1984
I wish I were the first one to come up with this catchphrase. I would certainly not bet against that at least one major Western country will develop into a full-fledged dictatorship during the next twenty years. Politicians in practically all countries of the world seem to take every chance they get to introduce new surveillance laws or ridiculous bans. The sad thing is that only a small minority is actually concerned about this development.
Jean-Claude Juncker, the current president of the eurozone and one of the most influential European politicians, gave the following insight how the politics of the EU really works in an interview with the German news magazine Der Spiegel in 1999:
“We decide something, put it on the table and wait some time if something happens. If there is no huge fuss about it and no uprising – because most people don’t have any idea what the decision is all about – we just keep going. Step by step. Until there is no way back.”
Truly a noble defender of democracy.
Our own nation moves toward socialism in much of the same manner. Most politicians are something like larval tyrants, and fear of the people is what keeps them and their governments in line. If they’re patient, however, rather than take away those troublesome rights that empower the people, something that would surly cause dangerous riots and, God forbid, THINKING among the general populace, they can simply wait for the masses give them up in exchange for a meal ticket…or is it a food stamp these days?
Are you sure about this? Sorry, I’m a little in the dark concerning what you’re talking about, being all the way in Canada and all. In my experience, laws like the Patriot act are often a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. They serve more to convince citizens the government is out there doing something to fight terrorism or keep out immigrants instead of making any real changes. Democracies of the world are quick to declare themselves Airstrip One only to find out later that no one is manning the telescreens.
…and it’s all you people’s fault for not buying Macs! XD
@Callidus-If you’re talking about “our nation” as in the the states…get over yourself.Only reason it seems that way now is because so much crap has happened here in the past 8 years damage control is having to be done for it,and there’s no telling how much of it is going to be successful until the measures put in place become active.To say the least,if our current presidential term is considered socialism,then the last term was Authoritarianism.
Stalin considered “Nineteen Eighty-Four” to be an instruction manual, to the point where he put it on the banned list, but had a secret official Russian edition made for the senior politburo.
No need to get offended A.L., this is only idle commentary. I wasn’t favoring one term to the other. The shifting between our two political parties is nothing. Government is government, democrat and republican are two faces of the same ugly thing. The Democrats keep the so-called ‘liberals’ in line, and the republican pander to the ‘conservatives,’ all the while Uncle Sam, or Big Brother, or whatever he is now, bumps up taxes, misappropriates funds, and does little service to the people for which this government was created. Our forefathers fought a rather bloody war to free themselves of an overly controlling government, and yet here we are making the same mistakes all over again. Someone once said, “the more power you give a government to provide what you want, the more power it has to take what you already have,” or something to that effect anyway.
Here in the US, there’s an old saying “To boil a frog, don’t dump him in the hot water, put him in a cool pot and slowly turn up the heat.”
America was formed with people escaping from over-reaching governments in Europe. All the founding fathers had real jobs outside of politics, and viewed political service as just that; A service to be performed, then get back to real life. Most of the founding fathers produced a tangible product (food, usually) so they knew directly the risks and advantages of the free marketplace.
Today, we have a lot of career politicians that never produced a tangible product in their lives. Worse we seem to have come into a ruling caste system where people are elected for the better part of their lives. The founding fathers would have never stood for that.
Finally, freedom entails responsibility. If you messed your bed, you sleep in it, this goes to the person that bought a $200,000 home while only earning $30,000 / year, to the bank that lent them the money. The most alarming thing I heard during the presidential campaign was a lot of individuals begging the government to solve their problems. The government doesn’t have the resources to give 300,000,000 people $50,000 in “free” services every year. Big government
will gladly step in to save the day, but will be forced to ration and micromanage everything so that everyone can get their shiny nickle.
Reform in this nation has to start from the ground up, people have to figure out what is truly valuable in one’s life. Is it I-pods, Houses and hot cars, or is it something else? Leaders are only as good as the culture that produces them. Post-modernist American culture is in a sad state indeed. Bureaucrats will gladly take all the power they can get and give as little as possible in return. Only when we start producing better responsible citizens, will we get better responsible government.
Hellyeah. Now we Czechs are in the centre of attention of the whole Europe because of our Mr President, Vaclav Klaus. He is under great pressure from the EU Parliament to quickly sign the Lisbon Treaty, although he keeps saying (and I do quite agree with him) that the document brings limitations to the suverenity and self-administration of the Czech Republic. Note the difference – Klaus should not decide on his own, he is supposed to sign, because someone decided so. The burlesque some folks from the EU made during their last visit to Klaus (Hans-Gert Pöttering, Cohn-Bendit and co.), trying to dictate a sovereign president what to do, was typical. I was all for the EU and I love most of the ideas the EU is based on, but some things seem to be getting too extreme these days…
I agree with your stance of starting at the bottom. The foundation needs to be secure before we can think of repairing the roof, but there is a problem. The most basic building block of any society is the family group.
As a species, we naturally learn everything from our parents. How to live, how to behave, how to speak and dress. Like any other animal, we instinctively model ourselves after them and their behavior. Good, responsible parents produce good, responsible children who grow to be good, responsible citizens, but how much control are parents even allowed to have over their children these days? The average child spends eight hours a day in public schools, learning from teachers who are only allowed to teach what comes out of a text book. Where do they learn social behavior? Where do they learn ethics? The other children?
The few hours out of the day that the parents have with their children, when they aren’t at work and the child isn’t at school, the child has his/her face plastered to a television, learning from cartoons, soap operas, and news networks, and even competing with that, they risk losing their child to defax should their rearing methods disagree with the government’s parental blueprint.
Is it any wonder that the latest generations of Americans behave like children or melodramatic soap stars, when that’s all most of us have had to learn from our entire lives?
Thank you, Callidus, you just wrote the other half of my post! I completely agree! Stable functional families have a far greater probability of producing stable functional citizens. Children learn by observing their surroundings, for good or evil. Boys learn how to be men by watching dad, and how to treat women by observing how he treats mom. The same applies to girls.
In a vacuum, where the parents have been removed for whatever reason, the child will observe the environment and look for other role models, be they neighbors, teachers, peers, and *shudder* television and video games…
Dear god, you have brought the demons of politics into this holy place…
(attempts exorcism)
ALAS! It is no use: the gateway to hell has been opened, and trolls and flamers already spew forth…
@Unsilenced: You know, the discussion of politics has been pretty good so far here. More conversation and less shouting match. ++ for that.
It is disturbing to think that our politicians – let’s be frank with that, there is not a country in the world that does not face this on some level – know that the best way to stay in power is to erode personal freedoms bit by bit, and is apparently happy to use that knowledge to their benefit.
The safety of the people will always stand in the way of their freedom.
Gentlemen and ladies, you seem to be forgetting that the American Revolution was principally a tax revolt.
Um… no.
There were other things, such as religion. Many colonists wanted to escape the Church of England. Also, it wasn’t just the taxes. It was the fact that they had no rights outside of the colonies. They didn’t get a vote in parliament, hence “No taxation without representation!”
The true irony of this post is that it was done on May 8, about 1984, which is the date of my birth.
I believe that political office is a complicated thing. The purpose of government is to serve the people. This is why we tolerate an institution that makes large scale decisions for us. If the people are not being served, however, then they are not being governed, but are being ruled instead. In theory, as each state is sovereign from the nation, and each citizen sovereign from their state, the act of taking an office is electing to forgo one’s sovereignty for a time in order to take up a position as a civil servant, with no greater purpose than to help your fellow citizens and improve or maintain our way of life.
Such a post requires a great amount of trust and authority to be placed in that individual’s hands, and while this enables them to do great good, it also carries the potential for them to do great harm. It is the potential for power that such offices hold that attracts self-serving individuals with little concern for anything other than their own well-being, who abuse the trust of the people and discredit the offices they unfortunately hold. This corruption spreads like disease, and eventually the system becomes so infected that the only way to survive in it is to be part of the problem, to be as corrupt as the system itself, and so corruption breeds further corruption, and at some point, the system becomes unable to serve the people. The question is, what to do with such a system? Do we attempt a cure? Wait for it do die, collapse, and start over? Or perhaps try to exercise our right as citizens to replace our government once it has reached this state? If so, then how could that be done?
The irony about the EU is: All 27 states could leave – but none is even threatening to. They all want a piece of control more than independence. And while some governments declare to fight for liberty and against “the superstate” – but if the EU after the Lisbon Treaty is a superstate, then it already is under the Nice Treaty.
That’s what Juncker means with “there’s no way back” – the power-greedy national governments aren’t interested in a remedy.