As a journalist, I receive a variety of emails, Facebook messages and text messages almost every day alerting me to this problem, that conspiracy, or whatever the government is doing. Many ask me to report on, or at least take notice of, what they see as important. While I would like to investigate everything, the truth is that I would need a team of researchers to get through these requests.
With that said, I was really struck by a piece written by Lithuanian citizen-journalist Gluboco Lietuva and decided to look more deeply into what initially seemed over the top claims about the Lithuanian government seriously infringing the human rights of individuals choosing not to take a COVID-19 vaccine.
To say I was gobsmacked is an understatement. What is happening there is a stark warning of how much control a government is prepared to exert over the lives of an individual declining to take a COVID-19 vaccine.
It should be noted that this article is not concerned with of the jab itself, but with how an EU government has withdrawn civil rights and forced businesses to choose between profit and a citizen’s right to privacy and bodily integrity, enshrined under Article 8 of the European Charter on Fundamental Rights.
Gluboco reported that the Lithuanian Pass system prevents him and his family from entering shopping centres to purchase food, banks, clothes shops, or to conduct business in government buildings; or enter book stores, second-hand shops, hairdressers, barber shops, phone repair shops, or even art supply shops. Nor can an unvaccinated person visit a relative or loved one in a hospital or nursing home.
In promulgating this law it seems the Lithuanian government is pitting one group of people against another after a recent surge in cases. The worry is that such a draconian measure won’t be confined to Lithuania either, as we can see from what is happening in Italy and France.
Excellent article on vaccine passes in Italy which is relevant to everywhere else: https://t.co/tug0TMUMOF
According to Gluboco in Lithuania the Covid Pass is called the ’Opportunity Pass’, as it offers the ‘opportunity’ to participate in society. The ’Opportunity Pass’ or Freedom IDis available to Lithuanians who are able to present a vaccination certificate, a recent negative PCR test, or proof of COVID-19 immunity (after having recovered). However, the government is considering excluding people with a negative test.
Without this Pass rights are seriously restricted. Gluboco went on to say: “My wife and I don’t have the Covid Pass. We refuse to accept authoritarianism and control of the new regime. So, we’ve lost our jobs and been banished from most of society. It’s been six weeks so far.”
He revealed, furthermore, that there is no end date planned for the new regime. With no Pass, he may only enter small shops with street entrances that mainly sell essential goods: food, pharmaceuticals, optics, or farm/pet supplies. Every other store must, by law, ban people without the Pass.
In Lithuanian, the Pass is referred to as the Galimybių pasas, abbreviated as “GP”. By law, GP signs must be displayed at the entrance to stores and public buildings to signal compliance with government policy. You must also provide photo ID to prove that the “Opportunity Pass” is your own.
As an example of the level of control that the state exerts, a construction worker went into a small supermarket to buy breakfast before his morning shift. After using his boss’s QR code he was reported to the police by a staff member and fined €5,000.
Gluboco went on to say that Lithuania’s Covid Pass started in May as a temporary measure, the goal being to facilitate economic activity. In August, the temporary measure, justified in order to restore the economy, became a permanent law, all but banishing certain people from participation in society.
Lithuania’s Covid Pass law does not ban specific activities. Instead, it prohibits people without an Opportunity Pass from all services and economic activities involving human contact, apart from limited rights, such as purchasing food in small shops.
This represents an inversion of traditional rights. In a free society, within reason, you can expect to do whatever you want, unless a law specifically forbids it. Under Lithuania’s new Covid Pass regime, however, the presumption is reversed to the extent that you can’t perform normal activities unless the state allows it.
In an EU member state, almost every business is forced to comply with the Opportunity Pass and enforcement seems to be strict. Gluboco indicates that many of those who initially opposed the Pass now acquiesce. People grow accustomed to coercion it seems.
Further to this, he goes on to say: “In just 6 weeks, the Covid Pass has transformed my country into a regime of totalitarianism, control and segregation. This is the new society created in Lithuania, the nation furthest along the path towards authoritarianism confronting all countries which have imposed a Covid Pass regime.”
What is happening in Lithuania is a warning to those who choose not to take the jab no matter what country you live in. It begs question: could we see this level of coercion, human rights infringement and control introduced into the Ireland and the rest of Europe eventually? The aim appears to be to punish people economically and socially for non-compliance.
There are also questions in regard to the use of data collected through the Covid-19 digital passes, held jointly by private companies and the relevant EU state which are supposed to abide by GDPR legislation. A citizen’s private data is kept on file by the state and could form the basis of a national identity card.
I leave you with the chilling words of ex-Lithuanian parliamentarian and now TV host Arúnas Valinskas who said: “There are people who deliberately take sides with the enemy… In times of war, such people were shot. But there is no need to shoot the anti-vaxxers, I hope, they will die out on their own.”
Featured Image: Lithuanian Army soldiers marching with their dress uniforms in Vilnius (2012).
I didn’t particularly want to write this article. I didn’t want to get involved in the whole online social media circus of opinion and rebuttal, triggering and offense. But I feel like I have something to say, and what I have to say is important. So I’ll speak my truth.
About a month ago, I completely removed my attention from the hysterical world of 24-hour news cycles, social media, the conspiracy theories, the craziness, the arguments and rebuttals, the fear, projection and lashing out. So I stopped watching the news and left Facebook, and very liberating it was too.
The collective process the world was going through as a result of Covid-19 (Coronavirus) was taking its toll on me. I had never experienced such fear and anger online before. People were literally lashing out, blurting their unprocessed emotions, fear and anger, all over social media, mirroring perhaps, conversations that were occurring in family homes all around the world.
Instead, I put my energy into the world around me: learning new skills, fishing, growing food, renovating a cottage. Putting my energy and vision into creating a new reality. But something is making me speak out at this time.
I would like to preface what I am saying by acknowledging that Covid-19 is a real threat that has caused great loss and suffering to many families all around the world.
The collective hysteria resulting from it, however, is every bit as damaging as the virus itself.
On the nature of fear
My background is as an outdoor guide. I spent two decades guiding in remote and sometimes dangerous rivers and mountains on four continents. During that time I became very familiar with the nature of fear. A large part of the psychological aspect of guiding in adventurous environments involves managing people’s fears.
One lesson I learnt beyond any doubt is that fear is contagious. Just like a virus. If one person in a group becomes fearful, it spreads like wildfire throughout the entire group, a legacy of our evolutionary heritage, and the fight or flight mechanism.
What we have witnessed, in the past few months, is the entire human species in fight, flight or freeze mode. It is collective anxiety on a global scale, amplified by social media and hysterical media coverage.
Our political leaders, for the most part doing their best and responding to an unprecedented situation, were pressured by a fearful media and hysterical public to do something, anything, and naturally they reacted from a place of fear.
As anyone with a background in adventure sports will know, good decisions are never, ever made from a place of great fear or hysteria.
The Indian philosopher Krishnamurti wrote: ‘Fear of any kind breeds illusion … where there is fear there is obviously no freedom … It makes one tell lies, it corrupts one in various ways, it makes the mind empty, shallow.’
I am not suggesting that our government in Ireland is consciously part of some nefarious plot to undermine democracy. Not intentionally anyway. But democracy has nevertheless been undermined as a result of the hysterical response to Covid-19.
In the UK, former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption said: ‘This is what a police state is like, it is a state in which a government can issue orders or express preferences with no legal authority and the police will enforce ministers’ wishes’. He has called the lockdown ‘the greatest interference with personal liberty in our history’. When great legal minds are telling us that the rule of law is being undermined, we should listen.
Our civil liberties and civil rights are not something that we be taken for granted. We forget now that Irish independence and the fight for freedom came at a high cost. ‘The price of liberty is eternal vigilance’, is a quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson.
It does not matter whether you consider yourself to be politically on the left, centre, or the right, the erosion of civil liberties that has occurred in most Western democracies over the last few months is something that should concern you. if the there is one thing the history of the last century has taught us, it is that tyranny can take many forms.
Over two thousand years ago, Plato warned of the dangers of tyranny arising from a fearful and chaotic democracy. The people, when afraid, beg for a strong leader to come to save them. Tyranny can arise, not from a despot seizing power, but through a fearful public demanding protection from an external threat. This threat is real, but is overblown: ‘This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.’
Many other great political thinkers have expounded on the idea of the tyranny of the masses. The great Irish political theorist Edmund Burke, wrote in a 1790 letter that ‘The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny’.
John Stuart Mill in his famous essay ‘On Liberty’ (1859) spoke of the need to protect against, ‘the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling … as the majority opinion may not be the correct opinion.’
We confront a dystopian nightmare of an Orwellian society of constant surveillance, with the government and/or corporations controlling what we can think, what we say, and how we act.
Militaristic language has become all too commonplace, thereby justifying extreme wartime measures. We talk of ‘front line’ workers. Much as these amazing doctors and nurses are doing a wonderful job and should be commended, there is no ‘front line’.
This is not a war. You cannot fight a war against a part of Nature. That is like fighting a war against yourself, a mass collective schizophrenia. This is part of the problem with our current rational-materialistic society: in our arrogance we believe ourselves to be somehow separate from Nature. This crisis is showing us clearly that we are not.
The following liberties have been undermined since the start of the Covid-19 hysteria:
The right to personal liberty and to protest.
Article 40.4 of the Irish constitution guarantees a right to liberty, while Article 40.6.1 says you have a right to assemble and to associate freely.
The right to assemble and to protest is an essential part of any functioning democracy. Remember the mass civil unrest that was occurring in Hong Kong and France before Christmas? This has disappeared without a trace. Are we no longer allowed to march on the streets should the need to protest arise? What is now stopping future governments using the ‘health and safety’ of the public as an excuse to crack down on civil disobedience?
One of the most important of our human rights, established as early as 1789 in Article XI of the French ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’ – ‘The free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man: any citizen thus may speak, write, print freely’. Article 40.6.1 of the Irish Constitution guarantees a right to express freely your convictions and opinions .
However, this right has come under attack in recent months, with censorship becoming very prevalent. Any questioning of the mainstream narrative quickly gets labelled ‘false news’ or a ‘conspiracy’ theory, thereby stifling debate and discussion. Who has the power to decide what is false news? Do you, or do I? Or does some unelected Youtube or Google content executive?
The mainstream media and social media companies have unprecedented power to manipulate the narrative. Social media and search engine algorithms can effectively control what we read and see, and therefore control the reality we live in. Who decides what we should think, and who holds this absolute and terrifying power?
I may not agree with what you are saying, but I absolutely respect your right to say it. Otherwise, one day, we may find that right has been taken from us.
The seemingly benign concept of using a ‘contact tracing’ app could easily be misused by governments to normalise mass surveillance of citizens at all times, in the interests of public safety. Keeping track at all times of where you go and who you are with, a smartphone becomes like a voluntary ankle tag. With smartphones becoming almost essential to function in society, this mass surveillance is constant.
One of the very worst tendencies this crisis has brought out in people is of of neighbours spying on one another, settling old grievances by informing. Have people forgotten already how secret police, such as the Stasi in East Germany, controlled populations by encouraging this behaviour?
The French philosopher Michel Foucault believed that: ‘the power of a goverment is co-extensive with its ability to surveil’, and wrote about the symbolic prison of the Panopticon, in which prisoners never knew when they were being observed, so were obliged to be on their best behaviour at all times. We are living in a digital panopticon, and giving governments unprecedented powers of surveillence.
Inside one of the prison buildings at Presidio Modelo, Isla de la Juventud, Cuba.
Moreover, with cash becoming redundant through this crisis, governments and corporations have acquired an even greater capacity to surveil, and therefore control, our lives. In the U.K., Derbyshire police used drones to film hillwalkers in a remote mountain area, while in California police fined surfers a $1000 for catching waves.
Is this the kind of society you want to live in?
Despite posts yesterday highlighting issues of people still visiting the #PeakDistrict despite government guidance, the message is still not getting through. @DerPolDroneUnit have been out at beauty spots across the county, and this footage was captured at #CurbarEdge last night. pic.twitter.com/soxWvMl0ls
The right to bodily autonomy and personal sovereignty.
Are we going to give away our right to bodily autonomy to pharmaceutical companies, and the possibility of a mandatory vaccination programme?
I am neither pro- nor anti- vaccination, but I believe that people should enjoy an absolute right to decide what is put into their bodies, freedom over their own body. A right to bodily integrity has been recognised by the courts as an unenumerated right, protected by the general guarantee of ‘personal rights’ contained under Article 40 of the Irish constitution.
There is some disagreement in the scientific community around the safety of vaccines, with billions of dollars having been paid out in compensation by the Vaccine Injury Courts over the past thirty years, but any dissent of the mainstream Big Pharma narrative is brutally suppressed and attacked. In the Middle Ages, heretics were burnt at the stake for daring to question the mainstream version of reality. While they are not burnt at the stake today, anyone who questions the mainstream narrative is attacked, vilified, and discredited
If anyone thinks these concerns over civil liberties far-fetched, I suggest you look at the situation in China at the moment, where the government has used the crisis to strengthen its grip on power, and to crack down on dissent.
Dmytro Sidashev / Alamy Stock Photo
What sort of world do we want to live in post-Covid-19?
I would easily sacrifice an element of safety for my freedom. I want to live in a world where personal liberty and civil duties are both honoured and respected; where personal sovereignty is not given away to unelected global corporations; where political power remains vested in individuals and communities, and a central State does not have unchecked power to interfere in citizens’ lives. Where policing is by consent, and not by coercion and control. I want young children to be able to run freely in the outdoors without fear, or masks.
Image: Daniele Idini (c)
I do not want to die anytime soon, but if I do, so be it. I have long accepted that one day I will die. I would much rather die a free man from Covid-19 than live in a dystopian surveillance society. What we are seeing is a global collective psychological process, the unconscious and unprocessed fear of death. By facing and accepting our own mortality, this fear dissipates.
I do not want to live in a sanitised, risk-free, nanny-state surveillance world, where the government knows where I am at all times and controls what I think, what I can say, what I put in my body. I do not consent to this version of reality. I will not be part of it.
The real front line is about personal power and self-sovereignty. Reclaiming our power from the unelected Silicon Valley AI/tech, media and pharmaceutical executives, who have acquired greater power over every aspect of our lives, with hardly any oversight.
We need to come terms with the immense power that is accumulating in Google and Facebook to influence, manipulate and control what people think. Even that most Machiavellian of realpolitik bureaucrats Henry Kissinger recently wrote: ‘The Age of Reason originated the thoughts and actions that shaped the contemporary world order. But that order is now in upheaval amid a new, even more sweeping technological revolution whose consequences we have failed to fully reckon with, and whose culmination may be a world relying on machines powered by data and algorithms and ungoverned by ethical or philosophical norms’. He who controls the algorithms controls the world.
This is not a world I want to create. I do not consent. For sure this crisis has brought out the very best in humanity, with neighbours helping one another, communities coming together, increasing food security and developing a great sense of solidarity. But we cannot, Pollyanna-like, ignore the potential for the slide into a dystopian surveillance society.
What sort of society do we want our children and grandchildren to inhabit? This is the real front line. We have had a great opportunity for reflection and collective dreaming, for visioning and birthing a new society and new reality. The birthing process of the new world will be messy and painful, as births always are, but the baby will be born.
We are not powerless. We have the power to rewrite the story and create a beautiful world for future generations. Let us make our collective vision a beautiful one.
