Among my cheering thoughts for the day:
A couple more human rights campaigners murdered in Chechnya in what must surely be state-sponsored violence, Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi sentenced to still further house arrest by the Burmese dictatorship's kangaroo court, and our own government facing serious questions about collusion in torture with self-styled "Defenders of the Free World", the US federal government.
Meanwhile, our technology continues to progress exponentially, giving those who wield power ever-greater scope for the surveillance, control and destruction of their peoples and opponents. Of course the same defects in our nature and condition persist that have plagued humankind for millennia: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely; but couple this with the incredible technologies we are now developing and you begin to see that one day an absolutely corrupt power may be able to take absolute – and truly inescapable – control.
It is perhaps something of a cliche, but I am reminded of how the Party controls its populace in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four with the use of telescreens, ubiquitous machines that simultaneously bombard the citizens with propaganda while giving the secret police a window into every last room. I am drawn to reflect on how many among the upcoming generations have any awareness of the origin or original meaning of the phrase "Big Brother", in this age where we are seeing a similar death of privacy amid the wide-scale monitoring of telecommunications, viewing habits and internet use. And this is only part of the picture: by comparison with Orwell's vision (though remarkable), the technologies available to modern day secret police simply do not bear thinking about.
Moreover, and unless the evidence from my own social interaction with a diverse array of people deceives me, possibly unprecedented levels of ignorance and apathy are compounding the threat to civil liberties and human rights – the freedoms which so many of us (though still far, far too few) are able to take so utterly for granted. Indeed, most people seem blissfully unaware of how rare the freedoms we take for granted in the West are, both geographically and historically; unaware of the fragility of these freedoms – the way they are, by their very nature, besieged from all sides; and unaware of how important it therefore is to have a vigilant and engaged citizenry jealously guarding them.
Let us not forget that one of the greatest contemporary threats to humanity's freedom and wellbeing was homegrown in the West – in the same laissez-faire petri dish as the technologies which support it – I refer to the overweening power of the modern multinationals, their self-aggrandising subversion of democratic government and death-by-a-thousand-cuts warping of the rule of law, the world over.
So awesome are the levels of ignorance and apathy in the face of these terrible threats, that I'm sure that many who are involved in and passionate about safeguarding human freedoms and wellbeing must feel like The Hero of Haarlem, the fictional Dutch boy who saves his community from drowning by using his finger to plug a hole he notices in one of the dikes built to hold back the sea from engulfing the town. Unlike the story, however, human rights and civil liberties activists must feel like most of the other villagers are too busy shopping, voting for their favourite act on The X Factor and generally "staying positive" to heed their cries, and that of those who do notice the predicament, most are deciding with a shrug or a sulky outburst that it's all too complex to even begin to deal with, before themselves returning to the fairground. All the while more and more leaks are springing open in the dike.
It seems to me that now, more than ever, Orwell's nightmare future of "a boot stamping on a human face forever" is an imminent flood.
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For those with itchy plugging-fingers:
Amnesty International UK: Link
Liberty: Link
