Vaccine mandates: Is there a nonviolent solution? Opinion

“’If each Jew in Germany had been prepared to take one SS trooper with him before he was sent to the camps and the gas ovens, precious few Jews would have been arrested,’ Emil Groteschele argued. ‘At some point Hitler and the SS would have stopped. Face it. If every Jew who was arrested had walked to the door with a pistol in his hand and started shooting at the local heroes, how long would the Nazis have kept it up? At around a few hundred they would have started to think twice. At a few thousand they would have started to shake a bit. If it got to twenty thousand, they would have called it off. But the first Jews who shuffled quietly off to death camps or hid like mice in attics were instruments of destruction of the rest.’”

FAIL SAFE, 1962

Government and societal COVID-19 responses have been characterized by what appear conceptually to be like two parallel universes. On the one hand, there are thousands of physicians, scientists, and experts worldwide who hold that the nature and severity of the COVID-19 outbreak is not what it was predicted to be, and that responses by most governments have been wrongheaded at best, and have only exacerbated the death toll and general “misery index”, with some going so far as to accuse proponents of these policies of crimes against humanity and mass murder.On the other hand, there are the government officials, and the doctors and scientists upon whom they rely, who relate to COVID-19, at least in public statements if not in private conviction and behavior, as no less than an enemy and strategic threat to national security, thus forming the basis to apply draconian measures and police brutality to individuals and communities deemed to be providing aid and comfort to this enemy.

Elderly man collapses amid spasms during arrest for 'failing to wear face mask' in public. The incident was filmed Monday in Brisbane's Botanic Gardens after Queensland's lockdown was extended.

In the years or months remaining to us of journalistic freedom, it may be worthwhile to explore what conflicting conceptions motivate and inform these two divergent interpretations of reality, and whether a nonviolent conclusion to this conflict is possible.The 1962 novel Fail Safe was adapted into a 1964 Cold War thriller film portraying a fictional account of a nuclear crisis, that starred Dan O'Herlihy as Brigadier General Warren A. "Blackie" Black, USAF, and Walter Matthau as Walter Groteschele.Fail Safe tells the story of the United States starting a nuclear war with the Soviet Union that cannot be stopped because of a technological system that precludes the possibility of human intervention. According to Steve Anderson, in Fail Safe, a technological malfunction triggers an unstoppable chain of events where "trained, obedient soldiers become an extension of a faulty technological apparatus, literally executing the programs of an attack scenario designed to prevent any deviation from orders, no matter how illogical or apocalyptic they may be," resulting in the nuclear destruction of Moscow and New York.Anderson continued: “Fail Safe enforces a rigid dichotomy between the compassionate, level-headed humanity of the U.S. President played by Henry Fonda, and the cold corporatism of his German-American national security advisor, Professor Groteschele played by Walter Matthau. Groteschele, who was transparently modeled on RAND Corporation military strategist Herman Kahn, who also inspired Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, is aligned with the computational logic of the computer systems responsible for the crisis as he coldly calculates the number of casualties that may be expected from detonating a nuclear bomb over New York.”