The Covid pandemic will shape the outlook for years to come. In good ways and bad. At the beginning of the lockdowns, I often warned that shenanigans would follow (also see AmericanThinker: Beware of tyranny more than covid 19. Now that some countries have entered a third round, the entirety of the experiment is open to the naked eye. The sight is not so pretty.
Freedom House, a think-tank in Washington, counts 80 countries under lockdown orders where democracy and human rights took a turn for the worse. The list covers dictatorships grown nastier and democracies sunk into quasi police states. Governments to the right and left have taken advantage of a general state of alarm. A journalist named H.L. Mencken wrote, long before the pandemic, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
When people have a pandemic to alarm them they will clamour to be led to safety. Some put their faith in rocky health experts, others in office holders arrogant as satraps. Both, with the help of big media, find it easy to spread panic and dread. Freedom House counted 91 countries using Covid as an excuse to harass commentary that displeases the powerful. Groupthink is fiercely enforced. Lockdown is the one correct position, and everyone must be for it.
There are pandemic elections to go with. Ruling parties suspend them because of being ‘afraid’ of the super-spreader. In Hong Kong pro-democracy candidates were expected to do well in the September election. Citing the risk of Covid, pro-China candidates put the election back a year.
