This piece was written in late September 2021 before vaccine passes came into force (and before this site was launched) separating the vaccinated and the unvaccinated in public life. It is published now for the first time. It’s interesting to reflect on what has, and hasn’t, changed in the year or so since.
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At Jacinda and Ashley’s regular 1pm propaganda shows, with covid-19 branding behind them the public is treated to repetitive, frightening, alarmist and manipulative nonsense masquerading as public health information.
They have seemingly modeled their covid-19 response communications after the dictators and authoritarian regimes of the 20th Century. It brings to mind the images I saw at school of fascist rulers addressing crowds in front of imposing symbols, perhaps with more friendly colourways, but the effect is not dissimilar.
A year and half after the public was sold on ‘two-weeks to flatten the curve’, a public relations campaign to divide the public and scapegoat the unvaccinated is well underway.
On Thursday September 23, Associate Health Minister (Māori Health) Peeni Henare said in a television interview that the Government’s focus was shifting to the unvaccinated.
The “iniquities will continue to grow” for “that community”. This meant “shutting them out” and being “unable to access certain things,” he said.
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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau earlier in September began making public announcements in which he pitted the jabbed against the unjabbed.
“You need to know that if you have done the right thing, you get to be safe, you get to be rewarded for having done the right things.
“That’s what it’s all about and those people that still hesitate, who still resist, they won’t get to enjoy the same things as those who have done their part for others. It seems like a very logical thing, it seems like a very obvious thing.”
The same ‘us and them’ rhetoric can be repeatedly heard by the premiers of Victoria and New South Wales.
One of the things that has been shocking to me personally, as I have tried to engage friends and others in my community on this issue, is the number of people who seem to be onboard and at peace with the potential introduction of vaccine passports.
I recently shared this matter-of-fact and moving account of a Lithuanian family’s experience of being shut out of society because they have chosen not to take the covid jab.
Both parents have been suspended without pay from their jobs, and the family cannot eat in restaurants or shop in many stores. They cannot access the healthcare they require, and may soon be unable to use public transport. An exemption for the wife was denied despite her doctor saying she was contraindicated for the jab. There is no way to appeal the decision.
I highly recommend everyone takes the time to read it, because it offers a window into the world we may soon be living in.
I shared it in order to shock people out of their complacency but it actually failed to have much an impact on people who I had expected it would deeply move. How did they respond?
There were those who immediately came back and said something like, “I believe everyone should have the right to choose”, or “it’s not right to force anyone. Only you know what’s right for you”. It’s reassuring to know there are still a large number of people who are strong in their respect for individual rights and freedoms, and interestingly, most of those people had chosen to take the covid jab themselves.
Then there are the ones who said things like, “you’ll be locked out of society and that’s your choice”, or “it must be very frightening for you”, or “I hope there will be support for people who can’t have the jab for health reasons” and even “I believe in freedom but in a pandemic we need a strong response”.
So the logic goes something like ‘authoritarianism is ok because it’s an ’emergency’ and the unjabbed have made their own bed’.
Just for fun, here are some recent Twitter posts that I documented for posterity.
“Why doesn’t the government go full hunger games and every two weeks put the regions with the lowest vaccination rates into level 4.”
Responses to this included:
“and get nanaia to cut off their water.”
“Forget the Hunger Games, why not go for The Purge?”
“Rolling blackouts.”
The casual nature of these comments, as if they were discussing something quotidien, not denying people freedom and the basics of life – are terrifying. Several people that I know had ‘liked’ these comments, people I have invited into my home and shared many good times with. How could they find this kind of banter acceptable?
Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt wrote The Banality of Evil in the 1960s, about how evil could be normalised, in her coverage of the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann. He was the man responsible for organising the transportation of millions of Jews and others to concentration camps.
“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
As an unjabbed person who intends to remain that way, I can say definitively that it is NOT my choice to be locked out of society.
I have chosen not to get the jab because on the balance of evidence it is neither necessary nor effective nor safe. Besides that, I rejected conventional medicine early on in life because it didn’t seem to have much to do with health, was not for the most part rational, and in my practical experience just didn’t work.
This position is somehow a danger and crime against society in 2021, as the cult of the vaccine reaches ever-greater heights.
You simply cannot have a rational conversation with most people about the safety profile and efficacy of vaccines in the same way you might be able to about antibiotics, opioids, thalidomide or any other pharmaceutical drug. Vaccine worship pervades our social fabric.
And that’s before you even get to broach the logic and ethics of mass vaccination with an experimental gene therapy (it shouldn’t really be called a vaccine), or stabbing children who are at no risk from covid (in some cases without parental consent), and experimenting on 6-month-old babies.
At the Nuremburg trials, Hitler’s chief physician Dr Karl Brandt, so divorced from the reality of what he had done, said the regime had made people healthier, and it was good what had been done to the Jews, gypsies, handicapped and mentally ill. This was because Nazi’s embraced the idea of ‘racial hygiene’.
A 2016 documentary, called Caring Corrupted, about how Germany’s nurses became participants in mass-murder, is worth an hour of everyone’s time to remind us what happens when a minority is exploited for ‘the good’ of the majority.
Today we aren’t manipulated with the concept of racial hygiene, but vaccination hygiene. The unjabbed are being portrayed as a cess-pool of germs ready to infect the clean bodies of the jabbed (as if that makes any sense – isn’t the jab meant to protect you?).
And the Government and media rhetoric is becoming angrier and more extreme every day – the vaccinated must be cast out and denied basic rights and privileges because they do not conform to the ‘new normal’ ideology.
So, for lovers of freedom and individual rights, and rejectors of fear and division, it’s important now that we hold the line, and I think, force the conversation with those hypnotised by the ridiculous theatre of the Jacinda and Ashley show. If for no other reason than to light a spark, sow a seed of doubt, make them consider their position with a little more depth and thought.
Another quote from Arendt to close:
“Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet–and this is its horror–it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think.” ― Hannah Arendt
Post script: Vaccine passes came into effect on 3 December 2021, several months after this story was written. They were scrapped in March 2022, after a three and half week protest and occupation against vaccine mandates and social segregation at Parliament grounds in Wellington. The occupation was brutally put down by riot police on 2 March 2022.