The Covid era produced many villains, across countries, governments, major political parties, the bureaucracy, the legacy media, the universities, the corporates, Big Pharma and Big Tech. Many villains and few heroes.
The years of living with increasingly oppressive Covid restrictions and mandates is a tale of many villains complicit in tyranny and a few heroes of resistance.
https://brownstone.org/articles/covid-expansion-abuse-state-power/
One of Australia’s undoubted Covid heroes of resistance has been the very author of these words, Ramesh Thakur.
Thakur is a political scientist, a former senior United Nations official, an Emeritus Australian National University Professor, and, most recently a columnist for The Spectator Australia and The Brownstone Institute, living in what has turned out to be an analytical and perhaps agitated retirement on the north coast of New South Wales. I am sure Ramesh’s retirement plans did not include experiencing and subsequently chronicling a totalitarian dystopia. That came out of nowhere. For him, and for the rest of us.
But chronicling a totalitarian dystopia is precisely what he has been doing, culminating now in the publication of a very substantial book, titled Our Enemy the Government: How Covid Enabled the Expansion and Abuse of State Power.
The first thing to note about the book is its title, borrowed, no doubt, with knowing irony from Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy the State, published in 1935. Nock was an essayist and one of the earliest and most famous leading lights of America’s libertarian movement. Nock was at the anarchist end. Post-Covid, Ramesh Thakur might well feel sympathy for Nock’s position. Clearly, in the anarchist tradition, Thakur sees government as “the enemy”. This has all sorts of implications for political obligation.
Thakur’s book will stand proudly alongside some of the other chronicles of public health dystopia, including the works of Alex Berenson, Scott Atlas, Naomi Wolf (two, now), Robert Malone, Robert F Kennedy Jr (also two, now), Tom Woods, Laura Dodsworth, Mattias Desmet, John Stapleton, Sharri Markson and Gigi Foster (with Paul Frijters and Michael Baker).
Mercifully, the list is growing. All power to those who are contributing.
We might also include an emerging literature on the coming new world order, not unconnected to the Covid affair. Here we can note the work of (USA Libertarian Party candidate) Michael Rectenwald and Michael Walsh. At least there are two 2024 presidential candidates who somehow have noticed that there has been an attempted global totalitarian takeover. Another, Florida’s heroic Governor, Ron DeSantis, is also up to speed.
So, there is a critical, dissident, narrative attacking literature emerging. It will continue, and it will matter. Getting the true story of Covid down matters, deeply.
That Australia has produced several works on the Covid period is, as old lefties used to say, “no coincidence”. It is illustrative of three aspects of the response to Covid down under. First, outside China, Australia’s Covid regime was just about as bad as it got. Second, the willingness of most Australians to hand over their freedoms without demur was astonishing to many, both here and overseas. Third, Australia is (with Britain), leading the way in Covid non inquiries. This has raised the need for those outside the Covid establishment to undertake their own deep analyses of what occurred on the watch of a political class that has, since Daniel Andrews unilaterally declared Covid exceptionalism “over” last year, shamefully looked the other way.
Thakur himself has given us a succinct overview of both the book and the era:
It’s a story of venal, incompetent politicians and brutish police – thugs in uniform – acting at the behest of power-drunk apparatchiks.
Medically idiotic, economically ruinous, socially disruptive and embittering, culturally dystopian, politically despotic: what was there to like in the Covid era?
· Billions, if you were Big Pharma.
· Unchecked power, if you were Big State.
· Power over the whole population of a state and fame with extended daily TV appearances on all channels, if you were a chief medical officer.
· More money and power over the world’s governments and people for the WHO.
· Template for action for climate zealots.
· Dreamtime for cops given free rein to indulge their inner bully.
But anguished despair, if you were a caring, concerned citizen who loves individual freedom and autonomy.
The existing frameworks, processes and institutional safeguards under which liberal democracies operated until 2020 had ensured expanding freedoms, growing prosperity, an enviable lifestyle and quality of life, and educational and health outcomes without precedent in human history. Abandoning them in favour of a tightly centralised small group of decision-makers liberated from any external scrutiny, contestability and accountability, produced both a dysfunctional process and suboptimal outcomes: very modest gains for much long-lasting pain.
https://brownstone.org/articles/covid-expansion-abuse-state-power/
The book isn’t only about Australia, by the way. Its lessons are for readers everywhere, certainly across the Western so-called democracies. While Australia was at the forefront of the world’s Covid policy crimes, it wasn’t alone. The Covid crimes were global, and Ramesh’s book covers the territory.
He analyses the course of events in his own native country, India, for example. He covers the non-medical interventions, the vaccine wars, the silencing of dissent, the sins of the regulators, the media “lickspittles of State power”, the failure of international institutions like the World Health Organisation, the failures of parliaments, the descent of the Anglosphere into authoritarianism, the maskism, and the linkages between Covid management and climate catastrophism. All are bundled into an all-encompassing, critical analysis of the State’s Covid crimes. A frightening attack by the State on the governed. For Thakur, who knows his Thomas Hobbes, it has been a complete demolition job on liberal democracy’s fundamental principle of the consent of the governed. This book is a comprehensive demolition job. Footnoted and researched, and reasoned. Meticulously.
The Covid failures were, at bottom, a crisis of politics. The seasoned political scientist in Thakur focuses on the “virus thin” line that separates democracy from dictatorship.
It is almost as though Ramesh’s predecessor A J Nock saw Covid coming.
The state, according to Nock, "turns every contingency into a resource for accumulating power in itself, always at the expense of social power". People become conditioned to accept their lost freedom and social power as normal, in each subsequent generation, and so the State continues to expand, and society to shrink.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Enemy,_the_State
Talk about prescient.
There have been two kinds of Covid realist. Those who were sniffing the totalitarian breezes from the start, and those who, while initially on board with China-style responses, subsequently saw the light. Ramesh was onto the Covid dictatorship very early on. His very first article appeared on 30 March 2020, its title:
Coronavirus pandemic: sceptical question marks make for better policy than excitable exclamation marks.
And once he was involved with the beast, he didn’t let go.
In the book, which reads as a present tense, evolving account of the crisis, he identifies the culprits, the connections, the causes. The culprits range from Neil Ferguson, “the Pied Piper of pandemic porn”, to the World Health Organisation, whose performance Thakur (a little generously, perhaps) describes as “patchy”. He upbraids the “science deniers” and the “self-censoring” media. He identifies lockdowns as the tools of the elites involved in a class war, and a war of the cities on the countryside. He pings the health regulators for not doing their jobs and of doing the bidding of their funders, Big Pharma, and he takes to task the journalist profession for abandoning ship.
Above all, the book is about executive overreach, the great scourge of our Western polities.
Indeed, all institutional checks on overreach and abuse of executive power – legislatures, the judiciary, human rights machinery, professional associations, trade unions, the Church and the media – turned out to be unfit for purpose.
No one, but no one, roused himself or herself to challenge what was going on. Every last institution to which we might have looked for resistance was caught like a rabbit in the headlights. Or on the take. The so-called left departed the building. The church-state separation dissolved without demur. Journalists obeyed their Big Pharma compromised management. Medical establishment institutions bowed before their benefactors. They flipped the bird at the Hippocratic oath. As Ramesh notes, they were simply unfit for purpose. To put it politely.
What should happen now, on the slow walk back to liberalism? Ramesh would like to see criminal convictions for brutal police and their bureaucratic and political bosses and the reinstatement of workers sacked for refusing the vaccine, just for starters. The principle of informed consent must be reinstated.
Thakur’s final verdict on the post-Covid future?
Will Covid illiberalism be rolled back or has it become a permanent feature of the political landscape in the democratic West? The head says to fear the worst, but an eternally optimistic heart still hopes for the best.
That doesn’t strike me as all that hopeful. What worries me the most is the utter non-interest by Jo(e) Punter in exacting any kind of revenge on the culprits. Even accountability.
Those who inflicted the plandemic upon us wish simply to “move on” and hope that we will all do likewise. The resistance, of whom Ramesh Thakur is a leading light (and a worthy successor to Albert Jay Nock), is working to ensure that none of us just “move on”. The future of freedom in Western democracies, not just Australia, depends on the success of the resistance. If no one listens to its leaders and takes heed of their warnings, we will be destined to have the dystopian dose repeated. Often. And worse.
Ramesh is not terribly impressed with those who seek an “amnesty” for their Covid crimes. Not so easy. Not forthcoming.
There is one question for every reviewer of books. Who is the reader? Is Thakur trying to change minds? Bearing in mind Julius Ruechel’s dictum that sober, data driven arguments are not, at least in the first instance, going to achieve a mindset shift among (in this case) the Covidistas, should we be optimistic about the reception of My Enemy the Government? I recently asked Ian Plimer whether he thought his massive long-term efforts to swing the climate “debate” towards realism, given the creeping climate madness across governments that shows no sign of being ditched. His response was that he had to do it – or someone has to – to get the record straight and on paper, so that one day, when the historians come to review our era, they will find a truthful, written account. Sounds fair enough.
With an emerging counter-narrative literature emerging, where should we locate this contribution? Ramesh Thakur cannot easily be dismissed as a “cooker”, as an “anti-vaxxer”. He adds a new and valuable dimension to the dissent literature. The former leftist Naomi Wolf has crushed liberal shibboleths. She has nailed the American left on Covid. The on-the-ground, authentic chronicler of the Aussie resistance movement, John Stapleton, has told stories of common man push-back. Robert Malone has nailed the Big Pharma cartel. RFK Jr has indicted the corporate culprits. Scott Atlas has provided an insider’s insights to the awful American Covid decision-making process. Alex Berenson has exposed the Big Tech-Big Government conspiracies. Sharri Markson has chronicled the Wuhan play. Laura Dodsworth has laid bare the tricks of the Nudge Unit strategies. Mattias Desmet has exposed the linkages between Covid governance and the early stages of totalitarianism.
As a result of these heroic contributions, we are coming closer to the full picture. There is still a ways to go, clearly, as we wade through the various Covid “non-inquiries” across the globe. Non-inquiries that refuse to ask first order questions about Covid totalitarianism. But having a high level, policy-based approach to the disaster is so very important to understanding the whole shemozzle.
Ramesh Thakur is a man of the official international family. A UN man. He is a man of the academy. He has seen the world of power and of international governance, both as analyst and practitioner. No far-right rabble rouser. Not an outsider with an outsider’s perceived ignorance. He has brought an international decision-maker’s eye to this horrendous crisis. A crisis, as he sees it, of liberal democratic governance. High level stuff. Not so easily dismissed.
His contributions to the Covid policy disaster are not just about this book, by the way. His presence in the public square over the past three years has been consistent, measured, fact-based, questioning, reasonable. He has been a force for the good. For reason. For common sense. The book is icing on the cake.
As a record of the Covid lunacy you aren’t likely to get a better, fuller record than that provided by Ramesh Thakur. A high level record. There is much depth here to be plumbed. This is a complex story, written by a political scientist of international repute who has committed himself to address the deep issues that have plagued the world these past years. And has taken the time to attempt to figure out what the hell has just happened.
Read the book. Note its messages. Send to friends. Hope that they will suspend their comfortable ignorance and embrace the uncomfortable truth about Covid.
Paul Collits
14 December 2023
Great article Paul! It’s a damn shame that the people reading all these publications are the ones who were awake or have woken up. It’s the ones still in so much denial that need to read and learn so that any future controls shutdown by the people very quickly. If the filthy governments removed ourselves from these global organisations then we wouldn’t have a problem. They are only profiteering they certainly don’t care.
He was fabulous during the covid hysteria. Gland book out now.