The strong counter-terrorism efforts undertaken by the British government are announced by officials and covered by the press, and so it’s logical to assume that the British people are aware of the various programs, right?
Probably not, Timothy Garton Ash suggests:
This has got to stop. Britain’s snooper state is getting completely out of hand. We are sleepwalking into a surveillance society, and we must wake up. When the Stasi started spying on me, as I moved around East Germany 30 years ago, I travelled on the assumption that I was coming from one of the freest countries in the world to one of the least free. I don’t think I was wrong then, but I would certainly be wrong now. Today, the people of East Germany are much less spied upon than the people of Britain. The human rights group Privacy International rates Britain as an “endemic surveillance society”, along with China and Russia, whereas Germany scores much better.
What degree of infringement on our freedoms are we willing to tolerate in order to feel secure?
It seems quaint now (shamefully so) to think of how outraged I felt only ten years ago when, in conversation with friends, I heatedly accused Rudy Giuliani of being a “fascist” for his Orwellian installation of surveillance cameras in Washington Square Park (in an effort to keep out drug dealers and other undesirables).
Like many people, since 9/11 I’ve traveled a long road in search of answers to these questions—without success so far.
Timothy Garton Ash tries to talk sense to Europeans (and other biens pensants) [e.a.]
Europe is slouching towards another foreign policy disaster on the scale of Iraq. This disaster is called Iran. It comes in two variants. Variant one is that the US bombs Iran before George Bush leaves the White House in January 2009. Variant two is that Iran acquires a nuclear bomb. Most Europeans are hyper-alert to the first danger and blind to the second. We should be acting now, urgently and decisively, to fend off both. Instead, we are sleepwalking to a cliff’s edge.
I don’t need to spell out the manifold perils of military action nor, I hope, to emphasise that no moral equivalence between Tehran and Washington is implied. But why don’t we also grasp the other danger? A quarter of a century ago millions of people flooded through the streets of Bonn, London and Rome to protest against the deployment of American nuclear missiles - and even against civilian nuclear power. (”Atomkraft? Nein, Danke.”) Now a fissiparous, unstable and increasingly militarised Islamic regime, whose president has called for Israel to be removed from the map, is deliberately proceeding towards the threshold where it could, if it chose, swiftly take the last step to having a nuclear weapon. Among the probable consequences would be a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, with Sunni Muslim powers such as Saudi Arabia deciding they need their own.
Where are the German, British or Italian intellectuals and peace activists raising the alarm about this? Where have all the demos gone?
Gone to pacifism, every one. When will they ever learn?
