Neil Oliver: Governments amount to hundreds, while we amount to millions - they are few and we are many

Here we stand on the brink of a new world – a world in which our governments have the final say about what we do with our bodies – a world in which governments have the final say on what must be done to our children’s bodies.

Germany is closer to the edge than us, so too Austria and others. German politicians will hold a vote to decide whether vaccines should be compulsory.

On Thursday they decreed that those who had not, so far, accepted the vaccines would be barred from all non-essential businesses … bars, restaurants, cinemas and the like.

This is the same game Austria has already played. Doors are closing, options grow limited.

Here in Great Britain, our own elected representatives are sniffing the wind and weighing their own options.

Last week Oliver Dowden, co-chair of the Conservative party, was asked what he thought about the steps taken in Germany and Austria – what he thought of the notion of making it illegal to refuse the vaccine.

He said: “It’s not something that we want to do or plan to do in the United Kingdom … hopefully won’t have to do any of that … as long as people, when they get the call up, take the booster.“

I noticed the use, inadvertent or not, of “call up” – nice military echo, there. One, two, stand by your bed.

He was pressed to say if he would simply declare that compulsory vaccines were wrong – wrong in principle – and that as far as he was concerned his party, his government, should and would never do such a thing. Not under any circumstances.

But Oliver Dowden would not and did not say that. Presumably because he could not. He twisted and turned like a hooked fish – the bait swallowed and the hook fast – but his position was plain to see, glinting in the light. He would not rule out compulsory vaccines for all.

His answer boiled down only to, “As long as you get the jab, we won’t have to force you.”

Here’s the thing:

Any politician, any government that will not unilaterally and unequivocally rule out compulsory vaccines … is just waiting to see when the time is right to bring them in. I say that what we are watching here is a government biding its time, sensing which way the wind is blowing on the continent and in the rest of the world, waiting its turn to do as Austria and Germany have done, and as others will surely do soon.

EU chief Ursula von der Leyen has already called for compulsory vaccination in all of its member states.

And so here we are, on the brink.

Mercifully, it is not all bad news. No, really – it is not all bad news. Barring only the unvaccinated from bars and cinemas and the rest, making the vaccines an unavoidable, legal requirement for participation in the ordinary stuff of life – these are the contents of a closed box politicians all over the world have been contemplating for a while.

It’s a box I think they always planned to open eventually. It was always and only a matter of time, a matter of when. But, I say again that it is not all bad news, because the contents of that box – that box in which lies the ultimate say over own bodies, our children’s bodies, our freedom to live our lives unmolested – are dangerous for all.

Because once that box is fully opened, the masks – and I don’t mean the trillions of strips of plasticised fabric presently littering the streets, hanging from trees and fences, sinking into our oceans and choking the life out of wildlife – I mean the masks disguising totalitarians as democrats and liberals … will finally be off.

And that, emerging as though from chrysalis as a fully-fledged totalitarian, takes some nerve.

As they do say, you can’t ride two horses with only one backside. If our elected representatives open that box, the days of masquerading as freedom-loving, liberal-minded public servants, the trustees of generations of democracy, will be over, for ever. Once that box is open, once we step over that edge, there will be no going back for anyone.

Is cuddly, messy-haired Boris Johnson, really going to stand up and declare himself the sort that would insist that he and his colleagues, and not we citizens, have the right to decide what happens to our bodies, and our children’s bodies? The same Boris Johnson who so reveres Winston Churchill?

The Churchill who spoke so effectively about the duty to stand up to tyranny so that people might be free to proceed towards the sunlit uplands?

Would that version of Boris Johnson be prepared to sanction the kind of tyranny, and then force, that would surely be required in order to get a vaccination – multiple doses of a vaccination – into every arm?

I don’t know the answers to those questions because I cannot look into his or anybody else’s heart. But when I say the cold wind of compulsory vaccines is not all bad news, I mean it – because it will reveal the truth of what governments here and around the world are really all about. And the truth sets you free.

What, anyway, will be the truth, the reality, of compulsory vaccinations. I have wondered what they will look like. No doubt it starts with tighter and tighter lockdown for the unclean – more and more restrictions on movement until such folk are effectively shut up in their homes. There will be loss of jobs, punitive fines, confiscation of property, maybe seizing of bank accounts – the opportunities are endless for a government seeking to force people to do that which they do not want to do.

But eventually, I imagine, if all else fails, it must come down to force – naked force. Eventually it comes down to a citizen held down in a room and a needle stuck into his or her arm. I know that sounds dramatic – and it is – but if a government decrees that every man, woman and child has to take the vaccine, willingly or not, well, force is how it ends.

I also wonder about who, when push comes to shove, is holding the syringes and sticking the needles into flesh. Physicians take oaths about first doing no harm, and about the inviolable sanctity of informed consent – which is to say understanding what’s about to happen to your body and being 100 percent happy about it.

And the free man or woman always, always having the right to say no – and to have that no respected without fear of disabling consequences.

I wonder about doing no harm and informed consent, and then I wonder how many physicians will be prepared forcibly to inject people who are unwilling, people who have simply said no. And if not physicians, then who will get the job done?

Covid is an illness that is survived by 99 percent of those who contract it. The vaccines don’t stop people contracting the illness, nor passing it on to others. As for the Omicron variant, many scientists, including in Africa, where it was first identified, say that so far it has resulted only in mild symptoms and there is no doubt that there are many questions remaining to be answered about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines.

From the beginning of vaccination, those questions have been silenced. That strategy makes no sense to me, and seems plain wrong. Already we know for certain that uncountable millions of people – children among them – have suffered dreadfully on account of the lockdowns and other measures already endured. Even as we seek to comprehend how much damage has been done, politicians, scientists and the mainstream media are howling, from throats wide open, for more of the same.

I say, and in this I speak only for myself, that the idea of compulsory vaccines in these circumstances is an evil one. Evil.

Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn survived to tell the tale of life in the Gulags, the work camps of the Soviet Union. He wrote:

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.”

For now, I choose to believe, at least to hope, that unmasked totalitarianism – such as we shall shortly see in Germany and Austria and elsewhere if and when vaccines are made compulsory and then enforced – that enough people will be so repelled by the behaviour of their leaders, and their leaders’ servants, that they will stand up and say no. And mean it.

The line separating good and evil passes through all human hearts. I believe that. I know it runs through mine and that I have the capacity to do wrong as well as right.

The outcome of all this is up to us. And there is something else worth remembering every day.

I have said it before and I will say it again now.

Governments amount to hundreds, while we amount to millions. They are few and we are many.