John Carpay, Western Standard

On April 29, 2021, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney said that his government may begin to impose curfews on Albertans.

I found it hard not to recall the stories of my grandparents who endured government-imposed curfews in the Netherlands during the Second World War. Those curfews were imposed by an infinitely more odious regime and under wildly different circumstances, but their effect and authoritarian nature are too similar to ignore outright.

Albertans are now suffering through the fourteenth month of the “two weeks to flatten the curve” temporary lockdown.

Premier Kenney continues to violate our Charter freedoms to move, travel, associate, assemble, and worship. If you believe that our current police state is going to be lifted, please tell me when the ‘curve’ will be ‘flattened’ or ‘bent’ enough. Who gets to determine what is “enough”? On what basis will anyone know whether the curve is sufficiently ‘bent’ or ‘flattened’? Kenney has already thrown all of his previously established benchmarks to the wind whenever they failed to suit him.

Jeffrey Tucker argues that “every political ideology has three elements: a vision of hell with an enemy that needs to be crushed, a vision of a more perfect world, and a plan for transitioning from one to the other. The means of transition usually involve the takeover and deployment of society’s most powerful tool: the state. For this reason, ideologies trend totalitarian. They depend fundamentally on overriding people’s preferences and choices and replacing them with scripted and planned belief systems and behaviors. An obvious case is communism. Capitalism is the enemy, while worker control and the end of private property is the heaven, and the means to achieve the goal is violent expropriation. Socialism is a softer version of the same: in the Fabian tradition, you get there through piecemeal economic planning.”

Premier Kenney’s covidism defines hell as death by Covid (but death by suicide, drug overdoses, cancelled surgeries, delayed cancer diagnoses and other lockdown harms must be stoically accepted as a necessary and inevitable part of life). Hell is a society in which pathogens run freely (even though mankind has successfully survived all kinds of viruses for thousands of years,). The enemy of the people are individuals who refuse to live their lives with the primary purpose of avoiding contamination. Covid is the sole or greatest evil; therefore, failing to make Covid eradication one’s top priority is a sin or moral failure. Resistance to lockdown restrictions is a heresy and deviancy.

Covidism’s heaven, sought after by Jason Kenney and Rachel Notley alike, is a place where nobody dies of Covid, regardless of the adverse by-products of their crusade. Sure, Albertans’ average life expectancy in this heaven will have declined, and our overall mental, physical, emotional, spiritual and financial health will be in terrible shape, but that’s acceptable, so long as nobody dies of this virus. Covidism’s heaven is an Alberta managed by government-appointed medical “experts” who know what is best for all of us, despite their ignorance of economics, finance, philosophy, constitutional law, human rights, psychology, history, anthropology, and other important fields.

Covidism’s most fanatical adherents are people with various degrees of germaphobia (mysophobia), once regarded as a mental disorder, but now elevated into laws that force all citizens to behave like germaphobes when outside of their own homes (or even in their own homes if they dare have guests over). Anyone could be a super-spreader, and you know immediately who the bad people are: those who don’t wear a mask, or have family and friends over for dinner.

Like other collectivist ideologies, covidism has little regard for the rights, freedoms, and basic human needs of each individual person. The basic human right (and need) to associate freely, in person, with friends and extended family, must give way to the ideological cause of stopping the virus at all costs. Nothing can stand in the way of the state’s myopic objective. The mental and physical health benefits of playing team sports, watching a live performance, and singing in a choir or church must be discarded. The only legitimate goal in life in 2020 and 2021 is submit oneself to the state’s war against infection.

Like other collectivist ideologies, covidism ruthlessly suppresses the freedom of citizens to assemble peacefully and protest against the violation of their rights and freedoms by the state. Peaceful rallies of more than 10 people are an embarrassment to Premier Kenney and to other public sector elites who collect their full salaries from taxpayers while claiming, falsely, that “we’re all in this together.”

Like other collectivist ideologies, covidism has no regard for religious freedom. Despite the inability of governments to provide scientific support for their belief in asymptomatic spread, people cannot sing in houses of worship, or gather freely in numbers of their own choosing. A non-compliant pastor will be jailed, and his church physically barricaded, all in the name of the greater good.

Like other collectivist ideologies, covidism desperately wants to be seen as “scientific,” in order to bully and intimidate freedom-loving opponents of the regime’s ideology. Karl Marx used the term “scientific socialism” to describe his communist ideology.

Like other collectivist ideologies, covidism isn’t based on science. The government’s own data tells us that of the 309,000 Canadians who died in 2020, only 5% died with Covid. Of 38 million Canadians, very few of us are going to get sick. Almost all who get sick will get over it, with a survival rate of 99.77%. If you are under 70, driving a car poses a higher risk of death.

The coronavirus has very minimal impact on life expectancy. The average life expectancy in Alberta is 82.5. The average age of those in Alberta who have died with Covid is 82. With few exceptions, Covid is not spread by healthy people or by casual contact. The “cases” reported on by sensationalist, government-funded media do not refer to sick people, but to those with a positive result from a meaningless PCR test that was never designed to diagnose this virus. One can quarantine the sick and protect the vulnerable, but trying to vanquish a virus by crippling the economy and breaking up civil society is futile. In all of human history, no country, society or civilization that has tried this approach. There are simply no success stories.

In Alberta, ICU admissions in 2020 were at the lowest levels since 2015. Covid patients currently occupy only 632 of Alberta’s 8,483 hospital beds. Lack of hospital and ICU capacity has been a problem for many years, and is caused not by Covid but by an inefficient, unresponsive and unaccountable government monopoly over health care.

Premier Kenney has had more than 13 months to increase hospital and ICU capacity. Doing so would have cost a small fraction of the massive economic losses that lockdowns continue to inflict on Alberta, not to mention the tens of billions in new debt that our children and grandchildren will be forced to pay back.

It took 74 years (1917-91) for the Soviet empire to collapse. Hopefully, covidism’s violation of our Charter rights and freedoms will face the ash heap of history much quicker.