----- Original Message -----
From: Michael Scheurich
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2008 9:24 AM
Subject: [ParanoidTimes] Re: The Orwellosphere: Anglo-American Drive to 'Total
Security State' Rolls On
Hi all--
I just joined this group. I am a 67 year old Anglo-American male and
have been an atheist since birth. With all due respect to the author
of this post I could have referred to the Orwellosphere as any of the
following:
1. Anglo-American
2. Afro-American
3. Latin-American
4. Feminist-American
5. Spanish-American
6. Asian-American
7. Indo-American
8. Japanese-American
9. etc,etc,etc
George Orwell's book "1984" is not a sci-fi novel. It is a
blueprint being used by powerful authoritarian plutocrat leaders of
the world to divide and conquer the world using racism, sexism, age
discrimination, ethnic discrimination, religious discrimination,
mind-control drugs, psychological warfare and psychotronic warfare.
The name of the game is mass confusion. The problem is dependent on
who you are.
If you a minority its the evil white people.
If you a woman its male chauvinist pigs.
If your gay its hetero-sexuals.
If your a man its feminists.
if your religious its atheists.
if your young its old people.
if your old its youth.
Parents are pitted against their children and children against
their parents. Husbands against wives and wives against husbands. And,
of course, races against each other.
If you don't think your a victim of mind control your already a
victim.
http://www.raven1.net/mind-mk.htm
peace,
Mike
--- In [EMAIL PROTECTED], "Bond" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/empire_burlesque/~3/414816243/1624-the-orwellosphere-anglo-american-drive-to-.html
The Orwellosphere: Anglo-American Drive to 'Total Security State' Rolls On
via Chris Floyd - Empire Burlesque by Chris Floyd on 8/10/08
"technology to wipe out truth is now available. not everybody can afford it but
it's available. when the cost comes down look out!" -- Bob Dylan, "World Gone
Wrong"
"toleration of the unacceptable leads to the last round-up." -- Dylan, ibid.
In the whirlwind of anxiety and confusion surrounding the global economic
meltdown, one thing is certain: governments will use the crisis to augment
their own power.
This may occur directly, as with the Bush-Paulson bailout plan, which gives the
Treasury Secretary virtually unlimited and unsupervised power to give billions
of taxpayer dollars to his cronies on Wall Street, while also allowing him to
override the few restrictions left on the machinations of raw greed in the
financial markets. (Yes, of course, all of this will change completely after
Barack Obama is elected: instead of Hank Paulson and George Bush doling out
bailout pork to their Wall Street pals, a brand-new Treasury chief and Obama
will be doling out bailout pork to their Wall Street pals.)
But the economic freak-out will also be employed as a distraction, with
governments using it to enact measures hugger-mugger while public attention is
obsessively focused elsewhere. A prime -- and chilling -- example of this can
be found in a new law slouching its way through the legislative process in
Britain, where it is likely to emerge in the stark light of day next year. And
it is a very rough beast indeed; the measure will, as Jenni Russell puts it in
the Guardian
[create a] centralised database that will track, in real time, every call we
make, every website we visit, and every text and email we send. That
information will then be stored and analysed - perhaps for decades. It will
mean the end of privacy as we know it.
Or rather, what's left of privacy as we used to know it. And Americans should
not take comfort in the fact that this truly Orwellian law is being prepared
across the sea. Britain has long been a bellwether for repressive measures in
the United States, blazing a path on detention without charges, omnipresent
camera surveillance, "strenuous interrogation," and other liberty-stripping
"counterterrorism" measures, many of them honed in the glory days of the dirty
war with the IRA. [For more on how British dirty war tactics cross-pollinated
American black ops in Iraq, see "Ulster on the Euphrates."]
Russell outlines in grim detail the full implications of the bill being pressed
forward by the "progressive" Labour government:
In the name of the fight against crime, and the fight against terror, we are
all to be monitored as if we could be suspects. Computers will analyse our
behaviour for signs of deviance. The minute we become of interest to anyone in
authority - perhaps because we take part in a demonstration, have an argument
with a security guard at an airport, spend too long on a website, or are
witness to a crime - the police or the security services will be able to dip
into our records and construct a near-complete pattern of our lives.
Russell also notes a salient point of this measure -- and also of the plethora
of other "security" strictures that are increasingly binding the lives of the
citizens of the Western democracies: to instill fear and obedience, not only by
the application of outside force, but more horribly, from within.
Stop and consider this for a moment. Think about how happy any of us would be
to have our lives laid out to official view. All our weaknesses, our private
fears and interests, would be exposed. Our web searches are guides to what is
going on in our minds. A married man might spend a lot of time on porn
websites; a successful manager might be researching depression; a businessman
might be looking up bankruptcy law.
We all have a gulf between who we really are and the face we present to the
world. Suddenly that barrier will be taken away. Would a protester at the
Kingsnorth power station feel quite so confident in facing the police if she
knew that the minute she was arrested, the police could find out that she'd
just spent a week looking at abortion on the web? Would a rebel politician
stand up against the prime minister if he knew security services had access to
the 100 text messages a week he exchanged with a woman who wasn't his wife? It
isn't just the certainty that such data would be used against people that is a
deterrent, it's the fear. As the realisation of this power grew, we would
gradually start living in the prison of our minds.
That last sentence is a shattering truth of our times -- again not only in
Britain but also in the land of "free speech zones" wrapped in razor wire,
where security forces raid privates homes in "pre-emptive" strikes against
potential protesters, and trigger-happy tasers silence citizens speaking
uncomfortable truths to the powerful.
As Russell notes, the proposed new law -- which is being smuggled into the
government's legislative program with almost no debate at all -- is "only the
worst manifestation of an official intrusion into our lives that is just about
to hit us, but of which we seem strangely unaware." And again, the UK is
leading the way:
The UK's network of speed cameras will soon be able to track every journey we
make by road under the automated number-plate recognition system. Mobile
network records can already place us, at any time, within 100 yards of our
phone's location. The ID database will record every time we go to a hospital or
a benefit centre, fill in a prescription or a draw a large sum from a bank. The
children's database will give access to every piece of gossip or fact about our
children or their family, perhaps in perpetuity. It will record that an older
sister may be alcoholic, or that a father is in jail, or that a 14-year-old is
thought to be having sex. Nobody will be able to break free of this information
about their past.
Most alarming of all, for its breadth of knowledge about us, the NHS database
will give hundreds of thousands of staff the ability to discover when we lost
our virginity, the drugs we're on, our mental health history.
Once more, Russell zeroes in on a salient fact about the growing Anglo-American
Orwellosphere:
None of this information will be safe, because we know three things about the
mass collection of data. The first is that the authorities will mine it where
it suits them. The second is that the data will be lost. And the third is that
it will leak.
Already in America, more than 400,000 people (by the most conservative
estimate; the real number is likely far higher) are now on a highly secretive
"terrorist watch list" -- compiled arbitrarily by unknown officials, using
unknown criteria (or none at all), for unseen ends. And of course, the American
government has been conducing widespread, warrantless, unregulated, and
patently illegal surveillance against multitudes of its own citizens for years.
This KGB-style operation -- openly acknowledged by the president himself -- was
later given ex post facto "legitimacy" by the Democratic-led Congress, which
also granted blanket immunity for the corporations which aided and abetted the
criminality. It was one of the most shameful Congressional actions in a decade
jam-packed with them -- and Barack Obama supported it fully.
As Russell rightly notes of such measures:
I'm all for the targeted pursuit of crime and terror, but this isn't it. This
is a multibillion-pound misuse of the state's time and our money which will
fundamentally damage our freedom to think and to act.
Here again is the crux of the matter. The relentless barrage of "security"
measures being heaped upon the British and American people will have almost no
effect on terrorists and organized crime, which are their ostensible targets.
As always, terrorists and criminals will game the system, whatever it is,
finding ways to work around it, outside it -- and within it. What then is the
real purpose of these measures? We took up this question here a couple of years
ago:
With each passing day, it becomes more evident that the main purpose behind
Bush's illegal, warrantless domestic spying program is not collecting
intelligence on terrorists and would-be terrorists -- a task for which the
government's existing draconian powers of surveillance were more than
sufficient. As many people have noted, Bush already possessed the legal right
to order the immediate surveillance of any person in the country, subject to
the sole restraint of having to seek approval from the secret FISA court within
72 hours. Given the established record of this court's near-total acquiescence
to thousands of such requests over the years, it is simply impossible to
believe that it would not grant its ex post facto approval to any surveillance
ordered by Bush which had even the most tenuous connection to a potential
terrorist threat.
This undeniable reality leaves us with only one logical conclusion: Bush's
secret spy program is designed for activities not covered by FISA's copious
security blanket. It is now apparent that these activities include using the
vast powers of federal, state and local governments to spy on the Bush
Administration's perceived political "enemies" -- a vast group, given that the
Bushist definition of an "enemy" is anyone who opposes any of their policies.
Again, we must note that the Democratic presidential candidate voted for the
measure which "legitimized" this program. Therefore it seems highly unlikely
that he will suddenly act to overturn it or de-legitimize it once he is in
office -- much less prosecute any of the perpetrators of this vast criminality.
It goes without saying that John McCain will also embrace this program, and all
other accelerations of the Total Security State now descending upon us.
------------------------------------
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