Emil Nolde Zwei Schwimmer1914
This letter is from longtime Automatic Earth reader and commenter “Huskynut” in New Zealand, written for the people in his address book. It may be good therapy for everyone to put all their Covid thoughts and frustrations in writing.
Huskynut:
Hi,
I’ve never done an open letter before – never had something I felt so passionately about as the precipice on which NZ is currently balanced. We’re way beyond any realm of “adults sharing political opinions” and a long way into “a cult just took my country”. I need to send this, yet I fear it will miss the mark, in which case I will have wasted my last shot.
My parents my schooling and several mentors along the way instilled in me a strong moral compass: one that hasn’t changed over time. As a human being I’ve fallen short of the directions of that compass many times, and sometimes even wilfully ignored it, but never was it wrong in pointing due moral North. I thank everyone who has contributed to that fundamental grounding in morality.
My experience has been that genuine morality exists outside of thought and rationality. The urging of our conscience is experienced subjectively and with immediacy, though we may subsequently analyse and understand it. I can dissect and understand why it is objectively wrong to segregate kiwis into Haves and Have Nots on the basis of their vax status, but I don’t have to analyse it to feel and know it’s wrong. It’s wrong simply and immediately because it’s wrong – the justification follows later.
Ours wasn’t a particularly virtuous or political family, but I remember when for a time we took inmates from the local Linton Prison home on day parole to help them adjust to outside life. On seeing my Dad doing the dishes one night, one mentioned he’d never seen a man do the dishes before.
I remember when we came very close to fostering a 14yo girl from a poor start – presumably to also help address the one-sided gender balance of five males to one females – but lost out on the basis of my mother’s Catholic aversion to assisting her to obtain contraception. I remember when the Springbok rugby tour drove a wedge through NZ society how we discussed the evils of the South Africa apartheid regime.
Those and many similar events – from which I benefited but can take no credit – were the grounding and calibration of my moral compass, which endures. I wish I could say the same for the moral compass of our collective society, which points nowhere and everywhere simultaneously. In 2021 NZ, “Don’t discriminate” has become “Must discriminate”. “Be courageous” has become “shit bricks, hide and await further instruction from the state”. “Think for yourself” has become “STFU and Obey”.
In my youth and till recent times, it was well understood from basic first principles that it was inimical in a democracy for people’s movements to be tracked. Now with “track and trace” I watch people queuing to do it voluntarily with nary a thought or a care. It used to be that “looking someone in the eye”, or more properly said their the face was the standard to assess their truthfulness. Now covering the face in social situations is considered “normal”, and indeed mandatory.
Some anecdotes:
– A local couple I know has just placed their house on the market. Both are now unemployed due to jab mandates and they can’t pay their mortgage. Logically and intellectually, that was a foregone conclusion of introducing mandates. Now I know first hand real people, good people, that it is happening to. In 2022 it’s entirely possibly it could happen to me. My home, that I fought so hard to buy and have put much blood, sweat and tears into rehabilitating could become another small casualty on my country’s war on reason and truth.
– My neighbour’s wife suffered a botched neck operation and hasn’t worked for six months. The surgeon who could have remedied it is now unavailable. He’s been promoted to brain surgeon at Wellington hospital – the previous surgeon was forced out for being unjabbed. Scarce, highly-skilled expertise, thrown on the bonfire of vanity that is our current jabbing crusade.
Nothing about those scenarios is remotely rational, normal or proportionate. Two years ago I would’ve sworn it could not happen in the country of my birth. Except, even back then, I felt it coming. I don’t know how or why – perhaps it was having a lot of time on my hands during the initial lockdowns, when I was out of work and couldn’t buy building materials. But I read, extensively and widely, and nothing I read remotely made sense, even in those early days.
The modelling was crude and implausible, and built on that of Neil Ferguson of the UK, who had a historical record of gross exaggeration. The NZ government cabinet papers were junk – and despite my tendency to hyperbole – in this case I mean it literally and accurately – they were junk: simply not fit for the purpose of decision-making on what was to impact the entire population’s liberties, livelihoods and liability (ie government debt).
When all this is done, Jacinda will leave NZ (she can scarcely remain) and ascend to a grossly overpaid job at the UN, for demonstrating her fealty to the globalist system. Those whose lives she is currently wrecking will not be so fortunate. That she was elected to represent and serve the NZ public will matter not a jot, as politicians increasingly identify with their international cohort ahead of their own country.
That is the tragedy of modern politics, sadly, and no amount of denial or “reserved judgement” will change it. Politicians change the “facts on the ground” and move on, whilst the horn-swaggled majority are passively “waiting to see” how it all turns out. Thus was history ever written, and those who pretend to study it whilst remaining silent on the need for urgent action at the junctures and pivots are the very worst of journalists liars.
I believe I grok what it might have felt like to be an awake person in 1930’s Germany. Whilst all around people were happily supporting the Nazi party, swept up in the material benefits of cheap cars, new autobahns, workers holidays, and effusions of national unity and emotion. Yet some few were awake and cognisant of where the demonisation and scapegoating of minorities was heading. And those people were, of course, unheeded and marginalised themselves.. voices drowned in the propaganda of the day.
Mandating via authority that individuals must receive an injection is – objectively – little different than medical rape. We can clutch our pearls and equivocate over the magnitude of the relative bodily invasions (and my impertinence in using the term), but the principle of the right to bodily integrity is fundamental. Post WW2, the victors were so appalled by Nazi medical experiments they enshrined that abhorrence in the Nuremberg Code.
No-one. Should ever. Be coerced into a medical treatment against their free will. The only time that code gets a mention these days is when the press are mocking a protester who naively carried a sign drawing attention to it. In the new world, nothing even exists until the authorities acknowledge it exists.
Truly the emperor not only has no clothes, but he’s mounting a child in the public square, whist the public sip their lattes and do their crosswords, lest their gaze fall upon the sight before them, and conscience compel them to utter the feeblest of peeps. This is the NZ of 2021, and – forgive me this indiscretion – I for one am fucking appalled.
This tyranny, this idiocy, this moral wasteland, will continue for precisely as long as it’s politically tenable – so long as politicians face no discernible backlash of opinion. That means every equivocating fence-sitter isn’t – as they might imagine – a passive observer. Rather, they’re an active enabler in the same way that passive German citizens in the 1930s enabled the full fruition and flowering of the Nazi regime.
Freedom to make one’s own choices around the benefits and risks of being jabbed is the only rational and moral basis for anyone – ever – to decide on a medical treatment, except in most genuinely extraordinary circumstances, for which Covid falls at least an order of magnitude shy of achieving. We need to abandon the virtue-signalling theatrics of “saving granny” or “saving the medical system from overwhelm” or whatever manipulative coercion is next invented. Recite after me these simple and readily-verifiable medical facts:
A jab (or two, three or twenty) does not stop someone contracting Covid
A jab does not prevent that person transmitting Covid
A jab temporarily lowers the risk of having severe symptoms from Covid FOR A FEW WEEKS ONLY
Oh, yeah, whilst the jab introduces significant risk of severe side effects. So much so that (in the US at least) the Covid jabs have in less than a year produced more reported side effects than all previous vaccines in total over the previous 30 years. In our munted reality, the marketing label on that one is: “Safe and Effective”.
There is no statistical correlation between countries with high vax uptakes and good covid outcomes. None. Not between countries, or within countries, where individual states are compared with others. If the damn jabs worked, that correlation should stick out like dog’s balls by now.
But those correlations don’t exist and so what has been published in their stead is a succession of ludicrously overbaked “models” prophesying doom, none of which have remotely approached reality, but all of which have stoked mindless fear and compliance. Goebbels would genuinely have bowed to the grotesque manipulators who carry this off. This chain of bullying has to stop:
– The bullying of business by Government – threatening them with hefty fines and turning them into arms-length petty enforcers, so that politicians do not have to front the public and face no direct backlash
– The bullying of staff and customers by business owners in “check your papers” petty tyranny. I need a vaccine pass to buy takeaway sushi now? Jesus Christ spare me..
– The bullying by families and friends of their counterparts in an urgent need to know their “status” as though that were the most normal thing in the world, when the right to medical privacy used to be a bedrock standard. Do you even remember those days?
It disgusts and appalls me that we’ve spent so many years uprooting and driving out the stain of pervasive bullying that was certainly a part of kiwi culture only for a cynical government to reboot the cycle and for a huge percentage of the country to actively participate or turn a blind eye. This jab-mania has become a religious fervour and a fresh batch of innocent witches is being set afire daily.
And yes, my choice of language contains hyperbole and vitriol. Yet it is not remotely an exaggeration. Whoever thinks this tyranny will all quietly disappear with time and patience is in for a horrible wakeup. Though, again, the lesson of history and psychology is that many – like the 1930s Germans – will employ every psychological strategy available to avoid facing the enormity of the reality surrounding and ahead of us.
Leaving the cult is painful, but you will become yourselves again. Or you can remain a servant to this Dear Leader, and the next, and the next. No tyrant in history has voluntarily relinquished power, and as mandates are extended and strengthened – as goalposts are now built on wheels to assist in relocating them – it’s blindingly obvious this will certainly not be the first autocracy to dismantle itself once the crisis de jour is over (hint: it will never be over).
Or, let’s take a moment to pull on that thread of “rationality” and see how long the garment hangs together. Once you’ve submitted to mandatory tracking and mandatory jabs, where exactly do you think you’ll draw the line and say “enough!”? Decades-old safety protocols were dropped to declare these jabs “safe and effective” – what happens when they drop those standards some more? Do they even need to test at all?
Can the next Fauci simply bless the coming vaccines like a Catholic priest with the host, and the faithful will line up for their next mandatory jab? Do we even need testing before we jab kids, or can we naively trust the Science knows what it’s doing? Once you’re comfortable with your movements being tracked 24 x 7, perhaps we can add your speech as well.
Are you OK if they mandate installation of an Alexa in your home to monitor what you say in private, for the good of everyone? It’d be really convenient. Should all government departments be allowed to share all your data with each other, because the more they know about you, the better the services they can deliver, right?
The specific scenarios don’t even matter – once you’ve surrendered your right to privacy and to bodily autonomy, you can give up any and all pretense to democracy. You don’t determine the State – the State determines you. And if you’re happy to accommodate and adjust rather than raising your voice now, the probability you’ll somehow grow a pair and decide to stand up somewhere later down the track is remote.
And if you don’t demand rights and freedoms for all – right now – before this toxic barrenness becomes firmly embedded and then built upon – then what? Is the current state of affairs “good enough” for the rest of your life? For your children?
Hence this plea to morality. To try and remind people of what they’ve forgotten – of the values they used to place stock in, and of the values that we as a country used to at least pretend we believed in.
The NZ of my (distorted, aging) memory used be a country with a good set of functioning moral compasses. There was some variation in the direction they pointed – one person’s North might’ve been another’s North East, but no-one’s pointed South. We pioneered the 40 hour work week and women’s suffrage of the back of those collective moral compasses. Nobody needed a thesis, or a statement from an Expert to know that bullying was wrong, discrimination was wrong, exclusion was wrong.
As my neighbour observed yesterday, when we saw someone bullied, we didn’t always stand up to the bully, but we knew inside that was the right thing to do. So what’s changed? Now that people are been bullied all over and few are raising a voice, what gives? Is it simple cowardice? Because that can be remedied. A bunch of broken compasses cannot.
Or does cause lie in the Orwellian double-speak that permeates and underpins everything we’re told? We’re a “team of five million” until its time to throw a chunk of the team to the wolves. Nurses are “brave and on the frontlines” until they exercise their own medical choice to remain unjabbed, at which time they’re worthy of no reciprocal loyalty and can be summarily “let go”. Silence and compliance are virtues. Fear is truth.
I could go on, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past months is that facts are little more than an inconvenience to Believers, whether they’re the Jehovah’s Witness at the front door, or the Covid Cult member. I could provide dozens of links to all manner of science, from epidemiological to psychological, all driving gaping holes in the mainstream narrative.
And then, like clockwork, I watch the person’s defense to cognitive dissonance kick in and there’s a rapid retreat into their cosy Beliefs, where the government is Kind, all manner of Science is Settled and Jabs are Highly Safe and Effective.
Been there, tried that.. and yeah, I’ve been kind of a dick about it some of the time. I thought the people I’ve known for years, and who I know to be good, decent, caring folk would want to hear facts that challenged what they’d been led to believe, and it was a shock to find they didn’t. It turns out that in the contest between fact and well-financed propaganda, the latter wins every time!
The government spin doctors and the “nudge units”, the carefully crafted and paced cycles of abuse, lockdowns and partial – conditional – release affect people far more than lone voices. You have to admire the government goons – they are good at the shit they do, and when every Western country on the planet is saying and practicing some variant of the same schtick, a vast number of people just zone out and lock step.
So – my challenge to you is this. Over the Xmas period, in conversation with people you encounter, say “What’s happening in NZ isn’t right- it has to stop”. If people – being freely and fully informed – want to get jabbed, then they should have ready access to jabbers. But bullying and coercing people to get jabbed by taking away their jobs, or access to social facilities needs to stop, and immediately.
I’m not asking you to take up arms and storm the ramparts, just to find and exercise your voice. What the government is doing, they are doing in your name (and mine). Find your sense of outrage and shame that your government is dividing and crushing citizens of this country. They are doing it in your name, and ostensibly for your benefit. And if it is actually OK with you, then our moral compasses may have diverged sufficiently that we’re now heading in different directions.
I see two possible outcomes – either as a society we wake up with a helluva start to realise we’ve fallen asleep at the wheel. We pull over, get some rest, and make a firm mental note to start paying more attention in future. Or we stay asleep, and we take that Thelma and Louise ride off the precipice. It’s not yet too late, but there is not a lot of clear road left ahead either.
I get that was a bummer of a read for a XMas story. But what’s XMas even about if it’s not joining in union with the rest of our society.
I genuinely wish you all the best for the year ahead.
Love and peace,
Andrew
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