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Comment by danabrams | Hacker News Reader

During WWII, in the place least impacted (USA) there were substantial, government imposed interruptions to daily life and business: government mandates on production, rationing, a military draft, curfews, the literal internment of Japanese Americans.

Of course, these interruption were tiny compared to those of life in England or France or other battlefields of the the war. There’s an entire genre of literature and film devoted to lives ripped apart by the interruption of World War II.

The lesson of WWII isn’t that we never need to impose individual sacrifice, but rather that the preservation of our liberty requires deep collective sacrifice on occasion, and to work to protect it not just for ourselves but for our friends who by virtue of luck are in a worse situation than we are.

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Internment of innocent Japanese Americans during WW2 has always been repugnant. It wasn't justified then and it's still considered shameful today. It's not "individual sacrifice [needed to] preserve liberty", it was just racist and abusive.

Governments will overreach and violate civil liberties when the people don't resist (Snowden revelations, anybody?). That's the lesson.

Let me clear that I’m not saying all of the govt actions that took liberties away in wwii were justified or helpful or good. Japanese internment is one of the clearest examples of paranoia that was destructive and did not help the war effort.

But many other actions, from curfews, to govt planning of the economy, a draft, collective bomb shelters in London, etc, clearly did help preserve life and Liberty in the long term.

But my larger point to the original comment was that wwii may have had an order of magnitude more causalities, but it also came with at least one order of magnitude more disruption. My own grandfather lost over a year of his life to POw camp and walked with a limp for the remain 77 years of his life. His family that were still in Europe on the other hand were systematically rounded up and murdered, their property confiscated, first by the Germans then by the soviets. But he was proud to have made the sacrifices he did to stop fascism in its tracks.

> Japanese internment is one of the clearest examples of paranoia that was destructive and did not help the war effort.

Sure, but it makes the point that just because people claim some measure is for the collective good, doesn't mean we should just take that at face value. Power is easily abused and we should be demanding more transparency and accountability from people who want to impose onerous top-down restrictions for speculative reasons. Instead, we get legions of people shouting down and vilifying those who are expecting more.

> But many other actions, from curfews, to govt planning of the economy, a draft, collective bomb shelters in London, etc, clearly did help preserve life and Liberty in the long term.

A literal interpretation of this (comprehensive) text yields a rather bold claim.

Yeah, WWII was a much bigger deal than COVID. And we come out of COVID to discover what? Suddenly we've got war in Europe involving the country with the world's biggest nuclear arsenal. We've got some terrifying tensions in the Pacific with the worlds largest manufacturing superpower that is going to rip the region a new one of they go haywire. We should have been focusing on war and peace, not trying to innovate new ways of torpedoing basic liberties. Signs suggest we might be about to lose a lot more human lives than just 7 million in the next 10-20 years. I hope not.

But that wasn't the point I really wanted to make; what I'm trying to say is that we should be dealing with a substantially bigger emergency before the COVID response was justified. Seriously; how hard is it to just leave people alone to make their own decisions, and pass information to them to try and help them make the best decisions?

Fundamentally, you can't leave people to make the decision "spread the airborne pathogen" when that affects other people to this extent.

Obviously there is a limit - China has recently hit the end of political support for zero-covid restrictions, because they were extremely onerous even in an already totalitarian country.

Fundamentally, you can. And do all the time with flus and colds and any number of other airborne pathogens that we don't mandate vaccines, masks, social isolation, shutdowns of economy and education, etc.

And most measures and expert driven response were pretty ineffective anyway. People whip out the 6 million number as though it has any bearing on the number of people who might have died or been saved by different responses to COVID which is really pretty disingenuous and emotionally inflammatory. A lot of government particularly health policy involves tradeoffs with lives, you can't just try to put blame on people for deaths if you don't like their position and use that as an argument. Because some extremist can always come in on the other side of your position and make exactly the same argument against your position.

In other words, why would you be the arbiter of exactly what is reasonable and what is "extremely onerous" and when you can and can not allow people to make their own decisions? It's circular logic, you basically justify your position by asserting they are the right decisions.

> Fundamentally, you can't leave people to make the decision "spread the airborne pathogen" when that affects other people to this extent.

Because....?

When it comes down to it, you're arguing for a type of society that prioritizes certain values, and those who disagree with those policies are arguing for a society that prioritizes different values. You are not automatically right or morally superior simply because you value safety more than freedom.

Not even safety. The ruling class has shown itself to be greedy, untrustworthy, and incompetent in their response to everything from climate change to hurricanes to pandemics to wars to corporate regulation.

It astounds me that people look at the utterly bungled and hare brained government responses to covid (or 9/11 or Katrina or the war on drugs or Vietnam) and can turn around say, "See? We need to give these corrupt greedy nitwits even more power to control our lives."

There are any number of cases in our society where we decide that you can’t just decide what you want to do because your behavior has consequences on others.

You can’t speed 65mph through red lights, for instance. In public spaces, or with actions that can’t be contained, many of your choices have consequences for me, so I get to have a say.

There was basically no risk of COVID in public spaces. It doesn't spread in fresh air.

The restrictions generally targeted private spaces. In Australia we even went as far as banning friends visiting each other at home.

> You can’t speed 65mph through red lights, for instance.

Driving is a privilege, not a right. You earn that privilege by agreeing to follow certain rules.

Being able to walk in public spaces or associate with whom you wish in private spaces is a right, not a privilege. You don't need to earn your rights. Do you see the difference here?

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