The First Edition of this monograph was published as a 56 page pamphlet in 1997, shortly after the Metropolitan Police (henceforth The Filth) had come within a whisker of destroying me, simply because they could ‐ or thought they could. It is probably true to say that my suffering at their hands not only contributed to its inspiration but coloured my prognosis for freedom.
For the next four years I was forced to endure intermittent persecution by this gang of psychopaths, habitual liars and agents of state repression, and really saw no hope either for myself or for the rest of mankind in the freedom stakes. And that was before 9/11 and the resulting War On Terror.
That being said, over the past couple of years or so, a new optimism has begun to emerge, especially in Britain, as people at the highest levels of government have openly expressed doubts about the entire concept of the central monolithic database and total surveillance, including the routine retention of DNA samples, and the near ubiquitous CCTV that tracks our every movement in all Britain’s cities, most of our major towns and even many of our villages.
While it is true that some or even most of this concern has been motivated by pragmatic rather than by ethical or other legitimate considerations, not all of it has.
The original publication contained a great deal of what some people might regard as fluff or even self-indulgent whining about the grief I suffered at the hands of Big Brother. While some might have found this interesting or even fascinating, on re-reading it several times I have concluded that it detracts from the important central message, so I have edited out most of it including most of the details relating to the events leading up to my trial at Southwark Crown Court in April 1997, and to the trial itself, including the little monster whose lies put me in the dock. All of this information and a great deal more besides relating to the persecution I suffered before and since at the hands of the legal authorities can be found all over this site and in sundry other Baron publications. They are all listed in the Baron/ITMA Bibliography, and I would refer the reader in particular to the years 1997-2001, and in the first instance to the article State Harassment Of Dissident Writer.
The prices alluded to re computers ‐ see in particular notes 19 & 20 ‐ have fallen exponentially since the original was written, so the reader should bear this in mind.
Finally, a few minor corrections/alterations have been made to grammar, etc (including to the back cover ‐ the “front cover” here) but these are all more of form than of substance. For example, the reference to Santander was originally Abbey National, the Spanish bank having taken over the latter in the interim. Also, references to page numbers within the pamphlet itself have been replaced by links to the relevant passages.
Alexander Baron,
Sydenham,
South London.
February 9, 2011
In 1995, former Coventry City goalkeeper turned sports journalist turned “green” activist turned “Son of a Godhead” turned enterprising mystic cum conspiracy theorist cum author, David Icke, published And the truth shall set you free. Modestly subtitled The most explosive book of the 20th Century, this self-published paperback was his latest offering in what looks like becoming a long running series of underground best sellers. Underground because Icke is in danger of becoming a non-person, and would have become one already had he not previously been such a high profile individual.
Icke first incurred “public disapproval” when he became caught up in the anti-poll tax protest. For taking what he believed to be a principled stand against this unpopular ‐ and many would say undemocratic ‐ local authority levy, Icke was sacked from his job as a sports presenter with the BBC. (1) But the ostracism he incurred from this incident pales into insignificance when compared with the outcry over the publication of his 1994 book The Robots’ Rebellion. In this Story of the Spiritual Renaissance, Icke endorsed the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion, a notorious fabrication of the Tsarist secret police which has become a mainstay of anti-Semitic propaganda since its introduction to the West and its endorsement by Henry Ford the Elder, Adolf Hitler and sundry anti-Semitic propagandists. (2)
As a result of this, Icke has, predictably, been smeared as both an anti-Semite and a fascist. He is obviously neither, but is just as obviously peddling a revealed truth; if he has read any of the standard works on the Protocols and related subjects he gives no indication of it in any of his books, although he does quote rather liberally ‐ and often without acknowledgment ‐ from a wide range of conspiracy and mystical literature. Icke is a devout believer in the Order of the Illuminati, an organisation that was founded in the 18th Century by a Jesuit theologian (3) to combat organised religion, whose priests and monks were “the adversaries of all progress”. (4)
Apart from the anti-Semite/fascist smear, Icke does deserve much of the criticism (perhaps abuse would be a better word) that has been hurled at him. He relies heavily on psychics, mystics and other charlatans. He draws unwarranted conclusions from insufficient evidence and false conclusions from both tainted and correct evidence. There is no reliable evidence that the Illuminati exists, and certainly none that the world is controlled by an alliance of international bankers, Freemasons and chlorophyll-based alien life forms. (5)
In And the truth shall set you free, Icke says the Illuminati (or New World Order) is planning to impose a world government, a world bank, a world army, and “a microchipped population connected to a global computer.” (6) In short, a totally planned socialist society. In Icke’s view, this is what identity cards are leading up to. It is all part of the plan. Is Icke crazy? Maybe. But the pertinent question is not: is Icke crazy, but is he right?
Any honest, informed person who takes a long, hard, dispassionate look at recent developments in the political arena, and strips away the rhetoric behind the current manufactured debate on identity cards will rapidly conclude that Icke’s errors are more of form than of substance. I will go further, much further, and say that it is not Icke who is crazy for believing this, but the rest of us who are crazy for not believing him. In short, there may be no Illuminati but this is happening. The question is not will computerised identity cards and the micro-chipped population come about, but when? And what can we do to prevent it?
“If you want barcoded human beings linked to a central computer, you must first get them to accept credit and identity cards.” ‐ David Icke (7)
The computerised identity card has long been popular in the realm of science fiction. Two fairly recent offerings are the 1993 Sylvester Stallone/Wesley Snipes satire on political correctness, Demolition Man; and the 1995 Sandra Bullock thriller, The Net. Although the self-effacing Stallone and his evil protagonist play it strictly for laughs, Demolition Man does have a serious message. In this film, Stallone’s hard man cop is resuscitated from suspended animation to pursue his old foe and super-criminal in a world which has become feminised by political correctness. Anything that could possibly be considered dangerous, harmful, or merely undesirable (one might ask undesirable to whom?), has been banned. The population is totally regulated.
Every citizen is monitored constantly and has a micro-chip implanted in his or her hand; minor infractions of the law ‐ eg swearing ‐ are punished instantly by automatic fines from the omniscient computer. Well, not absolutely every citizen is monitored constantly, but near enough.
The Sandra Bullock film is a more serious and far more terrifying proposition. The theme is a familiar one, the heroine ‐ Bullock’s freelance computer consultant ‐ is drawn into a web of subversion by mistake, is outlawed, and almost single-handedly saves the world from a power-mad corporation.
In this film, Bullock’s identity is changed; the bad guys have developed a total computer system which they hope to foist onto the governments of the world. She is transformed into a crook cum prostitute and her place is taken by one of the company’s assets. She finally defeats them by destroying their program with a virus.
All good thrilling stuff and well worth the £2.99 rental fee, but the reality of the cyber-nightmare will be, and is already swiftly becoming, far more terrifying, because the power of the totally computerised society does not rest in the hands of rogue mega-corporations, but in the hands of the state. And once this power structure has been established, there will be no undaunted heroines to save the world from the bad guys because the power they exert will be totally legitimate.
Since the end of the Second World War, and to some extent since the rise of Nazism, we have seen a worldwide crusade against racism. More recently we have seen “the war on drugs”. (8) Various other evils ‐ perceived and imagined ‐ have been perpetuated at various times throughout the past thirty and more years, and indeed throughout history. Some people ‐ David Icke for one ‐ read into the associated moral panics the grand design of the Illuminati. This interpretation is not merely simplistic, it is wrong, because there are all manner of organisations and individuals whipping up hysteria over racism, drugs, paedophile rings, etc and ad nauseum, from sensational and irresponsible tabloid journalists to the likes of Mrs Mary Whitehouse. At the time I started writing this short monograph, October 1996, one of the major moral panics was that of “porn” on the Internet. (9)
The catalyst for this appears to have been the then recent terrible revelations in the small European nation of Belgium; two young girls were murdered and others kidnapped as part of an organised paedophile network. (10) We in Britain also had the Dunblane horror, in which the mentally disturbed Thomas Hamilton walked into an infant school in the village of Dunblane, Scotland, and slaughtered sixteen young boys and girls and their teacher before turning the gun on himself. (11) This atrocity has also led to calls for further restrictions on, or the total abolition of, the private ownership of handguns, a project on which all the major political parties have already buried ideological differences in order to promote. (12)
We can add to this the at times seemingly trivial complaints of those who endorse the much hyped cult of “political correctness”. The one thing the proponents of “anti-racism”, the war on drugs, the anti-gun lobby, the anti-porn movement and sundry others have in common is a desire to regulate society, in particular to stamp out by legislation what they consider to be unacceptable behaviour and practices.
One pastime of which each and every one of us disapproves in some measure is crime. Even hardened criminals are opposed to crime, at least as far as they are the victims rather than the perpetrators of it. Identity cards are being sold as a measure to combat crime. Some Libertarians argue that identity cards will not reduce crime; this is simply not true. (13) Some crimes will be all but eradicated by identity cards. (14) But by the same token, amputating a leg will cure an ingrown toe nail. How many of us would opt for the “solution” of a leg amputation, a permanent and terrible disability and impediment, rather than endure a little pain once in a while?
As we move towards a totally computerised society, identity cards are indeed a very real weapon in the fight against crime, but both identity cards and computers can be abused. And while computers are worth the trade-off, identity cards are most certainly not. The reason for this is that crime is not simply credit card fraud, violence against the person, or any number of other unpleasant acts one person or a group of them can perpetrate on an individual, group or society as a whole. Crime is ANYTHING THE STATE PROHIBITS. In the words of Lord Aitkin “the only common nature they will be found to possess is that they are prohibited by the State, and those that commit them are punished.” (15)
Today, as in the past, we pass a lot of bad, stupid or even positively harmful, laws. These are passed, often at the behest of powerful organised lobbies, to cure some imaginary ill, or to give them a commercial or other advantage, or even to place them above all meaningful criticism. The prime example is “the war on drugs”. It has been reliably estimated that in the United States, one black male in twenty-one will be murdered, mostly by other blacks. (16) The most serious drug problems in the United States are among young urban blacks. Many if not most of these killings are drug-related in some way. Legalise drugs and the killings would stop.
In the 1920s, the Volstead Act of 1919 (Prohibition) made it illegal to manufacture or sell any drink with more than .5% alcohol content, and provided a fine of $1,000 or 6 months in gaol for breaking this law. The rest is history. Eliot Ness estimated that one man, Al Capone, had ordered or had been responsible for some three hundred murders by 1929. (17) Leaving aside the fact that the authorities never succeeded in pinning even one murder on Capone, every reader of this short monograph will have seen B Movie gangster films of men in hats wielding machine guns. When Prohibition was repealed, booze-related murders and other similar, serious crimes all but disappeared.
Not only is crime anything the state prohibits, which is surely bad enough, but the state has always been, and remains, the biggest criminal in history. The computerised identity card will make the state all-powerful and will allow the state to crush instantaneously and without due process of law any individual or organisation the state, a group or bureaucrats within the state, or even an individual rogue bureaucrat, wishes to crush, and for whatever reason. Including caprice. Consider the following.
In 1992, a science correspondent wrote that “IN THE 1950s, an electronic circuit that could store a single ‘bit’ of information cost more than £1. Today, a penny will buy 5000 of them.” (18) Today it will buy even more. A recent advertisement for a personal computer in the mainstream press is typical. For only £1,172.65 inclusive of VAT, you can purchase a Pentium computer with a CD-ROM, massive software bundle and other features, and a gigabyte hard disk. (19) If the average personal computer user can afford a such a huge capacity machine, the capacity of state-owned computers does not bear thinking about. But that is not the whole story. A high density floppy disk is about the size of an ID card, and this holds in excess of a megabyte of information. (20) How much does this correspond to? Well, recently I did a little experiment. Read the following sentence.
This line of type fits one side of a standard sheet of paper.
The above sentence contains thirteen words. Printed fifty-eight times in succession it consists of 754 words and will cover a sheet of A4 paper. Using my (primitive!) 386 computer and my beloved WordStar 6 wordprocessor, this takes up 3.84kb of disk space, which translates into over 375 A4 pages of tightly packed information on one floppy disk sized ID card. In practice a card will be able to hold even more information. How many pages would it take to write the basic history of your life complete with all your medical, financial and other details to date? Try making a list. In no particular order:
Date of birth, parents’ names, mother’s maiden name, place of birth, childhood diseases, education, criminal convictions if any, credit card status, library membership, the licence number of your car, outstanding parking tickets, wife’s name, income tax status...
You could write a fairly comprehensive personal profile of most people with a couple of pages of A4, couldn’t you? Now imagine all that information linked to a central computer, machine readable. This is not a fantasy, the police in Britain and most other countries have had such a facility for many years. Most motorists realise that when they are stopped by the police, the officer on the ground knows who owns the car they are driving before he flags them down. What is the first question he always asks? Is this your car, sir? If you reply yes and give him a name different from the one read out to him over his radio by the Police National Computer, you’ve got problems.
This is still a long way from total surveillance, but fairly recent developments are leading us to a society where total surveillance, or near total surveillance, is a real possibility. Indeed, in some fields, such near total surveillance is almost a reality already. We’ve already considered motor vehicles, and crime in the broader sense. Consider the following. This is an extract from the DRUG TRAFFICKING OFFENCES ACT 1986 (1986 c32):
Read this closely; this turns your bank manager, the clerks in your local building society, your accountant (if you have one),
and sundry others, into police spies. If they suspect that you might be using your account to “launder” drug money they are supposed to inform the authorities.
And if they don’t, they can be thrown into gaol.
How many gigabytes of computer power will it take to insure compliance? And this is purely financial surveillance. Let’s talk about actual surveillance. With motor
vehicles this too is extensive, leaving aside the Police National Computer.
The former Conservative Government had been selling off the family silver since the accession of Margaret Thatcher. One would imagine that this would have entailed
a decrease of state power; this is an illusion. Consider the proposal to fund road building by the private sector. Private companies will build motorways, which will charge tolls.
How do you collect tolls on a motorway or other major road which has hundreds or thousands of vehicles travelling in both directions day and night?
Easy, the motorist purchases a token which is affixed to his windscreen; this is read by laser and debited automatically. It goes without saying that such tokens can and will eventually be personalised (on the pretext of preventing fraud).
Then the state ‐ not simply the police ‐ will be able to pinpoint with a reasonable degree of accuracy, certainly within a few miles, the position of literally every vehicle in the country, and later the world, at any time.
An article published in the London Times in February 1997 makes this clear. The use of “ray gun” tolling technology is said to be a mere six years away.
Drivers on the privatised motorways would use meters that would be zapped; any cars not fitted with meters would be photographed! (22) When such a system is integrated with the cameras which can already be found monitoring traffic, city centres, car parks, etc, it will provide a system of near total surveillance of vehicles, and to an increasing degree, of people.
Just how widespread is such overt surveillance already is not widely known, and where it is known, people largely don’t seem to care.
Before the end of 1996 there were over three thousand closed circuit television schemes in cities, towns and some villages throughout Britain, mostly in non-residential areas. (23) And
even many people who do care don’t seem to realise the full implications of such schemes. For example, Tim Evans, a leading British Libertarian, unwittingly endorsed total
motor surveillance in his 1996 study of Conservative radicalism. Evans, a passionate anti-statist, wrote: “Once the whole of Britain was covered [by private roads]...an Automatic Vehicle Identification System (AVI)
that works on the principle of bar coding [would be used to collect tolls.]” (24) The ousting of the Conservatives in the May 1997 General Election does not mean that the new administration will be any less committed to privatising the motorways, and it certainly does not mean that government and bureaucracy will be any more committed to limiting the powers of state surveillance and increasingly repressive legislation.
One more example of surveillance must be given. In March 1997 it was reported that a man suspected of nineteen assaults on women in the West Midlands was snapped by a camera hidden inside a
cashpoint machine! (25) The quality of the photograph was very poor, and couldn’t have been of much assistance in identifying the suspect, but doubtless the quality of such covert photography will improve drastically in the not-too-distant future. And one doesn’t have to be paranoid to be disconcerted that one is being spied on when making a withdrawal from the local Santander cashpoint.
If I have waxed lyrical about overt and covert surveillance, the reader will, hopefully, see the point. Mass public surveillance coupled with the computerisation of society enables governments and bureaucrats not only to watch us but to control us. And all this information can and will be available to our oppressors at the press of a button with the introduction of computerised identity cards. The real danger of such an identity card, one that is all-inclusive, does not appear to have been spotted by even the most dedicated of Libertarians, and this is the fact that in practice the computerised identity card would enable faceless, unaccountable bureaucrats to over-ride, literally at the press of a button, all the constitutional safeguards that have been built up over the centuries, and which our ancestors paid for in blood.
In March 1997, a journalist wrote in a humorous article in the International Herald Tribune: “EVERYBODY violates the tax laws. The whole POINT of the U.S. tax system is to be so complicated that no normal human can conform to it...This system enables the Internal Revenue Service to select random taxpayers for audit with 100 percent
confidence that they will be guilty of something...” (26)
In other words, we are all criminals! This is hardly surprising, because there are more than seven thousand different crimes in
Britain, (27) and surely the great majority of the population has no idea that most of them exist except in a very general sense. Indeed, if we each and every one of us spent only a minute learning the intricacies of all these crimes that would take up over 116 hours in the classroom, ie a two hour lesson plus every week for more than a year. And don’t forget that old saying: “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”
Literally anyone can and will fall foul of the law in some way, manner, shape or form. A letter to
the British Medical Journal (28) from a hospital registrar in August 1996 pointed out
that many doctors may be innocently breaking the law simply by holding medical records! (29)
There are so many laws and the law itself is so complex that even police officers frequently arrest people for non-existent crimes and government ministers
frequently act ultra vires and are challenged successfully in the courts. The current writer has personal experience of the
former. (30)
And ironically, Michael Howard, who as Home Secretary was in favour of ID cards, was overruled by the courts more than once during his tenure.
The mammoth collection Halsbury’s, which covers all existing legislation in Britain, takes up thirteen shelves in the Supreme Court Library. Not even the most dedicated legal scholar could absorb more than a tiny fraction of that.
We mentioned earlier the Belgian paedophile scandal, the Dunblane horror and the related hysteria. This is nothing new, and although the vast majority of people who
leap onto the bandwagon in the wake of such outrages do so with the noblest of intentions, one should never lose sight of the fact that, as with the hysteria over racism and “the war on drugs”, the murders
and suffering of children are exploited cynically by powerful vested interests and pressure groups in order to further their own political agendas ‐ primarily the destruction of individual liberty. (31) In the first instance, restrictions are aimed at “paedophiles”, “Nazis”, “drug barons”, etc, and are then quietly extended to the population as a whole. (32)
At the time of writing there has been much talk in the media and Parliament of a register of paedophiles. (33) It has been suggested that convicted child sex offenders should be
obliged to notify their whereabouts to the police. There is a great deal of support from this, especially from parents, who make up a considerable percentage of the adult population. After all, what parent, especially of a young child/children would object to such a proposal? But how far will such proposals go? Will they be extended to anyone convicted of a sexual offence, then to anyone suspected of a sexual offence, then to anyone convicted of a serious non-sexual related offence, then to burglars and shoplifters?
Actually, they will go even further than that; some people are already calling for a DNA register to be set up which will take
samples from everyone at birth! Writing in the Sun (34) in February 1996,
a female columnist came up with the following brainwave.
After alluding to two rape/murder suspects who were arrested after DNA tests ‐ one who was convicted and a second who was then being
held in connection with the well-publicised
murder of a young French hitchhiker, Ms Fiona Webster suggested that the solution to motiveless sex murders is
“a DNA register ‐ which could be set up simply by taking a DNA sample from everyone at birth.
Now, I can already hear the bleating about big brother. But all sorts of personal information ‐ medical notes, bank details, school reports, blood groups ‐ is already on record.”
In other words, Big Brother is already watching through the crack in the door, what harm can it cause to invite his cameras into the
living room? Ms Webster
continues: “Men may squawk about freedom, but more than 90 per cent of violent crime is committed by their sex.
No society is completely free. I haven’t got the right to make noise late at night.
So if we ‐ and women in particular ‐ aren’t properly protected, then we’ll have to give up some freedom.
A DNA register wouldn’t stop murder and rape, but it would definitely improve the odds of criminals being caught. And that’s in everybody’s favour.” (35)
Computerised identity cards are being sold to all manner of groups with different agendas. In Germany,
immigrants (36) have been issued with computerised cards which have to be shown on entering and leaving hostels. Plans are
being considered for an “Asylum-Card” (their quotes) at the Federal level. (37) This sort of thing is inevitably portrayed by the organised
left as even further evidence of ‐ bore, bore ‐ state racism. The plain truth though is that the state is no more racist than it is “anti-racist”; the purpose of the machine is control, and that means everyone.
In this as in every other area of human activity, once control has been effected, it is increased. This is the Fabian process of gradualism, and one doesn’t have to look too hard to see it at work. In 1996, the debate over ID cards was shifted very unsubtly from should we have them to what insignia do we put on them? A controversy was manufactured over their use in Northern Ireland; a Union Jack would upset the
Republicans, it was said. Alternatively, shouldn’t we in Britain be patriotic and reject a card with a European symbol? (38)
A voluntary scheme has also been mooted, and this will doubtless be endorsed by the banks. Eventually such a voluntary scheme will become compulsory, if not by statute then by necessity. Let us now take a brief look at the accuracy of information stored on computer databases.
As the reader will doubtless be aware, there are credit reference agencies and similar organisations which provide financial information to banks, stores and the like. One of the largest in the UK is the CCN Group. Although generally such companies will not provide third party information to private individuals, anyone can make out a cheque for a pound, send it to CCN and ask for a print out of his or her own credit file. In July 1996, I sent in my quid and asked for all the information CCN held on me. I did this out of curiosity, because for personal (and ideological) reasons I have not purchased anything on credit for many years.
On July 31, I received a letter dated 26/07/96 which showed that the agency held one piece of information on me since 1986: my postcode. And this was wrong! The
information, obtained from the electoral roll, gave my postcode as SE26 5HX, instead of SE26 5HU. (39) The letter this piece of information arrived in was addressed to me at SE26 5HY! Sometimes when I have sent hand written letters my postcode has been misread thus, but on July 23 I had sent the agency a neatly wordprocessed letter. How much more incorrect information must this agency alone hold?
Apart from “official” information, many computer databases ‐ including police databases ‐ doubtless hold much information of doubtful quality, including gossip, hearsay and rumours. It is well known that when such information migrates it not only transmutes into other forms but can often be “upgraded”. Eg a rumour becomes hearsay and is then reported as fact. A truly spectacular example of “computer error” came to light in July 1997.
The Abbey National (40) managed somehow to blacklist “hundreds ‐ possibly thousands” of its customers incorrectly for credit. In one case, a man was shown, incorrectly, as having defaulted
on his mortgage to the sum of £18,420. This incorrect information was passed on by the Abbey National to a credit reference agency, and the problem mushroomed from there. People would not know about the
incorrect listings until they were refused credit and applied for a copy of their credit file. And who does? (41)
In September 1996, a former legal adviser to the security services called for the abolition of what he referred to as offshore bank secrecy. Such secrecy, he said, “other than commercial confidentiality, can and
must be abolished”. Or else? Or else it would result in the undermining of the governments of British dependent territories. He referred to such secrecy as “subtle corruptive subversion”. (42) Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?
In spite of the ravings of conspiracy cranks such as Larry O’Hara, (43) it is well documented that the security services
(principally MI5 and MI6) are in many ways a law unto themselves. Now, one of their mouthpieces is telling us that unless we
abolish banking “secrecy”, the world will end, or at best, British overseas governments (and eventually our own) will be destroyed by “subtle corruptive subversion”. Again and again this message is reiterated: the state will protect us from all the horrible criminals and terrorists, but first we must make the
state all-powerful, and second, we must trust the state to act in our best interests. Or for the “common good”. (44)
The “anti-fascist” movement never ceases carping on about the evils of racism and the lessons we are supposed to have learnt from the rise of Hitler. 99% of their arguments
are self-serving waffle, but leaving aside the fact that many of the Nazis’ most vociferous critics are themselves advocates of a far worse form of totalitarianism, (45) there was a real Nazi menace, and this was identified lucidly and concisely by General Lucius Clay, Governor of Germany
under the American military occupation from 1945-9. Writing in his 1950 book, Clay pointed out that: “Hitler had recognized that a dictatorship survives only if it controls the
judiciary and the police and can depend upon both to carry out its edicts.” (46)
In a democracy, or even a pseudo-democracy (such as we have in Britain), there are three arms of government: the Executive, the Legislative and the Judiciary, all of them,
theoretically, independent of each other. This is obviously a gross simplification but in general terms the Executive makes policy; the Legislative translates these policies into
law and the Judiciary interprets these laws. In theory, Britain has an independent Judiciary, although in practice judges are often subjected to political pressures and in some cases
their bias against a particular defendant or particular class of defendant can be outrageous. (47) However, it is by no means unusual for the Judiciary to rule against the government of
the day, as Michael Howard found out more than once when he was Home Secretary, (see above). (48)
An all-purpose computerised identity card would bypass the judiciary and to some extent the police. An all-purpose ID card would be a de facto merging of the
three arms of government, and ‐ if the reader will excuse my repetition ‐ in turn this power would rest in the hands of a faceless, unaccountable bureaucracy. Consider the following.
If every shred of information about the individual: criminal record (if any), motor vehicle information, medical records, financial records, library membership, and so on, were encrypted on a personal identity card, and if an ID
card were required to withdraw money from the bank/building society, to purchase a plane or coach ticket, or even to make purchases from the local corner shop, an ID card could be rejected for any and all transactions in
exactly the same way in which a credit card is currently rejected by sophisticated supermarket check-outs.
This is not fantasy, such a scheme is physically possible, or will be in a few years time, and not just on a national scale, but on a global scale. As stated, David Icke and his fellow travellers
visualise such a scenario, and interpret it as an all-pervasive conspiracy controlled by the all-powerful Illuminati, the Elders of Zion, or whoever. The really frightening thing is that there is no Iluminati,
no Elders of Zion and no world conspiracy. (49) Nobody is in control, not even the bureaucrats in any meaningful sense. The framework of terror is rapidly being erected, and once it has been completed, each and every one of us
is a potential victim. And once again, we can turn to Nazi Germany for proof of this.
The usual garbage about Hitler and the rise of the Nazis is that the Führer and his cronies rose to power by scapegoating the Jews ‐ everybody’s favourite whipping boy ‐ for all the
evils that had befallen Germany from defeat in the First World War to the Treaty of Versailles to the slump. Jewry is depicted as a poor,
powerless, persecuted minority who never did anybody any wrong ‐ and Heaven help
anyone who suggests otherwise. The truth is a light year removed from this dross. In Nazi Germany the Jews, who made up approximately 1% of the nation, were extremely powerful and
influential, both economically and politically, as the following brief survey will reveal:
The American-Jewish academic Benjamin Ginsberg has written that “Their relation to the state has often made it possible for Jews to attain great wealth and power.” (50) He wasn’t wrong, for example: of 21 daily newspapers in Berlin during the 1870s, 13 were owned by Jews. Hugo Preuss, a German-Jewish socialist, was the
principal drafter of the Weimar constitution, while in
Weimar, Jewish firms owned 80% of the department and chain store business in Germany; 40% of the wholesale textile business and 60% of the wholesale and retail clothing trades. Nearly half the private banks in Germany were owned by
Jews. (51)
An extensive analysis in the London Jewish Chronicle revealed that contemporary Germany Jewry had 2,208 lawyers, 3,670 doctors, 713 dentists, 374 authors, 31 actors, 113 singers,
and 41 editors. (52) In 1935, there were three Jewish-owned shipping companies in Hamburg
alone! (53)
Another source reports that in 1908 in Prussia, there were 747 millionaires (with more than 5 million Marks), 162 of them were of Jewish
extraction! (54) While “[A Nazi] document of June 1933 ‐ to be treated with due reserve but seemingly in the main reliable in many of its
facts ‐ claims that of 147 members of the stock, produce, and metal exchanges, 116, almost 80 per cent, were of Jewish origin.” There were 25 Jews and 11 Gentiles on the management committee of the stock exchange, 12 Jews
and 4 Gentiles on the produce and 10 Jews and 2 Gentiles in the metal exchange. (55)
Finally, on the infamous Night of the Broken Glass, (56) it is generally accepted that some 7,000 shops owned by Jews were looted and
destroyed. In 1933, the Jewish population of Germany was reckoned to be about 600,000. (57) By 1938, many Jews had emigrated. Yet German Jews
still owned 7,000 shops! (58) The Jews of Weimar and of Nazi Germany then were anything but powerless; they were ‐ and remain ‐ economically and politically one of the most
powerful minorities and lobbies on the face of this planet. Yet for all this power, they were totally helpless when the machinery of the state was turned against them.
The point of the previous five paragraphs is not to refute the myth of the poor, persecuted, powerless Jews but to emphasise, again, that if the Jews could be subjected to tyranny on such a scale as they were in
Nazi Germany, in an age when computerised ID cards were unthought of, the next repression, when it comes, the next Holocaust, (59) will be far more terrible, and it can and will be
directed at any of us by virtue of race, religion or any other or number of criteria. Or indeed against all of us as visualised
by George Orwell (60) and as practised by Stalin, Pol Pot and numerous others throughout the Twentieth Century.
When the coming repression is imposed it will target everyone. Literally. So there will be no sense in the anti-discrimination lobby carping on about the evils of racism, sexism or any other ism. Here are two examples of people who have been shafted by the state as it now exists; when you are forced to carry a computerised identity card (or when you have one implanted under your skin!) you can expect this sort of thing to happen on a far greater scale, but don’t expect to read
about it in the press. The first of our victims of state repression is a household name: John Stalker. (61)
In May 1984, Stalker, who was then Deputy Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, was appointed to investigate an alleged shoot to kill policy by members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland. Stalker was an honest police officer,
unfortunately he didn’t realise that honesty wasn’t what was required for this post, but whitewash. He put together an eight man team (including his lieutenant and himself) and set about
investigating the allegations in a methodical manner. (62)
When the penny failed to drop and it was obvious that Stalker was going to publish a damning indictment of dirty tricks in the Province, he was suspended and his financial and
other dealings were subjected to a microscopic scrutiny. At the end of the day the most damning allegation substantiated against him was that he had used official police cars to and from
certain social events, something he was entitled to do. (63)
In other words, as might be expected of so senior a police officer, Stalker was squeaky clean. (64) Yet he was as good as hounded out of
the police force and his career ruined. (65)
That being said, Stalker was one of the lucky ones. Uncharacteristically, our much vaunted free press devoted considerable space to what became known as the Stalker affair;
the story ran and ran and the public was overwhelmingly on his side. Most victims of witch hunts aren’t that lucky. The really incredible thing about the Stalker affair though is that not only was he never charged with any
criminal offence or any alleged misconduct, but that he didn’t even know what the allegations against him were nor who had made them! This is a violation of all the principles of natural justice. It was probably for this reason as
much as any that the public rallied behind him. Now imagine what would have been the scenario and the outcome if we lived in a totally computerised/total surveillance society.
As soon as the first of these ectoplasmic allegations was made, Stalker would have been transformed instantaneously into an un-person. He would have been denied access to all media; any journalist brave enough or foolish enough
to cover the story would have seen it killed dead, and perhaps would have suffered the same fate as Stalker himself. Again, this is not fantasy; the media is already controlled and regulated to a fantastic degree in some states and
has been for decades. (66) To give just one example, when Saddam Hussein made his ill-fated foray into Kuwait, news of the invasion was actually withheld for days by Saudi Arabia and the other states of the Arabian peninsula.
Saudi nationals could only obtain information about the invasion from the BBC, Voice of American or Monte Carlo radios. (67)
If news of an impending war in its back garden could be withheld from Saudi citizens, what price allegations of impropriety against one obscure policeman? (68)
Under the coming repression, Stalker’s bank accounts could have been frozen. He could have been denied the right to travel. He could even have been denied access to the telephone. You think this sounds unduly fantastic? We have long had itemised phone bills in this country so to begin with they know who all your closest friends and correspondents are. Devices which block calls to and from certain numbers have been available commercially for years. If all telephones were operated by phone cards built into your universal identity card, you wouldn’t be able to make even a phone call without state approval.
In fact, this is already the case for prisoners. (69)
Here is David Icke again from his poorly researched book And The Truth Shall Set You Free:
“Today if you go into a shop to buy food and your credit card is refused by the computer, you can pay with cash. What happens when there is no cash? You are at the mercy of the computer. If it refuses your card or microchip, you have no means to purchase anything.” (70) Is that true or is it true?
It has long been common knowledge that the vast majority of financial transactions do not involve cash; (71) most people feel uncomfortable walking around with large amounts of cash on their persons. However, the idea that cash will ever be made totally redundant, even for the smallest of transactions, is not tenable. Or is it? Anyone who believes that obviously hasn’t
been reading the financial press lately. In January 1995 an article in the London Times suggested that physical cash might be phased out altogether in favour of electronic cash
cards. (72)
The following month an article in the same paper by the same journalist reported that in Africa ‐ hardly the centre of technological progress ‐ smart cards are already set to
replace cash. One African bank already issues card holders with a four digit identity number which enables them to load their cards with electronic currency; while a Natal bank is
said to use a machine which reads the customer’s thumbprint! Smart cards implanted with a micro chip are also being used in the new “democratic” Russia. (73)
Returning to David Icke, on the same page he stresses that satellite TV decoders can be programmed by remote control. “If they can do that to a card, they can do it to a microchip
inside a human being.” (74) Yeah, sure, laugh at the guy, but they are doing it to human beings already, both on the outside and on the inside. Haven’t you heard of tagging?
Again, we need look no further than the pages of Britain’s most prestigious daily newspaper. In October 1996, a letter from the Director of “The Offender’s Tag Association” (!) claimed
that “offenders” as young as ten years old have been tagged. As well as reporting on a study from Indiana, he added that tagging has been used as far apart as Canada, Sweden,
Singapore and Australia. (75)
This may surprise the reader but implants in the human body are already with us, and have been for a long time. On page 443 of his highly imaginative book “BEHOLD A PALE HORSE”, American conspiracy crank
William Cooper (76) reprints a May 1990 newspaper article about ID tags implanted in pets.
On the following page a 1989 article speculates that this could be used on humans as a form of total control. The current writer has no doubt that this hypothesis has long gone beyond
the speculation stage. (77) Most interestingly, Swede Robert Naeslund has compiled an alarming compilation on biomedical telemetry (Brain-Computer Technology)
called SAVAGES, SCIENCE and citations of BRAIN-COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY. (78)
In his study Physical Control Of The Mind, J. Delgado reports that a procedure for implanting fine wires into the brains of anaesthetised cats was devised by W.R. Hess in the
1930s. (79) This is something with which most if not all of us are familiar, but whatever moral considerations it may have, vivisection does, at times, have a humane purpose, as Delgado
further reports: thousands of people around the world have had electrodes implanted in their heads to combat suffering from epilepsy, involuntary movements, intractable pain, anxiety
neurosis and “other cerebral disturbances”. (80) The important phrase here though is “other cerebral disturbances”. There have long been those
who regard racism (whatever that nebulous epithet means), anti-Semitism, (81) sexism and even, incredibly, homophobia as “cerebral disturbances”. After all, what sane person would not be revolted by the
thought of innate racial differences, sexual stereotyping or any sort of aversion to homosexual practices?
As Icke rightly points out: “The technology already exists and the only thing that remains is to persuade public opinion to accept it, or even
demand it.” (82) Icke may know little about history but he certainly understands psychology. In the wake of Dunblane the private ownership of handguns has almost been made illegal. In a debate on the then new firearms bill, two leading politicians were quoted thus: “If we leave a loophole, if we trust the very people that let us down before, we will not have made adequate redress for the ghastly
tragedy in Dunblane.” (83) And “If we were tonight to leave a loophole in the firearms laws big enough for another mass murderer ‐
another Michael Ryan, another Thomas Hamilton ‐ to walk
through, then we would never be forgiven or indeed deserve to be forgiven.” (84)
In other words, take away our guns, the people can’t be trusted to own them; the state can. Sound familiar? The same voices have long been raised in support of compulsory identity cards. One group of people who should know
better but like the Bourbons never learn anything any more than they forget anything, is Organised Jewry. In September 1995, the Board of Deputies of British Jews voted narrowly in favour of the introduction of ID cards. (85)
Ironically too, Icke’s prediction that “the only thing that remains is to persuade public opinion to accept it, or even demand it” came true before his book was published!
In his speech to the Conservative Party Conference in October 1994, then Home Secretary Michael Howard mooted the idea of a voluntary ID card scheme, and was jeered loudly by the party faithful because they wanted it to be compulsory! (86)
We mentioned earlier the Belgian paedophile scandal; like Dunblane, this human tragedy and horror story has been and will continue to be exploited for the basest of motives. (87) So it should come as no surprise that we have moved already from the worldwide tagging of offenders to (in Belgium) the bar coding of children!
“IT COULD prove the perfect solution for parents worried about losing their children. The European Commission is considering a Belgian plan to sew supermarket-style bar codes into children’s clothing to help identify them if they go missing...
Under the scheme, devised by a Belgian company and computer experts at Louvain University, parents would buy blank versions of the so-called junior stripe badges which could be programmed with the children’s details at a police station.”
No, this is not David Icke, this is the Sunday Times! (88)
Those interested in this “scheme” are ‐ or would be ‐ police officers (naturally), coastguards and “other officials”. Some fifteen thousand children are said to “disappear” on the Belgian coast every year, says the article, but then adds that most of these are reunited with their parents within hours. So what information will these bar codes contain? The name and address of the child, naturally, the hotel address, blood group and “other information”. Although this is currently being offered to parents, most ominously the European Commission is said to be interested in the
scheme, although talks are at an early stage. (89) Reading between the lines, we can see clearly what will happen next, albeit by stages. What is currently being offered to members of the public as a child protection device will become, in the course of time, a compulsory scheme run the state, and used to monitor not just children but anybody who is considered ‐ by their criteria ‐ to be at risk. Or to be a risk.
Returning to victims of repression, John Stalker was a high profile case; chances are that no one reading this short monograph will have heard of our second victim of state
repression; his name is Naheem Bashir. Unlike John Stalker, Naheem Bashir was victimised on a purely arbitrary basis. His “crime” is that he became the first person in Britain to be convicted of selling a lottery ticket
to an underage child. Trading standards officers used a 13 year old girl to make “test purchases”, and Mr Bashir failed the test. He was fined £500. (90)
Two points should be made here: the first is that with a name like Naheem Bashir he was very likely not of Anglo-Saxon stock, so anyone can be targeted and everyone will be.
The second is that although Mr Bashir committed a crime, technically, there would have been no offence if it had not been incited. To incite a criminal act is to commit a criminal act. So the trading standards officers who
prosecuted him were just as guilty as he was. In fact, in such cases ‐ and this is far from unique ‐ the people who incite the act are more guilty than the person who commits it because in the first place without the incitement there would have been no crime, and in the second place the likes of Naheem Bashir
can argue ‐ often truthfully ‐ that they did not realise that the purchaser was underage. A defence of entrapment would not succeed either because “there is no defence of entrapment in English law”. (91)
Entrapment operations often put the police and other authorities above the law. As long ago as April 1975, the NCCL called for tougher controls over the uses of agents provocateurs, which included a detective who posed as a forger to get fivers printed and a police officer who exposed himself in a public lavatory and smiled at men who came in! (92)
The reader may find the last example amusing, but Mr Bashir didn’t find his £500 fine the slightest bit amusing, that’s for sure. Now what would have happened to him in a total surveillance ID card society? One thing that would have happened is that he would have been fined automatically. When cash has been phased out and money consists solely of blips on a computer chip, this will be no big problem. A fairly lowly official of the local trading standards office, the police, Customs & Excise, or a dozen other government departments could cancel his ‐ and your ‐ credit at the push of a button.
Once somebody’s finances have been cut off, the rest is easy. The arbitrary nature of state repression is its most noticeable feature. Mr Bashir, you or anyone can be selected for any reason at all or none. These monsters are already ruining people’s lives; a totally computerised society will simply make this form of tyranny more efficient. The current writer has personal experience of this, so I know what I am talking about.
When I was raided by fraud squad officers in May 1993 they seized a great deal of property on a totally arbitrary basis. When it became obvious that the “crime” they were investigating was perfectly legal, the officer in charge passed on information to both another arm of government and one of his chums on the fringes of Organised Jewry.
Later, both these parties attempted to use this information against me.
When I was raided by the grandly titled Organised Crime Group in August 1996, the brown-nosing little snoops seized not only a large quantity of publications but a tranche of
proofs of posting, all of which went into their database. Although, following a further raid in November 1996 I was subsequently charged with
three criminal offences, I was cleared of all of them,
but they’ve had and have got their beady eye on me, and anyone with whom I have the most cursory association is also on their list as a
potential subversive. Now add the extra dimension of a totally controlled population; faceless bureaucrats have unlimited access to your financial records, your mail, your telephone records, you name it. (93)
When I appeared at Horseferry Road Magistrates’ Court I was denied Legal Aid; it was granted for the Crown Court, but it doesn’t take much imagination to see that somebody who the state or elements within the state has it in for can be totally
destroyed by such methods. (94) And with the computerised identity card, reams of confidential information about every individual will be available at the press of a button, as will the power to deny that person credit, access to his own funds, Legal Aid, the right to use the telephone, even to borrow books from the library.
Again, this is not paranoia, this is not fantasy, this is not even science fiction. David Icke is wrong about the Illuminati but he is right about everything else: “The technology already exists and the only thing that
remains is to persuade public opinion to accept it, or even demand it.” (95) And demand it they do: Dunblane ‐ the state must take away our guns; paedophile hysteria ‐ the state must
control everything we read and see; the
war on drugs ‐ the state must take away our rights. And so it goes on. And what better way to control everyone than by total surveillance? In short “a microchipped population connected to a global computer.” (96)
Again, I must stress that the coming repression will be systematic, and it will be arbitrary. Nobody is in control of the machine and everybody is at risk. And again, I am talking from personal experience. In 1995, I was in
litigation with a number of parties, including bookshops, over defamatory articles written about myself. My colleague visited one of these radical bookshops to purchase some
literature ‐ as he has done for many years ‐ and what did he find? Well, in one of them he found “anarchist” literature that incited the murders of police officers, among other things. This was obviously good ammunition
to use in a libel action, (97) so I visited these bookshops in turn and purchased some of this hate literature, photocopies of which I forwarded to the police.
I was subsequently informed that detectives had collected original samples and that these would be scrutinised with a view to prosecution. Nothing came of this. The most astonishing
thing about this entire affair is that one of
the bookshops concerned was a registered charity which was funded principally by public money: from national government and the local authority. (98) As far as I know, it still is, [ie in 1997].
This bookshop, like the others, also stocks what can best be described as queer porn of the vilest sort. Homosexual literature which is clearly
illegal (99) is tolerated and even condoned by central and local government. Now what would happen if, as may well happen, the powerful and very noisy organised homosexual movement falls
into disfavour with its sympathisers in national and local government bureaucracies? They, like anyone else, could be stamped on selectively. For the record, in his excellent monograph The Fatal Embrace, the American-Jewish scholar Benjamin Ginsberg documents
the reluctance of the academic authorities to condemn anti-Jewish hatemongering by black “radicals”. He cites the case of one black student who denounced the Jews as enemies of humanity and called for a second Holocaust.
When Jews and student organisations protested, this led to hardly a whimper of protest from the authorities. (100)
Under the new repression, when an organisation is declared illegal, either overtly or in a de facto manner, every member or sympathiser could and would have his assets frozen. This applies not just to members of organisations but to
those who follow a certain lifestyle ‐ as homosexuals; those who practise a certain religion ‐ or any religion; members of certain ethnic or racial groups; the possibilities and
permutations are endless. And with all this information programmed into an identity card, the tyranny can be instantaneous. As our New Age friend points out, satellite TV
decoders can already be programmed by remote control, so “If they can do that to a card, they can do it to a microchip inside a human being.” David Icke is looking less mad with every passing minute. (101)
It is ironic that since the 1970s the organised homosexual movement has been in the forefront of those movements and ideologies calling for more and more Draconian “anti-hate” legislation and for more and more state powers to combat xenophobia. (102)
Organised Jewry has been in the forefront of this “struggle” against the fascist menace for much longer. It is ironic that throughout history Jews in particular have been both the first to benefit and the first to suffer when the
iron fist finally comes out of the velvet glove. There is no evidence that homosexuals have learnt from the Jewish historical experience any more than Jews have. (103)
Again, don’t imagine for one instant that you ‐ or anyone ‐ will have had to have done anything wrong. As has already been pointed out, “we are all criminals”. (104) We mentioned too the fact that a great deal of information held by financial and other
databases is incorrect; the National Audit Office estimates that a staggering 35% of drivers’ records held by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority contain at least one
error. (105) The most minor of errors or inconsistencies in almost any computerised record could be used as the pretext to mount a full scale
investigation of some poor dupe, and in the meantime to his being relegated to the status of an un-person. (106) All manner of other pretexts can be used to instigate this form of tyranny, even something as mundane as failing to file a tax return or company records, or filing such documents late.
Then there is racism, a “crime” of which all white people (and at times many non-whites) are judged to be guilty. Individuals and companies can be smeared as racist ‐ whatever that means ‐ on the basis of
their hiring and firing policies, real or apparent, or by other more nebulous criteria. (107) In the United States, the obsession of bureaucrats with “affirmative action” has led to the instigation of legislation and
policies bordering on insanity. One American magazine cites the case of an entrepreneur who fired one of his female employees (who happened to be black) for rudeness and inefficiency. She reported him to the “Illinois Department of Human Rights” [sic!] for the heinous
crime of racism. Not only did the employer concerned replace the fired woman with another black woman, but sixty-three of his eighty-three strong workforce were non-white. So what did the “Illinois Department of Human Rights” do? It asked him “to prove that he hadn’t hired so many minorities just to make it look as though he didn’t discriminate” ! (108)
There is no need to belabour this point any further, which is that any and all of us can and will be targeted on the flimsiest of pretexts or none. This is the inevitable result of human nature; technology: the appliance of science, will be used as it always has been. The atom can be split to produce heat, light and energy; and the atom can be split to create mass
destruction. Highly toxic gases can be used in the manufacture of plastics and other useful artificial substances; and they can be used as weapons of war. Etc. So too can the silicon chip, one of the greatest inventions since the wheel, be used to free us from unnecessary toil and to bestow countless other benefits on the whole of mankind.
And alternatively, it can be used to enslave us. The computerised identity card will effectively abolish the rule of law and give an unaccountable bureaucracy total power over all our lives. And once this tyranny has been established it will be difficult if not impossible to overthrow.
It is difficult to overstate the menace posed to individual liberty and indeed to the survival of mankind by the computerised identity card. If this last claim sounds
unnecessarily dramatic, let me postulate a hypothetical scenario. It is possible and indeed has happened many times throughout history and up to this very day, that perfectly harmless and lawful activity has been suppressed by the state. Let us forget the hysteria of the war on drugs, we need look no further than Prohibition in the United States. Prohibition exists in Saudi Arabia to this day; in that country the state has totally suppressed the production and consumption of alcohol; those who fall foul of Saudi prohibition laws face Draconian penalties, including being publicly flogged. (109)
Now, suppose that an all-powerful world government were to prohibit scientific research into some vital area. Don’t forget, this has happened in the past. Surely everyone
reading this monograph has heard of Galileo? There are already restrictions on some kind of scientific research, deservedly so in
some cases. (110) The computerised identity card and
the total surveillance that goes hand in hand with it could be used to halt technology and all further human progress at the whim of the same faceless bureaucrats who would have the
power to destroy our lives arbitrarily. In the past two decades we have seen massive disinformation campaigns related to AIDS. Imagine research into some new AIDS or Ebola outbreak being
suppressed by an all-powerful bureaucracy. Or the unsafe dumping of highly toxic waste. The possibilities are endless. How many deaths would suppression by an all-powerful bureaucracy
cause? So how can the coming repression be stopped? There are two ways: (111) the first is by mass direct action and protest.
The former Apartheid régime in South Africa was known not only for its segregation of the races (112) but also for its undemocratic pass laws, which were used not only
against blacks but against coloureds and even on occasion against whites. (113) In spite of the, at times tiresome, protests against Apartheid we once saw in Britain, it is not
generally known that the pass laws in South Africa were, in the first instance, opposed successfully. And that by women as long ago as 1920!
“When women had first been issued with passes in the Free State province in 1913, they immediately organised themselves in a political protest of passive resistance. They simply refused to carry their passes, preferring to go to prison than be imprisoned by a pass. Hundreds of women persevered in the seven-year campaign, which ultimately ended in triumph.
In 1920, Free State women were finally exempt from the region’s pass law.” (114)
A more modest rebellion against bureaucratic tyranny happened in Britain in December 1950 when a motorist named Henry Willcock refused to produce his ID card when stopped by PC Harold Muckle. Willcock was convicted by the magistrates’ court but granted an absolute discharge. The case went to the Court of Appeal where, according to Andrew Roberts, the
Lord Chief Justice denounced the whole system of peacetime identity cards. (115)
If people simply refused to carry ID cards, they wouldn’t work, but the protest would have to be nationwide or even continent-wide, and it would have to be a grass roots movement and one without ringleaders. There is no reason why it couldn’t happen and couldn’t succeed. If a group of kaffir women could organise a seven year campaign shortly after the turn of the century, and if, as happened in Britain, a mass grass roots movement could defeat the poll tax...
The biggest problem with creating such a movement is the Fabian approach used by the proponents of ID cards. They are very unlikely to be made compulsory at once. This is partly because people everywhere can in general only be conned into giving up their freedoms gradually, and partly because the system wouldn’t be able to cope with the instantaneous introduction of compulsory ID cards. The new computerised cards would lead to a massive information overload and undoubted chaos.
The second way in which ID cards can be opposed is by what might be termed the individual culpability approach. This is by recognising that governments and bureaucracies may be machines but that ultimately they are run by individuals, and these individuals can, should, indeed must, be held personally accountable when they wilfully destroy people’s lives, livelihoods and freedoms. In this context my own recent experience has proved most illuminating, and I would like to share the fruits of that experience with my readers, but first a little history.
On November 7, 1938, an emotionally disturbed 17 year old Jewish teenager named Herschel Feibel Grynszpan (116) gunned down Ernst vom Rath, the Third Secretary of the German
Embassy in Paris, in cold blood. Vom Rath died two days later. As a result of this cowardly murder, pogroms erupted throughout Nazi Germany, the so-called Kristallnacht. (117)
Although Kristallnacht was widely and properly condemned, (118) the assassination of Vom Rath
was condemned less so. (119) Vom Rath was a mere diplomat who had never done the slightest harm to Grynszpan or to any member of his
family. His “crime” was that he was a Nazi and that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. What was Grynszpan’s motivation for the assassination of Vom Rath? Ostensibly it was the
forced deportation of his parents by the German government. In reality he was probably just a mixed up kid. This sort of act is still applauded by today’s “anti-fascists” for whom the only good “fascist” is a dead one. It remains only for them to brand you ‐ or anyone else they choose ‐ a fascist, on whatever flimsy evidence or none at all, in order
to justify snuffing you out. (120) That being said, one should ask the question: was Grynszpan on the right track? And here the answer is that while one must condemn the murder of Ernst Vom Rath, one should condemn
Grynszpan himself less for the actual murder than for his twisted logic. Let me expand on this.
In 1996, the American-Jewish academic Daniel Jonah Goldhagen published yet another book on the Holocaust. Hitler’s Willing Executioners (121) received rave reviews but was
severely panned by so-called experts on this
supposedly so difficult subject. (122) I haven’t read Goldhagen’s book cover to cover, but its thesis is well-known: anti-Semitism was rife in
Nazi Germany, ordinary Germans had nothing better to do than hate Jews and were only too quick to queue up to murder them. Gitta Sereny, a leading Exterminationist author, described
Goldhagen’s book as a “hymn of hate to the Germans”. (123)
I doubt very much Goldhagen is a confirmed Germanophobe, he is simply wrong. The fact is that prior to the ascent of Hitler, Germany was one of the least anti-Semitic countries
in Europe, as evinced by the economic power of German Jewry (already discussed in the current study). (124) There is a much simpler explanation for German “anti-Semitism” under the Nazis.
In the first instance, a lot of anti-Semitism was simply hysteria and people jumping on the bandwagon. This happens all the time. It is a well-attested phenomenon that if there is a media report of a flying saucer sighted in, say,
Leeds, pretty soon there will be sightings coming in from Manchester, Sheffield and from all over the country. Even if the first sighting turns out to be a wilful hoax. In short, anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany was simply fashion,
fad, a bit like the ongoing struggle against racism (bore, bore) or the hysteria that was generated about AIDS in the nineteen eighties.
But in the second instance, there were indeed plenty of people who had no compunction whatsoever about joining whole-heartedly in the Nazis’ anti-Jewish campaign, not because they were anti-Jewish, but for a far more prosaic reason. This is that there have always been and always will be people who enjoy stamping
all over other people. These same people formed and always will form the hard core of the secret police, Customs & Excise, and any and every other arm of central and local government in Nazi Germany, in contemporary Britain and
every society throughout history and the world. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with “anti-Semitism”, racism or any other ism. These people exist and they do these jobs because they are sadists, and more often than not spineless wankers into the bargain.
Now, returning to Grynszpan, if instead of murdering an innocuous diplomat he had sought out and administered summary justice to the real culprit or culprits, ie the particular
Nazis who had been responsible for the expulsion of his parents, it would have been wrong to condemn him. The way to deal with Nazi Germany in general was not, as Organised Jewry and others did, to mount trade
boycotts and other snide campaigns, but for individual Jews ‐ and others ‐ who had been victimised by bureaucrats and the Nazis’ lapdogs to seek out and exact summary justice on the individuals concerned. (125)
If the anti-Nazi movement inside Germany had indeed engaged in such tactics, then the German government would have been compelled to backtrack on its anti-Jewish and other repressive policies. This is the lesson that I learned from my suffering at the hands of our wonderful boys in blue
and the system of repression known as the criminal justice system. I don’t want to turn this disseration into a mini-autoibiography, but I do want to give the reader an insight into how I came to the conclusions herein.
In late 1995 and early 1996 I received just over eighteen thousand pounds in costs and damages from a number of parties in a
then ongoing libel action. These settlements were paid into an escrow account ‐ on legal advice ‐ and later some was used for legal costs. (Although
I was acting in person, these were not inconsiderable, and included taking procedural advice from Counsel, etc). At some point, the chief defendant,
the odious Gerry Gable, decided to stir things, and wrote to the authorities making a number of false allegations against me. He also made false allegations against my colleague Mark Taha and the late Morris Riley, both of whom were raided by The Filth. (126).
Gable’s letter ran to three pages and included a three page grossly all manner of innuendo and insinations. As a result of this I received a phone call from a state snoop who said she wanted to interview me under caution. I went along with my solicitor and experienced what might be termed a third degree. I find it difficult to describe dispassionately the attitude of this woman. My solicitor, who was then a Labour councillor, had done a number of these sort of interrogations, but even he was shocked by her tone. I will spare the reader the details, suffice it to say that later she denied all her lies in open court.
Some time after this third degree her tone changed, although again she denied this, and I was so foolish as to make an off the cuff remark about her which ended up with my being charged with making threats to kill, witness intimidation and assault occasioning actual bodily
harm, (see also above). The assault charge was based not on any physical contact but on a letter I wrote to a third party which was then shown to her, and she was so disturbed by its contents that she suffered psychological damage and spent the next six months off work. Believe me, I am not making this up. This charge was so bizarre that the trial judge ‐ bigotted old bastard that he was ‐ ordered the prosecution not to proceed with it, telling them it would cause “insuperable difficulties”. Although I used strong words about this odious woman, they were nowhere near either as strong or as obscene as the words she used about me. Which of course, she denied, and just as predictably, her denial was rubber stamped by the judge.
There were also the “stalking” allegations, none of which were either proved or could be proved, for the obvious reason that she simply made it all up; she was clearly deranged. As Counsel pointed out to me at the time, all these people have something wrong with them (ie in the head), especially
the women. (127).
What I found truly remarkable about this little sadist is that she spent a total of six months off work ‐ the entire time I was held on
remand ‐ apparently shaking and cringing in her apartment. And over what?
It came as a surprise to me that the police didn’t bother to investigate any of the allegations I made against her, (128)
but in retrospect it shouldn’t have. The police, at least the police officers involved in this case, had a common axe to grind, and this type of police officer is part of the
same repressive establishment. On the other hand, the jury, who were twelve ordinary decent men and women, (129) had no axe to grind, and they saw through the whole dirty charade.
Now the point of all this is that while agents of repression like the so-called victim in this case, and the bent copper who put me in the dock
will gloat over people’s misery and do their damndest to destroy people, when they themselves are called to account, they aren’t so brave, to put it mildly.
I hope the reader gets the message: the second way to preserve our hard won freedoms, in particular to ward off the threat of the computerised identity card, is to hold the
agents of repression personally accountable. This does happen occasionally, but nowhere near enough. In August 1997, a suspected police spy was kicked to death by a mob at a rally in
Nairobi. (130) Together with my personal experience this proves there is more than one way to skin a cat.
One more point of interest from my trial. The Crown tried to make out this little monster to be a dedicated civil servant who
was “only doing her job”. She actually said this or words to that effect under cross-examination. When I retorted that this was what the Nazis had said, the judge cut in; his honour didn’t like that at all, but Judge Watts was an even bigger muppet than her. If the state had gone out of its way to select a more biased, bent and bigoted judge for this show trial, it couldn’t have.
At Nuremberg, the Nazis, or most of them, pleaded superior orders. Similar pleas were made at other “war crimes” trials of both Germans and Japanese. (131)
The doctrine of superior orders was rejected, and, we are told, is no defence for war crimes or crimes against humanity. What utter cant and hypocrisy. The fact is that little monsters like the one I faced, and to a great extent the police and other bureaucrats and civil servants are above the law; they plead superior orders, public duty, “only doing my job”, and anyone who tries to call them to account is given short shrift.
We have seen this in the Birmingham Six, Guildford Four, Stefan Kiszko and a host of other, similar cases. Not one police officer was convicted of fitting up the Birmingham Six or Guildford Four. The case of Stefan Kiszko is particularly sad. He had a mental age of twelve yet was interrogated no fewer than six times, after which he confessed to the sex
murder of an eleven year old girl. (132) He was in his early twenties at the time, and was to spend what should have been the best years of his life, sixteen dreadful nightmare years,
in gaol, most of it on Rule 43. (133)
After his release he said he’d confessed to make the questioning stop because “he just wanted to get out of the place” ! (134)
Stefan Kiszko had a rock solid alibi ‐ his mother and his aunt ‐ they were not believed. But the most extraordinary ‐ and outrageous ‐ facet of this case is that the proof of his innocence was in the hands of the prosecution at the time of his trial.
Semen was gathered from the scene of the murder; it contained spermatozoa; Stefan Kiszko was infertile. (135)
In other words, the prosecution allowed an innocent man to rot in gaol for the best years of his life because they wanted a conviction,
any conviction. And again, no one was brought to book for this terrible injustice. Once again, the bureaucrats, the police, the civil servants, remained personally inviolable.
After all, they were only “doing their jobs”.
The computerised identity card will enhance the power of these monsters a thousandfold: the people who destroyed the lives of the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four,
Stefan Kiszko and countless others. We must not allow this to happen. If the defence of superior orders was not available to the Nazis, then it should
not be available to their spiritual heirs: the torturers of Stefan Kiszko, nor to any other of these monsters. Any bureaucrat or civil servant who does the Devil’s work must be held personally accountable. In some cases this will mean that the offender must pay with his ‐ or her ‐ life.
In the modern world the state has many functions, but one of its prime functions should be to protect the weak from the strong and to give those in need a helping hand.
This function has clearly been perverted; the state has long since become a vehicle for the oppression of the weak by the invulnerable, and for knocking a man down and kicking him when he is down. Like the trading standards officers who entrapped the otherwise law-abiding Naheem Bashir, and countless others who have suffered similar fates.
These people may be likened to the Wizard of Oz. The Wizard of Oz hid behind a mask to frighten people; when the mask was
removed all that remained was a pathetic, feeble old man: pathetic, feeble,
and utterly worthless. The only thing that gives these monsters power over our lives is the mask of the Wizard of Oz. Tear away
the mask, and all that remains is a typical sadistic bully boy (or bitch); when it comes to dishing it out against innocent people, they gloat and smirk, but when there is the
remotest sign that one of the downtrodden and oppressed intends to strike back, they literally fall to pieces like the spineless wankers they are.
To fight the coming repression effectively would require the development of a “leaderless resistance”, a concept which has, ironically, been pioneered in the United States by
the far right in their struggles against ZOG (the so-called Zionist Occupation Government). Okay, these people may have strange ideas, (136) but this concept works, and when push comes to shove, it may be our only hope. We must develop a leaderless resistance that can strike at random at the servants of Big Brother; it can be done, even in an age of near total surveillance. If anyone ever had any doubts about that, they should take heart from the IRA. Whatever one may think of the IRA ‐ and I certainly do not hold a high opinion of them ‐ they prove that a dedicated network of men and women can mount an effective struggle against the rulers of even the most hypermodern and futuristic near total surveillance. The IRA have the wrong goals, but their methods used against a bona fide tyrant, are admirable. (137)
We end this short monograph on a note of optimism. On March 3, 1991, a man named George Holliday shot a 90 second video that was to shock and horrify America and the world.
Rodney King, a powerfully built (black) ex-con, was seen being taunted and brutalised by four thugs in uniform. (138) The acquittal of his assailants
led to some of the bloodiest riots in American history.
On May 4, 1992, the Times reported that in Los Angeles, 49 people were left dead and at least 3,000 businesses looted, burned or destroyed. Five hundred and fifty million dollars’ worth of damage had been wrought in three days.
It was apparent right from the start that a lot of this carnage had been caused by people who took advantage of the genuine outrage over the bizarre acquittal, (139) but there was much genuine outrage over this case all the same.
According to an American academic writing in a lavishly illustrated primer on the American legal system: “The videotape provided dramatic evidence of police actions that many had previously dismissed as unlikely to happen in America.” (140)
It has to be said that this is, to a great extent, true. Rodney King would hardly have been the first suspect in the United States or anywhere else to have fallen down the stairs,
or to have had some other “accident” while attempting to escape from lawful custody, ad nauseum. (141) This prompted one Libertarian to suggest that video cameras should be made
compulsory! (142)
In Britain, the 1984 Police And Criminal Evidence Act provided for the taping of police “interviews” with suspects. This has greatly reduced the ability of police officers to “verbal up” suspects as well as offering honest police officers ‐ such creatures do exist! ‐ some protection from malicious complaints.
In other words, cameras and microchips can also be used to watch over the state; Big Brother is certainly spying on us, but we have the ability to spy on Big Brother, and to keep the power of the state in check.
There are all manner of other benefits which the new technology can and will bring; it is possible that in very many fields the crime of theft will be almost totally
eradicated. In North Yorkshire recently, the police mounted an unusual sting operation. They fitted an expensive bicycle with a tracking device and left it in a location where it could be
stolen readily. The result is that the thief leads them to his lair where much other stolen property is usually recovered. The scheme is
set to be extended to other property and to be taken up by other police forces. (143)
Along the same lines, it is reported that a new anti-theft chip is set to virtually eliminate the thefts of TVs and videos, and ultimately of other expensive consumer goods,
in the near future. The chip will enable TVs to be programmed with Personal Identification Numbers, similar to bank and building society cashpoint
cards. (144) No burglar would want to steal a TV set that he or a prospective receiver couldn’t use. Extending this to motor vehicles would
virtually eliminate car theft, which would in turn eliminate many other crimes. (145)
It is easy to become paranoid about new technology, but properly applied we will be the master, and the microchip, like the state, will be our servant. We mentioned the
Rodney King case; another and far more terrible case in which video cameras (enhanced by the latest technology) were used to bring perpetrators to book was that of the child murderers of two year old
James Bulger. (146) Mobile telephones can be used to summon help in an emergency ‐ or to deter an attack.
Recently, cameras hooked up to the Internet have allowed women to monitor their children in the nursery, and so on. Every day there are numerous cases in which video cameras and computer chips bring criminals to book, deter crime, or simply enable companies to provide prompt, efficient and cheap service to their customers, and to improve the quality of all our lives in numerous different ways. Itemised phone bills can be used first and foremost for our own benefits.
We must not fall into the trap of advocating a form of 21st Century Luddism. There is no such thing as an evil computer or evil computer chip any more than
there is any other evil machine. What is needed is not to fight 21st Century technology but to ensure that such technology is applied responsibly and that proper safeguards are enshrined in law, safeguards that protect the individual first and foremost from the creeping excesses of state power.
Exactly what these safeguards are and how they would operate is beyond the scope of the current study. Obviously legislation is one possibility; another is encryption, something
that has been much in the news over the past few years, and mostly for the wrong reasons. Governments worldwide fear the Internet and seek to
control it, ditto encryption, because the former allows individuals and organisations to circumvent their meddling and mendacity. The new powerful encryption programs provide total or almost total security from the prying eyes of Big Brother; even when cyphers can be broken, the time and effort expended on breaking them can rarely be justified. And if we all used encryption, the state would be able to spy effectively on only the tiniest minority of "dissidents". The point of all this is that we don’t have to allow the new technology to become a Frankenstein’s monster; we have the power to ensure that the silicon chip is a boon to mankind and not a curse: the silicon chip and all new technologies. But in order to do that we must ensure that the fearful master of government, the all-intrusive, all pervasive state, is kept constantly in check.
Above, we mentioned the Sylvester Stallone film Demolition Man in which the entire population of the future politically correct dystopia was linked to an omniscient computer by a micro-chip implanted in the hand. In this film, the ruling elite and the “underground” escaped such monitoring. The latter were people who lived in a subterranean world as outcastes and vagabonds making frequent forays into the upper world for food, and offering a spirited resistance. In Orwell’s 1984 too, members of the ruling elite could turn off the TV screen which monitored everybody’s every move. In the new dystopia, there will be no underground, no resistance, and nobody bar nobody will escape either the closed circuit TV camera or the micro-chip.
In 1939, our fathers and grandfathers went to war against Adolf Hitler; one of the reasons they did this, allegedly, was because of Hitler’s persecution of the Jews. One of the
anti-Jewish measures that caused the most outrage was the quarantining of the Jews and forcing them to wear the yellow badge. It is ironic then that fifty years after the defeat of Hitler and Nazism these same poor, persecuted, powerless people (147)
should endorse the use of identity cards. (148) If computerised identity cards ever are introduced, there will come about, within a few short years, a tyranny directed not simply against Jews but against all and sundry, a tyranny so monstrous and so terrible that future generations will gasp in open-mouthed amazement that the government of Neville Chamberlain should have declared war on a dictator the scope of whose tyranny was to force one percent of the population to wear a generic symbol, when they themselves have been branded by the Mark of the Beast, a micro-chip implanted not in their hands, but in the backs of their necks, and when their every movement, indeed their every thought, is monitored and controlled by a faceless army of bureaucrats and petty sadists who, like the Nazi leaders at Nuremberg, are “only doing their job”.
I said in the Preface to this cyber-edition that many people, including those at the highest
levels of government, have in recent years begun to express doubts about the wisdom of the emerging total surveillance society.
There have even been some curbs on the collection and retention of information by Big Brother. An even more interesting
phenomenon has been the emergence of a different type of surveillance; the rise of the Internet coupled especially with cheap, readily available mobile phone technology means that not only are they watching us, but that we are watching them. And they don’t like it!
Since the filming of the shocking attack on Rodney King by four uniformed thugs in March 1991, countless such incidents have been
recorded by ordinary people on both sides of the Atlantic and indeed all over the world. Two very recent incidents at the time of writing
have brought this home especially to everyone in Britain. The April 2009 assault on G20 protested Nicola Fischer by a police officer twice her size,
and the July 2008 incident at a Wiltshire police station involving another small (and far from young) woman ‐ Pamela Somerville ‐
and an officer twice her size.
The G20 incident resulted in the acquittal ‐ against the evidence ‐ of the officer concerned. The incident involving
Miss Somerville ‐ which came to light after the G20 incident, was more thoughtlessness than wilful assault, although it
left her with permanent facial damage ‐ resulted in first the conviction and gaoling of the officer concerned, then the quashing of his conviction on appeal, although ‐ small mercies ‐ he
was dismissed from the force afterwards.
In the wake of the legislation precipitated by the 9/11 attacks, we have seen countless incidents of people being stopped by both police
and private security guards for the “crime” of taking photographs in public places, almost always on some spurious pretext. It remains to be seen why any genuine terrorist would either need or want to take photographs of potential targets in the cyber-age, but the harassment of photographers and tourists is for the most part gratuitous. On many occasions though, the police and security guards have had cameras turned on them, and every single time they been camera shy. Often menacing, but always camera shy.
The assaults on Nicola Fischer and Pamela Sommerville are only two of countless such incidents in which police officers and other agents of state repression have been caught in flagrante delicto assaulting harmless and usually helpless members of the public. Most of these videos ‐ some of them truly shocking ‐ have been uploaded to YouTube and similar websites by concerned citizens, and quite a few have resulted in official investigations, condemnation, and, surprise surprise, successful prosecutions of the perpetrators.
It is clear from their reactions to Joe Public’s quid pro quo that the agents of repression are every bit as unhappy
as the rest of us about being scrutinised while going about their daily business, even more so, because unlike most of the
rest of us, they have something to hide! If we are unable to reverse totally the trend towards total surveillance,
we can at least ensure that we are watching Big Brother just as intently as he is watching us.
To Bibliography
Back To Cover
Back To Baron Pamphlets Index
(a) he knows, or suspects, that another person is engaged in drug money laundering,
(b) the information, or other matter, on which that knowledge or suspicion is based came to his attention in the course of his trade, profession, business or employment, and
(c) he does not disclose the information or other matter to a constable as soon as is reasonably practicable after it comes to his
attention. (21)
How The New Repression Will Function
For The Sake Of The Children And Other Back Door Schemes
Information, Misinformation And Disinformation
The Death Of Financial Confidentiality
The Merger Of The Arms Of Government
A Monster Out Of Control:
Another Lesson From Nazi Germany
The Coming Repression:
Who Will Be Targeted, How And Why
Implanted Micro-Chips Are Not Science Fiction
The Coming Repression:
Who Will Be Targeted, How And Why (continued)
How The New Repression Can Be Prevented
Mass Protest
Individual Culpability And The Wizard Of Oz Syndrome
Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining
Postscript To The Second (Internet) Edition ‐ Surveillance Cuts Both Ways
To Notes And References
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