Imagine a classification system that not only categorizes us according to our health status, but also allows the state to classify us in a hundred other ways: by gender, orientation, wealth, medical condition, religious beliefs, political viewpoint, legal status, etc.
This is the slippery slope we are embarked on, one that begins with vaccine passports and ends with a national system of segregation.
With each passing day, more and more private businesses and establishments are requiring users to provide proof of a COVID-19 vaccine in order to work, travel, shop, go to school, and generally participate in social life.
By allowing any agent of the State (police, civil guard, RENFE conductor, etc.) to establish a litmus test for people to be able to participate in commerce, circulation and any other right that corresponds to life in a supposedly free society, it lays the foundation for a “show me your papers” society in which we are obliged to identify ourselves at any time to any public official who demands it for any reason. If there were no “pandemic” involved, no self-identified “leftist” would hesitate to call this regime a fascist regime.
These state practices are rapidly escalating to a power grab that empowers the state or any company to force to prove compliance with all apparently sanitary measures. We say apparently because after each Royal Decree or autonomic decree related to the management of the “pandemic” contains, additionally, a whole panoply of economic, fiscal or surveillance measures that no media publishes.
This is also how the right to move freely has been undermined, suppressed and rewritten into a privilege granted by the government to those citizens who are willing to toe the line or who enjoy a social pre-eminence which, as it could not be otherwise in a fascist state, is associated with its economic power.
Now, vaccine passports, requirements for admission to public establishments and travel restrictions may seem like small and necessary steps to win the war against the virus, but that is nothing more than pure propaganda. Mostly they are necessary measures for the police state in its efforts to further brainwash the population into believing that the government has the right and power to enforce such blatant acts of authoritarianism.
This is how an entire society is imprisoned and locked up. In other times such police state tactics were carried out in the name of national security or in the fight against ETA, but now, the power concentrated by the state is done in the name of health, because the state has always been concerned about our health.
The fight against terrorism, where the State was attributed and provided with laws of exception (Anti-terrorist Law, Law of Parties), turned out to be a policy that went far beyond the terrorist excuse; it was a concentration of powers where the cases of repression that we have seen in social networks during the confinement could not be conceived without those antecedents.
The militarization of the fight against immigration or the so-called Operation Balmis turned out to be a rehearsal of the future involvement of the armed forces in street policing. And this “war” against COVID-19 (this is how former JEMAD Miguel Ángel Villarroya described it in one of his press conferences in April 2020) is turning out to be yet another war against the right of assembly, expression and any civil right, waged with all the surveillance weapons and tracking mechanisms available to the State.
When they talk about “providing us with laws empowering the Autonomous Communities to screen the population in order to control and prevent the spread of this virus”, what they are really talking about is creating a society in which ID cards, raids, checkpoints and detention centers become routine.
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