Dictators invariably have a paranoid streak a mile wide. Which should be no surprise: they know they’re perched on a wobbly pedestal that’s always about to tip them in front of a firing squad. All it took was a crowd to start booing Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and he was executed by his own guards within days. The ability of a fickle mob to take down an elite is immortalised in the fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes.
The most threadbare emperors of our time are the Covidian overlords. This gaggle of megalomaniac politicians, witless mainstream media and power-hungry bureaucrats have whipped up hysteria over a relatively minor pandemic to seize extraordinary, unwarranted power. Should that hysteria subside, the Covidians’ power will vanish overnight.
So, when an obstreperous sportsman challenges the hysteria, the Covidian machine goes into overdrive.
The Australian government all but admitted that the “threat” from Novak Djokovic was not to anyone’s health, but to the hysterical narrative that is keeping the Covidians in power. Naturally, the full force of a state witch-hunt was thrown at the tennis player. Even now that Djokovic has left the country, the propaganda machine is in full spin, trying desperately to keep the narrative going.
But nothing shows how terrified the Covidians are of losing their unmerited power than the ridiculous hyperbole they’re resorting to now: Novak is a threat to the globe! No, seriously.
With the dispute finally over and Novak Djokovic safely boarded on to a flight out of Australia, the issue now is about his long-term impact on world health.
That does seem an extraordinary sentence to write about a tennis player but it was kind of the case when he arrived in Australia and it is certainly the case now that he has left. Again, that is an extraordinary weight of responsibility on a man who just wanted to win a tennis tournament, but with fame and an influence such as his there comes great social responsibility. That is where Djokovic failed.
What an absolute load of hysterical tosh. Novak’s only responsibility is to win tennis games: it’s what he does. The whole “role model” nonsense is just another excrescence of the Cult of Celebrity, peddled by media dimwits who can’t think for themselves, so can’t imagine that anyone else can, either.
Quite quickly after his arrival in Melbourne 12 days ago, he became less a tennis story and more a Covid story.
Which is entirely the doing of the Covidians. If the federal government had just honoured the exemption that the Victorian government had granted, and the media had shut their idiot yaps, no one would have noticed or cared about anything other than watching the world’s No. 1 play great tennis.
But here’s what really terrifies them:
By strutting so prominently on the world stage these past two weeks, has Djokovic empowered the anti-vaccination movement more than he has weakened it? He has been portrayed as a hero and a martyr, and a poster boy for freedom of choice.
Read that again: “a poster boy for freedom of choice”. Freedom of choice is a bad thing to promote, now.
But if he is, again, that is solely the Covidians’ fault. They made him the whipping boy, as they tacitly admit:
Have they seen the strength of opposition that Djokovic provoked and thought again? Has it demonstrated how hard it is to operate in the modern world without being double-vaccinated? Have they been persuaded that even if you are not convinced by the science, social responsibility should be part of your decision too?
The Times
In other words: don’t get any uppity ideas, peasants. Look what we did to the world’s greatest tennis player: do you think you have a chance? Now, shut up and submit.
Because it was never about health: it was only ever about power and its narrative. As The Australian’s Chris Kenny writes, To deport someone for their views about public health issues is an outrageously undemocratic and illiberal action, and an ominous development.
Just to drive the message home, the media are only taking time out from bashing Djokovic to praise their poster-boy bootlicker, Rafael Nadal. No doubt, they’ll go into swooning overdrive, should he win the Open.
But even if he does, it will be a hollow victory: because Nadal and everyone else will always suspect, in the backs of their minds, that he only did so because the better player was nobbled by a political witch-hunt. The Open wasn’t decided on the court, it was decided in the halls of power and the editorial rooms.