"Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."
It's official. Britain is the most watched and monitored society ever. Not only that, habeas corpus has been consigned to history books, along with protections against double jeopardy. The distinction between sanctions for criminal actions and the raising of taxation has been blurred to the point of invisibility. The UK has the highest per capita prison population in Europe, the prisons are at full capacity. And, if the opinion polls are to be believed, the subjects of Her Majesty are all for it.
Doubtless you'll be unsurprised to hear I despair at this sorry state of affairs. Even if Bliar and his gang weren't a bunch of two-faced liars out to line their own pockets but instead the paragons of virtue they portray themselves to be, it wouldn't be good enough for me. Such powers as the Government has taken for itself, with little or no effective dissent, are ripe for abuse. It is not the end of history and we should be mindful of history.
The song seems to be, "If you have nothing to hide you shouldn't be afraid." Bullshit! Politicians claim they're actually harking back to an earlier age, where in small-town or village life everyone knew everyone else's business. They claim the modern surveillance state, Bentham's panopticon, is merely replacing that lost method of social control. Yet again, bullshit!
Although some of your friends and neighbours, in past times, may have been psychopaths at least they could be held to account. A faceless bureaucracy or mega-corporation is effectively unaccountable. Murder can be done and nobody is held to task. So a court fines a legally franchised monopoly for "corporate manslaughter" and so we the poor dumb serfs are the ones who end up paying higher taxes or charges for whatever it is the corporation or bureaucracy controls. And a bureaucracy or a corporation is a psychopath, it has no feelings of remorse or moral compass - whatever blandishment to the contrary is given.
You could, in a small town, keep secrets to yourself. In modern Britain you can be sent to prison for encrypting your data files and not disclosing what's in them - simply for that. In days past you could move to somewhere else if you didn't like the way your neighbours conducted their affairs. The modern surveillance state is all-pervasive, globalist, cradle to the grave, DNA-coded.
Legally-constituted governments, and their laws, are the biggest killers of human beings. History shows. Letting government take more powers can only make things worse - again, history shows. Why does everyone believe everything has suddenly changed and politicians have become angels who can wield power without being corrupted? Why, when history amply demonstrates the exact opposite?
What worries me the most is why the politicians believe this is so necessary. Common sense discerns that most of the beliefs ruling the public mind are also deliberate hoaxes, what Noam Chomsky calls "necessary lies," to keep the population pacified without brute force. The Global War On Terror can't be the real reason - the PIRA (Provisional Wing of the Irish Republican Army) blowing the centres of out British cities, and almost slaughtering the entire British Government, didn't warrant such trashing of British civil liberties and legal guarantees (though what did happen was bad enough). The mostly imaginary al Qaeda certainly doesn't warrant a police state either. The Government didn't bother to institute effective control of the borders post 9/11 which surely demonstrates that al Qaeda are a phantom menace. As for Anthropogenic Global Warming…don't make me laugh.
Which leaves the question of why the deployment of the engines of tyranny and the politics of fear in a sophisticated, thoroughly propagandised, modern "liberal democracy." Why are the gloves coming off? What do they know about the future that we don't? Is it simply monumental stupidity?
You know the world's gone crazy when what David Icke is saying makes more sense than the stuff you see on the TV and read in the papers.
