By VennerRoad, 19th Jan 2017
Did the Western democracies win the fight with the Soviet Union only to surrender to the enemies within? Many enlightened people are beginning to wonder.
Cold War cartoon
The First World War was called the war to end all wars. Less than twenty years after its conclusion, war in Europe looked inevitable again.
When it came, it did indeed engulf the entire world, ending with the greatest single atrocity of all time, the dropping of the atomic bomb - Hiroshima and Nagasaki being close enough together to be considered a single transaction.
Leaving aside the destruction of infrastructure, property, and mere injury, the Second World War is thought to have left over fifty million dead, but some considered that a small price to pay for the defeat of fascism, so-called.
It was not long after that however the democracies had a new enemy, one that - surprise, surprise - had been their ally against the twin menace of Germany and Japan. While freedom flourished in Western Europe, Eastern Europe was under the thumb of Stalin and his successors; it was acknowledged that there was no freedom of speech, or of thought, or of anything throughout the Soviet Union or any of its satellites including Poland, Czechoslovakia, and most especially East Germany. As if to hammer home that point, in 1961 a wall was constructed across the centre of Berlin, and it was notable that no one ever fled from West to East, it was always East to West, and the penalty for failure could be death. Well over a hundred people were killed during the 28 years of the wall’s existence.
In 1992, Don Cuckson, the librarian of the communist Morning Star newspaper, lamented the lack of freedom in the workers’ paradise; every aspect of life had been controlled by the party, the government, the state, from the top down.
That was not what he meant by socialism.
Four years ago, a man named Edward Snowden revealed to the world at large that the so-called democratic United States had been engaged in a programme of mass surveillance of its own citizens and the rest of the world that dwarfed the mass surveillance of the Soviet Bloc.
Although this was a revelation to most people, it was not to those who have studied this subject. Seven years before Snowden was born, the British journalist Duncan Campbell (one of two bearing that name) published The Eavesdroppers, which revealed that at a time when the Internet was unknown outside of military and academic circles, the British Government through GCHQ had been monitoring all international communications in collaboration with the NSA. Campbell’s classic article had been researched entirely from the public domain, but that didn’t stop him and his collaborators being dragged into court accused of spying. It gets worse though, because it isn’t only you they are spying on, but your kids.
In 2005, a mother from Hull learned by chance that her local school was taking the fingerprints of their young charges in order for them to check out and return books to the library, as least that was the pretext. Her two sons were 6 and 7. When she confronted the headmistress, Pippa King was told her permission was not needed. This resulted in her setting up her Biometrics in schools website; she and others with whom she has collaborated on an ad hoc basis have exposed a lot more than this. But it gets even worse.
As long ago as 1997, it was reliably estimated that someone working in Central London would be picked up by around three hundred security cameras a day. These do have their uses; every UK denizen of a certain age will remember that quite shocking CCTV image of a young boy named James Bulger being led out of a Merseyside shopping arcade by two ten year olds, and the unspeakable things they did to him. But mass surveillance and the Draconian laws that go hand-in-hand with it have led to what can only be described as tyranny. Clearly they need all this surveillance in case somebody somewhere utters a forbidden word, as we shall now see.
The kidnapping of James Bulger
The free speech which is enshrined in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution has been eroded to such a degree in the UK, Europe, and in some respects the United States, that it is to all intents and purposes dead. This has come about by the creation of something known duplicitously as hate speech, which is also known as promoting racial hatred, homophobia, and a dozen other imaginary crimes. Now, anytime an individual, company or organisation is accused of discrimination, it is virtually impossible to refute the charge in a civil court, and guilt is usually presumed during a criminal trial. Here are a few examples from the UK and one from the US.
1976: Robert Relf is jailed under the Race Relations Act for advertising his house for sale “to an English family only”.
1991: After a complaint about a supposedly anti-Semitic cartoon, the home of veteran right wing activist Colin Jordan is raided and his entire archive seized. Although he was able to defeat the police action due to a defective warrant, after he went on to win an out-of-court settlement, Jordan - who had a heart condition - suffered police harassment for the rest of his life. Ironically, the Jewish MP who initiated that raid - Gerald Kaufman - is now persona non grata with the Anglo-Jewish Establishment for making similar claims about the Israel Lobby.
2010: Shirley Brown - a black councillor in Bristol - is convicted of racial harassment for calling an Asian colleague a coconut. Her conviction is upheld on appeal.
2014: Soccer player Nicolas Anelka is fined £80,000 by the ruling body of the sport for making the quenelle gesture during a football match, in effect for touching his own arm.
2015: A Christian bakery in Northern Ireland is found guilty of discrimination for refusing to bake a cake for a homosexual activist.
2016: A bakery in the US State of Oregon is forced to close after being prosecuted for refusing to bake a cake for a lesbian “couple”. The homosexual lobby gloats.
2016: The publicity seeking Anjem Choudary is given a five and a half year sentence for exercising his free speech.
2016: Washed up soccer player and alcoholic Paul Gascoigne is dragged into court and fined for telling a “racist” joke.
These prosecutions are in stark contrast to the position taken by Western Governments when cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad were published by a Danish magazine in 2005 and a French magazine from 2006.
These are not the only imaginary crimes of which people can be convicted in the West. The attack on due process by - but not only by - legal dominance feminism, means that in England, in Australia, in India, and many other places, a man can be convicted of crimes as serious as rape and child rape with absolutely no physical evidence, no corroboration of any kind, even if his accuser claims the crime was committed a month, a year, a decade and more ago.
If a woman claims to have been raped years ago, or indeed a man claims to have been groped decades ago when he was a boy (as in the Cliff Richard case), this apparent delay is said to be due to trauma or shock, and claiming otherwise, a rape myth.
A man who is accused of rape will generally have his name paraded before the media and his reputation dragged through the mud, which in the case of celebrities can lead to false accusers crawling out of the woodwork and jumping on the bandwagon. An accuser will be shielded with lifelong anonymity, and may even be shielded by a screen in court if she appears in the same courtroom as the accused, denying him his right to confront her. So-called rape shield laws protect her reputation, a reputation she may not deserve, as for example in the case of serial false accuser Sara Ylen.
You think this is bad, have you seen the money laundering regulations? Last year, the Indian Government withdrew high value banknotes. Five hundred rupee and thousand rupee notes sound large denomination, but run them through your currency converter and you will see just how small they are. This is being done allegedly to curtail the so-called shadow economy. Or could there be another reason?
In 1995, David Icke wrote:
“Today if you go into a shop to buy food and your credit card is refused by the computer, you can pay with cash. What happens when there is no cash? You are at the mercy of the computer. If it refuses your card or microchip, you have no means to purchase anything.”
At the time, people were laughing at Icke because of some of his lunatic pronouncements. They still laugh at him today, but nowhere near as loudly. There is indeed a war on cash. True, it can be expensive to use, not to mention both difficult and expensive to store safely, but that is where its drawbacks end. If people have cash in their pockets, they can spend it at will. If it exists only as figures in a book or blips in cyberspace, the state can control it. All of it. And you.
Even before 9/11, the money laundering regulations were Draconian; sending money by MoneyGram or Western Union requires both the sender and receiver to fill out virtual life histories, yet billions of dollars are traded every day on the stock exchanges of the world.
In the UK, the US and elsewhere, the authorities can seize large quantities of cash - large meaning what, precisely? - and hold onto it until the owner can prove it is his. At least one billionaire has fallen foul of this tyranny in the UK.
Suppose you have been arrested for a crime, any crime, in the UK. Very often the police will routinely seize your computer and your mobile phone, even if they are not relevant to the investigation. Why? Because they can. They will retain these machines for as long as they can, copy the data, and afterwards, lie about destroying it. In the UK they can search and arrest without warrant virtually on a whim. The good news for American citizens is that their police can’t, usually they need some sort of warrant, or probable cause. The bad news is that the police can murder them with impunity, especially during a traffic stop, but not only traffic stops.
The usual suspects claim this happens almost only to black men. The bad news is that state tyranny is an equal opportunity employer; white me are shot too, even children on occasion. Check out this video. And their brutality doesn’t stop with shooting, the thuggery of the American police has not diminished since that shocking beating handed out to Rodney King in March 1991.
Perhaps the most controversial usurpation of our freedoms in the West comes from Draconian anti-terrorist legislation. Although they were in place well before the atrocities of 9/11, part of the justification for the money laundering regulations is terrorism. In reality, neither these nor any regular anti-terrorist legislation has thwarted any major terrorist operation, which nowadays are mostly carried out by so-called lone wolves or small groups of dedicated fanatics with little or no financial backing from this great Islamist conspiracy we are told exists.
The author Jason Burke estimated the cost of 9/11 to be around half a million dollars, a sum that at the time would not buy a house in Central London, and today would probably not buy a garden shed.
Since 9/11 we have seen the destruction of civil liberties on a colossal scale for those accused or suspected, often erroneously, of complicity in terror. This includes waterboarding and other forms of torture, detention without trial for years and potentially decades without access to proper legal representation, and the extra-legal execution - ie murder - of even American citizens, most notably that of Anwar al-Awlaki in September 2011.
While it is true that many people have a higher standard of living than at any time in history, and that our world is being reshaped in particular by new technologies that benefit us all, the question must be asked, is it really better to be a fattened slave than to be poor and free, especially if everything you own can be taken away from you at the drop of a hat, including your freedom? If this is what millions died for fighting so-called fascism and opposing communism in Korea and Vietnam as well as confronting the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union, then the sad truth is, they died for nothing.
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