OPINION
I see the Australian Federal Police Association, a police union, is calling for the setting up of an Australian National Guard patterned on the National Guard of the United States, which was made up of the colonial militias consolidated together as the “National Guard” under the National Defense Act of 1916. In other words, they are armed reservists maintained as back up to the full time army of the United States.
The purpose of the Australian National Guard, as suggested by their police union, would be to enforce health restrictions in order to ease the workload on police during the next pandemic, as:
Police forces nationwide were stretched to capacity during the pandemic, with officers forced to juggle normal frontline duties with emergency tasks including patrolling border checkpoints, enforcing social distancing rules and managing quarantine. […]
“National guard personnel could be given special powers during a declared incident, such as biosecurity checking, the authority to request personal details, or the power to stop and detain for suspected breaches of pandemic or natural disaster restrictions,” the [union’s submission to Australia’s Covid-19 Inquiry] said.
After our hard earned lessons of the lockdowns here in New Zealand, we ‘unvaccinated’ persons know exactly what kind of individual would be attracted to becoming a member of Australia’s National Guard, don’t we? I dare say such an organisation wouldn’t be very long in earning a reputation similar to that of the Nazis’ Gestapo or the Cheka, the first of several secret police organisations of the old Soviet Union that was established in December 1917 to conduct the ‘Red Terror’.
Perhaps a timely reminder from Aleksandr I Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 might be in order:
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.