Novak Djokovic’s case, and especially his recent reversal at the hands of a regime who obviously hate him personally and want to turn (what they no doubt consider to be) a filthy unvaccinated Serb untermensch into an example of their power for the undesirables to heed (incredibly, they’ve publicly admitted they want to keep him out so as to not encourage “anti-vaxers”!), have inspired some thoughts in me, thoughts against lockdown, particularly lockdown imposed by a “democracy”. I’ve already said quite a bit about it on Twitter, but I wanted to expand on a few other points here on my blog. Yet I’m also at a loss when it comes to my usual prose. So I think I’ll do a bullet-point list instead. Experiment with the forms of blogging, I’ve heard it exhorted. Well, I’ll play:
- Constitutional hardball is no bad thing. In this case the constitutional-hardball option, which hardly anyone has brought up for whatever reason, would be for the Queen to dismiss the government and appoint a new minister to approve Djokovic’s entry into the country. Wouldn’t that be better than following a “norm” that calls for us to obey people who have already, as proven by their embrace of lockdown, thrown out the most rudimentary precepts of liberal democracy?
- Even harder hardball would be to make #1 stick by proroguing parliament and not letting them come back beyond what’s legally required (in Australia this is as far as I know a pro forma session after the election every three years). Ditto for the other Commonwealth realms. Sure, this is a modern version of “personal rule”, but if that’s the only legal way to force a return to normal life wouldn’t that be the best option? Dark stuff, yes, but it’s true, isn’t it?
- Equally hardball-ish would be issuing a mass pardon for everyone convicted or charged with breaking pandemic rules, though if I were head of state I would (attempted to!) have assumed personal rule in March 2020, so this wouldn’t have been a factor. On the other hand maybe this option makes outright personal rule unnecessary, contradicting #2? 🤔
- Most hardball of all would be directing state prosecutors to bring forth criminal and civil charges against everybody in government who had anything to do with lockdown, which is something that somebody needs to make happen, lest the people in power receive impunity for what they’ve done and be emboldened to commit even worse tyrannies against us in the future (and I for one don’t want to know what “worse than lockdown” is…).
- If I could work my will I’d do point #4 through some kind of ad-hoc people’s tribunal rather than the regular court system, which has proven itself irredeemably corrupt, but that’s getting beyond the realm of constitutional hardball and into the realm of an outright coup d’état or revolution, in which case you might as well replace the whole system with the classical democracy of my dreams and be done with it (though while we’re dreaming, why not the full anarchy of my dreams?), and not give oneself the opportunity to make more like a Hitler than a Cincinnatus.
- I understand balking at #5, but if we’re being honest isn’t lockdown itself a coup d’état against democracy? Such action is properly considered a counter-coup to restore order. 😉
- The point of #1 through #4 is that reserve powers and various other seldom-used legal avenues should be embraced by the friends of freedom. The current monarch, Elizabeth II, is obviously a lockdown-cultist herself, so all this is hypothetical, but if a friend of freedom is ever in such a position he shouldn’t let norms keep him from doing what he knows is right. To paraphrase the great Lord Sidious, “the dark side of the law is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural”. 🙃
- The longer I live the more I understand how Maximilien de Robespierre must have felt: “let’s be merciful and tolerant and reason with these people!” after a certain quantity of frustration at their depredations, betrayals, intransigence, shamelessness, and lawlessness undergoes a phase change into “let’s just get rid of these people…permanently!”. One can feel just that vexed; it really happens that way!
- Circumstances can often thrust you into a place where eliminationism seems like the only way and you have no choice, which is a dark place indeed, not to mention a dangerous place. I’m sure many of you who want an end to lockdown world are there now in 2022, even if you have not the courage (the foolishness?) to admit it publicly.
- Like fire, eliminationism can and should be put to good use (some elements in the body politic need to be eliminated!), but only if it’s channeled properly, which it was not during the Reign of Terror (the vast majority killed were innocent by any reasonable standard!).
- What is a just form of eliminationism? Here’s the rule: reprisals for political crimes must be confined to state actors, and even they are entitled to fair trials.
- The example to follow in this, as I have written about before on here, is the classical democracies like Athens, who successfully kept their ruling classes on a tight leash (or, in Locris’s case, nooses…), yet never had democidal reigns of terror against innocent ordinary citizens. Because they followed #11.
- I find myself feeling warmer and warmer toward the idea of military intervention to keep governments in line, even daydreaming about an imperialistic crusade for freedom, something I didn’t really do before the lockdown crisis.
- I retain my non-interventionist stance, but there’s nothing wrong with a Civis Romanus Sum foreign policy: if you lay one finger on one of our citizens, you’ll suffer a punitive military strike, and if you persist in that pattern of behavior we’ll dispose of you altogether.
- Nothing wrong with measures short of war either. In this case think granting anyone from any lockdown-cultist (or otherwise tyrannical) country automatic refugee status, and providing assistance in their escape if such places prevent people from leaving the country.
- More radically, a safe harbor could be provided for non-state actors to conduct military action against lockdown-cultist (or otherwise tyrannical) governments. Non-interventionist principles might counsel against governments attacking other countries, but that doesn’t obligate you to stop other people from doing so.
- My first instinct when something riles me up and I think of what I’d do if I were in power is “Ultimatums! Punitive strikes! Cyber-attacks! Assassins! Death squads! Rattle the sabers! Purge everybody in sight! Bring me blacklists! Nuremberg-style tribunals!” Honestly I think my failure mode as a head of government would be turning into something like Louis Antoine de Saint-Just if he were a Mafia boss. 😟
- I didn’t even know this before I looked it up just now, but the thrust of one of my programs I’ve been proposing on Twitter, i.e. expropriating the political enemies of the people (e.g. border guards, pro-lockdown politicians, etc.) and redistributing it to their victims, is basically what Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, “the Archangel of the Terror”, spearheaded in the form of the Ventôse decrees. 😳
- Guess the name I chose is more apt than I thought; the namesake of Adamas Nemesis is Nemesis, the Greek goddess of divine retribution, and Adamas is the ancient Greek form of adamant, the whole name translating to, roughly, “unstoppable divine retribution”. My very moniker seems like something straight out of the 1790s. 🤔
- I know it’s a struggle for those unforgiving free souls with hot-blooded tempers, such as myself, to stay principled enough to refrain from going full “KILL THEM ALL!!!!” under circumstances such as the lockdown crisis, where a revolutionary reign of terror might seem like, indeed be, the only hope for lasting freedom and justice, but principled we must remain. There are right ways and wrong ways to get the vengeance we all deserve, and it is up to our conscience to guide us on the right path. Listen to it, and remember: justice is the best revenge. 😇