Compare this:
By 2050 earlier, probably — all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron — they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like “freedom is slavery” when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
Syme {no relation} in 1984
with this:
People’s names are already on a large number of databases.
Most of us have dozens of cards in our wallets with our identities on. We
already have a Big Brother society. ID cards mean identity fraud can be dealt with and stopped. ID cards are a means of controlling the Big Brother society rather than creating it. Big Brother society is already here.
Charles Clarke, quoted in the Eastern Daily Press today.
Controlling the Big Brother society might sound like preventing it, restraining it. But your expectations deceive you. Forget literary allusion. “Big Brother society” means whatever the establishment defines it to mean.
Now consider only the words, how they literally fit together. Big Brother society = our society. ID cards are a means of controlling society.
Irrelevant propaganda spam deleted. Don’t do it again.
To an extent, shouldn’t society have some sort of control mechanism? I mean, look at the goings on of New Orleans. When the super-imposed structure of society and the government are stripped away, you’re left with human nature, just as Hobbes predicted it. The Leviathan is a necessary “evil”, with its ID Cards and the lot.
No. Orderly human societies have survived for hundreds of years without ID cards, personal dossiers, and centralised control of everyone’s life. The structure of society has generally not been superimposed (rather systemic), nor a function of government to regulate. Modern Government control, which is to say bureaucratic management, is (often deliberately) destructive of competing mechanisms of social regulation.
Hobbes was not predicting anything. He was looking back, in particular on the 30 Years’ War and the English Civil Wars, and reflecting on lawless power in multiple and indeterminate hands. Hobbesian absolutism was essentially to do with maintaining political order and structure within which life could continue, not determining every whit how people should live their everyday lives.
– A.J.P. Taylor in the Oxford History of England
Until recently the degree of control sought by the modern bureaucratic social managers in formerly liberal democracies was a practical impossibility even for the most repressive of regimes. Even the most rigorous of early 20th century police-states were content to limit their surveillance to the intelligentsia and stamping out independent economic power.
New Orleans is a bad example for you, since the evidence appears to be not that order broke down generally, but that the disaster concentrated and exposed the endemic lawlessless of life in the underclass which has been unsuccessfully suppressed and controlled (and quite possibly made worse) by government intervention in the lives of the poor.
Regarding the comments about unused school busses in New Orleans. I’m amazed by the comments from you all notionally and internationally pursusuing “the blame game” when it comes to New Orleans and Louisiana officials. I’m the first to say that not evacuating those that didn’t have trasportation, some 20-25 thousand or so, was and will never be acceptable but:
Consider:
The buses wouldn’t of held all the evacuees.
If the city ships them out on buses the city has to find a place for them to ALL go and then has to pay to house and feed them. SIMPLY PUT, THERE AREN’T MANY CITES OR FOR THAT MATTER STATES IN THE NATION THAT CAN LOGISTICALLY AND FINICALLY AFFORD TO DO THIS. As a native of New Orleans and Louisiana, they simply don’t have the budget or manpower.
Why don’t you all place the blame on the only portion of government that can really handle these situations, THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT!!!
Karl,
That comment (though not idiot propaganda like El Ezer’s deleted comment) is utterly irelevant to this discussion. Are you sure you are commenting on the right blog?
My biggest complaint with the federal response to Katrina is that they actually PREVENTED rescue efforts. One group brought dozens of boats to the effort, and FEMA put them through a 10-hour inspection that culminated in the boats being rejected because they did not have enough chairs. Generators, truckloads of water, and donations of fuel were turned back. Also, they split up families once they actually started evacuating people from the “terrordome” and convention center. Straight up. Government will not protect you. They will never be anything more than faceless beaurocrats who will round you up at the point of a gun and take you to a “shelter” where they will impose petty rules to keep you under control. Remember Bush’s first reaction? Did he offer assistance to the drowning people? No, he offered to shoot some looters and impose martial law. Best to plan for your own protection.
As for the lawlessness following the storm, the police are now saying that it was exaggerated. Who knows? Now is the time when everyone is trying to cover their butts. Check out Democracy Now! , however. There are 517 prisoners missing and allegations that many were left locked in their cells, and that they ultimately drowned.
That has nothing to do with the post either. This is a blog about British civil liberties, not American disaster relief.
Sorry. I got caught up in the irrelevant conversation. However, my point that government will not make you safe applies to Brits as well. Better look after your own safety, the best the government can do is gun down innocent people in the subway. I find the loss of civil liberties to have frightening implications for all of us. The political elites everywhere seem to be following the same fascist agenda.