Why Fox News And Right Wing Brits Are Scrambling To Declare New Zealand A Fascist Failure On Covid-19

20
3312

Why is New Zealand’s pandemic response (as of a few months ago, might I add) being blasted across Fox News in the US and presented as some sort of dystopian totalitarian FEMA internment camp ridden nightmare?

Because there’s an Election on. The people backing one of the candidates therein, or even merely ‘fellow travelling’ with his brand of politics overseas – know that Covid-19 isn’t going away, is an incredibly salient political issue; and that against their expectations, the escalating prevalency of both virus and frustration with their not taking it seriously … hasn’t actually been diminished by railing against lockdowns, masks, quarantines. Instead just causing ever-larger numbers of previously pliant people to ask the obvious question: “Why is this happening? Why don’t we have a good response?”

It would be simple enough to attempt to claim that that’s because it’s a “tricky virus” and that nowhere has it good – therefore absolving the responsibility of leaders who have done little, by suggesting that there was nothing to be done other than what was.

Except this is the Internet Age – and the truth of the matter, that some places have done drastically better than others, is now a matter of public record for anybody with a smartphone. Which is everybody.

So the question changes. It becomes “Why are some countries doing better than others? Why didn’t WE do some of those things?” And the answer … the answer is “we COULD have, but there would be such ‘costs’ associated with doing so – to your freedom, to your income and our economy, that ‘the cure would be worse than the disease'”.

I somehow doubt that this rings true to many – especially as there’s an ongoing demonstration that having an ‘open’ economy which is nevertheless also open to the transmission of the virus, doesn’t actually lead to sustained positive growth outcomes. And especially, further, as people either fall victim to the virus itself (and its lingering, still poorly understood impacts) or hear of others in their community or perhaps even their own family who have.

So if the evidence suggests that there WAS an alternative, if people can read with their own eyes the statistics and the stories coming out of little old New Zealand showing that what a mighty global superpower was unable to accomplish via bloviating bluster, a small chain of islands at the fringe of the world could do via pragmatic and principled methods … where does that leave the naysayer?

Frantically endeavouring to obscurate reality itself with those well-worn tools of the recent political experience: fake news and alternative facts. All in a bid to present one of the international success stories – in this case, New Zealand – as being somehow ‘undesirable’ to attempt to replicate at home.

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

By making it seem like we’re operating … well … that aforementioned “dystopian totalitarian FEMA internment camp ridden nightmare”. A sort of Second Coming of Stalinist Russia – with Gulags for dissidents plucked up off the street under the pretext of potentially having the virus.

And the constant implicit repetition that therefore, the ONLY WAY to actually have a competent response to Covid-19 is … by , well, that.

It’s literally Orwellian. Both in terms of presenting our country as Oceania amidst the South Seas with repression aplenty ; and also, more pointedly, in terms of making active utilization of media to change and distort reality so as to make domestic dissent, domestic questioning of governance in their own countries a non-starter. Encouraging and facilitating the adherent of the politics, policy, and politician in question (I hardly think we need to name names by this point) to mentally shut down their own critical faculties; and to spray-repeat these lines to anybody else in their immediate orbit who may themselves be experiencing some subconscious doubts.

So 4 and 5 star hotels housing people coming into the country for mandatory 14 day quarantine , or close contacts of confirmed cases in the community .. get turned into internment camps where not-actually-ill New Zealanders are snatched up into from off the street ; and remarks explaining the Kiwi policy dating from months ago are branded as a “terrifying new response”.

They’re trying DESPERATELY to distract from their own blustering incompetence – and therefore transforming via the magic of the camera lens and the biased media talking-head, a situation wherein we are all pretty much living normally here in Kiwiland, one of the most free societies on the planet right now ..

.. into , as I (or rather, as they) say – a dystopian hellscape of socialist / fascist (mis-)rule dotted with camps for dissidents under a tyrannical pseudo-monarch with an adoring cult of personality sufficient to drown out the apparently repressed domestic opposition and “moderate rebels” .

Funny thing, I didn’t think the Trump Administration and its supporters had any problem with putting people coming into their country into camps.

At the rate we are going, I would almost be semi-seriously expecting some form of international sanctions to be discussed in ‘retaliation’ for Jacinda “rigging the election” to produce her unprecedented electoral result or something.

Also, lest I be misinterpreted as suggesting this is somehow a uniquely American problem … it isn’t. We’ve already seen a British politician push all of this, and this morning we had some guy apparently affiliated with anti-PRC activism around Hong Kong and Taiwan start making similar claims.

There is a Buddhist maxim I am quite fond of :

That there are three things that cannot permanently remain hidden:

The Sun, The Moon, and The Truth.

Leaving aside the Murdoch publication by the name of one of these, and the Cameron Slater edited rag which bore the last of these three names and operated in imitation of the first one …

The international reputation of New Zealand as something other than a “Hellhole”, and somehow less democratic (or, for that matter, free) than the modern United States – shall surely remain similarly resplendent. So bright in fact, that these benighted morons desperately clinging to the rather literal fake news broadcast about this by Fox et co, cannot bear to look upon us.

No wonder they are letting their lurid imaginations ‘fill in the blanks’ instead.

Unfortunate, yet unsurprising, that we are being made spurious mis-use of as a political prodding-stick for other countries’ political brawling . Because we cannot be allowed to be presented as having succeeded where the ‘big boys’ have stumbled and failed.

New Zealand in the 1950s was declared prominently to be the little country who had lead the world in developing and implementing the humane state and humane society of the Post-War Economic Consensus era.

Looks like We’re Back.

20 COMMENTS

  1. If I had thought for a moment that “fascism” would look anything like NZ circa late October 2020 we should have backed it in 1940.
    I wonder how much research some journalists actually do these days.

      • Ok I’ll bite.

        I say I say I say How was 2008 the year Fascism arrived in New Zealand?

        NB: You better start by explaining your definition of fascism. I sense it may differ somewhat to what most people think it is.

        • Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/) is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism[1][2] characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and of the economy[3] which came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe.[4] The first fascist movements emerged in Italy during World War I, before spreading to other European countries.[4] Opposed to liberalism, Marxism, and anarchism, fascism is placed on the far right within the traditional left–right spectrum.[4][5][6]

          Not long after National came in 2008 did our country become the above and what do YOU believe is “most peoples thinking”?

  2. Last August we took a three-week cruise around the Baltic and Scotland on the “Seabourn Ovation” .
    The guy in the suite next to ours was a gay maths teacher from San Francisco called Curtis Ingraham. Curtis is the older brother of that crazy Fox News host Laura Ingraham who is currently in the news about her take on our Prime Minister, our country and our Covid quarantine camps. Curtis and I would have 6am-ish morning coffee up in the observation bar on deck eleven and then meet up again in the same bar for pre-dinner slurps. He told me about his sister. I had never heard of her, mainly because I never watch Fox. He talked about their raving alcoholic father who had pictures of Hitler and the Nazi flag in his den when they were growing up in Connecticut. “He was an American Nazi,” Curtis said. His sister hates gays calling them sodomites although she has softened her views after Curtis’s partner, Richard Smith died of AIDS in 1997. Curtis is a really nice polite and charming person but he just can’t stand his sister’s extreme views. Last year he was quoted in the Washington Post attacking her after she compared Greta Thunberg to the ‘Children of the Corn’ and in an interview with the Daily Beast he said: “I think she’s a monster, she’s very smart, she’s well-spoken, but her emotional heart is just kind of dead.”
    It’s pretty obvious that most of Laura Ingraham’s DNA came from her Nazi father whilst Curtis seems to have been spared.
    Kester Macfarlane
    Ruby Bay

  3. Oh man – why do we always – always get so Pavlovian when we see NZ in any ‘news’ item. What – Laura Ingraham tells lies – wow, yes this is news! Fox news is a propaganda network and this is a great story to scare their simple viewers. It’s the same kind of tool used against the majority that voted no in the cannabis referendum – lies are much more fun.

  4. Can anyone explain why so many (often right-wing) American women journos/front-persons have a speech impediment that ensures they nasally whine their way through anything they say? Ingraham is a classic example, but far from the only one. It’s so prevalent, and so weird.
    Is it a narcissistic compensation for their unabashed lying?
    Is there a doctor/psychiatrist in the house who can explain, please?

  5. i always get fox news mixed up with the comedy channel. It’s difficult to tell the difference.
    The scary thing is that some Americans are so poorly educated that they think fox news is a serious news channel.

  6. Can anyone explain why so many (often right-wing) American women journos/front-persons have a speech impediment that ensures they nasally whine their way through anything they say? Ingraham is a classic example, but far from the only one. It’s so prevalent, and so weird.
    Is it a narcissistic compensation for their unabashed lying?
    Is there a doctor/psychiatrist in the house who can explain, please?

  7. I think they have a point but its a somewhat one sided argument. The initial lock down was deemed illegal and what’s gone on since hardly looks overly democratic. In Australia, particularly Victoria, it looks far worse.

    But then since when was New Zealand or Australia a proper democracy? Its a colonist state to this day with a dotted line back to the UK (which has a horrid track record on human rights) as is the case with Australia.Of course the US as the UK’s new master since WWII has inherited the family silver which includes NZ/AU. The US is no ones idea of a proper human rights respecting democracy either. Its track record on human rights inside and outside its borders is again, simply appalling.

    What happens this year in NZ will be telling too. Will we keep our right to free speech or will it be buried under virtue signalling, so called “hate speech” laws, we don’t need? Will promises of optional vaccinations be up held or will we all be herded together and given a dose like sheep whether we want it or not?

    If, at a minimum, we can’t complain anymore about issues that matter, any claim we are not a police state starts to look like a spurious one indeed.

    • sean: when we have Civics classes in schools; when we actually take on the responsibilities of being a citizen in a democracy; when we challenge the loudest voices and ask for information from all sides, we just might be heading in the direction of democracy.

      Until then, while we have people proclaiming their rights, though not their responsibilities – I guess the government will have to step in and require its citizens to behave as if they really had reached democracy. (Being considerate of others as well as scrambling to make bucks and please oneselfish.)

      • Andrea people do actually have human rights, that’s why its called a democracy. If govt want to redefine NZ as something other than a democracy then they should at least have the guts to say so. That way we can have a better idea of what is we vote for every 3 years.

        Meantime I’m happy to be selfish and expect mine and others hard won rights to free speech, amongst other things, be upheld. All empty arguments to the contrary readily cast aside.

  8. Just like a Fox reporter, sly and full of BS, lady you have no idea what it’s like in NZ, here we voted correctly and as for your information those so-called camps you say that we lock and separate families. FLASH NEWS: The members who got infected choose to go into a comfy hotel including their families with 3 square meals and morning tea and afternoon tea. They also go out and exercise and when they are cleared after testing (Which is something you aren’t too happy with.) they get to go home. SO LOOK AFTER ALL THE PEOPLE YOU ARE LETTING GET INFECTED AND MAYBE YOU CAN START WITH KINDNESS, EMPATHY AND DO THIS ALL MAGNANAMOUSLY. Get your facts straight to the rest of the US citizens who care we here in Aotearoa tautoko (Support) you, KIA KAHA (Stand tall).

Comments are closed.