Juan Manuel Olarieta
In September last year two French sociologists, Nicolas Mariot and Theo Boulakia, published a book entitled «L’Attestation» on the confinement imposed during the pandemic in several countries.
In addition, on Wednesday Mariot gave an interview to the journal of the CNRS, the French equivalent of the French National Research Council (*), a body that cannot exactly be described as “conspiratorial”.
The authors question what happened during the spring of 2020 with the confinements, which they qualify as an “experience of mass obedience” which led to a significant deprivation of public freedoms.
Social control prevailed over the health aspect, they conclude. “During the pandemic, we witnessed the resurgence of old habits of punitive management of the population,” says Mariot.
Just as important as political punishment and mass submission is the fact that there were governments that did not impose confinement. These are Nordic countries such as Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, but also Switzerland and Bulgaria. “They adopted sanitary measures as everywhere else (masks, prohibition of meetings, recommendation to wash hands), but they left the doors open,” says the French sociologist.
Others went too far with curfews, imposing very strict measures or very prolonged curfews.
These are the countries of southern Europe, such as Spain, which wanted to be more papist than the Pope and where the police entered homes, breaking down doors and arresting residents.
In such a case, it is obvious to ask whether the countries that imposed longer or stricter confinement did so for health reasons, that is, whether they did so because more deaths or hospitalizations were occurring in those countries.
The answer is no, say the authors.
“The countries that adopted the stricter standards were not at greater risk, from a health point of view, than the others. The difference in reaction is clearly linked to the coercive habits of governments […] The more police per capita European states have, or the more they are used to freeing themselves from public freedoms, the more they have locked up their population.”
It is no coincidence, therefore, that confinement has been characteristic of those countries, such as Spain, with fascist and repressive roots, where neither the government had scruples of any kind, nor the population habits of resistance, nor the judges the courage to stop something that was clearly completely illegal.
In Europe and in Western countries in general, governments have become accustomed to instilling fear – as well as falsehood – as state policy, and the pandemic boils down to that: instilling fear of viruses and fear of the police and punishment.
However, “fear of the virus alone is not sufficient to explain mass obedience to the rules,” say sociologists. A survey conducted in France at the beginning of the pandemic showed that more than half the population did not respect health recommendations.
The decisive factor was therefore the fear of punishment, repression and the police, but a third element was also important: not to appear as the black sheep, to follow the herd. “Rules are not questioned when their application appears not to be arbitrary,” say the authors. It is also an old habit: evil of many, comfort of fools.
(*) https://lejournal.cnrs.fr/articles/covid-19-bilan-dune-surveillance-massive
When Denialism Becomes a Public Order Problem
Juan Manuel Olarieta
At the end ofMarch, a series of files from the Robert Koch Institute, the German public health agency, came to light, causing an uproar in the Central European media, which have lost much of their enthusiasm for the measures adopted during the pandemic, all of which were illegal.
It was not only recalcitrant denialists who doubted the usefulness of the masks. At the Robert Koch Institute, the experts were not clear either, and the same was true of the confinements, according to internal records.
The ripple effect has reached Switzerland, where the Neue Zürcher Zeitung last week published an article entitled “Who has anything to do with the WHO plans?”. The tide may end up affecting the international body’s big project: the pandemic treaty.
The paper’s editor-in-chief, Eric Gujer, has gone over to the side of the most furious critics. “Covid signified the victory of feasibility madness (or technocratic madness) over political wisdom, which sees the self-limitation of power as an essential characteristic of democracies,” he asserts.
In Germany, Austria and Switzerland, many citizens have come to realize that repressive policy during the pandemic did “more harm than good,” says Gujer. But demands for greater transparency have come to nothing. Everything has remained in a kind of fog that no one is trying to clear.
Gujer regrets that, despite the time that has elapsed, no one is taking stock of the “fight against covid” because “secrecy destroys trust”. However, politicians are happy because, says the editor, “they want to extend their powers even further with the WHO pandemic pact”.
The secrecy about the pandemic is breaking down, but not because there is a desire for transparency in governments, but because of the leaks of documents that are appearing in several countries, such as the United Kingdom and Italy, where, in addition to the corruption of politicians, the lucubrations of epidemiologists are appearing. The picture that emerges dismantles the monolithic unanimity with which they appeared before the microphones in the spring of 2020.
In other words, what some (politicians) and others (experts) expressed behind closed doors in 2020 was a lie, and it is positive that a Swiss newspaper, such as the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, founded in the 18th century, recognizes this because the media played an important role in that deception.
The pandemic may be a distant memory, but quite a few passages in the original documents have been blacked out, so the cover-up continues. Trust in politicians, civil servants, parliamentarians and experts cannot waver. Denialists, conspiracists and anti-vaccinationists cannot get away with this.
The pandemic may be a distant memory, but quite a few passages in the original documents have been blacked out, so the cover-up continues.
Trust in politicians, civil servants, parliamentarians and experts cannot waver. Denialists, conspiracists and anti-vaccinationists cannot get away with this.
In German they call it “delegitimization of the state”, a category that has entered the criminal code with force, just like others such as “terrorism”. The Ministry of the Interior, the police and the secret services already have special files dedicated to all those who can never be right.
Denialism is not a problem of public health, but of public order.It challenges the State and its policies on something, such as vaccination, that the population should assume unanimously.
But don’t miss the doctrine of the German Minister of Health, Karl Lauterbach, who dug into the wound when he said that the denialists are in the service of “foreign governments”. If this were not the case, how can their persecution be justified?
A denialist is not someone who holds crazy opinions, but someone who commits a crime.
INTERNATIONALIST 360° 