First a quote, so that you know where we stand in the world. “The culling of part of humanity has been set in motion. It is a deliberate man-made calamity that threatens the very existence of humanity as we have known it and could spell the end of Western civilization. It is mass murder on a global scale; a crime too gigantic for our imaginations to process.”
No, this does not refer to Auschwitz or the war, but – I am not making this up – to national governments fighting Covid-19 with vaccines. Those are murder weapons. The diagnosis comes out Common sensethe conspiracy magazine for those who want to be injected with paranoia every two weeks.
It’s not just the creators of that horn-crazed magazine that believe we live in a toxic dictatorship, imposed on us by billionaires like Bill Gates (reptile-generated or not) who find the planet too crowded. In recent years, more academic circles have also accused the Dutch government of being criminal, but then because they let the virus circulate instead of stamping it out. That was neoliberal “necropolitics,” the radical left academia said, a politics of death that sacrificed unproductive lives to keep capital circulating. Or “fascism without fascists.” Not only death, but also hyperbole is still doing well in socially critical circles.
But where are we now? The Netherlands sailed silently through the autumn wave of the virus. At the same time, the fanatical zero-Covid nation of China was still busily stamping out – and not just the virus but protests against the stamping. With dramatic consequences. Three years after the first outbreak, entire cities and hundreds of millions of citizens were once again in lockdown in China for months. Social misery and unemployment skyrocketed. Only now that the protest is massive, is it relaxed. With risks: China has an aging population that has been moderately vaccinated. By the way, the virus is still raging in New Zealand, a shining example for left-wing zero-thinkers. The country was locked down for a long time and had to catch up with vaccinations.
Was Dutch policy that good? Not at all. Politicians hid, panicked at first and later ironclad, behind ‘science’. Advice was brought like tablets of stone. Colossal mistakes were made, from the drama in the nursing homes to the farce of Sywert’s masks. And there was the messy substantiated curfew, which went down in summary proceedings and was allowed to hobble on crutches for a while after a hasty appeal.
But dictatorship, neoliberal, fascist or reptile-driven? Anyone who wants to know what a corona dictatorship is had better listen to the stamping out of China.
Sjoerd de Jong writes a column here every Thursday.
A version of this article also appeared in the December 8, 2022 newspaper