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https://brownstone.org/articles/covid-expansion-abuse-state-power/

Covid and the Expansion and Abuse of State Power

The years of living with increasingly oppressive Covid restrictions and mandates is a tale of many villains complicit in tyranny and a few heroes of resistance. It’s a story of venal, incompetent politicians and brutish police – thugs in uniform – acting at the behest of power-drunk apparatchiks.

Medically idiotic, economically ruinous, socially disruptive and embittering, culturally dystopian, politically despotic: what was there to like in the Covid era?

• Billions, if you were Big Pharma.
• Unchecked power, if you were Big State.
• Power over the whole population of a state and fame with extended daily TV appearances on all channels, if you were a chief medical officer.
• More money and power over the world’s governments and people for the WHO.
• Template for action for climate zealots.
• Dreamtime for cops given free rein to indulge their inner bully.

But anguished despair, if you were a caring, concerned citizen who loves individual freedom and autonomy.

The existing frameworks, processes and institutional safeguards under which liberal democracies operated until 2020 had ensured expanding freedoms, growing prosperity, an enviable lifestyle and quality of life, and educational and health outcomes without precedent in human history. Abandoning them in favour of a tightly centralised small group of decision-makers liberated from any external scrutiny, contestability and accountability, produced both a dysfunctional process and suboptimal outcomes: very modest gains for much long-lasting pain.

In two World Wars, many risked their lives to protect our freedoms, but in the last three years, so many gave up freedoms to prolong lives. There evolved a co-dependency between the uber surveillance state and a Stasi-like snitch society.

Confronted by the coronavirus pandemic as a ‘black swan’ event, most countries chose the hard suppression strategy with variably stringent lockdown measures. There should have been more caution because of the history of failed catastrophist warnings from Professor Neil Ferguson, the Pied Piper of pandemic porn; the massive economic costs which also have deadly impacts; the draconian infringement on individual freedoms; and the availability of other more targeted strategies rather than the mythical ‘do nothing’ alternative.

The science-denying policy interventions inflicted devastating social, economic, educational, health and mental health costs, especially on young people in the long term even though they were at negligible risk of serious harm. It should not, could not possibly have been a surprise to any health specialist that as social creatures, human beings are scarred by social isolation enforced through state diktats promoting the message that humans are disease-ridden biohazards.

For the vast majority of poor people in developing countries, on the one hand Covid was rarely at the top of deadly killer diseases, on the other hand, lockdowns proved to be cruel, heartless and deadly. Their plight was neglected by the very people and countries that loudly trumpet their kind and caring credentials in being concerned about vulnerable and marginalised communities.

Among the most shocking developments as the pandemic dragged on was the degree of coercion and force used by some of the best known champions of democracy and liberty. The boundary between liberal democracy and draconian dictatorship proved to be virus thin. Tools of repression like unleashing heavily armed cops on peacefully protesting citizens, once the identifying traits of fascists, communists and tin-pot despots, became uncomfortably familiar on the streets of Western democracies.

Lockdowns destroyed the three ‘Ls’ of lives, livelihoods and liberties. Governments effectively stole nearly three years of our life. Pre-emptive press self-censorship helped to normalise the rise of the surveillance-cum-biosecurity state in the name of keeping us safe from the virus that is so deadly that hundreds of millions had to be tested to know they’ve had it. Canada’s Freedom Convoy laid bare the stark reality that lockdowns are a class war waged by the laptop class on the working class, by the cultural elites on the great unwashed outside urban centres, and by the virtue signallers on independent free thinkers.

Australia provoked international incredulity at the brutality of its authoritarian measures to “crush and kill the virus“. The defining image of the pandemic state of siege in Australia will remain the case of Zoe Buhler, the pregnant mum handcuffed in her lounge room in front of her children. The episode is the very definition of a police state. Having crossed that Rubicon, how do we walk Australia back? A good start would be criminal prosecution of cops executing dictatorial edicts and of the officers and ministers authorising such action.

Vaccines were initially recommended and subsequently mandated on the slogan that ‘No one is safe until everyone is safe’, ignoring the admission implicit in the slogan that they do not protect the vaccinated. Opposition to vaccine mandates hardened with evidence of gaslighting on the benefits, denialism on the collateral harms, refusal either to conduct or else to publish the results of cost-benefit analyses, and banning of alternative treatment options.

The policy conclusion is to lift mandates in public settings and prohibit companies from imposing them in most business settings, leaving it instead for people to make informed decisions in consultation with their doctors, without pressure on the latter from drug regulators. And take back all those who were fired for refusing the jab.

The longer the health authorities pushed COVID-19 vaccination, exaggerating its benefits, downplaying its rapidly waning efficacy, ignoring safety signals on its list of harms and banning alternatives, the more attention turned to the role of drug regulators enabling pharmaceutical interventions rather than acting as watchdogs on behalf of public health and safety. Health authorities and regulators shifted the balance decisively from being individual-centric in liberal democracies to the collective safetyism of technocrats and experts.

The WHO’s performance proved patchy. Its credibility was badly damaged by tardiness in raising the alarm, the shabby treatment of Taiwan at China’s behest, the initial investigation that whitewashed the origins of the virus, and by flip-flops on masks and lockdowns that contradicted its own collective wisdom developed over a century as distilled in a report in 2019. This makes it all the more surprising that there should be a concerted effort underway to expand its authority and boost its resources by means of a new global pandemic treaty and amendments to the binding International Health Regulations.

In reporting on Covid, journalists abandoned their cynicism towards official claims and instead became addicted to fear porn. A critical and sceptical profession would have put the Government’s and modellers’ claims under the blowtorch and subjected them to withering criticism for the magnitude of errors in their predictions. Instead, we went “from disinterested journalism to Pravda in a single bound“, as Janet Daley put it in the Telegraph. Indeed, all institutional checks on overreach and abuse of executive power – legislatures, the judiciary, human rights machinery, professional associations, trade unions, the Church and the media – turned out to be unfit for purpose.

We have had to relearn two abiding verities: once governments have acquired more powers, they rarely relinquish them voluntarily; and any new power that can be abused will be abused, if not today by current agents of state then sometime in the future by their successors. Like people with command responsibility when crimes against humanity are committed by foot soldiers, the highest level decision-makers need to be held to account. This is important to ensure misdeeds are punished, victims are helped to achieve emotional closure, and future acts of comparable malfeasance are deterred.

Will Covid illiberalism be rolled back or has it become a permanent feature of the political landscape in the democratic West? The head says to fear the worst, but an eternally optimistic heart still hopes for the best.

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https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/22/chris-hedges-let-them-eat-cement/

Let Them Eat Cement

Israel is not only decimating Gaza with airstrikes but employing the oldest and cruelest weapon of war — starvation. Israel’s message, on the eve of a ground invasion, is clear. Leave Gaza or Die.  

Israel, with the backing of its U.S. and European allies, is preparing to launch not only a scorched earth campaign in Gaza but the worst ethnic cleansing since the wars in the former Yugoslavia. The goal is to drive tens, most probably hundreds of thousands of Palestinians over the southern border at Rafah into refugee camps in Egypt. The reverberations will be catastrophic, not only for the Palestinians, but throughout the region, almost certainly triggering armed clashes to the north of Israel with Hezbollah in Lebanon and perhaps with Syria and Iran. 

The Biden administration, slavishly doing Israel’s bidding, is fueling the madness. The U.S. was the only country to veto the U.N. Security Council resolution calling for humanitarian pauses to deliver food, medicine, water and fuel to Gaza. It has blocked proposals for a ceasefire. It has proposed a draft U.N. Security Council resolution that says Israel has a right to defend itself. The resolution also demands Iran stop exporting arms to “militias and terrorist groups threatening peace and security across the region.” 

The U.S. and its Western allies are as morally bankrupt and as complicit in genocide as those who witnessed the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews and did nothing.

The conflict, which has taken the lives of 1,400 Israelis and at least 4,600 Palestinians in Gaza, is widening. Israel carried out a second airstrike on two airports in Syria. It daily trades rocket barrages with Hezbollah militias. U.S. military bases in Iraq and Syria have been attacked by Shia militias. The USS Carney, a guided missile destroyer, shot down three cruise missiles on Thursday, apparently launched by the Houthis in Yemen and heading towards Israel. 

Israel is also struggling to quell daily violent clashes in the occupied West Bank. It carried out an airstrike on Sunday on a mosque in the Jenin refugee camp – the first air strike in the West Bank for two decades – that killed at least 2 people. Armed Jewish settlers have been rampaging through Palestinian towns in the West Bank. At least 90 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed by armed settlers or the Israeli military since the Oct. 7 incursion into Israel by Hamas and other resistance fighters, according to the U.N.’s humanitarian office. Some 4,000 workers from Gaza and 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been arrested in the past two weeks, doubling the number of Palestinian prisoners to 10,000 held by Israel, over half of whom are political prisoners

“Many of the prisoners have had their limbs, hands and legs broken … degrading and insulting expressions, insults, cursing, tying them with handcuffs to the back and tightening them at the end to the point of causing severe pain … naked, humiliating and group search of the prisoners,” the Palestinian Authority’s Commission for Detainees’ Affairs, Qadura Fares, said at a press conference.

B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, told the BBC that since the Oct. 7 attack, it had documented “a concerted and organized effort by settlers to use the fact that the entire international and local attention is focused on Gaza and the north of Israel to try to seize land in the West Bank.”

Inside Israel, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and Jerusalem IDs are being harassed, detained, arrested and expelled from jobs and universities in what is described as a “witch hunt.” More than 152,000 Israelis have been evacuated from towns and villages near the borders of Gaza and Lebanon.

The U.S., in an effort to thwart a military response by Iran that could trigger a regional war, is deploying an additional 2,000 troops to the Middle East. It will redeploy one of its strike groups to the Persian Gulf and send additional air defense systems to the region. The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and its strike group — which last weekend was being deployed to the eastern Mediterranean Sea to join the USS Gerald R. Ford — has been redirected to the Persian Gulf. A Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile battery, and Patriot missile defense system battalions, have also been sent to the Persian Gulf.

Israel has unleashed its Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – Death, Famine, War and Conquest. 

It has given Gazans two choices. Leave Gaza or die.

Palestinians will be killed not only from the bombs and shells, and eventually, with the ground invasion, bullets and tank shells, but from hunger and epidemics such as cholera. Without water, fuel and medicine and with the breakdown of sanitation, diseases will spread swiftly. The U.N. states that hospitals in Gaza “are on the brink of collapse.” Thousands of patients will die once fuel runs out for hospital generators.

A doctor from al-Shifa hospital in Gaza reported in an interview Saturday, “We are collapsing.” He spoke of a lack of oxygen, light and medical supplies, no water in some departments, concerns about cholera and the loss of doctors killed by Israeli airstrikes, including a dentist killed in Israel’s bombing of an Orthodox church that left at least 18 dead, including several children.   

The handful of trucks, 37 so far, of aid into Gaza is a cynical public relations gimmick demanded by the Biden administration. It will do little to alleviate the Israeli-engineered humanitarian crisis. The U.N. says it needs at least 100 aid trucks a day. Gaza’s last functioning seawater desalination plant shut down on Sunday because of a lack of fuel. 

Israel has no intention of lifting the total siege on Gaza. It announced it will increase its airstrikes. It will continue, as it has for the past two weeks, to extinguish the lives of Palestinians and terrorize and starve them into leaving Gaza. 

The ground assault on Gaza will not be quick. It will involve weeks, perhaps months, of street fighting. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin compared the looming battle in Gaza to the U.S. assault on the Iraqi city of Mosul, held by ISIS, in 2014. It took the U.S. nine months to recapture Mosul.

When Israel says this will be a “long war” they are, for once, telling the truth.

Israel has requested more military aid from Washington, $14.3 billion including $10.6 billion for air and missile defense. It will get it. Israel is rapidly depleting its stocks as it pounds Gaza, including in the south of Gaza where hundreds of thousands of displaced families from the north have fled. 

Israel will not permit the distribution of the $100 million in U.S. aid pledged for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, at least not until their scorched earth campaign is finished. But by then, Gaza will be unrecognizable. Israel will have annexed part or all of it. Maybe the money can go to building more illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. And pledging aid is not the same as appropriating it. So perhaps that, too, is part of the illusion.

Egyptian officials are acutely aware of what comes next. Up to half, maybe more, of the 2.3 million Palestinians will be pushed by Israel into Egypt on Gaza’s southern border and never be allowed to return.

“What is happening now in Gaza is an attempt to force civilian residents to take refuge and migrate to Egypt, which should not be accepted,” Egyptian president Abdulfattah al-Sisi warned.

Reports out of Egypt contend that Washington has promised to forgive much of Egypt’s massive $162.9 billion debt, as well as offer other economic incentives in exchange for Egypt’s acquiescence to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The refugees, once they cross the border into Egypt, will be left to rot in the Sinai. 

“There is a grave danger that what we are witnessing may be a repeat of the 1948 Nakba, and the 1967 Naksa, yet on a larger scale. The international community must do everything to stop this from happening again,” said Francesca Albanese, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967.

Israel has long used war to justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Government officials have openly called for another Nakba, or “catastrophe,” the term for the events of 1947-1949 when over 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from historic Palestine and driven into refugee camps to create the state of Israel. During the 1967 war, which led to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel ethnically cleansed another 300,000 Palestinians during the Naksa, or “day of the setback,” which is commemorated every year by Palestinians.

Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, however, is not limited to wars. There has been an ongoing slow motion ethnic cleansing as Israel has steadily built more Jewish-only colonies and incrementally seized Palestinian land. Palestinians, denied basic civil liberties in Israel’s apartheid state, have been robbed of assets, including, often, their homes. They have faced mounting restrictions on their physical movements. They have been blocked from trading and business, especially the selling of produce. They have found themselves increasingly impoverished and trapped behind walls and security fences erected around Gaza and the West Bank. At the same time, they have endured periodic Israeli airstrikes, targeted assassinations and near daily attacks by armed Jewish settlers and the Israeli army.

Israel prevented Palestinians who left the West Bank and Gaza Strip from returning at the rate of about 9,000 Palestinians per year following the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, until the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1994, according to the Israel human rights group HaMoked. Israel has also revoked the residency permits for some 14,000 Palestinians who lived in East Jerusalem since 1967 according to B’Tselem. 

Israel demolished 9,880 structures, including over 2,600 inhabited residential buildings, displacing over 14,000 people and affecting 233,681 in the West Bank alone between Jan. 1, 2009 and 7 Oct. 7, 2023, according to data from the  U.N Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Since the Oct. 7 attack, a further 38 homes and other structures were demolished in the West Bank affecting an additional 13,613 people and displacing at least 73.

Less than 2.2 percent of Palestinian requests for construction permits made between 2009 and 2020 were approved, according to data from Peace Now and the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

The number of Israeli colonists in the occupied territories, however, has gone from zero before the June 1967 war, to between 600,000 to 750,000 spread out across at least 250 settlements and outposts throughout the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, all of them in violation of international law.

Israel makes no secret about its intentions. 

Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, told troops preparing to enter Gaza, “I have released all the restraints.” 

Knesset member Ariel Kallner, part of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, called on X, formerly known as Twitter, for “a Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48.”

The Israeli army mobilized Ezra Yachin, a 95-year-old army veteran, to “motivate” the troops. Yachin was a member of the Lehi Zionist militia that carried out numerous massacres of Palestinian civilians, including the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948, where over 100 Palestinian civilians, many women and children, were slaughtered. 

“Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them,” Yachin said addressing Israeli troops.

“Erase them, their families, mothers and children,” he went on. “These animals can no longer live.” 

“Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them,” he said. “If you have an Arab neighbor, don’t wait, go to his home and shoot him.” 

Where are our humanitarian interventionists? The ones who wept crocodile tears about the human rights of Ukranians, Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans and Afghans, to justify massive arms shipments and war? Where is the old anti-war wing of the Democratic Party and the liberal class? What has happened to the public intellectuals who used to decry the slaughter of innocents and the U.S. war machine? Where are the jurists who uphold the rule of international law? Why are the few lonely voices speaking out about Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians attacked, censored and doxxed?

“The previous president wanted to ban us and probably put us in concentration camps,” said Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who is of Palestinian descent, at a rally in support of a ceasefire on Oct. 20 in Washington in front of the U.S. Capitol. “This one wants us just to die. That’s how it feels. Shame on them.”

Israel will not halt its genocidal campaign in Gaza against the Palestinians until there is a U.S. arms embargo on Israel. Our weapons systems, munitions and attack aircraft sustain the slaughter. We must terminate the $3.8 billion in military aid that the U.S. gives to Israel each year. We must support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and demand suspension of all free trade and other agreements between the U.S. and Israel. Only when these props are knocked out from under Israel will the Israeli leadership be forced, as was the apartheid regime in South Africa, to integrate Palestinians into one state with equal rights. As long as these props remain, the Palestinians are doomed. 

“The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.” -Orwell