Authoritarians are apparently unable to conceive of any solution to any problem that doesn’t depend upon some kind of enforcers using violence to impose “regulations” conceived of by the ruling elite, with any deviation punished by still more violence. It doesn’t matter whether the problem is man-made or natural, intentional or unintentional, widespread or sporadic, common or rare, or even real or unreal, because the point of the proposed “solutions” isn’t actually to solve anything, but rather to seize more power for the rulers and their enforcers. If anything, real solutions (however brutal and destructive to human rights) are far less desirable than busywork “solutions” (preferably involving a massive, unaccountable bureaucracy and a boatload of new criminal laws) which do little if anything to solve the problem and therefore result in a new, permanent way to subjugate and bleed the peons. And wholly imaginary problems are superior (in the short run) to real ones, because without a real subject to examine, it’s harder for foes of the regime to collect actual facts with which to undermine the supposedly-benevolent tyranny. Reason‘s J.D. Tuccille has recently published two articles on the subject, one about tyranny imposed using a real problem as an excuse, and the other about similar tyranny justified by an imaginary “problem” that mostly exists in animal fears and petty intolerance. And as you might expect, there isn’t a lot of difference:
We’re told that life is never getting back to normal, so we need to suck it up and accept a world of mask-wearing, economic disruption, and social distancing…government responses to COVID-19 are pushing the world toward authoritarianism…dressed up as if that’s a good thing. That’s unfortunate, given that less-intrusive responses to the pandemic are proving at least as effective as heavy-handed ones…authoritarian tools may become permanent because government officials are rarely punished for doing something, even if the something is awful and counterproductive…In addition…crises are excellent excuses for accumulating unprecedented authority and using it in novel ways. “For authoritarian-minded leaders, the coronavirus crisis is offering a convenient pretext to silence critics and consolidate power,” Human Rights Watch cautioned in April. “The ‘lockdown measures’ adopted by many European states have disproportionately impacted racialized individuals and groups who were targeted with violence, discriminatory identity checks, forced quarantines and fines,” Amnesty International reported in June…”Governments…have exploited [the pandemic] to crack down on journalism and silence criticism,” the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression noted in July…Public health excuses continue to ride roughshod over protections for individual rights…
Compare with this:
…as the world wrestles with a pandemic and overbearing public health measures, [politicians] are taking the opportunity to tighten the screws on speech they don’t like…the French National Assembly…[tried to] give companies [only a single] hour…to [censor] content [it] alleged…to glorify terrorist activity or to constitute child pornography…France’s Constitutional Court struck down the vast majority of the law as an unconstitutional threat to freedom of expression. That’s really the only good news to report so far. France’s blocked…law was inspired by Germany’s notorious NetzDG law, which makes online platforms liable for illegal content…”the NetzDG conscripts social media companies into governmental service as content regulators,” with millions of euros in fines hanging over their heads if they guess wrong. That model of delegated censorship has proven to be as infectious as a viral outbreak, taking hold in over a dozen other countries…”Europe’s most influential democracy has contributed to the further erosion of global Internet freedom by developing and legitimizing a prototype of online censorship by proxy that can readily be adapted to serve the ends of authoritarian states,” Justitia, a Danish judicial thinktank, warned in a 2019 report…The U.S. faces its own speech- and privacy-threatening legislation in the form of the [so-called] EARN IT…Act…which…”would allow small website owners to be sued or prosecuted under state laws, as long as the prosecution or lawsuit [can be pretended to be] related to crimes against children,” warns the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “We know how websites will react to this. Once they face prosecution or lawsuits based on other peoples’ speech, they’ll monitor their users, and censor or shut down discussion forums”…
Governments have been embracing this fascist power-delegation model – using threats in order to force corporations to exercise tyrannies their constitutions and other legal instruments prohibit to government – for over a decade now, always using scarecrows like “terrorism” and “sex offenders” and “human trafficking” in order to put the masses to sleep about it. So when COVID came along, it was 100% predictable that they would seize upon it to feed their insatiable hunger for power, while telling their gullible subjects it’s for their own good.
