There is No Middle Ground with Totalitarianism
There are many places for nuance. But a global effort to trample on fundamental rights isn't one of them.
There is no middle ground with totalitarianism.
While we have a world operating on two different sets of facts, there is no way to deny this one: only one of those groups is attempting to have the government enact severe restrictions on individual’s rights.
Totalitarianism (n) - the political concept that the citizen should be totally subject to an absolute state authority.This is not a left-vs-right debate, though it often gets framed as one. There are many on the left traditionally who are aghast at the events that have unfolded since the ‘roni emerged. These people feel politically homeless similar to how many on the right felt when Trump was elected.
That said, the totalitarianism is coming from the left currently, and it behooves no one to pretend otherwise. Consider:
The Biden Administration is attempting to use OSHA to coerce every working age adult to inject a (temporarily useful, unsafe, and quickly out-of-date) therapeutic into his or her body.
Democratic-run cities all across the country are enforcing their own mandates for masks, “vaccines” (read: therapeutics) , and boosters even for kids as young as five to eat in a restaurant, join extracurricular activities, or do other basic activities.
There is clamoring to discriminate further against those who reject the “vaccine” for any number of reasons: fire them from their jobs, deny unemployment insurance, deny healthcare, and more.
Leftist-run Universities are requiring students to get boosted, and still enforcing mask mandates and many more draconian policies that defy imagination. Students are quite literally being put under house arrest in many cases and only given a few prescribed reasons that they can leave their dorm.
This is totalitarianism in action. There is no other way to put it. While such methods are limited to the “Covid containment” arena for now, this is not a cat you can put back in the bag. We still have a TSA, now 20 years after 9/11, and of course it has been massively expanded since then, all in the name of “keeping us safe.” Because Covid is endemic and naturally mutating, any “war on Covid” would extend for just as long as the “war on Terror.” That is: forever.
“Covid containment” - the set of theatrical activities that, over two years, have done nothing to stop the spread of the virus. Including, but not limited to: masks, social distancing, lockdowns and capacity restrictions, vaccine mandates, and curfews.
And all that is to say nothing of what the tools developed for Covid could be used for. QR-based vax passes in Europe and elsewhere could easily be adapted for the “climate change emergency” or a “war on climate change.”
Quite literally, you could add one line of code and your green pass will be red every other day. You are one line of code away from being kept under house arrest 50% of your life “in order to save the planet.”
Or if we stick to the dystopian pharmaceutical route: no (Covid) jab, no job? Darn it, let’s just apply that to every new pharmaceutical we come up with that allegedly has some moderate benefit.
Everything above is basically factual, minus one or two editorialized comments, and the extrapolation into the future of what “Covid containment” tools could be adapted to. Though on the latter, I would argue that this is such a clear logical step that it must be considered no matter how skeptical you may be.
So here’s the thing: given the above can be basically agreed upon, we now have our two sides:
The Totalitarians say “these measures appropriate and acceptable in order to keep us safe.”
And the Libertarians say “no, these measures are a gross abuse of governmental power and a grave threat to liberal society.”
Now, most people won’t call themselves a Totalitarian or a Libertarian, but whatever your labels, this is what the debate has morphed into.
And as we said up top: there is no middle ground with totalitarianism. Even if any of the measures that totalitarians deploy would be effective (they are not), they would still be a step too far for anything that wants to be called a free society.
While it is a human tendency to try to find the golden mean between two extremes and find a “rational middle,” there are cases where this simply can’t be done (without disastrous consequences). You either jump off the plane or you don’t (when you skydive), but hanging on to the plane is a recipe to get gravely injured.
This is true with rights as well. While there are exceptions to every rule, you either have the right to decide what to inject into your body or you don’t. And you either have the right to move freely within the country, or you don’t. Midwit nitpickers will argue “yes, but some childhood vaccines are required…” or “yes, but you still can’t trespass…” No shit.
If you really can’t tell the difference between substances tested for 20+ years that do actually provide sterilizing protection for life and those that were tested for 1 year and don’t actually provide sterilizing protection for more than a few months, then please put on your dunce cap and go sit in a corner. Similarly, if having the government mandate restaurants and other businesses to exclude certain kinds of people is just as much of an infringement on your right to move as the idea of private property, then please also go put on a(nother) dunce cap and go sit in a corner. These things are not the same.
No matter how much totalitarians in government and the media try to gaslight you, the fact remains: we are facing the fundamental erosion of the right to bodily autonomy and the right to free movement within our borders. And once those are gone, you have very little left. You could quite literally be put under house arrest and coerced (or forced) to take various injections in order to gain some (temporary) right to leave. Sound crazy? Germany, Austria, and Australia among others are already at this point. This isn’t some dystopian sci-fi novel. This shit is happening right now, here, on this planet.
Despite blue cities and states efforts, as well as those of the Biden Administration, these rights are not yet gone here in the United States. But we have to be clear: there is no middle ground. You can’t “only kinda” infringe on someone’s right to make their own medical decisions, or to move about freely. Once you’ve done it once in the name of “safety,” you can always do it again. Especially when the bar for safety is (in the case of healthy children) a risk of death of 1 in 1,000,000 or even less likely than that.
So there is no compromise to be had here. There is no acceptable way that we can “just infringe a little bit”. The sad fact is that we’ve already crossed these lines: people have been coerced into getting the jabs, fired for not doing so, and banned from many places in blue cities and various western countries that don’t have the protections that we do here in the U.S.
These mandates must first be defeated on a national level, but when we wake up from the mass psychosis, the people responsible for these despicable and discriminatory acts must be held accountable. There should be jail time involved for the elected officials, media members, and public health bureaucrats who have actively fomented the craze we are in and advocated or passed such extreme discriminatory acts on the American people.
As for individuals, all I’ll say is this: there is still time to turn this around. Many of us (myself included) got swept up in the mass hysteria of Covid early on. But what matters is whether you want to deploy the critical thinking necessary to understand the situation, are open-minded enough to realize your error, and brave enough to speak out despite the social pressure to accept and submit yourself to the forces of totalitarianism.
That’s it. It seems simple, but the fate of free society does hang in the balance. There is no middle ground with totalitarianism.