Internet a thorn in the side of the world’s dictators
I AM no great fan of the internet because of its role in allowing pervs to groom children but on one area I cannot fault it. It is the worst enemy of dictators.
In the old days they could close their country down to everything and everyone who might purvey news of what they were doing. Today it is guaranteed that someone will slip out a smartphone, film it all and send it viral.
The brutes in uniform who have taken over Myanmar reckoned on an easy passage but did not reckon with Generation Z. In the period when Aung San Suu Kyi was head of government a new youth came of age – very internetsavvy. Result? A torrent of pictures and data pours out to be logged abroad, and watched and read internally.
Their pathetic excuses that they were restoring democracy are exposed for the lies they are. Even a corps inside the Burmese police has risen in revolt.
Elsewhere, as in Belarus, the opposition goes on, constantly refuelled with fresh evidence, revealing dictators everywhere for what they are – brutes. The good news is they can’t stop it.
OUR GOVERNMENT is breaking all known speed records in congratulating itself on the rapid rollout of anti-Covid vaccinations, as well it might for it’s the one thing it has managed to get right. But the concomitant benefit of a vax passport as a key to freedom following the vax is a yawning zero.
It would be hugely simple to issue each newly immune oldie with a cheap plastic card to prove it. Something like a credit card – easy to issue and hard to forge, with its pin number and signature on the back.
When you join a members-only club you get a membership card. Flash it at the door and you can go in. Simple. With a vax passport an increasing number of millions could break out of lockdown; bars, pubs, cafes, restaurants, hundreds of thousands of small businesses could spring back to life... the whole nation could steadily, million by million, come back to life.
Dammit, we could actually start working again, earning money, generating wealth, paying taxes.
Yet, enslaved by those po-faced Jeremiahs Whitty and Vallance, the Johnson government chickens out again. This is not leadership, this is futile capitulation to the virus. Our scientists have given us the break-out key. Our non-leaders prefer imprisonment for us all.