Often I feel that we in the west have our own "whatabout-ism" when it comes to these issues. To those, I want to ask, if you wanted to enact fascistic surveillance and control over western society, how would you go about it differently from what we have today?
Would you really want to bring attention to yourself by being loud and violent, like we seem to expect "real" evil governments are? Or would you just do it secretly, mix it up with other issues like child pornography, terrorism and piracy, and just paint the alarmists as overreacting?
Because Julian Assange is free to come and go as he pleases. And of course Edward Snowden is happily drinking cocktails in Hawaii. And Glenn Greenwald's partner David Miranda was never detained at freedom-loving Heathrow airport. Chelsea Manning posts freely and regularly on her blog. See also Jeremy Hammond. Also Aaron Swartz. Also Daniel Elsberg. Also Lavabit. Also...
Ok, sorry for the sarcasm.
Maybe literally they don't physically attack your house with black helicopters. But they will bring the full force of the legal system on top of you backed up by threat and/or use of physical force.
And the tendency you describe is I think more properly denoted "whataboutery"?
Maybe you should apply it yourself and respond to my strongest points instead of my weakest ones.
2) You only made one point, and that was the only one responded to.
2) My one point wasn't responded to at all.
Even though I'm infinitely appreciative of his work with RECAP, in the end Swartz was just some guy that killed himself because he was too scared to go to court.
Ellsberg had his charges dropped and is a free man.
Levinson just broke the law for no apparent reason. (Snowden absolutely expected that email to be compromised)
I think the paranoia over potential tyrannical uses of this stuff to be misplaced. If you want to avoid tyranny, you need to prevent your leadership from being taken over by a tyrant. That's not to say that ubiquitous surveillance and such is not a worry, just that the worry isn't that it will turn our countries into Nazi Germany 2.0.
1) A political ideology (Nazism, Communism, Islamism)
2) A real external threat (Communism, Capitalism, Islamism)
3) Sanctions or economic depression (Weimar Germany, Russia today)
The real external threat is essentially a sociopolitical system that propagates itself inside the turf of another sociopolitical system. This leads to far-right war hawks, and then center-right, issuing xenophobic statements. The step before "supporting supreme leaders" is usually "suppressing enemy ideologies". Like McCarthyism in USA or anti Muslim sentiment today. Or Iran's hatred of the USA and the Shah prior to their revolution. Or Soviet hatred of capitalist bourgeouis. Or Ukraine's hatred of communists. And so forth and so on.
Once "the enemy" is identified, the crackdown begins, which leads to more clamps on civil liberties. Then you might want to read the poem attributed to Martin Niemoller:
Regarding your poem, it's the "coming for" people that's the big problem, not merely the ability. If you don't want the government to "come for" people, you need to make sure the people in charge won't do that. It's not very useful to try to make it so they can't
If you read primary sources it is obvious that many people are aware of what is happening but none felt powerful to act, a situation not that dissimilar to our present.
a) It is irrelevant what you "think so", that is not an argument. Weimar Republic indeed did have a secret police, Gestapo was modelled from that.
b) You are probably referring to the subsequent Holocaust and World War 2. If so, argumenting with Weimar Republic and drawing a quick installment of aforementioned practices from it is a straw man argument. You create a notion of how Weimar Republic immediately, "on a moment notice", preceded WW2 etc. (which is incorrect) and then beat that notion (incorrectly) into dust. All of that was built gradually from 1933, which is 6 years before WW2 and 9 years before Wannsee Conference.
Given that context, listing stuff like "data stored and processed in the cloud" is asinine.
The US has the biggest prison population, which is used for a slave labour. In Europe US operated torture prisons.
>Teen just spent three years in a New York prison without ever been convicted of a crime. (2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pClI66cd-T4
>Is Slave Labor Still Legal In America? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlCXjcQgNJg
>Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/reports/globalizing-t...
>Wesley Clark reveals on MSNBC : TPTB want to put you in a KZ internment camp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaPwqokBn9M
US operates much more complex prison camp than the NK could ever dream of.
The USA sees itself as the shining beacon of freedom and democracy. North Korea doesn't.
Because people brought up the US government in a thread about North Korea?
I disagree.
Here's what Article 67 of the 2013 revision of the DPRK constitution has to say about freedom of speech:
>Citizens are guaranteed freedom of speech, the press, assembly, demonstration and association. The State shall guarantee the conditions for the free activities of democratic political parties and social organizations.
Here's what Article 66 has to say about democracy:
>All citizens who have reached the age of 17 have the right to elect and to be elected, irrespective of sex, race, occupation, length of residence, property status, education, party affiliation, political views or religious belief.
It may also be intended for external propaganda, but is definitely used internally.