Comment by nephihaha
15 hours ago
Murderous dictatorships are enabled by mass surveillance and personal data collection. Especially East Germany, which was obsessed with data harvesting on every individual and installed as many CCTV cameras as its budget and tech would allow. East Germany would be creaming itself over the panopticon we are walking into.
Yeah but there's lots of surveillance like stuff that goes on without turning into murderous dictatorships. In England where I live we have cctv all over the place and on the internet Google knows most of my stuff but neither really worry me - we haven't really had a dictatorship setup since 1215 or so.
1215? Try Cromwell, or numerous dubious monarchs. The Tudors murdered 10% of the English population, I believe. Other monarchs have usurped the throne and most people never had the vote until Victorian times and after. Then you have the beginnings of an attempted coup against Harold Wilson and Blair using the so called Criminal Justice Bills to force things through. Lockdown demonstrated their powers well. Even Private Eye which poses as a dissident voice towed that line.
The UK is certainly not the paradise it thinks it is. Northern Ireland was pretty oppressive throughout much of my lifetime, and the state authorities were part of that along with the paramilitaries. The British state has engaged in all kinds of shenanigans to undermine Scottish and Welsh nationalism, including people dying under mysterious circumstances, manufactured political scandals and agents provocateurs. Some declassified information details the effort put into derailing the Scottish independence movement in the sixties and seventies (and even the devolution movement).
If you are in England, then agents provocateurs have been common in the environmentalist movement, the far left & far right etc. The Socialist Workers Party has to be one of the most obviously infiltrated groups out there or it certainly looks like it. The state has also tried to make the campaign against Digital ID look ridiculous by linking it to Flat Earth and chemtrail agents provocateurs, even though hostility to it is much more widespread and serious.