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The ritualistic public clapping in appreciation of front-line-workers felt odd from its inception. It was a trend that began in Spain and was, in the manner of the latest fashion, introduced to the UK and further afield. It struck the greatest chord in places that have a political leaning towards welfare state socio-economics. Places which tend to have an outsized appreciation of the ability of state institutions to provide cradle to grave care.
It felt odd and insincere because, even though it appeared to be an elevation of heroic front-line workers, it had a more explicit non personal nature; its nature was much more of a mass formation of the veneration of the health care institutions. It seemed to be about the collectivist state, not about the heroic work of individuals. We were not really clapping an individual nurse – we were clapping the idea of nurses, and clapping the Government which provides them.
This sinister undercurrent was always there in the public showing of support, because the public nature of support also showed who was not getting behind the cause. It presented an ingroup and outgroup dynamic, like the public vote casting in 19th Century Ireland did -and oh boy was that corrupting by its very nature.
The clap for the health service was never about the “heroic” front line workers.
As soon as these “heroic front-line workers” became a hindrance to the ever-changing central message, they were deemed dispensable. In every place – from New York to England and even Ireland – where they were once venerated as heroes, front line care staff were shoved under the bus if they didn’t comply with central messaging. If they had had covid and didn’t want to get a vaccine, they became untouchables.
Hero to Zero? No, they were never heroes to begin with, (this is not my opinion, this is according to the paradigm) they were part players acting their part and doing what was expected of them. This is the central paradigm of identity politics.
They were the contemporaneous positive publicity face of public policy. And so the social media feel good fluff pieces of dancing nurses videos were allowed to gush all over our devices for a full year.
Now from New York to the UK, these one-time “heroes” who have decided to think for themselves and have declined the vaccine for their own personal reasons (whatever those reasons are is their business) will be fired and ostracised. It is planned that on April 1st all unvaccinated NHS staff in the UK will be fired, and we have seen that New York is critically short of nursing and health care staff because they fired approximately 5% of their staff.
Isn’t it remarkable, when you think about it? A year ago, we are clapping these people like heroes. A year later, we stand by as they are fired. In that time, those nurses have done nothing different – at all. The only thing that has changed is what we are told to think about them.
As I see it, these health care workers have a choice. Like the polish strikers in 1980, they can walk off the job and refuse to return under the present witch hunt conditions, or they can do like the Russian workers under the Stakanovite purges and play along with a divisive lie untill they are exhausted and defeated.
The Polish strike of 1980 was one of the synergistic factors that broke the dystopian grip of the Iron Curtain on Europe. Reading their demands, it is interesting how they had a philosophical underpinning that was oppositional to centralised systems. This philosophical outlook included freedom of association and the right to take actions guided by the individuals conscience. These determinations are evident in their first two demands.
1. Acceptance of free trade unions independent of the Communist Party and of enterprises, in accordance with convention No. 87 of the International Labor Organization concerning the right to form free trade unions, which was ratified by the Communist Government of Poland.
2. A guarantee of the right to strike and of the security of strikers and those aiding them.
It was this spirit of veneration of the sanctity of the person which galvanised the strikers and created a movement that could reject the institutional coercion of the soviet state apparatus. Perhaps it is the same spirit which moved the Polish people in greeting the address of PJPII.
This was a very different spirit to the broken spirit of the Russian worker in 1935, when the soviet regime demanded they “clap for the heroic worker” and thereby ushered in a new level of hell.
1935 was the beginning of a new Soviet social disaster (another litany of human misery applauded by the intellectual Left in the West); a new “five year plan” that would end in mass imprisonment, mass starvation, and increased misery and poverty. It was launched with sensational news which was spread by all the communication organs of the state. All voices in the state media, the state party, the state education systems, and the state unions, proclaimed the marvel of Aleksei Grigorievich Stakhanov.
Stakhanov was a miner in the Donetz Basin coal region of Eastern Ukraine, and as soviet defector, Viktor Kravchenko recounts in his biographical critique of sovietism: ‘In September 1935 a “miracle” occurred… A worker named Stakhanov mined 102 tonnes of coal in one shift -fourteen times the normal output per miner!’
Kravchenko added: ‘Few events in all modern history have been greeted with such sustained, hysterical, and histrionic acclaim’ (I Choose Freedom; V Kravchenko pp187)
If Stakhanov could do it, any man could do it, that was the message distributed through the soviet mass media and other propoganda loudhorns. Workers committees all over the country, under the watchful eye of the secret police (NKVD), voted to speed up production under the spirit of stakhanovitism. The parallels with today are not terribly subtle.
All in this together
Anyone who questioned the viability of this new initiative -engineers, or fitters, or old hands on the lines who knew the potential of the factory- were ostracised and shunned as being obstructionists.
A war on “misinformation”. Follow the science of stakhanovitism.
Workers and engineers who showed any doubt over the new initiatives were denounced and taken away in handcuffs by the secret police (NKVD). They were accused of “wrecking”.
Selfish antivaxxers who won’t do their part.
Immediately the party hacks who knew the pitfalls of this initiative segregated out specialist shifts of the fastest and most energetic workers. The factory would be put into overdrive during these shifts and so the production numbers were inflated and the reports looked great. But what was gained in the stakhanovite shift was lost in the other shifts. Machinery that was rated to produce (for eg) 100 tonnes of rolled pipe per shift could not output 120 tonnes without failing under the strain. And so other shifts lost efficiency because machinery started failing and servicing, which was diverted to the stakhanovite shifts, was not available.
Remind anyone of the failing health system and a growing problem of unscheduled operations and diagnostic procedures?
The stakhanovite shift workers got greater recompense and this created resentment on the factory floor. The party used this resentment to create further division and as an excuse for purges to get rid of “wreckers”
Now they might be called ‘anti-vaxxers’.
However, the greater recompense in pay for the willing collaborators – the stakhanovites – was speedily depleted to a worsening of real pay. Inflation, through disastrous falls in productivity because of the stakhanovite initiative saw real wages plummet, even for the stakhanovites. Factories that were producing 60-70% of their theoretical output before the stakhanovite initiative were now producing as little as 30-40%. Starvation loomed.
Remind anyone of the inflation we are seeing right now – a result of a government-forced recession?
The government went harder, seeking out “wreckers” who were “sabotaging” progress.
Epidemic of the unvaccinated.
Through lies and deception the policy of stakhanovitism was a complete disaster. The parallels in policy and messaging with the present covid mass hysteria is alarming.
We are not, obviously, quite at the stage of Russia 1935 where dissent was a way to win sure fire passage to the gulags, but the authoritarian proclivity is becoming more strident with each renewed public announcement. This is a repressive authoritarian movement going one direction, and it is in the wrong direction. With an uneasy eye the critics of vaccine passports are saying “don’t get on that train, you have no idea where it’s destination is”.
Whilst this might seem alarmist, it is worth pointing out that no development of societal behaviour is impossible. The meme ‘last years conspiracy theorists is this year’s mainstream news’ is gaining traction precisely because it is self-fulfilling. Who would have thought that Australian politicians would be justifying detention camps, or that German messaging about segregating the unclean (the unvaxxed) would raise its head with all the aggressive ostracising force of the unsettled Weimar years? It’s here, and its ugly.
We can be victims like the unfortunate soviet workers, or we can be galvanised and visionary like the Polish strikers. It is time to shake off the notion that institutions of state will be our saviour. Reject the veneration of the state and its bodies – no matter how it makes you feel in the moment- and the crushing of dissenting voices. Like the Czech visionary Vaclav Havel said in response to passive submission to soviet sloganeering “live not by lies”.
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