Free People Who Mostly Did Not Resist
Naomi Wolf dispenses some hard truths.
Naomi Wolf has been taking a lot of heat on X (formerly Twitter) because of some comments she’s been making to people about vaccine mandates. For the most part (except in cases of children and some of the elderly) she is arguing that no one had to take the vaccine. For example she wrote:
Coercion is coercion. Force is force. I empathize with all of these difficult situations but I keep trying to make a crucial point: if we react to coercion as if it’s physical force, nothing keeps us from the death camps. There is a difference. None of the mandates were legal or moral but there should have been a lot more resistance. For everyone’s sake.1
And this:
I don’t mean to be unsympathetic here at all. My point is that if we give in short of the kinds of physical force that are down the line – if we treat state coercion as ‘force’ – nothing stands between us and actual physical state force. Fascism can get a lot worse that[sic] economic pressure.2
A lot of the reactions were more or less along the lines of, well, it was easy for you. You’re a Yale graduate, an author, etc. Or, you just don’t understand, we have to feed our families, etc. Here’s a comment by ElaineLiberty:
Naomi sounds like the very people who pushed the shots making excuses now that no one was “forced”. While I agree w her that all of us that were pressured should have pushed back hard and much sooner she’s too quick to discount the severe double binds many people were in3
And Naomi’s response to her:
I am not discounting the hard choices. I am putting them in historical context. They were awful but not Trail of Tears, not lynchings, not slavery, not cattle cars. We were still free people who mostly did not resist. If we don’t face the fact that that happened in our history, we are in grave danger.4
Life is not fair. Of course it was easier for some than others to refuse the jab. They may have been self-employed, wealthy or had a sufficient retirement income. For some it was hard, particularly if you were young, with a young family, little savings, etc. No one is denying that the decision had far worse consequences for some than others. But no one had to take it. I’ve heard several people say to me something like, “Well, I only got it so I could keep working,” or “I only got it so I could travel.”
I don’t understand that. It’s like saying, “I only played Russian Roulette to keep my job.” People risked their lives and their health. I know many people just did not know, but many knew there was risk and did it anyway. Some of those people who did it to provide for their families are now dead or maimed. They’ve burdened their families, the very thing they wanted to avoid.
The next time around, and unfortunately there probably will be a next time, they’re not going to make it any easier. 2020 – 2022 was the first salvo. Those of us who were largely unaffected (including myself) may face an easy decision with some very hard consequences. Let us not look back on what’s coming with regret:
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.5 [emphasis mine]
— Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
NOTES
Naomi Wolf, https://twitter.com/naomirwolf/status/1783602629265809882
Naomi Wolf, https://twitter.com/naomirwolf/status/1783600679568687616
ElaineLiberty, https://twitter.com/LajoieElaine/status/1783816542011965704
Naomi Wolf, https://twitter.com/naomirwolf/status/1783859657636827290
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956, https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2944012-arhipelag-gulag-1918-1956
Just this week I got news of two new stroke/trombosis deaths from people in my hometown. A southern hemisphere mountainous midsized tourist city. Acquaintances mostly, but people that I know enough to know that by now they were probably on theirs sixth dose.
People who definitely are not in the usual demographics for this kind of death. No known previous condition, no other health event that could explain it. For one of them, a few days before he dropped dead I saw an instagram posting, a family reunion, the guy happy around the swimming pool with family and friends.
During those years post-vaccination I knew of far more middle-aged people dying subtly than all the people I heard about dying of covid during the pandemic. This is not normal.
What people forget is that myocardial tissue once dead, it is dead forever. So, even a subclinical myocarditis, one without symptoms is robbing you of some healthy cardiac tissue. Probably every successive dose kills a bit more tissue, and then you get dangerously close to serious problems.
At first I didn't plan no to take the vaccine. But I had no hurry for two reasons, the first one being that I had once got covid, and it was unreasonable to believe that the infection didn't confer me with immunity at least on par with any kind of vaccine. The second is that given the lack of long term safety testing, I though prudent to wait for others to take it before me and watch the results. Over time I decided the risk was not worth the benefit. And I gladly paid the price of not being able to do lots of stuff without a vaccination card, because I value my life more than any of that stuff.