The Surveillance Society: Trading Freedom For The Illusion Of Safety
Giordano Bruno
Neithercorp Press Jan 25, 2010
Governments, regardless of their political structure or historical background, have always striven to not only control information, but also to gather it from the people by covert means. Often, this secretive observation of the citizenry escalates into a completely open and full-fledged surveillance state. The U.S. in particular stands on a precarious edge: the line between abhorring invasion of privacy, and embracing invasion of privacy as necessary for the “greater good.” Many people assume that such a mindset is forced on the masses by the elite, that strength of arms is somehow required to make them accept the conditions of a police state, but this is not always so. It is very difficult for governments, despite any technological developments or resources they may have, to enforce and maintain a fascistic political construct. In order to retain control, they must build a “Surveillance Culture;” a society in which the people watch each other, and where individuals censor themselves instead of being censored by the authorities. In the end, a police state cannot exist without the help of the people it means to dominate. By spying on each other, we destroy ourselves.
But how does a nation reach such a point in its collective psyche? How are we driven to passive enslavement? In this article we will examine the methods used by governments and aristocratic minorities to manipulate the majority towards self imprisonment, as well as examples of how this process is burgeoning in the U.S. at this very moment…
Communist China: The Future Of America?
Many of us conjure images of Hitler’s Germany and hordes of Nazi stormtroopers when considering the idea of a police state, and this extreme example often blinds us to the tyranny slowly building in our own country.
“Well, there aren’t troops in the street committing mass murder” we say, “so obviously we are still free…” But this conclusion is based on only one style of tyranny and using it as our only point of reference makes our viewpoint narrow, and sometimes a bit ignorant.
There are forms of fascism that also wear a “friendly face,” and one need only look across the Pacific to find such a government.
China is a good example of the “modern police state,” and is in itself a construction of Western financial interests. Americans often wonder why we continue to deal with the Chinese Communist regime, even owing them tremendous debt, while they murder and oppress their own citizens. I remember the Tienanmen Square protests and subsequent massacre vividly. I also remember the U.S. government’s response to be muted, even flaccid. All the grandstanding by our politicians and the supposedly hard nosed George H.W. Bush on the horrors of communism suddenly disappeared. The truth was, Western governments who posed as democratic actually had no interest in supporting the Chinese people fighting for liberty. Westerners had made China a police state and they planned for it to remain that way.
Franklin D. Roosevelt himself offered Stalin arms and supplies which were to be used to help the communists during the Chinese revolution, while at the same time supplying lesser arms to Chiang Kai-shek’s army who opposed them. Roosevelt even offered the Soviets control of strategic Chinese sea ports. All of these concessions he made without consulting the Chinese, the Congress, or the American people:
The Rockefeller Family later supported the heavy handed Chinese government with extensive investments, and with the UN, even helped them form their first one-child policy, which started out as “voluntary,” then over time became severely enforced law:
Whatever the price of the Chinese Revolution, it has obviously succeeded not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community of purpose. The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history.
-David Rockefeller, New York Times, August 10, 1973
What this shows is that the Chinese form of tyranny is not so alien as the average American might think. In fact, China is a “testing ground” for policies that Western Globalists wish to implement all over the world, including here in the U.S.
But what are some of these policies?
Replacing Independence With Interdependence:
In China, as well as all over the world, programs are being instituted to acclimate people towards a more collectivist way of thinking. That is to say, we are being intellectually molded into believing that the group (an abstract concept with little basis in reality) is far more important than the individual, and therefore the individual must sacrifice his independence, or even his life, for the good of the whole. This is evident in social programs, political rhetoric, and even television and film.
A disturbing Chinese pop-culture example of such propaganda (flashy though it may be) can be seen in the Jet Li movie ‘Hero’, in which freedom fighters battle a genocidal despot, only to come to the “enlightened” conclusion that his plan to unite the Chinese provinces under one centralized rule is necessary for the greater good. At the end of the film, they commit suicide for the sake of Chinese unity, even though it is unity under tyranny:
