Ihre papiere bitte

The tyranny of the past involved broken bones, night-time raids, and state-sponsored segregation; the tyranny of today consists of making you desperate, isolated, and impoverished.

I apologise if the title is linguistically incorrect as I’m not a native German speaker nor have I visited the central European powerhouse, or its resilient sidekick Austria on the other side of the Alps. If I was to fly across the sea and flash my Covid passport at Vienna International Airport, I had best always keep it in hand throughout my travels, and to know that when the Old Bill ask ‘ihre papiere bitte’, it means ‘your papers please’.  

And then they came for the unvaccinated. For two nations that have tried desperately – to the point of cultural and national suicide – to apologise for their dark past, this is rather counterproductive. For Austria has placed two million unvaccinated residents into lockdown – just the unvaccinated, with its pal Germany having its finger on the button ready to do the same.

In turn, five Italian regional governors have demanded that this medical apartheid stretch to the Mediterranean Sea and Latvia have banned unvaccinated politicians from voting (at least the Welsh just shut the internet off when it’s time to cast ballots).

As can be seen, it’s not just Austria that’s keen on collective punishment to ensure full inoculation. It certainly won’t be the last either.

May I also remind you that the vaccinated aren’t out of the woods either – after all, they’re the ones being asked ihre papiere bitte. Once a national law is written, approved, codified, and in some cases advertised on Twitter, it has to be enforced, and you need the muscular men equipped with the handcuffs, truncheons, and pistols to do it on the legislature’s behalf. Austrian police are now conducting random checks- and by this I mean walking up to members of the public, pestering them to see their ‘go outside green pass’, and then moving onto the next citizen.

There is not nearly enough manpower to cover the land from Switzerland to Bratislava, but if they check someone meditating on a mountain top in the middle of the Alps twenty miles from anyone else, I’m willing to retract that statement.

There’s a lot of equipment to remember when packing for a hill hike, and humans being humans forget the simplest of objects for the simplest of trips, so I wonder how many will be caught out because they left their internal passport on the kitchen surface?

I recall a scene from Schindler’s List (another deliberate violation of Godwin’s law) where Oskar Schindler’s Jewish secretary Itzhak Stern, and many of his Jewish neighbours, are pushed out of their home in the liquidation of the Cracow ghetto. Upon being escorted outside, they are asked for their papers, which Stern has forgot. The officer demanding to see his documentation gets increasingly angrier, with Stern becoming more terrified until, at the eleventh hour, he yanks his papers from one of his coat pockets, and is then thrown aside by the officer who moves onto another victim.

Austria’s unvaccinated and triple-jabbed are not on the receiving end of a bullet if the copper doesn’t see their papers, but they do face €1,450 fine. The tyranny of the past involved broken bones, night-time raids, and state-sponsored segregation; the tyranny of today consists of making you desperate, isolated, and impoverished, rounded off with an overdose of state-sponsored segregation.