PrintIs Global Tyranny Inevitable?
Maybe it is just being home, locked down because of the highly exaggerated coronavirus panic, but I have been looking at some recent documentaries and developments, and the future does not look good for humanity.
Present-day technologies will impel most of humanity into acquiescing to a worldwide tyranny. The flavor of that tyranny may evolve from place to place, but it will be tyranny nonetheless.
As I explained to a friend, roughly three decades ago, the problem lies in human nature. As we get more technologically advanced, the ability to avoid the inequities and wrongs in any system -- and no system is perfect -- will decrease.
From the beginning of time, those societies which organized themselves better usually survived and conquered those who didn’t. Hence, the highly organized and well-disciplined Romans swept almost all those before them.
Over time, technology has added to that edge. By the 17th century, the scientific revolution had given Europeans a technological edge that enabled Western Europe to literally conquer the world, an edge which lasted right up to the end of World War II.
The one chief exception to the European onslaught was Japan, but Japan had learned that to compete with the West, one had to adopt the governmental forms and technologies of the West. Now, even those nations outside the cultural norms of the West have had to adopt our technologies, albeit with some modification. Iran greatly censors its internet, as does China.
In order to compete, nations and cultures will have to adopt the most successful strategies and technologies or be swept aside. Get on board or die.
With the internet and computers, corporations and governments are now able to acquire enormous amounts of data on everyone… data which our American forefathers would have been horrified to find out that we give away freely. With this data, corporations and governments are becoming more efficient at tracking people.
Take for example Amazon. After a few purchases, Amazon knows what your preferences are, and will start to recommend to you consumer items that you might like. If the government needs to track someone, they can call Amazon to see what movies he likes or what fashions he or she wears. As time goes by, these databases will become more comprehensive.
Of course, Google is no better. We have all had the odd experience of going online to see that random Google ads somehow seem to know what product lines interest us.
There is no escaping this. Corporations which do not emulate the Amazon/Google model will not be able to compete and will go out of business. Hence, our once thriving shopping malls are going bankrupt, as more and more people buy online. Nor is this anything new. Grocery stores gave way to supermarkets, which gave way to giant-supermarkets, which are now giving way to Amazon, which bought out Whole Foods.
The same is true of governments. Those governments which retain a friendly, informal relationship with their people will not be able to compete with the data crunchers.
Consider, for example, Israel. With 20% of its population being Arab -- many opposed to the concept of a Jewish state -- and with another roughly four million hostile Arabs under its control in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], and Gaza Israel has had to introduce absolutely comprehensive communications tracking of the Arabs. It does so with its electronic intelligence Unit 8200.
As a soldier in Unit 8200, I collected information on people accused of either attacking Israelis, trying to attack Israelis, desiring to harm Israelis, and considering attacking Israelis. I also collected information on people who were completely innocent, and whose only crime was that they interested the Israeli security system for various reasons. For reasons they had absolutely no way of knowing. All Palestinians are exposed to non-stop monitoring without any legal protection. Junior soldiers can decide when someone is a target for the collection of information. -- The Guardian
There have been many stories of abuses, such as Israel using intelligence to blackmail Arab family members.
True or not may not even be the point. If Israel did not have a Unit 8200, it may not have been able to control Muslim terrorism. Hence, the imperative to organize or die. When the soldiers in Israel’s Unit 8200 leave the service, they often are picked up by technology corporations around the world. They bring these attitudes with them.
To date, EMC, Deutsche Telekom, Paypal, Oracle, IBM, and Lockheed Martin have all relocated their R&D centers to Beersheba. -- CyberVista
PayPal does not offer services in Palestinian territories, and one of the reasons given is that a lot of PayPal’s techs are drawn from Israeli intelligence.
And it is not just Israel. American tech firms are becoming both ruthlessly efficient and data intensive. Failure to do so means an inability to compete.
Though it may be sold as benign, it will end up totalitarian. As I tell my Jewish friends, the same technology used to track Arabs can be used to track Jews, should the political climate change.
To Track Coronavirus, Israel Moves to Tap Secret Trove of Cellphone Data
The information, intended for use in counterterrorism, would help identify people who have crossed paths with known patients. -- NY Times
And it gets worse. The present coronavirus panic is being used to discourage the use of cash.
Dirty money: The case against using cash during the coronavirus outbreak -- CNN
It won’t stop with the coronavirus. Once cash is outlawed, the game is over.
Throughout history, fungible cash has been the method of avoiding governments. Those Jews with cash, and the grace of God, could buy their way out of Nazi clutches. Once cash is gone, the tracking authority will know the time and location of any Jew who wants to make a purchase. Likewise, with any other tracked group. Ironically, it has been the Israelis who have perfected this method to protect themselves by tracking Arabs -- without appreciating that their professionalism may come back to bite them.
Those who do not fall in line will either go bankrupt or die. If Jeff Bezos did not invent Amazon, someone else would have. If Mark Zuckerberg did not corral Facebook to its dominant control, someone else would have set up a similar platform. Those who do not adopt die off. Does anybody still use MySpace?
Whatever system this runs under -- Democratic America’s Facebook or totalitarian China’s WeChat -- the result is the same: A highly, superefficient centralized database, which will be used to control or manipulate people.
And given human nature, this will inevitably fall under the control of vicious leadership. The flavor may change from country to country. In China, one cannot criticize President Xi. In America, one cannot criticize the LBGTQ agenda, but the principle is the same, and they will eventually merge. American companies now bow down to Chinese censorship in order to do business there, while China will soon be adopting gay rights.
I told my friend that this principle was “the inevitabitily of AntiChrist,” the prophesied world dictator which would arise in the last days. It seems this principle has been at work throughout history. There is something dark in human nature that leads to tyranny. Technology only aggravates the problem, while those who reject such technology cannot compete.
A few survivalists and outliers may avoid the trap, but as technologies becomes more comprehensive, that will become more difficult. The only antidote to this is a vigorous Christianity, but that is now considered hate speech, ripe to be censored.
Things are not looking good.
