by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Everywhere we look we see that George Orwell's book seems to be used as policy guidance to repress the people and to invent more and more restrictions to the freedoms once enjoyed by everyone.
The European Union appears to be, together with Britain and the USA, in the forefront of applying the ideas of “1984” in the real world.
Then again, those ideas have been well tried in one of the countries of what is the European Union today already in the 1930s and 1940s and found to be working, and later, in a similar vein, under Stalinism in the countries behind the so-called Iron Curtain.
If the people are not careful we will see a repetition of the Nazi and Stalinist repressions and worse and in more countries than we could imagine. Canada and others too appear to be looking at using “1984” as some kind of policy guidance to repress the will of the people and this is more than worrying.
CCTV cameras, some with audio capability, are springing up even in the remotest corners of, for instance, Britain and that means even in small villages, and not just the centers of cities and towns.
Unfortunately it is the public, so we are told, who demand that the authorities put up more and more of those surveillance devices to make people feel safe.
However, the question must be asked as to whether the public, that the authorities are referring to, really are (1) representative and (2) know in fact what they are asking for and (3) aware of the fact that, even according to some senior police officers and ministers, CCTV and such measures do little to nothing to actually solve crime and neither do they deter crime.
The truth appears to be that the powers-that-be use suggestive methods to have people clamor for such surveillance devices because they are made to believe that those devices make them safer. And the reason for this is because the powers-that-be wish to implement “1984” ideas of people control.
It is all about people control and has little or nothing to do with crime and disorder prevention and the solving of crimes and it is time that everyone realized that and the fact that the governments, or better the powers-that-be, aim to incrementally remove all the freedoms that were so hard fought for.
Our safety and security first and foremost is down to each and every one of us ourselves and we must get that message across to the governments also and we must take responsibility for it (and be allowed to do so).
People, however, have abdicated their own responsibilities to the government, local and central, and ask for more and more liberties to be taken away from them so that they can feel safer.
Crime prevention is the job of each and every one of us and should not be farmed out to some agency. It used to be that way. The law and its enforcers should only come in as a last resort.
That means that we must deny any potential thief or burglar the opportunity to commit a crime against us and the same goes as far as attacks, such as robberies and muggings are concerned.
The same goes for “terrorism” and the clamor by the authorities to be given more and more tools to watch every one of us just in case that will prevent “terrorism”. They know themselves that that will not but it will have us all treated as potential terrorists and many legal protests and actions are now categorized as “domestic terrorism” already, including anti-war, anti-pipeline, and other such demonstrations.
We, the people, have to remind our governments that George Orwell's book “1984” was and is a cautionary tale of what could happen if we, the people, do not keep control of our governments, and not a policy guideline document.
© 2013
