Last year, on a newspaper comment thread, someone called me a ‘nitwit’ because I said that civil liberties in the UK and USA are starting to resemble those found in places like China and North Korea. I’m not going to argue the toss in this post, because I’ve gone into it many times before (such as here). All I will say is that you only have to look at the laws the bastards have been passing to realise that we’ve had it; and that’s what this post is about: realisation.
In 2007, the journalist and activist Naomi Wolf published a book called The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. Amongst other things, in the book Wolf outlined ten steps in which an open society becomes a closed society:
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
2. Create a gulag
3. Develop a thug caste
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
5. Harass citizens’ groups
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
7. Target key individuals
8. Control the press
9. Dissent equals treason
10. Suspend the rule of law
(the Five Eyes countries – America, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand – are now approaching step 9)
The End of America was written during the presidency of George Bush junior. When Obama was elected president many people had high hopes, but of course things have got even worse under Obama; which brings us back to that word again: realisation.
Earlier this year, Naomi Wolf gave an excellent talk at the New Hampshire Liberty Forum. It was titled The End of America revisited, and for the first hour she goes into detail about the ten steps leading to a police state. Wolf then gave a 10 minute summary before doing a Q & A with the audience. It’s the summary that I’m going to hone in on here, because Wolf does an excellent job of describing where we are now at. She gets very emotional during this part of her talk, with the realisation of the enormity of it all…
The complete talk and Q & A runs to 1 hour and 45 minutes and can be found here.
In her summary, Wolf mentions the TTIP, which stands for the ‘Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership’, which will allow companies to sue governments that introduce new laws that could damage company profits. The TTIP might not, at first glance, appear to be startling stuff, but it’s yet another example of the corporate take-over that’s going on, all behind the scenes, in the shadows, with the general public barely aware of it (you can find more information about the TTIP here).
Last Sunday the Monty Python team gave their final performance at the London O2 Arena. You might be wondering what this has to do with what I’ve been talking about here. I dunno, it just seems appropriate to end this post with the Python’s final song…