Hundreds of excited demonstrators pass by on the Marnixstraat in Amsterdam, some with Prince flags and others with protest signs, with statements against the corona policy and tasteless comparisons with the persecution of the Jews. Spectators watch ecstatically, shaking their heads or furiously. It’s a terrifying scene.
I happened to walk past one of the corona demonstrations, which seem to cause more and more dichotomy. Many are furious at protesters who liken downloading an app to the Holocaust or apartheid. Rightly so.
Yet ‘corona criticism’ also makes sense. I didn’t want to download the app myself because of the privacy risk. Of course, an app you have to use to access public facilities is scary. And of course you do not want to be traced if you are sick or if your loved ones are monitored.
Alone – newsflash – our privacy and civil rights have been violated for some time by the government and tech giants. The fact that the whole world comes to a standstill in the event of a malfunction at Facebook says it all. Just like that people with a small grant and chronic illness often do not receive the care they deserve, because the deductible is too high, for example. Or that millions of people in the Global South are begging for vaccines that we refuse here. It is only more visible now because we are in an unprecedented health crisis, which also affects the wealthier citizens, with privileges and freedoms.
Last year I wrote for Free Netherlands on the shock doctrine and disaster capitalism. Canadian journalist and activist Naomi Klein states in her book The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism that dictatorial and neoliberal governments use crises to push through undemocratic policies. “The atmosphere of a large-scale crisis provides the necessary pretext for setting aside the explicit wishes of voters and turning the country over to economic ‘technocrats’.”
It is typically Dutch to make systemic injustice an individual freedom problem, which leads to extremism and polarization instead of solidarity. I’m curious how citizens, who claim to be freedom, justify marching alongside extremists to themselves.
It is also inexplicable to me that the victims of the Allowance scandal have not yet been compensated. And that the court states that you can be discriminated against on the basis of ethnicity. And that we don’t protest against it en masse.
I don’t believe in all wild conspiracies, but I do believe in unjust systems, and that those who benefit from them do everything they can to keep them going. a lot of those haves are rather incompetent, greedy and selfish than evil masterminds. Which in the end doesn’t have to matter for the malicious effect of their actions.
I now use the corona app. If I give Mark Zuckerberg my private information for entertainment, I can also take steps to protect vulnerable groups at risk and prevent further spread of a destructive virus. This is not to say that everyone should do that, but that because of the crisis we live in, my decisions are based on more than my personal preferences.
In wartime there is not one truth, they say. I think that always applies when our living conditions change drastically. There is really no longer a ‘right’ choice at this point. Only the least bad, which you can take, depending on your principles, in a global crisis – a crisis caused by a broken system.
I hope that the growing awareness about that system will continue and not disappear like snow in the sun once critics return to comfortable conditions in their hotels, restaurants and clubs under ‘normal’ conditions.
Clarice Gargard is a program maker and journalist.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of October 7, 2021
