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https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/authoritarian_madness_the_slippery_slope_from_lockdowns_to_concentration_camps

Authoritarian Madness: The Slippery Slope from Lockdowns to Concentration Camps

“All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwald, the Auschwitzes—all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers.”— Rod Serling, Deaths-Head Revisited

In the politically charged, polarizing tug-of-war that is the debate over COVID-19, we find ourselves buffeted by fear over a viral pandemic that continues to wreak havoc with lives and the economy, threats of vaccine mandates and financial penalties for noncompliance, and discord over how to legislate the public good without sacrificing individual liberty.

The discord is getting more discordant by the day.

Just recently, for instance, the Salt Lake Tribune Editorial Board suggested that government officials should mandate mass vaccinations and deploy the National Guard “to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.”

In other words, lock up the unvaccinated and use the military to determine who gets to be “free.”

These tactics have been used before.

This is why significant numbers of people are worried: because this is the slippery slope that starts with well-meaning intentions for the greater good and ends with tyrannical abuses no one should tolerate.

For a glimpse at what the future might look like if such a policy were to be enforced, look beyond America’s borders.

In Italy, the unvaccinated are banned from restaurants, bars and public transportation, and could face suspensions from work and monthly fines. Similarly, France will ban the unvaccinated from most public venues.

In Austria, anyone who has not complied with the vaccine mandate could face fines up to $4100. Police will be authorized to carry out routine checks and demand proof of vaccination, with penalties of as much as $685 for failure to do so.

In China, which has adopted a zero tolerance, “zero COVID” strategy, whole cities—some with populations in the tens of millions—are being forced into home lockdowns for weeks on end, resulting in mass shortages of food and household supplies. Reports have surfaced of residents “trading cigarettes for cabbage, dishwashing liquid for apples and sanitary pads for a small pile of vegetables. One resident traded a Nintendo Switch console for a packet of instant noodles and two steamed buns.”

For those unfortunate enough to contract COVID-19, China has constructed “quarantine camps” throughout the country: massive complexes boasting thousands of small, metal boxes containing little more than a bed and a toilet. Detainees—including children, pregnant women and the elderly— were reportedly ordered to leave their homes in the middle of the night, transported to the quarantine camps in buses and held in isolation.

If this last scenario sounds chillingly familiar, it should.

Eighty years ago, another authoritarian regime established more than 44,000 quarantine camps for those perceived as “enemies of the state”: racially inferior, politically unacceptable or simply noncompliant.

While the majority of those imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps, forced labor camps, incarceration sites and ghettos were Jews, there were also Polish nationals, gypsies, Russians, political dissidents, resistance fighters, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.

Culturally, we have become so fixated on the mass murders of Jewish prisoners by the Nazis that we overlook the fact that the purpose of these concentration camps were initially intended to “incarcerate and intimidate the leaders of political, social, and cultural movements that the Nazis perceived to be a threat to the survival of the regime.”

As the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum explains:

“Most prisoners in the early concentration camps were political prisoners—German Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats—as well as Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and persons accused of ‘asocial’ or socially deviant behavior. Many of these sites were called concentration camps. The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.”

How do you get from there to here, from Auschwitz concentration camps to COVID quarantine centers?

Connect the dots.

You don’t have to be unvaccinated or a conspiracy theorist or even anti-government to be worried about what lies ahead. You just have to recognize the truth in the warning: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

This is not about COVID-19. Nor is it about politics, populist movements, or any particular country.

This is about what happens when good, generally decent people—distracted by manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and fighting that divides the populace into warring “us vs. them” camps—fail to take note of the looming danger that threatens to wipe freedom from the map and place us all in chains.

It’s about what happens when any government is empowered to adopt a comply-or-suffer-the-consequences mindset that is enforced through mandates, lockdowns, penalties, detention centers, martial law, and a disregard for the rights of the individual.

The slippery slope begins in just this way, with propaganda campaigns about the public good being more important than individual liberty, and it ends with lockdowns and concentration camps.

The danger signs are everywhere.

Claudio Ronco, a 66-year-old Orthodox Jew and a specialist in 18th-century music, recognizes the signs. Because of his decision to remain unvaccinated, Ronco is trapped inside his house, unable to move about in public without a digital vaccination card. He can no longer board a plane, check into a hotel, eat at a restaurant or get a coffee at a bar. He has been ostracized by friends, shut out of public life, and will soon face monthly fines for insisting on his right to bodily integrity and individual freedom.

For all intents and purposes, Ronco has become an undesirable in the eyes of the government, forced into isolation so he doesn’t risk contaminating the rest of the populace.

This is the slippery slope: a government empowered to restrict movements, limit individual liberty, and isolate “undesirables” to prevent the spread of a disease is a government that has the power to lockdown a country, label whole segments of the population a danger to national security, and force those undesirables—a.k.a. extremists, dissidents, troublemakers, etc.—into isolation so they don’t contaminate the rest of the populace.

The world has been down this road before, too.

Others have ignored the warning signs. We cannot afford to do so.

As historian Milton Mayer recounts in his seminal book on Hitler’s rise to power, They Thought They Were Free:

“Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people‑—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the 'national enemies', without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.”

The German people chose to ignore the truth and believe the lie.

They were not oblivious to the horrors taking place around them. As historian Robert Gellately points out, “[A]nyone in Nazi Germany who wanted to find out about the Gestapo, the concentration camps, and the campaigns of discrimination and persecutions need only read the newspapers.”

The warning signs were there, blinking incessantly like large neon signs.

“Still,” Gellately writes, “the vast majority voted in favor of Nazism, and in spite of what they could read in the press and hear by word of mouth about the secret police, the concentration camps, official anti-Semitism, and so on. . . . [T]here is no getting away from the fact that at that moment, ‘the vast majority of the German people backed him.’”

Half a century later, the wife of a prominent German historian, neither of whom were members of the Nazi party, opined: “[O]n the whole, everyone felt well. . . . And there were certainly eighty percent who lived productively and positively throughout the time. . . . We also had good years. We had wonderful years.”

In other words, as long as their creature comforts remained undiminished, as long as their bank accounts remained flush, as long as they weren’t being locked up, locked down, discriminated against, persecuted, starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed or killed, life was good.

Life is good in America, too, as long as you’re able to keep cocooning yourself in political fantasies that depict a world in which your party is always right and everyone else is wrong, while distracting yourself with bread-and-circus entertainment that bears no resemblance to reality.

Indeed, life in America may be good for the privileged few who aren’t being locked up, locked down, discriminated against, persecuted, starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed or killed, but it’s getting worse by the day for the rest of us.

Which brings me back to the present crisis: COVID-19 is not the Holocaust, and those who advocate vaccine mandates, lockdowns and quarantine camps are not Hitler, but this still has the makings of a slippery slope.

The means do not justify the ends: we must find other ways of fighting a pandemic without resorting to mandates and lockdowns and concentration camps. To do otherwise is to lay the groundwork for another authoritarian monster to rise up and wreak havoc.

If we do not want to repeat the past, then we must learn from past mistakes.

January 27 marks Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a day for remembering those who died at the hands of Hitler’s henchmen and those who survived the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps.

Yet remembering is not enough. We can do better. We must do better.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the world is teetering on the edge of authoritarian madness.

All it will take is one solid push for tyranny to prevail.

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https://stephenlendman.org/2022/01/26/free-americans-from-tyranny/

Free Americans from Tyranny

Democracy in America was always pure fantasy from inception — except for the privileged few.

The supreme law of the land never deterred the US ruling class from serving its own interests at the expense of most others.

We the people always meant the rich, well-born and able, others ill-served, exploited and abused.

Elections when held are farcical. Two right wings of one-party state take turns running things.

Ordinary people have no say over how they’re governed — never did, surely don’t today.

Over time, tyranny gained traction to where it’s the law of the land in different forms — notably political and all things related to healthcare.

It’s why the latter should be called the sickness industry because wellness isn’t profitable.

According to bioethicist Donald Light: 

“(N)ew prescription drugs have a 1 in 5 chance of causing serious reactions after they have been approved.” 

“That is why expert physicians recommend not taking new drugs for at least five years” — unless no alternative options exist.

“(E)ven (when) even properly prescribed…(a)bout 330,000 patients die each year from prescription drugs in the US and Europe.” 

They cause “an epidemic of… hospitalizations…” In the US, it’s about 6.6 million annually.

The above casualty count, as well as other data on injuries and deaths from legal drugs, were before seasonal flu was renamed covid with the worst of diabolical aims in mind.

Since mass-jabbing began in December 2020, the casualty count has been off the charts.

Based on officially reported US and European data, over five million adverse events occurred in little over a year from kill shots alone, including tens of thousands of deaths.

Because officially reported numbers represent a tiny fraction of harm to health from mass-jabbing, the death toll alone likely tops one million in the US/West.

Numbers of kill shot illnesses, serious ones and disabling injuries may be tens of millions.

Who’s keeping count? The official toll in the US/West is way understated.

MSM even suppress what’s officially reported.

It’s in support of promoting maximum harm to maximum numbers of people with mass-extermination of unwanted segments of society worldwide in mind, along with elimination of what remains of greatly eroded freedoms.

Established last year, Make Americans Free Again (MAFA) is a grassroots group with a “simple and easily understandable campaign platform,” stating:

“I (we) want the freedom to accept or reject any and all medical treatments, including (jabs), for myself and my minor children.” 

“The state and federal government, employers, merchants, groups, schools, institutions, and other entities should not be able to force me or my minor children to receive any medical intervention, including (jabs for any purpose), without my express permission.”

“I (we) furthermore demand that full disclosure of the risks and benefits of any medical intervention, including screening tests, drugs, devices, surgeries, and (jabs) be required by law to be provided to any consumer prior to the delivery of services.”

No exceptions to the above should exist. None should be tolerated.

We alone have sovereignty over our own bodies — what no ruling authorities may legally overrule.

MAFA is led by Pamela Popper.

She founded and heads Wellness Forum Health.

“The company offers educational programs to both consumers and providers that facilitate informed medical decision-making, diet and lifestyle intervention, and improved long-term health outcomes.”

Popper also “serves on the Physician’s Steering Committee and the President’s Board for the Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine in Washington.”

A public policy expert, she supports the universal right of informed and voluntary consent on all things health related — including the right of everyone to choose their healthcare providers and treatment protocols.

At this time, Popper is involved in challenging the illegality of draconian flu/covid related mandates — what never should have been instituted in the first place anywhere.

It’s crucial to rescind ones in place to restore freedom of choice on all things health related.

The alternative is medical tyranny — enforced by political means to inflict maximum harm on maximum numbers of people domestically and worldwide.

Kill shots and all else flu/covid represent the mother of all diabolical state-sponsored scams.

Most of the medical and scientific community, along with dominant MSM, were co-opted, bribed, pressured, and at times threatened to support what demands exposure and denunciation.

Based on years of research and writing, Popper slammed “incompeten(t) big medicine, big food, big pharma,” and MSM.

What’s going on “isn’t new,” she explained. “It’s just a (much) bigger (and more destructive) version of” what gone on for years.

When the US/West and elsewhere was turned on its head in early 2020, most people were initially fooled, myself included.

Popper awakened to the scam in March 2020, she said, weeks before my own awakening.

She erred in one respect. What’s going on is an invented pandemic, not a real one, except for jabbed individuals.

They comprise the vast majority of flu/covid outbreaks and other serious health issues caused by kill shots.

Covid is seasonal flu renamed, what shows up annually like clockwork.

Not until 2020 was it accompanied by state-sponsored, MSM proliferated hyperventilating.

Until the world was turned on its head over two years ago, little more occurred than low-key reminders to get annual flu shots.

Left unexplained is their potential harm while providing little or no protection.

Everything changed dramatically once flu/covid mass-jabbing began a little over a year ago — notably unprecedented numbers of casualties.

As long as mass-jabbing continues, the toll will continue to rise exponentially — on the phony pretext of claiming that draconian policies are beneficial, notably kill shots designed to destroy health.

Committed resistance is the only option — including by mass-street protests and lawsuits against what no one should tolerate.

Defeating the most diabolical scheme of all-time is crucial to accomplish this year as soon as possible.

With enough determined people willing to put their bodies and spirit on the line, dark forces behind what’s going on can be beaten.

“Live Free or Die.”

The state of New Hampshire’s official motto is the only acceptable option. No other exists.

Patrick Henry enunciated it in his March 1775 address to colonial Virginia’s legislature, saying:

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?” 

“Forbid it, Almighty God!”

“I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”