I don’t often find myself quoting liberal writers (in a positive light), but it happens if they are correct. Not as uncommon as Haley’s comet but infrequent, and this is one of those times.
Dr. Naomi Wolf’s Substack has a piece titled ‘On the Subtlety of Monsters.’ Her concern is this. “How could “nice” people in the humane West…detain those exposed to a “contagious disease” in forcible quarantine, without charge or trial, and dependent on a court order and good behavior to get out?”
How can those “who grew up with post-Enlightenment norms about human rights and the rule of law — be doing evil now, with whole hearts.”
She believes, and I agree, that we should be concerned with the rapid progression of these events because of what could follow.
To frame the matter, she points to Nazi history, 1931-1933, when “so many vicious norms and policies were set in place. But these were often culturally or professionally policed, rather than being policed by camp patrols. That’s the point that better-informed analysts of these similarities are making.”
The Nazis laid a political foundation but society did the cultural heavy lifting for them.
[A] Casual, escalating cruelty, a culture of degradation of the “othered,” and a two-tier society, were built up in those years certainly at the behest of Nazi social policy. But the construction of a world of evil out of what had been a modern civil society, if a fragile one, was also endorsed and even policed by doctors, by medical associations, by journalists, by famous composers and filmmakers, by universities; by neighbors, by teachers, by shopkeepers — for years before the death camp guards were tasked with their own far more heinous cruelty.
Now – Yes! invoking Nazis or Hitler is unofficially a debate ender (you lose) unless you are a Leftist talking about Republicans then it follows white privileged, racist, sexist, bigoted, theocrat as naturally as higher taxes follow Democrat majorities.
But Dr. Wolf is not wrong.
As today, emergency laws then were the benchmarks that would allow democracy to collapse. “Hitler wanted full powers like Mussolini’s in Italy,” writes Elon. “He knew exactly what was needed to turn a government into a ‘legal’ dictatorship: emergency powers under Article 48.”
See if you notice any echoes here. Currently, forty-seven US states are operating with emergency measures, which suspend or bypass normal legislative checks and balances, including New York, the state in which I am writing. Under emergency measures, pretty much anything can be done.
In The Live Free or Die State our ‘Republican Governor’ closed businesses, levied fines, defined hours of operation, closed churches, mosques, and synagogues, denied the right to assembly and association, and approved illegal searches without warrants.
In real life, many just ignored that regime and not much came from it. Mr. Sununu eventually saw more political advantage in ending the emergency. But the mechanisms are still in place and Democrats demanded a lot more restrictions and still demand them. Democrat-run cities in New Hampshire are still walking on the edge of fresh new tyrannies.
And if able the Dems would have imposed more restrictions, for longer, more enforcement, and more severe punishment. The same party that supports mob violence to stifle speech they oppose, sees no natural right to self-defense and has no problem with compelling speech.
Some will still not see the potential for danger. They won’t learn from history. They will dismiss it as improbable or impossible.
As impossible as looking forward from 2018 and predicting that within 36 months we have plans for a two-tiered society based on accepting a government-mandated chemical modification in the absence of which you might be denied … the right to travel, shop, dine out, participate in government, get medical attention, an education, or potentially end up arrested or in a detention facility.
No court, no hearing, no jury.
All over a flu that 99.9% of people who catch it survive? Most don’t even get seriously ill.
All of that is real right now, in the enlightened West because that flu got nothing on human nature and the desire to abuse power.
There’s more than one kind of war and freedom isn’t free. It comes at the cost of lives, our loved ones, ourselves. And not just from bullets or in military battles. Many a patriot could lose their life to COVID in defense of liberty. We’ve lost a few already because they chose the face of freedom against the abuse of emergency powers. To get off the path upon which we’d been set.
Because human nature does not care what century it is. It will accumulate and abuse power if unchecked.
It is still unchecked, It can still be abused. And history has a lesson for us if we will take the time to learn.
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