Interview With Emeritus Professor Ramesh Thakur, author of Our Enemy the Government: How Covid Enabled the Expansion and Abuse Of State Power
10am Sunday AEDTWith John Stapleton and Michael Gray Griffith
Very few of the hundreds of thousands of Australian protesters who took to the streets during the authoritarian crackdowns of the Covid era realised that there was equally a backlash amongst some of the world’s most formidable intellectuals.
In Australia, the most courageous and forthright of those was Emeritus Professor Ramesh Thakur in the Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University. He is widely regarded as one of Australia’s most esteemed academics in the fields of international relations, global governance, nuclear non-proliferation, and security studies. His extensive body of work – including as editor and author of more than 50 books – along with editorial roles, advisory positions with governments and international bodies, and frequent media contributions, all underscore this high standing.
He served as Assistant Secretary-General at the United Nations from 1998 to 2007.
Professor Thakur began publishing critical pieces on the government’s Covid response, including critiques of policies on masks, vaccines, and lockdowns, very early on.
Some of his earliest essays on the subject were published in the policy magazine Pearls and Irritations, and subsequently in Spectator Australia. His articles critiquing official Covid responses were widely published around the world.
His work was collected in the historically significant 2023 book Our Enemy The Government: How Covid Enabled the Expansion and Abuse of State Power. An updated Australian edition of the book is in the planning stages.
There was simply no way that Australia’s politicians, as they repeated the “safe and effective” mantra ad nauseam and vilified, pepper-sprayed, and jailed Covid dissidents, did not know there was considerable scepticism about their actions from some of the world’s most respected epidemiologists.
They were either illiterate, ill-informed or deliberately lying.
Thakur was based in Canberra at the time he wrote some of his most penetrating critiques. Any bureaucrat or politician with an inquiring mind could have wandered down to his office at the Australian National University. None of them did.
Among the most shocking developments as the pandemic dragged on for more than two years was the degree of coercion and force used by some of the best-known champions of democracy. The boundary between liberal democracy and draconian dictatorship proved to be virus-thin. Tools of repression – like unleashing heavily armed police on peacefully protesting citizens – once the identifying traits of fascists, communists, and tin-pot despots, became uncomfortably familiar on the streets of Western democracies.
Interventions rooted in panic, driven by political machinations, and using all the levers of state power to terrify citizens and muzzle critics in the end needlessly killed massive numbers of the most vulnerable, while putting the vast low-risk majority under house arrest. The benefits were questionable, but the harms are increasingly obvious – revalidating Lord Acton’s dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Praise for Our Enemy The Government: How Covid Enabled the Expansion and Abuse of State Power:
“This book is worth the attention of anyone who wants to understand how and why governments and the world’s health bureaucracies ignored the devastating harms and failures of the lockdown-focused policies they implemented during the Covid pandemic.”
— Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Director of the National Institutes of Health in America, former Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration.
“The emergence of Ramesh Thakur as a voice of reason during the last three years is one of the few good things to come out of the pandemic. I find it difficult to disagree with anything he says.”
— Lord Toby Young, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, The Daily Sceptic
Goodbye RoadA ReviewI wanted to tell you Michael how the journey of reading your book was for me.Yes it certainly is a significant part of our Australian history during the covid era.It is so much more than that.As an avid follower of CLO since the Deplorables era and having listened to and watched many interviews and podcasts, I assumed there would be parts of the book that I might skim over .How extraordinarily incorrect that assumption was!My main reason for purchasing the book was really to help you guys out!The other reason was for an historical record of this time.Anyway reading it was a huge reminder to me of the power of the written word! Only a talented writer can evoke such emotion in a person that leads them to tears both of joy and heartbreakThank you MichaelMuch love and peace to you bothLisa AndersonOrder a personal signed copy herehttps://cafelockedout.com/clo-shop/the-bbc/
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