As the third anniversary of Canada’s March 25, 2020, COVID-19 emergency lockdowns and health policies approaches, a growing community of critics is taking shape that raises fundamental questions about the heavy-handed state interventions that continue to rock the world, including the world economy. Hard-line criticisms are not new, but in the past have come mostly from the political right. But a new surge of critics seems to be rising on the left.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

Try refreshing your browser, or
tap here to see other videos from our team.

Terence Corcoran: The left finally wakes to authoritarian nature of COVID lockdowns Back to video

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

Try refreshing your browser, or
tap here to see other videos from our team.

Play Video

An indicator of the existing and expanding conservative/libertarian movement to question the lockdowns are papers from the Fraser Institute and a new book published Tuesday by the Calgary-based Haultain Research Institute — an updated version of “Canada’s Covid: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic” published last year. Written by Barry Cooper and Marco Navarro-Genie, it delves deep into the policy machinery that gave rise to the massive Canadian and global response to the COVID-19 virus.

Cooper and Navarro-Genie cover the science, politics and economics of the lockdowns, but they also spend many pages tying the lockdowns to authoritarian impulses to use fear to trigger interventions, an argument supported in part by references to a long line of philosophers, including Hanna Arendt, the 20th century political writer whose most famous book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, deals with the use of “fear” to drive expanded government roles in society.

While filled with concrete evidence that details the different forms of political and scientific deception inflicted on Canadians — from masking rules to misleading death-rate statistics and drug overdoses — Canada’s COVID sets the lockdowns into a grand sweep of ideological history from Karl Marx to Immanuel Kant to Alexis de Tocqueville.

Cooper and Navarro-Genie argue their case against the COVID lockdowns from what would be considered the right-wing conservative view of the world.

But a new critical thread leading to the same conclusions is emerging on the left. Three Canadian academics have just published a paper calling for major new research from “the academic left” to probe what the authors consider to be political abuse of pandemic fear and the use of “catastrophizing” to justify the imposition of authoritarian policies. “We need a sustained collaborate research effort that investigates why the Academic Left lost sight of established anti-authoritiarian thinking,” say the authors.

Published January 23 in a scholarly Swedish journal, the paper is titled “The academic left, human geography, and the rise of authoritarianism during the COVID-19 pandemic.” It was written by geographers Dragos Simandan of Brock University and Claus Rinner and Valentina Capurri at Toronto Metropolitan University.

The hope of the three Canadian geographers, as “habitually critical, progressive academics,” is to “spur the growth of a new wave of anti-authoritarian Leftist geographical thinking that reaffirms the centrality of human rights and civil liberties to make the world a better place.”

They too site Arendt: “That the deliberate spreading of fear was often a key governmental manoeuvre for increasing population compliance should have been an early red flag for geographers and social scientists familiar with the nefarious politics of this emotion, as exposed by luminaries such as … Hannah Arendt.” But the academic left fell mostly silent through the lockdown fear mongering. In scathing language and supported by detailed references to the academic world’s response to the emerging COVID repression, the paper thoroughly documents its case.

Their objective is to “call attention to the emerging literature critiquing the authoritarian excesses of the COVID-19 pandemic response.” What, they ask, might have led to a failure of the academic world to challenge the rising authoritarian bent of pandemic policies? “A distinctly worrying possibility, we argue, is that the anaemic critique of the authoritarian dimension of the pandemic response might reflect or harbinger the rise of authoritarian attitudes and practices within the Academic Left and human geography themselves.”

A strong accusation, but one that comes with hundreds of bits of evidence piled up through the pages of the paper, dense with references, citations and quotations, including this one from a pair of Radical Marxist scholars in a 2020 paper that describes the bizarre corner in which the Left painted itself. “The left’s newly discovered love for state authority and organs enforcing these measures, a love in the name of the ‘vulnerable,’ precisely reflects a radical indifference towards the precariat and ‘underclass.'”

In a January 25 public Substack post on the paper — Calling on the Left to do What’s Right — co-author Claus Rinner summarizes the challenge he and his colleagues faced to get their paper published, fully peer-reviewed, in the Swedish journal. Challenges with other journals included delays, fiddling, calls for rewrites, length reductions, all leading to nothing.

How did the world end up with the pandemic lockdown crisis? Rinner summarizes the paper’s conclusions. “For answers, we refer to disproportionate and sensationalist media reporting, social media feedback loops, ‘groupthink’ among decision-makers, manufactured consent, and other social and psychological mechanisms leading to calls for more, rather than less, authoritarian measures. We deplore the abandonment of freedom and individual autonomy as shared values by the Left. The politicization of many aspects of the COVID response resulted in further defensiveness within camps and a ‘fear of guilt by association’ with the ‘wrong side.'”

In specific terms, the paper often reflects the same issues raised by critics on the conservative/libertarian side of the lockdown crisis. One of their shots is taken at the lack of “cost-benefit” research prior to the imposition of health regulations — issues raised at length by Douglas Allen, a Simon Fraser University economist whose two papers for the Fraser Institute summarize the failure to study risks created by the lockdowns. In one paper, Lockdowns: A Final Assessment, “All of the lockdown efforts amounted to almost nothing,” writes Allen. His paper, along with others, will soon be published in book form by the Fraser Institute.

Over the last three years, anti-lockdown ideas such as Allen’s and those raised in the revised Haultain book have been systematically branded as unhinged right-wing Trumpian denialism of the true risks of the COVID-19 pandemic and of the need for strong government interventions. The new paper by the Canadian geographers sets the record straight on the right wing conspiracy idea. Above all, it draws attention to the fact that anti-lockdown commentary on the left is global and reaches back to the early days of the pandemic but has been suppressed, often by others on the left.

A good example is Giorgio Agamben, a famed 80-year-old Italian philosopher described not long ago in the International Socialism journal as a complex but valued philosopher who “offers an analysis from which Marxists and indeed all revolutionaries can learn.”

But that was in 2013. In early 2020, Agamben denounced the application of emergency lockdown measures that stifled democracies and freedom. He blogged about “The Invention of an Epidemic” and in a paper Agamben said the issue “is nothing less than the creation of a sort of ‘health terror’ as an instrument for governing what are called ‘worst case scenarios.'”

For this and other writings, Agamben was heavily criticized by leftists writing in Slate and The New York Times. Last October, a student lecture at Stanford University by Agamben on lockdowns was cancelled and his views subsequently condemned by the organizers.

But that attitude may be changing. Taken together, these three fresh sources of lockdown criticism — Fraser and Haultain on the right and the new paper documenting the left side of argument — provide a useful starting point for what will certainly, in time, become the focus of even more detailed and comprehensive investigations into the ideological forces and science that drove lockdown responses around the world, imposing real economic costs and political losses that continue to impact the world.

What were the real benefits?

Over the last three years, anti-lockdown ideas have been systematically suppressed. Maybe what the world needs now is for intellectuals on left and the right to come together.

Financial Post