Emergency Talk is a Weapon of Mass Control. It Must be Disarmed.

Anyone who has lived on the planet Earth over the past two and a half years - at least anyone with access to national and international media - will have noticed that the media was saturated with “emergency talk” for the greater part of 2020-2022. For most of that time, it was the Corona pandemic. Later, it was the looming energy crisis and the war in the Ukraine. We seem to be lurching from one public emergency to another.

Some people claim that such emergencies have been invented out of thin air in order to legitimate illicit power grabs. The truth is more subtle than that: the corona pandemic constituted a genuine emergency, at least in the initial months that it swept across the globe, but the rhetoric surrounding it - the way in which corona emergency talk was utilised by governments - was hyped up to a point where it lost touch with reality, and became a convenient pretext for expanding government powers.

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Here is one dictionary definiton of an “emergency”: “something dangerous or serious, such as an accident, that happens suddenly or unexpectedly, and needs fast action in order to avoid harmful results.” Stated in this very general way, we could plausibly describe the corona pandemic as a public “emergency” - there was a broad consensus among epidemiologists and political leaders that some sort of concerted response was required, to minimize the potential harms of Covid-19 in hospitals, care homes, and vulnerable populations.

Peculiarities of the Corona Emergency Response

But the devil is in the detail.