Tyranny Always Appears Virtuous
December 16, 2020
FROM an outstanding article at the American Institute for Economic Research by Daniel J. Boudreaux:
Tyranny, again, doesn’t happen to us. We, after all, are complying voluntarily with our leaders’ commands, knowing that these are for our own good. If we were suffering the oppression of tyrants, we’d resist. We are, don’t forget, a proud people. We are enlightened, democratic, and free. And so because the vast majority of us are not resisting our leaders’ current rule, this rule cannot possibly be tyrannical. Q.E.D.
Our leaders, in short, aren’t tyrants. They’re public servants who we must trust if we are to be saved.
Or, so all who are tyrannized conclude.
Because tyranny always enjoys its victims’ widespread support, most people living under it are unaware of their ghastly fate. And so it is with today’s tyranny of hygiene socialism. Believing that Covid-19 lockdown orders, mask mandates, and school closings are necessary to prevent unspeakable loss of life, people obey. This is no time to allow nitpicking about the rule of law, or about concerns with matters other than Covid, to obstruct our leaders’ valiant efforts to save us!
Yet as with all tyranny, the truth will eventually emerge. In the future, people’s eyes will open to the exaggerations, half-truths, distortions, and outright lies used to excuse today’s tyrannical restrictions. Someday people will look back on 2020 and see it as a year in which tyranny darkened the globe.
Our children and grandchildren will shake their heads in amazement that the adults – the “adults” – of 2020 were so credulous as to fall for the hysterical overstatements and the deceits and duplicity used to justify this tyranny. They will be aghast that in 2020 so many reporters, pundits, and politicians swallowed whole and without question the over-the-top predictions of mad scientists such as Neil Ferguson and his Imperial College colleagues. The jaws of our progeny will drop from puzzlement when they ponder the news media’s atrociously poor and biased “reporting” on Covid-19. And our descendants will simply resign themselves to being unable to understand fully how and why we allowed ourselves to be engulfed by such tyranny.
And then our children and grandchildren will pat each other on the back, confidently relieved by their knowing that they will never be so gullible as were those of us in 2020.
