Snitch Britain part XXX

Hot on the heels of this story of sinister, creeping totalitarianism from Rob, comes this one picked up by JuliaM.

Advertisements looking for people to sign up for the unpaid “environmental volunteer” jobs have been posted across the country in recent months.

Critics said the scheme is encouraging a Big Brother society where friends and neighbours will be encouraged to “snoop” on one another.

At the risk of someone mentioning Godwin; a little lesson in history. The Gestapo during the early days of the Third Reich was not a powerful organisation. It did not have agents throughout Germany to spy on people. Instead, it exhorted the people of Germany to do its dirty work for it; to note and report to the authorities unacceptable behaviour on the part of their neighbours. They used all the right buttons with words like patriotism to sting peoples’ consciences, to encourage them to do the right thing. That was how they managed to round up people who were “unsocial” or a bit odd, mentally ill, or who were not abject followers of the party, in short; who did not fit into the ideal of the Aryan master race.

At the end of the second world war, the East German state simply picked up where the Gestapo left off with the introduction of the Stazi. Different name, same principle. Little busybodies with nothing better to do, snooping and snitching on their neighbours, settling petty squabbles and disagreements  reporting them to the authorities. This, inevitably created a situation where no one trusted anyone and were forever looking over their shoulder.

Take, for example, the people who live across the road from me. I’ve noticed (so I cannot be the only one) that they tend to just put out the one bin. In other words, they don’t appear to be putting out anything for recycling. Such a heinous offence once reported would, doubtless, leave them wondering which of their neighbours reported them. There would follow a pervasive aura of distrust that once it has taken hold is difficult to shake off.

But, supposing they don’t put out the green bin because they have nothing to recycle? Supposing they were reported erroneously? The article Rob links to relates to a database of allegations. Under New Labour, allegations are given credibility that they do not deserve. Allegations that are demonstrably baseless are to be maintained and used against the accused.

I wonder how many times I have to say it; but here goes… Sixty years ago these islands stood alone in defiance against a fascist empire that threatened to engulf the civilised world. It had swept across Europe and was but twenty miles from our shores. We stood firm and eventually with the help of our allies we drove it back. We then spent four decades in a stand-off with its successor before the people of Eastern Europe and Russia finally rebelled.

The cost in lives of the struggle against fascist totalitarianism that gripped much of the twentieth century was huge, but ultimately we deemed it worthwhile. Liberty was worth the cost, no matter how great that cost. This generation is allowing the monster back in, to rape and murder liberty and no one bats an eyelid. The fallen will be spinning in their graves.

They are not snoopers.

That is precisely what they are.

They will help councils cut crime and make places cleaner, greener and safer.

Oh, well, that’s alright, then. The Gestapo and the Stazi used similarly innocuous euphemisms for their behaviour.

11 Comments

  1. “Democracy, then, in the centralizing, pattern-making,
    absolutist shape which we have given to it is,
    it is clear, the time of tyranny’s incubation.”
    Bertrand De Jouvenel “On Power: The Natural History of its Growth.”
    Well worth a read.
    He identifies the problem as not socialism or nationalism or fascism or any of the other -isms but the nature of Power itself (“The Minotaur”), which will adopt any disguise in order to further its insatiable desire for expansion and whose chief tool is the state.

  2. Which is why, like the Devil’s Kitchen, I am not over enamoured with democracy; it is the tyranny of the majority over the minority. At best, it is the least worst option, but not a very good option, nonetheless.

    My aim is liberty.

  3. For some reason the youth of today don’t care about liberty. Or at least our liberty.

    However if you talk about building a new runway or freedom in Tibet they’ll go mental.

    It’s utterly ridiculous.

  4. LR
    “Which is why, like the Devil’s Kitchen, I am not over enamoured with democracy; it is the tyranny of the majority over the minority. At best, it is the least worst option, but not a very good option, nonetheless.

    My aim is liberty.”

    I would go further and say I am an anti-democrat for the reasons previously outlined. I should say that I mean democracy as actually practised rather than the prevalent vague and romantic notion of “democracy” as some kind of sacred cow.

    I don’t believe we live in a democracy in any meaningful sense. Shuffling a few people around at the top of the system is not democratic when the real power rests elsewhere. The political class controls the media, the education system, the civil service, quangos etc. and it doesn’t really matter which party has a majority in parliament. It’s actually the tyranny of a minority over the majority.

    As for democracy being the least worst system I would submit that both aristocracy and monarchy would be better for individual liberty. An aristocracy is unlikely to be peopled by those deliberately seeking personal power. Aristocrats are more likely to leave us alone. They can’t claim that they have a mandate and with any luck they’ll be more interested in gambling, drinking and shagging than regulating the lives of ordinary people.

    Likewise a monarchy would be better than the present system, which is bound to collapse eventually leading to god knows what kind of dystopian nightmare. Incidentally, who said this and in what circumstances?

    “For the people. And truly I desire their Liberty and Freedom as much as any Body whomsoever. But I must tell you, That their Liberty and Freedom, consists in having of Government; those Laws, by which their Life and their Gods may be most their own. It is not for having share in government (Sir) that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a soveraign are clean different things, and therefore until they do that, I mean, that you do put the people in that liberty as I say, certainly they will never be happy”

    He was right wasn’t he?

    Actually the very least worst form of government was that exercised by Sir John James Cowperthwaite. See here:

    http://www.tcsdaily.com/Article.aspx?id=020106I

    I can understand why lefties ignore Cowperthwaite but I can never understand why libertarians don’t make more of the man.

  5. Mass-Observation, a pre-war “anthropological study” started in Bolton in 1937, and later nationwide, was used by the Ministry of Information during WW2 to monitor public attitudes. Its anonymous, intrusive methods were widely disliked and its volunteer workers were dubbed “Cooper’s Snoopers” [after the Minister, Duff Cooper]. See:

    http://spender.boltonmuseums.org.uk/history_mass_observation.html

    Today, snoopers are, alas, actually popular because of peoples’ exaggerated hysteria about such drummed-up bogies as terrorists and paedophiles.

  6. …it’s actually from King Charles’ speech from the scaffold

    Indeed, I had to look it up. It had a ring of familiarity about it and I wondered if it came from Cromwell’s speech dissolving parliament. Certainly I knew it came from the English civil war period.

  7. Cowperthwaitsm sounds like a philosophy that many lovers of liberty would follow and enjoy. I don’t care nearly as much for democracy as genuine liberty. A libertarian Cowperthwatist movement would be really good.

    One point about ID cards in Hong Kong: the Britiah introduced them, but what were the circumstances?

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