The Week’s Most Stoned, Boned, and Bemoaned Headlines
“VEE HAFF VAYS OF MAKING YOU NOT TALK.”
Last week saw the 79th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, a.k.a. the day the
Japanese favored the world with a strikingly vivid real-life
illustration of the phrase “biting off more than you can chew.” Pearl
Harbor Day is certainly an appropriate time for reflecting upon what a
terrible, terrible world this would be if the Axis powers had won World
War II.
Imagine Germany in 2020 if the U.S. and Soviet Union had not beaten some democratic
sense into the totalitarian Nazi state. Imagine a Germany that had not
been immolatingly guided into embracing the sacred tenets of freedom and
human rights. A Germany not brought to heel in 1945 would surely be a
monstrous, oppressive society that tortures 92-year-old women just
because they don’t parrot state doctrine.
Oh, wait; that’s Germany today. Sorry, Hitler!
Ursula Haverbeck is 92 years old, and “free and democratic” Germany
just can’t stop imprisoning her. One could reasonably ask why any major
world power—or, frankly, any minor world power—would feel the need to
keep locking up one elderly woman. What manner of criminal mischief
could this senior scofflaw possibly be engaged in to merit repeated
stints in the pokey? Did she plow through an open-air market in her
Volkswagen? Is she a suspect in the disappearance of Hansel and Gretel?
Nope. She won’t stop saying that Auschwitz wasn’t an extermination
camp. And the fact that one insignificant old lady holds a view that the
state finds objectionable is something that free and democratic Germany
simply cannot allow.
In 2016 Haverbeck was sentenced to ten months imprisonment for saying
hurty words about Auschwitz. When she was released, the state asked
her, “Has your punishment taught you to stop holding your opinion?”
Haverbeck said no, and she was sent back to the pen for another two and a
half years.
A few weeks ago, she was released again. And again, the state asked
her if she would recite history in the manner that free and democratic
Germany insists it must be recited.
Unfortunately, the villainous granny still refused to parrot the
scripted words that the free-thought-loving, human-rights-respecting
German government was forcing her to recite, so back to jail she went
last week.
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Ursula Haverbeck repeatedly claims that there was no mass
murder in Auschwitz. She was just in jail—and was immediately put on
trial again afterwards. The 92-year-old was sentenced to one year
imprisonment just one month after her release from a prison in
Bielefeld. She was released at the beginning of November after serving a
total of two and a half years.
In the words of Tagesspiegel, “She kept asserting that
Auschwitz was not an extermination camp.” And the German government has
pledged to continue imprisoning and re-imprisoning this frail
nonagenarian until she quits “asserting” stuff that the government
considers untrue.
Thank heavens the Allies prevailed in Germany. Otherwise, who knows
what kind of dictatorial nightmare that nation might be today?
[I very much hope my readers take the challenge here seriously and start posing this question to lockdown supporters. It would be very interesting to know how they would respond. Would the realization that there is apparently nothing the government can do in the name of slowing the bat flu that would be too far in their estimation finally cause them to snap to about how dangerous that way of thinking is?Enjoy,Gerry T. Neal]
Rod Dreher is a writer who blogs at the website of The American Conservative, the magazine founded by Pat Buchanan, Taki Theodoracopulos and Scott McConnell in 2002 to oppose the foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration and more specifically the drive for war in Iraq from the right. Dreher is also the author of such books as Crunchy Cons (2006), How Dante Can Save Your Life (2015), The Benedict Option (2017), and most recently, Live Not By Lies which was released earlier this year. The last title mentioned warns small-o orthodox Christians – Dreher, who was raised Protestant, became a Roman Catholic and is now Eastern Orthodox with a large-O – about the coming “soft totalitarianism” to which wokeness, the more militant successor to political correctness, is leading the Western world. Note that there are many who would generally agree with Dreher’s assessment of wokeness but suggest that a past tense would be more appropriate than a future one.
Earlier this year, Dreher posted a piece entitled “Your Woke Breaking Point” at his blog. He began with an excerpt from an article by Megan McArdle at the Washington Post about how Donald Trump’s predictions of four years ago as to how the attacks on Confederate monuments would lead to attacks on monuments to the American republic’s founders, such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, were coming true. McArdle, in her editorial, referenced Dreher’s “Law of Merited Impossibility” which has been stated several different ways, the best known being “It will never happen, and when it does you bigots will deserve it”. The law satirizes, without exaggerating in the least, the paradox of the typical progressive response to conservative warnings about the direction in which left-wing causes seem to be heading, before and after the predictions are fulfilled. It is likely to end up being Dreher’s single most significant and lasting contribution to political discourse. McArdle’s article referencing it was an uncharacteristic moment of liberal self-criticism, in which she discussed the progressive side’s seeming inability to restrain its radicals and apply the brakes when they are going too far and too fast.
Dreher used the excerpt from McArdle’s article to introduce a challenge that he borrowed from mathematician James A. Lindsay. Lindsay had tweeted on the 24th of June:
Talking with a brilliant friend last night keyed me into an important idea: everybody has a Woke breaking point, a point where they can’t deny any longer the fact that it’s a totalitarian nightmare. Encourage your sympathetic friends to start naming what theirs would be.
Dreher re-posted Lindsay’s tweet and several follow-up tweets, the first of which went:
Whose statue has to come down? Seriously, whose is the last straw? Who has to get cancelled? Fired? Doxxed? Destroyed? Beaten up? Killed? Does it take a lynching? Does it take destroying the thing YOU love? Your family? Your kids? Your job? Your hobby? What is it? What’s too far?
It is an excellent question and one that we would do well to pose to any liberals of our acquaintance. What do the Social Justice Warriors – the BLM, Antifa and MeToo# types — have to do before you will admit that they have gone too far?
There is a very similar question that I would suggest we start posing to people. Or perhaps it is the same question asked in a different context.
This question I would pose to all those people who think that all the public health orders, all the restrictions imposed to control the spread of the Wuhan bat flu, are necessary and especially to those who think that even more restrictions are called for. I will note, obiter dictum, that Rod Dreher himself was certainly one of these back in the spring. Whether he still is or not I am unaware because he has written far less on that subject in recent months than in March, April and May.
The question is simply this – what is your Bat Flu Breaking Point?
Let us clarify the matter with some follow up questions.
What do our public health officials have to do for you to agree that they have gone too far? What line do they have to cross? What freedom do they have to take away? How much imposed loneliness, isolation, and misery is too much? How many small businesses have to be destroyed? How many people have to lose their jobs? How many people have to be driven to suicide, drunkenness and substance abuse? At what point is keeping us safe no longer worth the price we are being forced to pay for it?
Would curtailing to the point of eliminating our basic freedoms of association, assembly and religion be going too far?
Would telling people that they have to close the small businesses that has been in their families and served their local communities for generations and which they have been struggling to keep afloat for years right in the busiest shopping time of the year, the period that they rely upon to make enough to balance their books, be crossing the line?
Would fining people thousands of dollars for acts that are not only not mala in se but are rather clearly bona in se although forbidden by some petty health order be one step too many in the direction of totalitarianism?
Would opening a snitch line and encouraging people to rat out their family, friends and neighbours be the straw that breaks the camel’s back?
Would establishing a special police force – a Gestapo, Cheka/NKVD, or Stasi so to speak – for enforcing public health orders be the limit of what is tolerable?
Everything I have mentioned so far has already been done here in Manitoba and, indeed, in most if not all of the other provinces of the Dominion of Canada. For the many who support all of these measures and say they are “necessary” it is difficult to imagine what further step could possibly be taken that would finally have these people saying that it is too much.
Would it take forcing everybody to have foreign substances, including modified RNA, injected into their bodies upon penalty of not being allowed to work, buy groceries, or go anywhere if they refuse?
Would even telling everyone that they must pledge their allegiance to Satan by having 666 tattooed on their right hand or forehead in order to stop the spread of COVID-19 finally be enough to do it?
