GLOBAL RESEARCH - Dr. Emanuel Garcia - JUL 18, 2022
If there is a silver lining to the catastrophic Covid experience for us here in New Zealand it is the very clear and indisputable exposure of the political establishment. The green clean smiling benevolent face of the New Zealand government is nothing more than a mask – yes, a mask – behind which is harsh dictatorial mien of a government that feels no need to answer to the needs of the people it purports to govern.
During the brief but compelling and compellingly beautiful gathering of the people at Parliament earlier this year, repeated calls for governmental officials simply to meet and simply to discuss issues of import, such as their imposed mandates and societal apartheid that resulted from them, went blithely and purposefully unheeded. Not one single politician from the Prime Minister’s office on down fulfilled their good-faith political obligations by engaging with those from whom they derive their political power.
Furthermore, on the eve of the brutal and unnecessary invasion of Parliament grounds to clear the protesters, it became clear that those in office never had a wish to engage. I was a member of a small task force who the afternoon before, at 1:30 PM to be precise, had gathered in Wellington to negotiate a settlement of the impasse. The police representative who was to join us cancelled at the last minute.
Later that same afternoon I sat as an observer at a meeting of the Human Rights Commission as a number of petitioners presented evidence of the harm against fundamental human rights, evidence of police abuses and other poignant testimony about the harsh consequences of the mandates. An honest Human Rights Commissioner would have taken up the mantle of protecting those whose rights had been violated and would be violated further by violence. He didn’t.
These past two and a half years have seen those who were, during that first harsh lockdown, lauded and thanked for being ‘essential workers’ terminated from their roles as physicians, nurses, midwives and other health-care practitioners for deciding personally and for their own reasons of health and conscience that a hastily concocted genetic inoculation masquerading as a vaccine was not for them.
As a psychiatrist who worked within the system in the general Wellington region and saw firsthand the tenuous nature of mental health services – services characterised by endemic staff shortages, variable levels of skill, and a form of management style emanating from the top which I can only describe as peculiarly vicious, corrupt and inept – the termination of much-needed and highly competent colleagues was a strange, sad and ironic testament to irrationality and a cold heedlessness of the public weal.
I remember working as a psychiatrist during the first lockdown, making home visits, volunteering time at a local primary care facility when I was on leave, and generally carrying on as one would expect a doctor to do: it was no big deal and I bristled at the division of society into ‘essential’ and ‘non-essential’. This division, however, was a template for the later division of New Zealand into a veritable apartheid society comprised of the jabbed and the unjabbed or, psychologically speaking, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’, the ‘clean’ and the ‘unclean’, remnants of which we may see among those who mask and those who don’t.