If I may return to the question of the right of the state to invade your privacy, I have said that states do not have rights only people have rights. One of the most important rights people have is to be protected from an overweening and misguided state. The method that has been developed over centuries for this protection is law. You see the state is simply a generic term for a bunch of people. We elect governments, who are simply people like you and I, to make the collective decisions for our comfortable and safe day-to-day living that we cannot make individually. The decisions that government make are then administered by another set of people, civil servants that we collectively call the state. These include the police, the military, the officials in government departments, both national and local etc. In order that we can be safe against the massive power that we entrust these people with we erect a system of law, ethics, morals, custom and practice that we call the rule of law.
Government is derivative, that is it derives from a source and that source is the social nature of the human being. The human being is what Aristotle described as a zoon politikon, a political animal. There is no such thing as an atomised individual, our individuality is all conditioned by our collective life, we are creatures of our environment. As a result, government derives its roles and its purpose from this fact. It is there to serve the people it represents and does not have any other purpose, and must be answerable and accountable to the people who entrust the personnel in government and the state with its administration. If the people who are charged with national security wish to take measures that, in effect, threaten the freedom and safety of the public then they must make a clear and definite case for it and receive the public's approval. It was Benjamin Franklin who told us, that if we are prepared to sacrifice our freedom on the alter of security then we will lose both and will deserve to lose both. We must never be fooled into trading our freedom for some notion that it is necessary for our security, that is the methodology of totalitarianism and is the argument of soundrels and liars. No-one, whether a politican or a government, can claim to speak for the people unless they have specifically asked the people, and they most certainly cannot know what is in our best interests.
Governments cannot and must not be trusted. Lord Acton warned us that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and, if the past 30 years of British history tells us anything, it is that British government and politics is corrupt to its very core. All government actions must be demonstrably justified. We are being hoodwinked into thinking that governments have rights over the people they govern and that politicians have a right to deprive us of information or justification for their acts. I have said before, I find that Britain is beginning to mirror attitudes and conditions that existed in the 1930's and '40s and that I detect an increasing fascist mentality, particularly in sections of the right-wing press. We are increasingly applying a scapegoat mentality for the criminality and incompetence of our politicians that is being used as a smokescreen for ever increasing totalitarian methods of surveillance on our everyday activities. What is at stake is our freedom and the rule of law. You have been warned
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat.
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