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The disgrace of Australia’s pandemic betrayal

By Paul Collits | TCW Defending Freedom | June 27, 2023

What exactly do you do when your country betrays you and disgraces itself before the world?  When you find out that it is run by thugs and goons? When just about no one in the political class has the moral compass and the spine to stand up for you? When your fellow citizens turn on you if you dared to question things?

If you are John Stapleton, a retired Aussie journalist, you write a 450-page book about it. You call it Australia Breaks Apart. You write uncomprehendingly, elegantly, passionately, even elegiacally, ashamed, still shaking your head in disbelief, three years after a ho-hum virus called by the powers-that-be ‘Covid’ reached our shores.

Surely these words could be written about just about every country in the world, you might think. Two quick responses – we were the worst, and surely we, of all places, should have been above all this.

Whether the book explains to international readers how this all happened, I’m not sure. I am far from certain that anyone could explain it. But let us explore what the book does do.

The title suggests one of the main themes, that of division and enmity. There were members of the dobber class, the Covid winners (largely in the employ of government or corporates), the lap-top class, the blatherers. People on ‘the other side’ were routinely demonised. Granny killers, conspiracy theorists, neo-Nazis and so on. Many of these folks were morally upright, seasoned professionals, not rent-a-crowd ideologues. Australia did indeed break apart, literally as well as socially. State and territory borders were closed by spooked politicians on a whim and for very few Covid cases. Fear and derangement were everywhere. Subjugation.

There are things in the book that even those who lived through the nightmare will not have known. These matters should have been known, and most likely would have been, if not for the cover-ups and the wilful non-reportage of stories in the interest of defending ‘the narrative’.

The book tells not only the story of Covid policy excesses, but also of a resistance movement that grew into something astonishing. This underground, though in plain sight, movement of angry men and women became hundreds of thousands, if not millions. It has remained invisible only because the quisling Covid class and their corrupt media puppets refused to acknowledge that it even existed, other than being a ‘tiny’ bunch of anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists to be ignored.

John Stapleton doesn’t ignore them. He tells their story. This makes his book unique. The expected villains are all there, in graphic detail – Victoria premier Daniel Andrews, a truly appalling political figure, the thug police, the slippery bob-each-way villain-prime minister Scott Morrison, the other premiers and chief ministers, the unaccountable bureaucrats, the public health gauleiters, the Pharma-funded academics, the media shills. But what emerges in the book is an account of how resistance to tyranny can form and grow. This will be an invaluable resource when the medical totalitarians come for us next time, as surely they will.

The story is told through the eyes of Old Alex (the author), an old-time ‘pressman’ with a nose for a story and an unquenchable desire to unearth the truth. And, importantly, an open mind and no corporate constraints. Like many Covid dissidents, Stapleton made new friends during the Covid years, just about all of them independent truth-tellers. Citizen journalists. And he lost all sense of mainstream journalism having a soul and a purpose. Silent journalists were high up on Stapleton’s list of Covid criminals to be despised. But the stories of new voices and new connections among the refuseniks show the book to be about heroes as well as villains.

Journalism had very few dissidents who spoke out. Nor did the public servants or politicians or the police, but there were a few brave souls among the latter (for example) who broke ranks and saw Covid police brutality as a hill on which (professionally) to die. There was Andrew Cooney in New South Wales and Krystle Mitchell in Victoria.   

These brave hearts were not willing to go along to get along, as rubber bullets penetrated backs, grandmothers were shoved to the pavement then pepper-sprayed, and the heads of mentally challenged innocents were smashed against concrete floors in downtown Melbourne. These stories of fascist policing were systematically smothered by the legacy media and the protesters pilloried and defamed.

The book details so much more. The scandal of the quarantine camps, for example. Those gazillion-dollar, Orwellian white elephants. The bullshit Covid-speak pronouncements from on high. The thousands upon thousands of (often massive) fines for Covid misdemeanours. The National Cabinet mutual protection narratives. All based on lies. Deadly lies. Some of the Covid class still promote the shots. Amid the ever-rising, murky waters of excess deaths. Including, perhaps, that of the Australian legend Shane Warne. Deaths still unexamined by the Covid class.

We need this book, and those like it. More straight history than exposé, but no less significant for this. True crime reporting, if you will. And if you didn’t hate the Covid class before you open the book, I guarantee you will by the end, if not sooner.

There are those who might say, why dredge it all up again since we have ‘moved on’? Well, among those that Covid refuseniks detest the most, the ‘let’s just move on’ types rank pretty high. This book should be for them to read and to reflect upon. To contemplate the massive pain caused, and to ponder the fact that it is all likely to happen again, what with the great reset people and the pandemic planning industry already on high alert for the first opportunity to crank up the machine again. Moving on, not holding ‘them’, the Covid class, to account, will only make the next instalment all the more likely.

Oh yes, for those who lived through the nightmare, John Stapleton’s gripping book, while reviving painful memories in great detail, is a must-read account of the evil that men (and women) do. It is a thundering reminder, too, of the need for Covid accountability, and a spur to further action among a new Coalition of the Willing minded to pursue it, and who simply must not give up the fight in the face of performative Covid class insouciance. It is ironic, too, that Australia Breaks Apart has been published just as the stampede for the exit door by Covid’s decision-makers has reached a crescendo.

In the dying days of the narrative, there was a national election, with one party of despised Covideers replaced by another, and around a third of now largely unrepresented voters, many of them the deplorables featured in Stapleton’s book, refusing to support either major party. The great political escape raises the question, was all the protesting worth it? I recently put a similar question to Ian Plimer, the doyen of Australian climate sceptics – why does he keep writing books when the climate writing seems to be on the wall? He replied that it was critical that when the history of all this comes to be written one day, there will be a record of the madness.

Buy this book, this chronicle of the new totalitarianism, the definitive account of Covid Australia, then circulate it widely among those might think it didn’t really matter what they did to us. A short review cannot do justice to this deeply authentic, often transcendent and, indeed, magisterial work. An astonishing achievement. An Australian story.

See also:

Essential Reading for the Dissident, the Disenfranchised, the Disillusioned

June 29, 2023 - Posted by aletho | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | Australia, Covid-19, Human rights