The Unreasonable Man

The Economist has a perceptive article this week about security and the rights we (and the British in particular) are willing to give up for questionable (I would say: non-existent) “terrorism reduction benefits”. The article is here [link]. Chilling reading: it seems to me that we really will have another Nazi event soon enough, since we seem to have learned nothing from the 20th century.

It is strange that Britain, which as The Economist says as recently as the 1970s was the liberal outpost of Europe, has regressed to the opposite side of the spectrum. I have been saying this for years: Britain was relatively free; it is now the most illiberal democracy in the world. Voluntarily.

The No2ID campaign makes the case against ID cards. These are not simple ID cards: read the officious language (so often used in England to allow outrages to happen) that describes the data that can be stored on the card. And read the rest of the site: Kafka would have enjoyed this.

(Kafka would have enjoyed this too: in Britain, almost every car journey is tracked and stored by police for five years.)

Back to ID cards. The issues with these cards are not just fundamental - they are also practical. The No2ID campaign, for example, makes one of the best points at the end of its page here:

Lost identity, becoming an un-person

By making ordinary life dependent on the reliability of a complex administrative system, the scheme makes myriad small errors potentially catastrophic. There’s no hint from the government how it will deal with inevitably large numbers of mis-identifications and errors, or deliberate attacks on or corruption of what would become a critical piece of national infrastructure. A failure in any part of the system at a check might deny a person access to his or her rights or property or to public services, with no immediate solution or redress—”license to live” withdrawn.

I lost my ID a few years ago - that is, I had it stolen. Through no fault of my own, I was that un-person for a week. As Canadian Embassy staff told me at the time: “even if Her Majesty the Queen walked into here right now and personally vouched for you, we could still do nothing without a valid form XYZ”. People do not realise the horrors of being that un-person.

Or of being that person. Germanic tribes like the Germans and Dutch have always held paperwork in high regards. Without paperwork you would have chaos! In the Netherlands, to this day you cannot just buy a house in any town you like: unless your house is in a certain price range, most towns demand that you get a “woonvergunning” - a residence permit. Which is not a formality, and which is often denied . And of course during the war the Netherlands sent more Jews to the Gas Chambers, as a percentage of the Jewish population, than any country in Western Europe: 95% died. In large part because the Dutch respected authority and had excellent paperwork, records, stamps, seals, compulsory ID cards.

Plus ça change. The Economist puts it in diplomatic language, but I am not a diplomat, so I will say it my way: people who do not fight back against this slow slide into total state power are contributing to the next Nazi Era.

We will not call them Nazis, of course; we will probably call them something like “ATHAPOOCs” (Anti-Terrorist Heroes And Protectors Of Our Children”, but it will be “like Deja Vu All Over Again”.

Unless, of course, enough of our children are taught to think.

And let’s start in England, where “They Don’t Need No Education”.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 8:59 pm and is filed under Politics and social.