This Pivotal Moment Episode 1
This Pivotal Moment Episode 1
This Pivotal Moment – Episode 1
We all know that we’re living through challenging and troubling times. We are in the midst of a pandemic, cities and whole countries are being locked down for months on end. People are losing their lives, their jobs and their businesses. Mental illness and suicide are on the rise and the debt that is being built up will take generations to pay off. Censorship and polarisation seem to be the new norm with nuanced debate and mutual respect giving way to a pro vs anti, with us or against us, mentality that has a chilling and deeply divisive effect on our previously open and tolerant societies.
But far more disturbing that any of these troubling things is that we stand on the brink of a civilisational change that is so far reaching in its consequences, and so profound in its implications, that few are able discern the imminence of the danger, or to fully comprehend the Rubicon we are about to cross and the dystopian world that awaits us on the other side. How is this fundamental change being ushered into being, you ask? Through sleight of hand, through misdirection, and through the introduction of the seemingly benign ‘vaccine passport’.
Such a claim seems extraordinary and you would be right to be sceptical, but please allow me explain.
Most of us living in democratic societies today have been born into freedom; we’ve simply never known anything different. Now Liberal democratic societies are certainly not perfect, but we are essentially free to live the lives we chose, go where we please, and behave as we wish, except where are actions expressly prohibited in law, such as stealing, committing acts of violence or taking another’s life. But we have not earnt the freedoms we’ve enjoyed. They’ve been handed down to us by successive generations who wrestled them from the hands of monarchs and tyrants, who campaigned, fought and died so that we could enjoy the freedoms that we now possess to live the lives we chose.
Yet today, we stand on the brink of having these priceless, hard fought freedoms stolen from us as we look the other way, of relinquishing them without resistance or debate, because we are told we have no choice but to accept vaccine passports if we want to get some semblance of our old lives back. At first glance, accepting vaccine passports into our daily lives may seem like a trivial change, after all, many of us have already become accustomed to scanning QR codes as condition of entry into restaurants and shops. But do not be fooled, the universal adoption of vaccine passports is not a trivial change. It is no less than a fundamental inversion of what is meant by freedom in democratic societies and will facilitate a radical restructuring of our civilisation. No longer will your personal freedom be expansive, constrained only at the periphery by long established and mutually agreed laws. Instead, what will remain of your freedom will be limited to those things that you have been given explicit permission to do by some unseen, algorithmic power, mediated through the screen of your smartphone, one green tick at a time.
Let me say this again, for it is critically important to understand. Today, we are essentially free to do anything we chose except where our actions are prohibited in law. However, after the introduction of vaccine passports, that concept of freedom will be consigned to history, replaced by a completely new system in which you will only be allowed to do the things that you have been given explicit permission to do. This is what I mean by a fundamental inversion of freedom.
Almost overnight, our enshrined and protected freedoms will become mere privileges, temporarily granted to us for compliance and good behaviour. Can I go into this restaurant, this concert, this sporting event? Can I get on this bus, this plane or in this taxi? Can I go into this this shop, this doctors surgery, or even into my place of work? Participation in such trivial, day-to-day activities will be contingent on permissions granted to us via our smartphones, permissions which themselves will be liable to change from one day to the next. And don’t think for a second that because you are now double vaccinated this won’t apply to you. Australia, a country of under 26 million people has recently signed contracts to secure a further 195 million vaccine doses, on top of the millions of doses already purchased. That’s about a booster shot, every six months for the next 4 years! So in a couple of years from now, if you are two days late getting your booster shot for the latest COVID variant, you might as well forgot that dinner with friends at your favourite restaurant, those privileges will have been automatically revoked.
And it won’t stop there. Vaccine passports are just a trojan horse. Behind the seemingly benign functional facade lays a Digital ID scheme built on a software platform that is designed to be extended over time. Today, you’ll just get the simple binary green tick or red tick cross indicating your authorised inclusion or exclusion from everyday society, but tomorrow you’ll be rated on every aspect of your life, points added for behaviour deemed supportive of the government and big business, points subtracted for anything deemed to be divergent from the required norms. So how many times did you inadvertently break the 1.5m social distancing rule today? What about that mildly critical post on social media about some government policy? What about that video you shared with a friend raising legitimate questions about the current approved narrative? Watch your social credit score tumble and as it does, your access to the services essential for everyday life revoked, one privilege at a time. This sounds extreme but this social credit score is already a reality in China where people can’t even board a train if their score falls below a certain threshold. Make no mistake, this is coming, soon, and to the entire world and it’s coming hidden in the Vaccine Passport trojan horse.
Whilst such a world may seem implausible to us, if we stop and reflect for just a moment it becomes clear that COVID-19 has already given us a taste of a world where what is permitted, and with it the boundaries of our freedom, changes on a day-to-day basis. The desensitisation has already begun.
Although this vision of our imminent future is shocking enough, the true dystopian power of such a scheme only comes into view when we situate the Vaccine Passport / Digital ID platform in the context of the high tech, highly surveilled world we already live in.
It’s no secret to anyone that the global tech giants monitor and record our every online action, with each post liked, every article shared, ad clicked, and video watched used to build detailed profiles on us. These big data-generated psychographic profiles are not only used to determine what products we may want to buy but also, more chillingly, to infer our political preferences, our opinions, attitudes and beliefs and even our innermost drives and fears. It really can be argued that, armed with big data, A.I. algorithms and near infinite computing power, Google, Facebook and Amazon really can know us better than we know ourselves.
Furthermore, after Edward Snowdon’s revelations about the NSA’s illegal and ubiquitous surveillance programs in the US, working hand-in-glove, as they did, with their Five Eyes partners in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, most reasonably informed people know that governments collect and store vast quantities of data on their citizens, including almost all telephone calls, texts messages and emails. Every aspect of our lives today is monitored, scrutinised and profiled as part of the national security apparatus of the state or the for-profit apparatus of big business. To date, the Faustian bargain that we have made with big tech seems to have resulted in little more than a gentle nudge here and there from an online ad or an eerily accurate Amazon recommendation to purchase something that we didn’t even know we wanted. However, this will all change, and change forever, if we allow the vaccine passports to roll out. Why? Because the vaccine passport, and the social credit system it will rapidly evolve into, is the final missing piece in an automated architecture of total surveillance and social control.
George Orwell has made us all familiar with the ‘watching and monitoring’ aspect of surveillance. And we all intuitively know that the act of being watched puts pressure on us to confirm to certain rules and norms. Think speed cameras on the roads and CCTV cameras in shops and town centres. But there is another aspect of surveillance that, apart from the occasional speeding fine, few of us have experienced, and that is the disciplinary aspect of surveillance; the punishment for non-compliance that is received at the sharp end of the surveillance architecture. Until now, that piece of the puzzle has been missing. But with the advent of vaccine passports the mechanism to automatically discipline those who do not submit to the prescribed norms and mandated rules will be carried in everyone’s pocket, every moment of every day.
There is a term that is used in academic discussions on surveillance known as ‘turnkey totalitarianism’. This is the idea is that the surveillance infrastructure for a totalitarian system has been constructed around us but it has not yet been switched on; the machine is ready but the key has not been turned. Vaccine passports are the last part of that infrastructure, the last cog in the machine. They are the disciplinary sharp end of the totalitarian system of surveillance and control. Once we allow this final, critical part of the infrastructure to be slotted in to place, once we accept it as just a normal part of daily life, the key will be turned, the Rubicon will have been crossed, and there will be no going back. There will be no space for dissent, no opportunity for debate and no room for deviance from the prescribed norms or mandated behaviours. And as the crucially important space for debate, difference and nonconformity disappears, so too will the possibility of ordinary human beings collectively steering the direction we want our societies to go in.
The machine will be on, eternally and automatically watching, profiling and scoring, guiding our behaviours and, where necessary, punishing. We will be, forever, at the mercy of our masters, those with the key to the machine, those who keep score, and those who set the rules, those who decide if we are deserving of a green tick or a red cross, those who decide whether we can be included in society or pushed to the precarious margins of existence. If we allow this to happen it will be, as Aldous Huxley termed it, the Final Revolution. There will be no coming back from it. Freedom, as we have known it all our lives and for generations before us, will be extinguished, forever, for all but the privileged few at the pinnacle of the pyramid. In time, maybe in a generation or two, we will be so conditioned by the continuous gaze of surveillance and the rewards and punishments that it will automatically issue, that we’ll simply police ourselves, self-monitored, self-censored and submissive. The freedom we enjoy today, even the very idea of freedom as we conceive it now, will become all but unthinkable for our children and all the generations that follow.
It is said that “Totalitarianism is, first and foremost, the extreme focusing of surveillance devoted to securing political ends”. Under the cover of COVID-19, without debate, discussion or informed debate, we are about to let a new totalitarian world of total surveillance, control and compliance be ushered in, welcomed by many in the name of ‘doing their part’ in the battle against the virus.
It is tempting to think that those of us living today in our high-tech, media-saturated world are far too informed and far too smart to have such a trick played on us. Yes, people may have fallen under the spell of fascism and totalitarianism in the past but we are simply far too sophisticated to fall into such a trap. But is that really true? Are you sure? Look around you. Look at the censorship. Look at the how little deviance there is from the approved narrative on the Mainstream Media. Look at how fear is being used to corral and control us. Look at how we are becoming divided around the ideas of masks, vaccines and lockdowns. Look at the ingroup-outgroup mentality that’s beginning to form. Look how far we have come in less than 2 short years. When the scales are peeled from your eyes, the propaganda and control become all too clear, the destination laid bare for those willing to see.
Given the gravity of what I am suggesting, I ask you now to pause for a moment and consider this. For centuries, perhaps millennia, the torch of freedom has been passed from generation to generation, often paid for with blood, the flames of that torch fanned by the hands it has passed through. Those of us alive today, who are fortunate enough to live in democratic societies, now hold that torch.
Now imagine yourself looking into the eyes of you parents, your grandparents, and all the generations before them stretching back through time. Look at all those who gave their lives so that we might live free, who fought, who campaigned, who protested, and who faced down despots so that individual liberty could be secured for them and for their descendants. Are you willing to look them in the eyes and tell them you let that torch go out, forever, because of a virus? That you let the flame die because you were too fearful, too apathetic, too trusting or too easily manipulated to stand firm, stand tall and keep the flame alive?
Now imagine yourself looking forward in time and bring to mind all your descendants, your children and your grandchildren, be they living or yet to come, and all those generations that will follow us. Look them in the eyes and tell them that the gift of freedom was handed down to us but we allowed it to be taken from us, and hence from them, because we didn’t see the sleight-of-hand trick that was being played or, if we did, we did nothing to stop it. Can you feel the weight of the responsibility that rests upon your shoulders now? Will you be able to you live with the shame of knowing that you were one of those that stood idle, locked down, cowered in your home, as the precious gift of freedom, through sleight of hand, manipulation and misdirection, was stolen from you and from all future generations to come?
It should not matter where we find ourselves on the political spectrum, what are views are on masks, vaccines and lockdowns, whether we are rich or poor, or even if we are in the police or the military. We may disagree on many things, but surely we can all agree on this. That the freedom we enjoy today is the most precious of gifts, that it has been passed down to us and it must be cherished, nurtured and defended at all costs for the generations to come.
It should be clear by now that the vaccine passport, covid pass, green pass, o¬r however they choose to brand it, has absolutely nothing at all to do with your health, and despite how it’s being sold to us, its global rollout is not the way we will get our old lives back. In fact the reverse is true. Vaccine passports are the perfectly engineered gateway for creating a completely new type of controlled and surveilled society, the likes of which we have never seen before. Therefore, under no circumstances, no matter what pressure is applied to us, must we allow vaccine passports to be introduced.
Make no mistake, we stand at a pivotal moment in history, like the Spartan’s at the battle of Thermopylae, or the young men and boys on the beaches of Normandy. The true scale of what is at stake cannot be overstated. But this is not a message of fear and division. This is a message of hope, and it is a message of unity. I share this as my way of sounding the alarm; of calling attention to the imminent danger we all face. We are born free sovereign beings on this beautiful Earth, we are all brothers and sisters, we are one human family regardless of colour, creed or nationality. No weapons need be forged, no ramparts stormed, no buildings razed. We simply need to stand up, to stand united and say ‘Enough is Enough’, we’ve seen through the tricks, we see the plan clearly now and we will not allow our freedom to be taken from us. The torch of liberty will not be extinguished, not now, not ever, and certainly not on our watch. Our moment has come to defend it for all future generations, to fan its flames, and pass it on intact, and invigorated, to the generations that follow us.
To our descendant we must say, in unison, we will not let you down.
If this message resonates with you I ask you to share it with your family and friends, for the time to act, is now.
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