By Olivia Murray
Does the name “Emily Oster” ring a bell? It likely does, given the fact her “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty” piece in The Atlantic went viral a few months back, especially among those fashioned into second class citizens by the “pandemic.”
Now, Oster has an echo. Alena Buyx is a professor and the chair of the German Ethics Council (a body of unelected bureaucrats advising the German government), and she recently granted an interview with Die Zeit in which she suggested that accountability should be off the table; the Council and its members were ‘just following science.’ Sounds a lot like “just following orders” if you ask me.
For a bit of context, read the excerpt below from a piece posted to the Eugyppius Substack yesterday:
The German Ethics Council is an independent advisory body which has existed in some form since 2001, and which has a mandate to advise the government especially on matters of bioethics. It met its first serious test during the Corona era, when the entire political and bureaucratic leadership decided that the best way to respond to SARS-2 would be to commit massive human rights violations. Naturally, the Ethics Council not only failed to oppose these extraordinary policies, but supported them wherever possible.
Eugyppius goes on to aptly describe Buyx as “highly conscientious, deeply conformist, mildly intelligent, and totally bereft of all originality and independence of thought” and from the interview, gleaned that Buyx “decided that it would be better not to blame anyone for the hell that the Corona brigade has put all of us through.”
When the interviewer asks Buyx if politicians should apologize for the destruction, Buyx responds with:
May I start with the Ethics Council? We’ve clearly been self-critical and named our mistakes. Self criticism like this is a form of apologetic openness….
Yet, it’s still not an apology.
Buyx then goes on, and asserts:
There is a deep, comprehensive need to deal with this pandemic. And apparently also find someone to blame.
Um, yes Alena, when tyrannical regimes become so oppressive they commit crimes against humanity, heads need to roll. People lost everything. Their lives were destroyed.
Then, Buyx discusses the public’s “insatiable” need to “find culprits” — actions have consequences, and the little people generally frown upon totalitarianism. Buyx says:
But there is something insatiable about this need to find culprits, which sometimes seems to be more about revenge, about seeking propitiation. A search for culprits driven by revenge and anger is dangerously easy, and so it’s not a solution, it doesn’t help at all.
There is a need for much more learning and honest, serious retrospection, there is an obligation to do that, and that’s what is happening. It’s about learning from what didn’t go well and looking to the future with new recommendations. All this should remain constructive… no one would benefit from public flagellation now.
What I find particularly interesting is that Buyx emphasizes the need to “learn” from the mistakes — hasn’t this woman ever heard of the Nuremberg Trials? Has she ever read an actual history book?
Declaring the desire to “learn” and move on from mistakes is nothing more than a malicious attempt to sidestep accountability. There are no shortage of historical examples which show tyranny is tyrannical. How stupid does she think we are?
Bureaucrats like Buyx can never understand, because being societal leeches, their livelihoods are secure. Public flagellation is the least we can rightfully demand.
As Selwyn Duke noted, “Forgiveness does not obviate punishment.” Only “unconditional surrender” and “punishment” will do.