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Wednesday, 24 November 2021 03:10

Time for the Monkey Wrench in the Wheel: Strategies for the Covid Resistance

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Many have written about the causes and consequences of the Covid tyranny, the "pandemia".  But we also need strategies for legitimate dissidence by the Covid sceptics and also for the Covid true believers who might, just might, be feeling a little queasy about the current direction of travel of the Covid State.

 

C J Hopkins writes:

Seriously, the point of this entire exercise (or at least this phase of this entire exercise) is to radically, irrevocably, transform society into a monolithic corporate campus where everyone has to scan their IDs at every turn of an endless maze of perpetually monitored, eco-friendly, gender-fluid, ideologically uniform, non-smoking, totally meat-free “safe spaces” owned and operated by GloboCap, or one of its agents, subsidiaries, and assigns.

The global-capitalist ruling classes are determined to transform the planet into this fascistic Woke Utopia and enforce unwavering conformity to its valueless values, no matter the cost, and we, “the Unvaccinated,” are standing in their way.

They can’t just round us up and shoot us — this is global capitalism, not Nazism or Stalinism. They need to break us, to break our spirits, to coerce, gaslight, harass, and persecute us until we surrender our autonomy willingly. And they need to do this during the next five months [of the northern winter].

Preparations therefore are now in progress.

To date, the war between the ruling class and the isolated Covid dissidents has been very one-sided.  Only one side has turned out for the battle.  The Covid State has (literally) brought out the big guns, and has deployed them with intent.  It has used lies, the police state, the army, arcane (“emergency”) legislation that was never intended to be employed in the way it has, propaganda, bullying, interconnections with the crony corporate world, bribery, blackmail, Orwellian tactics like Newspeak, and (relentlessly) the legacy media.

The Covid State and its surrogates have strategies aplenty to achieve ultimate victory over the dissidents and refuseniks.  Like ratcheting up “cases” when they decline to a point where people become “complacent”, keeping up with the apocalyptic rhetoric, trying desperately hard to find new strains, preferably deadly, the daily press conferences, the ubiquitous masks (of course), the gaslighting of whole populations, the identification and the bullying of enemies who are stopping “us” from getting back to “normal”, the endless roadmaps and Plan Bs, the needless border closures just in case there is an “outbreak”.  And the rest. On the basis of minimal cases (as few as one or two).

There are some signs the people have had enough.  Perhaps, in Australia, Daniel Andrews has jumped the shark with his proposed draconian emergency powers that are on a par with Hitler’s 1933 Enabling Act.  The latest protests in Melbourne are now counted in the tens of thousands, perhaps the hundreds of thousands, no longer in the mere hundreds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wFqwpL_gDs

Craig Kelly’s United Australia Party now has more members than either of the legacy parties.  Public protests in Australia, as internationally, are now a regular event.  Anecdotally, there are more and more private conversations of the type “we have had enough” and “we know it is all b.s.”  The coming of the boosters will demonstrate that the vaccines do not work, and this is already sinking in here and overseas.  There is a massive quiet resistance in the UK.  Use of the NHS Covid App, its contact and trace technology, has all but dried up after peaking at over 14 million British users.  There is ongoing passive individual resistance to QR code sign-ins.  Resistance against vaccine passport bullying is real and ongoing, despite the costs to those involved.  For instance, New South Wales is now down around 4,000 teachers thanks to the Liberal Government’s imposed Clot Shot mandates.  Resistance to vaccines among the youth of Britain has been much commented on (and lamented).  Many are voting with their arms.  Those (unvaccinated) excluded from shops due to Covid State edicts might well be thinking they will not be returning to those businesses when the war is over (the businesses that are still going).  They will be voting with their wallets.

All of this is welcome.  But it remains focused at a low level, and none of it is shifting Government direction or directions.  We remain in the grip of a global dictatorship.  Blogger Lucy Davies in the UK sets us a challenge:

Imagine 6 months down the line…
Don’t want a 4th Covid jab in one arm & 2 flu jabs in the other? A concoction of whatever they’ve got leftover from the last round?
Don’t want a mask on your face for the rest of your life?
Don’t want to scan your digital ID barcode to get into a supermarket?
Don’t want your barcode permanently attached to (or discretely ‘just popped inside’) your body?
Starting to get suspicious as everyday activities become dependent on government approved ‘good behaviour’ credits?
Don’t want your newborn baby/ grandchildren signed up for a lifetime of the type of conditional ‘freedom’ (aka tyranny) we’ve accidentally allowed in?

https://www.lucydaviesnn.com/uncategorised/if-theres-a-finger-to-point/

She also senses a turning, a shift in the breeze:

The whole thing is extraordinarily unhealthy, & many of us are done.
The emperor is stark bollock naked.
If some want to carry on stroking his imaginary velvet gown please crack on, but don’t expect me to stroke it with you.
I’m not joining in the madness.
The whole thing has just got too f…ing weird to be involved with anymore.
We all know it’s about control & discrimination.
I can’t even humour it.
And I’m far from alone …

Because it all stops when the majority
just
say
no.

It’s starting already & it’s gathering pace fast.

https://www.lucydaviesnn.com/uncategorised/if-theres-a-finger-to-point/

Time will tell if these optimistic stirrings are justified.  The challenge is to switch from low-impact, individually based actions to high-impact mass action.

Other observers of the pandemia are differently optimistic.  The Canadian scholar Julie Ponesse is optimistic, not because she senses a mood swing, but because she believes it actually wouldn’t take very much to flip the direction of decision-making.  In an article at the Brownstone Institute, she states:

The dismissive, well-rehearsed messaging of our public health officials has created a highly efficient machine that does not publish its evidence or engage in debate, but only issues orders that we obligingly follow. With the help of the media, its mistakes are hidden, its policies unquestioned, its dissenters silenced.

How do we break this silence? How do we regain our sanity and rebuild our democracy? Perhaps it’s time to get a little bit noisy. Studies have proven that once an idea is adopted by just 10% of the population, this is the tipping point when ideas, opinions, & beliefs will be rapidly adopted by the rest. A vocal, a **NOISY** 10% is all it takes (emphasis in the original). 

The stress here is on making noise in order to shift political decision-making.  Make them think they are going to lose unless they flip their thinking, and flip their thinking right now. 

The need for action is more urgent than the timing afforded by the electoral cycle.  In any case, putting our faith in the formal electoral process is not the way to go, even if the elections were all held tomorrow.  Some of us don’t wish to wait until the next round of elections, due, respectively early in 2022 for the Commonwealth, in November 2022 in Victoria and in New South Wales in March 2023.  Others doubt whether voting out the incumbents would make a difference anyway, since both of the majors are fully signed up to the Covid State.  Some have realised that, despite having our small but growing number of heroes (about which I have written elsewhere), even getting a majority of sensible centrists who value freedom more than health safetyism into upper houses, may prove fruitless, since Covid-obsessed governments generally have simply by-passed their parliaments to enact their emergency measures. 

https://www.thefreedomsproject.com/item/685-heroes

And major party collusion in upper houses is still likely to trump new and/or small parties which have our interests at heart.  Private members’ bills designed to thwart the Covid aristocracy are thus doomed to fail.  Using elections to change governments and so achieve desired policy shifts, at least as far as Covid management is concerned, is next to useless.  As Jonathan Sumption has argued at UnHerd, the democratic process has been well and truly parked the past two years, a trend already under way before the Covid crisis was produced out of thin air by the ruling class.

https://unherd.com/2021/11/when-fear-leads-to-tyranny/

It gets worse. 

Most know that dissidents within the ALP and the Coalition, such that they are, do not have the principles or the stomach to threaten to walk out of their respective governments.  This is an ace card – the John McEwen option – which those to whom such a course of action is available simply refuse to play.  Alas, the crunching of their citizens’ rights, freedoms and futures is simply not the hill they will die on.  Their political careers are just too important to them.  (One might well ask them, if not this hill, then which?  What would it take to mobilise your principles?)  Most know, too, that those within the bubble, whether or not they are self-interested, ignorant or merely ideological, will not listen to rational arguments about lockdowns, masks or vaccines.  They simply do not sense the danger posed by the coming bio-digital technologies.  They do not value freedom when safety and furlough are on offer.

This all massively reduces the range of effective protest actions available to Covid dissidents, despite the low-level civil disobedience I noted above and to which Sumption has also referred.  To repeat Julie Ponesse’s basic question – what can we do?

As Canadian chemist and author Orlando Battista said: 

An error doesn’t become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.

Currently we are refusing to correct the errors our policy-makers have made (if we are prepared, for a moment at least, to regard what has occurred as the result of innocent error rather than intended evil).  We have decided as a society not to call them out.  We know that elected decision-makers fear numerical protests of sufficient size as to threaten their political futures.  Perhaps the majority actually agrees with them.  Some polls and several elections already held suggest as much.  But you do not actually need a majority to sway political opinion.  You just need a noisy minority.  This is well known.  It is both a curse and an opportunity.  Everyone now plays this game – using fear and noise in combination to achieve undemocratic ends over issues rarely now discussed at election time.  In fact, it is hard to think of any political issues now decided through elections.  Elections merely confirm in office the decisions already (undemocratically) made.

All that being said, here are five strategies for the currently powerless and the unwashed.  Don’t just read and share, but act.

First, support the heroes, but do it strategically.  Where the heroes are politicians (and there aren’t many, as noted), do this in all available forums, buy the tee shirt, wear the cap.  Give the heroes more resources.  Reward those who actively collaborate with other heroes.  Just imagine what could be achieved with one single anti vaccine mandate anti lockdown party, instead of half a dozen who don’t talk to one another.

Incentivise recalcitrants in the major parties. They are the only ones who can make any difference this side of the next electoral cycle.  Make sure that heroes outside the party-political process know they are valued.  I am thinking here of those who have sacrificed their jobs for a principle.  Teachers, nurses, even a few policemen and women.  Contact them.  Thank them.  Offer to support them in ways that they deem valuable.

Second, engage in visible protests.  And “protest” need not involve street marches and drums.  There have been plenty of private protests which, taken together, suggest broad cynicism about the Covid theatre and all the pettifogging rules.  Just look at the NHS Contact Tracing App in the UK.  Use of the App has gone off a cliff, from a reported high of over 14 million uses to a mere few hundred thousand now.  But these protests don’t convey noise, visible anger and momentum. 

Silence can be transformed overnight by taking it to the streets.  As the retired Australian Federal Court Judge Stuart Lindsay has stated:

… get to all the rallies and meetings you can. They have been going on around you for many months. It’s just that the bought-and-paid-for broadcasters have never told you. My favourites are the “pop-up” ones where we meet at short notice outside, say, the office of a union that promotes mandated jabbing of its members even though the recusant nurses and ambulance drivers and those who care for old folk are frightened and will lose their jobs. The pleasure of naming and shaming the quislings within those buildings cannot be overstated. We have met outside the Health Commission, the inside of the building sprawling with obscenely overpaid management, and chanted our defiance and our anger in the richest Australian demotic!

The important thing however is to get to the rallies during those times when public assembly is outlawed. And it has been, repeatedly, in a nation with our tradition of free assembly and protest and under the cover of the weakest pandemic in the history of the human race.

Turning up for these events is what will test the mettle of your pasture.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/free-speech/2021/09/nothing-to-lose-but-chains-and-shame/

Don’t try to reason with politicians.  They are beyond rational thought and argument about Covid, or else they know the truth but dare not speak it.  Instead, gather in huge numbers outside their offices.  That will get their attention, and remind them who they represent.

Spruikers for the Covid State can only get away with calling protesters mad and selfish and stupid while they believe we are a tiny minority.  Visible protest will encourage others to realise we are not alone.  One visible protest is to take off the masks.  See what happens.  Roger Watson speaks of mass mask compliance in Italy:

To be fair to most restaurateurs and bar owners, who are supposed to demand your vaccine passport, they were not doing this. I was never once asked to don a mask. In typical Italian fashion, the rules are selectively applied. But the Italians have bought into the mask mandate to an incredible degree. Mask wearing is not required outside but no self-respecting Genovese would be seen without a mask at the ready, mainly under the chin at all times, or draped on the wrist like an adornment.

Of course, being Italian, the men can look stylish in a mask and the women still look elegant, but it is the sheer mass scale anticipatory obedience on entering public buildings, bars and restaurants and the 100% compliance that is shocking – and all without any apparent enforcement. In some ways compliance is worse when it is self-imposed.

“Without any enforcement …”

Australians, too, have bought into the mask mandate, without question and without demur.  It is astonishing.

One Catholic parish (at least) in Sydney is a haven for the anti-maskers.  They make no difference to public health, as many studies have shown.  Take them off occasionally.  The mask has been the most ubiquitous tool in the fear armory of the powers-that-be.  The mask mandates, introduced uselessly in the middle of the pandemia with no medical argument in their support, and flying in the face of fifty years of global science, have been admitted by government officials to be merely a device to ensure compliance.  It is a lead indicator of submission by the underclass.  So it needs to be made a focus of the resistance.  The policing of Covid rules in public places – especially outside the cities, which also have far lower rates of vaccination – has waned dramatically, so who is going to make you put on a mask in a shopping mall?  Do not underestimate the power of a mass unmasking.

Another visible protest is wearing your opposition to the Covid State on your person.  Grow the resistance through visible defiance.  Many of us (in private) laugh out loud at the sheer idiocy of the Covid State’s fine detail and at some of the more absurd examples of Covid theatre.  Laugh in public through clever meme-driven apparel.

Sometimes the apparel need not even say anything.  As Rebel News notes:

Large crowds attended the #ReclaimTheLine protest in Parramatta on Sunday beneath the Elizabeth Street Footbridge to support freedom of choice against mandatory vaccination health orders.

'Unite in White' has created an unofficial uniform of a white T-shirt for protesters to show solidarity and support for those facing employment discrimination through government health orders.

Third, engage in more active non-compliance.  Join the Brits in doing away with world of the QR code.  The penny dropped when they were nearing their summer holidays in Portugal and Spain.  Contact tracing only serves the needs of, and ends well for, the fearful who welcome the ersatz protections of the health bureaucracy as life-saving acts.  Just walk into supermarkets where you can, rather than setting yourself up for a ping.  Always sign in with a pen when you are allowed.  I have mentioned masks above.  Let them dangle a little if you feel you have to wear them.  I know of cases where people with mask exemptions have taken to avoiding supermarkets and shopping malls for fear of the Karens.  If a few more of us took off the masks, these poor people might feel empowered to re-emerge in the malls.  The deterioration of mental health associated with Covid will forever be a mark of shame on those who were its perpetrators, and not just those in government.

As part of ramping up the activism, consider joining strategically with favoured minority groups:

“It is time that we come together and unite. Most of us have suffered. Most of us have lost our jobs. Most of us have lost our connection to the real world,” Indigenous Australian Activist, Bruce Shillingsworth told the crowd. “We are bringing those voices that have been silent for many years to the forefront. We are speaking in one voice and getting that one message out there that says that we need a better world – a safer, more peaceful world – not just for us, but for the future generations.”

The Covid class is less likely to call favoured groups stupid and to gaslight them.  They know the consequences of so doing.

Fourth, businesses for the unvaccinated must be cherished and frequented.  Typically, they will be small businesses with an independent mindset unsullied by corporatisation and the tacking towards vacuous and ideological “Covid safe” compliance that has characterised the bigger chains. Lucy Davies is big on this strategy.  We have already voted with our arms.  Now we need to vote with our wallets.  The Covid State has only succeeded in its drive to frighten us all into submission because third parties have been willing to become law enforcement bodies.  Punish them and reward those who have resisted.  It was not nothing for a business already all but crushed by lockdowns to go the extra mile and remain closed rather than engage in discriminating against their (sometimes decades long) loyal customers, when vaccine mandates arrived.  Thank them, again and again.  Especially the businesses that stood up to government.

There may, indeed, be a new type of business about to emerge – services for the unvaccinated.  Reward them too, especially the new start-ups.  Think of them as gay bars.  Places for the like-minded to hang out without fear of the angry and the self-righteous.

There is another way to resist Covid safe businesses.  The workers need to bully their employers back.  Enterprise bargaining might take on a whole new meaning.  At a German business of which I am aware, the employer tried to force the physical separation of the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.  The employees just said no, you can stick that idea.  The employer duly backed off.  Threaten to go on strike.  This is a cause worth fighting for in the workplace.

Fifth, get noisy (the Julie Ponesse strategy).  Noise can be created through numbers and the persistence of an argument.  Politicians speak and listen to momentum.  Noise is the twin of visibility.  Ten thousand peaceful protesters are far better than two hundred trouble-makers.  Social media noise cuts several ways.  You seldom win an argument with a Facebook post.  Just as politicians are no longer listening to rational argument, but only to numbers, the rabid vaxxers on social media are, (like the late Baroness), not for turning.  Instead, use online platforms strategically and with the force of numbers.  They were, after all, invented as connecting devices and to create communities.  The overwhelming temptation is to use these platforms simply to share ideas with those who already agree with us.  They need to be weaponised.  Public relations experts friendly to the cause of medical freedom should be mobilised and recruited, just as a number of lawyers have stepped up to the plate.

Margaret Mead once said:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has. 

Currently, the resistance is tiny, lonely, tired, worn down, isolated, gaslit, uncoordinated, silent and unsure of the right way forward.  But, as the most recent Melbourne protests have shown, every population has its trigger points, its pain points, where resistance stirs and the mood changes from grumpy to “I have had enough”.  This movement has been assisted by Andrews’ own hubris.  In the case of Victoria’s emergent resistance, it shows that it does take a lot to stir the sitting-on-the-Covid-fence masses.  The pain threshold is high.  Hence the need for a more proactive resistance than we have hitherto experienced.

As CJ Hopkins realises, time is now pretty short.  It is, indeed, three minutes to midnight.  The ruling class has gained much these past two years.  We who have lost many of our rights and freedoms and who believe quite firmly that freedoms taken away are seldom given back – especially when driven by bio-digital means – have only one choice.  To fight hard and to fight smart.

Paul Collits

Paul Collits is a freelance writer and independent researcher who lives in Lismore New South Wales.  
 
He has worked in government, industry and the university sector, and has taught at tertiary level in three different disciplines - politics, geography and planning and business studies.  He spent over 25 years working in economic development and has published widely in Australian and international peer reviewed and other journals.  He has been a keynote speaker internationally on topics such as rural development, regional policy, entrepreneurship and innovation.  Much of his academic writing is available at https://independent.academia.edu/PaulCollits
 
His recent writings on ideology, conservatism, politics, religion, culture, education and police corruption have been published in such journals as Quadrant, News Weekly and The Spectator Australia.
 
He has BA Hons and MA degrees in political science from the Australian National University and a PhD in geography and planning from the University of New England.  He currently has an adjunct Associate Professor position at a New Zealand Polytechnic.

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