James Alexander decries totalitarianism even when it is “nice.”
A few weeks ago I wrote a passage simply in order to get my thoughts in order on the way the world is turning. Here it is:
Our modern state ideology, our political correctness, appears to be three-pronged, like the devil’s fork or trident.
The first prong is climate change, its inevitability: carbon emission, global warming, rising sea levels and the need to do something about them.
The second prong is the pandemic, the necessity of dealing with a virus by the negative measures of lockdown, masks, distancing and the positive measures of vaccines and other, somewhat belated, treatments.
The third prong is wokery, or the requirement that we adopt the set of miscellaneous views about ‘Gay’, ‘Women’, ‘Race’ and ‘Trans’ which Douglas Murray has itemized in The Madness of Crowds.
Evidently, great minds think alike, and some great minds organize their thoughts more quickly than other great minds. For after writing the above I saw that Will Jones in an excellent article for the
Daily Sceptic entitled “
The Unholy Trinity of Social Control” had been the first to see that these three forces have to be assembled into a triad. He called them Covid, Climate Change and CRT (or Critical Race Theory). I admire the alliteration, though I think we might have to sacrifice some it so as not to emphasize the issue of race too much. Here I will call them CLIMATE, COVID and WOKERY. However, the three, whatever one calls them, must be so obvious to all of us that we should applaud Jones for having not only named them but put them together.
Let me try to take the thought a bit further.
We need to recognize that these are three elements of what we should probably call NICE TOTALITARIANISM. The words ‘social control’ do not quite capture the
total significance of what is being put forward by our governments. Every government ever in the history of the world has believed in
some measure of social control. To some extent, we define government in terms of its achievement of social control – though this, of course, may be minimally or maximally interpreted. The reason I prefer the phrase ‘nice totalitarianism’ is that it captures the fact that the control now, if not maximal, is a lot closer to maximal than anyone would have expected a few years ago. But there is another reason I prefer it: and this is because it captures the distinctively Western, or specifically, in our case, British, tonality of this totalitarianism: the fact that it is
nice.
We are being
nice, through ‘saving the planet’ (by sitting down on a busy road or sightseeing wind turbines), ‘making oppressed people feel included and secure’ (by tossing a statue into the sea or signing a petition) and ‘preventing Covid deaths’ (by wearing a mask or getting vaccinated).
Who would not want to do those things?
…..
COVID is the name of the threat: it threatens us as
individuals, threatening us with suffering and an early death, though our response to it has been interestingly not only collective but coercive.
Let us call the response to this threat FAUCISM. (We need a name for the response, to cover the myriad of non-pharmaceutical and pharmaceutical interventions.
Anthony Fauci’s name may stand for the whole enterprise, as he is more internationally famous than our own Chris Whitty or Patrick Vallance, as well as more determined and more obviously compromised:
and he has become the object of a cult in the United States at least.)
