Medically idiotic, economically ruinous, socially disruptive and embittering, culturally dystopian, politically despotic: what was there to like in the Covid era? Billions, if you were Big Pharma. Unchecked power, if you were Big State. More money and power over the world’s governments and people, for the WHO. Template for action for climate zealots. Dreamtime for cops given free rein to indulge their inner bully. Anguished despair, if you were a caring, inquisitive reporter. In Australia Breaks Apart, John Stapleton, a retired journalist with over 25 years’ experience with the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian, chronicles the collective madness that suffocated Covidian Australia, but also the resistance movement that began hesitantly and grew organically. It is a tale of the many villains complicit in tyranny and the few heroes of resistance. “What will you tell UR kids? Did you rise up or comply,” asked a sign during the Canberra protests. It’s a story of venal, incompetent politicians and brutish police – thugs in uniform – acting at the behest of “power drunk apparatchiks”.
If you want to know or recall what happened, read the book. If you questioned and resisted from the start, take heart at the documentation for the record. If you belong to the Covid class in slow retreat from the wastelands you created and now leave behind, take evasive action. An extract was published in the Weekend Australian. Among more than 900 online commentators, one quoted Tony Abbott that in two World Wars, many risked their lives to protect our freedoms, but in the last three years, so many gave up freedoms to prolong lives. Some took Stapleton to task for failing to thank our great and good leaders and public health authorities for keeping us safe through the terrifying ordeal of the ‘rona wars. The persistence of the last attitude justifies the book’s publication. It’s an effort to chronicle and, if possible, come to terms with how an entire population was terrorised into fearing a virus and complying with arbitrary and draconian rules. Stapleton laments this is not the Australia he knew and loved. There evolved a co-dependency between the über-surveillance state and a Stasi-like snitch society in which “we are all guilty until proven uninfected”. The unleashing of state violence on peaceful protestors included militarised responses on the streets and in the air that drew gasps of disbelief from around the world. State over-reach included “an insane level of micromanagement”. All was done without providing any evidence and cost-benefit analyses in support. It’s all here in grim detail, possibly with generous dollops of hyperbole. But who can blame Stapleton, writing amidst the “height of totalitarian derangement” syndrome?
Stapleton uses the narrative device of a fictional character called Old Alex who watches what is happening with detachment and growing disenchantment. In 444 pages divided into 19 chapters, he provides a comprehensive catalogue of the milestones, lies and obfuscations on the relentless march to medical tyranny and vaccine apartheid. He puzzles over the Left’s embrace of the Pharma-state’s over-reach. Struggles for words strong enough to convey the depth of contempt for the “shameless”, “odious” and “loathed” Scott Morrison, whose name became synonymous for some with the act of defecation as shouts were heard from inside a lavatory: “I’m doing a ScoMo, I’m doing a ScoMo.” Readers will encounter many writers from the Spectator Australia and Brownstone stables, which clearly sustained Stapleton through the dark Covid years with emotional connections to many of the world’s leading fellow dissidents. They will be reminded of many characters whose horror stories were illuminated briefly during the long darkness, such as Anthony and Natalie Reale who run the Village Fix café in Shellharbour, NSW. I wrote about them in the Speccie on January 15th 2022. We encountered the big-hearted and generous family on the drive up from Canberra to our new home in the Northern Rivers in December 2021.
Australia broke apart most obviously in the way in which the Morrison Government was complicit in the fracturing of the federation into mini-fiefdoms run by wannabe warlords a.k.a. Premiers and their palace courtiers of CHOs and Police Commissioners, some of whom have since been pushed upwards into Governors’ mansions. But it was more. Trust was also broken, perhaps irreparably, with respect to parliaments, the judiciary, human rights machinery, police, medical establishment, experts and the media. The significant switch to independent media reflects disillusionment as much with social media’s Big Tech platforms that turned into narrative enforcers as with the legacy media that turned into fear-mongering Big State mouthpieces and Big Pharma shills.
It was important for someone to write this instant history under time pressure, an accessible work of record, lest we forget. Or rather, lest they be allowed to forget and move on. This is neither a book by nor for academics. Therein lies some of its failings and much of its strength. “The Government is my enemy,” laments a disillusioned citizen. Do not trust politicians and bureaucrats. “They lie for a living,” says the cynical reporter. In the years to come a flood of scholarly tomes can be expected, analysing in excruciating detail the excesses of lockdowns, masks and vaccines and systematic assessments of their successes and failures. Given the paucity of critical journalism, it’s useful to have a record of contemporaneous events before memories fade and stories are conveniently rewritten. The journalistic strengths include on-the-ground reporting from protests like the Canberra Convoy, observation skills, an eye for the human interest story, jargon-free writing and analysis uncluttered by theoretical explorations. His stories of the personalities encountered during the massive Canberra protests in early 2022 bring out vividly the electric atmosphere, energy and camaraderie of what became a festive, exultant celebration of shared emotions and commitments to securing the freedoms of future generations of Australians.
This is a book to read, display prominently on the coffee table or discreetly on the bookshelf, recommend for purchase to the public library, and spread awareness by word of mouth. It contains many literary quotations and allusions. It’s appropriate therefore that I am left at the end recalling these lines from Dylan Thomas that apply very much to ‘Old Alex’: “Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rage at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Ramesh Thakur is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy and a former UN Assistant Secretary-General. This article was first published by Spectator Australia.
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Highways Act 1980:
137 Penalty for wilful obstruction
(1)If a person, without lawful authority or excuse, in any way wilfully obstructs the free passage along a highway he is guilty of an offence and liable to [F1imprisonment for a term not exceeding 51 weeks or] a fine [F2or both].”
I’m not a lawyer, so am I missing something here?
I have also wondered why Joe Public can’t just make citizen arrests? It seems that you can only use those powers for an indictable offence and unforunately, it appears that blocking the highway is a summary offence.
This article explains: https://www.westminstersecurity.co.uk/news/citizens-arrest-uk-law/
The state blob – at its core – agrees with what these JSO morons are saying, even if they don’t agree with the methods. Unless the state stands up and says that oil is good, that we need it and it’s morally wrong to deprive our population of fuel and thus warmth, power and freedom of movement, these evil psychopaths have free reign.
What should happen is that the whole lot of them are tear gassed and dragged off to jail. The police were happy enough to kick the crap out of anti-lockdown protestors with a legitimate issue, but not these human garbage climate religion cultists.
Admirable restraint there Dom which I fully endorse.
Spot on. The state groupthink is one of support for these morons.
I remember 2 or 3 years ago that there was a climate protest in Cardiff and I caught a report on the radio news. They interviewed the Chief Constable – and he said something along the lines of “Whilst many of us will agree with what the protesters are saying…..”
I regret not going online after getting home (at the time) and recording his words for my files – as I found his words really shocking.
I was trying to find confirmation of the above – but failed. However, I did find this comment to an article in Wales Online from 2021 – which I found amusing:
“It is a pity the experts haven’t publicly acknowledged the amount of CO2 and other more serious toxic gases that have been pumped into the atmosphere by the volcano on the Island of La Palma for the last 6 weeks. A natural process that has, around the world, been going on since the formation of Earth.
But there’s no doubt in the minds of the great and the good that this can be easily be offset by me changing out my boiler.”
I think that’s the point of the slow march. If they don’t actually stop they’re not obstructing ‘the free passage along the highway’.
I also am not a lawyer.
It’s a great example of the letter rather than the spirit of the law.
However, by their actions the human garbage are restricting the rights of citizens to go about their lawful business.
Nor am I a lawyer, but surely their activities have the effect that they force the traffic to stop? That’s whole point of their action. The fact that the individual protesters keep moving is irrelevant.
It’s a fine point, and one which would need probably need a lawyer to clarify. My own take on it is that they are obstructing free passage along the highway.
The OED definition of “obstruct” includes: “…prevent or retard progress of” (my emphasis), and they are certainly retarding the progress of the traffic behind them.
Helpful.
They certainly fit my definition of retards.
Out of interest, supposing a group of us joined in amongst them but then unfurled a COVID or vaccine sceptic banner? What a dilemma the police would have then!
I like the idea – but it would be even more fun to raise banners pointing out how crap the idea of net-zero is and backing energy and economic security through fossil fuel investment. Probably have to have lots of cameras about to work out who throws the first punch though.
On further thought the police would probably not arrest a JSO prat for assault/ABH/GBH but arrest me for behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace.
I thought JSO activists were non-violent extremists?
Sure.
Just the same as Antifa.
Never, EVER, act like fascists.
Oh!
Wait….
Now we’re talking.
I like your thinking .. I’m currently reading a book written by a psychoanalyst (Phil Mollon) called ‘Pathologies of the Self: Narcissism and Borderline states of mind”. In it he outlines social and political narcissism (and I’m thinking Just Stop Oil/XR). “An idea, a cause, a slogan, or motif is selected as the basis for identification and idealisation”. The group is then idealised – perhaps for its moral superiority. The “idea” is seen as the solution, perhaps an urgent necessary solution, to complex societal problems. Reality and logic are systematically distorted to fit this delusional simplication of complex issues.” It goes on …. “Once the narcissistic movement has coalesced around its overvalued idea, the group and its members no longer care about the reality of their impact on others – since reality itself has been partly discarded. Members of such a group may not appear delusional because their distorted perceptions and compromised cognition are shared by others. It is the group as a whole that is delusional.”
I could go on but you get the gist of this.
Sounds like a plan
Holding a protest on the Coronation would give their cause greater visibility. Aside from the event itself and all the branded plastic waste it has already generated, there will by an RAF flypast pointlessly burning jet fuel they can highlight as a polluting waste of resources. I look forward to their plucky exploits next weekend where they genuinely take on The Establishment rather than inconvenience those who cannot afford to be on the receiving end of their faux campaign.
Oh, I say. This sort of interruption might even be worth switching the telly box on for. On second thoughts – nah, the trusted news initiative would not allow any broadcasting of interruptions of Chuckles’ ‘do.’
Jet fuel?
Surely the RAF will use the whey from His Majesty’s cheese production?
Just like he uses in his Aston Martin?
Allegedly.
The banners they are holding are made from plastic – which is made from? Plus, going slowly makes cars use more fuel, which they will get from a petrol station. Brainless idiots.
If every driver in the hold up just kept their horns blaring it might drown out both the chants and the BBC’s fawning coverage.
Just Stop Oil…
Their orange banners on which they carry their slogans are plastic…made from oil.
Their fluorescent high viz jackets…made from oil.
Their safety hats are plastic…made from oil.
Their safety glasses are plastic…made from oil.
The glue they use to glue themselves to the road surface…comes from petrochemicals which comes from oil.
The road surfaces they glue themselves to, are made from asphalt…which comes from oil.
The mobile phones and laptops they use to run their social media campaigns, are full of plastic components…which come from oil.
Right now, a world without plastic and oil would be unthinkable. It would push billions of people into abject poverty and starvation. They are so moronically ignorant about the role of oil in the world’s economy and society, to the point where stopping it would mean our entire civilisation would collapse without it. I cannot stand these misinformed idiots. How about we just stop Just Stop Oil?!
“would mean our entire civilisation would collapse…”
Bingo.
That’s the plan.
You will note they don’t try this shit in China, Russia, Iran, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Indonesia, Venezuala etc etc.
And if they did, their fuzz and courts might be just a smidgeon less “understanding”.
And that would be a good thing.
The right to ‘protest’? Absolutely. But how about when the ‘protesters’ are directly supporting the policies of the Uniparty, directly against the citizens?
Bang on.
Hear, hear.
Protesting against lockdowns etc, we did just the same as these JSO protesters (ie march around central London), but the bus/cab/ordinary drivers were extraordinarily patient with, indeed often extremely supportive of, us. And our protests were never reported on by the MSM. (BTW, I am no young rebellious type. I often say that, as an until then law-abiding citizen, I resented being forced to become a rebel in my 70s!)
How bizarre that people don’t just clamour for their own impoverishment. They actually DEMAND IT.
Indeed.