The mad war on covid made victims of us all
Freedom was the main casualty in our poorly led, scientifically inept and politically dishonest global war on a virus that greatly expanded government power and permanently damaged society.
J.D. Tuccille at Reason reports on the latest ranking of the Human Freedom Index, which is a co-production of the Cato Institute and Canada's Fraser Institute.
He quotes one of the authors of the annual index who says:
"In the year 2020, 94 percent of the world's population saw a fall in its freedom compared to the year before” … and says the index “documents how the Covid‐19 pandemic was a catastrophe for human freedom."
It’s hard to quantify the rise and fall of personal, economic and social freedoms around the world with great accuracy, and the index hasn’t scored 2021 or 2022 yet, but the findings that freedom took a direct hit in the war on covid should come as no surprise.
What’s most disturbing is that so few people in power and in the mainstream media saw the threat to freedom coming when the global war on covid was declared in the early spring of 2020.
War is the health of the state, Randolph Bourne so brilliantly said in 1918:
War is the health of the State.
It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate co-operation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense. The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties, the minorities are either intimidated into silence or brought slowly around by a subtle process of persuasion which may seem to them to be really converting them. Of course the ideal of perfect loyalty, perfect uniformity, is never attained. The classes upon whom the amateur work of coercion falls are unwearied in their zeal but often their agitation, instead of converting, merely serves to stiffen their resistance. Minorities are rendered sullen, and some intellectual opinion, bitter and satirical. But in general, the nation in war-time attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values, culminated at the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be produced through any other agency than war. Other values such as artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty, the enhancement of life, are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed and the significant classes who have constituted themselves the amateur agents of the State are engaged not only in sacrificing these values for themselves but in coercing all other persons into sacrificing them.
It sounds a lot like Bourne was describing what went on in the last three years in the USA during the war on covid.
But what Bourne, a socialist, said doesn’t just apply to big wars overseas and gigantic defense departments at home.
The federal wars on terrorism, drugs, alcohol, gambling, poverty, pollution etc. each enlarged state power and made many new government powers permanent.
The war on covid was declared by our power-mad public health generals and enforced by the political tyrants in charge of our states and cities .
The fight to defeat a virus whose lethality and infectiousness were overstated allowed the state to impose sweeping restrictions on our basic freedoms that in many ways were worse than those imposed on American society even during WWII.
My generation — the spoiled Boomers — let all of this bad stuff happen and should forever be ashamed of itself, but of course it never will.