Law, Politics, and Virtue Signalling
A Parable from the Last Year B.C. ('Before Covid'), i.e., 2019, which exposes the shallow hypocrisy of legacy politicians
Editorial preface: originally posted on 25 Oct. 2021, I’m reposting it today as I’m extra-short on time, as well as because it fits the last posting about the rule of law.
As we continue to document the madness of the Coronavirus Crisis, significant changes have been announced in Europe’s post-1945 political ‘shire’ (no offence, J.R.R. Tolkien, I really liked your books). As befits unpopular efforts of housecleaning, around 10 p.m. local time last Friday, new Chancellor A. Schallenberg from the conservative ‘New People’s Party™’ and Health Secretary W. Mückstein (Greens) announced a stringent set of new anti-Covid measures to mimic the government’s readiness for autumn and winter 2021/22.
As per the Daily Mail, these measures were to be quite stringent, for they envision a ‘Covid lockdown for the unvaccinated ONLY that would confine people without jabs to their homes except for “authorised” reasons [sic]’.
‘The pandemic is not yet in the rearview mirror,’ Schallenberg said. ‘We are about to stumble into a pandemic of the unvaccinated.’
Schallenberg announced that if the number of Covid patients in intensive-care units reaches 500, or 25 percent of the country's total ICU capacity, entrance into businesses such as restaurants and hotels will be limited to those who are vaccinated or recovered from the virus.
If the number reaches 600, or one-third of total ICU capacity, the government plans to impose restrictions on unvaccinated people. In this case, they would only be allowed to leave their homes for specific reasons.
In a glowing piece, former news organisation and current government mouthpiece Austrian daily Der Standard, added a brief ‘op-ed’ of the health minister that is telling in a number of ways. Apart from serving the health minister’s narcissistic streak (see the photo in the linked content), it contained two valuable nuggets of (mis-) information. As the staff writer held, the new strict measures were due (my emphasis):
Because vaccine hesitancy has become the driving force behind the Corona crisis - this is reflected in the numbers: In Vienna alone, 86 percent of the people who need intensive medical treatment for a Covid 19 infection are currently not fully immunised.
Leaving the data aside (discussion here), the op-ed writer’s primary concern is that (my emphasis):
the mere announcement of a possible unvaccinated-only lockdown sets a next step of division in society… On both sides, anger at each other is cemented in…The fact that the state’s opinion is imposed on you, that you are restricted and ultimately imprisoned—this is what drives the ‘doubters and waverers’, as Schallenberg calls them, not into the vaccination centres but into the arms of the Corona-denying parties and groups.
Well, well, well. Who would have guess that plot twist? Let’s briefly take this apart, for what happened is the following:
On 22 Oct. 2021, around 10 p.m., the government announced a stringent set of measures. There is no legal basis for this, as Mückstein readily admitted (watch the event): the government will work on the executive order (Verordnung) sometime next week.
This is nothing but a press conference, or media stunt. In saner days, this would have been called ‘agit-prop’ or, to use today’s terminology borrowed from U.S. discourse, ‘gaslighting’. It’s government by press briefing, and if that doesn’t remind you of J. Biden’s comparable ‘stunt’ that announced a ‘vaccine mandate’ in early September that has not been followed up by anything resembling promulgation of rules or regulations as of this writing, reported even the Wall Street Journal in weeks later.
In other words: it’s politics dictating the law, or, more precisely, it’s dictatorship by secondary legislation.
It does remind me of something someone said a long, long time ago. You see, back in the good ol’ days of early 2019, Herbert Kickl, then Secretary of the Interior of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (careful, it’s a quite Orwellian translation), speaking about his party’s stringent anti-asylum rights stance, said the following about the relationship between politics and the law:
The law has to follow the politics and not the politics the law.
Of course, Kickl was chastised by all opposition parties, virtually all media in the country, and this entire affair provided the juste milieu with yet another reason to hate the person instead of engaging in the arguments provided about charities and NGOs profiteering from the ‘asylum crisis’ (it’s the same with Austrian education policy since the 1970s, but that shall wait for another comment). There are plenty of examples (see here or here), but that’s not the point.
In Friday’s announcements, we can clearly see the same dynamic: politicians provide the direction, the law must follow. Constitutional Law Professor Karl Weber (U Innsbruck) back in early 2019 said the following, as reported by Der Standard (and cited by Swiss daily Der Tagesanzeiger)
What the Minister of the Interior says is completely incompatible with a constitutional state [Rechtsstaat]…If a student were to write in an exam that the law has to follow politics, he would fail.
Now, for a fun thought experiment, substitute ‘Health’ for ‘Interior’ and think again. Needless to say that no law professor or journalist called out Health Secretary Mückstein these days.
Odd, how the times, they are a’changin’.
OT, remove if too outré.
Not covid-related but certainly about law and especially about signalling, virtue or otherwise:
Stockholm got a change of clocal governement this election, from a neo-liberal alliance to Socalist Democrat-Green party alliance.
One of the first actions taken was to remove the word "anti-semitism" from all documents pertaining to how school's work to combat violent extremism and racial prejudice. While media speculates as to why, the real reason is glaringly obvious for anyone who has got a little insight into the schools of Sweden, especially in the cities:
Moslem students regularly cheer and heil when the topic is the Holocaust or anything else to do with jews and/or Israel.
This means schools are forced to focus on removing such attitudes from them, which isn't possible since the hatred is endemic to both islam as such and the various tribes of arab descent having made colonies in Sweden. And this in turn means all migration-critics get "water on their mill", being proven true about the nature of mid-easterners in general and moslems in particular.
Also, any society, club, NGO or whatever receiving tax funds is obligatd to actively combat antisemitism and racism, and to promote multicultiralism and LGBTQ+ (you can guess how much the mosques care about that...) - meaning that by removing all references to anti-semitism from official documents, the city can now pay money to the various "cultural centres" and mosques without having to check if they comply with the guidelines.
Which makes the moslems happy as theycancontinue to siphon off tens of millions of crowns in Stockholm alone, and ensures the clan chiefs tell their tribesmen to vote Socialist Democrat.
With friends like this, democracy needs no enemies.