We as a people have ceded total control to authoritarian rule. People have become fearful and frightened, and that’s when it’s easy for the totalitarian forces of government to take control of our lives. Historically, authoritarian regimes use emergencies to come to power and crush the people’s freedom and liberties.
Authoritarian regimes that come to power in democracies, tend to look at voters in blocs. Instead of representing all the people, they divide the voters into separate racial and ethnic groups, vaccinated and unvaccinated blocs, gender blocs, or a “basket of deplorables.”
There is a pattern here. There is a method to the madness, for authoritarian leaders to use emergencies to seize absolute control, which they have accomplished by dividing and terrifying the people into complete submission. It’s not about public health and prevention of Covid. NYC, with America’s most burdensome mandates has one of the nation’s highest rates of Covid cases per capita. It’s about absolute power. It’s about using crises and emergencies to strengthen the power of government to mandate totalitarian rules.
Power corrupts all. Even some of our nation’s greatest past leaders have fallen prey to the corruption of power, during the wars and emergencies throughout America’s history. During World War II, FDR ordered Japanese Americans unjustly into internment camps. During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus, that protects people against unlawful arrests or detention. As America dealt with the threat of war with France, President John Adams signed the Sedition Act into law, to suppress political speech critical of his government for his own partisan advantage. The USA Patriot Act was passed after the terrorist attacks on Sept 11, 2001, in order to combat terrorism, but later on, provisions of the law were ruled unconstitutional in violation of the 4th Amendment for allowing the federal government to spy on and search American citizens without showing probable cause.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Authoritarian leaders used wars and emergencies as pretexts to seize absolute power in the last century. Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler and other murderous dictators declared emergencies and took over. Lenin used the widespread disdain for Russia’s involvement in World War I to launch the October Revolution in 1917 to overthrow the democratically elected Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky. Hitler notoriously used the despair caused by the Great Depression and the fear of Communism to rise to power. In 1933 the Reichstag fire and the purported threat of a Communist revolution, gave Hitler the pretext to seize complete and absolute power over Germany.
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