Democracy muzzled
by Peter Hitchens, The Critic:
Covid masks are a potent symbol of the West’s headlong flight from Enlightenment values.
The long retreat of law, reason and freedom has now turned into a rout. It was caused by many things: the mob hysteria which flowered after the death of Princess Diana; the evisceration of education; the spread of intolerant speech codes designed to impose a single opinion on the academy and journalism; the incessant state-sponsored panics over terror; the collapse and decay of institutions and traditions.
These have all at last flowed together into a single force, and we seem powerless against it. Absurdly, the moment at which they have achieved maximum power is accidental, a wild, out of-proportion panic response to a real but limited epidemic.
Outside total war and its obscenities, we have not seen what we are living through now. To list the constitutional events of the last few months is to ask the complacent chattering classes of Britain what it reminds them of: the neutering of parliament into a rubber stamp controlled by the executive; the death of political pluralism; the introduction of government by decree; the disappearance of the last traces of an independent civil service; the silence in the face of these events of media and courts; the subjection of the police to state edicts rather than to law.
Then those who have for years objected to campus censorship but are oddly silent now should surely list certain consequences for individual citizens: the cancellation of their unconditional freedom of movement; effective house arrest; arbitrary punishment; forced unemployment; restrictions in internal travel; disruption of family life including compelled separation of living spouses at the ends of their lives, and bans on attending funerals; the abolition of the freedom of assembly.
Add to these a gap in the life of civil society so long that every remaining independent institution and corporation has been permanently wounded, and the habits of a free country have been forgotten and atrophied. Add also the compulsory cessation of religious worship, the actual cancellation of Easter, the greatest and most subversive of all the Christian festivals; the prevention or severe punishment of gatherings of all kinds (except those approved of selectively by the authorities) and the suppression of education; the introduction of compelled speech, through the forced wearing of face coverings which publicly signal both surrender to the state and acceptance of the utopian, unscientific policy which guides that state.
Please right-click links to open in a new window.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
