The German Ethics Council is an independent advisory body which has existed in some form since 2001, and which has a mandate to advise the Government especially on matters of bioethics. It met its first serious test during the Corona era, when the entire political and bureaucratic leadership decided that the best way to respond to SARS-2 would be to commit massive human rights violations. Naturally, the Ethics Council not only failed to oppose these extraordinary policies, but supported them wherever possible.
Among the failures serving on the Ethics Council is its chairwoman, a medical ethicist and professor named Alena Buyx. Like Emily Oster, Buyx is an archetypal Head Girl – highly conscientious, deeply conformist, mildly intelligent and totally bereft of all originality and independence of thought.
Also like Emily Oster, Buyx has decided that it would be better not to blame anyone for the hell that the Corona brigade has put all of us through. Her most pointed remarks to this effect come in a long and otherwise unremarkable New Years interview she gave to Die Zeit:
ZEIT ONLINE: … We’ve talked about the lack of solidarity and justice – would it be advisable for politicians to apologise [for overreaches during the pandemic]?
Buyx: May I start with the Ethics Council? We’ve clearly been self-critical and named our mistakes. Self-criticism like this is a form of apologetic openness. But I was really surprised by the reaction.
ZEIT ONLINE: Because it provoked even more criticism of you and the Ethics Council?
Buyx: There is a deep, comprehensive need to deal with this pandemic. And apparently also to find someone to blame. And for very different aspects of it: Blame for individual decisions, or for the whole policy. For what happened to people. For their losses.
ZEIT ONLINE: Even for the pandemic itself, many are seeking culprits, if you follow the discussion about the origin of the virus.
Buyx: Yes. And for political decisions, for measures, even for discussions, for statements and much more. And that’s where you reach the limits of what is possible. Personally, I have no problem apologising for the fact that we at the Ethics Council have not focused enough on the young. But there is something insatiable about this need to find culprits, which sometimes seems to be more about revenge, about seeking propitiation. A search for culprits driven by revenge and anger is dangerously easy, and so it’s not a solution, it doesn’t help at all.
There is a need for much more learning and honest, serious retrospection, there is an obligation to do that, and that’s what is happening. It’s about learning from what didn’t go well and looking to the future with new recommendations. All this should remain constructive; we shouldn’t stop at criticism and self-criticism. But no one would benefit from public flagellation now.
Every time another Head Girl demands amnesty, I am going to re-post this photo of Dutch police kicking a lockdown protester in the head.
It was taken in March 2021, at one of the many protests that erupted after the months-long second- and third-wave European lockdowns. The failure of containment policies to stop the virus had by that point driven governments into a frenzy of repression – a “search for culprits driven by revenge and anger” if ever there was one, and a search against which the Buyxes of the world spoke not a word. They were equally silent when it was the vaccinators’ turn to fail and people like Karl Lauterbach fulminated that the unvaccinated were holding all of society hostage. That was all okay, but now, nobody should be interested in assigning blame. That’s not constructive.
Of course, the reason you publicly denounce, investigate, fire and imprison criminally negligent bureaucrats and policymakers is not because anyone “would benefit from public flagellation now”. The damage has been done. Where it might help, though, is in dissuading future bureaucrats and policymakers from doing anything similar the next time a novel coronavirus presents itself.
This is something that Buyx simply cannot understand.
She has no real idea of what went wrong these past few years, though increasingly she can’t deny that something did go wrong, because every day the broader social consensus to which she is in thrall tilts a little more against the excesses of the pandemicists. As a Head Girl, though, she believes deeply that conformity is pro-social. Agreeing with everyone makes her feel good deep down inside. In her mind, she’s been doing the right thing all along.
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Where were this so-called “Ethics Council”, when Germany was over-ruling its constitution to force people to isolate, wear masks, take forced medication and have digital passes?
But now….as more and more information gets past the state censor, they all want those who made these tyrannical rules to be “let-off”, excused consequence-free? How close did Germany (and other countries inclusively) come to ensure that those that did not comply with the rules should become part of a “Solution”?
There is a small town in Germany made infamous in its name to a court system which mete-out accountability to those who believed they could do what ever they wished without repercussions.
These Ethics Councils need to be reminded of the past.
It is remarkably rich isn’t it, and let’s be clear – this change of attitude is coming from a place of shame and fear where accountability is held to uphold those standards (otherwise what use are they), not ethics or morality, a concern for that which they’re supposed to be championing and which don’t go flying out the door when the winds of change insist. To coin a phrase from the same pharmaceutical media-industrial complex.. “the walls are closing in.”
It is very important that we have a proper enquiry into the serious failures of governance (etc) that we saw during Covid. ‘Blame’ will naturally be an outcome of this (it is unavoidable).
The question that remains is whether or not we should punish those that have made such terrible decisions over the last 3 years. I’ve previously stated that we shouldn’t, because we’ll not be able to find out the truth if people are scared of the punishment if they do tell the truth (with punishment reserved for those who don’t engage with the inquiry).
However, I fear that the time for a measured inquiry is rapidly passing — there’s more information coming daily on the damage caused by lockdowns and vaccines.
Tell them all there will be an amnesty, get the truth, then sling them all in prison and just say “Sorry, we lied”.
The perfect solution.
tof, some might say that what you are suggesting would be unethical
Well I’d suggest that the lady in question could advise us, but she would not know what “ethical” if it bit here on the arse.
The normal argument against lying to defendants in this manner is that it undermines the justice system and no-one will ever believe you again when you offer plea agreements. That might wash in normal times where the “justice system” is sort of working, but we’re in a situation here where the entire establishment is either directly guilty of crimes or acquiesced to them, so normal rules do not apply.
tof, I am 100% with you but the “unethical” quip was too good to miss. Just my bit of fun.
The truth is already out for everyone willing to take a look at it. The (self-styled) democrats tied us to raft they christenened Our Core Values and sold us and it down the river in exchange for something that’s much more dear to them. And they’re planning to repeat this as soon as the next usable pretext can be manufactured.
The only proper enquiry is criminal prosecution in a Court of Law.
Forgiving people like her and her agenda would be like forgiving Pol Pot for year zero! Never will I forgive any of this inhumane treatment of our fellow man by these power hungry zealots!. Never,.. so don’t even think about trying to wriggle out of your decisions in life, it will pay you back!
You missed the footnote:
” Or you vill be shot”
Yep. Those who run our society lack self awareness and humility. They are clueless people with power. Very dangerous. And they are everywhere greedy for even more power.
Over thinking. All pre-planned.
Part of the problem, I think, is that some of us, including me personally, want to hold these people to account, for ‘crimes’ they don’t even readily accept as actual crimes….I’d even go so far as to say they don’t even know what we are really mad about…..
For instance the Telegraph did a piece the other day where they held up the ‘successful vaccine roll-out’ as one of the stand-out things that, in the New Year, we should be proud of as a nation…..you can possibly imagine the comment I put on..but the fact that this is ‘still’ a belief with so many is both baffling and horrendous to me….
I don’t doubt that Ms Buyx thinks there WAS a pandemic, that everybody WAS going to die, that everybody DID need to be vaccinated, that the un-vaccinated WERE selfish and wrong and shouldn’t have protested…that Restrictions WERE correct and needed…..that vaccines are STILL the way forward…..as I think so many people still do…
So until we actually get them to see that EVERY single thing they did/thought was a lie or wrong, we will always be talking at cross-purposes….
Two points. The vaccine was certainly successful, if success is measured by hitting sales targets, and presumably profits for the manufacturers. (However, the risk of direct harm from non-bioactive devices and PPE, such as masks, is presumably much lower compared to vaccines and pharmaceuticals.) Similarly, it was a success for some good short-term sound-bites for politicians quick to take credit for chance positives but quick to run to the jungle when faced with deterministic negatives. On the other hand, measured as a reduction the percentage of people who ultimately became infected at some time (40% in the UK???), or as a reduction in fatalities (especially long-term), vaccination looks pretty useless. It’s tricky to assess numerically as it all depends on “modelling”, notably, how many people “might” have died if their had been no global vaccination programme.
Secondly, I am very pessimistic that about whether this will all return again, and about the long-term financial impact of the lockdowns. A quick survey among my friends yields “boredom, move along”. They don’t want to be reminded of what happened, and how they contributed to it by snitching and bullying, and are all to quick to support the Oster and Buyx chalice (viz forgive, forget and move on, before anybody realises what happened). Strangely, in the DM the comments differ from it own polls (notably masks): the commenters overwhelmingly say “never again”, but the polls give 50/50. (I don’t normally pay much attention to DM upticks/downticks as they, and the allowed comments, are so manipulated, but this discrepancy looks really odd, even by DM standards.)
So, one of the guilty then.
Another stupid cow trying to minimize the extent of the damage done by human rights abuses that were suffered by countless millions. I don’t care if the author wants to refer to them as ”Head Girl/Boy”, these idiots are available in both genders and are clearly operating in some sort of alternate reality, where the denialistic, sociopathic perpetrators dwell because they’re clearly hoping the old adage of ”Time heals all wounds” applies here and the masses who were victimized, stigmatized and othered will just forget over time and get back to living their lives. Well tough luck. You do not get to legitimize crimes against humanity, including weaponizing fear in your extended, elaborate PsyOp, then just stop and expect the people affected to clap and sing ‘Kumbaya’. Justice must be brought upon these criminals after what they’ve done and we’ll never give up on calling for it, despite it not exactly looking likely in Clown World, where 2019 rules no longer apply.
They can run…but they can’t hide.
Thank god the internet keeps receipts. You can try and rebrand it or disguise it but an offensive, lying turd will always remain just that.
Yeah, “mildly intelligent” says the author?
Thick as shit in the neck of a bottle more like!
Anyone like her with even an ounce of insight, would be keeping their head about a mile below the parapet.
No big deal though, always good to be reminded who and where these people are, in case they’re needed for some important trial type thingy later on
I wish I had posted that Mogs. Superb.
Many thanks huxter!
Hmmm… “German Ethics Council”; sounds a bit like “Ministry of Truth” to me. Just read they want to legalise incest among other progressive things. Not sure what they use for a moral compass; a weather vane presumably.
Weather vane in the traditional shape of a big cock (theirs)?
“Buyx: May I start with the Ethics Council?”
You may indeed Ms Buyx, but what follows does not contain any reference to that which she is responsible for upholding….ETHICS.
Strange that.
So it is difficult not to disagree with Eugyppius’s assessment:
“Like Emily Oster, Buyx is an archetypal Head Girl – highly conscientious, deeply conformist, mildly intelligent and totally bereft of all originality and independence of thought.”
In other words, by any normal reckoning she is very much the wrong person in the wrong job. And when the next round of destruction to our human rights commences she will do exactly what she did last time and remain resolutely schtum.
Another leech sucking from taxpayers. A disgrace to the world.
Don’t give these people the benefit of doubt. Buyx (and also Oster) know damn well what went wrong because it didn’t go wrong: What happened was the inevitable and thus, intended, outcome of something they’ve intentionally chosen to do. They’re serial child abusers, mass murderers and would-be grand inquisitors presiding over imaginary torture chambers. That they went to great lengths to make all of this appear like side effects of procedures meant to accomplish something else is of no concern. The inevitable outcome of restricting access to health care (example) is lots of people dying miserable deaths. Hence, whoever puts such restrictions in place wants to accomplish this.
What these people would deserve is a rerun of la Teurrer.
The guilty are always blame-dodgers.
This is a tricky one, but not just for Germany this time……
‘The moral issue arose only with the phenomenon of “coordination,” that is, not with fear-inspired hypocrisy, but with this very early eagerness not to miss the train of History, with this, as it were, honest overnight change of opinion that befell a great majority of public figures in all walks of life and all ramifications of culture, accompanied, as it was, by an incredible ease with which lifelong friendships were broken and discarded.
In brief, what disturbed us was the behavior not of our enemies but of our friends, who had done nothing to bring this situation about.’
‘Personal responsibility under dictatorship’ Hannah Arendt
What’s that supposed to communicate here?
Knowing the historical context, it probably means that the revolutionary SPD-state in lieu of the German Empire was a lot less popular than many people had fooled themselves to believe, ie, that Philip Scheidemann’s description of the 9th of November 1918 as Great victory of the German people! may have captured the sentiment of the SPD but not that of German people not associated with it.
But how’s that related to these (presumably again centrally orchestrated) exercises in damage control PR supposed to ensure that the people who were responsible for the horrors of 2020 – 2021 (and partially, 2023) can escape that responsibility in order to try a more refined method at the next opportunity for that?
‘Agreeing with everyone makes her (Prof.Alena Buyx) feel good deep down inside. In her mind, she’s been doing the right thing all along.’
She, along with the vast majority of the German population, is guilty, again, of ‘just following orders’
Only, this time, most of the developed world was complicit in the profoundly illiberal, undemocratic, covid measures that, arguably, killed millions, most of them the poorest living in the developing world.
‘We hadn’t really thought through the economic impacts….’
Melinda Gates 09 Dec 2020
‘Hannah Arendt aims to clarify the question in her title by arguing that if Eichmann were allowed to represent a monstrous and inhuman system, rather than shockingly ordinary human beings, his conviction would make him a scapegoat and let others off the hook. Instead, she believes that everyone who worked for the regime, whatever their motives, is complicit and morally culpable.’
https://www.openculture.com/2017/01/hannah-arendt-on-personal-responsibility-under-dictatorship.html
And I’m sure that I am not alone in being shocked, horrified, having lost good friends, fallen out with family members, over the last three years of this covid ‘pandemic’ shambles.
This doesn’t answer my question what the quote was supposed to communicate in the given context. Considering your new text, probably nothing.
The vast majority of the populations of all countries where Chinese/American innovation of lockdowns et al were introduced by a complicit ruling class just obeyed. Coincidentally, that’s always what the vast majority of the population does, regardless of what’s currently being asked of them. That’s because the vast majority of the (in this case seriously abused) population are powerless little people who see no options for themselves beyond trying to get along as good as possible. But they’re nevertheless victims of those giving and enforcing the orders.
I’m intentionally ignoring the Arendt-drivel as that’s an overdiscussed topic wich doesn’t fit in here at all.
Why not just say: I don’t understand…
You entirely miss the point.
This article is about those responsible for this (covid) shambles attempting to avoid blame.
Arendt was saying that, as well as indicting the major figures, the vast majority of the German population had to accept culpability for German Second World War atrocities (and many of them did). She made a good point now pertinent to culpability for the collateral damage of covid policy responses, widely (and still) endorsed by developed world populations.
‘Following orders’ ceased to be an excuse for the ‘powerless little people’ (as you put it) at Nuremberg
There is no chance (may well never be) of any ‘lessons learned’ regarding the illiberal, possibly illegal, national and supranational covid responses in the developed world until most of the populations of the West (including the professor named in the article) accept their responsibility for the thousands of unnecessary deaths at home and that of millions in the developing world as a consequence of the hopelessly incompetent response of the developed world to the ‘pandemic’ common cold coronavirus.
‘An additional 95 million people are expected to have entered the ranks of the extreme poor in 2020 (80 million more undernourished than before) due to the average annual loss in per capita GDP, says the IMF.
An additional 207 million people could be pushed into extreme poverty by 2030, due to the severe long-term impact of the coronavirus pandemic, bringing the total number to more than a billion, according to a new study from the UNDP.’
USGLC
That is why I am, as are so many others on this site, still incandescent not just at the behaviour of Bunter and his unsavoury crew but the bulk of the spineless population of this country: socialist fascists, the vast majority of them, with disastrous economic consequences for which they are entirely responsible and all now all up in arms.
Petards etc….
Arendt was saying that, as well as indicting the major figures, the vast majority of the German population had to accept culpability for German Second World War atrocities
The most recent Nazi criminal tried and convicted in Germany was once a teenage secretary for some head of office of a concentration camp. You simply cannot let really evil people like her have a free pass!
I’ve no demonstratively fallen for your (meanwhile pretty dated looking) anti-German trolling. Apart from that, I think you’re either trying to create a pointless distraction by run-of-the-mill Nazi-babbling in inappropriate context or are advocating for the perpetrators to escape responsibility by trying to blame their victims.
“anti-German trolling”
Don’t mention the war…
You accused me of being anti-German the other day. Perhaps everyone on this site is anti-German. BTW, I used the same type of arguments with friends and family in Spain and Italy, both of whom have also either experienced in living memory or via parents and grandparents tyrannical regimes. Perhaps I am anti-Spanish and anti-Italian too. Let’s be clear – no country or people has covered itself solely in glory since time immemorial, and humans everywhere have capacity for individual and collective folly and evil. Germany is often referred to as an example – probably because of the rapid transformation from democracy to dictatorship, the impact that this transformation had on Europe in the last century which is really not that long ago – a lot of us here will have parents and grandparents who spoke a lot about that period.
Your English appears to be failing…….
Arendt’s point reads across to the population of this country and others in the developed world.
It is the populations of all ‘democratic’ socialist fascist developed nations that allowed the ‘covid’ debacle to happen.
It is not just the leaders, socialist fascist health establishments, that should be in the dock.
Never mind. Entirely understandable that you are struggling to comprehend, given that English is clearly not your first language.
An Ethics Council with no ethics whatsoever – how novel.
This “Head Girl” doesn’t understand that the only option for her to avoid blame and “revenge” is to profoundly apologise and resign. But since she obviously has no ethics, she wouldn’t understand that.
Another “academic” who cooperated actively in the deaths and injuries of millions, no wonder she wants to “move on”, with an apology, perhaps in her world of ethics every murderer, rapist etc should be allowed a free pass, by just uttering the words she has.
She is a guilty, inhumane individual who conspired and earned money from creating misery for millions of people, she must pay her debt to the society she has so benefited from destroying.
I saw Lord Lucan riding down West Bromwich High Street on Shergar looking for Rishi Sunak and Chris Whitty. Not having much luck
Very good