Lithuania
Covid-Pass in Lithuania and Europe
I want to share the situation which my family and I are now facing because of Covid Pass restrictions.
We live in Europe. In the last few months, strict Covid Pass restrictions have been introduced which represent a fundamental transformation in society. The new regime has significantly altered both the concept of individual rights as well as the relationship between the individual and the state.
There hasn't been much reporting in English-language media about what has happened. So I thought a detailed first-hand account would be useful to illustrate the transformation. I initially wrote this report as a post on Reddit. It got lots of attention on the subreddit r/LockdownSkepticism, but it was banned by mods after a day (details on that below)…
1980s: Fight for freedom. 2021: apathy.
There is not much protest in our country against the vaccine mandates. In France and Holland, there have been large demonstrations by broad-based groups of diverse people. Not enough to stop the restrictions, but at least something.
But in our country, protests have been small, dominated by anti-LBGTQ activists, and limited in many ways by government restrictions and police.
I don't think we're so unusual among the European countries in the apathy and lack of protest of the broad population. In the last 18 months, it's been rare in most of Europe to see strong, large, organized opposition to Covid measures.
That's surprised me very much. It's staggering to me that large numbers of people, in my country and throughout Europe, don't seem to care much about individual rights and liberty.
The contrast with history is stark, even just in living memory. In my country, we were occupied for decades by the Soviet Union. We fought for - and won - a revolution of independence 30 years ago. Liberty was vital then: the political movement (Sajudis, which means, literally, "Movement") spearheaded the fight for independence, and was supported by hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom took real risks to oppose the oppressive communist regime. In the most famous incident, in August 1989, fully 30% of the entire population of the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia joined hands at the same time to form a human chain of 675 kilometers in support of freedom and independence from the authoritarian Soviet occupation…
