If that was deemed to be acceptable, what wouldn’t have been tolerated?

If any country needed to inquire into its COVID response, it is Australia. With North Korea and Cuba, we were the only one to stop citizens leaving.

We were the country about which overseas people were most shaking their heads over submissive obeisance to totalitarianism. Americans and Brits just didn’t understand it.

We were unique in creating a formal alternate governmental process (called the National Cabinet) that replaced parliaments and accountable decision making.

INNOCENT

We had the army in the streets. We had military police hunting the innocent. We had curfews and house arrests. We had internal border closures. 

We also had just about zero deaths at the height of COVID in 2020-21.

That is until the vaccine mandates and brutal vaccine marketing arrived in late 2021. Then more people started dying in more serious numbers!

It is one of history’s starker correlations. Unexplained deaths? Huge spikes in excess deaths? No, still nothing to see here.

If for no other reason, we need a Royal Commission just to remind ourselves of all the madness. And that the madness cost people their lives, jobs, careers, businesses, goodbyes to loved ones and friendships.

Oh yes, it was divisive. A mere virus – quite possibly simple influenza rebadged to fund a sinister and profitable, Gatesian global vaccine campaign – was able to render families and friendships permanently split in ways that even climate change, same sex marriage, the Voice or Brexit couldn’t.

Yes, many do want to punish people. And only consider forgiveness after an admission of criminal culpability.

But those given to ponder these things also want all the stages and cases of the insanity recorded so as to be remembered. Remembered with clear minds the next time the fascists come for us.

As Joshua Philipps of The Epoch Times sums it up neatly: “It seems they’re hoping the public simply forgets what actually took place.”

Lest we forget.

You might say the political class is simply hoping to exploit the late American economist Anthony Downs’ “issue attention cycle” – where even the most important political issues have a limited shelf life, and eventually just go away.

NOTHING

The other great line of the COVID class, literally from the mouth of Anthony Fauci, is: “Nothing was done perfectly.”

Yes, he really wrote that, in a New York Times “puff piece”, as Philipps calls it.

This is the “we did our best” excuse. “If only we knew then…”.

Do we really want to let them get away with this tosh? I suspect this type of thinking is alive and well among the Australian political establishment.

One of the greatest symptoms of “forgetting” (and the new Australian insouciance) has been noted by US publisher Jeffrey Tucker: “We are back to pretending that the people and not the Faucis of the world are in charge.”

The people are far less in charge now than they were three years ago. And they weren’t remotely in charge then.

Assuming that the totalitarian moment was just another event, and has now passed into history, would be a fatal error. Remember that history rhymes, even if it doesn’t repeat (as Mark Twain suggested).

Then there is COVID fatigue militating against popular resistance.

Jeffrey Tucker again: “People are tired and demoralised and more than ready for normal life again. But we cannot simply wish away the ugly truths all around us.”

Things are no better Stateside. As Tucker notes: “Congress holds hearings on the pandemic response and that’s great. But the mass media does not cover them.”

Does anyone think that, were an inquiry actually to be held in Australia, the corporate media so in thrall (and often in financial debt) to the perpetrators, would actually report it?

The fact checkers who endlessly and chillingly hover atop the search engines would rubbish its findings.

HEROES

A few heroes in Parliament – there are only a few, and Albanese certainly isn’t one of them – actually did conduct an unofficial inquiry of sorts a little while back. No one in voterland heard about it.

Which questions should most occupy the minds of some (highly unlikely) future inquiry?

The first agenda item should be to abandon the easy, default sin of false binarism. Making everything a choice of stuff-up versus conspiracy can be futile and fatal distraction.

Yes, the motivations of placeholder puppet-pollies, public health gauleiters, media saboteurs, corrupt academic grant-seekers, careerist doctors in the pay of drug companies, fanatical NGOs and neighbourhood Stasi-snitchers are important.

The motivations of Big Pharma and Big Tech we already know. And we know about the creation of waves of new billionaires in what Robert F Kennedy Jr and others have recognised to have been the greatest wealth transfer from the outsider class to the insiders in history.

Punishment must be the immediate goal. AKA accountability. Explaining remote causes can come later.

As the Brownstone Institute states: “These days and for many months and years following, all the people involved in the pandemic response – not only government officials but media mouthpieces and Big Tech accomplices – will be rewriting history and hoping that everyone will forget the real history.

“They are trying to avoid accountability and save whatever vestiges of despotism that they can, while hoping to institutionalise the powers that made all of this possible. They cannot be allowed to win this struggle for essential rights, liberties and truth.

“The people who implemented this hell remain in power, and they appear unremorseful.”

So, the immediate goal is to identify crimes, put the perpetrators on the stand, enjoy their inevitable squirming and punish the guilty. And to compensate the injured, those that are lucky enough to still be alive.

REVERSE

It is important to get the history correct. In one place. On the official record. But a Royal Commission might also shed light on meta-issues, so as to begin to reverse course and commence the long and winding road back to sane, non-corrupt governance.

Five issues on my list are as follows:

• The worship of scientism;
• The reflexive urge to censor dissidents and stifle debate;
• Executive government creep, in secrecy;
• The treason of the medicos;
• How COVID became a woke issue.

This is only a start.

With apologies to all those who are currently focusing with all their might on the Voice, the republic, the prospect of mass immigration, and all of the other important-in-normal-times issues that are dangerous but not game-ending, I would say, there is another elephant in the room here.

We simply cannot allow the political class to re-write history. They took almost everything we had. They lied about almost everything.

Getting away with that, then simply looking away afterwards, and assuming that merely ending restrictions and mandates will earn our everlasting gratitude, demands a little more than a national shoulder shrug.

If nothing more happens, expect the formation of parallel societies, mass disengagement from the mainstream system, civil disobedience, the further emergence of fringe groups (that will automatically be branded neo-Nazis), rampant tax avoidance and far more cynicism than we have even now.

Allowing spivs and thugs to tiptoe away from a crime is most unseemly for the polity. And our self-respect as citizens.PC

– Paul Collits