A century ago, Adolf Hitler noted that ‘the receptivity of the masses is quite limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few select points and must harp upon these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want them to understand by your slogan.” Today, Statists lie and hope that our attention spans are short, as do their media allies. Recently, “The Atlantic” published an article advocating for a “pandemic amnesty,” stating that we need to forgive each other because we were all in the dark about Covid. This is pure, unadulterated sophistry.
We were not at all in the dark. The mass media, social media, big Pharma, big corporate, and big government all conspired to violate our freedoms and destroy the lives of Canadians. This occurred not because these evil forces were ignorant or uncertain about the true threat that COVID posed to our health and safety, but because we were emphatically told that such tyrannical policies as eliminating church services, closing businesses, and imposing vaccine mandates would save lives. There was no ambiguity or conflation about what slogans were being propagandized or for what reasons.
With inflation raging nationwide, grocery and energy bills skyrocketing, carbon taxes escalating, and an economy teetering on the brink of stagflation due to the Trudeau government’s disastrously incompetent COVID policies, we are still being told daily by witnesses at the Emergencies Act inquiry in Ottawa that COVID deniers are a threat to democracy. What about the damage to democracy and to our rights and liberties caused by the COVID lockdowns? The destruction of democracy and the erosion of social trust was far more dangerous during the pandemic lockdowns than a virus that only kills .04% of the population.
Moreover, if the future of democracy rests upon the next generation, then the lockdowns caused extraordinary harm to the developing minds and lives of Canadian children. This does not yet begin to address the propaganda being pushed in our public schools, however, plummeting mathematics skills and reading comprehension directly attributable to COVID lockdown hysteria will have generational impacts, the societal costs of which we must expect to be both profound and dire.
The Constitutional promise of Peace, Order, and Good Government depends upon a virtuous and educated citizenry. This was elucidated by the late British philosopher Roger Scruton in his brilliant book “How To Be A Conservative,” in which he describes the term Oikophilia (love of home):
We hardly have a virtuous citizenry in Canada today. This is not an indictment, but a simple statement of reality. COVID may have ruined any chance for us to produce a properly educated generation in the terms described by Dr. Scruton, which are a pre-requisite to preservation and conservation of a free, prosperous nation. This state of affairs is of course ideal for big government totalitarianism, but is poisonous to Canadian democracy. We were not so long ago a nation committed to the moral and spiritual self-improvement of its people under the protection of a Charter of Rights and Freedoms that shielded individuals from the abusive overreach of soulless institutions and bureaucratic barbarism.
Some of us were sounding the alarms on COVID tyranny when it first struck, and paid dearly for it (Google my name, for example). Lockdown policies were never about saving lives, but rather a test to see how many rights and liberties governments could vitiate with little resistance from Canadians or even from our courts. Fear is the super-highway which tyrants take to strip liberty from citizens. Scare us enough and we will be enslaved to whatever diktats our elitist rulers and their medical experts may conjure.
This is replaying itself as we witness the farcical inquiry going on in Ottawa right now. Government COVID policies destroyed entire families through its lockdown policies, which eliminated businesses, destroyed marriages, divided families, produced massive job lay-offs, harmed the intellectual development of children, and subjected Canadians to a massive drug experiment under the false pretense of an injectable panacea.
COVID tyrants are banking that Canadians will forget their debacle in handling the pandemic and the tyranny that so many needlessly suffered. Families were unable to visit loved ones, churches were closed, or razed to the ground never to be rebuilt. Thousands of small businesses, once staples and pillars of Canadian communities, suddenly vanished and are now gone forever, along with the livelihoods they provided to workers and the free choice they gave to consumers.
Those who do remember the totalitarianism of COVID are still being beaten over the head by the “tin-foil-hat” conspiracy theory derangement syndrome and “Christian nationalists are Nazis” rhetoric. This is to conceal the fact that our rulers declared war on democracy in the name of COVID hysteria. Unable to fully execute their tyrannical globalist plans as expeditiously as possible and sensing the tides of public opinion turning against them, they now insist that we simply disabuse our minds of the intimidation and force they imposed upon us through fear of an invisible virus. Conservatives, especially in Alberta and Saskatchewan, are trying to save democracy and pass on to a new generation of Canadians a nation worth loving, including our cherished Western cultural values of God, family, and country.
Democracy as the expression of the rights and liberties of Canadians and their self-determination is now very much at stake. The calculated war waged against freedom and prosperity via COVID policies has been far more pernicious and destructive than supporting the Trucker Convoy. The war against self-determination of Canadians is meant to break the back of our nation so that we are pawns to globalist bureaucrats and managers.
We must not fall for the lies that conservatives are a threat to democracy. The Trudeau Liberals are the real threat; they have shown themselves to be willing and able to erase our rights and liberties, to violate the Charter protections of life, liberty, equality, and mobility, and to subject Canadians to various forms of tyranny, all in the name of a globalist ideology that is by its very nature antipodal to democracy and freedom.
To all tyrants and their sycophants in the mass media who seek general amnesty for the perpetrators of COVID atrocities, I say that this is both unjust and premature. Before there can be an amnesty, there must first be assigned deterrence, specifically, to the principal villains responsible for COVID lockdowns and also generally to all those who might consider reinstitution of them. In our criminal courts, ignorance of the law is no defence. Nor is the lack of specific intention to do harm exculpatory when an assault has occurred. Likewise, the actions of Canadian governments were heinous, they were calculated, and they were intentional. The principal offenders must be identified via a full-blown public inquiry, and then prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Only then can the healing process begin for Canadians. Only then can most of the perpetrators of COVID harm who were just following orders be forgiven. Only then can a true amnesty be declared and the COVID era be fully archived into the annals of history, never to be resurrected.
Leighton Grey is a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. He is also Creator & Host of The GreyMatter Podcast.
