The totalitarian regimes responsible for the most heinous atrocities in the 20th century – think Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot – didn’t get there overnight. They used fear to control. They excluded the dirty people, softly at first. They justified the exclusion.
They moved to harder exclusions and eventually eliminated people either socially or physically.
In 21st century Australia state premiers are racing down that familiar path, trying to out-tyrant each other, drunk on power, setting up their own biosecurity police states complete with medical apartheid.
Sadly, we have enabled it, refusing to rein them in and, worse, supplying the Australian Immunisation Register data that underpins this medical apartheid.
Fear is a justification of choice for coercion and control, with non-vaccinated Australians increasingly demonised, ostracised and socially eradicated.
In Queensland the premier tweeted that people not vaccinated raise red flags – not just one, but 22 of them.
In the media politicians and health bureaucrats all claim Covid-19 is now a pandemic of the unvaccinated, but there is no justification for such demonisation. In a German study, 55% of symptomatic patients over 60 were fully vaccinated. Gibraltar, where all 34,000 residents are fully vaccinated, is recording 60 new cases a day.
The totalitarian path we are unquestionably on has never ended well. The solution is a rediscovery of human dignity, along with – and I don’t say this lightly – civil disobedience.