Dustin Broadbery: The Controlled Demolition of Society:
The Trojan Horse of COVID
Admittedly, this is not your standard issue-industrialised,
globalised takeover of society. Why would it be? Fascism has come a long
way since Hitler. Nowadays the general population is too smart, would
recognise the face of tyranny and not this garden variety imposter. Or
so we think. Besides, ‘without the Allies landing on the beaches of
Normandy, how could we be under siege?’ We reassure ourselves before
crawling back into captivity in a comforting lockstep with less
fortunate nations. Adaptation is a wonderful thing, but maybe not for
us. In keeping with the opaque nature of this political confidence
trick, this is not your typical dictatorship either. Instead it’s Middle
England’s answer to a veritable military junta, carrying the letters of
marque from Her Majesty’s Government to legitimize its piracy, courted
by the ivory towers of science and medicine, and extolled as a force for
good by a population sleepwalking towards the edge of disaster.
Meanwhile society burns ritualistically to the ground. But that’s ok, we
can build back better from the ashes. Or so we are told.
This journey towards the wrong side of history is made possible by
subtle nuances of control, confusion and fear that most fail to
comprehend. Triggering the wholesale abandon of logic and reason to a
seemingly benevolent cult who offer protections against our day of
reckoning. The threat of death strikes an uncomfortable chord and our
ability to adapt makes us low-hanging fruit. But who could have
predicted fascism would look so ordinary from inside the Panopticon?
Once we’re plugged into a shared digital common, a state of emergency
can rapidly contaminate consensus, until collectivism flourishes like
wildfire. Meanwhile, measured perspective becomes an act of war. Who
wants to be on the wrong side of the cult, when those failing to bend a
knee to COVID, are, by disassociation, guilty, with blood on their
hands? This entire process works because the fertile ground for any
dictatorship to prosper is fear. A state of emergency unites us with
common purpose. And what could be more compelling than a pandemic?
Death, like communism, levels the playing field of all distinctions.
Regardless of class, age, gender, or race, death is indiscriminate.
Reaffirming the normalcy of our departure from one place of relative
safety to another is straightforward enough. Safety is, after all,
relative to the setting of the emergency. The higher the alert level,
the safer we feel in the herd, regardless of small matters such as the
number of prison bars holding us captive. In a strong-enough current
people are like driftwood trying to dock in the reeds. Remember the
motto of this thing from the outset: ‘The New Normal?’
