Back in 1983 French philosopher, Jean-Francois Revel wrote a very crucial book called How Democracies Perish. It was written during the height of the Cold War and was a prophetic call to the West to wake up to the threat of Communism from without and self-doubt and apathy from within. The very first line of the book is worth repeating: “Democracy may, after all, turn out to have been a historical accident, a brief parenthesis that is closing before our eyes.”
Today we also need to speak about such matters. Democracies are certainly not eternal structures but have feet of clay. They can come to an end, be it by external attack or internal decay. And when we look at how the ‘free West’ is faring today, we all should be very much concerned.
I have written before about the totalitarian social credit system in Communist China. And I have written before about how the West is quickly moving in that exact same direction, primarily because of its over-the-top responses to Covid. Let me speak more to what is happening in China, and look at how this is being played out in the West.
A very important article has just appeared on all this by Ashley Sadler called “How ‘vaccine passports’ would turn America into a Communist China-style surveillance state”. She begins:
In 2007 researchers with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began to look into using China’s cutting edge technology, mass surveillance capabilities, and top-down government power to control the behavior of Chinese citizens down to the most minute measure.
The scheme would analyze, track, and score every aspect of Chinese citizens’ lives including their spending habits, their care or recklessness in driving, their social media posts, how politely they stood and waited for a train, and how hard they worked.
People could bump up their scores for good behavior, but would lose points for acting in an “untrustworthy” manner as determined by the CCP. High scores could get participants discounts, rewards, and other perks. Low scores would lead to losses of freedom and privileges.
Now, more than halfway through 2021, China’s social credit system is not isolated to East Asia. Amid a worldwide totalitarian response to a not-so-very lethal virus that originated in Wuhan, China, the communist social credit system has spread like a communicable disease, infecting some of the freest, most democratic western nations in the world.
Those with their finger on the cultural pulse have begun to warn that so-called COVID-19 vaccine passports open the door to a China-style social credit system in an America that is rapidly deteriorating into a technocratic surveillance state.
She offers more details about the Chinese system of total control and then says this:
In a June 2014 statement, Chinese State Council said the system is designed to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.” “You could see China’s so-called trust plan as Orwell’s 1984 meets Pavlov’s dogs,” wrote Rachel Botsman in a 2017 article for Wired UK. “Act like a good citizen, be rewarded and be made to think you’re having fun.”
The frightening situation in the US is then discussed:
The 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic showed Americans where the true power lies. A handful of unelected billionaires in Silicon Valley showed themselves capable of deplatforming the President of the United States and choking a politically damning story about Joe Biden’s son, while deleting, censoring, and banning qualified voices who spoke out against the prevailing COVID-19 narrative which advocated universal masking, lockdowns, and experimental inoculations as the only way to deal with the pandemic.
Meanwhile the ill-advised riot at the Capitol on January 6 spurred a political witch-hunt which demonized half of the country as potential domestic extremists. Over the past year a series of actions by Big Tech working seemingly in concert with the liberal establishment have signaled that a centralized system of social credit and top-down dictatorship has made its way to the Land of the Free.
She continues:
For decades, our data has been spread over a network of carriers, providers, companies, and institutions, none of which communicate with one another unless we allow them to. [China expert] Reggie Littlejohn warns that vaccine passports would change all of that.
Universal digital documentation for vaccine status would provide a centralized platform with which to collect and curate all of our personal data, from spending habits and driving records to political opinions. The data could then be used to determine whether or not we can enjoy freedoms in society. Citing tech experts, Littlejohn said “the digital platform used by Vaccine Passports can provide the same totalitarian functionality as used by the Chinese ‘Social Credit System.’”
“While it may begin with only carrying digital information regarding whether an individual is vaccinated, the rest of the functionality of the Chinese Social Credit System can be integrated into the ‘Vaccine Passport’ system in a matter of minutes or hours,” she said. Politicians have begun to signal that the same measures undertaken to “slow the spread” of COVID-19 might be employed to tackle the so-called “climate crisis.”…
Inherent, God-given rights cannot be stripped away by any temporal government. At least, that’s what Americans have always firmly believed. But the CCP, with its authoritarian governance and its liberty-crushing social credit system, does not agree. Nor, increasingly, do our own American leaders. According to Littlejohn, “the arrogant and officially atheistic CCP” believes rights come from the government, and are anything but “unalienable.”
“Under Communism,” Littlejohn explained, “you only have a right if the government grants it.” Under such a system, forced experimental inoculation is acceptable because “our bodies are in the domain of the State, and we only have the rights the government gives us, and only if we are compliant.”…
Last year Americans became righteously angered when they learned that “contact tracers” would order them to quarantine if they came close to a person who had tested positive for COVID-19. After massive backlash, the contact tracing scheme all but withered away.
Will a global vaccine passport scheme go extinct before it robs millions of their civil liberties? Much of it depends upon us. While it may seem as though the obstacles presented by a massive overarching scheme to subject citizens to a regime in which their every move is tracked, monitored, and judged by an atheistic superstate, it’s important to see signs of victory across the world, and become emboldened to resist, to refuse, and to speak out.
Despite huge coercive mass vaccination efforts and mandates, nearly a third of American adults have refused to take a single dose of the COVID-19 shots. In Texas and Florida, governors have banned vaccine passports outright, with even private businesses in those states forbidden to ask patrons for their vaccination status.
Earlier this week California Democrats dropped their plan to impose a statewide vaccine passport scheme throughout the Golden State, with Assemblyman Jim Patterson saying the decision “is a testament to the thousands of calls and emails made in the last couple of days.”
Unpopular laws are doomed to fail, if only the people draw a line in the sand. As Kentucky Senator and physician Rand Paul said in a stirring video last month, “It’s time for us to resist. They can’t arrest all of us.” “We are at a moment of truth and a crossroads,” Paul said. “Will we allow these people to use fear and propaganda to do further harm to our society, economy, and children? Or will we stand together and say, absolutely not. Not this time. I choose freedom.”
Now is the time. We must choose freedom.
I have documented plenty of cases of this rising tyranny here in Australia, along with all the hysteria, fear-mongering and panic porn that our leaders and media are shamelessly pushing all the time. And often it takes an outsider to sound the alarm about all this.
Consider this overseas report about what is happening in South Australia:
The government of South Australia, one of the country’s six states, has implemented a new policy requiring Australians to use an app with facial recognition software and geolocation to prove that they are abiding by a 14-day quarantine for travel within the country….
“I think it is accurate to describe it as Orwellian, but one has to understand the context,” Robert Carling, an economics senior fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies, told Fox News. “It is home quarantine Australian style, and the alternative is hotel quarantine Australian style, under police guard, which people hate.” Carling explained that South Australia is launching a trial home quarantine as a replacement for hotel quarantine, a nationwide policy, “and Australians would be happy to take any form of home quarantine instead of hotel quarantine.”
“Hotel quarantine is much more oppressive than home quarantine, even if the latter comes with Orwellian surveillance features,” the CIS scholar explained. Australians have to pay for hotel quarantine themselves, which costs about $2,500 Australian ($1,850 U.S.D.), he estimated.
“Since March 2020 Australians have been banned even from leaving the country unless they can get a special permit to do so,” Carling explained. He called this exit ban a “totalitarian, North Korea-style measure. Many other countries have had compulsory quarantine of some kind but they haven’t had exit bans.”
Not everyone is bowing down to the Totalist State and accepting this encroaching tyranny. Some are fighting back. The American state of Florida is one case in point, and this recent news item about the state offers some good news:
The Florida Department of Health has issued a notice indicating it will start issuing $5,000 fines to businesses, schools, and government agencies that require Floridians to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination.
The health department rule, which goes into effect on Sept. 16, details the penalties that businesses and other entities, including nonprofits, face for violating section 381.00316 of the 2021 Florida Statutes, which prohibits them from requiring customers or patrons to provide any documentation certifying COVID-19 vaccination or postinfection recovery in order to gain access to their premises or services.
Democracies seldom become totalitarian police states overnight. But they can and do become them incrementally – especially when the populace is unaware or unconcerned about the downward slippery slope they are on.
