Yeah, I do need some more explanation before understanding this one. Are you talking about the use of social media for propaganda? If that's the case, I have some news for you, the pandemics only destroyed it, it was being used that way for years already.
> destroying small businesses in favor of large corporations
I suspect this refers to small mom-and-pop shops and restaurants that couldn’t survive the lock downs. Much bigger chains seem to have survived better.
* Austria made vaccines mandatory. You got a letter from the government saying "present yourself at this time and place to get a vaccine". Making a vaccine whose long term effects are not known mandatory is an abuse of power IMO. There were talks of this in Germany too but luckily the officials were more level headed there.
* Despite taking literally daily tests, I was not allowed into any establishment inside Germany since I did not have a vaccine pass. The only place I could go for months was the supermarket -- it got so bad I left Germany temporarily get away from the measures.
* Lockdowns and curfews abound. My grandparents (not in Germany) were not allowed outside the house except for 1 hour a day, and they had to write down their route exactly in case the police checked them.
* This is from the people, not the government, but the amount of people who would blindly say "trust the science behind the vaccines" is.. insane. Do they understand the concept of science at all? You cannot prove there are no long term effects of a newly developed vaccine, also using a newly developed method of creating vaccines, without an experiment. No matter how smart the scientists are. Trust is not a thing in science. (The same can be said of COVID, but then _let me make my own choice_, based on my own risk factors)
Ok... but that mostly just seems like Germany. At least the stereotype of Germany is that all the rules are very strict and it's very important to follow them.
On the high-speed train gliding smoothly from Berlin to Düsseldorf, a young man started chatting to me. He eventually asked, “What are some of the cultural differences you’ve noticed between Germans and Americans?”
As if on cue, a middle-aged woman hovered over us and gave a harsh, “Shh!” with her finger pressed against her lips. She pointed to a sign of a mobile phone with a cross through it, indicating that we were in the Ruhebereich, the quiet carriage of the train.
“You must be quiet,” she said, before returning to her seat.
“That,” I said to the man sitting next to me. “That’s different.”
As their eyes alight on the small sign that goes with it, which reads “barefoot zone” in German, grown men freeze as though they have hit a force field, or had an electric shock administered for being foolish enough to try to pass it still shod. But I can not say what the repercussions would be. This being Germany, I have never seen anyone wearing shoes on the far side of the line and certainly would not risk it myself.
These are articles published in respectable, mainstream, western news. I'm not alone in thinking that German society is somewhat stricter than most other western societies.
You are right in saying Germans love to follow rules. The restrictions in Italy were also not as hard as in Germany. I gave the example of Germany since that's where I lived during the pandemic, but Poland for example I heard was similar to Germany, and much of Eastern Europe was _worse_ (since for them it was properly life or death -- all the doctors left, and the medical infrastructure is in shambles).
>Italian citizens and permanent residents can get a super green pass when they get vaccinated or recover from Covid. The green pass is the equivalent of the EU Digital COVID Certificate, issued to EU citizens and residents as digital proof that a person has either:
- been vaccinated against COVID-19
- recovered from COVID-19
- received a negative test result
I don't disagree that governments have imposed restrictive COVID measures, especially in Europe. I just am pointing out some limitations and caveats in your examples that makes them less damning than they seem as supposed "abuses of power". At a high level, I agree with you.
Edit: the shift from "use of power" to talking about "abuse of power" was itself a strawman by marcosdumay. We all got baited.
About the cultists repeating "trust the science" or even better, the attack "you don't believe on the science!", yeah, those are about as stupid as the people doubting the main vaccines are safe up to now.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, many people in the West took for granted the freedom and mobility that we enjoy in our societies. We assumed that the government would never impose drastic measures such as curfews or lockdowns, because these measures are often associated with authoritarian regimes. However, the pandemic has forced us to reevaluate these assumptions, because as soon as some governments in the West saw how well it "worked" in China they decided to implement the same thing.
Where in the West were there actual curfews? In the U.S. I don't remember there being any; just some talk about potentially quarantining NYC which of course never actually happened.
These comment threads about covid drive me nuts. At times more people were dying _per day_ from covid than died from the terror attack on 9/11, but there has been far more long term government overreach from 9/11 than there was the short term blip of emergency measures from covid.
