Vaccine passports serve a purpose for international travel. There’s little use or need for them on a domestic level.
Certification between countries where tried, time-tested, scientifically indisputable safe and effective vaccines are necessary for pragmatic tourism.
Abstracted from this context those passports are arguably problematic.
A “papers please” police state is built on a culture of suspicion. There is no due process. No mercy. No habeas corpus.
Domestic papers which grant permission for movement and privilege are also the substance of caste systems.
When discussing India’s Affirmative Action programs, Thomas Sowell explains that although India is the ‘world’s largest multi-ethnic society, it’s the most socially fragmented.’
There’s a hierarchy. The lowest are the “backward classes”. Such as ‘tribal groups outside the mainstream, and the “untouchables” (Dalits).’
India’s Dalits ‘constitute about 16% of the country’s total population, and members of the backward tribes another 8%.”
Sowell adds, ‘these two very poor and historically outcast groups are greatly outnumbered by members of the “other backward classes, who constitute 52% of all Indians.’
He continues, the “untouchables” have been outcastes in the literal sense of not being one of the four broad categories of castes recognised by the Hindu religion.’
Consequently, ‘they could not draw water from the same well used by caste Hindus – and, in some places, still could not in practice, decades after they had the legal right to do so.’
Dalits face restrictions and ostracization.
For instance, in the 1930s,
‘…discrimination against harijans (untouchables) extended to restrictions on entry into cafes and “eating houses,” access to village amenities like wells and cemeteries, and on the clothes they wore – their right to wear shoes was a frequent point of contention.’
Social stigma encourages social fragmentation.
Violence against outcastes, Sowell states, has been widespread.
Citing an article from 2001, in India’s The Hindu, ‘attacks on Dalits (most often orchestrated by collectives representing upper caste interests) and even massacres of men, women and children are indeed a regular feature in most parts of the country.’
Though these ‘horrors are in retreat’; affirmative action programs such as a quota system benefiting the “backward classes” has ‘eliminated what goodwill the upper castes had for the lower castes.’
‘Partly,’ Sowell writes, ‘because of an overestimation of the effectiveness of preferential policies’, which only end up benefited a very small amount of those they’re designed to help.
Sowell’s conclusion: preferential policies create ‘poisonous intergroup relations and [are] real dangers to the fabric of society.’
When it comes to advocates of the COVax domestic passport, two points of relevance exist.
First, the non-COVax are already being treated like they’re part of a “backward class.” Dismissed as “anti-vaxx”; “anti-science” troglodytes.
Why would anyone jump onto the same boat as a bully, who’s also happy for you to be oppressed, until you do as they do?
Secondly, pro-COVax privileges are preferential policies. This is affirmative action. In the words of believers: ‘positive discrimination.’
Why would any sane person support as system that divides the people, and feeds bad government?
Many in Australia’s media are vying for the very things that in any other context, that same media would be crying out against.
A caste system isn’t going to end COVID or the widespread COVID madness attached to it.
Such as India’s Hindu scheduled class structure. Where Dalits and the “backward classes” face (and have faced) restrictions and ostracization.
Is it religion or science that justifies this?
An apartheid between the COVaxxed and un-COVaxxed will carve a caste system in the fabric of Australian life.
This isn’t something to celebrate or welcome. It’s something to resist because precedent matters.
Informed consent should be respected. Any erosion of civil liberties, rejected. This isn’t hard to add up.
It’s one thing to encourage the COVax. It’s another to demonise others, and beg the Government to take away rights because other people have chosen to show more discernment in their decision making.
The media in Australia are choosing militant medical tyranny, over a duty of care to make sure “democracy doesn’t die in darkness.”
India has the longest running affirmative action programs in the world. These programs had a use-by date, and yet they’ve been extended and expanded time and time again.
Remember, when discussing the issue of mandatory COVax and certification, we’re talking domestic “papers please” police state oppression, not pragmatic tourism.
The former we have no choice over. The latter we do.
Give the government an inch on this, and they’ll run a mile.
If that happens, Democracy’s death certificate will read: cause of death, a complicit and compliant media re: COVID-19.
First published on Caldron Pool, 3rd August 2021.
©Rod Lampard, 2021.
