2005

[Johnny Odd]

Ok, so we've had the arguments over wheter or not this could happen, to what extent it already has ya da ya da (I do like Lynn Truss' connection between NewSpeak and TxtSpeak!!).
What I wanted to ask is does anyone see the possible introduction of 'identity cards' into the British Isles as a lean towards the autocratic, totalitarian power held by B-B?
I'm not sure if these cards have already been introduced into other countries or what; they have all your details contained on them and they have some kind of genetic coding in them too - fingerprint or iris scan detail.
The idea is that there would be a fine for not being able to produce this card when asked for it.
Is this not wrong? Is it not an intrusion, whilst not on the same scale as telescreens, of citizens' lives?
Just a thought.

[volvoreta]

No. I am not a conservative person and had never favoured autocratic governments, but I have nothing against ID cards. The rest of Europe has had them for ages and guess what, we don't need a passport to travel within the EU, we only need it to come to or leave Britain because it's the only country that does not recognise other countries' ID cards.

[Johnny Odd]

ok, so Europe has had them for ages and gets along fine with them - Britain has been without them for ages and doesn't seem to be doing that bad!! So you might argue there's a number of ILLEGAL imigrants if we follow the media, and crime can always be lowered and the cards may go some way to expelling such issues but by keeping tags on EVERY member of the community - which is surely what happens in the book, no?
I am not entirely against these cards, indeed I can see they have their uses, I'm simply interested in the correlation between Orwell's fiction and security measures being taken today.

[volvoreta]

CCTV, phone call screening (for all I heard it doesn't work), etc. are more Orwellian measures.

[Johnny Odd]

Certainly Orwell, as well as many other authors, has correctly predicted certain 'advances', yet the point I'm getting at is does anyone believe that we grow ever closer to Orwell's estimate of the future?

[Zippy]

Let me propose a hypothetical situation:

Suppose in the 1930s that the French government had set up a similar ID Card scheme. All their citizens’ details were centralised and held securely by the government, who assured them that the information would only be used with citizens’ safety in mind. All fine and good, but for one small problem – Nazi Germany invades France in 1940. Suddenly an occupying force has access to all this valuable information – names, addresses, ages, ethnic groups, occupations, religions, the lot. There wouldn’t have been a resistance movement, thousands more French Jews would have been deported and murdered, and the Nazi occupiers would have found it a lot easier to begin rounding up the next group of ‘undesirables’ who didn’t fit their idea of ‘the master race’.

What I’m trying to say is that these cards look like a good idea at the moment when we have a democratic government and a relatively free society, but what about the future? None of us know what is going to happen. We may get a wildcard leading the government – some highly unstable individual who would use the information against us. The most likely scenario (in my opinion) is that successive governments will chip away at our freedoms, gradually diminishing them until, forty or fifty years later, we haven’t any freedom left – a sort of slow death, where no-one notices that they’re dying until the last gasp. I believe that if we don’t take a stand against ID Cards now, then it’s our children who will suffer.

I sympathise with the argument that we need to do something to stop terrorism, but ID Cards are not the answer. If they can fake passports it won't be long until they can fake ID cards too. The biggest danger facing us at the moment is not the terrorists themselves (their bombs and guns), but the terror that they are creating. People don’t think straight when they’re scared, and we are willingly signing away our hard earned rights and freedoms in a bid to stop the bogey man from getting us. To come over all pretentious for a moment, I think it was Nietzsche who said ‘He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.’ It’s very true, we don’t want to become like the despotic societies that support terrorists. If we do, they’ve won.

[NewWorldOrder]

No you have to fear nothing especially when the philosopher SIR Bertrand Russell recommands a crafted bacteriological epidemy for he wrote a book "The Impact of Science on Society" in 1955 (yes not before but after nazism so nazi spirit hasn't disappear):

"At present the population of the world is increasing at about 58,000 per diem. War, so far, has had no great effect on this increase, which continued throughout each of the world wars.... War has hitherto been disappointing in this respect…but perhaps a bacteriological war may prove more effective. If a Black Death could be spread throughout the world once in every generation, survivors would be free to procreate freely without making the world too full." Russell went on, "this state of affairs may be somewhat unpleasant, but what of it? Really high minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people's."

[imprudentica]

Haaaaa. What a miserably stoic expression Russell made. If that isn't incentive to not aspire to high-mindedness, I don't know what is.