The Covid-19 Repression Is so Grotesquely Stupid and Over the Top It’s Making Anne Applebaum Cringe

If you're more of a bootlicker than this infamous neocon it's time you had a talk with yourself

Poland was not the first European country to shut its borders, nor was it the last. About a dozen European countries have now halted or dramatically slowed border crossings. In addition, the Schengen Area—the European Union’s free-movement zone—has now stopped admitting non-EU citizens. The medical evidence for these dramatic border closures is muddy: Amy Pope, a former National Security Council staffer who worked on the Ebola crisis in 2014, told me that the Obama administration considered closing borders to travelers from West Africa at the time, but “scientists strongly advised against it, as it would likely make the outbreak worse.” Border closures, without careful planning, can slow down movement of equipment and expertise or create clusters of infectious people at airports and other checkpoints.

Closures also give the illusion of resolute action without changing the reality on the ground. Back in January, President Donald Trump’s decision to stop flights from China gave him and his administration the false sense that they had stopped COVID-19. They had not.In Poland’s case, the abrupt, seemingly unplanned decision caused massive chaos. Polish citizens are now stranded all over the place, and the government has been forced to arrange charter flights to get them home. Thousands of citizens of Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states—including truck drivers and tourists just trying to get home—were lined up in their cars at the Polish-German border for several days, using nearby fields as a toilet, because border guards were refusing non-Poles entry. The German Red Cross was handing out food, drinks, and blankets.

None of these harsh, dramatic measures stopped the virus in Poland. The epidemic had already begun to spread a few weeks earlier and is still spreading. But despite the chaos—perhaps even because of the chaos—the border clampdown is immensely popular. The state is doing something. And this may be a harbinger of what is to come.


There is nothing new about the sudden enthusiasm for aggressive government intervention during a health crisis. Throughout history, pandemics have led to an expansion of the power of the state. As the Black Death spread across Europe in 1348, the authorities in Venice closed the city’s port to vessels coming from plague-infested areas and forced all travelers into 30 days of isolation, which eventually became 40 days; hence the word quarantine. A couple of centuries later, William Cecil, the chief minister to Queen Elizabeth I, battled the plague in England with a law that allowed authorities to shut the sick in their houses for six weeks. A few years later, the Plague Act of 1604 made criticizing these and other measures illegal.

At least while they were frightened, people complied. At times when people fear death, they go along with measures that they believe, rightly or wrongly, will save them—even if that means a loss of freedom. Such measures have been popular in the past. Liberals, libertarians, democrats, and freedom-lovers of all kinds should not fool themselves: They will be popular now too.

In some European countries, we are already watching that process unfold with a good deal of social consensus. Italy has gone into total lockdown. All shops and businesses are closed except those deemed essential; roadblocks are in place to prevent unnecessary travel; public parks and playgrounds are shut. Italian police already have fined tens of thousands of people for being outside without a valid reason. [“Valid reason.”]

Since last Tuesday, Paris has been on a similarly stringent lockdown. You cannot leave home without filling out a form; 100,000 police officers have been assigned to make sure people don’t break the rules. On one day alone—Wednesday of last week—French police issued 4,000 fines for being outside for nonessential reasons.Harsh, yes—but people now accept these measures as necessary.

The Italian prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, enjoys the support of seven out of 10 Italians at the moment, an extraordinary number in a country that historically distrusts its politicians. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has openly described the fight against the virus as a “war,” and this tougher approach and language have won him a majority of national approval too.

Taking advantage of this impulse, some are already going much farther. On Friday, the Hungarian government sent a bill to Parliament that will give dictatorial powers to the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, in the name of the “emergency.” For an indefinite period of time, he will be able to ignore whichever laws he wishes, without consulting legislators; elections and referenda are to be suspended. Breaking of quarantine will become a crime, punishable by a prison sentence. The spread of false information or other information that causes “disturbance” or “unrest” will also be a crime, also punishable by a prison sentence. It is unclear who will define false: The language is vague enough that it could include almost any criticism of the government’s public-health policy. None of this will fix the fact that Hungary is one of the European countries least prepared to fight the pandemic—not least because the policies of its nationalist government persuaded so many educated people, doctors included, to leave the country.

In normal times, the Hungarian opposition would never support such a blatant transfer of power, especially one that seems designed to hide the government’s failures. But at this time, some who would normally oppose the government will go along. “All of their warning systems have been switched off,” Péter Krekó, a Hungarian analyst, told me. At this moment of rising fear, he said, nobody wants to be seen as unpatriotic, as somehow harming the health and safety of Hungarians. Everybody wants to believe in the essential goodness of the nation and the state.

A similarly abrupt transition is taking place in Israel, where Benjamin Netanyahu—still prime minister despite having lost a recent election—has enacted an emergency decree that allows him to postpone the start of his own criminal trial and that prevents the newly elected Israeli Parliament, in which the opposition has a majority, from convening.He has also given himself huge new powers of surveillance without any oversight. Institutions and tactics normally used to track terrorists will now be used to monitor quarantine compliance, follow average citizens’ activity and movement, and keep track of their temperatures and health status. A part of the Israeli population will never accept either the enhanced role of security services or Netanyahu’s self-interested crackdown: The English edition of the newspaper Ha’aretz has already dubbed these moves a “corona-coup.” But as long as Israelis are frightened, another part of the population will.


Here in Poland, the old methods are still in place. Local police in our rural district have been phoning, regularly, to make sure that everyone in our house remains inside: 14 days of quarantine are now compulsory for everyone in the country who has returned from abroad. They have been polite. I understand that they are doing their jobs, and I understand that the point is to make people safe. But neither I nor anyone else on their lists has any way of knowing whether, after this epidemic subsides, new powers ceded to the authorities during the crisis will ever be given back.

Source: The Atlantic

6 Comments
  1. JustPassingThrough says

    anything that makes annie cringe is not all that bad.

  2. Gery Clarkson says

    I love to read you, but as a Hungarian I refuse to give Viktor Orban dictatorial laws! He’s the greatest president! 80% of Hungarians support him! Peter Kreko is a communist. He shouldn’t have been asked! 🙁

  3. XRGRSF says

    “Neither I nor anyone else on their lists has any way of knowing whether, after this epidemic subsides, new powers ceded to the authorities during the crisis will ever be given back.” QUICK ANSWER: NO, NEVER !!

  4. Jihadi Colin says

    Never let a good crisis go to waste.

  5. Charles Homer says

    Here is an article that examines death statistics from normal seasonal influenza:

    https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2020/03/covid-19-engineered-health-crisis.html

    Governments around the world are using a faulty and incomplete data set to suspend the rights of their citizens to freedom of movement, engineering a “health crisis” to justify their control over all of us through the coercive use of fear to intimidate citizens into complete and unthinking obedience.

    1. CHUCKMAN says

      It does indeed appear so.

      Death rates are based on very faulty infection rates.

      Some experts believe huge numbers of people were infected in the recent past, but no one knows because most show no symptoms, seek no help.

      It does not help either that this was discovered in China, the target of huge hostilities and resentments in the US.

      A number of experts believe that it was already passing through populations in Europe and America at the time of the Chinese outbreak.

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