7th October 2023 – the day that the Freedom Movement died

Simon Elmer, David Fleming & Niall McCrae

 

The Freedom Movement, a nebulous collective of people who resisted the assault on liberty during the purported Covid-19 pandemic, is no more. It died, alas, on 7th October.  

Back in March 2020, when the unprecedented tyranny of ‘lockdown’ was imposed on the British people, a small minority of dissidents raised their heads above the parapet. They faced a barrage from the compliant majority, the propagandist media and political leaders drunk on power. But they were steadfast: their critical thinking and humanistic principles made them impermeable to government scare tactics. 

As time under state oppression wore on, gradually more people awakened. The more courageous sceptics attended rallies, despite being threatened by thugs in police uniform. Some took to their high street with yellow boards proclaiming the truth tha there was no deadly virus, but instead the global technocratic coup of the Great Reset. Many found sanctuary in Stand in the Park gatherings. Others distributed The Light newspaper in an effort to counter mainstream media messages. We did our bit as authors, exposing the lies and immorality of the Covid-19 regime. 

Massive marches in London, a backlash against the ‘no jab no job’ mandate in the NHS, and rumblings of civil disobedience led to the government retreating from domestic vaccine passports and an authoritarian scheme of digital identity reminiscent of the Gestapo. Too many citizens were seeing that such interference in daily life was not for a contagious disease but for control. 

Then, in February 2022, after the threat of another winter lockdown receded, came the next ‘big thing’. War in Ukraine split the Freedom Movement, with many Covid-19 critics initially falling hook, line and sinker for the official narrative of Vladimir Putin as an evil dictator with military designs on the liberal democracies of Europe. After three years of learning to distrust politicians and media, they unlearned and reverted to type: leftists perceiving a threat to progressive values, conservatives falling into jingoistic line. However, it became obvious that this was not simply a bully invading a neighbour, but a proxy war by the West against a rival power. Meanwhile the actual fighting settled into trench combat in eastern Ukraine, and people lost interest. 

What would be next global event? For a while it seemed that Covid-19 would return. In August there was talk of another variant and mass vaccination, but as winter approached, the theatre curtain opened on a new stage. On 7th October Hamas militia broke through the security border, killing and kidnapping scores of Israelis soldiers and civilians. The Israeli response was immediate, firing missiles to destroy apartment blocks in crowded Gaza city. War was declared within hours of the terror attack.

Suddenly, all but a tiny minority of ‘freedom fighters’ were watching the television news again, and shouting for Israel. They did not stop to wonder whether the Zionist regime could have planned this event for a further land grab and ethnic cleansing, just as Covid-19 was used to advance global technocracy. When an Israeli minister declared 7th October as his country’s 9/11, he was right – although not in the way he meant. Horrified Westerners saw the incident as an existential threat to the modern world from Islamist barbarians. Conservative influencers jumped at the chance to revile Islam and mass immigration, particularly after large pro-Palestine protests erupted in London and other cities.  

One of us (Simon) tweeted: –   

‘Many of those who for three years denounced Govt lies about COVID, opposed censorship and were called anti-Semitic for doing so, now believe everything the Government says about Gaza, want to censor protest against the genocide, and denounce anyone calling for a free Palestine as anti-Semitic. The stupidity with which the Left unthinkingly aligned itself with lockdown, gene-therapy mandates and environmental fundamentalism has been matched by the stupidity with which the Right has unthinkingly aligned itself with Zionism, collective punishment and genocide in Gaza.’

Among the worst in the Freedom Movement was Laura Dodsworth. Lauded for her book State of Fear, on the abuse of behavioural psychology by the government, Dodsworth came up with the idea of the October Declaration, a petition to protect British Jews in their hour of need. Of course, all communities should be safe, but to our knowledge no Jewish person had been assaulted. The declaration ignored the massacre of Palestinians in their homeland, with already many more dying at the hands of the IDF than Israelis killed by Hamas. 

The October Declaration was launched by Toby Young of the Free Speech Union. Young is also editor-in-chief of the Daily Sceptic, which has given shamefully biased coverage to the Israel / Gaza conflict. Not once has this website showed any concern for the tens of thousands of innocent Gazan people killed or maimed by the collective punishment of carpet-bombing by the Israeli air force. Rather than taking a sceptical view of 7th October, and of the ulterior motives of Netanyahu’s government, the Daily Sceptic reads like the Daily Mail in the Falklands war, but cheering for a foreign country engaging in crimes against humanity. The bombing victims are not merely collateral, but intended targets, Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant vowing to ‘wipe Gaza off the face of the earth’. 

The October Declaration presents a cynical and undemocratic call to politicise the policing of protest in the UK, and reveals how skin-deep are its signatories’ commitment to freedom of speech, conscience and assembly. But arguably they were never genuine advocates of liberty and truth anyway.  Dodsworth’s last chapter in State of Fear promoted the improperly tested Covid-19 vaccines. Allison Pearson and Julia Harley Brewer, for example, spent as much time criticising conspiracy theorists as challenging lockdown. Young barred any discussion of the validity of the Covid-19 virus from the Daily Sceptic. 

Regarding doubts about 7th October, Young applies his favoured ‘cock-up’ theory to why the Israeli army abandoned its watchtowers and took seven hours to reach the carnage. Indeed, he argues that any suspicion about this lapse in security is offensive. Young, Pearson, Dodsworth and Douglas Murray (surely an asset of the security services?) want you to perceive any criticism of the Israeli leadership or Zionism as anti-Semitic. They want protests banned, and placard-bearers arrested. 

It’s ‘freedom but…’.  And that is neither a principled or ethical position to take, when a sickening slaughter has been unleashed on fellow human beings – half of them children. After failing to organise itself into a viable political force capable of mobilising members to reject the orthodoxies of, first, Ukraine and now Gaza, the Freedom Movement has failed a fundamental moral test, and thus we conclude that it ceases to exist. 

Let us remember the Freedom Movement (23rd March 2020 – 7th October 2023) for a fleeting resistance to the New World Order, which it could not sustain.