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A new blog on the block

With the assistance of several notable bloggers, namely Perry de Havilland and Dissident Frogman, I have set up a protest blog collective called White Rose. The original impetus came from an article about imminent introduction of identity cards in Britain which scared the hell out of me, and so I decided it is time to rally the Anglosphere behind resistance to the accelerating destruction of personal liberty in the UK.

White Rose will point a finger at the British government’s measures eroding personal freedom. All the time. With as many people helping as possible. It is not an exclusively libertarian project and we welcome regular contributions, from bloggers and non-bloggers alike, across the political spectrum. The only requirement is a refusal to tolerate the draconian nature of the state’s reach over the individual.

The format is that of a one-stop-shop for news, analysis, ideas, concepts and arguments, information and contacts related to privacy and civil liberties. The focus will be on the situation in the UK but any contributors who can point at similar cases and experiences in their countries will form an essential input in the debate. The objective is to discuss alternative solutions and halt the drive for security undermining personal freedom and privacy.

To read the White Rose argument about why the debate should not be framed around the trade-off between freedom and security, please go here.

If you want to find out how to become a White Rose contributor, please go here.

Visit White Rose, a protest blog collective

19 comments to A new blog on the block

  • George Peery

    This sounds like a noble undertaking. If I lived in Britain, I would definitely be alarmed by the intimated schemes of, e.g., the Home Secretary.

  • Perhaps if it all goes well, there can, in future, be subdivisions for other countries as well.

    Just a thought!

  • T. J. Madison

    When the police state finally takes over, basically all of us agitators and dissidents are going to die very, very slowly.

    Anyone foolish enough to speak out against the government at this late date better scream REAL LOUD, because if we lose, it’s your ass.

    Think about it — there was some freedom of speech in Germany in the 20s. But I’d bet 10:1 Uncle Adolf went back and checked who had been saying naughty things about him. The coming police state will just use Google.

    Free speech is a trap to lure dissidents out into the open so that they can be tagged and neutralized later.

    What we REALLY need is HARDENED ANONYMOUS COMMUNICATION. In particular, we need some way to run blogs and post messages without it being traced back to realspace identities. Current generation proxies and anonymizers work great until the surveilance state either brackets the proxies with sniffers or seizes them directly. What percentage of public proxies are actually honeypots?

    We need a better technological solution.

  • Anyone foolish enough to speak out against the government at this late date better scream REAL LOUD, because if we lose, it’s your ass.

    Why such pessimism? Is it better to keep quiet? At least we will know we have tried… The point is, with blogs, you don’t have to try alone… Anyway, it’s not like I haven’t been an agitator and dissident before… My experience made me see that there is value in numbers and in knowing that there are others thinking the same way.

    Also, I haven’t completely written off the British public. My impression is that they just haven’t woken up to what is going on. Again, there must be a way to change that.

  • Liberty Belle

    It’s a noble undertaking, but Gabriel, if the British public hasn’t woken up to what’s going on, the British public is legally brain dead and can’t be woken up. Unlike contributors to Samizdata, they are bovine and passive, concentrating on the micro – standing in the right spot on the platform to get a seat on the 8:24 from Hemel Hempsted – while the macro is built up stealthily, being slotted into place with barely an audible click. Even the sinister shadow that this vast infrastructure casts is barely noticed …

    Your clarion call will only be noticed if you can get to the mainstream media. As we know, the BBC is the ministry of progaganda, so they’re out. That leaves The Times (News International, strange ally of the Labour party) and The Telegraph, which (am I the only one who’s detected it?) has strangely softened its stance on Labour during these last six months or so, no longer attacking in a deservedly harsh tone but giving courteous nuanced nudges now and again. They seem to have adopted the gentlemanly, “Now, see here, there’s a good chap …” approach.

    This is not to say that I don’t applaud what you’re attempting and heartily wish this effort well.

  • Gabriel, well done for making this effort — I absolutely believe it can make a difference.

    As for getting noticed, well, all it really takes is one massive publicity stunt. Wait a sec…Perry, you don’t own an Osama bin Laden costume, do you…?

  • D Anghelone

    War of the Roses? Better than the War of the Sub rosas as advocated by T.J. Madison. Maybe you’ll rouse some people who’d otherwise suffer silently.

  • “430-21-4093”

    See that? That’s the Socialist Insecurity number with which the United States Government insists on identifying me.

    I present it here so that anyone can use if they want to, because I don’t.

    If you ever played tug-of-war, what happens if you let go of the rope? The other person falls on his ass.

    Get it?

    Publish all your numbers, kids. Let the state try to sort it out.

  • Arjuna

    Dude, someone is going to get a credit card number in your name. The government is only one of your worries with your social security number.

  • Johnathan Pearce

    Gabriel, best of luck on this and I will of course, work permitting, love to help out.

    We may go down, but let us go down guns blazing!

  • Andy Duncan

    T. J. Madison writes:

    When the police state finally takes over, basically all of us agitators and dissidents are going to die very, very slowly.

    By God, that fatalistic sentence of inevitable destiny makes me feel a bit depressed. I know how you feel, but trying to shake it off, I believe there’s always hope. Although the world does seem to be heading towards some kind of terrible Phillip K. Dick novel situation, with a mixture of all-powerful left-fascist police states, or right-fascist police states, or even a UN-led police-state monster, they’ll never destroy us entirely.

    Because as Ms Rand realised, they feed on us, they need us, without us they are nothing but soon-to-die hostless parasites.

    Okay, it’s a bit Matrix-like, but the whole history of freedom in the last 10,000 years has been one of civilised freedom always staying one step ahead of clumsy statist government, as the trail moved west from Egypt, to Greece, to Rome, to Britain, to the US, to the West Coast, interspersed by various terrible dark ages, and the cloying hands of the 18th Egyptian Dynasty, Plato, Julius Caesar, the Labour Party, and Washington DC.

    We may be about to enter another such dark age, though we should fight it each inch of the way, but eventually it will end, sooner I hope rather than later; and we will come through.

    In the meantime, we should seek to destroy the statists at every opportunity to give this probable future as good a chance as possible.

    And this new blog seems an excellent way of taking the fight back to these creators of dark ages. Bravo Gabriel Syme. Best of British! 😉

  • I am very pleased to see this new site. I would be happy to contribute as well. I know all about government attempting to limit individuals liberty and right to freedom.

  • Fred Boness

    There is already a White Rose. This is an outgrwoth of a WWII German (passive) resistance group. I believe they were all killed.

    White Rose International

  • T. J. Madison

    >>There is already a White Rose. This is an outgrwoth of a WWII German (passive) resistance group. I believe they were all killed.<< Yep. They were killed because they bravely (and stupidly) stood in front of the juggernaut that crushed them. I'm not saying that victory over the police state is impossible. I AM saying that direct, public confrontation with the State at the present time isn't very smart. Effective political action is very difficult because of the Collective Action Problem: no individual's contribution is likely to be decisive, so it's hard to get rational people to join the resistance. What we need to do is develop tools that individuals can use to save their own asses from the State, tools that can be given friends and family and sold to everyone else. In the past, these tools were firearms, but I don't think violence is a necessary (or sufficient) part of resistance to tyranny today. We need better tools.

  • Fred: Yes, we know about all the other ‘White Rose’ groups… now there is another 🙂

    You are correct that the original White Rose were pamphleteers in Nazi Germany and have inspired many groups. No group is directly ‘descended’ from them as they were indeed all killed.

  • Fred Boness

    I would feel better if you modelled your new organization after a group that won.

  • Ted Schuerzinger

    Actually, the original members of the White Rose weren’t all killed by the Nazis.

    There’s a 1997 interview with Jürgen Wittenstein which was printed in the US magazine “German Life”.

  • That is interesting to know Ted