Freedom Is Never Given; It Is Won

There are many Kiwis who mistakenly believe that they can comply their way out of the tyranny we are now experiencing. They are the Karens reporting people to the emergency 111 phone line for daring to play touch rugby in a park, or the Karens who tut tut at you as they step into traffic to avoid you as you walk mask-less and free down the street, and they are the Karens who deluge you with endless Facebook posts ordering you to get vaccinated…for the country of course.

They call the unvaccinated selfish, because supposedly it is those people who are stopping them from having their holiday in Rarotonga or Hawaii, blithely ignoring their own selfishness which is driving them to bully people to comply. I’m not sure a vaccination is worth it for a holiday in Rarotonga.

None of these people seem even remotely concerned with the inexorable slide towards totalitarianism we seem to be on. They’ve accepted lockdowns with a whimper, they’ve accepted government border restrictions, they’ve accepted government subsidies, they’ve accepted continued lockdowns and now they are accepting mass medication of the population and are even suggesting that these be forced or “mandated”, to use their preferred euphemism. To cap it all off, they are even accepting discrimination against unvaccinated people, up to and including denying them health care. Can they not see the dangers?

This Government has allowed New Zealand to fall from an egalitarian country where Jack is as good as his master, to a deeply divided country afraid of its own shadow. They’ve promoted and encouraged a snitch culture, where neighbours and citizens inform on others. They’ve created divisions based on race, and they are now fostering bigger divisions based on health status.

We even have internal borders now within New Zealand, and an ‘us and them’ attitude between the rest of New Zealand and Auckland, complete with forced medical procedures and showing travel permits in order to cross the border. In what free democracy does this exist? The answer is of course that it doesn’t; it only exists in a totalitarian regime. Never before in the history of the world have healthy people been locked up to protect them from the sick, with a disease so dreadful that most of them need a test to tell them that they even have it.

But even John Key thinks it is acceptable to deprive people of their liberties in order to make people get vaccinated. Worse still, people are cheering this on. The same goes for David Seymour, who curiously seems to have precisely the same views as John Key.

But we must fight against anyone seeking to deprive us of our liberties, even if they say it is only a temporary removal of our rights and freedoms. Now, I’ll tell you why it is so very important to fight any degradation of those liberties and freedoms, even if John Key and David Seymour mouth the words.

Liberties and freedoms hard fought for, are almost never given back once they are taken away. When they are, it is usually a hollow sham of what you once enjoyed. The lesson from history is to never give up those freedoms in the first place. It took nearly 100 years for Russia to throw off the shackles of communism and even then they replaced it with another form of totalitarian rule. Moreover, it took bloodshed and revolution to do it.

It took nearly 50 years for formerly free states to cast off the oppression of communism in Eastern Europe, and again it took a bloody revolution to do it.

It took five years of war where millions of people lost their lives to overthrow the Nazi state that had enslaved millions of their own people in the grand delusion of the 1,000 year Reich where you surrendered your freedom for a benevolent corporate state. Again it required bloodshed and war to remove the stain of Nazism.

The Chinese are still under the yoke of communism, approaching 75 years of totalitarian rule. I’ll bet thousands of those on the long march following Mao never thought they’d be replacing one form of totalitarian rule with another.

History tells us that once taken, freedoms are never returned in the form which you previously enjoyed them. History also tells us that your freedoms are eroded slowly, one small bit at a time until you wake up one morning in chains, real or metaphorical.

We are in lockdowns, an arbitrary enforcement policy completely under the control of Jacinda Ardern, but only because we allow her to do this. We willingly gave up our freedoms on the now spurious rationale that Covid-19 was this super-deadly virus. But now she is unwilling to relinquish the power over us all. Ryan Bridge is right: they won’t give up their power until the polling tells them that they are running a very real risk of being removed from power entirely. When the polling and focus groups tell the Prime Minister that we no longer support her draconian enforcement of fear then it will end.

Never give up your freedoms, because once you do you’ll find they never return. Even if John Key says it is OK.

We must fight once again for our freedoms, because those who oppose our freedoms, like John Key, must be fought, debated and opposed with every living breath in our bodies, else we become slaves to government diktat.

John Webbe had some sage advice for those who think we can be given our freedoms back when he wrote an essay in Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette on April 1, 1736 that said; “Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature.”

Benjamin Franklin echoed that in words that even John Key and David Seymour should be able to understand; “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

I leave you with the words of A. Philip Randolph, an American labour unionist, civil rights activist, and socialist politician who once said that “freedom is never given; it is won”. Never have truer words been spoken.

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