Limping Towards Catharsis I: Covidinistas are Trapped

Covidistan at the Crossroads: part 1 of a 3-part mini-series on events and developments in late November and early December 2021

I may have been overly optimistic when drafting my last post on the Covidistan situation yesterday. While I slightly adjusted the title of the post (no worries, the original URL stays the same), I stand by my concluding ‘musings’:

‘It’s a lose-lose situation for the Covidistan régime, but I cannot see how the Committee of Public Safety can continue without protests reaching fever pitch.

(…)

I move to call on the President to dismiss the government and announce new elections.

In any ‘normal’ country, this would happen.

If it doesn’t, it’s time to bring out the pitchforks.’

Today, we learned ‘more’ about the shape of things to come, and while I personally watch these disgusting shenanigans with ever-growing loathing, my above thoughts offer three hypotheses, which I shall further explore in this post:

1. Thesis: the Covidistan régime is trapped in a corner of its own making.

2. Antithesis: Covidistan is an abnormal country.

3. Synthesis: what will bring (likely) bring about change?

Part I: If you’re in a hole, stop digging

Things don’t break up, they break down. And in Covidistan one could sense these shifts a in the first couple of days of the régime’s existence. This is neither the time nor the place to rehearse things I explored earlier (on the following remarks, see here), hence it suffices to mention now that a rising tide of protests has caught the Committee of Public Safety more or less by surprise. In many parts of the country, these scenes are quite unprecedented in recent history, by which is meant since 1945.

There were 40,000-100,000 people protesting the house arrest for ‘the unvaccinated’ in Vienna on 20 Nov. 2021 (the first number is from media and the police, the latter from the Freedom Party). Yet, on 23 Nov. 2021, we find an op-ed by David Krutzler in the self-identifying as left-liberal daily Der Standard, which reads, well, Nixonian, but not in a good way:

‘After the Corona Protests: The Silent Majority

The people participating in the demonstrations against the Corona measures are neither “the people” or “the majority”…there are far more impressive numbers elsewhere: on Saturday [20 Nov.], the day of the Vienna protests, 86,000 people in Austria got jabbed much more quietly. On Friday [19 Nov.], this number exceeded 136,000, the second-highest number of daily jabs since the beginning of the vaccination campaign. Of course, it could be argued that the majority were booster jabs…however, in the last seven days [15-21 Nov.] alone, more than 107,000 people were willing to be jabbed for the first time.’

Leaving aside the weird Nixonian allusion (I’m unsure whether Krutzler actually knows about this), here we can see the weirding of discourse and perceptions: why should a private, individual decision on one’s health be—become—something to be celebrated? I mean, it’s not as if we’re talking about something like ‘see, mom, I’m 16 now, thus you can’t prevent me from getting a tattoo’. Still, the main take-away may be the quite implicit admission that the majority of people in Covidistan who went and got jabbed for the first time was coerced into doing so, as, in Krutzler’s words, ‘the 2G rule and lockdown for the unvaccinated have certainly created pressure,’, with ‘vaccination lotteries [providing] possibly an incentive’.

Mind you, this was two weeks ago, i.e., before the announcement of the régime’s intent to force-vaccinate the remaining third of the people. Also, in case my use of the word ‘coerced’ is too strong for your taste and feelings, I also hear about quite some bullying and mobbing going on in Covidistan high schools, directed at those students who (and whose parents) elected to forego ‘the jab’.

As a public service, here are the official numbers about the period mentioned in that above piece, all courtesy of the Covidistan Health Ministry:

15 Nov.: 70,593 jabs—15,368 (1st jabs), 9,308 (2nd jabs), 45,917 (3rd jabs)
16 Nov.: 92,266 jabs—18,366 (1st), 11,340 (2nd), 62,560 (3rd)
17 Nov.: 108,142 jabs—17,744 (1st), 12,984 (2nd), 77,414 (3rd)
18 Nov.: 120,143 jabs—16,967 (1st), 15,073 (2nd), 88,139 (3rd)
19 Nov.: 141,879 jabs—20,601 (1st), 19,325 (2nd), 101,943 (3rd);
20 Nov.: 88,737 jabs—14,339 (1st), 12,130 (2nd), 62,268 (3rd)
21 Nov.: 56,688 jabs—7,226 (1st), 5,456 (2nd), 44,006 (3rd)
22 Nov.: 88,149 jabs—9,955 (1st), 8,973 (2nd), 69,221 (3rd)

As you can see, there’s quite a clear trend at the time of Krutzler’s piece: stagnation, followed by a decline. In fact, only on 9 (23,154), 11 (22,346), and 12 Nov. (26,941) did the number of 1st jabs exceed the number achieved on 20 Nov.

Be that as it may, as I reported on elsewhere, the régime never gained much traction. And before Schallenberg and his ilk could trot out the any vaccine mandate legislation, a number of commentators highlighted the cracks, which appeared literally as soon as the Committee of Public Safety had made its plans public.

Take, e.g., this op-ed by Gerald John in Der Standard, published on 30 Nov. 2021, which called for ‘an end to the pan-Covidistan lockdown solidarity’:

‘The current lockdown was not necessary because of Vienna. Even if the lowest infection rate in Austria cannot be explained by political measures alone in view of the viral tendencies, the city government led by the SPÖ and Neos coalition has gotten a lot right since the days when Vienna itself was a national laggard. Stricter rules pre-empted the fourth wave, and Vaccinations are available on virtually every corner, as are PCR tests, and the results usually arrive on time…

Now, however, the Viennese are to suffer unconditionally with the citizens of those states that have up to three times Vienna’s incidence. Styrian governor Hermann Schützenhöfer (ÖVP) called “All [in lockdown] or none”…This is typical of a state governor [the German original reads ‘Landesfürst’, or fief-tain, which I explained here]…when it comes to bearing the unpleasant consequences of one’s own policies, Austria is suddenly far too small for federalism.’

There’s some more of this pontificating (which I’ll spare you), but John ends on this: ‘If in the end…everyone is always lumped together anyway, why would anyone supposedly follow the rules?’

This, I move, is the pertinent question, isn’t it?

If the Covidinistas don’t follow their own (asinine) rules, why should anyone else?