential emergency.  Treating humans as numbers justified trampling on the Constitution and Bill of Rights.  The result of that shortsightedness has been devastating.  

Conspiracy of silence

Imagine a serial murderer preying on a community.  Both the mayor and chief of police are determined to protect their jurisdiction.  Officers arrest a suspect who seems guilty.  A jury convicts and the murders stop.  Then, years later, it is discovered by an investigator that a piece of evidence was illegally planted on the suspect and that the man in prison may not be guilty.  What happens?  For moral people, the answer is simple: you bring the evidence of impropriety forward to ensure that justice is done.  However, in practice, such a disclosure would end up damaging both the police force and the civilian political authorities, as well as weaken the public's sense of safety, so too often, a conspiracy of silence develops, whereby the very people vested with the power to punish crimes end up becoming after-the-fact accessories to those crimes in a type of wicked feedback loop.  "Good intentions" are protected with silence, even after they've proven to have caused tremendous harm.

Now think of everyone in the U.S. government who must have known that the emergency-use "vaccines" developed to combat the China Virus would injure or kill a percentage of those treated yet chose not to inform the public.  Think of all the doctors denying simple therapeutics to patients.  Think of all the hospitals fraudulently listing unrelated causes of death as from COVID instead of with COVID in order to recoup higher payouts from the federal government.  Think of all the medical journals that have censored research contradicting the official COVID narrative.  Any one of these institutional guardians would have benefited the public by providing greater transparency, but they chose instead to protect the reputations of government actors, medical luminaries, and even "science" itself by staying silent.  When the "ends justify the means" and ethics are supplanted with "good intentions," unfathomably large numbers of people can conspire to commit crimes against humanity without ever having to say a word.  

The allure of propaganda

The first lesson politicians learn is that slogans work.  Unfortunately, this lesson teaches them that propaganda is more important than objective truth.  Repetition of certain selected words becomes more valuable than complex nuance.  Successful repetition of lies proves that some people are more than willing to be led astray.  Routinely successful manipulation of a population eventually convinces political actors that people are nothing but sheep to be controlled.  People become things not worthy of individual respect, and when that happens, propaganda flows from the government without remorse.  Those with power justify these deceits as "noble lies."  

When one "noble lie" is followed by another and another, nobody even asks what is right or wrong.  Instead, the question asked is whether those lies will succeed in obtaining public compliance.  Or whether those with power today will retain power tomorrow.  Or whether the policies of COVID-1984 further the "Great Reset" goals of global government.  Memes and sound bites replace concern for truth.  

The end effect is rampant nihilism among those with power.  Human life becomes insignificant next to the self-interest of government actors.  The natural rights and liberties of any individual become undermined and forgotten.  And those who choose to defy regime-enforcing propaganda become "domestic enemies."

What two years of COVID-1984 should have taught people by now is that bureaucracies can never be trusted to police themselves for our protection.  When the powerful treat the powerless as meaningless statistics to be manipulated and kept in the dark, then it is up to the powerless to determine how much tyranny they are willing to endure before deciding they've finally had enough.

Image: qimono via Pixabay, Pixabay License.