The Onslaught of Digital Tyranny

The COVID pass, digital surveillance, climate lockdowns, and 15-minute cities

Christine Anderson, a German politician and Member of the European Parliament. Tal Atzmon/The Epoch Times

“Germany was a highly developed society with lots of smart, well-educated people,” says Christine Anderson, “but it was possible for this society to turn evil to an extent that is unimaginable. That’s the question we always get asked, ‘How was that even possible?’ Take a look at the last three years, and you have your answer.”

In a recent episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek and Anderson, a member of the European Parliament who represents the Alternative for Germany party, discuss government oppression during the COVID-19 pandemic and the possibilities for a digital dictatorship. Anderson is one of the parliament’s most vocal critics of the pandemic policies imposed in Europe and Canada.

Jan Jekielek: Here in the United States and Canada, you’re best known for being a harsh critic of vaccine mandate policies, especially the policies around the Freedom Convoy in Canada.

Christine Anderson: Actually, I just did a tour of Canada on the one-year anniversary of the freedom truckers. They invited me over and organized a Freedom Convoy for me, so I got to ride in a truck and participate, which now makes me a freedom trucker, which I’m really proud of.

Mr. Jekielek: Your voice is unusual in the European Parliament, and among politicians around the world. How did you come to have these views?

Ms. Anderson: My parents were born and raised in Thuringia, which was formerly in the GDR [German Democratic Republic]. They were born in the 1920s. My dad fought in World War II. He was drafted when he was 16.

When the war was over, he found himself in communism, and that just did not sit well with him. He spoke up against this so-called democratic regime, and it landed him in one of the most horrific prisons you can imagine.

He was sentenced to 25 years of hard labor. Luckily, he only had to serve five years of that sentence and got released in 1955, but he still wouldn’t shut up, if you can believe that. In 1959, he was about to be arrested again, but this time he had been warned and he fled the country.

So I was born and raised in Western Germany, but I grew up with this idea that you always question your government. You never take anything they’re telling you for granted. That’s kind of what I’ve been doing.

Mr. Jekielek: What prompted you to start saying extremely controversial things?

Ms. Anderson: In the beginning of the pandemic, we didn’t know what was coming. On Easter 2020, I completely left that narrative, because the things they were doing didn’t add up. There were steps they could have taken but didn’t, because they were afraid of being called racist. There is this pandemic raging throughout the world, but the refugees still poured in. We were in the absurd situation that anyone could step foot into my country with no questions asked, but as a German citizen, I was not allowed to enter a restaurant, a shoe store, or a hairdresser without showing a vaccine pass.

Pretty soon, it occurred to me that this had nothing to do with public health. It was always about breaking the people. They wanted to see how far they could go and how far the people would allow them to take away their fundamental rights.

When some people said, “No, we’re not going to mask up, and we’re not going to get this mRNA shot,” they cracked down on these people, threatening them and their livelihoods. They said, “You’re no longer allowed to go to work. You’re no longer allowed to ride on a bus.”

That’s what I’m fighting. I don’t want a government to have so much power and control over people that with the flip of a switch, their life is pretty much over.

I’ve just seen Vera Sharav. She’s a Holocaust survivor, by the way. She was speaking about the future totalitarian regimes. They’ll no longer require electrified, barbed-wire fences. All they need is a phone, a digital ID, a QR code, and then they can do whatever they want with you.

[In the 1920s,] Germany was a highly developed society with lots of smart, well-educated people, but it was possible for this society to turn evil to an extent that is unimaginable. That’s the question we always get asked, “How was that even possible?” Take a look at the last three years, and you have your answer.

There’s a lot of people that would like to think that they would’ve been in the resistance back then. Take a look at what you did in the last three years, and you have your answer. Most of the people would not have been in that resistance, because they just went right along with everything the government asked them to do.

This whole fearmongering was going on, which, by the way, is something I’m accused of all the time, but it was actually done by governments all around the world.

Mr. Jekielek: What fearmongering are you being accused of?

Ms. Anderson: By outlining the fact that if governments have too much power, eventually we will no longer have a democracy.

Mr. Jekielek: There’s a number of places in the world now—notably in the United Kingdom, as documented by Laura Dodsworth—where unequivocal evidence shows that the government was involved in sowing fear and had a specific strategy for doing so. Was this the case in Germany as well?

Ms. Anderson: It was supposed to be a documentation only for internal use, but it got leaked. God bless the internet. They were targeting kids, and then, they were also specifically talking about addressing the most rooted fear in people, which is suffocation. They said, “You will suffocate, and you will die a horrible death.”

Mr. Jekielek: What has to be done at this point? In the United States, a number of congressional members are involved in this subcommittee on COVID, and there’s also the weaponization of the federal government. A number of subcommittees are looking at these questions in Congress. But people don’t have a lot of faith in Congress right now, and I don’t exactly know what the situation is in Germany and in the European Union. What do you see as reasonable for the people to act on?

Ms. Anderson: First of all, what I always say is to turn off your television set. It’s dumbing you down. Then, especially in the Western democracies, we need to revisit democracy. What is it, what is it supposed to do, and what is it not supposed to do? The people are the employers of the elected representatives and of the government. The people get to tell the government what to do, not the other way around.

People need to realize once again what we have now. Our freedom had to be wrestled from former elites. Our fathers and forefathers literally spilled blood so that we could live in a free and democratic society. But what we are doing now is just pretty much slandering democracy as though it does not hold any value anymore.

We need to get back to holding elected representatives and the government accountable for what they did. We should never allow them to be able to move democratic processes further and further away from the people. The EU institutions are, by the way, an example of that.

We’ve been seeing that. Look at the WHO [World Health Organization]. They were trying to seize executive powers from the member states. They’re not accountable to us, they weren’t elected by us, and this is going on everywhere.

Mr. Jekielek: Are you talking about the International Health Regulations and the treaty that’s coming?

Ms. Anderson: An example, yes. We see this on so many levels of how they’re trying to actually take away the people’s right to elect their representatives and hold the politicians accountable.

The internet is here. Come up with documentation. Any politician trying to gaslight you into thinking that he’s always been on your side, pull it up and say, “Oh, excuse me, is that what you said? Did you try to lock me in my home because I was dangerous?” Get an archive going so people will not forget what the so-called elected representatives did to the people.

Mr. Jekielek: I’ve been thinking about this a lot. How do societies emerge out of communism? How do societies emerge out of totalitarianism? How do they emerge out of a situation where a very significant portion of the population became complicit in something that was bad?

It’s very hard for people to admit they were wrong. We don’t talk about these genetic vaccines and their impact on society, but a lot of people got involved believing they were doing the right thing and now may have to face the fact that something went horribly wrong, and they were a part of it. There’s resistance to that. How do we get out of this?

Ms. Anderson: What people need to understand is as long as you give the government power over you, meaning as long as you buy into their fear mechanisms and as long as you fear them, they have power over you. Take that away from them. Just make it known. You say, “Yes, I understand you have a lot of power over me and you could put me in jail, I get that, but guess what? I don’t care. Go ahead and do it.”

Because every once in a while, there are things way more important than your fear. Trust me. Once we end up in a totalitarian regime and it’s full blown, given the technological means they have at their disposal today—we’re not talking about 30 years of GDR, 40 years of GDR, or 70 years of the Soviet Union, we’re talking about a very, very long time—that’s what you should fear. That and only that. Don’t fear your government, is pretty much what I’m trying to say.

Mr. Jekielek: That can be hard for people, though.

Ms. Anderson: I understand. I understand that people have a mortgage to pay, and they need to make ends meet every month. I get all of that.

Mr. Jekielek: It’s fear of the government, but it’s also not wanting to go outside of your social group. I wonder if that’s not even a stronger mechanism, just having watched what happened over the past few years. That’s extremely difficult to do, to be the person that steps out. That’s why I’m so interested in people like yourself, because there weren’t a lot of people standing up on the floor in the EU talking like you did.

Ms. Anderson: Democracy lives off of debate. If everyone is thinking the same thing, then something has gone horribly wrong. But there’s another mechanism that totalitarian regimes and dictatorships always implement. You single out a specific group, you scapegoat them, and the rest will not voice their opinion anymore because they don’t want to become those guys. Then you are complicit in what is about to happen, and you are a bystander, and you are not doing anything to keep it from happening.

Mr. Jekielek: Since we mentioned the truckers, what is your reaction to this new Rouleau Commission? This is the commission that was looking at whether the use of the Emergencies Act by the Trudeau government was justified. I’m paraphrasing here, but their findings were that it was justified.

Ms. Anderson: It’s shocking that they came to that conclusion, because from what I saw, it was nowhere even close to being justified. The government was bashing citizens’ protests, taking away their rights to freedom of assembly, freezing their bank accounts, and literally labeling them as terrorists, which was the prerequisite for freezing their bank accounts. This is absurd, and now they came to the conclusion this was justified.

This is really a blueprint for all the governments around the world now. Whenever they fear the uprising of opposing citizens—which is the citizens’ right, by the way—they just invoke an emergency act. There you go, you no longer have any opposition.

Mr. Jekielek: I’m curious about your opinion on 15-minute cities. It’s a new idea that we’re only beginning to hear about. I understand they’re coming to Europe now. There is legislation pushing in that direction already.

Ms. Anderson: Yes, it is. The digital green certificate, the COVID pass, was a test balloon to get people to have to produce some kind of a QR code, getting people used to that. Now, they’re slamming us with these 15-minute cities. Make no mistake, it’s not about your convenience. With the 15-minute cities, they will have to have those before they can lock you down, and that’s what we were talking about here.

In Great Britain, some counties have already passed legislation. They will be able to impose a climate lockdown. That’s the next step. In order to do that, they will have to have these 15-minute cities.

The next step will be [that] you are only allowed to leave your immediate area two or three times a year. But there’s other people that may have more money, and they can actually buy your passes off of you. Guess what? The poor people will be left in these 15-minute neighborhoods, while the ones that are better off get to go wherever they want.

It will be a complete impoverishment and enslavement of all the people. I’m stating it so clearly because that’s what it looks like to me.

Mr. Jekielek: Just briefly explain what 15-minute city means.

Ms. Anderson: A 15-minute city is basically a neighborhood where you can reach everything you need within a 15-minute foot walk: a doctor, grocery store, and so forth. The bare necessities will be provided within a 15-minute foot walk. However, if you fancy another store and it doesn’t happen to be in your neighborhood, you won’t be going to that store anymore. Like I said, total control is what we’re talking about. They can decide you are no longer allowed to leave your 15-minute immediate area. They don’t have to fence it in or anything. It will be done via digital ID.

There’s pilot projects already going on in Bologna. There, it’s called the Bologna Wallet. In Vienna, it’s called the Vienna Token. It’s voluntary for now, and if you do this, you get some tickets for a little less, like going to the theater. But soon, there will come a time when you don’t have a choice anymore. They will tell you where you can go, what you can do, and what you cannot do.

Mr. Jekielek: You’re a member of the European Parliament. But I get the sense you have suspicions about these larger institutions, like the European Parliament or the European Commission. What are your thoughts here?

Ms. Anderson: If it was up to me, Germany would leave this hellhole today, not tomorrow.

Mr. Jekielek: Why?

Ms. Anderson: Because these institutions are not only undemocratic, they’re anti-democratic. Look at the way the Parliament is elected. It’s a gross violation of the principle of one man, one vote. Every German representative in the new Parliament has to get more than 850,000 votes for one seat. But a representative from Malta only needs 64,000 votes.

Then, you look at the institutions and how they work together. We are not a parliament. It’s a disgrace to call it a parliament. We don’t have budget control, for instance, which actually is a good thing. Because if we had budget control, then the national parliaments would have been stripped of that.

We don’t pass any laws. We vote on resolutions, which are like letters we write to the EU Commission, “It would be nice if you could do this, that, or the other.” Passing laws is done by the Council, which is composed of the members of the National Executive.

If the German government wanted to pass a law and the German Parliament said, “No, we are not going there,” story over, right? Not in this case. Now the respective minister just travels to Brussels, speaks with his colleagues, passes the law there, which then has to be implemented as an EU law in all of the member states. There goes your rule by the people.

So elected representatives of other countries get to pass legislation that the Germans will have to put into law and adhere to even though they never wanted it. That’s why this entire EU institution is anti-democratic. It’s just another step to a more elitist world.

Mr. Jekielek: As we finish up, what are you working on now?

Ms. Anderson: I am trying to expose their lies, whenever they come up with some kind of a legislation program. I just look at what they’re telling the people and what they are actually doing to the people.

That’s the only thing we can really do at this point, just to educate people on the lies. The governments and all of these so-called elected representatives feed them to buy into their sick narratives about some kind of agenda. Whether it’s climate change, whether it’s transgender, or whether this whole COVID madness, you see it everywhere.

We are working on this to see what we can do, because the WHO is not done yet with trying to seize these executive powers of the member states. I’m working with a few really good lawyers on that. But we need the people to back us up on this, because after all, we only do what the people want us to do. They need to do something—stand up, take to the streets, and let their governments know they will not put up with this anymore—then, the stronger we will be able to voice our opinion.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.