Resist The Authoritarian Response To The Coronavirus

[parochial boy]

I'm guessing this a result of a strong lack of faith in government, since I've seen few Europeans worry about temporary measures leading to the permanent suspension of democracy, same with gun control policies. Anyway, I'm hanging out at the international Covid thread, things are much less alarmist and more factual over there at least.

Is it a specifically European thing to smugly pat yourself on the back for not being like those Ugly Americans ...?

Well, obviously, yes.

You’d think that Europeans would be more worried about antidemocratic trends and opportunities for state repression, considering much of the past (spectacularly so in certain decades of the last century) and trends in certain countries in the present.

But lots of European countries also have, at least as part of their national mythologies, experiences of real backs-to-the-wall emergencies. In a number of cases instances where authoritarian measures were implemented to address these, and then removed afterwards without doing any medium or long term damage to the quality of democracy or civil liberties.

[parochial boy]

Perhaps the most disturbing development has been the slobbering over China's response to the pandemic, as if a lying, authoritarian government with no respect for human rights were in any way preferable to our own.

The stuff that I'm hearing on NPR, CNN and other media outlets is unbelievable. In a few years, we're going to look back on it with disbelief. The Chinese Communist Party is in the midst of a global propaganda campaign and they are acting as its mouthpiece.

To be clear: China's response to the pandemic is in no way an exemplar. They have not even been transparent enough to distinguish truth from fiction. Anyone telling you otherwise is at best an unwitting stooge.

By all means, order takeout from your local Chinese place and do what you can to silence any knee-jerk racism. But it shouldn't be hard to see what the larger threat is right now.

Those media outlets, and the BBC and the European press, have 'no choice' but to follow the Chinese party line ("no new cases in Mainland China"). They would be expelled from China and Hong Kong just like NYT, Washington Post and WSJ have been if they didn't.

Both the major German and French language papers here had fairly prominent articles criticising the response in China today. It's not as if Europe itself doesn't also have a large and diverse media environment. I would be careful abuot casting generalisation about what the media in languages you don't understand might or might not be saying.