3. The Fascist State and Human Rights (The Road to Fascism: For a Critique of the Global Biosecurity State)

‘Totalitarianism is not only hell, but also the dream of paradise — the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a common will and faith, without secrets from one another. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phase of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way, and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time, this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets smaller and poorer.’

— Milan Kundera, interview in The New York Times Book Review, 1980

Table of Contents

1. The Return of Fascism
2. Eternal Fascism
3. The Fascist State and Human Rights
4. Fascism and the Decay of Capitalism
5. The Psychological Structure of Fascism
6. From Kitsch to Woke: The Aesthetics of Totalitarianism
7. Fascism, Neoliberalism and the Left
8. The Camp as Biopolitical Paradigm of the State
9. The New Totalitarianism
10. Humanity in Dark Times

3. The Fascist State and Human Rights

As Umberto Eco pointed out, Italian fascism was riddled with contradictions: revolutionary yet with a king serving as Head of State; advocating the absolute authority of the state while being financed by landowners and big business; extoling military conquest with the backing of the Roman Catholic Church (although there’s nothing new in this). But perhaps its most coherent theoretical formulation was made in The Doctrine of Fascism, which was co-authored in 1927 by Giovanni Gentile, the official ‘philosopher of fascism’, and Benito Mussolini, the Leader of Italian fascism and since 1922 the Prime Minister of Italy. In this text, which was published in 1932 in the Enciclopedia Italiana di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, they laid out the totalitarian reach of fascism:

‘For the fascist, everything is in the state, and nothing human or spiritual can exist, much less have value, outside the state. Thus understood, fascism is totalitarian, and the fascist state — as the synthesis and unity of all values — interprets, develops, and strengthens the whole life of the people.

‘The fascist state lays claim to rule even in the economic field, and by means of the corporative, social, and educational institutions it has created, makes itself felt in every aspect of national life; and all the political, economic and spiritual forces of the nation, framed in their respective organisations, circulate within the state.’

There is a difference between what Mussolini meant by a fascist ‘corporation’ (from the Latin corpus: ‘human body’), which brought together federations of workers and employers’ syndicates under government-appointed officials in order to ban strikes and lockouts and control production within a given area or profession (agriculture, industry, commerce, transport, banking and insurance, professional men and artists), and the commercial corporations that went on to dominate and control the politics, economics and legislation of the Western world. But it is hard not to hear in this definition of fascism a description of the totalitarian reach of the global biosecurity state today, which has unified the populations of former neoliberal democracies into obedience to its dictates to a greater degree of success than any government or crisis has since the Second World War.

I’ve had considerable trouble pinning down what this series of articles is attempting to argue, partly because the government authoritarianism, state violence and legal suppression of the rights and freedoms of the populations of Western nations over the past two years has so self-evidently been fascistic that to argue the point seems almost redundant. And as I’ve argued, such treatment hasn’t been limited to the actions of the public sector, but has been inflicted by precisely those multinational corporations to which so many of the functions and duties of the state have been outsourced under forty years of neoliberalism, and which have expanded their reach during two years of lockdown. As a result, private companies are now given the responsibility and authority to make judgements about the definition and qualification of our human rights: whether that’s pharmaceutical companies deciding whether injection with their products should be mandatory, information technology companies deciding when and where our movements and associations should be tracked and recorded, or social media platforms deciding the limits of our freedom of conscience and expression.

As an example of the latter, in a re-enactment of the ‘Two Minutes Hate’ in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Meta recently released a statement that the ban on ‘hate speech’ on Facebook and Instagram would be lifted in certain European countries if it is directed against Russian soldiers and politicians and made in the context of the invasion of the Ukraine; and would permit praise for the neo-fascist Azoz regiment in the Ukrainian armed forces it had previously banned. This isn’t surprising, given that the biosecurity state has been built on the fabricated, manipulated and directed hate of its national populations and international consumers: first against those refusing to wear masks or remain in their homes; then against protesters against the imposition of lockdown and ‘vaccine’ passports; more recently against the nurses and doctors who refused to be injected with the experimental ‘vaccines’; and now against anyone failing to declare their solidarity with the US-installed puppet government of the Ukraine.

However, given the widespread perception that the restrictions on our rights and freedoms justified by the coronavirus ‘crisis’ are now over and in the past, and the collective amnesia that appears to be the defining characteristic of the political psychology of our time, I think it would be useful to revisit recent history. Obviously, the state violence and illegality with which the regulations and programmes of global biosecurity have been enforced over the past two years is beyond the scope of this article, so I’m going to focus on ‘vaccine’ mandates in selected countries in the Western world where they have been enforced over the previous 7 months.

1. The Biosecurity State in Practice

From 13 September 2021, in Lithuania, under the Government of Ingrida Šimonytė, injection with a COVID-19 ‘vaccine’ was made compulsory for all citizens. Those without a ‘vaccine’ passport proving compliance or a medical exemption were banned from all ‘non-essential’ shops, shopping centres, cafes, bars, restaurants, indoor public venues, outdoor events of over 500 people, government buildings, gyms, bookshops, libraries, trains, banks, universities, inpatient medical care, care homes, and also from any employment involving contact with other humans. Private businesses are permitted to require injection as a condition of employment, and to suspend the non-compliant without pay, thereby circumventing legal challenges for unfair dismissal. Government inspectors conduct spot checks to ensure businesses were enforcing compliance, with the public encouraged to report any business that does not, with fines for non-compliance for both businesses and customers. Armed police were stationed at larger venues to  bar entry and issue fines. A spokesman for the Government issued the following statement: ‘I urge you to avoid associating with the unvaccinated, because associating with the deliberately unvaccinated is the same as getting into a car with a drunk driver.’

In September 2021, in Melbourne, Australia, in response to demonstrations against 18 months of periodic lockdowns and ‘vaccine’ mandates for construction workers, armed riot police and anti-terrorist paramilitaries in gas masks attacked protesters with rubber bullets, pepper balls, pepper spray, stinger grenades, tear gas and armoured cars mounted with a new heat weapon. These fire a beam of microwaves six feet across that penetrate human skin to a depth of about 1/64th of an inch, enough to affect pain receptors and trigger an involuntary response. Extensive testing has shown that nobody can withstand the beam for more than a few seconds. This heat weapon has an effective range of several hundred metres and can be aimed as easily as a searchlight. Protesters who braved this armoury of weapons  were additionally threatened with $5,000 fines.

In October 2021, in Italy, under the Government of Mario Draghi, students, lecturers and staff occupied the University of Turin in protest against the imposition of ‘vaccine’ passports (the so-called ‘Green Pass’) as a condition of access to both education and employment. In Trieste and Genoa, in response to dock workers striking against the Green Pass, riot police illegally entered the ports, where they fired tear-gas canisters and water cannons against strikers and their supporters, among whom were many women and children. A port official in Trieste wearing a sash in the national colours was recorded giving the fascist salute before directing police armed with a watercannon to the assault. The following month, the Prime Minister banned protest in Italy.

In October 2021, in Canada, under the Government of Justin Trudeau, injection with a COVID-19 ‘vaccine’ was made mandatory for federal public servants and workers in federally-regulated industries. Proof of full ‘vaccination’ for healthcare workers and public servants including teachers was enforced in most provinces and territories between October and November, with ‘vaccination’ mandatory for anyone over 11 years of age in Ontario in order to enter ‘non-essential’ businesses, and to many other public venues in the rest of Canada. In November, the mandate was extended to essential workers, including Canadian truck drivers, crossing the borders with the USA.

From 15 November 2021, in New Zealand, under the government of Jacinda Ardern, injection with the first dose of a COVID-19 ‘vaccine’ was made mandatory for all workers in healthcare, education and prison staff, with a second injection received by 1 January 2022, and a so-called ‘booster’ injection by 24 February. For fire and emergency personnel the respective cut-off dates were 29 November, 14 January and 1 March; for the military it was 17 January and 1 March. Private businesses were permitted to enforce injection with 1 of 8 government-authorised COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ as a condition of employment. Ardern admitted that this will impose a ‘two-tier society’, with those refusing to be injected facing what she called ‘tougher’ restrictions on their rights and freedoms.

In December 2021, in Germany, under the Government of Olaf Scholz, school children were forced to go to the front of their class and declare their ‘vaccination’ status every day. Those who were vaccinated were applauded, while those who were not had to explain why they were not. Outside, police officers were filmed roamed through city crowds, using 2-metre rulers to enforce social distancing among shoppers; while cafés in Berlin that were handing out free coffees to both the ‘vaccinated’ and the ‘unvaccinated’ were attacked in a campaign of violence orchestrated by the media.

From 7 December 2021, in Melbourne, Australia, the Premier of the State of Victoria, Daniel Andrews, has absolute and non-reviewable power to keep the population under lockdown indefinitely. At 262 days in total, the residents of Melbourne had endured the longest cumulative lockdown of any city in the world; but under the Public Health and Wellbeing Amendment (Pandemic Management) Act 2021, lockdown can now be enforced even if there are no medical ‘cases’ of COVID-19 (i.e. positive PCR tests), and can be maintained for an indefinite period. Those breaching a ‘pandemic order’ can be fined up to $45,250 or face two years imprisonment, with businesses fined up to $109,000. Protests have not been banned outright, but can be stopped by the Health Minister if he believes it is ‘reasonably necessary’ to protect public health.

From 16 January 2022, in Greece, under the Government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis, injection with a COVID-19 ‘vaccine’ was made compulsory for anyone over 60 years of age, with a fine of €100 per month of non-compliance added to citizens’ tax bills. Mitsotakis, the former CEO of the private equity and venture capital subsidiary of the National Bank of Greece, said the fines were not a punishment but a ‘price to pay for health’ and an ‘act of justice for the vaccinated’.

On 23 January 2021, in Belgium, under the Government of Alexander de Croo, armed and armoured riot police used water cannons in the middle of winter against citizens defending their rights of assembly and protest against ‘vaccine’ mandates under EU law.

From 5 February 2022, in Austria, under the Government of Karl Nehammer, injection with a COVID-19 ‘vaccine’ was made compulsory for anyone over the age of 18, with those refusing confined to their homes. The Chancellor announced that those leaving their home and unable to produce a vaccine passport when stopped by the police would be fined between €600 rising to €3,600 per year, with imprisonment for non-payment up to 1 year.

From 15 February 2022, in Italy, injection with 3 doses of a COVID-19 ‘vaccine’ was made mandatory for everyone 50 years of age and over, with a fine of €1,500 for non-compliance. As a result of this mandate, half a million Italians over 50 have been suspended from work and left without a salary. The Prime Minister, Mario Draghi, the former President of the European Central Bank and member of the G30 who was appointed by the Italian President, announced: ‘The unvaccinated are not part of our society.’

On 12 February 2022, in Paris, under the Government of Emmanuel Macron, who the previous month had declared he wanted to ‘piss off’ those refusing to be injected, armed riot police and paramilitaries violently assaulted protesters against ‘vaccine’ mandates with truncheons, pepper spray and tear gas. At the same time, heavily armed and armoured vehicles of the Gendarmerie, a French military force, were deployed to stop the ‘Freedom Convoy’ from entering the capital, with participating truck-drivers threatened with a fine, driving ban and up to two years in prison.

On 14 February 2022, in Canada, the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, invoked the Emergencies Act to grant him emergency powers and suspended Parliament. The Minister for Finance, Christia Freeland, declared that anyone who protested or continues to protest against ‘vaccine’ mandates or donates to funding them would have their bank accounts frozen. Freeland, who sits on the Board of Trustees of the World Economic Forum, also announced that any company whose trucks were used in the protest would have their bank accounts frozen and their insurance suspended. On 19 February, mounted riot police and anti-terrorist paramilitaries in armoured vehicles armed with weapons firing chemical irritants and direct impact batons, stun grenades, pepper spray and tear gas, violently assaulted protesters against ‘vaccine’ mandates, including the ‘Freedom Convoy’ of truckers in the capital, Ottawa.

From 14 February 2022, in the USA, under the Government of Joe Biden, who had repeatedly claimed that this is a ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’, injection with a COVID-19 ‘vaccine’ was made mandatory for healthcare workers, with a first dose by 14 February and a second by 21 March. Hospitals, nursing homes and surgeries failing to comply are threatened with losing government funding for its patient health insurance programmes. In the States of Washington, New Jersey, Connecticut, Illinois, Oregon and California, and in New York City, this mandate has been extended to all state government and educational workers. That same month, the Supreme Court blocked the Biden Administration’s mandate, issued under emergency powers in September 2021, that private companies with more than 100 employees can require weekly COVID-19 tests for employees who have not been fully ‘vaccinated’. This mandate would have applied to 84 million citizens. Despite this ruling, many businesses continue to make injection a condition of work for employees, of entry to their venues for consumers, and of access to their services for customers, including students.

On 2 March 2022, in New Zealand, under the Government of Jacinda Ardern, riot police armed with tear gas, pepper spray and truncheons attacked protesters in the ‘Freedom Camp’ against ‘vaccine’ mandates that had been camped outside Parliament House in Wellington for three weeks, setting the camp on fire.

From 15 March 2022, in the UK, under the Government of Boris Johnson, injection with a course of COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ was made mandatory for workers in care homes. This was to be extended to healthcare and social care settings from 1 April, but all mandates were subsequently revoked on 15 March, 2022.

From 16 March 2022, in Germany, under the Government of Olaf Scholz, employees of medical establishments have to provide proof of a full course of injection with COVID-19 ‘vaccines’. The German Parliament is currently considering ‘vaccine’ mandates for those over 50 years of age as well as a general mandate for all adults.

As I said, is it really necessary to argue for the fascism of the nation states that imposed and continue to impose such measures on their populations? But then again, isn’t this all in the past — an unfortunate and perhaps overzealous response to an unprecedented situation which is now all but over, and we can now return to something like normal, even if it is the ‘new normal’, ‘built back better’ and more prepared for future pandemics? It is to challenge this view, which has dissipated much of the opposition to the global biosecurity state, that I am writing this series of articles. Let’s have a closer look at what happened, is happening now, and is set to happen in the immediate future to the former neoliberal societies of the West from the perspective of human rights and their subordination to the state.

2. Erasing Human Rights

According to a briefing on ‘Legal issues surrounding compulsory Covid-19 vaccination’ published by the European Parliament, as of 14 March 2022, ‘vaccine’ mandates in Austria have been suspended, but will be re-evaluated for re-imposition in June, in anticipation of the next wave of infections this autumn. A full course of ‘vaccination’ — although what constitutes this arbitrary designation changes according to the declarations of the pharmaceutical companies producing the ‘vaccines’ — is still obligatory for specific age groups in Italy and Greece; and for specific categories of workers (in healthcare and public services, including schools) in Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Hungary and Latvia; and employers are allowed to impose them on workers as a condition of employment in Hungary and Estonia; while access to certain public spaces (including public transport, post offices, banks, work canteens, restaurants, hotels, catering establishments, sports facilities, receptions, congresses, spas, amusement parks, gaming centres, discos and cultural centres) is only permitted for those designated as ‘vaccinated’ in Germany, France, Italy and Latvia; and, except for Lithuania, Slovenia and Sweden, all member states in the European Union still require travellers from other member states to present a ‘vaccine’ passport.

In many of these countries (including Germany, France, Italy, Greece and Hungary) legal challenges to the ‘vaccine’ mandates have been made by workers on the grounds that their human rights under the European Convention on Human Rights (and specifically Article 8, recognising the right to private life and protecting, therefore, the physical integrity of a person) are being interfered with; and in each case the constitutional court has dismissed their claims on two bases. First, that since the mandates are a condition of their continued employment in a particular industry and therefore not compulsory — ‘mandatory’ meaning, in legal terms, the agreement between employee and employer to meet a requirement of their employment — workers are free to leave that industry and seek employment elsewhere. And second, that the injection with a COVID-19 ‘vaccine’ of a given demographic (whether defined by age or the entire adult population) is in the interest of public health, and therefore comes under ECHR conditions for interfering with qualified rights (Articles  8, 9, 10 and 11) in order to protect public safety. Several things can be said about these court rulings.

First, that ruling that a worker who may have trained and worked for years in a given industry, the prime example being in healthcare, is free to find new employment is a clear violation of the first requirement of medical treatment under EU and international law, which is that it must be voluntary and not influenced by pressure from the medical profession or anyone else. For example, under Article 6 the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights,  which was adopted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in 2005: ‘Any preventive [i.e. mask], diagnostic [PCR test] and therapeutic [vaccine] medical intervention is only to be carried out with the prior, free and informed consent of the person concerned.’ More specifically to the COVID-19 ‘vaccines’, under the Council of Europe’s Resolution 2361, which was adopted by Parliamentary Assembly on 21 January, 2021: member states of the EU must ensure that citizens are informed that vaccination is ‘not mandatory’, that ‘no one is under political, social or other pressure to be vaccinated if they do not wish to do so’; and ‘that no-one is discriminated against for not having been vaccinated . . . or not wanting to be vaccinated’. This resolution has been ignored by the constitutional courts of these European nation states. Threatening a worker with being banished from their profession or trade is clearly a failure to uphold this Resolution, as well as a failure of the courts of the relevant countries to uphold the rights of the individual under EU law. Indeed, this failure has characterised all legal rulings in the global biosecurity state, and the UK is no exception to this rule.

Second, human rights were written into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the European Convention on Human Rights (1950) after the Second World not only to give capitalism a veneer of morality in its Cold War with the more obvious morality of socialism, but precisely in order to protect the individual from the state — and specifically the fascist state. They should not be abandoned, therefore, when the state — fascist or not — rules that they must be limited by what the government decides is the common good, whether that’s public health or state security. It was against the arbitrariness of those decisions, on which the fascist state was historically constructed, that human rights and their legal arbitration are meant to protect the individual. And although the rights of the individual must necessarily be balanced against those of the collective, that balance has been written, first, into the original formulation of those rights in the text of the European Convention on Human Rights, and, second, into guidance on that balance made by the European Court of Human Rights in the course of enacting its functions.

That these rights and freedoms should now be cast aside at the bidding of governments of member states on the unexamined and globally contested ground that ‘vaccines’ of contested efficacy, proven dangers, documented injuries including deaths, rushed clinical trials, dubious content, experimental biotechnology, censored trial data and unknown long-term consequences, which have been mandated in order to protect us from a virus with the infection fatality rate of seasonal influenza, are more important to the public good than our human rights, demonstrates how weak both national and international courts are in protecting us from the global biosecurity state. Indeed, far from offering a means of holding the governments implementing the biosecurity state to account, the courts have become the means for enforcing its suspension of our rights and freedoms.

Article 11 of the European Social Charter imposes on the contracting parties the obligation ‘to take appropriate measures designed (3) to prevent as far as possible epidemic, endemic and other diseases’. This has been interpreted by the European Committee on Social Rights as requiring member states ‘to ensure high immunisation levels’. Yet the question of whether high immunisation rates can be attained through mandatory vaccination has never been addressed by the European Committee on Social Rights; nor has the question of whether mandatory masking, social distancing, contact tracing, lockdown restrictions, ‘vaccine’ passports and all the other politically enforced ‘measures’ did or do anything to prevent the spread of a respiratory virus in circulation since the end of 2019.

And third, this subordination of the individual and his freedoms to the common good as it is declared by the government of the nation state is one of the political foundations of historical fascism. In The Doctrine of Fascism it states:

‘We were the first to state, in the face of liberal individualism, that the individual exists only in so far as he is within the state and subjected to the requirements of the state, and that, as civilisation assumes aspects which grow increasingly complicated, individual freedom becomes more and more restricted.’

‘The concept of freedom is not absolute because nothing is ever absolute in life. Freedom is not a right, it is a duty. It is not a gift, it is a conquest; it is not equality, it is a privilege. The concept of freedom changes with the passing of time. There is a freedom in times of peace which is not the freedom of times of war. There is a freedom in times of prosperity which is not a freedom to be allowed in times of poverty.’

The structure of every nation state requires the individual to subordinate his abstract freedom to the common good in accordance with the law. It is this, at least in principle, that guarantees the protection of the individual by the state. But just as important to this social contract is the protection of the individual from the state. Arguing, as has the Secretary of State for Justice in order to justify the UK Government’s impending reform of the Human Rights Act 1998, that our individual rights must be balanced by ‘personal responsibility’ and the ‘wider public interest’ is political sophistry. It is not the role of Governments to dictate the responsibilities of its citizens. That way lies fascism. The balance between the rights of the individual and the state is precisely what human rights laws were written to protect. Human rights are described in the 1776 United States Declaration of Independence, the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as ‘inalienable’ precisely because they are not subject to the revisions of individual governments claiming they must be subordinated to what they decide is the common good. That’s why they are called human rights and not obligations of citizenship; and the erasure of the former by the latter over the past two years — and, most worryingly of all, the obedience of the population to their erasure — has laid the ground for the return of fascism today.

Over the past two years, in which our governments have repeatedly told us that ‘we are at war’ — for example, by the French President, Emmanuel Macron, in March 2020 — previously thinking citizens of neoliberal states have willingly, and even happily, subordinated their individual rights and freedoms to the ‘requirements’ of the biosecurity state, and handed over the responsibility and judgement to decide what those requirements are to national governments, multinational corporations and international technocracies. In an astonishingly short period of time, vast numbers of people who previously held a healthy suspicion of governments, pharmaceutical companies, information technology companies and the corporate media have made the decision to believe everything they say with a conviction that can only be described as ‘blind faith’.

However, this is not the ‘mass formation psychosis’ that some have claimed — somewhat loosely applying the terms of mass psychology to social formations — but rather the effect and product of the return of fascism in our governance, our corporations, our media and our society, and of the impact and success of two unrelenting years of propaganda that continues to this day. Certainly, the susceptibility of the public to this propaganda has assumed hypnotic dimensions, with otherwise rational adults leaving their parents to die alone and without medical treatment in care facilities when ordered to do so, injecting their children with experimental biotechnology for a disease to which they are statistically immune, and doing the same to themselves for the sake of a summer holiday. However, attempts to explain the mass support for the global biosecurity state in terms of individual or mass psychology serves only to depoliticise the global biosecurity state. In accepting this explanation, the last two years of cowardice, compliance and collaboration is transformed into a temporary aberration in our neoliberal democracies excused and perhaps necessitated by a global threat to public health, rather than being identified for what it is, which is a revolution in global capitalism necessitating the imposition of a fascist superstructure capable of policing, controlling and suppressing the anticipated social and political resistance.

In ‘The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man’, chapter 9 of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt, the German political theorist and escapee from the Third Reich, reminded us that history has repeatedly demonstrated that, without a nation, citizenship and a state to defend them, human rights are worth little or nothing. Indeed, the Law on the Revocation of Naturalisations and the Deprivation of German Citizenship of 1933 revoked the citizenship of naturalised Jews and those the Government deemed to be ‘undesirables’. This was followed in 1935 by the Reich Citizenship Law, under which those designated as Jews were stripped of their citizenship and instead made ‘subjects of the state’. This was defined as ‘a person who enjoys the protection of the German Reich and in consequence has specific obligations towards it.’ Finally, in November 1941, the Eleventh Decree to the Law on the Citizenship of the Reich stripped Jews of their remaining rights as subjects of the state, stipulating that any Jew living outside Germany was no longer a citizen. The first act of fascist states, therefore — whether that’s the Third Reich stripping Jews and communists of German citizenship, the State of Israel stripping Palestinians and Bedouin of Israeli citizenship, the European Union declaring refugees from wars and political violence in Africa and the Middle East to be illegal immigrants, or the nation states of global biosecurity imposing ‘vaccine’ passports as a condition of citizenship and their leaders, as we have seen, describing the non-compliant as no longer part of society — is to render their victims stateless.

Finally, the fact that ‘vaccine’ mandates, the laws for their enforcement and the punishments for non-compliance have recently been suspended in some nation states, far from being the cause for celebration they have been even among those opposing the regulations and programmes of the biosecurity state, doesn’t mean that the governments of the former neoliberal democracies of the West will not be prepared to use the full force and violence of the nation state to push through this revolution in global capitalism. And we shouldn’t forget that other mandates are still in effect in most European countries, where citizens who formerly had human rights under former neoliberal democracies continue to be violently assaulted by their police forces for such crimes as not wearing a covering over their mouth and nose in public or trying to enter certain venues without first being injected with however many doses of gene therapy their government decides. Worse, the ineffective and dangerous UK ‘vaccination’ programme continues unabated, having been extended since April in the UK to children between the age of 5 and 11; and the data and reports on its negative effects, which are escalating in severity and incidence, continue to be suppressed, censored and denied investigation. Finally, in the course of writing these articles, the threat of lockdown has once again been suspended over our heads, the axe placed gently on our necks. Indeed, the current lockdown of 45 cities in China, following the Government’s medically nonsensical ‘zero-COVID’ strategy, is even more severe and even more brutally imposed than the one that set off copycat lockdowns across the West in 2020, to the astonishment and delight of Western governments who believed their populations would never tolerate such authoritaranism. No, there is nothing to be celebrated in this pause in breath for the war to come between the populations of the world and the global biosecurity state being constructed around, between and within us — in the service of which, to echo The Doctrine of Fascism, all the political, economic and spiritual forces of the nation state will be placed.

3. Towards a Global Technocracy

The situation in the Ukraine has undoubtedly played a catalytic role in the unexpected pause in the two years of unrelenting dismantling of our rights, freedoms and democracies. This hiatus has been compared to the ‘phoney war’ between the declaration of war in Europe in September 1939 and the start of hostilities in April 1940. Perhaps it would be hard for the West to put on its customary mask as staunch upholder of democracy and brave defender of human rights if its populations were living under lockdown restrictions, their citizenship dependent on obedience to mandates in violation of national and EU law; and our governments and corporate media have been as ready to wheel out these tired old stereotypes as we have been to accept them, as if the memory of the past two years had been erased with a single wave of the now ubiquitous Ukrainian flag. Or perhaps not. It’s far more likely, as I will discuss in the next section, that the West’s imposition of economic sanctions on Russia has served to extend the time of reckoning for the repayment of the vast sums of electronic money that were injected into the collapsing global financial system in the months immediately before the coronavirus was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation. This has allowed our governments to pile even more debt on the future to pay for the expenditures of the present, while at the same time presenting an easy-to-understand explanation and convenient villain to blame for the spiralling escalation in the cost of living.

In addition, some commentators have attributed the temporary relaxation of restrictions to the approach of general elections in, most notably, France (April), Australia (May), Austria (September) and the USA (November). However, the re-election of Jacinda Ardern as the Prime Minister of New Zealand with a landslide victory in October 2020, and the similar mandate won by Olaf Scholz as Chancellor of Germany in September 2021, suggests that the majority of the populations that have lived through the revolution of the past two years still believe that it was ‘for their own good’, and that Emmanuel Macron, Scott Morrison, Karl Nehammer and Joe Biden will be re-elected to continue the construction of the global biosecurity state. But even if they are not, the consensus from all political parties in the legislatures of these former neoliberal democracies strongly suggests that little or nothing would change under new governments. Indeed, were the Labour Party to form a government in the UK, we would be living under the very worst restrictions to our freedoms of any of these nation states.

What the past two years have shown — and that perhaps more incontrovertibly than any of the other periodic crises between which we live in the West — is that, behind the facade of democracy these national governments are there to represent, there is the rule of a global technocracy of which the UN and the EU are the models inherited from the past, and the WHO and the WEF are those of the present. Just as the institutions of the UK state — the Crown, the legislature, the judiciary, the civil service, the security services, the military, the police forces, the financial sector, the media — will retain their grip on power no matter which political party is elected to the Government of the UK, so the international organisations administering the global biosecurity state will continue to implement the revolution in global capitalism to the new form of technocratic governance irrespective of the national governments that will execute its mandates on their populations. As an example of what’s in store for us, two days after his re-election as the President of France on 24 April, Emmanuel Macron, in compliance with the decision of the European Commission last June to create a European Digital Identity framework, announced the Digital Identity Guarantee Service for the French electorate, 58 per cent of whom didn’t vote for him.

Turning to the UK, which has emerged as one of the nation states with the least severe biosecurity restrictions, as an example of how the biosecurity state will continue to be implemented outside the immediate context of the coronavirus ‘crisis’ — and instead be based on a model of authoritarian rule with whose compliance that crisis has demonstrated the population’s almost total obedience — recently passed and imminent legislation in the UK includes the following Acts and Bills of Parliament. This is the fascist state in formation, for which the past two years has prepared our acquiescence and collaboration, and shows why none one of us should be celebrating the suspension of coronavirus-justified restrictions.

• The Telecommunications Infrastructure (Leasehold Property) Act 2021 amends the The Communications Act 2003 to allow telecom network operators to gain access to multiple-dwelling buildings, most obviously blocks of council flats owned by local authorities, to erect communication transmitters or receivers, even when the landlord has not granted permission. This anticipates the installation of new 5G technology on which the Fourth Industrial Revolution will rely for the quantum leap in computing capacity required for the expanded surveillance, data collection and interconnection capacities of the biosecurity state.

• The Financial Services Act 2021 amends the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 and the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 with regard to the forfeiture of money so that they apply to money held in accounts maintained with electric money and payment institutions. This allows funds to be automatically removed from a person’s account in the event, for example, of non-payment of fines for non-compliance with ‘vaccine’ mandates or, as we’ve seen in Canada, support for or participation in protests against such mandates.

• The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 empowers the police to impose conditions on demonstrations, including where they are held, and that they do not cause ‘unease’, ‘annoyance’ or ‘disruption’, all of which are now a criminal offence punishable by up to 10 years in prison, effectively banning protest in the UK in contravention of the European Convention on Human Rights (Article 11, Freedom of Assembly and Association). It also permits the police to have access to our private education and health records, criminalises trespass on privately-owned land, and increases the maximum sentence for damaging a memorial from 3 months to 10 years.

• The Health and Care Act 2022, as part of the NHS Long Term Plan, accelerates the privatisation of the National Health Service, the sharing of medical data, and allows privately-run ‘integrated care systems’ to write health legislation, much as pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and investors like the Bill Gates Foundation and the Welcome Trust have throughout the coronavirus ‘crisis’.

• The Public Order Bill extends the powers of police to criminalise protest through extending stop and search powers for police to search for and seize objects that may be used in the commission of a protest-related offence; and through the introduction of Serious Disruption Prevention Orders (SDPO) that prohibit an individual from being in a particular place, being with particular people, having particular articles in their possession and using the internet to facilitate or encourage persons to commit a protest-related offence. The court may also require a person subject to an SDPO to wear an electronic tag. Breach of an SDPO is a criminal offence carrying a maximum penalty of six months’ imprisonment, an unlimited fine, or both.

• The Judicial Review and Courts Bill removes the ability of UK citizens to challenge and appeal against the decisions and actions of the UK Government and other public bodies, making the UK biosecurity state even less accountable to public scrutiny and legal accountability than it has been under the emergency period of the last two years.

• The Elections Bill, despite the tiny incidence of voter fraud in the UK, makes proof of voter ID a requirement for voting, and will doubtless be used to impose Universal Digital Identity already introduced under the guise of the NHS Covid Pass.

• The Nationality and Borders Bill empowers the Home Secretary to revoke, without prior notification, the British citizenship of anyone who is not born in the UK, who is of dual nationality, who is judged to be a threat to national security or whose behaviour is deemed to be ‘unacceptable’. As the previous Home Secretary, Sajid Javed, did in 2019 with Shamina Begum, a British citizen who at the age of 15 went to join the Islamic State, this will leave such persons stateless, and therefore effectively without human rights. Echoing The Doctrine of Fascism, the current Home Secretary, Priti Patel, recently decribed UK citizenship as a ‘privilege’ and not a human right.

• The Online Safety Bill hands authority for policing the internet to information technology companies, who are obligated and empowered to censor and block access to content they deem ‘lawful but harmful’. This new legislation allows the censorship of online content that is deemed harmful, such as, for example, information about the adverse drug reactions, including injury and death, to experimental gene therapies presented as vaccines, which in the judgement of the state may inhibit the compliance of both adults and children with a given ‘vaccination’ programme, thereby, with regard to this legislation, exposing them to the effects of a virus and therefore causing harm. Under the cover of protecting us from harmful content, therefore, this legislation will formalise the blanket censorship of anything and anyone challenging or questioning the medical and rational basis to the Government’s ‘vaccination’ programme, which has been demonstrated to have little or no medical benefit, considerable negative impact on the health and lives of millions of Britons, and with unknown consequences in a future that is rapidly approaching.

• The Human Rights Act Reform by a Modern Bill of Rights makes existing rights subordinate to ‘public protection’ and ‘national security’, effectively erasing them as a legal recourse for UK citizens. By making the worst Parliament in British history the ultimate source of laws having an impact on the UK population, the UK will effectively sever its obligations under European and international human rights laws and agreements. These include the Nuremberg Code (1947), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the European Convention on Human Rights (1950), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), the  United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1991), the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Human Dignity of the Human Being with Regard to the Application of Biology and Medicine (1997), the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights (2005), all of which have signally failed to protect or even defend our human rights in response to the increasing authoritarianism of Western governments over the past two years. Once again, then, this legislation will formalise the actions of the UK Government, Parliament and Courts throughout the coronavirus ‘crisis’.

This severance of the nation state from international laws and agreements and the suspension of human rights under a permanent state of emergency were defining characteristics of the governments of historical fascist states. At the same time, however, the UK Government is ready to sign up to the World Health Organisation’s imminent resolution on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response, for which more than 70 member states, including the European Union and the UK, are advocating a strong and legally binding international treaty. It appears that, when it serves to expand and increase the power of the global biosecurity state over the British people, the UK Government that was elected to an 80-seat majority on the back of the Brexit referendum is nonetheless more than willing to cede UK sovereignty to global and technocratic forms of governance intent on reducing us to digital serfdom. In practice, however, rather than relieving nation states of their sovereignty, this treaty will allow national governments to represent, justify and excuse the consequences of future decisions on lockdowns, masking, ‘vaccine’ mandates and all the other regulations and programmes of the biosecurity state as the technical decisions of a global health technocracy, and in doing so to depoliticise and therefore remove from contestation their governance of the biosecurity state.

Based on this technocratic model of global governance, Universal Digital Identity, Central Bank Digital Currency, Universal Basic Income, Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance, Sustainable Development Goals, Social Credit, Smart Cities, Facial Recognition, and a host of other programmes, will all be introduced without the UK electorate — like that of every other nation state in the West — having a say or vote or perhaps even a debate in Parliament. Instead, like the fifth generation of cellular networks introduced into the UK in 2019 with nothing more than a guide to best practice belatedly issued by the Government in 2022, they will be unilaterally imposed by committees of technocrats drawn from the private sector as though they are mere upgrades in the technological capabilities of the infrastructure of the state, rather than the means to bring about a qualitative shift in the power of the state over the people. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is not only a revolution in our technology but also in the forms of governance under which we live, from the elected parliamentary democracies of nation states to an unaccountable global corporate technocracy. Beyond the mass of legislation about to undo three-quarters of a century of human rights and freedoms in Europe, these are the weapons of fascism in the Twenty-first Century; and what defences against them remained to us after forty years of neoliberalism have been dismantled over the past two years in the name of that ‘common good’ we now call the global biosecurity state.

Simon Elmer
Architects for Social Housing

In the next section, ‘Fascism and the Decay of Capitalism’, I’ll be looking at the economic causes for the return of fascism to Europe and the West in the crisis in the financial system in late 2019, and the attempts of central banks and neoliberal governments to stop the collapse of global capitalism.

Collections of articles by the same author about the UK biosecurity state :

• Virtue and Terror: Resisting the UK Biosecurity State (May-October 2021)
• Brave New World: Expanding the UK Biosecurity State through the Winter of 2020-2021 (October 2020-May 2021)
• COVID-19: Implementing the UK Biosecurity State (March-August 2020)

Architects for Social Housing is a Community Interest Company (no. 10383452). Although we occasionally receive minimal fees for our design work, the majority of what we do is unpaid and we have no source of public funding. If you would like to support our work financially, including the research for these articles, please make a donation through PayPal: