The idea that history has a tendency to repeat itself is at least 2,500 years old and probably originates from the “History of the Peloponnesian War” written by Methodydes. Mark Twain humorously claimed that history does not repeat itself but it sometimes rhymes. Whether we believe that this is a deterministic loop over which we have no control or a tendency that awareness and political involvement may minimize its damage, how we remember history has future importance.
Therefore, it is important for me to write sharply and clearly: during the Corona period, there was coercion here.
I have no desire to determine whether the forcing of an issue was justified from a purely epidemiological point of view or not. I assume that in the coming years we will see published studies that hold one way or another. I also have no desire to determine here what were the motives of those who engaged in coercion. I am willing to assume that a significant portion of those who engaged in coercion believed that they were acting from moral motives and not from lust for power or greed or other moral weakness.
Now that we have put these two issues aside, it is important to understand what coercion is in general so that we can recognize it throughout history, throughout the world and when it presents itself in our lives as “there is nothing to do”, a moral order or a law of nature.
It is important to understand what coercion is in order to be able to recognize it throughout history, throughout the world and when it presents itself in our lives as “there is nothing to do”, a moral order or a law of nature
The tendency in our pornographic culture is to understand complex processes through short and extreme scenes. We imagine that the extreme case, the most visual image, is what defines a phenomenon. This is probably why everything including everything reminds us of the Holocaust. But in many fields we have learned to understand that an extreme visual image does not define a phenomenon.
We understand and understand, for example, that bullying does not have to be expressed as beatings from a physically large child lurking on the way to school. Bullying can also be messages from swords of life in the class WhatsApp group.
We understand and understand that corruption does not have to be reflected in the transfer of suitcases of money in exchange for a direct favor. It can also manifest itself as a bizarre purchase of submarines with a tangled money trail that is very difficult to explain.
We understand and understand that rape does not have to come with a gun to a girl in a dark alley while there is obvious physical resistance. It can also occur between husband and wife.
We acquired these understandings and we are still acquiring and acquiring them partly with the help of myth busting. If so, let’s debunk four common myths about coercion:
1. Not all coercion is violent or overt
When we talk about coercion, it is important that we stop thinking of it in the cinematic version as a scene in a dark torture cellar or an extermination camp. Coercion can be violent, involve a degree of violence or none at all. It can be visible or hidden.
In Anna Pender’s masterpiece Staziland, one of the most chilling descriptions of the coercion of the East German regime did not involve any violence. A woman named Yulia was invited to room 118 at the police where a pleasant man in a western suit was waiting for her who talked to her casually and then took out a package of love letters between her and a lover she had already broken up with.
He sat in the office behind a clerk’s desk and read the letters one after the other out loud to her and occasionally stopped to ask something casual about Mila. At the end of the reading, he told her briefly and with the intimacy of a relative about her parents and sister. and asked politely and without any threat or coercion for cooperation.
From the seventies of the last century, the Stasi stopped using forceful and violent methods and switched to a method of personalized psychological harassment – a method called “Zarstung”, a word that describes the decomposition of organic materials in nature.
From the 1970s, the Stasi stopped using forceful and violent methods and switched to a method of personalized psychological harassment – a method called “zerstung”, a word that describes the decomposition of organic materials in nature
The technique was built with the aim of breaking down people’s self-confidence, the relationships in their lives, isolating them, breaking down their status and reputation in the community with the help of gaslighting, disinformation and psychological manipulations such as inviting a bureaucratic reading of love letters.
“Zarstung” allowed East Germany to deny accusations against it mainly in the international arena. But today it is clear to all of us, both in the torture cellars and in the lip candy, that the regime in the German Democratic Republic engaged in coercion.
2. Choice is not a sign that there is no coercion, and resistance is not a sign that there is no coercion
Another myth is that if there is a choice, there is no coercion. And further, if there is resistance, it means that there is no coercion because “real coercion” (meaning the pornographic fantasy) does not allow anything else to exist alongside it. This is simply not true.
In Iran, women are required to wear the hijab, but if the compulsion were absolute, there would be no need to strengthen the enforcement by the “morality police” that led to the murder of Mahsa Amini, and that ignited a wave of protest. Does the fact that women are now burning hijabs and participating in demonstrations mean that there is no coercion? of course not.
In communist Russia, atheism was a legal requirement for party members. But unlike the hijab for Iranian women, there was no legal obligation to be a party member, although being a party member gave members privileges that made life difficult for those who weren’t.
In communist Russia, churches were converted into cryptic buildings like warehouses and the government used campaigns that mocked religious belief. Religion was not criminalized but became a ridiculous and non-solidarity position. People in the former Soviet Union actually had a choice and the fact that religion didn’t disappear either. But does anyone want to argue that there was freedom of religion in communist Russia?
In communist Russia, churches were converted into cryptic buildings like warehouses and the government used campaigns that mocked religious belief. Religion was not criminalized but became a ridiculous and non-solidarity position
Alan Turing, the renowned mathematician and computer scientist – who helped crack the Enigma code of the Germans in World War II – was given a choice as someone who testified to having a homosexual relationship: go to prison or undergo chemical castration. Turing was not given a choice between freedom and heteronormative coercion; He was given a “Zarstung” style choice, a choice that disguises coercion. Turing opted for chemical castration, which led to a loss of cognitive ability and grew breasts. In the end he chose the only freedom he had left, and committed suicide.
Coercion can involve blatant criminalization of behavior or the construction of a system of incentives (carrots and sticks) that makes free and open choice difficult or impossible.
3. Not everyone feels coercion to the same extent
Precisely because it seems obvious, it is important to dwell on it. Coercion is only coercion if someone consciously does not want it. Those who want something, or those who convince them that they want something, do not experience coercion as coercion!
Those who want to marry and divorce in the rabbinate do not experience the fact that there is no forced civil marriage in Israel, because that is his or her preference. Of course, it is also possible not to get married and not start a family, therefore those who want to will claim that there is no coercion. Because again, this is not a soft gun. But those who claim that there is no religious coercion in Israel regarding the whole issue of family law are placing, similar to the British government with Turing, a simulated choice within the framework of coercion.
That doesn’t mean you can’t fly to Cyprus, pretend to be a single parent or hold a shamanic ritual with a guitar. As a country, Israel maintains religious coercion in family law, which is unequally felt among the entire population. Those who get divorced feel the coercion much more than those who get married. Agonized women feel the coercion much more than others. And so on.
It is possible to live an entire life with an undisturbed theoretical understanding of the depth of religious coercion, simply because it affects different people differently. That is, the fact that a person does not experience coercion himself, whether it is because he wants something or because for accidental reasons or because of discrimination the coercive forces did not meet him, does not mean that there is no coercion.
4. Coercion can exist within a democracy
It seems to us that coercive regimes fall into a drama similar to the Berlin Wall or the victory of the Allies in World War II. But there are examples where coercion existed and ceased in a gradual and less photogenic manner. Thus, for example, during the McCarthyism period in the USA.
For about a decade between the 1940s and 1950s, people were persecuted who were suspected of having some kind of affinity even just in thought to communism. A series of Supreme Court rulings and publicized hearings gradually closed that period of political and ideological coercion in the US, without the drama of overthrowing a totalitarian regime.
and back to Israel
Reviewing the myths through examples allows us to see that coercion is the product of deliberate manipulation of a person’s free will and freedom of action; that it involves power relations but that it does not have to include violence; It can exist even when there is apparently a choice; Not everyone feels coercion even when it exists; And that it can begin and end without drama even within a democratic regime.
During the Corona outbreak, there was coercion in Israel. Force closures, force masks and force vaccines.
At first the coercion was violent and open and included a degree of criminalization. We saw checkpoints of security forces between cities. We have seen people being violently dragged into custody for meditating in the park, taking a dip at the beach or for not wearing a mask. We saw distribution of reports about a demonstration more than 1000 meters from the house. The Shin Bet followed us like terrorists.
Later, similar to the change that took place in East Germany in the 1970s, the coercion was refined into a current version of “Zarstung”. Techniques of manipulation with trendy names like “nudges” and “behavioral economics” were behind policies that set a layered goal of vaccinating students to get school parents to fight and put pressure on the unvaccinated in the school community.
A green card prevented people like teachers, nurses or postal workers from making a living without two vaccinations and a booster, while those who are retired or self-employed are not required to show a green card to enter a workplace.
A green card prevented teachers, nurses or postal workers from making a living without two vaccinations and a booster, while those who are retired or self-employed are not required to present a green card to enter a workplace
As we know, coercion can exist even when there is a choice, which is another expression of coercion, and in Israel this type of choice was given: those who did not want or could not get vaccinated at least three times or did not agree to the violation of their privacy with a green card, but were destined to be among the people who must have a green card to make a living or to study, could “choose” to do special institutional antigen tests for a fee every 24 hours, while tests for the vaccinated were free. The price of the test was more expensive than the cost of an antigen test at full price in the store.
Both the green sign and the paid tests required consent to a violation of privacy, both in the sharing of the information and the requirement to present it, and also in the technology in which subjects received results. And even those who have privacy in mind had the choice to give up studies or livelihood.
What else did “Zarstung” style coercion look like in Israel? After they started to vaccinate children, a policy was established according to which upon exposure to a verified in the classroom, the vaccinated children will continue their studies as usual while the unvaccinated children will be sent to do an institutional examination and regardless of the results, even asymptomatics will go into isolation for 10 days and at the end – in order to return to school – they will have to repeat the examination again. And if there were not a certain number of children in isolation at a given moment, it was determined that the teacher should not open a Zoom lesson for them.
Due to the multiple exposures, there were families who spent weeks in endless isolation while being excluded not only from the classroom physically but even from passive participation through existing technology that only required the push of a button. Children who were not vaccinated were actually boycotted.
On the networks, in the press, on the radio and on television, campaigns were conducted to ridicule critical positions, including the destruction of the reputation of professionals in the mainstream media channels, warning letters from the Ministry of Health to doctors who opened their mouths, blackmailing, hiding and avoiding access to public information – all these were the official policy of the government in Israel – Both in the government led by Benjamin Netanyahu and in the government led by Naftali Bennett, which has rights but the lack of coercion in the field of the corona is not one of them.
On the networks, in the press, on radio and television, campaigns were conducted to ridicule critical positions, including destroying the reputation of professionals in the mainstream media channels
The fact that not all coercion was violent or overt, the fact that people were given a choice within a set of positive and negative incentives designed to make the lives of the unvaccinated and unboosted miserable and exclude them from society, the fact that not everyone experienced the coercion as coercion, whether they wanted it or the circumstances of their lives did not put them under Full of its oppressive weight, and whether the fact that alongside a blatant policy of coercion there were also democratic processes – all these testify, for those who know history, not only that there was coercion here, but that it has a place in the pantheon of history that rhymes with itself.