10. Humanity in Dark Times (The Road to Fascism: For a Critique of the Global Biosecurity State)

‘We need to conceptualise an alternative political configuration that could escape the eternal oscillation — one that we have been witnessing for decades — between a democracy that degenerates into despotism and a totalitarianism that is shaped in an apparently democratic form. For a careful observer it is difficult to decide whether we live today, in Europe, in a democracy that uses increasingly despotic forms of control, or in a totalitarian state disguised as a democracy. It is beyond both that a new, future politics will have to appear.’

— Giorgio Agamben, ‘Polemios Epidemios’, Babylonia, May 2020

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

10. Humanity in Dark Times

In 1959, eight years after the publication of her book on The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt gave a talk on the German Jewish Enlightenment writer, philosopher, dramatist and art critic, Gotthold Lessing, titled ‘On Humanity in Dark Times’. Delivered in Hamburg, Germany, upon her acceptance of the Lessing Prize, it was Arendt’s chance to reflect further on how a new beginning can germinate within a totalitarian world, and she does so around a discussion on the politics of friendship. This talk went on to become the introductory text to a collection of Arendt’s profiles of twentieth-century intellectuals, some of whom were her friends, including Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Jaspers, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, which was published in 1968 under the title Men in Dark Times. By ‘dark times’ Arendt means those periods in history in which the world becomes so obscured that people cease to ask any more of politics than that it guarantee their individual freedom and survival, a demand that precisely describes our own time, when the conditions of both have been made very clear to the compliant. Arendt’s reference is to Brecht’s famous poem, To Those Born After, written in 1939 on the brink of the Second World War, which begins: ‘Truly, I live in dark times!’; and her book is an examination of how each of these more or less public figures lived through them, and what light their work and life casts on the darkness. Addressing the only figure in the collection not from her own century, the talk on Lessing introduces the importance Arendt attributed to friendship, which she elevates in this text to a political relationship both to others and to the world in which we live with others. The basis of her argument, which I want to draw on in this final chapter, is the distinction Arendt makes between the politics of fraternity and that of friendship.

1. The Politics of Friendship

To the liberté and égalité that had always been categories of the political demands of the oppressed, the exploited and the persecuted, the French Revolution of 1789 added fraternité. Insofar as this concept drew on eighteenth-century theories of a fundamental human nature underlying the multiplicity of nations, peoples, races and religions into which the human race is divided, fraternity was understood as the fulfilment of humanity. This human nature, however, was manifested not through reason but in compassion, which was made an inseparable motive of the subsequent history of European revolutions. Indeed, insofar as it is an aspect of human nature that responds to the sight of suffering in others, compassion would seem to be an ideal basis on which to establish a society in which all of humankind might really become ‘brothers’. A barrier to the formation of this society, though, was that humanity manifests itself in such brotherhood most frequently in ‘dark times’, and it does so primarily for persecuted peoples and enslaved groups. Humanity in the form of fraternity, therefore, is the great privilege of what Arendt calls ‘pariah peoples’, accompanied as it is by their ‘radical loss of the world’.

On the one hand, this loss creates an intimacy, intensity and warmth of human relationships of which human beings are otherwise scarcely capable. On the other hand, as the privilege of pariah peoples, fraternity becomes a substitute for the world from which they are barred by their persecution and oppression. In the bond of fraternity, therefore, the element that is common to all humans and binds them together is no longer the world in which they live but the abstraction of ‘human nature’, whose qualities vary according to the requirements of the persecuted group. Most importantly of all, since fraternity is manifested in dark times, this human nature cannot be identified in a world common to all people. Indeed, when those times have passed, however temporarily, and the world is once again open to previously pariah peoples, their fraternity, writes Arendt, ‘dissolves into nothingness like phantoms’. This applies as much to the working class that nationalism, racism and religion have kept fighting among themselves for centuries as it does to Jews who survived the Shoah only to create the apartheid state of Israel founded on the same racial identity fabricated by the Third Reich. In words that should be embroidered on the flag of every protester against lockdown and ‘vaccine’ mandates, Arendt writes:

‘The humanity of the insulted and injured has never yet survived the hour of liberation by so much as a minute. This does not mean that it is insignificant, for in fact it makes insult and injury endurable; but it does mean that in political terms it is absolutely irrelevant.’

Arendt is famous for saying and writing what nobody wants to hear or read, least of all those who turn to her for an easy truth; and it is partly for this reason that I have been drawing on her writings now, when our lives are being lived according to convenient lies and self-deceptions that have not attained such hegemony in public discourse in Europe since the rise of fascism a century ago. Indeed, the attacks on her after the publication of her book on Eichmann have been repeated in the attacks on the equally intransigent Agamben, their shared crime being that both abjure popular explanations of totalitarian programmes (then as now, that they have been imposed for the ‘common good’) for how they are created within the legal framework of democratic states. And, unfortunate as it is to witness, Arendt’s words here have been proven to be as true as they were during the years immediately after the Second World War, when the coalition that won the struggle against fascism split into both old and new factions whose political divisions continue to this day, not least in the State of Israel and the widely-accepted equation of fascism with socialism.

Today, the fraternity among the ‘unvaccinated’ who faced unemployment and loss of freedom for their disobedience, the brief compassion of middle-class libertarians in the public eye for the overwhelmingly working-class protesters against lockdown, and the beginnings of solidarity between the non-compliant outside of their former allegiances to parliamentary parties or the redundant division between Left and Right, or indeed their depoliticisation, have all dissolved with the removal of coronavirus-justified restrictions this March. Despite the fact that these restrictions have, by the admission of the Government, only been suspended and may be reimposed this winter; that the ‘vaccination’ programme has not only continued but been extended in this country to children as young as five and an appalling 6 months old in the US; that, far from being dropped, ‘vaccine’ passports are waiting to be implemented outside of any immediate threat of a ‘pandemic’; that the programmes of biosecurity are being extended to encompass Central Bank Digital Currency, Social Credit and Universal Basic Income; and that a wave of new legislation and treaties are being made into law that will permanently remove the human rights and freedoms that were temporarily suspended over the previous two years — despite all this, the popular opposition to, non-compliance with and protest against the UK biosecurity state have all but vanished. Meanwhile, its public spokespersons have returned to sniping at the Government on social media, with no attempt to form what is left of the former resistance of millions into a force capable of resisting what is in store for us in the future. As Arendt warned in The Origins of Totalitarianism, it is only when the first stage of terror has achieved its aim of rendering further opposition impossible that the regulations and programmes of totalitarian domination are unleashed, and in the West we are totally unprepared to meet them with anything but more protests, bewilderment, submissive acceptance and willing collaboration.

This is where Arendt’s discussion of friendship offers a political alternative to this already failed fraternity. For the Ancient Greeks, she writes, friendship among citizens (philia) was one of the fundamental requirements for the well-being of the city state (polis) on which Western democracy is based. This concept of friendship, however, is different from that held by the individual in modern or even our postmodern times. For us, friendship is experienced as the intimacy in which we escape our alienation from the world through exposure of the details of our private life in face-to-face encounters and, increasingly today, online. Friendship, therefore, is the opposite of our public lives within the social and political realm. But for the Greeks, citizens were only united in a polis — only constituted this public realm — in the constant interchange of talk. The essence of friendship, therefore, consisted in discourse, which was not the intimacy in which individuals talk about themselves, but that in which the world common to all is made manifest.

This is an important point for Arendt. For her, the world is only made human because it has become an object of discourse. However much they may affect us otherwise, the things of the world only become human when we discuss them with our fellow human beings. And, crucially, in the course of speaking, Arendt says, ‘we learn to be human’. The Greeks called this quality of humanness, which is only achieved in the discourse of friendship, ‘philanthrōpia (love of man)’, since it manifests itself in a readiness to share the world with others. Misanthropy, in contrast, means an inability to find someone with whom to share the experience of the world. This concept subsequently underwent numerous changes to become Roman ‘humanitas (humanity)’, the most important of which corresponded to the political constitution of Roman citizenship, which could be acquired by peoples of widely different ethnic origins, who were thereby able to come together with other Romans and enter into discourse with them about the world. Humanity, therefore, was exemplified in friendship, which was not intimate and personal but, to the contrary, made political demands upon friends and retains, in their shared discourse, reference to the world they inhabit. For Arendt, it is this that distinguishes the politics of friendship from the abstraction of human nature on which fraternity is founded.

It is, I think, a measure of the political potential of this concept of friendship that, for the two years during which we lived under restrictions on our freedoms justified by a politically declared ‘pandemic’, friendship was under unrelenting attack by the state. The space of friendship has been explicitly targeted by biosecurity ‘measures’ that continue to instruct us to maintain social distancing, are trying to erase our faces behind a permanently-worn mask, encourage us to see others as a threat to our health and lives, instructed people to remain in their homes for months on end, have normalised working from home for the always-obedient middle-classes, still promotes online interaction over personal ones, and more generally and progressively is removing our access to the world in which we live and whose revolutionary transformation into the global biosecurity state we have been banned from discussing. This attack, which continues to this day, has resulted in the widespread breakdown of relationships between the compliant and the non-compliant that, in my experience and that of everyone I know or who have talked to about this topic, has extended from friends, comrades and colleagues to families — dividing husbands from wives, parents from children, brothers from sisters. Once again, Arendt identified the loneliness in which totalitarianism isolates the individual as one of the definitions and conditions of this novel form of governance, each of us isolated from each other, no longer able to call on each other for support, fearing in each other a threat or source of denunciation. Perhaps most importantly, therefore, the concerted assault on friendship by the biosecurity state has served this political form most explicitly in the enforced ban on discussing the Brave New World into which we’ve been forced without debate in our Parliament, in our media, and largely in the absence of discussion between ourselves.

In my experience, as in that of many thousands and no doubt millions of others in the UK, those with whom in any other circumstances and on any other topic I would expect to be able to enter into discussion, debate and disagreement, have flatly refused to do so: either declaring themselves uninterested or ‘too busy’ to question what they’ve been told by sources they would previously not have trusted; or denouncing me, as they have millions of others, as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ who should be censored, or arrested, or worse. Indeed, the discourse between citizens about the world that the Ancient Greeks identified as the foundation to the well-being of the state has not only been repressed but is now criminalised on the justification of that ‘common good’ by which bare life has been accorded an absolute value over the now subsidiary values of citizenship, friendship, debate and democracy. Indeed, perhaps the most distinctive character of the consensus on which the biosecurity state has been built in a little over two-and-a-half years is the willingness of the vast majority of the population, and of almost all our so-called intellectuals, not merely to submit to censorship but to abandon critical thinking. Those ‘dangerous thoughts’ that Arendt identified as the condition of all thinking have not merely been abandoned by the most intellectually craven generation in modern history but actively suppressed with their willing collaboration. And as she argued, without that constant discussion by which the things of the world become humanised, our world has become less and less human, more and more inhumane, in direct correlation with our compliance with the post-human agenda of the global biosecurity state. It is not surprising, therefore, that the regulations of biosecurity have targeted precisely this political dimension of friendship, since it is on the erasure of the political — of that constant debate on which the democratic polis is founded, if more in principle than in practice — that the trans-human programmes and technologies of the global biosecurity state are being implemented.

At the start of the previous chapter, I asked who is the ‘we’ to whom and with whom I wished to speak if we are to find that collective voice with which we must speak if we are to make ourselves heard above the imposed and policed silence in which we have been politically isolated from each other. The simple answer is: it is the we of friendship. If we are to formulate what Agamben, in my epigraph, called a ‘future politics’ founded neither on a democracy that is employing increasingly despotic forms of control nor on a totalitarian state disguised as a democracy, we must start by reclaiming the political dimension of friendship described by Arendt as a preferable foundation to such a politics than the abstraction of fraternity.

My attention to Arendt’s talk was drawn by another talk, delivered by Agamben at a conference organised by Venetian students on 11 November, 2021, against the Italian Government’s illegal imposition of the ‘vaccine’ Green Pass. Agamben agrees with Arendt that friendship is the possible foundation for policy in the dark times that described Europe under fascism as much as they do the global biosecurity state today: so long as we remember that friendship is what he calls ‘a threshold that both unites and divides the individual with and from the community’; that rediscovering the politics of friendship means ‘nothing less than trying to create a society or a community within society everywhere’; that ‘faced with the growing depoliticisation of individuals’, friendship means ‘rediscovering in friendship the radical principle of a renewed politicisation’; and, finally, that on this rediscovery ‘will depend the very possibility of living in a human way’. So what is this community in which individuals are united, that we must establish as the basis of a future society, that is founded on a radically politicised concept of friendship, and on which a human way of living will depend in what future is left to us?

Agamben argues that, before we live in a nation or a state, we live in a language, which is the condition of all other transformations of society. Ours is the language of modernity, which began with the First Industrial Revolution in England and the political revolutions in France and the USA, which implemented, among other things, the division of powers between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary that totalitarianism renders redundant. These economic and political revolutions were preceded, however, by the scientific revolutions of the European Enlightenment, which gave birth to a language of science that has progressively sought to eliminate any ethical, poetic or philosophical experience of the world in order to transform language into a tool for the mere exchange of information. Agamben calls this ‘the illusion of reason’, which allows us to account for and govern both nature and the lives of human beings. If science, whose revolutions have increased in number as they have expanded its domination over our politics and ethics, has nevertheless failed to increase either our freedom or our happiness, it is because science presupposes not the speaking being of poetry and philosophy but a mute biological body, the bare life that is the object of our increasingly totalitarian forms of governance. As a sign displayed in the counter-demonstration against the Freedom Convoy against ‘vaccine’ mandates in Ottawa in February proudly announced, as though it were a declaration of objective truth: ‘Science doesn’t care about your beliefs’. In actuality, what the past two-and-a-half years have demonstrated is that this apotheosised Science has supplanted our beliefs, to the extent that it is now the dominant religion in the West. Today, under the totalitarianism of the global biosecurity state, whose mantra is to ‘Follow the Science!’, our relationship to language has been so transformed that — as Arendt said of the ideal subject of totalitarian rule — we are no longer capable of distinguishing a truth from a falsehood, fact from fiction, a cause of death from the criteria created to manufacture a ‘pandemic’, medical measures from the totalitarian programmes of biosecurity, a vaccine from still experimental and evidently dangerous and increasingly fatal biotechnology.

This extends even, and perhaps above all, to those to whom we have looked to make precisely this distinction: doctors, scientists, jurists, who have instead accepted and embraced a language that has renounced and even banished questions about what is true and what is false. In this respect, they have come to resemble Adolf Eichmann as Arendt described him: unable to speak in anything but officialese, capable only of obedience to their superiors, incapable of thinking outside their particular fields of technical expertise, whether that’s the biotechnology that is transforming the conditions of citizenship, or the artificial intelligence by which our compliance is monitored, or the emergency powers by which their imposition is enforced. It is for this reason that doctors, scientists and lawyers are the last people we should be listening to for the truth about this manufactured crisis, since they are, as the technocrats of the biosecurity state, at the forefront of the revolution in language through which thinking has become prohibited, not only in practice and principle but now in law. The result of their servile collaboration with power is that those we previously regarded as intellectuals with the ethical duties that entails are no longer capable, as they have shown themselves to be throughout this revolution, of doing anything but obeying orders.

How, then, do we reconcile Arendt’s concept of friendship as the basis of a future politics with this still unrecognised and — given the bad faith in which the COVID-faithful continue to live — likely to remain unacknowledged betrayal? Not by forgetting, certainly, and, speaking for myself, not forgiving what, given the cowardice and consequences of their betrayal, is unforgiveable. Yet we cannot, as I have said, abandon these fools, these cowards and these collaborators to their stupidity, their cowardice and their complicity. That way lies disaster. On the contrary, we must continue to try to speak to those who refuse to speak to us, listen to those who long ago shut their ears to anything but the lies of their superiors, try to educate and persuade those who were and still are willing to ban us from their society for our lack of belief. Because if we don’t, fascism will more surely triumph than it will, perhaps, do so anyway even if we do. And if only because, as Agamben wrote in the most poetic of the texts he has published since this ‘crisis’ began, it is with these fools, these cowards and these collaborators that we must exchange a final look as the flames of the world we once inhabited rise about us, consuming us with it. What we can imagine ourselves saying to them then we must say to them now, if only so that they may have the chance to add their voices to those silenced in the roar of a collapsing world.

2. Resistance

I want to end these considerations with an example of resistance drawn from Arendt’s report on the trial of Eichmann in which she recounts the various means by which the so-called ‘Final Solution to the Jewish question’ was implemented across Europe. This was accomplished with the collaboration of most fascist governments, including those of France, Norway, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Croatia and Serbia, and of the populations under German occupation, including those of Poland, Austria, Greece, Belgium and Holland. The one exception, she says, was Denmark. Arendt, as I said, was not given to offering simple answers to difficult questions or dispensing unwarranted praise, so we should listen when she writes that:

‘One is tempted to recommend the story as required reading in political science for all students who wish to learn something about the enormous power potential inherent in non-violent action and in resistance to an opponent possessing vastly superior means of violence.’

While Sweden, which maintained a policy of neutrality, proved to be immune to anti-Semitism, and Bulgaria and Italy, although their governments placed both native and foreign Jews into concentration camps, contrived to sabotaged German plans for their deportation to the killing centres in the East, only Denmark dared to contest the policy. Having also declared itself neutral in September 1939, Denmark was nevertheless occupied by German forces in April 1940, after which the Danish Government and King functioned as a de facto protectorate over the country, with political independence in domestic matters. However, when ordered to introduce the Yellow Star for those designated under the law of the Third Reich as Jewish, officials in the Danish Government threatened to resign. There was even a rumour that the King would be the first to wear it. As a consequence, the occupying German forces weren’t even able to establish the distinction, which was key to the process of deportation across the rest of Europe, between Danes of Jewish origin and Jewish refugees from Germany who had been declared stateless by the Third Reich. Indeed, the Danish Government explained that, since the stateless refugees were no longer German citizens, the occupying forces could no longer claim them without its assent. Most surprising of all, although the Danish Government had denied naturalisation and even the right to work to these refugees before the war, they now took them under their protection. Faced with these decisions, the Germans could carry out none of the moves preparatory to deportation, which was postponed until Autumn 1943.

With the German offensive in the Soviet Union having been defeated at Stalingrad in February 1943, the Afrika Korps having surrendered in Tunisia in May, the Battle of Kursk handing the initiative on the Eastern Front to the Red Army in August, and the Allied invasion of Italy finally launched in September, Danish workers decided the time was ripe to launch their own offensive on the home front. Industrial strikes and civil disobedience followed, with dock workers refusing to repair German naval ships in Danish shipyards. When the German army tried to seize Danish vessels in port, the Danish navy scuttled 32 of its own ships. In response, the German military commander declared a state of emergency, banned assemblies in public, outlawed strikes, introduced curfews, censored the press and radio, and imposed martial law. In protest, the Danish Cabinet resigned (although the King never officially accepted their resignation), Parliament ceased to convene, and the running of the separate Ministries was effectively handed over to the Permanent Secretaries.

Just as the UK ‘vaccination’ programme was implemented under a politically-declared ‘emergency period’ that allowed the temporary authorisation and promotion of unlicensed ‘vaccines’, it was under cover of this state of emergency that the German plan for the deportation of Denmark’s Jews was relaunched. However, in the intervening years, the German officials had changed their attitudes, no doubt under the awareness that the war was already lost and a reckoning was coming. The military commander refused to put his soldiers at the disposal of the Reich Plenipotentiary, and even the SS units occasionally objected to their murderous duties. . This was to have decisive consequences for the German plans. In 1943, the festival of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, ended on Friday, 1 October, and with their customary sense of humour the Germans had designated Friday evening for the round-up of all the Jews in Denmark, sending police units from Germany to undertake a door-to-door search of homes in Copenhagen. At the last moment, however, the Reich Plenipotentiary informed the police units that they were not permitted to break into private homes, since the Danish police might interfere, and a running battle between opposed police forces was bad for civic order. In the event, only those Jews who voluntarily opened their doors to the German police were deported, some 477 out of a population of more than 7,800 native and foreign Jews. Sent to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, even these were treated better than their fellow inmates because of the constant enquiries after their status made by Danish officials and citizens, and only 48 died, most of whom were elderly, by the time the camp was liberated in May 1945.

Even more damaging to the success of the deportations, a German shipping agent, probably tipped off by the Reich Plenipotentiary, revealed the German plans to the Danish Government, which in turn informed the heads of the Jewish community in Denmark. In contrast to other Jewish leaders — most notoriously and catastrophically in Hungary — these communicated the news in the synagogues during the New Year services, allowing the Jews to go into hiding. This was made easier by their long integration into Danish society, which viewed the attack on Danish Jews as an attack on Denmark, and therefore a political rather than a humanitarian issue. They might have remained there, however, for the remainder of the war, were it not for the solidarity shown by the Swedish Government, which in August had cancelled its 1940 agreement to permit German troops to pass through the country, and now offered to receive all the Jews in Denmark, both Danish and German. With the help of the extensive Danish fishing fleet, 5,919 Jews were ferried to Sweden, where they all received permission to work. Extraordinarily, the relatively low shipping costs were largely paid by wealthy Danish citizens at a time when only wealthy Jews could afford the small fortunes required to bribe corrupt officials across Europe for exit visas, and poor Jews, consequently, had no chance of escape.

For Arendt, the most interesting aspect of this story, politically and psychologically, is what happened to the Germans. In the face of open and principled resistance from a people, and not just a government, that refused to carry out the dictates of a totalitarian regime, the formerly iron resolve of the German authorities melted away. Indeed, some of the authorities even began to show the beginnings of courage. The vaunted ‘toughness’ of the Aryan master race was shown to be a myth of self-deception, concealing what Arendt called ‘a ruthless desire for conformity at any price’. At the subsequent Nuremberg Trials, not a single one of the defendants tried to defend the ideology of National Socialism, with every one either claiming they had always been opposed to it or, like Eichmann, blaming the abuse of their loyalty on their superiors, while denouncing each other in an attempt to save their own lives.

It is incumbent upon me, and perhaps on all of us, to compare this story of courage, resistance and solidarity to how we in the UK have behaved under different but comparable circumstances, at a time when the new totalitarianism is still very much in the process of being implemented. Part of the self-deception and lies that continue in the wake of the temporary lifting of lockdown restrictions is the denial of just how appallingly the British people have behaved towards each other over the past two-and-a-half years, and only by acknowledging and confronting that behaviour can we begin to start behaving like the citizens of a democracy, reclaim our rights and freedoms from the criminals to whom we’ve so cravenly conceded them, and begin to create that future politics we so desperately need if the new totalitarianism is not to so ravage the world that its overthrow will lie beyond any future we can see or predict. Unsurprisingly, the comparison with the behaviour and actions of the Danes under occupation by the Third Reich does us no favours.

It goes without saying that our puppet Head of State, unlike the Danish King, collaborated fully and obediently with the UK Government in promoting every regulation of the biosecurity state, from lockdown to the ‘vaccination’ programme, while at the same time playing host to parties of unmasked, unsocially-distanced heads of state from the G7 countries while the rest of the country was under threat of fines, arrest and imprisonment for doing the same. That Her Majesty’s Government was itself doing the same and more at drunken parties the night before the burial of her husband, during whose funeral service she continued to play her part in the charade of masking, social distancing and bans on indoor socialising, was, in my opinion, insufficient retribution for her collaboration with this criminal Government.

Also needless to say, not a single Member of Parliament, let alone the Cabinet, resigned in protest against the Government’s removal of the rights and freedoms of the electorate they were voted to represent. Indeed, on the few occasions when coronavirus-justified legislation was presented for their brief scrutiny and obedient approval before it was made into law, the level of debate, if one can call it that, presented a spectacle of servile collaboration, intellectual cowardice and professional incompetence fully the equal of any puppet Parliament under occupation during the Second World War. No Member of what I have consistently called the worst Parliament in British history should ever be permitted to hold any public office again. All are complicit in enabling if not actually implementing the UK biosecurity state, and are collectively responsible for the ongoing damage it is doing to the UK and its people.

But the collaboration didn’t stop there. While the Danes refused to separate native-born Jews from Jewish refugees from Germany, the British people recognised and embraced the arbitrary distinctions by which the Government divided us from each other, whether that was between those who were and were not exempt from the various restrictions, or between those designated ‘vaccinated’ and ‘unvaccinated’. Those who declared themselves exempt from masking, or who paid for fake proof of injection, merely gave the appearance of legality to what were illegally imposed regulations; while those who declared that getting ‘vaccinated’ was a personal decision they had chosen to make, in doing so turned their back on the consequences of their actions for those who took a principled stand against what mass compliance was enabling.

In comparison to the Danish workers who refused to comply with the German occupation and even dared to sabotage their war effort, no such stance or action was made by our unfailingly servile unions, who instead responded to the state of emergency by abandoning those workers who refused mandates on everything from masking at work to ‘vaccination’ as a condition of employment, and joined the political Left in and out of Parliament in refusing to join and instead denouncing the overwhelmingly working-class opposition in marches and demonstrations as right-wing conspiracy theorists. The current strikes by the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union only demonstrate what could have happened if the unions had had the courage to do more than demand higher wages for their workers, and had instead defended all workers against the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in UK history we call ‘lockdown’.

As for the military, while even the occupying German forces refused to participate in the Final Solution in Denmark, necessitating the arrival of German police units to do their dirty work, the British military, rapidly formed into the ‘COVID Support Force’, was visibly present on our streets. Ostensibly employed to aid with the building of temporary Nightingale Hospitals that were never used or carrying out medically meaningless tests that justified further lockdowns, the presence of the military was a threat to suppress any civil unrest during the state of emergency. Since Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his legions and entered Italy in defiance of Roman law, the presence of the military on home soil has been a sign that a society is living under a dictatorship, and the fact that ours was constitutional does nothing to change that truth. Indeed, the Government did not hesitate to threaten to ‘send in the army’ should the protests against lockdown and ‘vaccine’ mandates continue.

Arendt argues that one of the characteristics of totalitarian governments is that the police forces have greater power than the armed forces, and since lockdown was imposed the already great powers of the UK police forces have increased exponentially, to the point where they now constitute a politicised police force whose primary function is to enforce adherence not merely to the regulations of the biosecurity state but to its totalitarian ideology. Again, while the Danish police force presented a barrier to the German police conducting door-to-door searches for Jews, UK police forces the length and breadth of the country, whether empowered to do so by new regulations as in Wales or without that legal power in England, did not hesitate to break into private homes to enforce lockdown restrictions. And now, in the wake of those restrictions being lifted, the same invasion of privacy beyond even their newly created legal powers is being conducted by police for such newly-created crimes as posting comments on social media that have caused someone, somewhere, offence or anxiety. For this our police have rightly been compared to the fictional ‘Thought Police’ of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the ideology they’re enforcing is composed of the orthodoxies of woke. Those who have dismissed fears about the uses to which the raft of new legislation will be put have been brought up short at how ready and willing our ideological police force is to enforce the newly designated crimes to the letter of the new laws and beyond.

And while the heads of the Jewish community in Denmark risked their own lives to give the members of that community a chance to escape the imminent pogrom, the equivalent heads of community in the UK, not only of the Jewish community but of the Muslim, Christian, Asian and Black communities, have provided a crucial conduit between biosecurity regulations and programmes and communities which, from long experience, have learned to distrust central, municipal and local governments. Indeed, SAGE’s sub-group on Social and Behavioural Impacts (SPI-B) explicitly targeted community leaders as the key to compliance in these religious, ethnic and racial communities. It’s to their credit that the Black community, particularly in London, has in general refused the criminal ‘vaccination’ programme, and constitutes one of the highest demographics of non-compliance. This is something the middle classes arrogantly attribute to that community’s ignorance and lack of education, but which is clearly attributable to its far greater experience and knowledge of the corruption and lies of officialdom.

With the honourable exception of a handful or public figures who have dared to put their heads above the parapet of conformity and compliance (and who were very quickly targeted by the propaganda arm of the biosecurity state for doing so), none of the UK’s immensely wealthy and potentially influential individuals have raised a finger to help, let alone offered to assist financially, those most affected by the restrictions of the biosecurity state. These are, of course, the working class and the poor, who rightly understand this politically-declared ‘pandemic’ as a global form of class war — something the middle classes are only now, perhaps, beginning to recognise as the cost of living soars.

And while Danish civic institutions and individuals alike held on to as much of the pastoral care they could over the Jews deported to Theresienstadt, to the marked diminishment of their fatality rate, in the UK, in contrast, individuals and institutions alike have abandoned those in their care to the bare life they became as soon as they pass the doors of our hospitals and care homes: incubated, injected with powerful sedatives, denied resuscitation, and refused visits from anyone outside the legal state of exception to which these medical facilities gave spatial permanence. And worst of all, those who, either personally or professionally, should have done everything they could to protect the vulnerable from these dehumanising and in most cases fatal conditions, were happy to participate in their disappearance into the biosecurity archipelago, which continues to this day.

Finally, and once again to its credit, just as Sweden was largely immune to the ideology of anti-Semitism and the authority of Race the occupying German forces tried to force upon it in the 1940s, so its Government and people have been more immune to the ideology of biosecurity and the authority of an apotheosised Science than any other country in Europe, having refused to deny work to the ‘unvaccinated’ as did the UK Government.

The only comparison in which we can recognise ourselves with parity is the backtracking, rewriting of history and denials of complicity in the demands for masking, lockdown, mandatory ‘vaccines’ and COVID passports by public figures both in and out of office who, like the occupying German authorities in Denmark, suspect the war might be lost and that, one day, the Nuremberg Trials so many opposed to their criminal behaviour have called for will be convened. This shows how ignorant they are of the revolution in capitalism they have served, and of which they have been the more or less unwitting tools. Unfortunately, the war has only just begun, and whatever trials may one day bring these collaborators to justice lies on the other side of the long defeat of the Global Biosecurity State.

As I know well and have on occasion been guilty of myself, in attempting to warn against our descent into totalitarianism, one can fall into mimicking its ideologues’ predictions of catastrophe. Both must be resisted by a practice of thinking and of action that, while not averting its eyes from this descent, retains its hold on the world of experience from which our moral collapse increasingly separates us. While it is more than evident that the Danish people, in civil society and their social interactions, continued to think, continued to debate and continued to humanise the totalitarian world the occupation forces of Germany tried to force upon them, we have just as evidently stopped thinking, stopped debating and given up humanising the global biosecurity state whose governance, laws and ideology we have embraced with the same cowardice as those who, willingly or under threat, collaborated with the implementation of the Final Solution. Indeed, over the past two-and-a-half years of active collusion and passive compliance, the people and civic institutions of the UK have failed, at every turn, to act as the people and civic institutions of Denmark acted under occupation by the Third Reich, and have instead experienced something like that ‘moral collapse’ that Arendt said gripped the German people during the twelve years of the latter’s political existence. And like the German people then, we are not alone in that collapse, which like fascism in the 1930s has spread across Europe in the 2020s. Unfortunately, the Government of Denmark has, if anything, distinguished itself this time by the brutality of the enforcement of this ideology, rather than its resistance to it. But as we look forward to the reinstatement of many of the restrictions and obligations of the global biosecurity state and the implementation of many more with which we are currently being threatened, it is not too late to learn from the historical example of Danish resistance. It is, at its most simple, a question of courage, of refusing the right to obey, of reclaiming the space of friendship, of sowing the seeds of a future politics in the ground of the present — however dark the time grows.

Simon Elmer
Architects for Social Housing

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-March 2021)
• COVID-19: Implementing the UK Biosecurity State (March-August 2020)

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