When I read this quotation today from Proudhon on Zerohedge, posted by Able Ape, I was astonished. The outlook is incredibly modern. It seems like such suffocating government would have started after 1910 or so. Apparently issues of top heavy and tyrannical government are nothing new.
“To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.” ~ Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1851)
There is something quite Shakespearean about the repetitive invective here. Having lived through near anarchy and private armies in early 1990’s Moscow, I forever lost any naive taste for anarchy. Anarchy is basically caveman rules – I have gun, you give me. On the other hand, limiting government and its reach is a necessity in preventing democratic government from becoming an all-consuming tyranny. This is the precipice on which we stand now.
The internet has become instead of a friend of knowledge, a tool to distribute propaganda, lower the intelligence of the population through vulgar memes and pornography and, worst of all, an all-seeing gestapo.
Evil, arrogant men like Eric Schmidt love to say nonsense like “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt on privacy
Everyone has secrets, including Schmidt who loves infidelity, sexual perversion and (illegal) recreational drugs when he’s out of his suit. By making all secrets of all men and women available to the government and more particularly its secret services, one simply makes (almost) everyone an available victim of state-sponsored blackmail.
What’s the harm?
It’s pretty clear that the CIA/NSA managed to get their hands on many of Angela Merkel’s secrets while they had access to her phone and her computers. It was important to them to let her know what they had. It’s probably enough to put her in jail, certainly enough to have her thrown out of public office. It may include secret bank accounts, it may include sexual peccadilloes but it’s certainly enough to put her on a very short leash.
Merkel went from we don’t need or want “multi-kulti” to enthusiastically cheerleading a land invasion of Europe by two million economic migrants. Most of those economic migrants had had their homeland partially destroyed by the USA and Israel’s wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria).
“Wir schaffen es,” proclaimed Merkel and promptly made Germans second-class citizens in their own country. No longer was their safe access to public baths, poor Germans were thrown out of their public housing to accommodate the economic migrants, undocumented migrants were more or less free to commit crimes of their choice as police dreaded the paperwork when trying to prosecute them.
If the all-seeing eye of Sauron can successfully push a multi-decade elected leader to betray her country, her people and her continent, what else has it done?