Originally Posted by
RDJ
Well, unfortunately, there are a few analogous - but not of course identical - historical precedents.
(I note your screen name, and I learned my earliest i.e. post-graduation trauma medicine in that neighbourhood).
For example, consider the entity that was Yugoslavia. Its capital, Sarajevo, hosted the Olympics. Only a few years later, its citizens were running for their lives down Sniper Alley trying to get the basics of life... after ethnic and religious divisions spilled over into bloodshed and massacre. Or consider the Hutu-Tutsi genocide; all those villagers, the killers and the killed, used to be neighbours, literally not just figuratively. Also, unless unless it is not news to you, read up on the farm killings in South Africa...
For perhaps a less dramatic/simplistic example, consider that not that many decades ago, Beirut was known as "the Paris of the Middle East". Culture, civilisation, drama, fine architecture, it had it all. Then it slumped into the slagheap of history.
Do I think that New Zealand is going to follow any of those paths? no, I don't. However, having lived and worked in many countries which have that sort of recent history - also have a look at what Syria and Iraq were like only a few decades ago and compare that to what they are now - 'there is a great deal of ruin in a nation' as someone once said. And if things go bad, then they will tend to go like Hemingway is reported to have said when he was asked how he went bankrupt - "very slowly, and then suddenly".
If you or I had told people five years ago that the police would be chasing law-abiding citizens off beaches and pathways back in to their homes because the government said so, but there were no laws underpinning it; if you or I had told people that there would be a terrorist massacre of other immigrants by an immigrant but all New Zealand's firearm licence holders would be blamed; if you or I had told people five months ago that one half million previously-employed New Zealanders would suddenly either be unemployed or on wage subsidies and we are going to have a debt that our children will struggle to pay off - a decision mostly reached (in Ardern's own words) because the Prime Minister had heard from her friends in London that our country had to be locked down, 48 hours after she said that was a rumour - and that she and the government should be our only source of truth - we would have been laughed at.
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