Is Reporting Lockdown Breaches the Same as Snitching on Jews? 

This poster appeared on lamp-posts in a Christchurch suburb in New Zealand recently. It uses Jim Halpert from The Office (played by John Krasinski) to ask the question, “If you will snitch on a person for violating quarantine, you would have snitched on Anne Frank and Harriet Tubman.” It refers to the police initiative to encourage people to dob in those breaking the strictest level of the lockdown, here called Alert Level 4. As at 25 April there had been 55,000 reports about potential breaches from the public (we have now moved to Alert Level 3). That’s in a country of just under 5 million people.

The writer continues:

Same moral compass. Same choice of irrational fear over humanity. Irrational because many, many independent (not funded by [?]) experts are saying that Covid-19 has a lower mortality rate than influenza. There is a MUCH bigger picture here than Covid-19. Covid-19 is the Trojan horse to allow tyranny to take over. Open your eyes. Pay attention to the power grabs. Research what independent scientists and physicians are saying about the true mortality rates of Covid-19.

Law enforcement officials and military personnel need to remember that the Nuremberg Trials determined that “following orders” is not a valid defence when enforcing tyranny.

Remember your history lessons. The Holocaust did not begin with Jews being put onto trains. The average German had no idea what the future held when the propaganda against Jewish people, and the orders from the government to turn in neighbours, began. We need to look at the BEGINNING stages and recognise the similarities as they occur here.

For a poster stapled to a lamp-post it is a sophisticated argument, and there are a number of things in it worth noting. First, it is stapled to a lamp-post, not uploaded to the internet. The writer realises that there the message will be lost or, more likely, will have no platform. In New Zealand there are very few opportunities to make comments on news or other widely read sites, especially since the mosque shootings in Christchurch in 2019. The media here are predominantly owned by one company, Fairfax Media, which through Stuff dominates online news, and comments are turned off for even slightly contentious issues. How can the individual have a voice? He or she is forced to resort, like Martin Luther, to pinning arguments in a public place.

The next thing worth noting is what the intrepid journalist from the NZ Herald did with the story. Discuss civil rights? Question the introduction of discretionary powers? Dig into what independent experts are saying? Or run off to the Jewish Council of New Zealand in order to get the attention-grabbing headline, “‘Ludicrous’ Chch leaflet compares lockdown laws to Nazi Germany’? According to Jewish Council spokesperson Juliet Moses, "Comparisons with the Holocaust and Nazi regime should be made sparingly. Making the comparisons often dilutes the importance and power of what actually happened and trivialises it.” According to Moses, "Most people would recognise the lockdown has been imposed to save the population from sickness, and death and try to minimise the death as much as possible, whereas the Nazi regime and the Holocaust was doing the exact opposite”. She stresses that “this context is completely different to Nazi Germany” and calls it a “far-fetched comparison”.

The problem is that the Jewish Council’s attitude threatens to lock the Holocaust in a glass museum case, where we are allowed, under supervision, to look in horror at a grotesque piece of history without relating it to anything that occurs currently. But if even the events in the early 1930s long before the death camps are placed beyond comparison, then how are we to learn from them? How are we to stop terrible things from happening again if we cannot draw comparisons, see similarities, issue warnings that acts ostensibly carried out for the good of the people could be the precursors of something truly vile in society? It is perhaps telling that Harriet Tubman, an escaped Maryland slave who became a civil rights activist, is simply ignored. Even slavery doesn’t measure up for comparison.

What our poster writer wants to stress is the tendency of people to ignore how tyranny and loss of control can be introduced gradually if they unthinkingly acquiesce to discretionary powers.  We need to think about the fact that not only was the emergency not great enough to warrant many of the measures imposed, such as preventing people sitting on the grass in a park, but that the emergency was drummed up to start with. It was clear before the lockdown that the modelling was based on poor data and promoted by people with no real grasp of epidemiology. Since then it has been shown that deaths have been over-attributed to Covid-19 in order to ramp up fear and justify the heavy-handed response.  Alert Level 4 was introduced here in tandem with a state of emergency, which formally lasts for seven days and can be rolled over. Under a state of emergency the government can issue edicts without having to pass legislation through Parliament, and the police have “discretionary” powers – much as occurs in your standard tin-pot authoritarian state. 

This is worth viewing in the context of China reacting to Australia’s calls for a full, independent investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic with thinly veiled threats. Authoritarian regimes don’t like being investigated. There is also the issue of apps that trace who a person has been associating with and fears that having an immunisation certificate might be a requirement in the future.  Of course those of us who have experienced China’s social credit system know where this can all lead. Minor infringements, such as putting one’s feet on a seat in a train, can result in deductions to one’s social credits, resulting in penalties such as an inability to travel, which make life difficult if not impossible. So surely it is fair to question where well-intentioned neighbourhood dobbing in can lead.

David Wolcott